L’innovation pour atteindre les Objectifs de Développement Durable (ODD)

Par Sandro Marcotullio, Ambassade de Suisse en Chine

Jeudi 24 mars 2022, un public animé a participé à la résidence de l’Ambassadeur de Suisse et en ligne à notre événement du Mois de la francophonie pour découvrir comment les Objectifs de Développement Durable (ODD) peuvent être atteints grâce à l'innovation. Cette édition spéciale du Café des Sciences, entièrement en français, a été organisée par l’ambassade de Suisse en Chine avec le soutien de Swissnex.

Des intervenants de cinq pays différents (Italie, Chine, Suisse, Belgique et France) ont discuté de nouvelles approches ainsi que de leurs activités dans le contexte de la Chine contemporaine.

L’événement a été ouvert par Bernardino Regazzoni, Ambassadeur de Suisse en Chine et Président du Groupe des Ambassadeurs Francophones qui a souligné l’importance de la langue française en Chine ainsi que l’action politique de l’Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie autour de valeurs telles le développement durable, la promotion de l’égalité et la paix. Valeurs que on retrouve aussi parmi les 17 Objectifs de Développement Durable établis par l’Organisation des Nations Unies.

L’Ambassadeur de Suisse en Chine Bernardino Regazzoni pendant son discours de bienvenue

La conférence a été modérée par Didier Vuarnoz, chef adjoint de la science, la technologie, l’éducation, l’innovation et la santé à l’Ambassade de Suisse en Chine, qui, après une introduction sur les ODD, a donné la parole à Ippolita Gallo, enseignante atelierista auprès de l’école italienne de Pékin. Elle a présenté l'approche innovante qui place les filles et les garçons - les plus jeunes citoyens - au centre d'une expérience éducative collective. L’école italienne de Pékin met l'accent sur l'éducation à l'environnement et les enfants sont engagés dans différents projets comme par exemple la création d'une fresque avec une peinture qui purifie l'air.

Didier Vuarnoz, modérateur et chef adjoint de la science, la technologie, l’éducation, l’innovation et la santé à l’Ambassade de Suisse

Ippolita Gallo, enseignante atelierista à l’école italienne de Pékin, présente l’approche innovante qui place les enfants au centre de l’expérience éducative

En passant de l’école maternelle à l’université, Rina Sa a consacré son intervention à l’enseignement du français auprès d’étudiants dans les domaines scientifiques. Elle est professeure de français à l’École Centrale de Pékin, la première école d’ingénieurs francophones en Chine. Cette dernière est née d’un partenariat entre l’Université de Beihang (l’Université d'aéronautique et d'astronautique de Pékin) et le Groupe des Écoles Centrales françaises pour former des ingénieurs polyvalents trilingues, en associant le modèle de formation des ingénieurs français et les expériences d’enseignement de Beihang.

Rina Sa, professeure de français à l’université d’aéronautique et d’astronautique de Pékin, a consacré son intervention à l’enseignement du français auprès d’étudiants dans les domaines scientifiques

La collaboration entre la Chine et la France n’est évidemment pas la seule, l’université de Genève peut se vanter d’un partenariat avec l’université Tsinghua, l’initiative Genève-Tsinghua, qui recouvre un portefeuille complet de programmes d'enseignement, d'échange et d'innovation visant à contribuer concrètement à la réalisation des Objectifs de Développement Durable.

On a eu l’honneur d’accueillir Tina La, qui fait partie de la première volée du Master en Innovation et Développement durable auprès de l'Initiative Genève-Tsinghua. Elle a présenté les différentes dimensions de l’économie informelle grâce à son travail de terrain sur le transport à moto (Ojek taxi) en Indonésie.

Tina La, issue de la première volée de l’Initiative Genève-Tsinghua sur les ODD, parle de l’économie informelle avec l’exemple du transport à moto en Indonésie

Marie-Luce Chevalier, professeure en tectonique à l’Académie des Sciences Géologiques de Chine, a parlé aussi des missions de terrain. En effet, elle étudie principalement les failles du Karakorum dans l’Ouest Tibétain et celle de Xianshuihe dans l’Est, qui s’avèrent particulièrement dangereuses pour la construction de la ligne de chemin de fer Chengdu-Lhasa.

