PassWord – 9th September 2015

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm. The art of listening.

Speaker C: Hello and welcome to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren, the technology program that lets you into the bits and bytes of the information age. In today’s show, the factories of the near future that can reskill their robot workforces in the blink of an eye, why football club Manchester United has decided to boot itself up and to become a technology powerhouse, and why most crime writers are afraid to stop following the path of Poirot and Miss Marple and to start learning about cyber forensics. Um, now something that in a sense our live guest will be doing, because Professor Vincent Gaffney is going He’s going to go under the waves of the North Sea to find the clues that will allow him to rebuild the sunken Doggerland that used to connect us to Europe in virtual reality. And finally, the power that will cast light on all of this: an innovative idea to generate solar power by panelling over the UK’s sprawling car parks.

Speaker D: We like to put solar panels in places that are used by somebody else at the same time. We don’t like solar panels to take up green fields, for example, where it’s much better to grow crops in green fields.

Speaker C: Now, some months ago, Oxford University put out a report predicting that around one-third of our current jobs will be lost to robotic systems. And devotees of the programme may remember that IBM has told us that it had trained a production line so it could switch from making oxyacetylene cylinders one day to cupcakes the next by using sensor data in the machines themselves and big data. A frightening world, perhaps, but one that Rahul Vijayaraghavan, a senior analyst of the research company Frost Sullivan, says it need not worry us as much as we think. Robots, he says in a recent report, are taking away the jobs we did not want anyway. Here’s Rahul to tell us about this new world of artificial intelligence, data, and sensing that might see us closing the gates of the factory forever.

Speaker E: I mean, this is where the future lies. As we go along, if you look at analytics as a whole, we see analytics can be applied across many places on the manufacturing plant. In our opinion, in Frost Sullivan’s opinion, it’s primarily going to be used for, you know, process control equipment. So when I say process control equipment, I’m talking about, you know, motors or turbines or pumps or valves. In the future, it can be applied across the production line, but now we’re already seeing it for certain applications.

Speaker F: Yes.

Speaker B: And in a sense though, those process controls that you’re talking about, I mean, they may be motors and they may be controls, etc., but there’ll be more and more intelligence built into them so that everything can be varied.

Speaker E: Yeah, that’s where the hype is. And that’s what they’re saying. You know, it could take another decade for that to happen. You know, personally, I think it, you know, I mean, if you look at the legacy systems that are already out there, you have your SCADA, you have your DCS in your shop floor. Then you have your manufacturing execution systems for, you know, software side. Now you throw in these sensors and you’ve got a whole new complex network. And I think, you know, the vision is there, but I think it’s going to take at least the next decade for that to happen.

Speaker B: I mean, it’s interesting too, isn’t it, that you talk about all of these sensors on the production line. One of the other things that is happening is that sensors are, in a sense, being put into things like social media. To actually work out what demand is, what future pictures are, you know, where the world will be going. In a sense, we have all of these social sensors out there, and those are then being taken and fine-tuning this manufacturing process.

Speaker E: You know, if I were to look at analytics, I would probably classify the use of analytics in, in 4 areas. One would be process improvement, which would include equipment monitoring, machine learning, supply chain network optimization and so on. The second area would be resource optimization, where we’re looking at inventory management, workforce availability and so on. The area which you talked about, I would classify that as customer and consumer behavior, where we’re looking at optimizing product pricing, purchase characteristics, you know, and other market-related activities. And finally you have your risk and security management, you know, safety, counterfeits and so on. So these would be the 4 areas which we see analytics can be used across the manufacturing value chain. Currently, I think process improvement is the number one thing in the manufacturing domain.

Speaker B: Some people, when they’re talking about big data, say, well, I’m a big data theorist, you can only have really good useful big data if you’ve got all of the data. Now, what you’re saying is, no, actually, if you’re working on a particular problem in a particular area, then this is all of the data that you need to work with.

