 I love this. Almost instantaneous silence when I open my mouth. That is the wonders of a big fat microphone. My name is Wendy Kerr and it's my absolute delight to welcome you all here tonight for our merging tech stars talk at the University of Auckland. I have the pleasure to be the director for the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and our mission is to unleash the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship across everyone at the university. And we do this through hosting a range of experiential workshops, programmes and events just like this so that we can broaden people's views about what being innovative is, how to be entrepreneurial and what impact that will make with the New Zealand economy. So we're delighted that you could spend some time with us tonight and I'd like to thank Naomi and Shrestha who are part of my team who have pulled this together. So we are getting involved in Tech Week and for those of you who don't know, Tech Week is a work designed by New Zealand Tech and it's a nationwide event and it's designed to celebrate innovation and technology across all of New Zealand. And the reason why we love to get involved in Tech Week is because we're passionate about enabling students and staff to transform their thinking and build their entrepreneurial capability so that we can build New Zealand into a prosperous and creative nation. So we aim to entertain, educate and inspire you tonight. We have a fantastic line-up of six emerging tech stars from our labs in the University of Auckland and they are a range of emerging academics, PhD students and researchers. They're going to spend a bit of time talking about what they're passionate about and how they make it happen and what they hope to do with it. And then once they've all spoken, we're going to have a panel discussion at the end which I will facilitate. So I'd love you to hold all of your questions of which I know you'll have plenty right till the end and then we can get everyone's views on what your question may be. So about further ado, let's introduce our first speaker. And this woman is passionate about blood splatter. So there's an opening line from at a party. So Ravishka Athor, she is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Science and she is working on understanding more about blood splatter at crime scenes and of course there is a lot of information within blood and of course how it's splattered out in a crime scene. And I know many of you will be casting your mind directly to CSI and she tells me that it's a lot more sophisticated than anything you've seen on TV. So I'm delighted to introduce Ravishka to come up and share her story. Thanks Wendy. At 0800 hours on the 24th of March 2015, forensic scientists were called to the scene of a violent crime. It appears to be a normal house in the middle of Suburbia is now the scene of a violent crime. Blood splatter has been found at the outside of a house and on the inside a male John Doe in his early 20s has been pronounced dead. Severe blood staining has been found on the wall behind him and a potential weapon in his arms. The circumstances are suspicious. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my world of forensics and blood splatter. Thank you for being here and taking the time out of your day to listen to me and tell you all about what I'm passionate about. And without further ado, why am I passionate about forensics? Well you probably all know about these cool forensic TV shows like Dexter or CSI and I just want you to imagine yourself as an investigator on one of these crime shows. Whether you're just like Dexter who likes analysing bloods better or you're an investigator on CSI who loves to piece together the puzzle that makes up a crime. Well that's exactly what I used to do. I love these TV shows and this was what inspired me to get into forensics. Now you're all probably thinking well I could have just then become an actress and gone to Hollywood and acted in CSI. But actually I was really passionate about the science because I knew that there was so much unknown information about forensic science. I was also inspired by cases like the Amanda Knox case and the Oscar Pistorius case which tended to shed some negative light on forensics. And that inspired me because I wanted to go into the backdrop of what forensics was about and really understand the science. So blood stain pattern analysis is the study of the shapes, the sizes, the directionality of blood stains found at crime scenes. And one of the jobs that a blood stain pattern expert does is to distinguish between different types of blood stain patterns. So as an example we can see up on the screen here two different types of blood stain patterns that were found at crime scenes. On the top here we have arterial spatter which is the result of a breached artery and on the bottom an analyst would classify this pattern as an impact spatter. So a force that's acted on a blood source. So as I said the job of the expert is to be able to distinguish this and at the moment the challenge is that analysts aren't being very scientific by how they're doing this. They're depending on their experience and their knowledge to guide them in this and there's no real objective means of analysing patterns. So this inspired me because I wanted to understand the science and develop a way of actually helping analysts