 Hi, welcome to Intergeo Digital 2020, a live here from the Expo Lounge. And as I announced, I'm happy that I have a guest right now here physically in the studio and I'd like to welcome Ika Mai. Hi and welcome. Nice to have you here. Yeah, Ika Mai is really a BIM expert in Germany. And she's a sort after speaker and talk show guest on BIM digital construction and of course digital twins. And this is what we are talking about here within the next half hour. And yeah, Ika, when I say you are a sort after speaker, you are the BIM expert because we know you from Intergeo. We saw you in several talk sessions. Yeah, why are you, where does this expertise come from? I'm afraid I have to say Denise's expertise comes with age, it comes with experience and exposure, of course. And I think I was very lucky that many years ago now, as I say with age, I worked for Over Arup, it's an international engineering consultancy firm, very innovative and I lived in London at the time and I was exposed to fantastic projects, fantastic people there. They allowed me and enabled me to sit on various committees like the institution for civil engineers, the BIM Action Group and other groups for the British Standard Institute. I worked on a committee developing a standard. And this is where you gain experience, also big projects of course, Crossrail and others. And in just working with so many different people on so many different projects, you gain experience and all of a sudden people think you are the expert. Yeah. So you gained so much experience. You are talking about BIM and what comes first in your mind when you think of these years of working with BIM digital twins and for railway projects, for example. The first thing that comes to my mind is that it is still quite hard for people to really understand what we mean when we talk about BIM still really hard. So if we talk about digitalization, a whole sector, an industry sector like the construction sector, we realize this is a really big sector. So in Europe, for example, this sector employs 18 million people, sorry. And when you think about that, how big that is and what a big change digitalization is for a sector, then you realize it can't just come out of the supply chain. It can't just come bottom up. So it needs a sort of leadership and someone needs to drive this. And I'm always a bit stunned when I look around, when I look in Germany, when I look into other countries or at the EU level. And I worked on the with the BIM, EU BIM task group that we are still lacking leadership and a strategic approach in just pushing the entire sector and millions of people along this curve. So why do you think why is Germany still considered to be such a back venture when it comes to BIM? Is it rightly so? Well, would you get these numbers from? How do you compare it? Why are we always so self critical and always consider ourselves to be the the the trailing edge of the whole field? I don't think we are, to be honest. The numbers that I've got, there are now also a few years old and I haven't seen any recent surveys or any numbers. And again, I wouldn't know how would you compare different nations and how far advanced they are. I'm talking about about Germany. It always strikes me. Not that we are lacking BIM expertise or digital expertise. I think we have some fantastic companies and and we see wonderful things when I look at construction and how we procure and deliver construction projects. I think we have a problem right there. And I think that was picked up again years ago by this committee for major projects and our committee delivered a report which has 10 very specific points addressing to the policymakers and to the most to the public sector. What needs to change in Germany when we think about the whole construction sector? And I think we are quite poor in how we procure projects, how we manage risks in Germany and how we do a certain few other things. And when we compare that to how other countries and other nations do that, that's different, especially managing risks and procuring. And I think that all we need to think of all that together when we talk about BIM and digitalization, it all needs to come together. But if we look at the world and look at the digitalization of the construction sites and so on, do you think it's more Asia, it's more US, it's more Europe thing to be there really good or is it developing at the same time in different places to be good there to get forward? I think we see a few nations that have quite early taken a very strategic approach. And I'm thinking of Singapore here, for example. So the Singapore BIM guide and BIM strategy was one of the very early documents that came out at a national level. And the other one, I mean, it's quite ironic now talking in the European context or EU context, even, is the UK. The UK was the first nation that published a digitalization strategy for the construction sector alongside a BIM strategy. And I was the first nation that looked at BIM and the whole sector from a very strategic level, and they developed a long term plan and they understood that if you want to move these millions of people working in that sector, you can't have a conversation with six million people. So you need a different approach, how you get them to move and also how you create some breathing space in the supply chain so that they can innovate and that they can change and do something and adopt new ways of working and new tools and new methods. And that comes back to procurement. So if we always procure projects to the cheapest bidder. And I'd say the cheapest because in reality it is always the cheapest