The Impact of IoT & AI on Society: A Deep Dive – Guest Host Takeover Special

Cigdem Sengul:
Okay, welcome back to the IoT podcast, guest of special. I, Cigdem Sengul and Sepi Cakaveh will take over the studio for an episode. In today’s takeover, we will be taking the spotlight to discuss the impact of new technologies ranging from data science, AI, quantum computing and more, and the opportunities they bring to us. Okay, let’s get into the episode. A little bit information about me, I was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and my introduction to technology was probably with, started with the Commodore 64 that my father brought home one day. But I would not say I was immersed in the technology until I started my undergraduate program in control and computer engineering in Istanbul Technical University, where I developed a huge interest in computer networks and security. United States and I got an MSc and a PhD in computer science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where I worked on ad hoc networks and focused on routing and energy management solutions. And after my PhD, my career kind of followed an unconventional path, I believe, and I worked in research labs, I held roles in an industry and academia. I worked on delay tolerant networks at INRIA in France. labs, Germany, you can see a pattern with networks there. And in the UK, I worked at Oxford Brookes University and then Nominate UK, which runs the.uk domain. And now at Brunel University, focusing mostly on Internet of Things now. Currently, I’m a reader in computer science at Brunel and I co-lead the Computer Science for Social Good research group. And I am also affiliated with the research center, AI centers, social and digital innovation. And I’m part of My work has now in IoT a different focus on usable security, privacy, and data protection with applications to healthcare. So that’s all about me. Can you tell me a little bit about your background, Sepi?

Sepi Chakaveh:
Thank you, Cigdem.

Cigdem Sengul:
Yes.

Sepi Chakaveh:
It’s a pleasure to meet you. Well, actually, I am originally Iranian. I was born in Tehran, but I was quite young with my family when we moved to the UK. I did my A levels and O levels and everything in the UK. Then I did a degree in electronic engineering I did my PhD with the Giotto mission which went to Halley’s Comet and I created the first image processing techniques to extract things like the hidden jets in the nucleus of Comet Halley. Then I worked as an experimentalist, instrumental astrophysicist at Imperial College. where I worked on the analysis of the instrumentation of the interstellar dust. Then I was on various postdoc positions. Then in 1991, I got a job for two years at University of Göttingen Observatory. I was working there as a software system engineer. stage I got fed up working in astronomy. So I started looking for a job and as it happened I was recruited by GMD which was predecessors of Fraunhofer Society and the first job I had was to build the first internet-wise satellite in Eastern Europe. So in countries like Romania, Bulgaria, internet-wise satellites. So we literally went to these countries. That was in mid-90s. And then when I built this, we were supposed to be representing these technology. I didn’t know what I should be representing the internet. So because all our partners were academic myself in 1997 and use a streaming technology to show how it’s possible to do e-learning via satellite. And our partners were in Central and Eastern Europe, but then what we did was we connected our network, satellite network, to ISDN, to Marrakelle, so the company, there were some studies, so we actually did the first demos of how it’s possible to use internet to do teaching. This was then I was, I did a lot of stuff at Fraunhofer, I built the first virtual TV presenter on avatar because we were working on the multimedia home platform and interactive television. Then we did a lot of formats. Fraunhofer till 2007. The last thing I was when I was there, I was the architect of Citizen Media project, which was, you know, I mean all the data convergence stuff that you know use. It was actually partly my brainchild. Then I moved to the UK back because of family reasons and I was senior lecturer technology and biometrics. Then in 2013, I went to University of Southampton. I worked there at the Web Science Institute. And in 2014, 2015, I set up the first online data science academy in the UK. And 2017, I handed over, I did a part-time teaching, setting up the first data science courses of Oxford, open access and a set of lifelong learning based on what I created at Southampton. And that’s where I’m now. I’m a departmental lecturer and course director, teach data science, software engineering, AI. I’m doing a little bit of quantum computing. And then at the same time, That’s me in a brief.

Cigdem Sengul:
Thank you so much. This is so inspiring. You’ve been immersed in so many different technologies and we’re the first in a number of them. So this is amazing to hear. So having seen so many technologies take shape and form, what are the most exciting and innovative uses of recent technologies

Sepi Chakaveh:
Thank

Cigdem Sengul:
you see,

Sepi Chakaveh:
you.