be more objective. So in keeping with the theme of tonight, technology has really grown and in forensics at the moment what we use is high speed video technology. What you can see on the screen in front of you is a person coughing up blood and high speed video technology is now used very actively by forensic scientists to give us information about how these blood stain patterns form. In my own research I was really inspired by understanding what analysts actually do when they look at blood stain patterns and this was my idea to go along and use some eye tracking technology to capture analysts in terms of what they were looking at. So what you see on the right hand side is a recording of an analyst as he's looking at a pattern that I created in the lab and I use this technology to just help me get into the mindset of the analyst. Now as I said, technology is evolving and we want to help scientists be more objective at the crime scene. So part of my task was to develop an image processing based methodology that could help analysts extract information from a blood stain pattern. I also wanted to use pattern recognition algorithms to develop an automated system that could help analysts actually do some of this work at the crime scene and analyze the pattern and classify these patterns into different types. So part of this process was to use image processing methods so taking a pattern, removing the background, doing some measurements and extracting some features like the impact angle or the area and other important information. And I found that my computerized method could actually do the job of the analyst. It could take a pattern and it could classify pattern, unknown patterns based on examples. So I found that this was interesting because it sparked in me potentially something that could be commercially viable. So as you will know, we have existing 3D technology that's in the market and I've really thought about incorporating my pattern recognition method with existing technology. So as an example we've got an image here of a crime scene reconstruction and I want to use my technology by marrying it up with existing technology so analysts can go to the crime scene, their eye movements can be tracked and they can get immediate feedback about a pattern whether it be the sizes of stains, the irregularity in stains and I think that this could be potentially a powerful tool that can stand its ground in court. So as you can expect there have been a lot of challenges going through this process of really analyzing patterns coming up with ways of being objective. Technology for me has been a positive challenge. One thing I had to learn was programming and I found that actually that was a very useful tool to learn because I was able to develop all these methods using a programming language. I found that there was resistance to change. I found that people in the forensic science field were unwilling to accept that a machine can do their job but what I was trying to show was that technology is there to assist us and we've got to capitalize on that. Motivation, that can be a huge barrier to us as we do in our research careers and I found that being a researcher myself I often had to take 10 steps backwards and look at my work from the outside perspective just to gain that motivation back. And finally, accepting that you don't always know what the right answer is I found that as a researcher people think that I know that how my program works or how things should be but I think one thing that I've accepted is that I don't always know the right answer and that's okay. So my name is Ruvishka Arthur. Thank you for listening and no humans behind in the making of this presentation. Thank you very much Ruvishka. That was absolutely fascinating and what I was really pleased to hear you, you shared your challenges and often when we're on this pathway of innovation there are many challenges and sometimes we don't hear about them but I think that also helps us understand that we can overcome the challenges to create something truly innovative. So thank you. So next up we've got someone who is passionate about sperm and not just any sperm but sperm from bulls and this is a multi-billion dollar global industry that he's about to get interested in. So this is Peter Hosking. He is a PhD candidate and a project manager for Engender Technologies and Engender Technologies is a very successful spin-off from the Photon Factory which is one of our labs in the Science Faculty at the University. So Peter. Thank you. This is probably not the dream I had for myself when I was eight years old but I am proudly passionate of sperm now. So the dairy industry is huge. In New Zealand we have about five million cows right now and last year we produced 21 billion litres of milk. One of the best opportunities for market disruption in the dairy industry right now is in sex selection and that's because every year dairy farmers artificially inseminate their herd of cows and if nature is left to its own devices you're going to get 50% male offspring and 50% females. Now the females they're mostly used to replace the dairy cows but the males don't have the same career opportunities. Most that the males can ever hope to become as a hamburger but the sad thing is they're not even going to become the best or the tastiest hamburger because these males have been selectively bred using