Welcome to a special collaboration episode of the Navigating Major Programmes podcast featuring Henry Fenby-Taylor from the Digital Twin Fan Club. Joining them is Associate Professor Jen MacArthur from Toronto Metropolitan University to discuss digital twins in major projects. They delve into complex programme management, emerging digital trends, AI's transformative power, and essential leadership for billion-dollar projects. The trio also explores the nuances of building information management (BIM), digital twins' practical uses, and sustainable practices shaping future cities. “But what if you could actually transfer learning from previous buildings into that one, from previous genericized systems into a new system. And you built in this online learning capability, that your twin was actually capable of learning what was typical for the building as the data came in. And then adapting those algorithms to be able to tune them to that building, with very, very little human intervention.” – Jen MacArthur
Welcome to a special collaboration episode of the Navigating Major Programmes podcast featuring Henry Fenby-Taylor from the Digital Twin Fan Club. Joining them is Associate Professor Jenn MacArthur from Toronto Metropolitan University to discuss digital twins in major projects. They delve into complex programme management, emerging digital trends, AI's transformative power, and essential leadership for billion-dollar projects. The trio also explores the nuances of building information management (BIM), digital twins' practical uses, and sustainable practices shaping future cities.
“But what if you could actually transfer learning from previous buildings into that one, from previous genericized systems into a new system. And you built in this online learning capability, that your twin was actually capable of learning what was typical for the building as the data came in. And then adapting those algorithms to be able to tune them to that building, with very, very little human intervention.” – Jenn MacArthur
Key Takeaways:
Jenn MacArthur is an Associate Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, specializing in mechanical engineering and sustainable infrastructure. Her career spans from energy and water management in India to leadership roles in design engineering and construction in Canada. In academia, she focuses on Building Information Management (BIM), AI, and digital twins, aiming to optimize building operations and energy use through advanced technology applications.
Henry Fenby-Taylor is the CEO of Athenophilia, where he assists clients on their digital transformation journey, creating software applications, digital twins, and information management capabilities. He also hosts the Digital Twin Fan Club podcast, exploring topics related to digital twins, AI, and the broader infrastructure industry. Henry is engaged in driving innovation and managing change within organizations, working closely with stakeholders to accelerate change and drive innovation.
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Riccardo Cosentino 0:05
You're listening to Navigating Major Programmes, a podcast that aims to elevate the conversations happening in the infrastructure industry and inspire you to have a more efficient approach within it. I'm your host, Riccardo Cosentino. I bring over 20 years of Major Programme Management experience. Most recently, I graduated from Oxford University Saïd Business School, which shook my belief when it comes to navigating major programmes. Now it's time to shake yours. Join me in each episode as I press the industry experts about the complexity of Major Programme Management, emerging digital trends and the critical leadership required to approach these multibillion-dollar projects. Let's see where the conversation takes us.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 0:51
Hello and welcome to a very special episode. That is a collaboration between the digital twin fan club podcast with myself, Henry Fenby-Taylor and across from me, Riccardo Cosentino, who is from Canada. That's right. Navigating Major Programmes podcast. That's it. Exactly. And we have a very special guest today, we have Associate Professor Jen MacArthur from Toronto Metropolitan University. Hi, Jen.
Jenn MacArthur 1:35
Hi, Henry.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 1:36
Great to have you. So Riccardo and Jen are both over in Canada. So this is an opportunity for us to learn a little bit more about what's going on in the world and in Canada. We've met Riccardo before. But Jen, tell us a little bit about who you are and your background, and what your passions are.
Jenn MacArthur 1:58
Sure, so, well, to start with, I started as a teenager, I thought that Henry Thoreau was a wimp, and didn't push it far enough. So when I, when I graduated with my masters I bought a one-way ticket to India, moved to a village in the middle of nowhere and tried to save the world for five years and fell into energy management and water management. So seeing energy and water master planning for hospitals for about four and a half years, managed to do 15 year backlog of projects, worked myself out of a job and then went over and took over as a design engineer for a Finnish company that made custom equipment but in 2009, that was not a very lucrative line of business with the whole economic crisis and came back to Canada. At which point I came and took over as the, well, started the mechanical engineering team at Arup in our nascent Toronto office. So Arup's a multinational engineering firm, I guess for a U.K. audience it would be well known, in Canada, we were completely unknown. And I was, I helped to build the Arup (inaudible), start the buildings practice and lead, or stamped about three-quarters of a billion dollars worth of construction in my four and a half years before I became an academic about 10 years ago. And yeah, and since then, I, I took some of the BIM work that I've been doing at Arup and realized that construction BIM research was a very, very crowded space design. BIM research was a lot of fancy pants, architects talking about things I didn't understand. But I had worked facilities for a few years. So I took facilities management and BIM. And then a couple years later, I fell into AI and machine learning through some chance connections, and amazingly, when you mix AI and BIM with existing facilities, you wind up very quickly in the digital twin space. And that's where I've been playing halfway for the last few years.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 3:57
Excellent. Beautiful, beautiful segue, I'm really interested about all of that, and I could do a whole separate podcast on your life history. Maybe another time. So it's really interesting to talk about, you know, BIM and facilities management, and AI. It does feel like that, certainly for BIM, was the holy grail for a long time that we would have this sort of integrated lifecycle supply chain, everything would be known, everything would be understood. And, you know, we would live in this perfect BIM environment that understands itself and iterates and reacts to users and, you know, operates completely optimally. But I would say that that is not the case, certainly in the UK, but I suspect everywhere.
Jenn MacArthur 4:50
Yeah, absolutely. We're a far cry from that. I think one of the challenges is we keep asking them to do things that BIM is simply not set up to do.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 4:59
Oh, okay.
Jenn MacArthur 5:00
Right? BIM isn't actually a very good platform for AI, it's a great database, right? Think of BIM as a database with a really, really nice front end, and you can navigate it visually. So it's great for visualization. And it's great for the data itself related to design and construction. And if people are using COBie for much more data construction information, but when it actually comes to the real time, I use the BIM as a consumer of the data rather than a creator of the data, because it's just a nice way of it's, it's a really convenient single pane of glass, but it's not a very convenient way of trying to actually do any sort of machine learning. And it's just, that's just not what it's for.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 5:40
100%, 100%. So I have to ask the question, because we get letters. This is a very naive and dangerous question. So we're done. What is BIM?
Okay, so, well.
Yeah, because you get very different answers, depending on who you ask.
Jenn MacArthur 6:02
Well, Building Information Management is, I believe, as Chuck Eastman put it, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna go back to the creator on this one, it's a system for managing the information related to a building.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 6:15
Wow.
