 Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the third and final day of the annual meeting of the new champions 2015. Delighted to be here with our first issue briefing of the day we have two to day. We are going to move from science to innovation with our second one being about the shadow banking and technological disruption in the finance industry. But first, very, very pleased to be joined by some of the World Economic Forum's community of young scientists, all brilliant scientists in their own rights. We're hoping the network effect of having them as part of the World Economic Forum's community here, that there's some synergies that can be gained from bringing these brilliant people together. I was able to capture four of them and here they are now, our captives for the next 30 minutes. I'm going to start in true fashion for these briefings with a brief round of questions for each of them and then we're going to open up the questions to the floor and also to our audience who are watching live online. I'm going to start with Mandy Holford, your associate professor of chemical biology, Hunter College at the City University of New York, doing a lot of work in the field of using killer snails and capturing their venom for the good of mankind. Give us your brief elevator pitch. My brief elevator pitch is killer cure. So the snails that we work with, they're lethal, they have a venom like snakes or scorpions, so they can kill you, but that venom can also cure. In the venom they've evolved over millions of years to hit specific targets, which is what drugs do. If you have a headache, you take an aspirin because you want to alleviate your headache. You want it to get rid of your headache quickly, you want it to only get rid of your headache and you don't want it to cause any side effects. That's what the peptides in these snails are able to do for us. They're showing us new drug therapies that are going to be both specific, fast acting and alleviate side effects. What kind of treatments are these peptides going to be useful? The first one is our proof and principle. There's a snail drug on the market right now used to treat chronic pain in HIV and cancer patients. The one that's being developed in my lab, we found one that seems to be very selective for liver cancer. It runs the gambit between pain and cancer and that's because they're basically good at shutting down signals. If you think that pain is a chronic signal that's going through your neurons, your neuronal signals and cancer is a chronic signal that's going through the cells to divide, these peptides work in the same way to shut down or to inhibit those malfunctioning signals so that you can alleviate the disorder that's occurring. We've had painkillers around for a while. What makes these different? The painkillers that are coming from venomous snails are different because they don't target the same thing. Most of the painkillers on the market are opioid acting. They're opioid receptors and they have a major side effect in that they're addictive. The painkillers we're finding from these snails are not addictive because they don't work on opioid receptors. They work on a different molecular target. This target doesn't go along the addiction pathway. That's one major breakthrough. The other is that they're very potent. The current painkiller morphine loses its potency over time. You never get back to that original high as they like to say. The peptides from these snails don't behave in that way. They don't lose their high. They're much more potent than morphine. They're longer lasting in the therapeutic application and they're not addictive. Basically, they've shown us a new model for how to treat pain, which prior to discovering these snails, no one knew about. That is genuinely fascinating. I hope there are enough snails to go around to kill all the pain in the world. Louis Philippe, your work is at the intersection of two sciences, artificial intelligence and life science and healthcare, if I'm not mistaken. It's very true to the concept and philosophy of the forum, which is bringing different disparity of communities and skill sets together. Tell us a bit about your work. I think this is one of the really exciting things right now is to see the intersection of computer science and healthcare. Two different fields coming together. Now these days we can see computer science helping doctors in their diagnosis and their treatment of depression, different mental health issues like psychosis and autism. This field, which is called multimodal AI, is really the equivalent of the blood sample. I think this is the best analogy I have. You have in many cases, if you have a doctor and you want to confirm your hypothesis about a patient, you will order a blood sample and a blood test and you get the results. We want to do the same with mental health so that we have an interaction sample where the person is talking and we are able to quantify their nonverbal behaviour, how they smile, how they are voicing different and how we can see that over times so that the doctors can have objective measures for something that has been really subjective mental health disorders. What kind of disorders are you hoping to target first? What's the stage of your bringing this into practice and to everyday usage? We started with distress, depression and anxiety. One of the really interesting things, we were so sure that people who are depressed smile less often. In fact, they smile as often because of social norm, but their smiles are shorter and less amplitude. We also thought that there was a difference with negative facial expression, but in fact there is the same between distress and non distress. But if you separate men and women, what you see is that women are showing less negative facial expression while men are showing more negative facial expression when they are depressed. So these tools have a real impact. We can now observe things that were subtle and may not have been able to be seen in a large scale. So now we are doing with autism, with Yale Medical School and we are working with Harvard Medical School with Psychosis and these