People talk about terms like multidisciplinary,
but it really means is individual people,
each with their own, just awe-inspiring depth.
And when you are able once in a while to bring that together,
some pretty amazing things can happen.
Times of crisis push us to innovate, to adapt, and evolve.
To truly come together,
we must break down barriers and nurture alternate perspectives.
Science and technology offer the opportunity
to fuel discovery and magnify our ingenuity.
These are some of the stories and people
whose ideas are carrying us forward to emerge resilience.
[RESILIENCE]
[Episode 3 Discovering Ways to Find Resilience]
It's been really humbling to see so many people
from so many different walks of life
come together
and try to tackle
something that is almost inconceivable.
The pandemic has changed the way we work,
learn, and gather
how we connect
with our communities.
We saw for the first time,
researchers working together
and engaging in some of the most creative methods for clinical testing
that medical science has ever seen.
And that resulted in just an avalanche
of new therapeutics,
new diagnostics, and multiple vaccines.
Now is the time for individuals, businesses,
and organizations to consider their impact on the well-being of others.
We need to develop tech not only for our communities
but with our communities.
Everyone has their own unique views,
values,
and belief systems.
And we don't need to imagine what others believe in,
we just need to involve them in the process.
Innovations in science and technology are helping us to address
some of these challenges as we work to reopen our shared spaces.
A huge amount of scientific discovery is,
for lack of a better word, pure luck.
[Bringing new perspectives to the future of research]
In the pandemic, it became really important for researchers to step forward
with their research capabilities and attack problems
that were critical for crisis response and recovery.
We had the opportunity to do, you know, some interesting research,
but at the end of the day, I think everyone was trying to do that.
We just had the tools at our disposal.
Since COVID-19, is a airborne, you know, virus.
Well, we thought,
why can't we track COVID-19 through a city?
And because different people move around different parts of the city,
wouldn't that be interesting to provide people insight about
what the exposures to hazards
that they're going to individually experience?
We would put these passive fabric sensors
into the HVAC system of metro buses,
what we're trying to measure from that is the presence of the COVID-19 RNA.
How I see this advancing is that we're actually going
to try to do whole-genome sequencing of the entire biological material
that's on our filters, so that we can kind of understand
collectively what's going on
in our biological environment within a bus.
What's also really powerful about this type of passive sensing technology
is that if you can use something so simple on buses around the world,
where they don't have the privilege of getting millions of people COVID tested,
then it's a potential way to be able to track and inform
where the hotspots are in a country or in a city.
As we are entering into a much more hybrid workplace,
spatial analysis is helping to determine social distance compliance
and face mask detection and all those safety measures
that you want to have in place for a better reopening.
Most people these days just want to go in and out of stores
and don't want to linger around too much.
So spatial analysis can also be used by retailers to better manage
their queues in the stores, as well as product availability in shelves.
I believe that ethics improves product quality,
it's very important to be transparent.
What are the benefits to them?
Who has access to the data?
How long is the data retained?
Get the perspectives of the different communities
and study that in the context of views,
right, because the same finding may not translate to different contexts.
We also done participatory design sessions where we bring a team of users together
and have them co-design with us as well.
And when you improve product quality, that's going to lead to better adoption.
Most people really connect with what we can see,
what we can feel, what we can touch,
but we can't really grasp what they can't see.
There are things floating right here even.
So I think it's important to provide information
that allows other people to help visualize the unseen.
That's actually when a simulation plays a big role,
not only in visualizing
what is actually happening
but also in giving further insights to other researchers,
how you can actually tackle these concentrations
that can be too high and could be causing a mass infection.
So when you perform a computer simulation with,
say, three billion computational cells,
you get information in every one of these three billion cells,
you can vary the parameters,
you can put more people in the stadium, less people in the stadium,
more ventilation, less ventilation.
You don't have to wait for the ideal weather condition to arrive,
which will maybe never arrive.
I think maybe even the most important aspect is indeed illustrating to people
how things can be a problem or not be a problem
and how they can be solved.
The World Health Organization has said,
"Okay, we now consider the ventilations may be one of the most important measures."
So we have to ventilate 6 to 12 times more intensive
than we're doing today.
For many small businesses, for many schools, this is unaffordable.
And that's why we and many other researchers worldwide these days
are advocating a combination of ventilation and air cleaning.
And that combination is much cheaper, it's much faster,
and it's much more efficient to be installed.
If it's an air cleaner, you put the power plug into the socket.
And that's it, you have a reduction in aerosol concentrations with up to 95%.
Like we calculated with the simulations,
with computer simulations in some indoor environments.
So much of the work in the pandemic
was focused on understanding
and shutting down, right?
When do we shut down?
For how long do we shut down?
What is the policy around shutdown?
Bert was a story about opening up.
It was a story about getting life back to normal.
Once we get ventilation and air cleaning in order,
we will also be better prepared for next pandemics,
then hopefully, we'll never have to do again,
what we have to do now is shutting down a large part of our society.
[Building technology solutions for a healthier society]
The SMART Health Cards technology
is something that we just started developing
over the course of the last year.
And really in its current form,
it's been around as a specification
for about six months.
But the collaboration that we've had
and the community that we've built around this project
has been really impressive.
The goal with health cards is to make sure that anyone
who's received an immunization or COVID lab test
has easy access to a copy of that result.
And we decided that we wanted to make sure
that anything that we could do on a smartphone,
we could also do on paper so that if you were giving a consumer
a copy of one of these SMART Health Cards,
they could have that copy as a digital file, they manage on their phone.
Or as a paper print-out
that they could keep in a wallet or in a folder.
The thing that's really impressed me throughout this pandemic response has been,
how much we can get done when we have focus
and when we understand
what are the most important things to accomplish.
And I've seen groups come together from across the healthcare industry,
including healthcare providers, and healthcare records vendors,
and academic medical centers,
really focused on very specific technology problems.
With that level of focus,
we've accomplished much more in terms of technology development
and technology deployment than we have in the five years leading up.
Everything that we're doing and things like vaccine credentials
and any kind of clinical validation and new ways
of understanding data interoperability between public health agencies
and healthcare delivery organizations,
all of these things ended up being helped by the fact
that we had pure researchers involved with,
you know, only the technology and scientific advances in mind.
Prior to the pandemic happening, we weren't working in the space.
But now it has become really part of our research.
It has happened in the past that new paradigms of science
emerge and catalyze whole new communities of researchers.
During the past year,
we've seen the emergence of new global pathways
for information and insights, unexpected partnerships and coalitions,
and projects that live at the intersections of diverse disciplines and industries.
All those different connections
that happened in the spirit of crisis response,
they ended up mattering a lot.
We have a rare opportunity to be selective about
how we proceed from this point,
to learn from this shared experience, and create better systems for our future.
Over the next few years,
we'll be working towards the worldwide scientific community
coming to a clear definition of societal resilience
or crisis response science,
what does it mean to be ready and resilient for future calamities.
[RESILIENCE]
[Microsoft]