genetics that are best for dairy not beef and so as beef cattle they're not very high value but if dairy farmers were able to just flick a switch and have that determine whether or not a cow would give birth to a male or a female then they'd be able to ensure that only high value females were ever born. Okay and this is where Engender can offer a solution. So Engender, as Wendy said is a spin-off company that I am currently working for and we are developing a microfluidic and photonics based technology for sorting male and female bullsburn by sex. There is one sole competitor to this technology. They've enjoyed a monopoly for the last few decades but unfortunately for them their technology is lousy. It's very slow, it's very expensive and most importantly it damages the sperm cells and so that lowers fertility rates and as a result of all of those things the uptake in the market is not being very strong at all. However, Engender has been able to design around the limitations of the competing technology and our chip based design is low cost, it's efficient and it's very gentle on the sperm. So this is basically how it works. A very simplified schematic obviously but it does show the four key steps that we've identified as being sort of critical to make this process work. Everything you see here happens on a microfluidic disposable chip that fits in the palm of your hands. The channels that direct the flow of the sperm cells are about the size of a human strand of hair. So anyway, step one is flow focusing. The cells enter from the left and they reach a junction where multiple sort of sheath flow inputs converge on the cells and they separate them out and then sandwich them to the centre of the channel so that they're sort of lined up one by one so they head to tail in a nice thin stream. The second step is orientation. Here, bull sperm, they're actually disc shaped. They're kind of like little frisbees with a tail and we need all of those frisbees to be lined up one in front of the other as well as having the same orientation each time. So the flow focusing puts them one in front of the other. Orientation, they all have to have the same orientation and that's critical for the next step which is detection and this is the part that's obviously necessary. At some point, we have to know whether it's a male or a female and the only way that anybody knows whether a cell is male or female is by looking at the DNA. This is for bull vines sperm. So the male bovine sperm cell is characterised by a Y chromosome and the female is characterised by an X. The X chromosome is just ever so slightly bigger than the Y chromosome and so what we do is we stain the DNA inside the sperm cell with a fluorescent dye and then we take a UV light source we illuminate the cells one at a time and because the female cell has the slightly larger X chromosome it glows with a little bit more intensity than the male cell and at this point we can do switching. So now we know whether it's a male or a female cell we've got to do something with it. All we have to do actually is just move the cell sort of up or down up if it's a female so that it goes out the top channel down if it's a male so it goes out the bottom channel and this is where sort of gender's core IP comes in and actually I've been remiss I've forgot to point out that our core IP is also important in the orientation step so I mentioned we have to orient them and the way that we do that is to use laser beams to apply a force to the cell so that and that force just flips every cell one by one into a particular orientation and it's that same physics that we use in the switching step so we put a laser into the chip and we use the force that that laser imparts on the cell to just nudge it just by a few diameters up or down and that gives us enough control to ensure it goes out one of the selected output channels for collection So I have a couple of videos I can show you this one is a demonstration of the hydrodynamic flow focusing in step one so instead of sperm cells we've put red food colouring into the sample input and this lets you visualise what happens to the flow in the main channel and so you can see the effect of the vertical sheath flow channels sandwiching that red dye into a thin stream and we actually have quite good control over its thickness and position In this next video unfortunately what you're seeing is not sperm cells I couldn't show any sperm cells or the board will have my guts but I can show you an old experiment that we did early on where we simulated the effect of putting small particles into a light beam and so what you're seeing here is the 10 micron particles coming in from the left and there is a laser which is invisible but it's coming down from the top centre of the screen and it's deflecting those microspheres one by one and that's how we do the switching So Injenda has enjoyed already a fair amount of success. We've raised over four and a half million dollars in funding. We've partnered with two of the world's largest artificial insemination companies We've also just recently signed a deal with the biggest dairy company in China. In addition to that we were the winner for the AgTech category in the Silicon Valley World Cup Tech Challenge We were named one of the five most innovative international startups by AgFundr and also named one of the most promising early stage companies by