Marie-Luce Chevalier, professeure en tectonique à l’Académie Chinoise des Sciences Géologiques, montre une faille dans l’Ouest Tibétain

Enfin, on a eu le plaisir d’écouter Arnaud Debauge pour la dernière présentation. Il est spécialisé dans les politiques climatique et environnementale et travaille pour le Programme des Nations Unies pour le développement (PNUD). Ce dernier a expliqué comment on peut mesurer le développent environnemental notamment avec l‘ajustement de l’indice de développement humain et le nouvel indice de pauvreté.

Arnaud Débauge, Programme des Nations Unies pour le Développement, explique comment on peut mesurer le développement et la pauvreté

Nos cinq intervenants ont touché différents Objectifs de Développent Durable à partir de l’éducation de qualité (objectif 4), le travail décent (objectif 8), la vie terrestre (objectif 15) et la lutte contre le changement climatique (objectif 13).

Un coup d’œil sur les 17 Objectifs de Développement Durable définis par l’ONU

Pendant le panel le modérateur et les intervenants ont discuté de la consommation responsable (objectif 12), de l’eau propre et assainissement (objectif 6) et de l’égalité entre les sexes (objectif 5).

Finalement, grâce à la complémentarité des exposés et aux questions du public, l’événement a réussi à couvrir l’intégralité des 17 Objectifs de Développent Durable.

Nos cinq conférenciers et le modérateur pendant le panel

Un public animé a posé des questions sur la faim et l’éducation

La soirée s’est terminée avec un buffet qui a permis de poursuivre les exchanges entre le public et nos cinq intervenants.

Les échanges se sont poursuivis après la table ronde autour d’une table garnie

Si vous n’avez pas suivi la conférence sur place ou en direct sur Zoom, ne désespérez pas.

On se réjouit de la première collaboration avec CGTN, la télévision publique chinoise en langue français, qui a produit une émission basée sur notre conférence - disponible sur YouTube.

Sur la même plateforme vidéo, vous trouverez également l’enregistrement intégral du Café des Sciences.

En conclusion, nous remercions de tout cœur l’équipe de l’Ambassade et de Swissnex ainsi que Ippolita Gallo, Rina Sa, Tina La, Marie-Luce Chevalier et Arnaud Debauge pour avoir partagé leurs expertises de grande valeur dans la langue de Molière – dont on fête d’ailleurs cette année le 400ème anniversaire de la naissance.

“See” More with Technology

By Ruoran (Kathy) Li, Junior Project Manager - Art-Science

On Jan 20, the 31st Café des Sciences event “Assistive Technology for Individuals with Visual Impairment” kicked off our 2022 lecture series focusing on the theme of social innovation. The event highlighted two researchers from Switzerland and one researcher from China working on assistive technology that can help visually impaired persons “see” more, and increase the level of accessibility in their life, study, and work.

The first speaker of the day, Prof. Dr. Alireza Darvishy, is the head of the ICT Accessibility Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences, School of Engineering. He was one of the first two visually impaired computer science students in Switzerland and has been committed to accessibility for over 20 years, active in both the private and academic sectors. In 2016, he received the UNESCO Award for Digital Empowerment of People with Disabilities. 

Prof. Darvishy introduced his current project, Accessible Scientific PDFs for All, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Bridge Discovery program. PDF is the most prevailing document format, and it has been mandatory that PDFs be accessible for people with visual impairment in the EU since 2018. Yet, many PDFs are still partially or entirely inaccessible due to their lack of support for screen readers - one of the most commonly used assistive technology that enables users to obtain information from computers. Prof. Darvishy’s project goal is to research and develop AI-based solutions to create accessible PDFs for visually impaired users. Its potential impact could reach multiple technological, social, and economic levels. 