Cigdem Sengul:
internet things or artificial intelligence that you’ve seen recently?

Sepi Chakaveh:
Well, I mean, this is really an interesting question. I think as far as I can see, these are, I mean, what I’ve got to tell you is, I’m sure you are much more aware of that. As human beings, we’ve been living in an analog world for the last 40 to 60,000 years. And then because of the inventions which been happening primarily in the last hundred years, but especially in the last 20 years, We have completely moved from the digital, from the sort of like an analog domain into a digital domain. I mean, just think about it. Just think about it that if you had the pandemic 20 years ago, not only half the world population would have died, we also would not have the opportunity to do things which we have done like working from home, you know, doing studying, stuff like that. years. It’s funny because when I was teaching data science prior to the pandemic to my students, I was trying to sort of give them the perception, what is data? What is digital universe? What is? So I think to answer your question, it’s really there is nothing unique about the technology. It’s about building this universe. And as engineers, I mean, as human beings, do a task. But till recently, we’ve been doing building sort of real physical machinery, real physical tools to help us to improve the quality of life. Now that we have discovered this other universe, and the interaction between the two, it’s a huge amount. So I mean, the technologies of AI or IoT or quantum computing, these are effectively some of I think as an individual technologist, this is my perception, I don’t think that any of them are carrying anything specific. I mean, they are part of evolution, because what happened was, let’s say when I was doing my PhD, for example, I discovered this JETS, but I had to sort of sit down and write an algorithm and write a filter, images through these filters, run them 40 times. This was my own intuition that I did it. But now you have got things like probably it’s the same sort of process, but you call it neural network. What I’m saying is these are just the evolution. And the reason that we can actually access and create all these technologies is because of several things. First of all, it’s because the data is so accessible. big data

Cigdem Sengul:
No.

Sepi Chakaveh:
and then we have got the possibility of things like a very very cheap computation through cloud computing or edge computing and Then is is also the the communities have been built. So people are sharing their own ideas I mean like I remember when I was working in Fraunhoff where we built a my institute built the first virtual studio applications and I remember doing some work for things like Jurassic parks at the time. And this was like mid 90s, I would say. And for each of the servers that they were doing processing, they were about $8 million, something like that to do the image processing. Now you can do that in your mobile. I mean, this is because it is the democracy is the access to this technology is in is the and that is what is important. And I think I don’t particularly like the perception that some people are trying to really mystify these technologies as something. This is really an enabling technology, something we have to use. Sometimes I personally think that we have to be able to walk before we run. So the provision of some of the technologies It completely distracts the natural evolution of the technology, where the humanity is going to use it. So, a much more realistic and a much more practical, for me they are just tools, they are just enabling technologies. And the bits of things that are coming, they are components, that if somebody has got an insight, how they can use them. Does that answer your question? It’s a long-winded one.

Cigdem Sengul:
Yeah, I completely agree. I see them as building blocks as well. And as we advance in computational technologies, as well as communication technologies, data collection becomes much more integrated and distributed. And with the, I would say more access to data, you get to operate these technologies in big data. And a lot of a number of things became possible within machine learning and artificial building blocks as well. I am also inspired more about the use of technology as a tool, mostly with cross-disciplinary work inspires me a lot, where I feel like the technology has a great potential to improve. And that’s why I’m much more interested in healthcare applications recently, because I feel like these technologies can help from diagnosis to clinical care, to disease management, as we’ve seen in COVID, for instance, huge response. with the technology as well as our lives. We could follow up on our lives with the enablement of technology, be able to keep in touch with our loved ones, continue education, access to remote healthcare. So how do we manage our wellbeing and care at home with access to technology? So that really, really inspires me. And we will see more and more innovative use cases. I also like simple technologies, like things that solve one thing and not try to be the world. about a company that does meta-alert, I believe, a GPS tracker hidden in the shoe soles just to detect when an Alzheimer’s patient, for instance, wanders off and may need help. And I feel like this is one great example of a simple technology that doesn’t try to be lots of things but only one thing and it can transform the lives of a patient as well as its carers when it’s most it’s a great example of how also we need to consider side effects of technology, for instance, in terms of privacy and etc. When we consider how it becomes integrated into our lives and embedded into social systems like healthcare. So that leads to be a little bit to my next question about how you feel technology, be it Internet of Things, be it AI, be it other technologies, do you feel it creates for us?