a tin 100 Finally any success that we have had or will have is very much the result of a team effort. These are our fearless leaders Brent Ogilvee, Jim Mervis and Gary Payson together they handle the business side of things Professor Keitha Simpson is the founding scientist and leader of the technology Last but not least, this is the technology team These are the people I see every day They're a joy to work with. They are a mix of physicists, biologists, engineers without their diverse range of talents None of us would be remotely possible. Thank you Thank you so much Peter. That was absolutely fascinating I think you'll all agree and what was mind blowing to me and I think we're going to hear more of this in a minute is how much one can do on such a tiny scale and I think what you're going to do is transform the dairy industry we hope Thank you so much. Now I have been remiss of not telling you what our social media strategy is for tonight So we're on Facebook and the Facebook tag is at UOACIE So that's at UOACIE So if you want to post anything follow anyone that lets the place to do it So our next speaker is passionate about tiny, tiny things. So Ankita Gengrata is a PhD candidate and a nanotechnologist at the Faculty of Science and she's really embraced how multidisciplinary research can be. So she reaches over physics, biology and chemistry to create the work that she does She's also really pioneering the use of basters and as she's put it here a tiny turkey baster to understand what happens inside our bodies and this will help us lead to the early detection of cancer and other disease So thank you Ankita. I'm going to try and use the mic and this and also demonstrate all of the stuff I have here for you so it will literally be juggling Alright so I am a PhD student at the Department of Physics but I'm actually an electronics engineer by training Currently my lab's in chemistry but I'm working on biological samples So when someone asks me what I do it can be quite a tricky answer but the common denominator here is nanotechnology. I usually say I'm a nanotechnologist and that I study the science of very small things My research is in the adaptation of nano-pipetting apparatus for nano-aspiration and we love as scientists using really fancy terms but for the fear of losing you to boredom I'm going to avoid using jargon So what I'm trying to do basically is make a tool make a technology using very very very small objects called pipets which look exactly like this turkey baster here only a million times smaller and I'm doing this to aspirate or suck up very tiny particles Now I'll get right down to the point When disease affects our body it changes the mechanical properties of some of the cells in our bodies So disease such as cancer, sickle cell disease in that area can make our cells stiffer or it can make it softer But there are parts of our bodies smaller than cells known as exosomes These are about 100 times smaller than cells and they're basically packets of proteins that are exchanged between cells Now we don't know much about their physical or mechanical properties let alone how they're affected by a disease So through my project we're trying to learn what these properties of these exosomes are and eventually we hope to be able to characterise and catalogue them on the basis of this And this is where my little turkey basters come in handy What I'm trying to do, the idea is to first try and locate these exosomes on a surface and apply pressure to try and set them up If they don't get sucked up, they're stiff but if they do, they're squishy So it's as simple as that And now that you understand most of the basic concepts of my project, I'm going to show you exactly what a week looks like doing research for me So Monday is usually really excited about going into work and doing science and I go in and I have a meeting with my supervisor I talk to him about what I did in the previous week and what I should be doing in the next week Often I fabricate my little nano-puppets So I'm going to try and show it to you I don't know if you can see it, often even I can't see it but there you go And I fabricate these out of quartz glass in a machine that fires a laser at the glass, it heats it up beyond its melting point and pulls it apart making these little capillaries and it takes about 5 minutes to make 10 or 15 of these So I get to do that but I also get to do some really cool things like design and 3D print objects for my lab and my supervisor will be happy to know I also do a lot of reading Reading is a very crucial part of research as one always has to keep abreast with the latest findings in their field So Tuesdays I usually spend over this table in my lab hunched over this table in my lab wearing these gloves Now I'd wear it for you but it's going to be fiddly with the mic So I won't, also they make my hands my palms really sweaty and stinky So I won't do that right now But yeah, so what I usually spend such a day doing is I spend it trying to set up my experiment I take these little pipettes and I try and align it I get caught up in wires and I fumble and I drop it and then I pick it up and I see it's broken and I restart and I get to use cool devices like a potentiostat and a piezo translator but sometimes I also resort to using basic tools like a hammer So I go home feeling exhausted and tired but I persevere I come back the