bidder. We take the entire breathing space from the suppliers to innovate. And that approach, if we're not taking a strategic view on that, will only drive costs but not drive value. But that is what we're trying to do. We want to deliver value. That's what we need to do. So I have another question because I'm the communication expert. And when it comes to building information, managing or modeling, there's always one other expression on the side, the digital twin. So isn't that the same thing? Or how can we do the difference between these two things? Yeah, I can explain my view to that. So BIM, as such, well, for me, BIM is like the equivalent to digitalization in construction. But it's also seen as a different method of creating data for construction projects, designing things, buildings, assets. Now, using objects and objects make the difference. It's not so much the move from 2D to 3D. It is now using objects in the design process and a construction process because when we have an object in a model, we can start linking and attaching information to that. We can enter parameters and that opens a whole new world. It's all about objects. So what BIM does is it gives us new tools and a new way of working to develop object based models, 3D models out of design. You could call that a digital twin. Why not? But here's the problem. We have a huge amount, millions and millions of existing assets, bridges, buildings, railway tracks, roads. Well, we haven't got these models, object based models. We might have some old paper drawings or PDFs or something. But what do we do with those? We haven't got objects. So what we do, for example, is we create object based models from existing assets. And that is a totally different method because we're not using the same software that the designers are using. We're doing it in a different way. But you could say, well, the end is a 3D model that contains objects. Yes, it's a digital twin. Does that explain it? So coming to the same result from totally two different sides and using different methods, but creates a similar result, if you like. Yeah, that's perfect. Thank you for that. And, yeah, can you give some more examples from your everyday life, maybe, because you also have your consulting agency, LockLock Consulting. And you use digital twins, you create digital twins, these objects. So give us some practical examples of these twins. Thank you for that question, Denise. Yes, of course, that's exactly what we do. So we copy existing stuff, whatever that is. It could be a machine, it could be a road network, it could be a railway track, a bridge or building, but mostly we are in infrastructure, energy, networks, etc. And again, a lot of people are doing that now and a lot of people are capturing the assets with laser scans. Yes, you can do that. That creates large amounts of data, point cloud data, which is quite data heavy. So it's very often as terabytes of data. And the problem is, what I said earlier, you haven't got objects. They're just points. So we don't do that normally. What we do is we take an action camera, like you put that on your helmet or hold it in your hand and we walk through a station that just takes an hour or two, a railway station, for example, and we take videos. And we have a method how we create, first of all, a point cloud, a videogrammatic point cloud from the video. And then how we process that and how we use AI, artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms, which detect the objects in this point cloud and replace them with objects in our library. And this is how we create digital twins from existing assets. And that only works because we've got this massive, massive library that's been developed over years, many, many years. And the algorithms which find the objects. Is this very cost intensive to create those digital twins for projects? We're trying to keep the cost as low as possible, because in our view, this is the only way how the method can really scale because we are talking about such an enormous amount of assets that need to be digitalized or bemized or turned into object-based digital twins. And that's exactly why we are not going down the laser scan route because that is already a quite costly method for capturing the data in the first place. So this is where we are reducing costs to start with, just data capturing costs. And also why we use so many machine learning algorithms again, which do a lot of the work so that we have a semi-automated way of doing that. And our people are mostly there to do the quality assurance that the algorithms have done a good job. Yeah. So I switch a bit. I switch to intergeo, the topic of intergeo or the center of intergeo is geo information, of course, geodata. You just talked about the amongst of data. And geodata belongs to BIM on those digital twins. You just explained about the objects and the buildings. So how will this topic of creating digital BIM, digital twins and change the geo IT industry? Well, I think we all are starting to understand how important the geolocation is, because it matters where things are, not just what they are, but also where they are. And putting again now BIM and our lovely models, we just talked about into the context of a city and now into the context of a smart city. That's actually also is quite simple. So the smart city is trying to satisfy the increased need of the society without using exponentially more resources to do so. So it's not just a connected city with lots of networks and is connected, but it's also really it's learning. It's learning about the needs of the society and of the people, consuming the