are amazing avenues for the future. It sounds like interpreting these expressions, there's a commercial interest outside of medicine and healthcare as well. I think this is clearly really important when you think about treatment. There are a lot of drugs developed these days and when you think about mental health you want to be able to know if this drug has an impact and you would like to reduce the time of treatment and so that you don't have to wait the usual six weeks if it's working you would like to be able to have these objective measures that allow you to reduce that. So it has a really big impact for medication and all these pharmaceutical companies and I think this is going to be an area of great interest in the future. Any other industries outside of pharmaceuticals? Definitely in education. So one of the areas where all of this research is going now is looking at education because now these days you have online learning where people are working together from really different areas of the world and we are good face to face. We're having a great conversation. How can we have this great conversation online and be able to have a really engaging conversation and increasing learning, massive online learning courses are a first baby step but I think there's a lot more to be done and I think part of the answer will be in this nonverbal multimodal area. That's great and I'm terrible. I didn't even introduce you. The protocol is just something I've got to get better at. Llywodraeth Merion, you're the assistant professor at Langwish Technology Institute School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University. Thanks for that. We'll be coming back to you soon. A good friend of ours here in the issue briefing room, Yota Pwyrrazi. You're the research director of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, the foundation for research and technology in Greece. You were here last year. This is your second AMNC and you were arguing about the memory associations being a good way of optimizing memory capacity. How has your work developed since then? I'm mostly interested about understanding the mechanisms that underlie our ability to form new memories and what goes wrong when we can't remember very well. Last year I explained that we have developed some strategies in order to improve the way we store information. This is by trying to associate items with a context or similar views of the same subject so that we can remember it better. Since then what we have been doing in my lab is to try to develop models, computational models that simulate these processes so that we are able to identify the mechanisms at the very low level starting from the molecules and the structure that are mostly responsible for memory formation. The aim here is to replace essentially what people are doing now in a wet lab where you have to slice a brain and stick electrodes into it in order to record the activity and understand how the whole system works. But if you can instead provide a model, a computational model where it is used in a similar manner but not invasively and much more easily if you like to understand if you perform a causal manipulation what would be the effect on the processing of the brain and what would be the effect on our ability to learn new memories then it's much easier to proceed to new treatments or even incorporate these mechanisms into artificial intelligence agents. So in this way we are essentially zooming in compared to Philip, we are zooming into the mechanisms of the processing in the brain and trying to understand how they work so that we can then translate this understanding into new treatments or smarter robots if you like. Fantastic, do you work with roboticists so there's lots of talk of robots being in the middle of various disciplines, we had some robot experts here on Wednesday I believe. Is that an area you're looking into at the moment? Not right now but in the near future once we have something that is easier to apply into a machine than probably but we're still right now trying to understand the mechanisms that are behind this, the molecular mechanisms. So I would say that we are closer to the pharmaceutical industry than the artificial intelligence field because we are mostly capable to identify key elements that are responsible for memory loss and those can serve as targets for new treatments. And I think it's good that you're looking after humans before robots first, I like your prioritization there. I'm just going to go back to one of the comments we had on social media about the field you're in and about implanting false memories and conjuring up ideas such as films like Inception. Is this a worry that the work you're doing could have negative consequences? Well, my strong belief is that any kind of technology that is frontier and for advance from what we have today, it consists of both risks and great benefits. So I'd like to think of the benefits than the risks and I think of such a technology if we had it which essentially would be the ability to manipulate the formation of memories in humans in a non-invasive matter and implant new ones or better way to say it would be to delete the ones we don't want because that's the most important application of such a technology. It would be a great advantage for people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, when you can turn something really negative into something that is really positive. Of course, there are serious worries related to such a technology which if it goes to their own hands, then you essentially would be able to manipulate people in different ways. But I think we're a little bit far from that. Cross that bridge when we come to it. Yvanna Cajanski, you are the assistant professor, R&D centre for bioengineering, Belgrade Metropolitan University. Welcome again. I believe it's your second AMNC as well. Yes, it is. If I'm not mistaken. It's very interesting for us because you're a scientist but you're also practicing and encouraging entrepreneurship in Serbia. How do you split your time? Tell us about your work. Yes. I basically work along two lines. One is still basic