Jenn MacArthur 6:16
And that's basically what it is.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 6:17
Ten points, ten points. You didn't fall into any of the holes. You didn't go too narrow or specific. It was holistic and complete, but succinct. So yeah, okay.
Jenn MacArthur 6:28
I was challenged once, I had a BIM manager in the early days of learning BIM who told me that if I truly understood it, I could make a BIM of a building with a pencil and/or notepad, and never actually draw anything. And I said, ha, okay, but that got me thinking about the information content. And I think that was actually a really helpful way of starting to think about just don't think of it as a pretty picture.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 6:52
Okay, that makes sense. Clearly, it's great to have you here, you know what you're talking about, and there's lots of interesting things going on that we can get to. But being from the U.K. and having an international audience, in Canada I understand that things operate quite differently in terms of how when it comes to deploying the research that is done. So in the U.K. we've had the Center for Digital Built Britain and various (inaudible) centralized U.K. government innovation programs, and that's very much how we have operated. Then we devolved, and Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland can nominally do their own thing. So we're in this funny space where there is no England government, but there is a U.K. government. And I think a lot of people in the U.K. find that very confusing. So, in terms of the research world, it's very centralized here. How does it work in Canada? In 30 seconds or less?
Jenn MacArthur 8:06
We're kind of the Wild West.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 8:08
Okay, great.
Jenn MacArthur 8:08
So most of, we do have some national funding bodies for science, humanities, in the health. Those are three Tri-Councils. But typically, most of the work, I would say most of the research has some sort of industry partner. And we usually look, industry partners usually look for us, we usually look for industry partners who are capable of actually translating the research from our labs or our minds into real life. So we tend to, I particularly work in research that is commercializable. So I do a lot of the fundamental research and that's my kind of basic government grants, but the big money is really working with the companies to then translate that into products. And take, basically, solve the the major scientific challenges that you need to be able to deploy.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 8:08
Okay, awesome.
Jenn MacArthur 8:11
So it really is, yeah, it's basically commercial Wild West.
Okay. Awesome. So maybe segues into the, into your bet, Riccardo.
Riccardo Cosentino 9:04
Yeah I mean, I think, for international audiences, it's just understanding some of the sort of jurisdiction and how Canada is made up of provinces, and it's a federation of provinces. And, you know, the domain, the responsibility and the domain of influence of each provinces is, broadly speaking, you know, healthcare, highways, so anything to do with that type of infrastructure is actually regulated and managed by the provinces. However, there are payments coming from the federal government. So whenever you're dealing with large infrastructure projects, you typically have, the project sponsor is at the provincial level. However, there are funding coming from the federal government. So there are pots of money that the feds deployed on a 50/50 basis or if (inaudible) policy is involved we're on a 3% basis, so you have this multilayer of funding for large companies, infrastructure, which makes it a little bit cumbersome to deploy because, obviously, you know, you might have different political masters or different political levels. So you might have conservative government at a regional level and (inaudible) and then labor government at the federal level, and there's that natural tension, which could impact the development of infrastructure. And the education, the education space is similar. I think the education is governed by the provinces, but there is federal funding for that too, right.
Jenn MacArthur 10:44
Yeah. As is environment and unlike, say, some of your devolved governments where provinces have the right to collect taxes. So they are in control of their own income. So that's, that's another big one. One of the things, the other big change that I, that is not, I know you guys have the PFI, we are pretty much addicted and Riccardo can correct me if this isn't just Ontario, but in Ontario, we're kind of addicted to this alternative financing and procurement, which is basically that the financing of a project is actually often by the private sector for anything fairly large, let's say $150 million and up. Okay, so most of our big hospitals, they'll be design, build, finance, maintain. A lot of (inaudible) has design, build, finance, operate, maintain. (inaudible) find the occasional design, build, finance, but that's relatively rare. I've worked on kind of one of each of these. So there, and those are a special base, because then you not only have your funders, but then you have your end user clients. But you also have this planning, development and compliance body, which is another set of architects and engineers who are basically trying to act on the client's best interest. So you wind up in this room with about 35 different stakeholders every time that you present. And it's a it's an unpaid competition up to 50% design. And forbid, it's a bit of a, yes, it's chaos. So I mean, but it's where all the billions are.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 12:07
Wow. So I mean, that sounds like management by Ouija board, which is a phrase I'm popularizing, very proud of this phrase where there's so many hands on it, but nobody feels in control yet it seems to be moving on its own. So PFI, I think everybody in the U.K. should know, but if someone out there might not, so it stands for private finance initiatives. And this was effectively seen as a way of helping governments to fund investment. So it could be infrastructure, it could be schools, hospitals, etc. It was launched in the 90s over here, and it's become very complex. Okay. So there's, you know, there's, for example, schools, that could be academies, which would be privately run, and they can fund them, there are also positions where construction companies will own the building that they are creating and then lease it effectively to the end users, as the client just kind of creates all and it's very different, you know, we've privatized water, pretty sure we're the only country in the world to privatize water. And it's a very hot potato, because of the state of our rivers and the finances of that. So it can be very contentious, because it can be seen to almost be giving away the responsibility or the onus, which is also the benefit. Because, you know, private, you know, there's this view that the private market, private investment, and the commercial worlds always going to operate in a more efficient way. And I'm not going to comment on that, because there's examples where it does and there's examples where it doesn't, but it does give governments access to greater investment, above all other things. And that's something you can't get away from. So, yes, I think we're so addicted to PFI that I think we've even stopped mentioning it. But it's I feel like it's absolutely integrated into everything that's done over here, as well. And you do end up with so many people in the room trying to make decisions. So on that note, how, how do you think national issues or you know, like netzero, or aging population and these sorts of issues and, to both of you really, can be addressed at the national level and then at the regional level. How do they work together?
