Interview of the two chairmen of the 2021 Congress: Sascha Eichstaedt and Daniel Jullien.
Why it is important to attend this Congress? What are the main three tracks of the Congress? Answer is easy: digital transformation, Green Deal, health...
Transcripts
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So good morning, everybody. And good morning, Nicolas Gosse from the magazine Contrôles Essais Mesures, I'm Sandrine Gazal from the CFM. And this morning we'll talk about the International Metrology Congress. We have with us Sascha Eichstaedt and Daniel Jullien. So I will let you introduce yourselves.
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I'm Sascha Eichstaedt , I'm with PTB, the German National Metrology Institute. My background is I'm a mathematician and I'm working in the field of digital transformation in metrology. And I'm very happy to this year be the co-chair of the International Metrology Congress, one of the two co-chairs
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And Daniel Jullien...
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Thank you, Sandrine. So I'm Daniel Jullien. I'm in the world of metrology for more than 30 years. I managed different companies in the dimensional metrology and for a couple of years, I'm a consultant in that world and for the second time I'm the co-chairman of the International Congress of Metrology. So I am very pleased to work with Sasha for this new session.
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So my first question concerning the event: could you present the international Metrology Congress?
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As you know, I know this International Congress of Metrology for more than 15 years. And this is a very unique event. This is the only event in Europe that is gathering all the world of metrology from the academic world, universities, research centres, all the bodies in the quality, the structures and of course, industry and people directly involved in these matters. So it's a very unique, very big and international. And I'm very happy to see these tendencies, this trend being starting with NPL two years ago, being with us, and now with Sascha, because, the PTB of course in Germany is very important for our world, for the metrology world.
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And what about you, Sasha?
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I also have a quite a long history with the International Metrology Congress. In fact, it was my very, very first metrology conference at all that I have attended earlier in my metrology career. And already in that first event, I was very impressed by the combination of the scientific presentations, the round table discussions and the industry exhibition. I think this is a very, very unique element of this Congress that you have this combination, because it allows to really bring together the scientists and the practitioners and the manufacturers. And it's a very interesting element for me each time again, to go from a scientific presentation to the industry fair and start talking with them and say, I just learnt this in this session and now I see your instruments or your products here. What do you think about this new development? This is something you can't find at other conferences without.
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What are the news and the highlights for this event this year?
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First, the Congress remains as it was before. That means you will have a lot of conferences, more than 200 conferences from different people, from people, from research, from academic world, from the industry. That's important. You will have roundtables and different items that will be back or will be back also later. But it's it's important. It's all what we could find during these three days of of the Congress. Then we have this year, we've highlighted three main sectors when we want to bring people and information. These three tracks will be about industry, industry 4.0, because now that's a very, very important point for the industry to go to this digital world. We will have the Green Deal. The climate changes are very important and all the industry should take care of it. And we will have the health because with the sanitary crisis today, health is also a very important point where metrology is, of course, very present.
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Sascha?
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Yeah, exactly. And there's not so much I can add to that. Just to reiterate that these three tracks are representing the global grand challenges we have right now, and we included those in the Congress as the three main tracks. So the main themes of the Congress, because we also see that the metrology community is working towards addressing and developing solutions for these grand challenges. So we want to give these metrology scientists a way of possibility to present these solutions, not only to each other, but also to to the other communities. So this is the aim for the Congress and the highlight is really to give a sneak preview into these developments.
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OK, many thanks. And maybe you could put some key topics of the event or some key roundtables to give some kind of examples that will be addressed during the event?
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As I said earlier in the introduction, I'm working in the area of digital transformation and I'm very happy that we have two roundtables dedicated to the challenges and opportunities in this area. One is on the changes that we gonna see and the quality infrastructure. So not only metrology, but also accreditation, calibration, conformity assessment, market surveillance, standardization and so on.
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And this whole whole area of these elements interacting and the underlying regulation. This is one important roundtable dedicated to digital transformation and another one is more like look into the future and to discuss what metrology look like in the digital age, what will we see? And we have other roundtables on topics like industrial emissions, where we are talking about new requirements, trust and health measurements, where we talk about new challenges not only due to the pandemic, but of course, also shopfloor measurement challenges. So more measurements are carried out directly on the production shop floor and we need to develop new solutions for that. And due to all the changes in metrology, there is a need for new skills for metrologists. And we want to have a roundtable on that as well.
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OK, Daniel, do you have something to add?
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Not really, because Sascha gave most of the information. What is I think interesting to see is the international congress of meteorology until now was really focusing on the industry and the transformation of industry, but now we are seeing that metrology is wider than just the industrial process, I would say. The industry should take care of the environment with the Green Deal challenges and we're opening the Congress to all these requests. And that's why I think the people from industry will also look when you focus on the digital transformation of the factory, but also how they could be in this new world facing new challenges.