next day and I write code and I programme and I try and collect data and if I'm able to collect data I try and analyse it and I hope things are working and if things indeed are working the next very crucial step is writing up your results So I write and I draw graphs and charts and I analyse and make sure that my results are repeatable and are consistent and at the end of the day when I'm done writing up and I'm ready to send it over to my supervisor I feel pretty pleased with myself but the next day when my report comes back with more red marks than white paper on the page a lot of emotions go through my head but mostly I feel sorry for my supervisor who has to read my terrible writing and I have to write at least four or five more times to get it perfectly right to publish the paper So that's what a week looks like for a researcher like me in the lab and while there are lots of ups and downs but don't quote me on this number but sorry, 95% of the times research and science doesn't work the way you want it to but the 5% of the times that it actually does it's totally worth it Thank you very much It was absolutely fascinating to get inside the day with the PhD researcher which I have just learnt so much in that last five minutes Our last speaker is coming up and she is passionate about glowing bacteria and how many of you have ever seen a glow worm? So what we're going to hear about is that bioluminescence that emits from these organisms and how a business has been created around using glowing bacteria to help people learn about science in a fun way I'm going to read who is a research assistant in the bioluminescence superbugs lab to talk to us Hello! Hold that a little bit further away Hopefully everyone can hear me, that's great, brilliant So as I don't actually have a name tag so hopefully remember the next few words that I say which is my name is Hannah and I am a postdoctoral researcher at the medical school So I work on nasty pathogens so those are nasty little bugs which make people sick So I'm going to show you some pictures they're not quite as gory as the bud spatter ones but there are some mice, hope you're a little bit, whatever So what you can see here on the screen on your left you've got some mice which are infected with bacteria which causes food poisoning but you know because that's what we do in our lab we've made the bacteria glow in the dark So those bright spots that you can see there are actually the bacteria that you can see from within the living animal What you can see on the right there because another thing that we do is we're looking to see if we can find new antibiotics So the bacteria only glow when they're alive So the ones which aren't glowing on that so the ones that you can't actually see they're ones which are being killed by whatever antibiotic is being produced on that plate So that's my day job I use things which glow in the dark which is pretty cool but unfortunately none of these things can actually come out of the lab which is a real shame because stuff that glows is really cool, right? We all like stuff that glows, shiny things So to help us explain these sorts of things to people in the public in a way which won't actually make them sick because that's really really bad publicity we don't want that to happen So we've chosen to find a naturally glowing bacteria from the ocean perfectly safe and then we can actually show that to people and do all sorts of cool things with them First I'll give you a little bit of science behind it so you can learn something while you're here because that's good So the bacteria produce an enzyme called a luciferase and this luciferase needs a few things so that it can glow So it needs a luciferin which is a substrate it needs oxygen, it needs energy and then it will glow and it also looks really cool So it looks something like this but pictures aren't actually that exciting are they? How about we actually look at what they look like right here? Can we turn the lights off please? More lights please Thank you! Still on? Yes, yes it is What we've got here is some glowing bacteria it doesn't look like it's glowing very much does it? That's because it needs oxygen but if we give it a bit of a shake suddenly it starts glowing again Another one there Glows! Pretty cool We've also got it on some plates here Nice, shiny Got one and then in case you're wondering what it is it's a glow bug and I'm not really much of an artist but I had to do another one because we had these plates so why not? I also made a face Okay, we can have the lights back on again and stop bugging the camera crew Okay, great So that's what it looks like, it's pretty cool We can take this out to the public people can look at it, they can get excited about it You can have kids actually touching it, playing with it So we've done some pretty cool things with it including getting involved in wearable science competitions So this is myself when I had much shorter hair and a couple of my colleagues wearing essentially petri dishes So those plates, all over our bodies That's what it looks like in pretty dim light This is what it looks like when we actually turn the lights off Yeah, kind of So it's pretty heavy, it's not very practical so I wouldn't really recommend wearing this but it looks pretty cool So there's a few other things that we've done with this because we can actually show this to people so why