By Simin Yang, Project Coordinator Innovation & Entrepreneurship
On May 27, 2020, we hosted our webinar titled SheTech: Enabling Women’s Empowerment in Tech, co-organized with swissnex India and in collaboration with Innosuisse.
Today, women are making incredible advancements in politics, economy and society, they are founding and leading companies more than ever. Female entrepreneurs are pushing the frontiers of innovation and technology.
In this webinar, we have as our keynote speakers three female entrepreneurs from different countries with different backgrounds, who are leading technology enterprises from different areas. They are Chunguang Wang (Charlotte), Founder & CEO of EQuota Energy Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd from China, Séverine Chardonnens, Co-founder of IDUN Technologies (ETH spin-off) from Switzerland, and Himani Shah，Co-Founder & CFO of Intello Labs from India. They shared with us their cutting-edge technology projects, as well as the opportunities and challenges they have faced during their entrepreneurship journey.
Our first speaker Charlotte WANG founder and CEO of EQuota is specialized in smart energy management solution. As an AI and big data-driven energy technology startup, EQuota serves users from every stage covering both the energy supply and demand side in the entire industrial chain, from energy efficiency optimization, operation & maintenance monitoring, to carbon emission management, energy planning, electricity trading services, micro-grid services and etc. She gave a talk on “Big Data analytics’ impact in manufacture process and energy optimization”.
Charlotte share with us three products provided by EQuota to save energy
Real -time monitoring: Based on data, EQuota makes all-round analysis and diagnosis for customers, finds key indicators, analyzes influencing factors, and designs solutions.
Predicative maintenance: EQuota provides system-level solutions such as operation warning, fault diagnosis and predictive maintenance for key equipment.
System optimization: Operation optimization / process optimization reduces human operation through algorithm model. EQuota can directly issue operation instructions through automatic control system or give optimization suggestions.
As an example, Charlotte shared the case study of EQuota providing solution to the China State Grid
The key task of power grid operation and inspection department is to ensure the stability of power supply. Under the background of power Internet of things, it is a trend to integrate online data for equipment health management. Under this background, EQuota provides the State Grid:
Condition monitoring and predictive operation and maintenance of key equipment in two main substations
Dynamic early warning and trend analysis of main transformer, GIS combined cabinet and switch cabinet
As a result, the accuracy of fault feature recognition is 99% much higher than 44% of traditional methods.
In addition, Charlotte shared about her career story. She feels obliged to contribute the society, especially in terms of tackling environmental problems. She was encouraged by her mentor to think more, be brave, and accept the challenges in the early stage of her career. She believes that a low carbon future will come true with the help of data and technology.
Our second speaker Séverine Chardonnens, Co-founder of IDUN Technologies showed our audience a smart wearables future with her speech titled “Brain wave is the new heart rate”. IDUN Technologies is enabling the Internet of Humans by empowering the next generation of wearables. It has developed world-class biosensors for ECG, EMG and EEG for wearables, which collect and analyze biosignals. The holistic understanding of this process allows the startup to provide the end-user with actionable insight to enhance their wearables experience and knowledge of themselves.
IDUN Technologies starts from material innovation (soft conductive materials with specific shapes) to focus hearables (EEG Monitoring). Now IDUN also focuses on data acquisition hardware, data interpretation through algorithm, and data visualization.
In the future, IDUN will keep working on monitoring mental and physical health, focus, attention, stress & sleep with innovative materials they bring to society.
Our third speaker is Himani Shah, Co-founder & CFO of Intello labs. She touched upon the waste problem in food & agriculture. Himani pointed out that there are $500 B of fresh produce wasted globally every year because of supply chain issues. She believes Agriculture 4.0 is an innovative solution to tackle global food waste problem.
Agriculture 4.0 is a term for the next big trends facing the industry, including a greater focus on precision agriculture, the internet of things (IoT) and the use of big data to drive greater business efficiencies in the face of rising population and climate change.
Agriculture 4.0 has a major role to play, not only in terms of feeding the world more sustainably but also in terms of business opportunities. Himani also introduced the imaging technologies in Agriculture 4.0 including satellite imaging, drone imaging & mobile and camera imaging.
With the fast and assessment enabled by AI, food organizations are able to measure quality objectively. In the end, it will decrease 21.6% loss for fresh produce in the retail supply chain.
After the keynote presentations, speakers were invited to have interaction with audience and shared more about her entrepreneurship journey story. It is not surprising to know that they never limit themselves in the stereotypes of women. For them, professionalism and expertise always come first, instead of gender.
We would like to express our special appreciation to our speakers who have presented their incredible leadership directing tech-driven organizations and dynamic exchanges with audience during the webinar, as well as our colleagues from India for co-organizing this event, and our partner Innosuisse for supporting the event.
We hope that webinar participants have acquired informative insights on the topic and trust female entrepreneur is always spotlight in tech world.
The webinar recording is available to view and download here.