research. I work on tissue engineering. I started on bone and cartilage engineering when I was at Columbia University during the Fulbright Fellowship. Now back in Serbia I work more on blood vessel engineering and the idea is to actually, you need vascularization always in tissue engineering. So that is definitely something that can be integrated with other fields of tissue engineering. And the other line is the work on fab labs. And fab labs stand for fabrication laboratory, which is actually a workspace for digital fabrication, which means the use of 3D printers, CNC machines, laser cutters. It's a concept that started at MIT and it's spread now globally. And in Serbia there are not yet functional fab labs but we are starting. We actually now are establishing educational fab lab, which means that we will have teachers and high school children being educated there. How to use 3D printers, how to use CNC machines, how to actually make things on their own. And the idea is also to integrate this kind of new knowledge into the official STEM education. So this is what I'm really enthusiastic about. And there is a strong connection of fab labs and entrepreneurship. Because especially for hardware oriented startups, fab labs are a great place to do the rapid prototyping. You can really make your MVP minimum viable product in a very fast way and you can do really fast iterations. So it can really speed up the process of prototyping your product. And also it's a good way to connect science and entrepreneurship. Because scientists can come to fab labs and interact with entrepreneurs working there. And that's a very powerful combination. We had a great session here partnering for science, which is all about connections between scientists and industry. And I feel it's a little bit easier if it's one on one. So you have entrepreneurs, you have scientists talking to each other like literally one on one. And you can also have pitching competitions, you can have VCs coming to fab labs. That's actually what's happening in the fab labs in Europe. And we are starting also a large project on making the network of Southeast Europe fab labs. So I'm really looking forward to that. And I think it's a good way for kickstarting the economy, which is a big issue in Serbia. So it's also a big issue for science because of the budget cuts. And I think that's basically a universal problem, budget cuts for science. And this is a good way to help science. The fab labs can be used to make low cost but research grade equipment. So that's also something we've been working on, especially for Serbia. Yes, it's important because it's so hard to get really cutting edge equipment. And I think this is a way to overcome these problems. It's a great point. Let's stay on that point here because we are at a meeting where we're bringing together business leaders and policy makers and regulators and scientists and startups and larger businesses as well. What have your experiences been of talking to business leaders? Do you think there's enough collaborative spirit at the moment? Is there any areas that need improvement for bridging? And I appreciate a lot of your research is very much at the frontiers. Any experiences from conversations you've had with other stakeholders? I think right now there's an exciting time because I think there's a genuine interest in trying to figure out how do we go from bench to market more efficiently, more successfully using initiatives like Ivan's fab labs, to do the drug discovery process, like our work in a way that scales up in both a rapid and effective manner. And so in talking to policy makers and business leaders here at the meeting, that's sort of what I've been trying to figure out. And we had a great session on the YS about going from bench to market and figuring out if you have a clever idea or if you have a concept, what's the best way? Who should be on your team? Who do you reach out to and how do you identify those people? And so that's where I think this kind of a conference is powerful, because it gets us access to be in the room with the business leaders so that you can talk about what's happening. And not only talk about what's happening, but in practical terms, discuss what should be the benchmarks, how do I go next, how do I form my team, and how do I make sure that what I'm thinking about actually will make it to the market and have impact when it gets there, so it's not dead on arrival kind of thing. And so I think right now in general, regardless of the field you're in, whether it's what I'm doing in drug discovery, what you're doing with AI, your work as well in memory, and the fab labs industries are now actively coming to us and trying to pursue and figure out models for how we can scale this in a way that makes sense and where you don't require you becoming super person. So you don't have to be the scientist, the CEO, and the policy decision maker all at the same time. You can effectively partner and work strategically to get these things to scale in a much more efficient manner. That was what I was thinking because that was what you were saying is an awful lot for you guys to do. You have to be business strategist. It's not possible. A financier as well as a brilliant scientist. And frankly, I'm sure we'd rather keep you in science. Everyone wants me in science. Maybe you'll be a good financier. Who knows? Maybe we'll never know. But I mean that's a very good point. Is that your experience too that you're getting more interest now from business and other stakeholders recognising your work and recognising commercial potential for science? I think one point I think related to that is the fact that as scientists our job is yes to discover, to push the boundary. But what I think I got, that was my first time at the World Economic Forum is the idea of it's a two-way dialogue and if you stay and you just stay by yourself and you're not ready to make the next step you cannot complain. You have to be part of the dialogue and so you have to make the effort to make your research accessible and so that the dialogue can start. That's the first step is just make it accessible