Speaker E: If you look at the manufacturing environment, if I’m looking at a motor or a pump, your data’s gonna be very specific. So I don’t really buy that trend of collecting all the data and all possible sources. I think in certain industries like the oil and gas, where you have integrated operations and you want everything on a single view, you know, to ensure transparency of the processes, I think in those cases you would want to, you know, collect data from as many possible sources as possible.

Speaker B: And are those challenges going to be for the algorithms to extract that information, or is that a challenge for people? And what are the employment opportunities in the future?

Speaker E: Personally, I think that there is a limited skilled workforce right now. I think, you know, one of the things with this analytics, they’re going to be new positions open. If you look at the job market now today, I mean, everybody’s talking about data analytics. There’s so many softwares out there, you know, R software, there’s Tableau. People are learning that. So I think data scientist is going to be a huge role in the future. It’s already out there now. I mean, at Frost, we, you know, in Frost, we’re thinking about opening, you know, analytics wing, for example, right? Everybody’s talking about it. So I think that there are going to be positions open for this.

Speaker B: And that cannot be done by a machine. You can’t teach that analytics, these very intelligent tools that we’ve developed.

Speaker E: And, you know, a lot of people say that, you know, we don’t need people anymore. We can do it without a data scientist. Like you said, platform itself does all the work for you. You probably need a layman just to sit there and, you know, come print out a report, for example. A lot of them have, they have conservative mindsets. The people are very conservative. They’re not gonna, you know, just jump into these autonomous or semi-autonomous networks. I think they will always need people to be there to, you know, validate the data. And I don’t see that happening, not for the next 15 or 20 years at least. And also, there is also the cybersecurity concern, right? So people are very, very worried if, you know, somebody can access their networks, their autonomous networks. So yeah, I think in 20 years’ time, maybe.

Speaker C: Well, that was Frost Sullivan’s Rahul Vijay Aragavan on the factories of the future. Well, the sound of adulation for the beautiful game coming in a week that has seen Wayne Rooney eclipse Sir Bobby Charlton’s 45-year-old England goalscoring record. In a week, and in a week that has also seen their club Manchester United announce that it has digital ambitions. This season has seen all of the major Premiership clubs announce that they are entering into the digital age, and in the case of Manchester United, it is because they want to engage with their 569 million fans worldwide with a digital laboratory at Old Trafford. Is developing jointly with the Indian high-tech company HCL. So what’s behind it? At the press conference for the launch, I asked Richard Arnold, Manchester United’s chief executive.

Speaker B: Is this a business opportunity for Man United, or is it also something that you’re going to do to find out more about your fans and to engage them in different and new ways that may not involve them actually spending any money?

Speaker H: Our success is founded on the family of fans we have and the support that they provide, which whether that drives the revenues of the club by way of gate revenue or TV revenue or sponsorship revenue or merchandising, that was ever thus. You know, if you went back 100 years, the support that you get from fans enables you to be economically successful. And you know, anyone who’s heard us talk before will know that that success off the pitch is what funds and drives success on the pitch in a sustainable strong way, and it’s the virtuous circle we aspire to. So going back to your question in terms of learning from fans being the second part of your question, we’ve worked very hard at making sure that we measure what fans are interested in, and this partnership allows us to take a huge leap forward in the quality of that data in terms of the depth and breadth of those analytics. Which allows us to further enhance what we offer to fans to make sure it’s the right content in the right format at the right time, set up for the right device in the right way that allows for whatever bandwidth they’ve got at that point in time. And when you look at the complexity of doing that for one fan and then you multiply that by 200 countries, 27 languages, and all the different mechanisms of engaging with us, it’s a complex business. And so Going back to your learning, you know, underpinning that learning as an individual and then in a structural way, which is what we referred to previously, is pivotal to making sure that that success continues. So, you know, the hidden surprises like that in certain parts of the world, wishing players happy birthday is one of the most engaging pieces of content that you can do, which, you know, you’d have thought, oh well, it’s a goal or it’s a signing or it’s the result or it’s the anticipation of such and such a game against an opposition But in certain markets, wishing fans well, wishing players well, sorry, is a hugely important part of what people want to do. It allows them to feel they’re showing their support and showing their commitment. Those learnings and others like them have been hugely successful with us, for us. Measuring in terms of, for example, on Twitter, the frequency with which you produce content, more is not always better. There’s an optimal point that fans appreciate the content. After which it ceases to improve their experience. And that’s something we’ve been measuring, and it varies hugely by language and geography. So those learnings are very, very important to driving that engagement, which in turn is very, very important to driving a successful Manchester United.