Sepi Chakaveh:
That is again a very good question. I think it goes back to the basics of what I mean in my perception The digital world is based on I mean the building block is data. So you first have the data then you Process it make it an information then you make a knowledge and then I would always say that intelligence is very contextual so

Cigdem Sengul:
I’m out. Bye.

Sepi Chakaveh:
What do I mean by that? I mean the process of making data to to acknowledge is a generic process. So it doesn’t matter what sort of scenario you’ve got, you still have to do the same data wrangling, cleaning, do this and that. But you only understand the data if you have got some sort of a minimum background about it. Let’s say if somebody speaks to me Swahili, I wouldn’t understand what they’re talking about unless I know at least 20, 30 words, and it just happens that I might hear that and then I could make an understanding that that are talking about certain subject. So this is again about intelligence. I mean, the intelligence is only applicable if you have got the right domain knowledge. And that is what the machines do these things like, machine learning, because they try to do the basic work of the whole thing. But when it comes to the significance of the data, literally, that nothing in this world is free. And I mean, I have been a data scientist literally since I’ve been an astrophysicist, because if you are an astrophysicist and you work on the perceptions of the worlds that you cannot reach, you have to have a means to actually simulate that, interpret that, look at the data, make analysis. So somebody said to me that the best data scientists astrophysicist. Anyway,

Cigdem Sengul:
I’m gonna go to bed. Bye.

Sepi Chakaveh:
what I want to say is that, so when you look at the tech companies, I mean, this thing that has been always obvious to me, because I’ve been working in this field for the last 30 odd years, but nothing is free. So effectively, if a tech company offers you a free service, what they have done, they have long before anybody else, they recognize more important because what you do is you get targeted advertising, you get certain type of preferences. I’m not going to go through that, you know, it’s a sort of a long established business. I mean, like 15 years ago, I came across companies that they were already doing things like auctioning. 15 years ago, there were already systems built into social media or even things like emails and stuff like that. But the point is that nothing is free in this world. So people didn’t realize that when they were using an app, which they can go and sign up, they were actually paying it through their personal data. And to be honest, they didn’t realize the potential of this personal data because most people, they were completely unaware So, this is really a… Now is the question of the data privacy. I think, unfortunately, I would say, especially with the emergence of a number of the recent technologies come up, I think they’ve all fundamentally built on all our personal data. And I think we’ve missed the boat. But what we have to do is… I mean, the data is there. My personal understanding is, that our digital profile is far more accurate in terms of what the real presentation of us in this world is. Because every single transaction we do, every telephone call we do, everything, it just forms our profile more and more accurate. And I think it’s, everything is out there. So, but what happens is now coming back and trying to see something that they’ve already got the authority and the ownership and they have already built complete infrastructures that they can extract appropriate business models of the data. It’s already done. Now what I think is important, I think it is important to educate, to educate the powers to be, to inform them, for when they are making decisions, They’re not making decisions based on the concepts which were ten years ago, and even if they come with some sort of a policy or something like that, it’s not going to be relevant because already, let’s say, if you have got a certain type of application, I’m not going to talk about it, but this is clearly based on all the information that companies gathered over years, and then they come with a new predictive, new type of technology. the most important thing about data privacy is that you really try to educate the powers to be and they and then they would come unfortunately with all the regulations in the technologies that they’re on average 10 years behind 10

Cigdem Sengul:
Hmm

Sepi Chakaveh:
years behind of the standard i mean um now obviously you’ve got something like chat gpt and everybody talks about it so uh it is it is for it’s just a tangled piece of wiring and you know it can be anything to anybody. But it is really actually by the way one of my students, ex-students, he is one of the developers of this product. So I have got sometimes some discussions with him about this. people on the status quo of the technology and give them the ability to make the right decisions. And this is not the decision about individuals, but I think it’s the policy makers, it’s the people who are making sort of like certain decisions for the country. They are the ones that have to have the right education in order to do that. Because if they’re not really quite aware of it, that could just turn the other way around. That’s our

Cigdem Sengul:
I completely

Sepi Chakaveh:
last question.