Jenn MacArthur 14:43
I can talk about the net zero because I was, actually, lucky enough for me last Monday, I was actually at a World Economic Forum, low carbon sprint for the City of Toronto. And that probably tells you a very good idea about how it's being done. Typically a lot of the netzero efforts are actually owned by the cities. The cities tend to be really taking a lot of an ownership or a leadership stance on trying to drive net zero. And that's because we often have city bylaws related to energy efficiency. So we do have building codes byproducts. And those will typically dictate three code requirements. A lot of them then defer to either our national energy code for buildings, which is a federal code that goes across, or ASHRAE, which is the American code for energy performance and buildings as a minimum requirement. But the cities often require something above and beyond that. So we've been part of the C40 cities for some time. So a lot, a lot of our larger centers have had very overt decarbonisation goals, and you tend to have a lot of activity at the city scale. And that's a mix of local government, as well as the private sector. So a lot of the architects, the consultants, the engineers, the developers are a big part of that. And then there are some nonprofits, and then we tend to have some coordination nationally. So we've got Natural Resources Canada, has the Office of Energy Efficiency, and they've been driving a lot of incentives to try and support that and will often get a lot of provincial incentives. Technically, the environment is the mandate of the province, depending on the flavor of the political government, and you might have a lot of promotion, we used to have a Ministry of Energy and Climate Change, now we have a Ministry of Energy and Mines. So you can guess that perhaps climate change is not as proven by the province these days, as it was, say, seven or eight years ago, which is why the cities have stepped in, but there's, with the three levels of government, our cities tend to be more stronger than, say, councils in the U.K., they tend to have a lot more, a lot more oomph to them, I think, at least where I've lived, so we tend to be able to pull off some fairly large and innovative things at the city level.
Riccardo Cosentino 17:02
Yeah, 'cause it's, again, just to give it a bit of color, you know, the municipal entities are elected, but they are a child of the provinces. So, the province as we have learned in, you know, Terry, over the last few years, the provinces can dictate how many municipalities operate and they can intervene in the governance. And so they really exist at the pleasure of the premier of the province. And but the reason I think, Jen, and you correct me if I'm wrong, but the CD are driving this is because it's really the citizens that are pushing the series. I mean, that's, that's a political agenda. And, you know, again, when you zoom out, and you look at Canada, you know, you've got the federal government that needs to appease different constituencies, right, different provinces, and different provinces have different point of views. You go to Alberta, I mean, an oil and gas province. And, you know, that's, that's your prerogative. And so as a federal government, you need to make sure that you speak to all your constituencies. So you need to craft policies that thread the needle.
Jenn MacArthur 18:17
And building energy efficiency is pretty uncontested by people, because it saves people's money, and it makes for better and safer buildings at the end of the day.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 18:26
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I guess that leads on to it leads on to digital twins in a way if we're going to be talking about you know, net zero. And buildings, that would make sense. But in terms of the Canadian population, I'm not expecting you to have statistics, but it's a big country. And there are a few major cities. So do most of the people live in cities in Canada?
Jenn MacArthur 18:56
90% of our population lives within 100 kilometers of the U.S. border, because that's where it's warm. So for context, we are I think, last census, about 38 million people. And we're the second largest country in the world. So if we all spread out, there will be four of us per square kilometer.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 19:14
Okay. I feel like there are some jokes about Fins that other Scandinavian countries make that that's exactly how they would like to live. I don't think that's necessarily either true, but certainly not true in Canada.
Jenn MacArthur 19:31
Yeah. No. So Toronto, I believe is the fourth largest country in North America, our city in North America. So after New York, Los Angeles and Mexico City, so we, we're, the city itself was about three and a half million, but the Greater Toronto Area is about 9 million. So a little over a quarter of the population of the country actually lives in the Greater Toronto Area. So we tend to be very, very highly urbanized. In Quebec, you have a huge population, in Montreal, in BC it's a huge population and the Greater Vancouver and Alberta is Calgary and Edmonton. And then you have some mid-sized like, Ottawa is a million-ish with the Quebec side with all the federal government there. So you tend to have some fairly large urban centers, and that I would argue is probably about three-quarters of our population in our top five, six, if not more, it's we really, and it's a tale of two solitudes. Two, we used to say that, like the English and the French, we're the two big groups now it's really the urban versus the rural, I'd say it's a much bigger cultural divide in Canada. So we do have, we still have farmers, we still have people out in the mines, we still have, and then we've got our indigenous populations up in the northern territories, and Nunavut, which is actually a self-government indigenous population.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 20:49
Fantastic. Yes, I did, when I was in Canada, over 15 years ago now, I did to fall in love with Haida art, and, you know, the culture of that, and, you know, seeing some totem poles and seeing some of that some of them are amazing stuff, there's a lot, you know, there's a lot of important heritage there that just, I want to bring up the British Empire but you know, we did some awful things to people in Canada. But also, my mum actually lived in Montreal for a couple of years in the 70s when it was the divide, you talked about, the the French-speaking, English-speaking divide was really strong. So it's really interesting to see that it's, you know, this is kind of is now you're reflecting more of a, the International conundrum of urbanization, that everybody's coming together. So that must mean, therefore, that, you know, I imagine in my world of hierarchies, there's a big boss at the top, and they run everything. And everybody just does what they say. That's not what I really believe but that's the theory. And then you have the regions, the provinces that do their own thing, and then you have right at the bottom the cities, but it sounds like almost, you know, first of all, it's not as simple as that, because the cities are so populous. And if they are, if the provinces are able to raise their own taxes, and I seem that applies to the cities as well, then.
Jenn MacArthur 22:27
Yeah, your property taxes paid for the city's infrastructure.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 22:30
Then they, you know, they have a lot of power, effectively, to really change how the country operates as a whole. So how do you think this can all come together to make the world a better place effectively? We can use a specific lens of digital twinning. We could talk about it in general, but.
Jenn MacArthur 22:52
I think you, I think it's a lot easier to mobilize grassroots, potentially, because we have strong cities we have. And, and when you one of the things that we also have, we have this group called the Federation of Canadian municipalities, which basically means that if you have a city-level initiative that's successful, you actually have a venue where you can translate that all across and share those learnings with all of the other cities in Canada. So say for net zero, Toronto built a net zero platform. So that's a urban building energy model. So, kind of a very simplistic digital twin, it's not live just because of the way that the utility data goes. But it does give a sense of how the buildings at a block level are generating electricity. I've got a new research grant to update that and expand it. But this is also a scalable model. So we're building on work that's been done out of Montreal, we're bringing it to Toronto in the hopes that then that can be replicated all across Canada. And then we can actually get a sense of almost like a video game. Like, here's your city, if you are going to make some changes to this building what would it do to the carbon emissions for your building? What are the different retrofits that are on the menu? If you did this to a thousand buildings how does that change the relationship with the grid? Can we model that? Can we simulate that? Can we start looking at thermal energy? So I think sometimes we get stuck thinking of digital twins that maybe like a building, or, or a I don't know, sometimes maybe a train line, but the fact that you could actually do it at the city scale, obviously, with a different level of granularity. And that could allow you to make some really strong decisions. And then if we can do that for a city and then we can translate that and say, okay, if this is, this is the way that we need the data formatted and here's just a rough, replicable platform, once you've got the data in, you could just actually start to mass deploy this give this tool to other city planners. I think that that's gives you a lot of possibility. So I think I think that building up from the bottom really gives you a really good chance. It actually builds and scale and have a huge impact whether there's government support or not, I think a lot of the times because our governments change every four or five years at the province and the federal level, to be blunt, I think a lot of people in the private sector have just gotten a little bit tired of the fact that you will get a very, very progressive government in certain areas. And then you'll get a government that has completely different mandates, completely different goals, but the private sector has made these commitments to go net zero. And sometimes they will simply drive. And then they will enforce like, so it's, so then they work with whatever government is ready to go. And when the government is not ready to go, we just get together ourselves. And we just go ahead and do it. Because they can't stop the private sector from decarbonizing and if that's and that's the idea of if you get the public and the private with the nonprofit groups, and we're active at the grassroots level than we can be active regardless of how it, it can be any government. And if the government doesn't show up for a while, we can just keep on moving. And when they're ready, we can say here, here's the solution. And we're doing it. And do you want to be part of part of doing it? Do you want some political products do you want to get some political capital for enabling this work that was going to happen with or without you? Is that too skeptical?