Speaker C: So partnering with HCL has puzzled some observers, but as 85% of Man United’s fans are overseas, many in Southeast Asia, the decision to partner with the Indian giant makes sense, as the company has proved itself adept at managing fans across the the various different communication devices and networks in the region, because as Mark Ogden, football writer for the Daily Telegraph, points out, this is all about money.

Speaker I: They’re trying to get as many commercial partners as possible in every field possible and just put their name and brands on everything because it raises money and it’s brand awareness and people are knocking at the door to do that.

Speaker B: So you actually think that this is— they’re essentially seeing a revenue stream that they can develop and they want to engage with fans because they actually want the money from their pockets.

Speaker I: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I mean, what’s this one? The official digital partner. They’ve got partners in everything. Partners in noodles, partners in cars, partners in chocolate bars, partners in gambling. They’ll find a field, they’ll exploit it, they’ll approach the biggest companies and they’ll take the money from it. And it’s just the strategy they’ve had for a long time, which has made them the most powerful commercial club in the world.

Speaker B: So do you think a lot of other clubs will follow suit now?

Speaker I: A lot of them not. Yeah, you look at Manchester City, they’re following a similar path of having, you know, the big sponsor on the shirt and on the, you know, City Stadium, but, you know, slicing up little areas of the club to sell off to different partners. So yeah, they’ve all got this policy now where they’re following United’s lead.

Speaker B: Because one of the things that all of these clubs want to do is to be able to offer what they call an enhanced experience, which is essentially a sort of slightly different experience from being here, but they see it as a way of shaving more value out of the club.

Speaker I: Yeah, it’s also a way that they see that fans across the globe can connect as well, because obviously they’ve got millions of fans in the Far East, and United engage quite well with those fans on a commercial, on a digital basis, you know, Twitter, Facebook. So it is a way of, I guess they would say, keeping connected with the fans across the globe, not just on a match day at Old Trafford.

Speaker B: One of the really interesting things, we talked to some people who were developing some technology for Man United, only about 9 months ago. One of the things that they were talking about was actually being able to offer a similar experience in your living room to being at the ground.

Speaker I: What do you think about that? Yeah, well, it’s interesting. I suppose a lot of fans these days are armchair supporters anyway, so what that experience would be, I don’t know. I think being in the ground, being cold, being wet, you know, not much room, it’s probably not the best experience, to be honest.

Speaker C: So, you know, I think fans will happily watch the games in the living room and enjoy the experience as much as they Perhaps all of this explains the missing elephant in the room at the press conference, because players, management, and club ambassadors were all present. The fans weren’t. Perhaps they’ve not yet been engaged by the laboratory. Now, the detective novel has not changed for a while as the genre struggles to bring the archetypal sleepy English village of Midsomer Murders or the twists and turns of Morse into the modern age. And according to the celebrated crime thriller writer Val McDermid, the genre has to change because we are all digital now.

Speaker J: People are afraid of things they don’t understand. And because we come out of science so early on, particularly the people who are writing, who are the opinion formers, who are the journalists, who are the novelists and all that, then it’s just something that’s strange and alien and difficult. I mean, I don’t know enough of the science to write about the process in great detail, but then people don’t want to read about the process in great detail. They just want to have a sense of what can be done.