Prof. Darvishy demonstrated how screen readers work: the software can quickly read the information on the computer aloud. This includes the text within a document, as well as any directive information to help users navigate the operating system. The most common problem with inaccessible PDFs is a lack of “tagging”, which would result in scrambled reading order. In addition, when reading longer documents, sighted readers can quickly understand the document structure by visually identifying the headlines and figures and focusing their vision on the sections of interest; however, screen reader users can only rely on the software to read the text aloud one line at a time. Such a problem is particularly acute for scientific PDFs, which often contains formulas and equations and are often of great length.

Prof. Darvishy mentioned that there are existing tools to make PDFs accessible by allowing the authors to tag its document structure and provide alternative texts for images that screen readers cannot process. However, such a process requires a lot of tedious work and can be daunting for an untrained author. Prof. Darvishy’s working on an AI that uses deep learning to identify the structure through zone detection and classification and recognize math symbols, tables, graphics, etc. According to him, a fully automated process to make scientific PDFs accessible will stay a dream for the current decade. Therefore, his more immediate goal is to research and implement a semi-automated process that requires only a small amount of manual work. The graph below demonstrates its process.

Next up, Arthur Gassner, software engineer at the Swiss start-up company biped.ai. The team has just returned from the CES (Consumer Electronics Show), where they introduced their wearable device “biped” - the world’s first AI copilot for visually impaired persons, now in the beta-testing stage. The device is worn on the shoulders with three 3D cameras capturing the environment, and it can track, identify, and predict trajectories of all surroundings and guide its user using 3D sounds. All of this is done in real-time and locally on the device. 

Arthur elaborated on the technical process to solve biped’s critical problem: figuring out where it is safe to walk. As seen in the slide, here is the data stream from one of the 3D cameras shown in greyscale and depth images. They need to come up with a ground detection algorithm that can predict where the user can walk. The first solution that the team thought of was to use deep learning. The issue is that they want all the computation to be done offline locally, but deep learning is usually computationally expensive and power-consuming, so they must look for alternatives. 

Inspired by a paper titled “Fast Cylinder and Plane Extraction from Depth Cameras for Visual Odometry (Pedro F. Proença, Yang Gao, 2018)”, the team took a depth image and divided it up into “superpixels”. Since they only need the “planar” superpixels, they discard those that have too much depth variation or too many invalid pixels within. After this process, the remaining superpixels are roughly planar.

Then, they use Principal Component Analysis (PCA), as demonstrated in the slide below, to merge similar superpixels together and “grow” the region of the plane, then assign the bottom-most region as ground. Eventually, the team further optimized PCA through random subsampling, NumPy, and eventually Cython and improved the computation speed from 0.2 FPS to 10 FPS - a result that meets the needs of local real-time analysis.

The third and final speaker of the day is Dr. Yang Jiao, assistant professor at the Future Laboratory at Tsinghua University. His main research interest is human-computer design, haptic cognition and interaction design, affective haptic design, and tangible interaction design. At Future Laboratory, he and the team developed “Graille”, a graphical, tactile display that can dynamically generate Braille and other tactile graphical information. 

“Graille” prototype

Dr. Jiao started his presentation by giving some primary data. According to WHO statistics, in 2020, there are 253 million blind and visually impaired people worldwide, including 19 million children. China Disabled Person’s Federation’s statistics in 2018 showed that there are 17 million visually impaired people in China; however, there are only 40 thousand blind and visually impaired student positions in all kinds of blind schools or special education departments in China, according to the data from the Ministry of Education. This means many people with visual impairment cannot receive compulsory education due to disability, travel conditions, economic conditions, school capacity and other barriers. 

Nowadays, most individuals with visual impairment can utilize Braille and voice-assisted software such as screen readers to obtain information. However, there are still minimal tools to help them learn and understand graphical information, such as geometric knowledge in mathematics and circuit knowledge in physics. They set out to explore a multimodal immersive cognition approach that stimulates both the tactile and hearing sense. The goal was to create a user-experience oriented haptic interaction design with low-cost integration. 