Henry Fenby-Taylor 26:21
The word I was going to use was pragmatic. I think that's, yeah, we've experienced that over here, where, you know, we've, we had the national digital twin program started off as a very holistic project, about (inaudible) and we wanted to, you know, solve, basically, like, let's get the ontology let's, let's get the whole universal view, sorted. And let's get this kind of like national, the very various elements at the national level sorted about data sharing and information and all that sort of stuff, like setting all that up. But then they've gone in a very pragmatic direction and have just gone to the Isle of Wight where there is a demonstrator happening, and that is where they are trialing things. And then you get it made me think, actually, you know, talking about that kind of regional level, I have some work that I got to investigate that the energy systems catapulted because there was a big retrofit program in the U.K. to retrofit houses because the U.K. has, I believe it is the most poorly insulated housing stock in Europe because it's very old. And we don't as a rule go in for high rise. So to actually have a policy tool that is effectively almost gives a politician a sit where you know, whatever level, at the city level, or at the national, a little slider to say this is how much we have done. And if we did this much more, this is how much return we would get in terms of the insulation saved. And, you know, obviously, the the knock-on benefits of reductions in healthcare costs from people not getting sick, which they do in colder houses and in older buildings. So yeah, I really feel like that's a really refreshing view to see that, you know, you're coming in at all levels there. But let's go let's go down into the building. Because I feel like we've been stood outside the door, admiring the insides. What have you been investigating? In terms of, you know, your interest through BIM, digital twins, AI facilities management?
Jenn MacArthur 28:50
So I was incredibly fortunate. So that's eight years ago, I found out that our then provost, now president of the university had approved an extra couple of million dollars in the budget to make our latest or one of our newest buildings, a living lab. And he wasn't entirely sure what that was going to look like, but needed a researcher to step up and step in and nobody had stepped up. So I finally said, "Sure, I'll do it." And what that wound up working out with was, I was really interested in trying to make these existing buildings smart. I used to design eight fax systems right now, I'm that flavor of engineer, I know my building automation system. So I'm like, okay, we'll usually we have a lot of sensors, what additional points would be helpful, so I came up with the list of additional submeters subpoint to BTU meters, local branch metering, local air flow monitoring station so I can get a sense of what's happened in the smaller areas of the building, not just to get the building from the central plant. And then I wrote into the contract or I got them to write into the contracts, didn't quite have that much power, that the controls company had to give us a feed of every single point recorded on their system. So every single time a sensor recorded a measurement it had to go through basically, we cloned it. And then we send a copy of that to a data lake that's in a secured environment. So ever since the building automation system came online, every single sensor at every single change of value has been recorded. So that's about 6 billion data points. I've got about 14,000 sensors in the building
Henry Fenby-Taylor 30:39
(Inaudible) at this point.
Jenn MacArthur 30:41
It's data heaven. So I've got lots of data, I have the as-built BIM, which was incredibly cumbersome. I've done a lot of research on simplifying BIM facilities for facilities management. And it's a little tongue in cheek because my first few I really pushed it and my models were invisible. I told you that was the the pen and paper thing I mentioned earlier. I've, now I do cave, I now skin my buildings so that you can see them in 3d because it was working people out to be I'm like, here's your model, they're like, where is it? I'm like, well, if you look in plan, you can see all of your data. But now.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 31:15
It's a statistical, building as a function of what it's doing, not what it looks like. And so that's what's important. So that's what we've modeled, I mean.
Jenn MacArthur 31:24
I have made prettier versions for the digital twins. But that basically led into so with this much data, we can do predictive models, we can look at online fault detection, we can look at online energy optimization, we can do system emulation, and develop these web strategies for controls. So that's most of what keeps my PhD students and my master's students busy. But then we also have worked it into digital twins. And we've used a few platforms, we're trying to not be platform-specific. But we've, we work with the Autodesk products, primarily in Canada, and in North America. And that's probably because they give free licenses to all of the universities. So we've been. So there's the Autodesk forge that we put it in, there's an Amazon web services, they've got the twin maker that we've put it in, we migrated it into the Unreal Engine. So I actually have the digital twin as a video game, which is definitely highly engaging for people. So that's something for your DT fan club. But we're actually looking at also making it a very open source, nonproprietary system, where, at the end of the day, no matter what system we're using, you access it through a web browser. And it's just a matter of it's the same functionality. It just looks slightly differently. So we've been playing a little bit with how do you package up the digital twins, because at the end of the day, it's all driving from the same data lake, the same kind of set of data models, the same ontology, the same AI algorithms, and it's just a matter of how do you navigate and interface with it and what's important for different user groups.
Riccardo Cosentino 32:58
Jen, so, can I just jump in? Yeah. There's a lot of listeners from Toronto on my podcast, and they, are you able to tell where the Living Lab is? Most people might walk by it many times.
Jenn MacArthur 33:10
Oh, yeah. It's the Daphne Cockwell complex. It's the TMU Faculty of Community Services. It's basically our nursing school, their nutrition school, so it's on Church Street between Gould and Dundas.
Riccardo Cosentino 33:25
Yeah, we'll pass it regularly I feel so. Thank you.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 33:30
Awesome. So what sort of stuff goes on inside that building then just to give us a bit more flavor?