Speaker B: Well, that’s one of the issues, isn’t it? Because one of the big problems that the technology community actually has is it tries to develop a language all of its own, which sometimes is for particularly pragmatic sort of technological reasons, but for other times it is actually deliberately exclusive.

Speaker J: Yes, I mean, it’s not just digital community that does that. Every community, every professional community develops its own jargon. It’s a way of saying, you know, we’re all in the same club and you’re outside the club. So it’s not just a phenomenon of people in the digital community. I think this happens everywhere. It’s like, you know, academics have their own language, engineers have their own language.

Speaker B: But the problem with this as a language though is that obviously this is a language that we have to become involved with because it is a— it’s the language that we live in.

Speaker F: Yeah, I think the responsibility goes both ways. I mean, I think writers need to engage with the world of technology more, and I think that the people in the world of technology need to work a bit harder to explain themselves to people who are not in that world. You know, it is quite glamorous to be sort of kind of speaking a language that nobody else really understands except the people who do the thing that you do. What we need to focus on, I suppose, is encouraging scientists to be good communicators, and I think that’s the kind of bridge that we need to be building all the time.

Speaker B: So typically, how, when you write a book, do you start to go about that process? Because it’s all about balance, isn’t it? One of the problems seems to be that. You either get the novel is remorselessly techie and everything that’s going on in it involves technology, or then the balance goes the other way.

Speaker F: How do you get that balance right? What you always have to bear in mind is that good fiction is always about character, and everything else has to be at the service of character and story. Because if it’s about the technology, what happens is that in a year’s time when the technology has moved somewhere different, nobody is gonna read that book.. But if you just make it a sort of seamless part of the tapestry of the whole story, then it does work. And my teenage son, he was reading one of my Kate Brannigan novels, which was published I think in 1993, ’94. At one point she’s driving around looking for a phone box, and he goes, “Why doesn’t she just use her mobile?” ‘Cause almost nobody had a mobile in 1993, and there were only two places in the north of England where you could get a signal. And he’s like, “Really?” And so we then had a conversation about early mobile phone technology. He was intrigued by what he’d read in the book, but that wasn’t what the book was about.

Speaker B: That was an incidental, but it provoked a conversation. That actual use of phones and that way everything has become so ubiquitous. The other day I was walking through Westminster and was trapped behind a lot of tourists who were all simultaneously using their phones to tap out stuff, and I couldn’t get past them because they were walking so slowly. That world of social media that they were evidently engaged in at that time, How are you going to start to deal with that in your books?

Speaker F: Yeah, well, you just have to talk about it, you know, as a phenomenon, but not make it what it’s all about. You can have that be part of a character’s hinterland, part of the landscape, but you still have to make it about them and not about the technology. Not go, “Wow, I can communicate with my friend anywhere in the world!” But you just have it there as a kind of matter of fact, this is how things are.

Speaker B: That world of social media, as you say, that’s how things are, But it has taken over to such an extent that there are some quite unpleasant crimes that are actually now being perpetrated within social media itself.

Speaker F: That’s what’s at the heart of my new book as well, is about cyber trolling and internet bullying. And in fact, I just actually wrote a piece yesterday for The Scotsman about this Mumsnet business, the swatting.

Speaker B: Said essentially this is a kind of terrorism. When you say it’s a kind of terrorism, how do you mean?

Speaker F: Well, the function of terrorism is to disrupt normal life. It’s to stop people going about their normal lives. It’s to subvert normal existence, and that’s exactly what this does.

Speaker B: Terrorism isn’t always about men with bombs and guns. Then perhaps what you’re realizing or recognizing in your writing is that this penetration of technology into our lives is beginning to have an impact. One of the interesting things about crime now is that, okay, crime on the street seems to be decreasing, crime in cyberspace is increasing, and there are real victims.

Speaker F: We used to think it was a victimless crime. Yes, oh, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that my digital forensics guy says is that for every step forward you make in terms of digital forensic detection, you know, within 6 months the criminals will have figured out how to subvert it or figured out the way around it.