In order to better understand the need of people with visual impairment, Dr. Jiao and the team conducted comprehensive research on the current teaching methods, as well as existing assistive technology that can communicate graphic information (such as the extremely costly refreshable tactile screens) and worked with Beijing School for the Blind to study the blind user experience of the tactile interaction.

Chinese Braille is based on the phonics-based Pinyin system and can pose extra challenges. Each word can be ambiguous, and readers need to rely on the context to understand its meaning.

Through fMRI experiment, Dr. Jiao also found that the hand kinesthetic area of blind people is no greater than that of sighted people.

After experimenting with multiple models, the prototype “Graille” was born. To test its functions, Dr. Jiao co-designed a class with a math teacher in Beijing School for the Blind to teach the students the Pythagorean theorem and essential trigonometric functions. Before, the textbooks combined several geometric shapes in one graph. With Graille, teachers can start with a straightforward figure then dynamically add in more geometric information, making it much easier to follow. The experiment yielded exciting results: the students significantly outperformed traditional paper-based classes.

In addition to classrooms, Dr. Jiao also envisioned Graille to be an effective tool in libraries, museums, and other barrier-free public institutions, as well as in scenarios such as online shopping. They are looking for partners to roll out the product to the market to benefit more people with visual impairments.

During the Q&A session, the audience was very engaged, and the speakers delved more profound into the challenge as well as the prospects of their projects. We encourage our audience to email us with any additional questions, and we hope that this edition of Café des Sciences will prompt you to consider the issue of accessibility in the future. Together, we can build a more inclusive and friendlier world.

Click here to watch the recording of the webinar.

Complexity-X Pilot Project: Solving “Complex Problems” Through Interdisciplinary Exchange

By Ruoran (Kathy) Li, Junior Project Manager - Art-Science

In December 2021, UNArt Center – an art space and an integrated communication platform that interlinks technology, art, and education founded in 2019 – launched its new initiative titled “Complexity-X”. Inspired by the complexity theory that emphasizes interactions as a mean to understand complex systems, Complexity-X promotes interdisciplinary communication as a method to solve complex issues.

Approximately 50 practitioners and researchers working in the field of arts, science, and technology participated in the pilot project that ran from December 20 to 24.

The art-science team at Swissnex in China had the pleasure to be invited to join this cohort comprised of many players active in interdisciplinary collaborations in Shanghai, as well as scientists and independent artists interested in cross-discipline exchange.

Visiting Thermo Fisher’s Experience Center in Shanghai. ( Photo by Jiajie Shi, courtesy of Complexity-X. )

The group visited six companies of different fields, sizes, and organizational cultures. Each day’s program began with a guided tour at the hosting company, followed by presentations of selected participants introducing their own interdisciplinary projects, and concluded with a group discussion that wraps up the day’s learning and observation. Each participant has the liberty to choose different sessions to join. As a result, each day, the “observation group” comprises various participants with a wide range of professional backgrounds, which stimulated vibrant exchange that never ceased to inspire.

Visiting Impact Hub Shanghai. ( Photo by Jiajie Shi, courtesy of Complexity-X. )

During the exchange, several decision-makers at the hosting companies expressed their appreciation of the inputs and questions raised by people outside that field and welcomed future interactions of a similar nature. 

Swissnex in China is looking forward to strengthening its connection with local individuals and institutions practicing in the interdisciplinary field in our upcoming projects this year, including the Café des Sciences 2022 series focusing on social innovations, the Art x Science Dialogue series following the latest development at the crossroad of art, science, and technology, and many more special events to come.

The companies that hosted the first Complexity-X group included:

(In order of the on-site visits)

Dipole Tech Shanghai

Dipole aims to build a reliable and efficient platform to trade distributed energy with ease in any scenario using blockchain technology and the Internet of Things. For energy providers, Dipole will be the energy platform of smart cities in the future, providing energy and information effectively for trillions of devices on the demand side.

Thermo Fisher Scientific, Shanghai

Thermo Fisher Scientific, the world’s largest provisioner of scientific instrumentation, opened a new customer experience centre in Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park, Shanghai. The facility, the biggest of its kind in Thermo Fisher’s global network, aims to facilitate local partnerships and elevate the development of science and technology. It is also a tool for strengthening its “rooted in China and serving China” growth strategy. 