not do some exciting things with them So people who are actually artists have worked with these plates and drawn things like you can see on the top left-hand corner there So we have these temporary art exhibits where we'll get artists involved they can draw on these petri dishes and then we can have these displays because the plates will glow for about two days and then the bacteria get a bit tired they stop glowing and the light goes out So these temporary displays we've also had people who are illuminated so the bacteria can take photos of them, it looks kind of cool We've also done some 3D printing so what you can see in the bottom right there is some 3D printed squid which we've filled with this bacteria and so they glow, they look kind of cool and then we've also done obviously a lot of educational stuff so because it's so safe we can have kids playing with it so they can learn about bacteria realise it's not quite so scary and it actually looks pretty cool So we've done quite a lot of things this is not a complete list you'll notice that it stops in 2016 and we've already done stuff this year so a lot of different things a lot of experience that we've gained from it so we've learned quite a few things like we've learned that those glowing 3D printed squid actually leaked, which was not that great so we needed to actually cover them with a lot of glue so they didn't leak those large petri dishes which are quite heavy sticking them on the wall not actually the easiest thing to do but you live and you learn What we consistently got from this though was it's safe, it's cool people like it Why are we selling it? Why are we actually making some money out of this? So what we started off doing is we started getting the involvement of the artists who had been making these beautiful pictures and then saying can we actually sell artwork and things can we sell t-shirts and stuff which has got these things on so we've had this red bubble thing going for quite a while where we can sell pillows, t-shirts and what not but we can do better than that so recently, this year we've started up a company called Britons I think it's kind of catchy, I hope you agree and so what we're looking at doing now is actually selling selling the bacteria in these little kits so each of these little kits contains bacteria petri dishes, instructions information so educational stuff involved in them as well so the people who use this not only is it something kind of cool and a kind of unique gift but it's also hopefully teaching people Which is important, we're at a university, come on so that's what we're currently doing but we can do so much more with this so the applications here things that we want to do we can look at providing street lighting providing lighting for buildings tea lights we can look at seeing how safe it is and seeing if we can put it into food making glowing birthday cakes glowing makeup pretty much anything you can think of, we can make glow and that'll probably make it better thank you thank you Hannah, it was illuminating wouldn't you agree I was absolutely I was absolutely enraptured by that because there's something so wonderful about the combination of science and art and creativity and then being able to use that as a tool to educate more young minds about science so from the dark we now move into the light and we've got Daniel Zoo who's going to talk to us about UV and obviously the issue for us in New Zealand is how strong it is and the impact of that on our skin and our health so Daniel is passionate about tech and growth and we know this because he's been part of the centre for innovation and entrepreneurship over the last few years as a participant in our student entrepreneurship programme which is called Velocity so he has devised a new business which is called UV Lens and it uses sensors and algorithms and all together on an app to enable people to be warned about what's happening in the sky and how it will impact them Thanks Wendy Hi everyone so my name is Daniel for the last couple of years I've been working on my PhD in tech engineering but at the same time I've been trying to grow a start-up company so I thought today I'll share a little bit about the insights of trying to manage both from an academic perspective and also trying to be commercial in our focus so when most people think about academia research we think about people in lab coats or doing science experiments but actually it's more like this we do spend a lot of time sleeping catching up on sleep and part of it is we get really passionate about what we're doing working really long hours trying to solve problems so in a way it's very similar to working in a start-up my PhD was working on a technology a wearable sensor technology was used to measure your human body motion for athletes we're training athletes to be more efficient we're using it for healthcare rehabilitation I want to talk a little bit about the intellectual property perspective of the university and part of it is because we have a very we have a very different approach in Auckland and one that's very rare in the world and essentially it means that students own the IP and it means that if you develop some technology as a student and your PhD you own that intellectual property and from there you have a couple of options you could choose to commercialise that yourself or you could go through the university