Jenn MacArthur 33:36
Well, it's nine stories of academic or eight stories of academic and then a mechanical room. Obviously, as a mechanical engineer from a camper. It was very interesting to me. But it's primarily large lab spaces. We've got a nice open student space, we've got to kind of like some food services and lab space on the ground floor. We've got lots of large classrooms. We've got a lot of our various labs, and some commercial kitchens for our nutrition program. And then we have a lot of offices and smaller labs. So it's primarily like a lab and office classroom building for the first eight storeys or so. And then above that podium, we actually have a residential tower. That's another 20 stories of residence. So what you said on a slightly different system, so it says basically, we have the opportunity to do residential digital twin lab digital twins. And it's so it's a it's a wonderful diversity of spaces, you know, wonderful diversity of systems. So we've got, you know, some newer systems, we've got some chilled beams, it's all demand control outdoor air are supposed to be and with the local chilled beams, local fan coils, and it's a really, really interesting building in terms of just the way that it's been set up and the diversity of the systems and how everything's network-driven, we have a heat recovery chiller, which is something that I'm increasingly seeing in these decarbonize buildings. because this is a nice way of actually being able to use some of your rejected heat, from the places that always require cooling, at least in the shoulder season to give you that first little bit of heating. So let your data center be your heat for your building, basically.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 35:14
It makes sense. You got to try and get circularity in there somewhere I have my answer. It's got (inaudible). So with all of that data, I really want to know about, you know, all the cool things you can do with it. But I think one of the concerns that the inverted commas market has people who own assets or building assets is bringing in any innovation can seem to them to be extremely expensive, and has a huge overhead. And seems as though, you know, by writing a requirement in really early, you've actually almost circumvented that, but do you think that there, it has to cost more to do it this way? And if not, why not? And how?
Jenn MacArthur 36:09
Okay, well, there, it really depends on the building. So my research is sneaky, called, he called me on earlier. I am pragmatic above everything. And I came out of the consulting world, I know what's nice, right. And I know that there are, you know, nine data points you can expect to have, whenever you're handling it, there's four or five point to expect to have on every chiller. And I've tried to keep our research within my research group that using a most standard set of data points, could we write AI as to help understand and optimize the building energy use, and we found that so if we have our own gas meter for the boilers, then that's good enough, or we needed a fluid temperature, there's usually like one or two extra points that we're going to need for a system to actually give us our total energy use. But if we haven't, if we have an energy meter for the system, so sometimes it's more of a submetering, which is actually, to be honest, I would argue that that's best practice for anybody who wants to save energy anyway, it's kind of energy management one on one. But beyond that, it doesn't actually cost you anything to access your building automation system data, there is code, if there's a national standard, or an international standard, that actually allows you to subscribe to your back net points, and to actually be able to receive that data. So it's actually more of a matter of knowing what you're doing, and then being able to figure out what you want to do. One of the challenges I have, and it's the same thing with BIM, it's like, well, what, what can what information can I put into a BIM? I was like, well, you can kind of put in whatever you want, like, you could, you could have,
Henry Fenby-Taylor 37:47
But why?
Jenn MacArthur 37:49
Exactly. But you can have the most ridiculous smart building that kept track of who's at their desk. And that historically, you've kept track of say, how many pizza slices of pizza do they eat? And what's their favorite kind of pizza. And then for a lunchtime meeting, based on all of the sensors, you could automatically optimize your lunchtime pizza order. That's a stupid application of a smart building, but
Henry Fenby-Taylor 38:13
Optimal pizza. I can see it now.
Jenn MacArthur 38:16
And I like to think of that, because it's so trivial. And nobody would spend money on doing that. But you can think, okay, what are the things that are actually really important to me. And I think if we can kind of take a Lean and Agile perspective to creating the digital twins, you don't have to put everything into it all at once. If you have the ability to have the data, the ability to manipulate the data and the ability to visualize and interact with those manipulations, then it's just a matter of you can keep adding algorithms, you can keep adding new functionalities, and you can build it up and do the things that you need. So yeah, if you want to put in the Disneyland of, of smart building systems or digital twins that has every single possible functionality is going to cost you millions, tens of millions, right? But for a very small amount, you could have a very, very basic system that could add in maybe the single most important use case that you have, then you could start to actually see the benefits, start to get the financial benefits of implementing that. And then you can put in the next the next step. So I've done a lot of work, say on boiler system optimization, and you save so much or not demising maybe a poorly run boiler system that that then funds the next step, the next step after that. So you can see some really easy you can go after the quick wins. And then you can actually use that to both get some buy in. We have a saying in Toronto that everybody wants to be first to be second. What does that mean? It means that nobody is willing to be the first person to do something, but as soon as somebody else proves that something is safe to do they all do it. It was I was at a conference in 2017 when one of our biggest and most progressive like Energy and Sustainability landlords told us they had put solar panels on top of the building. And I was like, really? I've had solar panels on my house for six years. So, but once they did that everybody else do it, they said, oh, wow, we can put energy I'm like, of course (inaudible).
Henry Fenby-Taylor 40:14
You could the whole time.
Jenn MacArthur 40:17
Yeah, there's this real hesitant to be the first person to do something. I don't think in some ways, that's why these demonstration projects are so important, too.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 40:24
Yeah, yeah. And I think that's, you know, somewhat the nature of large organizations, the almost the larger they are the more you know, the bigger the ship, the slower to turn effectively.
Riccardo Cosentino 40:39
And just how much? I mean, I think you just articulated if I'm paraphrasing, a concept of scalable digital twin, right, I mean, you're, you're scaling it up improving the use case, you're moving on to the next one. How much of a limitation is the ability of having? Sorry, I completely lost my train of thought. Okay, so this is a scalable digital twin.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 41:20
I think I know where you're going with it. I think I know where you're going with it. So we've talked about how, you know, there's, there's this opportunity to do something, you know, it's at the planning level, and then we've gone down to the building. But you're, you're actually proving a concept with something small here. How would you apply that sort of proof to the regional level? It won't be the sort of city municipal, provincial, you know, that boiler is how are you going with that, Riccardo?
Riccardo Cosentino 41:49
Yeah, absolutely.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 41:50
I did read your mind. I did read your mind.