China Merchants Cruise Research Institute (CMCI)

Established in December 2019, CMCI is a professional research institution for the cruise industry established by China Merchants Industrial Group in the Lin’gang Free Trade Zone. CMCI serves as the development platform for the entire cruise industry chain of China Merchants Group, as well as the research and consulting platform for the development of the China Merchants Industrial Cruise Manufacturing Industry.

Participants shared their interdisciplinary projects during the exchange at CMCI. ( Photo by Jiajie Shi, courtesy of Complexity-X. )

Impact Hub Shanghai

Impact Hub was founded in London in 2005. Every Impact Hub is established and operated by a local team and deeply rooted in the local community. In 2017, Impact Hub Shanghai broke ground in China. Like our worldwide counterparts, we support entrepreneurs with incubation programs and community events, address innovational needs of corporates, institutions, and governments, and incubate solutions to systemic challenges - all towards the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Creative Technology Laboratory, School of Creativity and Art, ShanghaiTech University

The Creative Technology Laboratory plans to set up several science and technology laboratories and art design studios in different fields and is committed to building an interdisciplinary, creative, heavy application that integrates intelligent technology, design and art, and has a high degree of social responsibility and mission. The platform has the following laboratories and studios. It will continue to expand in the future: Artificial Intelligence and Digital Art Lab (AIDA), Center for Adaptive System Engineering (CASE), Creative Entertainment Lab (CEL), Design Interaction Visual Lab (DIV), Lab for Experiential and Affective Design (LEAD).

Last day at ShanghaiTech University. ( Photo by Jiajie Shi, courtesy of Complexity-X. )

AIZI: Giving AI-Power to Chinese Type Designers

By Kathy Ruoran Li, Junior Project Manager, Art-Science

In digital typography, a Chinese typeface needs to cover at least 6,763 glyphs to compose basic texts. In Latin typography, a comparable set would be around 400 glyphs. As a result, creating a Chinese typeface translates to a considerable investment, which becomes a barrier for freelance individuals who compose the majority of the type design industry in the 21st century. The number of existing Chinese fonts available is extremely small, in contrast to the fact that Chinese has the biggest number of first-language users. But this situation may change. Researchers from ECAL (University of Art and Design Lausanne) and EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) are working on an AI project, AIZI, that might change the work process of Chinese type designers.

AIZI stands for “Artificial Intelligence Chinese Character”. It can also be written as AI字, or even 爱字 - “love of typography” in Chinese. It is a joint research project between Master Type Design at ECAL and Computer Vision Lab at EPFL to help the creation of Chinese digital typefaces with the use of artificial intelligence.

Swissnex in China was pleased to partner with ECAL (University of Art and Design Lausanne) and organized two events, at Juanzong Books and Art & Design Education Exhibition “FutureLab”, respectively. Across the two events, four speakers ranging from ECAL type design professor to Shanghai-based type designer delved into the topic of utilizing AI in Chinese type design, as well as AIZI and its future prospect.

At Juanzong Books, from front row left to right: Shuhui Shi, Di Tao, ZHENG Chuyang.

At the hybrid event on November 27, Matthieu Cortat, Head of Master Type Design at ECAL, introduced the research projects conducted at EPFL. Of all the arts school in Switzerland, ECAL has the ability to run research projects with a wide range of interests and domains, that goes from product design, photography, to art.

Matthieu Cortat’s recent project, Rationalist Lettering and Architecture in Fascist Rome, in 2018

ECAL’s Color Library research project analyzed the existing techniques of CMYK and proposes a new color library for graphic designs.

AIZI started in 2018 as the diplomat project of Shuhui Shi, a graphic and type designer, and also our second speaker of the event. With the collaboration of researchers at EPFL, AIZI has taken one step further beyond a student project.

Currently, AIZI cannot achieve the target level yet, but results have been improving.