and take the time to understand the other side because you come in and so I think this was really interesting in that sense because the dialogue that is happening here is a two-way dialogue and I can see there is interest on both sides but it was great opening for me, Luke, coming here for that reason. Let's take the example you gave us of your work and primarily it was for treatment of mental disorder but you also said massively open online courses another application I'm kind of thinking maybe audience measurements as well but was that your idea to people come to you and say Louis-Philippe, let's use this for education too or is that an idea you had? Original I cannot over emphasize collaboration and I think a lot of my work will never have been possible without all my collaborators and this multidisciplinary that has become key to research these days and so when I cannot, I'm here in front of the audience but I really believe that there is a momentum in the scientific community towards that and I'm probably one who is pushing that but there's a lot of other people there. Education was early on when I wanted, when I always love I think we're all in research part of it to discover but it's to work with students. I mean that's the reason I love this work is the working with students who help them so this was from day one something I want to do is help them learn and not just my students but also other students from other country, other university so that was always a goal for me now I'm glad I can start addressing it but I think anybody in research, I mean we're doing it I mean my students are really doing the work we're working as a team together and so I think education has always been there but a lot of the new ideas that I didn't think about job interview training that's the kind of feedback I'm getting here a lot of other applications that I had not thought about and that's really exciting and now I have to think about how I'm going to take that but it is really interesting to get that feedback something for the plane ride home you've got lots of ideas, you can start processing Yotra have you had any meaningful conversations with people outside the scientific community this week? Oh yeah and that's one of the things I really like about this meeting is that you get an opportunity, a huge opportunity to meet with policy makers, with publishers with young global leaders and exchange ideas of how to proceed further so I thought for me it was very beneficial to have a discussion with policy makers where we are trying to get across some of our needs for change in the scientific field especially the young generation I think there are many things that we would like to have them different in the way we do our research and how people appreciate our work or how do we judge excellence, how do we publish these are some of the issues that we had the opportunity here to communicate to the people who are mostly responsible to drive this change so this I think was really great in terms of interaction with industry I personally would like to have more of it I mean it was great talking to people of our parties last night about whether my idea is really good for a new company for example and there was interest but I would like to have more organized you know twinning between the industry and the science community perhaps in this forum or somewhere else I think it is a great opportunity and we should capitalize on it having these people together that both can contribute to each other It's a very good idea Ivana you've been working on this in your home country what's been your greatest learning about trying to build this community together where investors and scientists can share the same platform Yes, well that's always a challenge it's still a challenge and it helps a lot having as Yota mentioned now this opportunity here to actually talk to the investors, to the policy makers and I was very happy to be at one of the main sessions Professor Klaus Schwab was chairing it about the next industrial revolution because these technologies, digital fabrication and the maker movement, the fab labs that's part of the next industrial revolution and that brings along a lot of different aspects the questions of IP, intellectual property because everything is open source so who's actually the owner of the product that you make and there are also different aspects of well if you now go to the more scientific side because I'm also using these digital fabrication technologies in biology research because there is 3D bioprinting so we are establishing a facility for this and there are also these ethical questions also concerning this when you make a new tissue, a new organ what are the again ownership issues about that so it's a lot of the whole field of regenerative medicine is very charged with the ethical issues and I was again very happy to see a lot of discussions also this year and last year last year was a very good session on bioengineering in general and bioprinting in particular and if you told me before that the World Economic Forum there would be so much talk about cutting edge science I wouldn't have believed it and now when I witnessed it first hand I'm so positively surprised and it's really really great which shows that it's really going in the right direction really really close interaction of science and business so that's what we are aiming all of us aiming to do and it's really good that now we have this community of us young scientists and we really are trying to connect also with the other communities and I think we will make something great definitely I also was at Professor Klaus' session on the new industrial revolution that's coming forward and because it's going to be so tech heavy it goes to a point that Louis was bringing up just now about education so how are we going to educate the next generation of young scientists that's not a topic that's a web topic but the topic is directly pertinent to economies and keeping economies sustainable and so how do we engage new scientists and new stems in a global scale and so one project that we're trying to do in my group we're calling it