spaces. And when we again think about the design process and about BIM, so we design a new, let's say, a hospital and there are lots of questions you need to answer. Where is this where geolocation? Where do you want to build this hospital? How many wards? How many patient rooms? How many operating theaters? Do you need? How big do you need it? How it is accessible? How is it connected to public transport, for example? So lots of things you need to decide before you even start designing the actual hospital itself. And then from the design and the construction process, we hand over data from one phase to the next. And then eventually you hand over the data from construction into operation. So someone needs to operate that hospital, but not only maintain it and clean it, but also provide the services which are happening inside the hospital. And that is always the biggest cost. The biggest cost of society is the service provision. And that happens on the back of the built environment. So if we can make our hospitals and our assets better performing and better supporting the people working in it, we can create better cities and we can keep again the costs low and the assets in a high performance. But in order to do so, so I just talked about data getting passed on from one phase to the other. We need to pass on data the other way as well. And that's what we call feedback loops. So how do we as a society, how do we as people, how do we consume the spaces, how do we consume public transport? Are the trains running at the times when we need them? Or should they change the timetables set up because we have different needs? And then this understanding of how what we do with the actual built environment and how we consume it, that needs to get fed back into the design process of the next hospital. So it's a loop. And that's that's, I think, where something like Intergeo has an absolute vital role to play, because that brings it all together. It brings together geodata understanding of what we do and where things are and now, increasingly, through your Smart City initiative, how this all belongs and fits together. Yeah, this is the Smart City Solutions part of the geo, which exactly fits into this topic, because I think the city of tomorrow and the challenges of mass urbanization and the population is growing. It's not possible without the digitalization and BIM models and digital twins to, yeah, to organize all that. Do you have any more examples for those cities, how they work with the digital twins? I mean, you had hospitals and there, but they help in so many areas. Yeah, it's public transport. Yeah, it's all the different layers of a city. So it's education, it's offices, it's residential, it's transport, energy, everything we need in this society and everything is possible without. I mean, every service we think about happens on the back of something of something that was built from the construction industry. This is why the construction sector is such an important sector in our entire society. It's not only because it's big and employs so many people, but it delivers the built environment for us and can make us healthy and happy. It can make us sick as well. And it can make us dysfunctional or functional. Eka, I have another question concerning your career, because it's not so usual that women are in those engineering jobs or in the construction industry as you did several years before. So why did you decide to go this way? And how hard was it to be there as maybe one woman to five hundred men or something like that at the university? I don't know, just tell us about a little bit about your story. And maybe it gives some other girls just the idea just the opportunity to go that way. Yeah, yeah, I'm very happy to encourage women to go into engineering. However, I'm not an engineer myself. I'm a geographer, so my background is GIS is geography. So this is my home turf here. Absolutely. But it was then when I moved to London in 2006 and then I said I joined the engineering firm Arab. And all of a sudden I worked in the construction sector and I had absolutely no clue about engineering and construction, etc. And all of a sudden I found myself in exactly that world. Construction sector engineering is still quite male dominated. And I was the red herring. I was not an engineer and it was a woman. However, I must say Arabs is actually very, very good in diversity. And it was a very diverse in every regard, not only gender diversity, but also cultural, nationality, age. So a real diverse firm, which was great. But you're right, the entire sector is not. And from my experience and from my colleagues and other people I've met, women are fantastic engineers, mostly. And I would like to encourage them to go into technical jobs and and and don't don't be shy. Don't shy back. Just take it on. And I think every every job or every aspect of our life really benefits from more diversity in every regard. Yes, I mean, when you just open this whole can into the wider discussion about. Career and family, especially for young women, that's a very personal decision, I think, and that's everyone has to decide for themselves how they deal with that. And my observation again is that we have a much better balance now than we have maybe 20 or 30 years ago in parents sharing the burden or the pleasure of looking after the little ones and also progressing in their respective careers as well. Thank you very much, Ika, for your time talking about digital twins, BIM and also your career. It was a pleasure to have you here. Thank you. Thank you, Denise. It was a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.