Cigdem Sengul:
agree. Yeah, I completely agree. This is an area that I was passionate about as well. We ran a project called 3D, which looked into rethinking interfaces, into IoT interfaces into smart homes, with the idea of bringing interdisciplinary researchers to discuss how to make things more transparent, more obvious to the end user, depending on the smart home context. This could be home security. This could be appliances. care could be smart toys, right? They’re entering all aspects of our lives and they’re transforming our lives as well. And some technologies are adopted faster than the others like smart speakers or the ring system with the Amazon ring and home security devices and et cetera, or like the heating systems, heating control systems and et cetera. And some of them are entering more slowly, but they are. They are slowly coming into every aspect and the idea of choice is not there. So when we were talking with researchers who would be expecting to be much more privacy aware and privacy conscious, there is even there a kind of acceptance that this is a lost cause, that they don’t have a choice, and probably they missed the boat on that. And then we need to more and more think towards, yes, people do care about privacy, people do care about data protection, like to have a choice and they would like to be able to exercise that choice. And not every device needs to be networked and, you know, emitting data at all times. We would have to have some control over that. So all of those things are slowly, I think, coming in. But again, it’s in a much more slower pace than the innovations in technology. We, you know, we see we see technology growing in a super fast pace, adopted very prematurely sometimes. then we see the side effects and then we start thinking, ooh, how about we could be done to all with those side effects. Right. So it’s definitely an interesting period to live. We are going through towards transformative change. There are lots of opportunities, but I also think that there is also we should not just be carried away with the speed of things, but have time to think about the utilization of technology. I know there are so many exciting things happening, like 3D printables, wearables, being able to customize devices according to person’s needs, facilitating AI human collaboration, especially with, again, healthcare or other industries. So many things are happening, but at the same time, I think we need to have a thinking cap on and see about how these technologies affect lives. event at Brunel in May, where this is the questions we’re posing, taking the idea of interdisciplinary co-creation of digital health solutions. We would ask, we will challenge people to think about how to make more careful use of data in smart homes, reduce differences among social classes in terms of accessing digital health technologies, improving access to digital solutions, especially in older age groups, who are we excluding from this digital world? How do we eliminate barriers to digital technologies for disabled or differently abled people? So how do we… And I think there is a lot of opportunities in terms of more inclusive solutions. We just need to advocate more for them and not be just, I think, taken away by technology but how it is going to be integrated into our lives. There’s much more thinking to be done there and that’s what I believe.

Sepi Chakaveh:
Absolutely. Couldn’t you agree more?

Cigdem Sengul:
I mean, there are good, I also have been inspired by good steps taken by some of the organizations like microbit.org, which distributes these microbits, the small devices for physical computing and communication devices to teach younger children, you know, computational thinking with a very physical computing object. around UN sustainable development goals. And they already embed that thinking into the young generations, into future engineers about creating technologies that have social impact, right? So

Sepi Chakaveh:
Thanks for watching!

Cigdem Sengul:
I think that kind of training, you mentioned training a lot. I think that kind of training education needs to be embedded very early on into our thinking so that we create socially responsible projects basically. We work on socially responsible technology. of leads to the next question very well, the ethical considerations that we need to be aware of when we are using IoT or AI technology and how can we ensure these technologies be used responsibly. What are your thoughts on that?

Sepi Chakaveh:
I mean, I think effectively there are two, I think there are two ways to approach it. One is obviously we discussed that the education, I

Cigdem Sengul:
Yeah.