the killer snails project because killer snails gets people's attention exactly and so we're trying to figure out not only how students learn about science but why which components is it that they start to internalize and how do you make it and so it's in the form of digital learning games that we're putting out there because AI and digital is so effective for the young generation if you have a child they grab your iPhone and they know what to do with it so we're trying to come up with materials that engages on that level what we can do to ensure that in the industrial revolution everyone sort of has an opportunity to play and it's not just the high-end economies but the low-end economies as well that should be able to be there so education is key and how do we figure out how to engage young scientists to give back in that realm as well education and low cost research grade research that's a good mix you can also print on a 3D printer very beautiful nails a couple of minutes I can spend all day here but you've got to go but a couple of quick questions first let's go back to the fun stuff so outside of your own field of science what's been most exciting for you what other sciences are really inspiring you at the moment, Louis? I think right now there is there was for a while in artificial intelligence really established discipline language, speech, computer vision machine learning and now multimodal is becoming so the dream if you look at AI, artificial intelligence from 1950s they were supposed to solve it in 20 years that was their research agenda we know it's not going to happen I hope it doesn't happen right now but what happened is the multidisciplinarity is now everybody agree and it's not just they agree but they are doing it and I think that's the main difference everybody knew it was important but now it is happening now we understand about language we understand how people are talking where they speak and also social aspects so the group dynamics so we really see this fusion that comes because there has been this dialogue for a long time there has been new policies and the funding agency has seen it so that wheel has been going on for a long time and now it has real effect and that's really exciting because the multidisciplinarity is real for now What's exciting outside of the memory work you're doing? Because I think it's the decade of the brain and what I find really fascinating is the fact that there is a worldwide effort in multiple countries to try to do basic research in order to understand the brain and how it works and to do that you have to go through the development of new technologies which contribute to many other areas you have the people that work the experiments collaborating with people developing technologies collaborating with modelers and everyone is chipping in into this great effort which is essentially to map the human brain within the next, I don't know, 50 to 100 years and I find it fascinating because it is, I think for the first time an activity where it is multidisciplinary it is cross scale it leads to new technology the development of new technologies it leads to the application of the new technologies in an immediate time frame so it is an activity that encompasses pretty much everything we dream of in science and I think we will have a revolution in brain science in the next few years and I find that fascinating and it's global that several countries have taken up all at the same time which is powerful because as we know when scientists collaborate it leads forward and the fact that the brain you're calling it the decade of the brain but the fact that the brain initiative has been taken on because the brain is the ultimate frontier kind of like space so for me the things that I'm excited about including the brain initiative is what's happening in space so Pluto, if everyone saw the flyby Pluto is amazing and I think the technology development that's enabling us to get there so we're learning that we can do these things faster and I think that's really exciting and on such a tiny level so we're doing a lot of single cell research as well where before we had to cluster everything and get general pictures of what's going on now we can get specific information about a single cell and that's really powerful and zoom in and zoom out at the same time which is really amazing now, we have the power to do that Ivana, last question we hope you come back in years time what would you in the best case scenario hope to have achieved in the next 12 months I'm not giving up very tight with my time well maybe it's good to go backwards just to compare how it was last year and then what happened in these 12 months it actually moved along quite well the non-profit that I founded in the meantime which is its FAB initiative it's focused on establishing FAB labs and what happened in the past year is that we started the educational FAB lab in Serbia the first one and I have to say that being a young scientist from World Economic Forum helped a lot in fundraising and getting really good grants so that is what happened and I would be very happy if that trend continues so we make more new FAB labs so that would be really good and also what happened is that ok maybe not everything is so positive so on the negative side is that my startup failed so but that's also very good learning experience like everybody says failure is nothing to be feared it's not pleasant but it's also great learning and I'm thinking about starting a new one so I'm maybe going to do that in the next 12 months although of course you have to focus so I'm probably going to do it through the FAB lab so integrate and I'm also looking forward to collaboration with the other young scientists I mean Mandy and I talking about I like these killer snails a lot so yeah and also this about neuroscience I mean I actually have PhD neuroscience so I might get back to that so there's plenty of opportunities for future collaboration thank you so much it's been a real pleasure having you here thank you very much for joining us and thank you to our audience watching live on weforum.org this session is now closed