 Hi, my name is Denise from InterGioTV and I'd like to welcome you to the Tech Talk, which is today about monitoring solutions and Two experts are with me virtually in the studio today. It's Alberto Beachy and Lorentz Meyer. Hello. Hello and welcome Yeah, just let me say some words to you Lorentz You are CEO of Geo Prevent. We will talk about that later, which is also part of Hexagon and Alberto, he is president of the division of radar and monitoring at Hexagon Geosystems and Yeah, I just said we are virtually meeting today. Just let us start with a question So how Hexagon is helping those professionals to keep up with all the ongoing technology innovations and the situation looking on monitoring solutions Regarding the monitoring needs, we are facing today increasing hazard coming from climate and ecosystem changes such as a landslide glaciers which melt avalanches, rock falls following heavy rainfalls and also if we look at the infrastructures, our infrastructures have been built many decades ago and they are aging subject also to increased stress caused by increased urbanization and construction activities. So for example we know that in the US alone 40% of their 600,000 bridges are more than 50 years old and it's calculated that one over 11 are structurally deficient. Again, so if we look also at the mining activities the global industrialization is asking for more and more raw materials and these poses new constraints and new demand on the safety of the workers in open pit underground mines. Yeah, and let's have a look to Lorenz. Lorenz, I found out that GeoPrevent develops monitoring and alarm systems also for natural hazards and just tell us something about that situation of GeoPrevent. What are you developing? What are you solutions for? Yeah, we help communities. We help road and railway users to be safe. We are a leading provider of monitoring solutions for natural hazards. So we develop for each site we develop a customized system that is adapted to the local needs of the situation, to the local needs of the customer. So for example, we develop systems that can predict ice falls or rock falls where we have time, for example, to evoke people or to close a road. So there is systems that can predict these kinds of events. We call them warning systems where we have time, time on the order of hours to days to weeks in order to prepare for an event. But there are also other systems that we call alarm systems where we don't see any precursors. So for example, an avalanche might release without any prior warning. So in such situations, we have time, for example, to close a road within a few seconds and the avalanche might reach the road after a minute. And this is usually enough to stop traffic and to prevent that people in cars or in trains are hit by such an event. So for many of these systems, we use radar and why do we do that? Radar has a big advantage. It works in any weather. It works day and night. And especially for systems where you have to react within seconds, it's important that those systems are working 24-7 because with the example of avalanches, most of them happen in winter when it's dark and when it's snowing. So radar is the only technology that allows to detect those avalanches reliably. We do the same for rockfall as well. So we have systems that close roads also for rockfall and not only for avalanches. In some areas this can happen 100 times a day. We have a very active site where a road is closed many times a day and then also automatically reopened in case the rocks stop above the road. And this is, I would say, a cheap alternative to structural measures. What has been done in the past in the last, I would say, maybe 50 years is building tunnels, building dams, building retaining structures for these kind of events. That's a good solution, but it's also a very expensive solution. And if you are responsible for a road network, for example, and you have your budget, then you might need all your budget for a single problem by building a tunnel, but all the other, whatever, 99 sites are still unprotected. So by monitoring you can solve the problems in a cheaper way and at the same time install the systems on many more sites with the same budget. So that's a big advantage of monitoring. What is important is that you choose the right technology and the right combination of sensors. So I mentioned we use a lot of radar, but also we combine it with other tools. We combine it with vibration measurements, with laser measurements, with GNSS measurements, registrations and so on. So all these sensor data is combined and we develop the algorithms that allow, in the end, to maximize the probability of detection. So to maximize the probability that we detect an event that needs to be detected, but at the same time, we keep a very low false alarm rate, because it's important that you only close the road if it's really necessary, because otherwise, if there is too many false alarms, people will not respect the traffic light anymore. So that's kind of the secret to protect roads or railways from these kind of natural events in an efficient way. Okay, so thanks for that. And of course, as I'm part of the intergeo communication team and we're looking forward to the first digital intergeo edition, where also companies like Hexagon will launch, will show their innovations. I'm also really curious to get more information or details on what are the latest technologies in monitoring solutions. You can then show interested visitors or guests of intergeo at the Hexagon