Sepi Chakaveh:
think the power to be, they have to understand, not things within a short term, but what is it we’re going to be, what sort of world we’re going to have in 50 years time. And I mean, it’s probably 100 years ago was difficult to project out. and technologies that we have got divisions and everything, it is not as difficult as to predict what is it that we could have in 50 years time. So I think that is the case. And based on that, then you have to come back to the drawing board. And there is for any action, there is a counteraction. So you think about, I mean, let’s say, social media. Let’s look at all these ideas that people at schools get this bullying, this sort of messaging, things like that. Okay, what do we do? This creates huge discomfort, huge impact, negative impact. A lot of youngsters, they go into depression. I mean, we don’t want to go to that sort of level, but it is just by taking one aspect of this digital media, it could do a lot of damage to our society. It doesn’t matter where you are, I mean it is global impact of it. And I think what would you do is you look at the counter effect of that. So I think it’s about creating tools which counter-effect that. And actually it’s not very complicated because the way that you engineer these social media, you can also tools which would flag these things out very early on. But you need to actually implement that. So I think it has to be a lot of resources available to do the engineering of these social negative impacts of the tools and technology that exist. And that is the work we have to do. So I mean, I remember something like already as… I don’t know, maybe it was about 12 years ago. I was trying to work with the students, which my idea was to actually try to flag out these sort of like messaging that was bullying and stuff like that. I mean, it’s all metadata, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not really rocket science, but somebody has to be sitting there, somebody has to be dedicated, create these tools, to be available. It has to be part of the services that companies, social media are offering. And they just don’t want to maybe do it because it’s easier to just roll on an existing business and stuff like that. But we have to be socially responsible. Everybody has to be. Because for one child or for one individual to be deprived and use this tool. destroy somebody’s life, somebody’s morality. So, I mean, that cannot be acceptable. And I think the same sort of resources should be dedicated to create these tools which interacts negative impact of the social media or technology. That I think we have to realize. This shouldn’t be about just talking about. It’s the education and then it’s provision of real, tangible tools and products that that’s

Cigdem Sengul:
Mm-hmm.

Sepi Chakaveh:
my opinion

Cigdem Sengul:
I do believe so as well. I think there is the concept of privacy by design or security by design as opposed to having these things take the backseat for a long time and prioritizing technology building first. I think you cannot afford to do that anymore. As I said, as the technology becomes more and more embedded into our daily lives, you just cannot afford to do that. visions of IoT where devices will be quietly integrated and embedded into our background without us noticing it, is a scary vision. We have to notice them. And this is some of the things that we were discussing in our 3D project where we talked about polite machines, which kind of introduce themselves when a new person comes in and says, hey, by the way, I’m recording this area, you know, or a number of people in our workshops talked as well, where as a community we decide how far we want to adopt a technology because a single person’s adoption of a tech can affect other people in the vicinity in their neighborhood as well. So we are discussing these things more and more. It has to be becoming, it has to be made more mainstream, I think. That’s the thing. Not only people who are considered or labeled as privacy aware or privacy conscious, but mainstream. We have to understand that and creating technologies. And we see examples of things going wrong all the time, like biases in the data affecting machine learning AI, leading to wrong predictions, affecting a cursory predictions for a certain segment of people, misdiagnosing, you know, or chatbots hallucinating or becoming anti-social quite fast, right? So we see lots and lots of bad examples you know, how things could go wrong very fast. So that awareness needs to needs to be there. Now we should be building that awareness and be prepared to do something for it. Any technology that builds on human data, and I think this is any technology that we’re talking about now, be it Internet of Things, be it AI, be it, you know, chat GPT, it needs to be careful about how the data is collected. What is it, what purpose it is used for, how it’s shared, how it’s retained, how it’s right? So, and we need to create those trustworthy systems. You were going to say something.

Sepi Chakaveh:
No, I was going to say that most of these technologies have already been built on the existing data that they have harnessed anyway. So the models that they use. So, as I said, that boat has gone. So what is important, however, is to look at this from the engineering and there’s algorithms if they’re not done properly, or if they’re trying to do, as you say, I mean, like these shoes, I think I find it absolutely fascinating. You know, you have to do one thing at a time because the technology of AI is not that advanced. I mean, we still are very narrow. I mean, it does one thing at a time. So if you are trying to sort of cascade various different processes working at the same time in unison, very difficult to actually engineering and it’s on the cost of the errors, on the cost of giving you wrong predictions, wrong results. So I think at the end of the day goes back to the people who are creating these things and they have to be more responsible and I think we have to also start thinking at the adopting certain formats, certain standards and this has to go through the future of It has to have all these checks and balances before we offer them to the users. Because, I mean, if you build a car, you make sure that everything, all the safety is there. This is exactly the same with the digital product. You have to make sure that you as somebody who’s creating these things have got the responsibilities. The social responsibility, you have to take responsibility if something goes wrong. I don’t know, the break doesn’t work. Unfortunately, there’s an accident. Who’s going to take care of that? This is the sort of thing that we are completely oblivious about it. And I think this has to go through the new regulations and the standardizations, formats. And currently, digital domain is just like the Wild West. Everybody comes with something and they don’t really think about it. I mean, it has to be structure, structureized. It has to be well thought of.