Shuhui introduced the goal of AIZI - with the help of AI, Chinese type designers only need to design 500 characters, and then AI would generate the rest. She adopted the technology of Style Transfer and GAN to teach AI to read as many pictures as possible, so they can generate results of a target style.

zi2zi (Yuchen Tian, 2017) used these technologies and is now the foundation of many other AI-based design of typefaces.

Shuhui started by training the AI using an upgrade version of zi2zi model, and discovered that this existing model cannot generate satisfying results across different styles of typefaces - it does not work well on fonts with straight vertical and horizontal strokes. To solve this issue, Shuhui came up with a different approach by breaking down each Chinese character’s composition.

Shuhui proposed a Layout System that can cover any Chinese character.

Shuhui then introduced the AI training process and how she improved the approach to ensure the desired outcomes of horizontal and vertical strokes. Going forward, she would continue to adjust the proportion of characters to keep improving the results.

AIZI’s AI can already achieve the result demonstrated in the P2 column.

At the time of the event on November 27th, AIZI achieved a milestone and successfully established a website (http://aizi.ch/) proposing a database of 90,000 entries that decomposes Chinese characters into radicals and components. The online database is open-sourced, and the website is embedded with a search function for any designer to utilize. AIZI will continue to develop and collaborate with new partners. 

Shuhui’s introduction is followed by the presentations of two locally based type designers, ZHENG Chuyang and Di Tao. Chuyang is the founder of 3type & Mallikātype, he reflected on what he identified as the most important thing of typefaces. Mallikātype specialized in large-scale typefaces and is currently working on several projects, including a collaboration with a Dutch partner. Following a pictorial survey of their previous designs, Chuyang shared his thinking from his years of experience as a type designer, and how Chinese is unique from other written scripts. 

Chuyang shared how he approached the different composition styles of Chinese characters and how it affect the design process.

Then, Di Tao, a type designer at Monotype Studio, talked about the difference between Hanzi and Latin type design. Di had the experience of designing Chinese, Japanese, and Latin typefaces. Not only the number of minimum glyphs required is drastically different, but the complexity of the structure is also not comparable in Latin and Chinese characters. Therefore, the design processes are completely different. Using some of his previous works, Di briefly walked the audience through how a type designer would generally approach Chinese typefaces.

When designing a Japanese typeface, Di drew inspiration from inscriptions on Chinese ancient stone tablets.

At a separate event on December 5, Matthieu Cortat and Shuhui Shi present the AIZI project to an on-site audience at Art and Design Education (FutureLab), an education exhibition that ran from November 28 to December 5, 2021, at West Bund Dome, Shanghai.

Matthieu discussed in more details about the type design education offered at ECAL, and his take on Chinese type design. Shuhui also gave a more detailed breakdown of the AIZI project development process and shared her study and research experience at ECAL.

Shuhui Shi introducing AIZI at Art and Design Education (FutureLab).

Among our audience, we had many designers joining the events. We would like to thank everyone for their participation in the Q&A session, and we hope AIZI can continue its great work and that it would facilitate the work of Chinese type designers in the future. 

If you have further questions for our speakers regarding their work, please email us at artscience.china@swissnex.org. We will try our best to forward them to our speakers.

Click here to watch the recording of the hybrid event on November 27.

A Greener Way to Travel: Exploring Climate-Neutral and Decarbonized Transportation

By Kathy Ruoran Li, Junior Project Manager, Art-Science

Transport is the single biggest source of CO2 emissions at the global level, and it accounts for more than a third of total carbon emissions in Switzerland. To reduce the impact on the environment, Switzerland needs to switch to zero-carbon transport. With the development of renewable energy technology, electric or hydrogen vehicles are emerging as a promising solution.  

The 30th Cafe des Sciences zoomed in on the topic of green mobility, and we were pleased to have speakers from two Swiss companies devoted to green mobility and sustainable transportation: Stephan Guggisberg, Head Outpost of Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) in Shanghai; and Anne Mandron, Global Business Development Director of STOR-H. Switzerland has one of the highest rates of train use in the world, and SBB is the most important player in the public transport sector. STOR-H is a robust startup company specializing in developing hydrogen-powered transport and producing innovative designs for small modular vehicles that are particularly suited to city driving.