commercialisation agent uni services was one of the things that I did with the patterns that we did we licensed it to a wearable company called StretchSense they've got about 50 employees now doing really well so in your spare time when you're working on your research and you're not sleeping or lifting weights or so there's a lot of time for exploratory side projects and that's kind of how our business got started me and my co-founder who's here tonight we entered into a technology competition run by Microsoft it's the world's largest student-led technology competition developing solutions aiming at big global problems and the one about sun safety about people getting skin cancer was the one that we wanted to tackle so we developed this wearable wristband that captured how much ultraviolet you're getting throughout the day and gives you notifications on your phone when you've had too much sun or in cases when you haven't had enough sun we tell you to go out and get a bit more vitamin D so we started off doing that the app has now got a user base of over 70,000 users we were featured on the New York Times Apple selected us as one of the top apps featured on the front store of 87 different countries we've now moved away from wearable technology and actually used a network of sensors here's main putting one up it's got a whole bunch of weather stations sensors on it from rain, humidity, temperature it's got a solar panel on it so we use a network of these sensors and also other IoT sensors to form a really good database of what the UV is like throughout the world along the way we've had to really prototype really quickly so here's a couple of midnight drawings we did on the whiteboard the next day it was really important for us before we built anything that we would go out and test the market and this is one of the things I think research could do a lot more is testing out whether or not there is a commercial proposition out there so I quickly painted the whiteboard drawing onto Microsoft Paint I phoned up a whole bunch of kindergarten or preschools which we thought were our first target market and we were doing interviews the next week so we were out there driving all around Auckland talking to teachers trying to figure out what is it that they like how would they use something like this how much would they pay for something like this we had all of that data before we even wrote a single line of code we found a commercial partner a sunscreen company Banana Boat sponsored the first 100 of these kits to go out into preschools we then went on to secondary schools in the next year we've put on 50 of these up around the country one of the really cool things was going back to my old high school and I'm a proud mags boy so the first sensor number one was at Mt Abergrammar Ming who installed a whole bunch of these is also our videographer and he's our drone pilot who captures all of the videos for our media so along the way there was a lot of technical challenges that we had to solve and one of the things we realised was a real scaling issue and this was, we were at the day right this was 2014 I think we were there in the lab ourselves so Ming wrote all of the software I designed the PCBs and we were assembling these like murder of the night and this is one of the things we realised that we could not do what we're doing in export to the rest of the world there was just no way that we could scale what we're doing and sell it overseas and it was one of the things that really picked our thought around what is the kind of business that we want to build with our capabilities and we started looking more into software and we started looking more about how can we build something that we could ship global from day one that we could push a button and someone on the other side of the world can use so last year we created an image recognition chat bot essentially it's a plug-in on messenger, Facebook messenger you take a photo of anything you like like that beer sir you're drinking and the bot could figure out what exactly is in your photo we quickly hacked together a prototype we had over 10,000 people come on board and use this it was featured on the magazine Wired it was really a thought experiment for us we were trying to figure out what can we do with very little money in a very short amount of time we're now currently working on a couple of chat bot ideas and AI so come talk to me afterwards if you're interested in this area over my time being really quite closely with the university I was quite fortunate to be given a chance to go over to Stanford University to do more about entrepreneurship and I think if you imagine what this is it's essentially start-up weekend and an MBA and you squish that down together in a month and then you have this course so I spent a month over there working on a couple of ideas developing this chat bot but also getting a taste of what it's like in Silicon Valley when people are living and breathing start-ups every day and it's a great opportunity to share some of the thoughts I learnt so the first thing was that people over there really understand this idea of scale and it's not they're not trying to look for problems that only a few people have they're trying to do true global problems and the night that I came back to Auckland I was actually at a software networking event and a couple of people were pitching