Cigdem Sengul:
in.

Sepi Chakaveh:
to be frameworks that has to be in the place. And I’m actually very happy that there are now sort of organisations and people are coming, starting the debate, but it has to really be well defined. Until we

Cigdem Sengul:
Yes.

Sepi Chakaveh:
do not do that, then we would keep generating these tools which go into these digital universe and then might have maybe 30% of quick return, but It can be a disaster and we have to think about it.

Cigdem Sengul:
I think absolutely. There are steps, but I do also feel that these steps are slower compared to the pace of technology. For instance, general data protection regulation, I think, had a huge role on embedding a little bit of thinking, building devices for purpose, regulating the data collection, a little bit making it more mainstream in terms of rights, on their own data. And now with the AI regulation, we see more attempts on regulating that space. We will see how effective that is. We see also reactions from country level, like Italy’s reaction to JTPT, et cetera, and their response, and other agents saying that we should be, how careful we should be in considering these technologies, and et cetera. taking steps, I think, but albeit a bit more slowly compared to the pace of technology. And sometimes the cat is out of the bag, basically, when these things are introduced. Okay, so we’ve talked about the pace of technology a lot. How could businesses, organizations prepare for the future when you consider the pace of technology, and what steps could they take to ensure that they can take advantage of new opportunities and be prepared for this type of future.

Sepi Chakaveh:
I mean, again, that’s a very good question. I think, I mean, I talked about powers to be, but I think we also have to go back. And if you are trying to introduce these digital technologies, early age to the young children or, you know, young adults, I think we have to have the, give them the awareness of the boundaries as well, while we are introducing them to this. And I mean, five or six years people start getting the awareness about the data privacy and things like that. For as long before all these tech companies were just harnessing your data, they were using it, it was just like a wild west as I said. I think now there has been a bit of an awareness but it is you know people are sometimes get very to the extreme about it and then I guess it’s a bit like I don’t know advisors law that they always find another way that you can so I Don’t want it like that. I think it has to be black and white It can’t be shade of gray because as you’re lung is the shades of gray. There’s always Room for mistake. I would say it has to be as part of any type of education all these Ethics all these boundaries all these impacts has to be thought from the beginning and You can’t have one without the other. And I think it is the responsibility that goes to the individual as well as it goes to the society as well as goes to the big country. And

Cigdem Sengul:
Mm-hmm.

Sepi Chakaveh:
I mean, this is a unique opportunity for our generation to be able to harness the emergence of this digital universe. You know, this is a huge opportunity, but we have to do it in the right way. based on correct judgment, based on fairness, based on a right global impact. And I think that is really the way forward. And you cannot be really too softly, softly about it. I think we should go back to our educational teaching books. We have to teach the teachers, we have to teach the lecturers, we have to have a really proactive sort of process and then go back and then reinvent ourselves. Because if we do not do that, we are not capable of taking the advantage of this opportunity. And I’m really, really very passionate about it. And as I said, there is no shades of grey. It has to be black and white. You have to actually educate people properly about it.

Cigdem Sengul:
It’s great to find another person as passionate. I mean, this is music to my ears because this is how I feel as well. Having worked in the industry as, you know, first in innovation lab in Deutsche Telekom and then in innovation research group in a smaller company, I feel, we discussed this before as well, the technology is just a tool, an adoption of a new technology, you know, how businesses and organizations for it. To me, they have to embrace systems thinking and consider all the issues that you mentioned. It is beyond technology really. It’s about how the organization embraces change and how it manages that change. And I feel like each business needs to analyze how the technology affects them. Are they disrupted in any way, for instance? And how would they counter that disruption? enhanced by the new technologies? Do their customers want that enhancement? Sometimes that innovation is not necessary. We shouldn’t do innovation for innovation’s sake, right? We should do innovation because there is a need for it in our companies. And trying to innovate just because it’s cool doesn’t take you very far. And it’s not sustainable either.