Speaker C: Well, that was Val McDermott, whose latest book Splinter the Silence came out at the beginning of the month. Now, another digital detective, but one picking up on the forensic evidence from the last ice age, as he and a group of other universities start work on a project to recreate the sunken world of Doggerland in virtual reality. On the line from Bradford, we have Professor Vince Gathney, the university’s Anniversary Chair of Landscape Archaeology, to tell us about it. Hello, Professor Gathney, welcome to the program.

Speaker F: Thanks, Peter.

Speaker G: So, Vince, so first of all, what is Doggerland? Well, Doggerland, it’s a word which was coined about, well, 50, in the late ’50s, I think, originally, to describe the area of the North Sea which had been lost to the sea after the last ice age when the temperatures rose the ice melted and the last glacial maximum was reached, and essentially the river, the waters rose and inundated the area.

Speaker C: So this was a land bridge between Europe and the UK then?

Speaker G: Stretching those far ultimately is the Norwegian Trench in the north.

Speaker B: Okay, so how on earth are you going to go about recreating Doggerland then?

Speaker G: For the past 10 years, we’ve been working with the oil companies in particular to use their seismic data to map the area. What we’ve been doing is using that, we can 3D models that they can generate from this to slice and dice the data, produce maps of the rivers, the marshes, the hills. The streams of the land underneath the sea. And what we intend to do now, though, is to take out ships to core some of these marine valleys, to get out the paleoenvironmental data, and to use this essentially to reconstruct what Doggerland would have looked like.

Speaker C: So how can you be sure that the details that you are logging are accurate? Surely the sea’s been shifting the sands of the Dogger Bank, to give one example, for a while now.

Speaker G: It must have been obscuring a lot of this information. Absolutely. The bathymetry of the North Sea is a false friend. I’m absolutely certain of that because the rivers like the Maas and the Scheldt have been dumping silt on top of what would have been low hills in the past. But equally, a lot of area is actually scoured and kept clean, or in relative terms, and the streams that we have looked at, or located, the rivers, about 1,500 square kilometers of rivers, we’ve been able to date in the past using cores collected for other reasons. But now we want to go and do the work in a systematic manner.

Speaker C: And you’re going to be collecting DNA material, aren’t you? You’re going to be trying to find information about the sort of plants that were there?

Speaker G: Yeah. One of the things which has only become, you know, obvious recently is that the marine conditions appear to preserve DNA in the sediments. So everything, you know, that’s walked across it, urinated, scratched, you know, has left some trace, as have the plants as well. And we carried out a pilot project now a year and a half ago in the Solent, which produced very good evidence that you could use DNA in this way to provide complementary data to the traditional paleoenvironmental methods that we use, pollen and the like. Actually, some of the information is very, very different. In fact, the data from a site called Buldner Cliff dates about 6,000 BC, suggests that wheat was actually arriving in Britain 2,000 years earlier than we’d realized.

Speaker C: Now, you’ve had a very busy week, Professor Gaffney. For the most part of the week, you’ve been talking about the discovery of the sunken Stonehenge itself.

Speaker B: Is— and obviously this ability to visit places of the past is going to be the future.

Speaker C: Very quickly, what would it look like? What will I see when I go into this virtual reality model?

Speaker G: Well, what we see is essentially a number of complete stones which have been simply pushed over, covered with soil. I mean, we’re recreating the shape using electrical tomography and ground-penetrating radar, and we think, well, pretty sure, that up to 200 stones were around a roughly C-shaped monument which was also formed with a large chalk scarp cut into a hill, and it would have looked incredibly impressive.

Speaker C: Not like Stonehenge. Well, it’s a shame that it’s come down. Professor Gathening, thanks very much, and we’ll revisit this again in the same way that you’re revisiting all of this with virtual reality.

Speaker G: We’ll come back and talk to you about this when when you’ve got a lot further.