for money and one of the things that really struck out for me was in their business plans that were having revenue projections and a couple of million dollars in the first or second year or so and I thought yeah that's cool but this was something that the guys in the US just don't even touch when we were brainstorming ideas over in the US we were looking at things that we weren't going to touch anything that was the rule under 100 million and that was the kind of scale that people over there think so really I want us to think more about what can we do, what are some of the bigger problems that we can solve and what we can do is is a really good place where we can leverage some of this technology like nanotechnology or sperm counting, like sorting this is stuff that has big potential so think about scale the second thing is really about how to moving really really quickly and we thought we were doing this already we were making prototypes before we were building any lines of code we were getting upfront payments from customers before we even sold it to them but really over there was a different story one example was a design thinking class we did where literally in the space of four hours we would build prototypes out of cardboard and polystyrene that kind of stuff and then we're out in Walmart talking to customers doing interviews, getting price analysis data coming back and it was that kind of four hour turnaround that we're trying to get feedback and I think that's something that academia or research could do a lot more off I think traditionally we've been holding too long on projects, we're almost not failing fast enough so in a way we want to move more aggression like they're doing in the US so I want to leave with this idea of trying to summarize what I've seen in both academia and working in the business sense is that in science in engineering, well in science we're often looking for things that are universal truths we're looking for things that are like if you look at a landscape it's the tallest peak out there it's the thing that is absolutely true it's the perfect data we're trying to chase after but it's really slow to get there whereas in business we're often looking for what we call temporal truths or things that are like a small peak that we currently have that we can leverage and really use that to build momentum so we don't necessarily need to find the absolute, the best thing right now we just need to get something going where we can launch and really get some quick feedback so that's something to think about I think having gone through a lot of this stuff is in hearing other people talking hearing other people talking getting some feedback inspired me to come back and share some of my learnings two takeaways from today one is currently there's a University of Auckland Inventus fund there's a $20 million fund designed to fund support projects around the university there's going to be a new committee there's going to be a student-led committee that looks at student projects, student ideas so if anyone has got an idea that they think have grown into a business please come talk to us I've been fortunate enough to have been offered to cheer the meetings the committee is going to be consistent with a whole bunch of students, PhD students so you're in a really safe environment to come picture ideas two is if you're looking if you're working on chatbots or AI or anything with machine learning, natural language processing come talk to me we're interested in doing that in our business so lots of career opportunities thanks what an absolutely rousing call to arms that was which is great that you are our last speaker because I think what you'll see from Daniel's journey is it's been a journey that's emerged and changed and evolved and also done that at pace and I really agree with what Daniel's saying about the new student committee for the the Uni Services Inventus fund and that will be a safe environment you've got ideas and you want to see if they can go to the next level but before you get even there so I've got two ads to say and then we'll get on to our panel first of all if you do have an idea and you're thinking about could this be something could I take it somewhere is that velocity is running their innovation challenge right now so if you have an idea that you can articulate in under 1000 words which I think you'll be able to you'll then be judged and you could win a prize of $1000 so the entries close next week so you need to really move with that and that's what we're interested in and secondly the centre for innovation and entrepreneurship really runs a masters of commercialisation and entrepreneurship degree this program is a part time course it's 18 months and what it does is it gives you the tools and the frameworks to commercialise your science and your research but as well as that you get to meet a lot of practitioners so every week we have talks from people community people who have set up businesses and professional services firms so that you're able to link the leading edge academic theory with what really happens out there and the capstone project is a chance for you to deal with some very tough IP and to see what you can do to bring it to life and to commercialise it so if you are interested in that come and see me or my team or visit our website because we have an information session for that next Tuesday