 Welcome to TF4. Let's talk. I'm your host Apilbhartya and we have two guests with us, Lakshayana KC, Technology Consultant and Nirmal Adhikari, NFT Coding Hub Manager at BuildChange. And you folks are also associated with Lennis Foundation's Isaac Seymour open source project. Before we get started, Nirmal, Lakshayana, first of all, welcome to the show. Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir, Nirmal. It's nice to be here. Lakshayana, can you just give us a quick background about yourself? I'm currently working as a Technology Consultant at BuildChange and I've been working in BuildChange since 2017 in Nepal. And I joined because of my passion in technology for social impact. So I've been working on different projects related in the New Frontier Technology Division at BuildChange. And I work at the intersection of technology and its application for the construction related projects at BuildChange. Nirmal, can you please quickly talk about yourself? I'm working here as NFT Coding Hub Manager. We usually manage in NFT multiple projects, multiple projects from multiple countries, multiple apps related to the BuildChange and related to the BuildChange donor and also third party and government depending upon which projects we are. We usually develop in-house code and also manage all the technology stops here. Tell me a bit about BuildChange. What do you folks do? What is it all about? So BuildChange operates around the world. It's a non-profit organization with a mission to protect lives and livelihoods from disaster induced housing destruction. And yeah, it operates around the world and we have different projects in emerging nations and our focus is to enable disaster resilient housing around the world. When it's a disaster in housing around the world, what exactly do you mean? Or if you want to just explain the scope of the BuildChange project. We work by bringing together people, money and technology and for example, we spread awareness about the importance of safe construction, following safe construction guidelines during construction and also trying to bridge the gap in lack of technical assistance in remote areas to homeowners. So they are more aware of safe housing construction practices. BuildChange also provides training and facilitates policy level changes in different institutions. So it works at different levels and we also try to leverage technology and innovation to be able to achieve skill and achieve more impact in reaching our goal basically. Excellent. When you do talk about safe construction, are you talking about it in general or you're talking about sometimes a lot of places. Earthquakes are a big challenge and sometimes the construction is not up to that. So are you focusing on that particular area or you're talking about construction in general? Exactly. We are focusing on disaster prone regions in terms of earthquakes, typhoons and so on. And yeah, basically it's not these disasters that kill people, right? Or damage, create, cause the destruction of houses. It's because of substandard housing conditions. So our focus is to help mitigate the challenges that lead to substandard housing conditions. These natural events, they are just like, for a planet, it's just a normal activity. It's the buildings and how quickly we can either get out of those buildings, how quickly or how early we get information. Hey, something is going to happen or how well they are built. And as you were alluding to earlier that you are involved with a lot of policymaking. So I think there are three aspects here. One is, of course, technologies there. You can build technologies that helps in early warning signals. Number two is that you have to work around policies, right? There are right policies. Number third is, which is more important and more difficult is people are social. You can have technology in place. You can have policy in place. You can bring a horse to the water, but you cannot force it to drink water. So can you talk about these three aspects and if you look at Build Change, what are the aspects that you focus on? I think that you do focus on all three, but I want to hear from you. Build Change as an organization focuses on all three because each people, money and technology are important to change or transform the systems that regulate and finance and build the houses. So basically we have to work at each step of the construction value chain all the way from data collection and gathering information from the field to all the way supervising and monitoring the construction and also getting the designs of disaster resilient houses and all the way to reporting so that we are aware of the situation in the field. So the organization focuses on each step of the construction value chain and ultimately our goal is to be able to leverage technology people and money in order to bring them all together and help transform the condition of substandard housing. Our focus today, like my colleague Nirmal and I, we work specifically in the technology component. So yeah, our focus is to be able to support or bridge the gap in lack of engineers and technical professionals in the field and by leveraging technology trying to bridge that gap basically. We also help from awareness level to the post-disaster level from pre-disaster during disaster and post-disaster. So in pre-disaster we usually focus on awareness and the prevention type. We have a different apps in Nepal we call Surakchitgar in Indonesia and Philippines. We also have the app called Tebe Balai and Ruma Aman that usually focus on the awareness part. So how they can be aware? So if disaster happens, what can they do? What are the main primary goals they can do to prevent from that disaster? And yes, sure, of course, we also work on policy levels. So we help governments to develop the policy of post-disaster as well. So for how we can distribute trends. So we have like, maybe I can put the name but in some country we work and also help the government to make the policy how we can distribute the trends in the post-disaster. What are the application processes? What are the policy level that you need to implement to get good post-disaster results in terms of construction, developing all those damages houses. So this kind of policy level we also work on that part as well. So from starting to end, we usually work on all those parts. Excellent. Yeah, you talked about the social aspect which is equally important. I won't focus on technology now. There are a couple of things that you folks mentioned and one of the kind of collecting data and all those things. So I want to understand how much software you leverage for this project and then we'll talk about how much of that is open source. But let's start with the tech aspect of it. Because I'm also sure you're using a lot of IoT devices because if you're collecting a lot of data, you know, seismic data or whatever it is. So let's just focus on what is the technology aspect of build change. So in terms of technology, we work in the field. So from data collection to taking the seismic data. So we doesn't have our own device to collect the seismic but there are a lot of open source and even government has the seismic data. So we usually coordinate with the government and other organization who has the seismic data for that. And then for data collection, we also have the in-house app and we also use a lot of open source. If you know that the COBO toolbox is the data collection app. We usually work with COBO toolbox in field to collect the data and then there is a design. We also use Autodex different technology to build design to make a design of the houses. And so this kind of technology we use from data collection to the design and the implementation and also the systems that can send back the data to the field. So what happens is we collect the data and then we send back the results to the field. So in these cycles, whatever technology we have and whatever latest technology we find in the market, we usually use and