virtual booth. So maybe it's a question for Alberto to start. Yes, Hexagon has a wider range of advanced monitoring technologies products. Since a long time, you know, that Leica geosystem developed, introduced in the monitoring market, the geodetic instruments, such as Total Station, GNSS, laser scanners, and the related software for processing and visualizing the data, like GELMOS. And these have been applied to all the natural and main made hazards that I mentioned before. And Hexagon has been always a leader in this technology and continues to improve these products to be at the forefront of the technology. Here at the intergeo, there will be important announcement about a new geodetic instrument and software for monitoring. In recent years, Hexagon, through the acquisition of IDS GeoRadar, had to do the geodetic technology, the radar technology, as also Lawrence mentioned, the interferometric radar technology in particular, or the radar technology in general, is gaining more and more interest in monitoring because of the benefits that this technology can offer. The night and day continuous, all-weather working, the fact that you can achieve great distances up to four or five kilometers, the accuracy. You can reach sub-millimeter, millimetric or millimetric accuracy even at these relatively high distances. The remote nature of the measurement, you don't need to put any reflectors, any target on the monitor scenario. So the radar has become today a complement to the geodetic instruments. And these offer to the user the opportunity to have a more comprehensive solution, a more effective solution for monitoring the different hazards. And Hexagon, being the owner of these different technologies, is now committed to the total monitoring concept, which means to continue to provide to the monitoring professionals these wider range, this comprehensive range of different hardwares, but also software which permit to merge and connect the data coming from these different sensors, and so to facilitate the interpretation by the user. Maybe just an add-on to why we think that radar is a very important new technology. With radar you can detect both very slow movements within the ferrometric radars. You see millimeter movements over over days, weeks or even months, but at the same time radar can also detect very fast movements like the movement of a falling rock or a flowing avalanche. It's the same technology, slightly different concepts, but both work day and night in any weather. And well, what do you think? Will the future of monitoring look like in case of hardware or software? Will there be more monitoring with cameras or with drones? Or will the technologies just develop? And what do you think? What will the future of monitoring look like? What are the next steps, for example? I think that say monitoring will profit more and more from the existence of these different sensors, of these different technologies, because each technology has its benefit and its limitation. So putting together different sensors, different technology help the user to have a more complete view of the situation and to have more data to understand what's happening. Of course, on the other hand, the user, the customer can become overwhelmed by this big amount of data coming from different sensors. Then I think that an essential frontier of the new technology will be to provide the monitoring professionals with the tools, software in particular, which is capable of collecting together the data coming from these different sensors to merge and correlate this data to help the monitoring professional to interpret the situation. This is for sure one of the things where Exagon is committed. The Exagon Gel Monitoring Hub is the current software platform that Exagon offer for collecting, for aggregating the data coming from different sensors, not only the Exagon one, but also third-party manufacturers, for example, of geotechnical contact sensors. And this software, the Gel Monitoring Hub, is able to aggregate and to provide unified visualization to the user of the different data. But Exagon is continuing to work on these and new things will come in the future regarding this total monitoring concept. Another frontier for the technology where Exagon is also committed is to have more and more intelligent sensors, more autonomous sensors, which are capable of triggering the alarms when there is a risk situation and also taking action like today, the Rockfall radar, that from gel prevent close the road when there is an impossible Rockfall event or an avalanche event. I think in general we are all profiting from the developments in the electronics and IT industry that electronics is getting cheaper and cheaper, computing power is getting more cheaper, uses less energy, which then allows in the end to monitor more and to have smarter algorithms running on these devices so that the user does not have to check everything for himself, but that the portal cloud solution can aggregate everything and make interpretation much easier. So thank you very much, Alberto and Lorenz, for this tech talk and the monitoring solutions of Exagon. And I'd really like to invite many visitors as possible to Intergeo Digital to interview you live at the Exagon booth virtually. And yeah, it was that from my side. Do you have anything else to add? No, I thank you and I welcome the people visiting Intergeo, although in a virtual way this year to visit our site, our presentations to see what's new from Exagon. Okay, thank you and bye bye. Thanks.