Jenn MacArthur 41:52
Well, well, I'm actually, to scale that, I've got a project right now. So kind of going zooming right out. There's these building archetypes that we often use for energy modeling, right? So the representative buildings, the representative of the average. No building is actually like it. That's kind of like saying, you have your 50th percentile man, nobody is exactly at that height and that weight and and, and, and, and, but it's a decent approximation for on average, if you took 100 people, what might they look like? So we tend to use that when we're doing these urban models for cities. If I know that, and I have a sense of for these archetypes, and I've modelled them, what if I did this on the boiler? What if I did this on the boiler, then I can start to very quickly scale that up and start to get a sense of what that mass modeling looks like. So I think it's a matter of figuring out what data you need to scale it up from a building and whether it's simulated or whether I've actually got real oil and gas consumption, or electrical and gas, natural gas consumption for the buildings. That's a privacy issue in Canada, as much as I believe it is anywhere in Europe. But there are ways that you can get certain aggregate levels. So at the block level, if I took all the boilers on the block, and I were to apply this, then what could that look like on the block level, or more interestingly, if I took all of the boilers in the block, and all the heat they're generating, if I want to replace that heat with another heat source, then do I have another block that say, has a lot of high rise commercial buildings that are generating a lot of heat, and need a place to dump that because we start to do this energy brokerage and actually using waste heat recovery. So I think it is eminently scalable is once you come up with the solutions and strategies that work at the building level, you can start to look at the entire building, right, because every every building is at some point either a source of heat, a place to sink heat, or something that is storing heat, right? So if you start to think very simplistically, that way, if you can map all of your sources, all your sinks and all your stores, and this can be buildings, it can be. And it could be for electricity, it could be for energy, it can be for whatever, you can really start to think at a network scale. So you can go from the building all the way up into the within the building. Maybe it's your heat recovery chiller, that's actually allowing you to take advantage of that. At your block level. Maybe it's a network between buildings at a city, maybe it's a district heating and cooling utility, or an energy recovery utility where you're not even generating heat, you're just moving it from one place to another. Could you imagine if you could if you could actually have a digital twin that could help you to justify or, or actually do the use case to be able to get people to pay you to take away their excess heat and then get people other people to pay you to give you that heat. You're not even generating anything. You're just transacting it back and forth. This sounds like perfect capitalism.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 44:50
It does sound like perfect capitalism because you know, we have the there's the heat island effect that you get in in cities and everybody's, you know, everybody's doing something with their heating, or individually and the net effect is a couple of degrees more outside, which is, you know, is going to be is negative in the long term for our species. So it seems like seems like a natural fit well, okay, next startup sorted. So I think that's a really good way of taking that up the scale, because you could apply that sort of thinking of, effectively, if you can get the incentive for one element, let's say call, I'm calling a building an element. You know, but it could be a school, it could be a railway station, you know, it could be whatever. If you can prove it there, then you effectively you're creating that almost a cascade effect by proving it. And then everyone can kind of go on their journey and share that information as people go off in different directions. Well, we started with the boiler like you did, because that's a good proof of concept, we proved it, we're on board, and then we went and pursued something else entirely. And then you get this really kind of strong effect. There's a real tension, though, between this sort of, you know, there's an organic way of sharing information and organizing people and effectively trying to connect it, there's probably a specific number, you know, some sort of specific, like, undiscovered rule of you must have X number of people sharing data before you can get to this scale, or you must have Y number of collaborators talking together so that they can effectively make this work at a larger scale. I always think of Parkinson's Law, which is the optimal number for a meeting is eight. That is, and there was he said it quite fancifully in the 50s, and it was proven by the Vienna Institute in the 80s. But there are similar numbers, like any community over 150 people need a hierarchy, which is from archaeology and anthropologists believe that's Burners Number. Because I, one, I just, I love that sort of stuff. So I'm just thinking about it from that sort of scale. So how do you do that? I want this sort of thing to happen around the world, I feel like that's the sort of is a huge challenge. And it's almost like, I feel like you can't just look directly at it and say, right, we're gonna go over there and make that happen.
Jenn MacArthur 47:36
But it's, I was I've actually been really heartened in the last four or five months, I discovered this whole ecosystem that sprung up during the pandemic that I wasn't aware of. So because I was over in the U.K. for a couple of years and I came back and kind of fell out of the scene for a bit, but there was this, there's this thing called the transition accelerator, which is all about the zero carbon transition, and the Building Decarbonization Alliance, and they had their very first forum in April, and I was there. And some of their initiatives include this energy modeling hub that basically has faced, they basically act and they find out everybody who's doing any sort of energy modeling at the district, city, province or national scale, and tie them together into this one place. And the idea is, can you make your all of your models open source and share them so that we can very easily translate them all the way across the country? And this translation or transition accelerator will get these working groups. So this thermal energy network is more than just something I'm blabbing on about on your podcast. It's something that I've been beating for a while, not surprisingly. And there's a thermal energy network working group that's been formed. They're like, your should be part of us. I'm like, Yeah, I really should be. Because these are apparently there's a there's a lot of other people like me who feel like that. So I think that when you get these organizations that come in, and this is entirely nongovernmental. Yeah, this is, there's nothing government about this. This is basically a coalition of the willing, that I think seems to be how things are done in Canada. It's a lot of private sector people and academics who get together as this coalition of the willing, we'tr like, I'm really passionate about this. So am I okay, let's do this together. Okay. We just kind of go and do it.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 49:25
Absolutely. Yeah. So yeah, I think I have a I have a theory on why governments are like that. I think, Well, I think I've taken this from eminent thinkers. It's not my specific idea, but that the basically, every new minister and every new person who's responsible for something always wants a new initiative. So they just want to do something new. And so you're inherently in a country that has elections every four years. You're gonna get a new initiative, and it's almost like a lot of government things. A lot of government programs departments, etc, are set up for new initiatives in the sense of that's what they just expect this. It is a very project mindset, as I call it, you know, it's a project, not a products and services mindset in the sense of how do we change the system, or a project, not a system mindset. So yeah, that's really, it's really interesting, it's nice to know that that sort of thing is happening. I did just have a look at their website. And I love that approach, which is, it's an iterative and also cyclical process of understand, to understand why people are doing it, what's currently going on, what works, what doesn't work, to co-develop a love co-develop, that's just the best, to bring people together from across industry, academia, government, indigenous interests, analyze, to then really understand the pathways and the alternatives and then advance it. That's so simple, but so it's clean, it is clean in the way that it's just, it's exactly what it needs to do, and no more and no less. So yeah, I think I think we could all take a lot from that sort of approach. Yeah, I think that'd be really, I'm really excited to see where where this is going to go in the future. So let's go back into the building. I feel like we we've gotten into the we started in the helicopter, then we landed on the jetpack, then we landed in the building went in the building, then we got back in our jetpacks and flew out. Let's go back into the building and think about some more of those use cases. Why isn't digital twin for you know, we talked about energy, and we've talked about heat. But that there are so many potential uses, and you know, doing a lot of work in this area. So why digital twin?