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That's a very important point, because it really it becomes more and more obvious that to in order to overcome or address all these challenges we've mentioned earlier, you need to do a measurement. You cannot address the climate crisis without doing measurements to really assess what the current situation is and what measures have what kind of impact in a positive or even of a negative way. You cannot talk about the CO2 emissions from factories or cars without proper measurements. You cannot improve production in a factory of the future without proper measurements of tolerances of quality and so on. So it's measurement is everywhere. And the Congress really brings all this together and shows us in a very good way.
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Yes, our environment now is full of sensors, measuring so many types of information. And of course, we need to be sure that the information coming from these sensors are well processed and of course, well made. This new environment, everybody should take care of it. And the first, of course, the factories and the industry itself.
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The question also about the context and the sanitory context today, so how will you ensure the Congress next September in that context, considering the health crisis?
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I'm not sure that it is only our responsibility. We are following some regulations coming from people which should, of course, take care of all the context. We are very happy to have listened to the last news from the French government that will give us more freedom to do and more hope to do the Congress as it should be. That means not only a virtual Congress, but a Congress where people could be there, could exchange, because it's very important to have the Congress itself where we could learn a lot, from the Congress, from the organization, from the roundtable. But what is also very important is to have exchange. And nothing is better than to have a face to face discussion. And it will also, in September, maybe one of the first event where people could go and could be there, maybe we could hope that we would have many people there.
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And of course, with the limit we could we have but we're quite confident to have a very nice event in September,
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Sascha, you will be able to come from Germany?
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Hope so, I hope so, really. Fingers crossed.
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I will go and fetch you...
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At the very the beginning of preparing this event we also considered a hybrid organization. So we considered video recordings in advance of the presentation. So all speakers, scientific speakers are asked to prepare a video presentation in case that they cannot attend. It may happen that I mean, it's an international Congress. We can not not take care of all people around the world to be able to travel to France, of course. But we try our best. There will be the possibility for a virtual attendance so people can book access to the virtual platform to have a look at the videos with your presentations, at the posters, to attend the live streams of the plenaries and so on. So there will be a mixture of virtual and physical attendance. And if everything goes wrong, which I absolutely don't hope, of course, we could very easily switch to a pure virtual if necessary.
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Yes, many thanks for that precision and to give possibilities and the opportunities to participate to the Congress. What would you expect from that kind of events, you Sascha coming from a NMI and you Daniel as working in the industry field . What do you expect of such an event?
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On my side, which I was very close to the to the industry, to the factories. And I always say that the Congress is a unique place where the people from factory could meet the metrology, the ones doing the rules for metrology and the quality system. So it's always important not to stay in the factory, you have to open your mind and see how the rules, the quality structure could impact your process. This place is the only one where you could have this type of information through all the sessions or the roundtables. So it should attract and I'm very pleased if we could get more and more people from industry, because I am sure that if they are coming, they will get the information that will help them to make better decision in these challenges they are facing, especially the move in the digital world.
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And you Sascha, what do you expect from that kind of event?
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First of all, I expect from this event this year to have an exchange with a lot of scientists and industry experts who are very, very eager to meet and discuss in person again. So I think this will really be a very interesting atmosphere at that Congress, given that people are for so long now only match in virtual meetings or via telephone or email. And this will be very, very unique element of that Congress this year. In general, what I always expect from the International Metrology Congress is, as a metrologist, to see the current research advances that others made. Again this year, we will have many contributions from a lot of metrology research projects that show their recent advances in science and new measurement methods, their new data analysis, uncertainty machines, AI, whatever method. So a really recent research results. But I also, from the point of view of a metrologist working in MI, I also always expect and really appreciate the possibility to get feedback from the industry. Sometimes it's something like: have you considered this and this kind of element that is there in practice? So maybe we are in a MI lab are doing some kind of research and preparing methods, but nobody in practice is able to do that because of something we had we didn't have in mind or the other way around, they the industry makes us aware of an issue that is out there that we haven't thought of before because it wasn't an issue for us. So this kind of exchange, I expect from the event again this year.
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Many thanks. So next step will be in Lyon in September, and I don't know if you have a last word to say, but I think you gave me many answers to the questions...
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Being in Lyon could be another feast, because it's not only to be the metrology world, you could also test the gastronomy of Lyon. So if you could do both, that would be perfect, what a marvelous world...
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Lots of measurements in gastronomy...
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yes, that's true.
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OK, so, so many thanks for that. Many, many thanks for you, too, and for your participation this morning for the interview. And let's so let's see in Lyon.