Sepi Chakaveh:
to.

Cigdem Sengul:
So I think I think you need to invest in it. You need to build capacity. If you’re interested in building that technology, you have to be patient. in budget and support and support at every level. From the engineer who’s kind of needs to train, retrain, to the person who manages them, to the C level, to the board level, right? It has to be championed that whatever new technology you’re introducing to an organization and you know if you go I’m going to go back and forth and be undecided about it, that’s when those things don’t take root. They just get forgotten or disappear very fast. Whereas when there is a clear dedication, clear commitment, then technology is taken on board. And you can see how it changes every aspect of the business, right? It has to be really adopted at all levels. And I think that’s one of the key things. Not following technology because it’s just the next coolest thing to do, but following technology because it does add or bring real value to your organization or to your business. doing that work as part of an innovation team where one of your job roles is to innovate, but then I would say always earn the side of caution, innovate responsibly and as needed.

Sepi Chakaveh:
Absolutely.

Cigdem Sengul:
Okay, so this we’ve been talking a lot about this, but maybe our final kind of discussion could go around this as well. What impact do you think IoT AI technology will have on society as a whole in the years to come? And how can we make sure that this impact is positive?

Sepi Chakaveh:
Okay, I mean, this is, I think it’s a very, very important, very sort of vast, broad subject. And what I think I would do is I would just talk about my own technology and I tell you what is my interpretation of this and why I have done that. Because effectively that is really partly answers my motivation. generation of data communication platforms. What do I mean by that? You see, for example, you’re gonna WhatsApp and you can talk to anybody across the world. But what I have done is I have created the next generation of this that you can speak with anybody in their own language. So you can have a conversation, a seamless conversation with one or many people in So what is the motivation behind that is because… So you get the, I mean, just very briefly, our representation in the digital world is what we call as a social machine. I mean, the social machine can be just one piece of, one page of Facebook, which is our representation. it, then we have social media. And this is really what happens. But the true social media currently, it means that if you want to communicate with someone, we have got just one common language. Or if you go back to telephones, for example, when you were trying to communicate the first phones that you have got is if you are sitting in the UK and you want to talk to someone in Tokyo, you either have to speak in English or Japanese or Turkish or Persian, you have to have one common language. If you speak two different languages, you can’t do that. Take that and expand that on the social media aspect. And that is exactly the problem. So this is the problem I have solved. And the reason for that is because you only can truly harness the advantage of the digital if you can communicate, express your own ideas in your own language. And that is that is the impact. I think the language barrier through the communication, through social media, is something that is absolutely fundamental. And and this is really taking it a step further. If you come to IoT devices, if you come to future metaverse or something like that. Everything becomes completely personalised if you can express it in your own language, in your own culture. If you try to copy it from somebody else, it doesn’t quite work out. I mean, I was born in Iran, I grew up in the UK, I was a German civil servant, I’m a sort of like a triple-speaking three languages, but I still sometimes, language and it goes back to the fundamentals because I was born in that country and that language and there is some common cultures that if I want to express it, it’s just very difficult if you are not really mastering a particular language. So for real digital democracy, for real share of equal share of pie for everyone, that has been my contribution.

Cigdem Sengul:
This is so excellent. It goes back to, as I said, when I was starting my background and journey, then I didn’t consider myself embedded in technology before I started my bachelor’s degree. I wanted to be an interpreter and translator, basically. And then I had a change of career in terms of engineering and started computer science degree. And this is talking to me in so many levels, having lived in the US and in Germany and be able to

Sepi Chakaveh:
You’re muted. Sorry, you’re muted.

Cigdem Sengul:
I’ll just

Sepi Chakaveh:
Yeah.

Cigdem Sengul:
say let’s redo that part because I had an entrance to the room. So

Sepi Chakaveh:
Thank you.