Jenn MacArthur 51:56
I think, I think the nice thing about a digital twin, and maybe this is, if you (inaudible) the sidestep, is something we talk about the digital shadow, right, so the digital shadow is kind of your digital model of an asset at some point. So maybe it's your as, as constructed BIM that's never been changed your digital twin is your up to date BIM because it can read and understand what's going on with the well can't necessarily understand but it's you've got the information in real time. And you can query it and it gets updated by the system. And then what I like to play with is cognitive digital twins, which is kind of like the next level, if you can imagine a digital twin that's self-learning. And I think that this is actually I think a really important step for digital twins is one of the challenges if you're trying to bring in a lot of these use cases, whether it's for the energy management, or thermal comfort, or building optimization of any or, you know, asset maintenance, whatever. There's this cold start period where you're learning how that particular building behaves. And it can take a while. And if you're starting from scratch, you know, typically we say it's like a year or two before you really have a good idea. But what if you could actually transfer learning from previous buildings into that one, from previous genericized systems into a new system. And you built in this online learning capability, that your twin was actually capable of learning what was typical for the building as the data came in. And then adapting those algorithms to be able to tune them to that building, with very, very little human intervention. Obviously, people checking in to make sure that it's realistic, because we've all seen some of the garbage that can come out of an AI when it's left with some devices, we don't actually check the outputs. But this idea of a cognitive digital twin is something that can determine what information is important, act upon that, integrated it. So things like automatic outlier detection, right? So wait a second, that data is crazy. I'm not going to use it to update my model, I'm just going to report it as a potential fault.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 54:13
I've seen that in in digital twin certainly with air handling units that are just occasionally you know, it's going it's warm, it's warm, it's cold fans on fans on fans off fan is running at 1 million RPM, just one just one dot and you know, you're taking a statistical view over this thing. So it just it, just naturally brings it in and that's usually something you know, data cleansing world somebody's got to go in and go click Delete, you know.
Jenn MacArthur 54:40
Or your CO2 level in the building is 12 PPM I'm like, really are we in space? I'm pretty sure there's nowhere on earth that's 12 PPM, guys.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 54:50
I must be breathing I feel good (inaudible). So that's I think that's really interesting because that's a huge opportunity to share and almost create that ecosystem approach.
Jenn MacArthur 55:06
And factories have been doing it for a while, actually. And that's actually what inspired that is the factory like manufacturing actually does have ups. So you can actually have a train of equipment and maybe equipment number 12 says, Hey, wait a sec, this dimension is off. Hey, equipment 11, check your specs, you're making this, like 10 millimeters too long, stop and recalibrate and check and see what's going on. And you'll actually have the equipment and giving other equipment commands, which blew my mind. And I was like, wait a sec, buildings could do this. Sorry.
Riccardo Cosentino 55:40
No, you answer my question. I was gonna ask you how, you know, where are we with this, this this concept of carbon to digital twin. And as usual, the manufacturing work is already there. And infrastructure is gonna slowly follow.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 55:57
Yes.
Jenn MacArthur 55:58
I found, actually, I joke with my students on my last day of class, I very boldly told my architecture students that are going to predict the future for where things are going to be 10 years that which is kind of wild, because I find my slides from 10 years ago, and I'm not that far off. All I do is I look at where the automotive manufacturing sector is like, well, where's automotive? Because we seem to lag about 10 years behind them? And they're like, how did you know? And I was like, I just, we're our cars now. We're our planes.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 56:28
Yeah, I do that. I'm blind, don't tell people. No, I'm just some sort of article.
Jenn MacArthur 56:36
Just let the cat out of the bag.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 56:38
Yeah, that's what the other industries are during, oh, we'll get there, we'll get that, that's what, that's what we're doing. And yeah, you know, it's that institutional buyers are slow, institutional asset owners are slow to change. But they will get there. And but you know, I think the opportunity is much larger in the, in buildings, in cities and infrastructure, because there's so much more of it. I mean, I would like to see a world and I can see how this could happen, where public transport is on time for the people that it needs to be there for where there are no empty buses, where you know, the bus comes when you need it. I could see that working, I can see, it's the sort of imagining how using things like public bus planning, right, you do a timetable. And maybe you review it quarterly, probably annually, maybe every four years to say, well, actually. And the only way, then the data that they have is, how much money did it take on the machine? You know, how many tickets did we issue? And that's all you can really use as your input. But what if everything could just be so much closer to real time across the world? I think we can get there. It's just a question of having the data having the systems and we could, you know, we could avoid all the traffic jams, we could, you know, we could avoid all the issues of kind of knock-on effects when there's a delay, because things will still break. Right? You know, things will still need repairing. But what if we could mitigate all of the, you know, there's an accident on this road? What if we could mitigate that sort of stuff in real time, but I think that's the sort of world we could get to?
Jenn MacArthur 58:25
And could you predict that something is likely to start breaking soon, take it out of service and do the cheap repair, right, like, as we say, you know, you can either change your oil, or you can replace your engine, you know, there's the easy way and the hard way, but for a lot of our boilers and chillers, and that other equipment, we don't really have an early warning system, saying, hey, in about six months, your boilers gonna fail, and being (inaudible) now would be a really good time to take it out of service and do the overhaul rather than have it fail in the middle of the winter time,
Henry Fenby-Taylor 58:55
Which is when it will fail, because that's when something suddenly gets turned on. It's interesting there, because there's all sorts of interesting connotations. I'm thinking of a specific project oversaw at Cambridge, that was looking at sensing up railway bridges. So they went, they went ham, they went all out on the sensors on this bridge, and ended up almost kind of following your thinking they ended up really only using vibration sensors. Because they, you know, they started saying like, what is on this, what is on this line, and by the end, they could go well, we can actually tell what it is by the vibration, we can tell what it is we can tell how much it weighs. We can tell how fast it's going. And therefore, we can tell the load and the where that is happening. Because right now so much of and this is true of buildings and infrastructure. So much of this is done manually by engineers, engineers need to go and hang off the side of a bridge and look at it and go is that a good or bad crack? And get the same as it's not. A tape measure, but you know it metaphor, the metaphorical tape measure that go, yeah, that crack's good for another five years. Yeah, that's fine. And then you get catastrophic collapses because actually, it's so intensive a job that not everything gets seen and not everything gets looked at. So you create these these problems in advance. I got one more as well, because I have to bring up Landscape Architecture at some point. In the U.K., you can't dig up trees or move trees or hedges or plants during nesting seasons. And the amount of developers in the U.K. who are so developing residential, who have multimillion pound projects that get stopped, because nobody thought to check or just okay, just click on that, click on it. Okay, delete that ahead. Okay, deleted, right, well replant it somewhere else, that's fine. Okay, problem solved. And then the council turn around and say No, you can't do that. You have to wait another six months or a year, until you can do that. And there's all these things happening, not just cracks in the bridge. But the nesting birds, or the news or whatever it is, all of these complex factors that we can't plan for. You know, I'm saying we potentially could plan for it, just trying to fit it all in our in our brains, but it doesn't happen. And the way to get around that is with data.