we always be up to date with those technologies so that it can live with a lot of human effort. So yeah, we leverage technology in each step of the construction value chain from data collection to information sharing, design, and then construction monitoring and reporting. In terms of the specific technologies, we, as my colleague mentioned, we use data collection open source tools. Also, we have our own platform that we deploy in different projects depending on the context. And currently we're with the support of IBM. We are working on an open source project, which is mainly, which is called ISEC-SIMO. And it stands for Intelligent Supervision for Construction. And that's the open source tool that we are working on developing and the goal of that tool is to enable access to safe construction practices and quality assurance feedback on various construction elements. So that is still in progress. And now it's been hosted under Linux Foundation. Excellent. That's the perfect segue to my next question, which is, can you talk a bit more about IBM, their call of code, call for code and ISEC-SIMO project? So call for code challenge is a great opportunity to work on pressing issues that are relevant around the world. And as part of the call for code challenge in 2018, we were one of the finalists in the call for code challenge for disaster preparedness and resilience. And our solution was called PD3R, which stands for Post Disaster Rapid Response Retrofit. And basically through this challenge, we were able to work on a tool with the goal to basically tackle the challenges faced in post disaster response via rapid assessment tool to determine which houses can or cannot be retrofitted and to do so quickly through the help of technology. And building on top of that project, now we're working on this construction supervision and quality assurance tool called ISEC-SIMO. And yeah, basically that project is about enabling homeowners, builders and local inspectors with access to safe construction practices and quality checks of some construction elements. So I just want to add a bit background on this if you want to. So what happens is this tool is built upon a need. What happens if you know that 2015, Nepal earthquake was a massive devastating earthquake and while working on that phase with bill change, we found a lot of problems with actually deploying our engineers to take the assessment on the field. So it happens is like there is a blockade. So there are a lot of problems to deploy and you also need a massive engineer at once to deploy on all of the sites and to take the actually current housing assessment. So we need a solution that can leverage that work and we don't have to deploy a lot of engineers, maybe homeowner even can be a part of that process. So we came up with the solution that calls post disaster rapid response retrofit that is PD3R solution. And then what happens in that is we have like certain criteria of which houses can be retrofit or which houses cannot be retrofit and depending upon that criteria we transform that engineering to the machine learning model and then we generate a model that says that this house cannot be retrofitted with simple click of images. So this can then leverage a lot of engineer even some homeowner and whoever in that local community that can access the mobile phone and know how to use the mobile phone where the part of that. And in 2018 we had a great opportunity what happens and then we thought that these tools is because we are not only the person or the organization that is facing a lot of problem with this kind of need and need this kind of solution. That's why we and this call for code 2018 was a very great opportunity to make this open source and put them into the people and where a lot of other organization and other government agency who wants to use this solution can be also a part of this solution. Excellent and since you are talking about other people other organization and of course Lakshana you can also jump in is that how do you collaborate with other organizations as you earlier mentioned that you know there are a lot of data that yourself cannot you know create you know you get it from others. So can you talk about technologically how do you work with other either companies organizations or projects. We usually work on post disaster so we work on mainly the government organization and give us the solution that okay these are the solution we can implement to make the retrofit or maybe the new construction what they can do after post quit and as a part of this tool we provide this kind of solution and then they usually use these tools so whoever needs whoever works with our organization and then we usually use this solution to collaborate with this organization and then deploy this kind of solution. Yeah so we collaborate with different organizations depending on the project and the region in the past we've worked with UNOPS we worked with American Red Cross team and so and other organizations and basically yeah so we we train the staff who are in the project or it really depends on the scope we don't have a generic framework or tools we use to work with different organizations we in some cases it's better to use an existing tool that the organization is already using and so in that case we develop quality assessments and monitoring systems using those tools so it's very context specific. We have talked about Isaac Seymour but I want to get deeper into the weeds can you talk about from the you know what are the core components of it? So Isaac Seymour tool comprises of two components one is the mobile app which can be implemented on the field by users to carry out quality checks of construction elements by taking pictures of the specific elements and are in construction sites and we also have another component which is the web platform which is a multifunctional platform for crowdsourcing image data set for future machine learning training it can be used by open source developers to add new checks in the project and that can be leveraged in a different context or they can help modify the existing checks and they can create a multi pipeline of different machine learning models and image processing scripts so yeah it's very multifunctional and it can be used to also dynamically update the content of the mobile app so yeah these are the core tools that we have developed so far and this is the beginning and we would like to continue development of more machine learning models and more quality checks in the future Excellent now before we wrap this up I would like to throw the floor open to you folks and to invite other members who can join you folks into this initiative and help you with the project Sure so we would like to invite the open source community to join our initiative and also we would like to invite them to be a part of this project which is really the target targeted towards tackling the challenges of substandard housing conditions so it's a big endeavor so the more people that support us with this initiative the better our chances to succeed in our goal and the kind of support they can provide us with is some short term updates they can support us with crowd sourcing image data set which can be used to train future quality check models and also to improve our existing checks or they can also support us in the long term by helping develop things like object detection models and also trying to help us tackle some of the challenges of computer vision related like project sorry computer vision related challenges that we are facing in the project so yeah these are there are many ways you can help contribute and you can check out the GitHub link and IsaacSimo.net URL to learn more about the project. Nirmal Nakshana thank you so much for taking time out today and not only talk about change but also this project and the efforts that are going on there from the community from the government sector to to build saver houses and keep us all safe. Thank you. Thank you sir.