We first heard from Stephan Guggisberg on SBB’s initiatives in moving towards a more environmentally friendly operation. SBB is an integrated transportation provider in Switzerland, managing 3260km of the railway network and 3500 buildings. Each day, SBB operates 5,800 trains to transport 840,000 passengers (1.32 million before Covid, compared to Switzerland’s total population of 8.7 million) and 185,000 tons of freight. 

Currently, SBB’s trains already draw 90% of their energy from hydropower, and the remaining 10% is nuclear power. By 2025, all rail power is to come from renewable sources. This includes heating systems, road vehicles, diesel traction, to name a few. In addition, SBB has an ambitious goal to reach climate neutrality by 2030, which means increased energy efficiency, 100% renewable energies, and being backed by CO2 compensation to offset the remaining CO2 emissions.

Stephan also introduced SBB’s power management program and how it mitigates the challenge brought by SBB’s unique dynamic power profile. As can see in the chart below, SBB’s power consumption is full of peaks due to its synchronized timetable - when the trains depart the stations at the same time, there is a surge in energy consumption, resulting in drastic fluctuation and peaks. Instead of building extra power plants to cover these peaks, SBB has found a creative solution: peak shaving. Since these peaks were highest in the winter due to the trains’ heating services and are usually less than one minute, SBB designed a power management software to “shave” the power surge. When the system detects energy consumption reaching the threshold, it will stop heating in the train for a maximum of 2 minutes, so that the trains will still depart at the same time without impacting the passengers.

SBB also implements other specially designed programs to help decrease its power consumption. The Adaptive Train Control and vPRO functions give the locomotive crews comprehensive information about the timetable and operating situation directly on the tablet in the driver’s cab, enabling more precise, punctual, and energy-saving driving that saves about 120 GWh per year. At the end of his talk, Stephan briefly introduced the concept of Circular Economy, which recognizes that all physical resources are finite and promotes circulating all material, a step up from the recycling economy.

Then, Anne Mandron, global Business Development Director of STOR-H, joined the event virtually and introduced their technology and products, and how they can be integrated into the ecological system. STOR-H’s parent company, AAQIUS, has long invested in decreasing polluting emissions and began searching for an alternative to fully decarbonized traffic solutions four years ago. STOR-H develops hydrogen-based products focusing on light-weight vehicles, with three keywords at the core of its products: simple, safe, and freedom. The product should be simple and safe to use and should also free the user of the psychological burden - the constant anxiety from worrying about how many more kilometers can one still travel before having to charge, where or when to charge, and for how long. STOR-H’s goal is to eliminate all these anxieties so that people would naturally adopt this new way of decarbonized transportation.

STOR-H aims to provide a whole ecosystem for its customers

In this ecosystem, users would use cartridges that store hydrogen at low pressure. These cartridges can be used on a variety of vehicles, can be charged on public chargers or at home, and users can easily swap their empty cartridges for fully charged ones at dedicated “vending machines”. Customers would pay a monthly fee based on consumption, and in turn get insurance, maintenance, access to energy, and can lease STOR-H powered vehicles. Some delivery companies in Geneva are the early adopters of this new technology.

Different types of vehicles powered by STOR-H

Model of Hymont 氢梦 at China International Import Expo 2021

In China, STOR-H is now actively pushing to land its first project, as well as selected industry partners to produce the different components of the ecosystem like fuel-cell and capsules locally.

They partnered up with ICONA, an industrial design company, and revealed their first vehicle model at China International Import Expo 2021 that is to hit the Chinese market.

In 2021, STOR-H also wins the Swissnex Award for Most Innovative Startup.

During the Q&A sessions, the audience were very engaged and sparked several vigorous conversations with our speakers. If you have further questions for our speakers regarding their work, please email us at artscience.china@swissnex.org. We will try our best to forward them to our speakers.

Please click here to watch the recording of the event.