Cigdem Sengul:
I was just going to say this talks to me at so many levels. It’s my personal experience having lived in various different countries, France, Germany, UK, US, having been embedded in different social cultures and sometimes even if the language is the same, the British English and what, you know, US English and what certain words are used for what and what expressions are used for what and you have to even have translation between the same language, this talks to me a lot. And I think this is a wonderful invention to be able to unite people across a single platform without being affected by the barrier of language, basically. So this is great. And these type of technologies are going to be even more important with COVID. communication world very very very fast and

Sepi Chakaveh:
I’m

Cigdem Sengul:
you

Sepi Chakaveh:
so.

Cigdem Sengul:
can imagine how this is going to be so much more impactful as we continue to embrace this for educational purposes as well as other business purposes so this is this is great invention.

Sepi Chakaveh:
I mean, I worked on this for the last six years. I start working and in fact, the first versions of it, we put out for digital catapult 5G network was already in March 2020 before the pandemic. And then PixelChat became sort of, we started having the first tests with people sitting in the UK and Singapore having a seamless conversation. things about 5G or 6G is obviously why you have got these sorts of like the latencies disappears because of the fast bandwidth you have got but there’s a lot to do with a lot of people talk about you know streaming or these headsets and stuff and actually in reality that’s a bit of a whitewash because if you’re watching a movie on your handset on your 5G handset structure of the design is that you always have to buffer the system because of the compression. But the true, the true seamlessness comes when you have got a conversation with somebody across the world, because you are expecting that this person respond back to you without any delay. And that is why PixelChat is just perfect for the future networks of communication. I mean, we already have got customers and we already are testing it with telecom companies, but this is really going to be the future. And the idea is that once you have got these relatively cheap 5G handsets, which are coming into the market and everything, Pixochat is going to be their embedded communication platform. So you can not only speak to your everybody in your own language, you can speak in their own language as well. And this is the next generation of data voice communication. And that is, I mean, I’ve been working on it for six years. This had nothing to do with COVID. But obviously, with COVID, the need for technologies of remote communication and telecommunication became far more tangible and essential. Let’s put it this way.

Cigdem Sengul:
And in a recent project we’ve been running called SMILE, which was looking into monitoring infants for health monitoring in Sierra Leone, we did run a kind of a user study with our stakeholders and with our home carers, parents, as well as medical staff. And it became so obvious in that context that language barrier is one of the barriers that we needed to think about. This is the part where I find innovation very important, that kind of consults with the stakeholders first, because we entered the area project with the whole idea of creating this, maybe wearable to be able to monitor some symptoms and et cetera, but then the whole project took a different turn when you talk to the stakeholders and they say that, well, our barriers are actually, the carers and the parents talk different languages And the literacy levels are different. Sometimes what they mean does not necessarily are understood by the carer, for instance. And you can see within the same country where there are language differences in a healthcare setting, you see how it affects communication. And this is not only for remote communication, maybe in-place communication, those kinds of facilitators would be really, really helpful as well. So there is great potential for, and this is, about positive impact to society. And I think we are concluding with a brilliant positive example with your invention. So with that, I’ll slowly wrap up. We really enjoyed our time on the guest host takeover.

Sepi Chakaveh:
Yeah, thank you very much.

Cigdem Sengul:
So just a few comments. For more information, you can find me in LinkedIn, Chidam Sangol or doctor at Dr. Chidam Sangol at Twitter. Plugin. a Hacking the Digital Health event at Brunel in May. You can find that information in social media. Please come join us and let’s create technology with positive social impact. And Sefi, where does our audience find you? Where can they find you?

Sepi Chakaveh:
I mean, they can also find me on LinkedIn. And also my profile is at the University of Oxford. So yeah, I would be happy to hear from people. And if they are interested for this course or discussions, I would be very happy to participate. Thank you so much for your time. Cikdem, it was really, really a pleasure meeting you. And…

Cigdem Sengul:
It was my pleasure. I really enjoyed our discussion.

Sepi Chakaveh:
Thank you so much for your time and thank you so much for the opportunity. I hope that we can start some sort of more closer interaction in this area in the near

Cigdem Sengul:
That

Sepi Chakaveh:
future.

Cigdem Sengul:
will be my wish as well. That’s great.