Speaker C: Okay, thanks very much, Peter. Thank you. Now, we’ve all seen them, the solar fields that are beginning to appear in our landscape. Row upon row of solar panels reaching up to the sky, and some say soaking up valuable agricultural land. Well, a solution to that has been found by an innovative engineering company in Cambridgeshire. Turn our ugly car parks into solar generators by roofing each bay with a solar canopy. The theory is simple: if we had 30 solar panels 100 kilometers square, we could supply enough energy energy for the world’s needs until 2030. So if we can put panel technology in unexpected places where they will have no effect on the aesthetics, then we can fuel the country, charge our cars, and save the planet. Here’s Dr. Roger Carpenter of Inside to Outside to tell us more.

Speaker D: We like to put solar panels in places that are used by something else at the same time. We don’t like solar panels to take up green fields, for example, where It’s much better to grow crops in green fields. If we put them in car parks, we are harnessing the power of the sun at the same time as the same site is being used as a car park. We’re also, coincidentally, we’re providing an amenity to the car park user in that they will have a car that’s protected from our summer sun, but more likely our winter snows and rains. When you say protected from our summer sun, I mean Surely cars in the UK don’t really get damaged by summer sun? They don’t get damaged by the sun. They don’t get damaged by the sun in southern Europe either, but in southern Europe there’s an awful lot of covers over the car parks, and that is purely to keep them cool, to stop them heating up in the sun.

Speaker B: And is another benefit of this, is it that you are able to provide solar power to the cars to actually charge up those electric cars that people have?

Speaker D: All those electric cars that people are going to buy in the future, I’m sure, yes. The power that’s collected in the solar car parks, in essence, it’s sufficient to go straight into the grid. So it’s the same as putting solar panels on the roof, but it’s more closer to putting solar panels on the greenfield site because car parks tend to be very, very large. So you are collecting a large amount of power, and one of the things you can use that power for is to charge cars.

Speaker B: What’s the incentive for this. Is the government encouraging this, or is this something that you’ve just suddenly said, hey, it’s a really good idea, there’s all of those great unsightly car parks, we’ll turn them into solar fields?

Speaker D: A bit of both. The government is not yet actively encouraging this. I’m not quite sure it’s on their radar yet, but they are discouraging solar panels in greenfield sites, and they are encouraging putting solar panels onto brownfield sites, particularly onto commercial roofs. There are some problems with putting solar panels on commercial roofs. Health and safety reasons. Commercial roofs do lots of other things apart from just being a roof to the building, and they support air conditioning or other such plants, chimneys.

Speaker C: Just to put something over a car park is much cleaner, easier, faster, safer thing to do.

Speaker B: But surely most people turn around and say, hang on, a car park isn’t a commercial roof.

Speaker D: How does that qualify for feed-in tariffs, which are still around at the moment in ever-decreasing amounts, but they certainly do help pay for car car park structures, as long as you supply the power from the car park into the meter that’s being used to supply the power for the adjacent building. Particularly interesting if the adjacent building is using an awful lot of power themselves. Supermarkets, of course, they use massive amounts of power. If they can during the day use the power of the sun to cool their fridges or freezers, that is an obvious win-win. Cold storage places, Warehouses, distribution centres, they use masses of power. Steel plants, most factories use masses of power. Where they have large car parks, we can solve their power problems.

Speaker C: So when you say a large car park, I mean, how much power can you actually generate from a car park?

Speaker D: Can you generate any usable amounts of power? Absolutely, yes. An average supermarket-sized car park will generate roughly a 2 or 3 megawatt peak of installation, which equates to quite a few thousand kilowatt-hours, roughly speaking, equivalent of having the standard installation on 250 houses.

Speaker C: Well, nice to finish on something sunny. You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM, and if you’ve just tuned in, you’ve missed it. But if you want to learn more about these stories and technology in general, log on to our website, Future Intelligence. Password is brought to you by Angel Media Productions.

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