Jenn MacArthur 1:01:31
And so one of the projects that I'm playing with that I, we haven't gotten into birds nesting, but good thing you actually brought it up is we've been one of the, I've been talking a lot about the building part of this digital twin, like Living Lab that we've done, but I'm actually one of four scholars working on it. So I'm the smart (inaudible), my colleague, (inaudible) is the smart infrastructure. So he's actually mapped out all of the energy and water and waste streams for the campus. My colleague, (inaudible), has mapped out the pedestrian flow traffic flow. Alright, so, so now we have the transportation element. And then my colleague, (inaudible), is a imaging person. So he's got his drones that have the laser scanning, the thermal imaging, the photogrammetry, to be able to actually go through and capture these details, so he could fly his drone over said bridge, as long as you could be looking at the system serving the bridge, we could be looking at the structural integrity of the bridge, we could have that you could have a naturalist digital twin that we could actually be having, you know, the, the eco issues. So what are the trees most likely to be nesting? In Toronto it's for us if it's tree diameters, 30 centimeters, it can't be dug up period, right? You have, you have to build a giant, giant wooden crate around it and just protect it. We have these tree protection zones. So you simply plan your development trend where the tree is, although we don't protect little hedges, so it is slightly different for that. So.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 1:03:05
Yeah, it's done here on there's a quality assessment basically, on the tree done, usually. And yeah, in cities, it's very different, especially in, in London, where there's so much underground, that it's, you know, there's there's a lot to think about when you touch anything, and planting new trees is a nightmare. But I think certainly no in Canada that, you know, there are just thinking of the sort of use cases, you know, we're talking about making very specific decisions at certain level, but that it scales, you know, these decisions can scale. And so, in a country where the railway lines will go thousands of miles, hundreds of miles? Kilometers?
Jenn MacArthur 1:03:49
About I think it's like eight or 9000 kilometers coast to coast.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 1:03:53
Okay. So.
Jenn MacArthur 1:03:55
Yes, it does.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 1:03:57
So, you know, this ability to scale seems like this is where it's at this is how we get that world of the future where everything can work together is by working at that sort of scale. And
Riccardo Cosentino 1:04:08
I think it's important, like we wanted to jump in earlier. You know, we've looked at the energy use cases, I mean, just for the people listening from other countries in the U.K., I mean, we have we have a 60 degree swing, you know, you can get minus 30 in the winter plus 30 in the summer. And you literally have, you know, you have highly level imaging, especially in Toronto late June. So, you go from, you know, we had with a snow snowstorm in mid-April and you know, this weekend was 30 degrees, and that's what we're dealing with. And so the energy consumption and the insulation of buildings, it's really, really important. You know, in terms of mobility, the reason Jen was talking about looking at the pressure flow, you know, when it snows, it gets complicated. to move around, you got your snow banks, you got a lot of infrastructure that gets limited by these weather effects. But then also generates, generate innovation. I mean, one of the one of the really cool thing that's wrong to date, and Jen knows this, but you know, we're using the lake water as a cooling system for buildings. So there's basically you go into Capitol water in the middle of the lake, and that is, it's always a believe at four degrees, I might be wrong. And so there was always four degrees. So it's a great coolant in the summer, and it's free.
Jenn MacArthur 1:05:39
And then what they do is then they go in, and they take out a lot of the heat, and they use that to provide heating to people who actually still need summertime heating or seasonal heating. Yeah, and I was looking at the temperature. Yeah, this afternoon is high of 32. Feels like 40. And it was like 13 degrees last week. Yeah, yeah, no, we, we actually, you guys have chaotic weather. Like I've been in Scotland watching the sunny, rainy and snow within the space of an hour.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 1:06:08
Yeah, well, you can see, you can see it in the same view, you know,
Jenn MacArthur 1:06:12
Still like a five degree swing. For us it's like 60 degrees.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 1:06:18
So, bear in mind, if you're going to develop residential properties, you need big wardrobes for everybody, because they're going to need to have t-shirts and (inaudible). Yeah. Take proof clothing at the same time. It just feels like that's, I mean, I experienced that. I went snowboarding in Banff. And then I went back 15 years later for a conference in the summer, and I went mountain biking, totally different place. Totally different place. And yeah, that's just that's just how the country works. So yeah, it's, it makes me want to move to Canada. That's what it makes me want to do. I hope it makes our listeners want to listen to Canada to listen to us and move to Canada as well, where you can pick up both of our podcasts. So I think unless we have any closing statements, I think we can, we can say thank you very much and draw this one to a close.
Jenn MacArthur 1:07:19
Thanks so much for having me. That's been a real pleasure.
Henry Fenby-Taylor 1:07:22
Yeah, I've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed it.
Riccardo Cosentino 1:07:24
Yeah, thank you for making the time on your busy schedule. It's been a pleasure meeting you and talking to you. I mean, I lived in the TMU campus. So it's, hearing about all these great things that Toronto Metropolitan University is doing. It's fascinating and it fits with the podcast that Henry and I have. So thank you for having me and Harry, thank you for hosting it. Great, (inaudible).
Henry Fenby-Taylor 1:07:56
My absolute pleasure. So thank you very much everybody for listening to this collaboration between the Digital Twin Fan Club Podcast and the Navigating Major Programmess podcast.
Riccardo Cosentino 1:08:07
That's it for this episode of Navigating Major Programmes. I hope you found today's conversation as informative or provoking as I did. If you enjoyed this conversation, please consider subscribing and leaving a review. I would also like to personally invite you to continue the conversation by joining me on my personal LinkedIn at Riccardo Cosentino. Listening to the next episode, we will continue to explore the latest trends and challenges in major programme management. Our next in-depth conversation promises to continue to dive into topics such as leadership risk management and the impact of emerging technology in infrastructure. It's a conversation you're not going to want to miss. Thanks for listening to Navigating Major Programmes and I look forward to keeping the conversation going.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai