 Well good evening everybody and welcome to this fantastic celebration I think of what is showcases the best of ANU. My name is Margaret Harding and I'm the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation and I'll be your emcee this evening. But to begin I'd like to hand over to the Vice-Chancellor Professor Brian Schmidt to do the welcome to country and make some opening remarks. Thank you very much Margaret. I would like to acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet this evening. Pay our respects to the elders past, present and emerging here on our campus. It's a great privilege to be able to use their land for such an inspirational event. So welcome attendees and finalists and this is one of the, sorry, alright Vice-Chancellor used to teach and know not to do that. Anyway this is one of the most exciting events from my perspective, the second ANU Grand Challenge, Final Pitch Night. And it's exciting because I think it embodies what we want to be as the National University. We want to take the amazing breadth of talent here at ANU and let you figure out how you want to change the world and the university supporting those activities. So this is a real chance to let ideas flourish, which is right at the core of what we want to do. And my hope is that out of these things big advancements will come. And these big advancements are always going to be gone from the bottom up, not from the top down. And so that's why we really are putting our stocks in you, the ANU community to come up and self-organize in this. So the ANU Grand Challenges program, which Margaret Harding has been instrumental in launching and creating is really here to amplify and acknowledge some of the incredible work happening across campus. And it is the second of course, last year we had our first group and we've learned a bit and we'll continue to learn as we go. Last year's winning team, your health in your hands has gotten up and going and I'm looking forward to amazing things coming out of them over the next five years. So this year we had 14 Grand Challenge applications and tonight you will see four of those battle it out for our 2018 title with a quite a considerable paycheck at the end, even by university standards. And I'm very excited to myself see what the four teams have come up with. I have of course seen the initial pitch videos myself. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Margaret who is obviously I'm seeing, but this is I think acknowledged her last Grand Challenge event as she will be finishing up here in the next week or so. And I want to thank her publicly for all that she has done in this space and she hates to be acknowledged publicly. So I think we should just give her a little hand. And without further ado Margaret, I'll hand over to you and don't kick me on the way. So thank you. It is fabulous to be one of the the second last actually formal event I'll do as DVCR to actually host and celebrate this event here. I'm delighted to be here. This evening as you know we have four teams where the judges have had a very tough challenge to get this day to this stage. But to remind you this scheme here is quite different from what we use to do in the university. It is an investment scheme. And you as the audience this evening will get to participate, but we are looking for you know large-scale ambitious programs that bring together the disciplines across this university that require long-term visionary thinking that will bring new thinking and innovation in methodological approaches to solve problems that really ANU is positioned to make a really national international impact in here. We've got a phenomenal celebration as I said but a showcase of research this evening with the four teams who are listed there this evening. The pitch night here is very simple but there are a few rules that you need to be aware of. There's a huge stop clock over there and it will be used. 15 minutes presentation and the teams will be given a alert at 14 minutes and then I will stand up and if I begin agitating and moving closer to the team it will mean really you need to wrap up and we will then open to the audience to have some questions and answers before rolling to the next team. So those are the rules. Next slide. Can I please publicly acknowledge and thank the judges for this final stage of the process and stage three they are seated in the front row and very warmly thank the expertise both of our ANU experts but also of our alumni partners and collaborators and thank them warmly for their ongoing contribution expertise to the process to date and they are sitting in the front row one at least is said to me that they're open to brides and whatever okay and I'll leave you to work out you know who that might be on here but thank you to all of our judges this evening. So if I could invite the first team who are presenting this evening our humanising machine intelligence to come to the the front of the auditorium. All right so let the show begin. So my name's Sathliza I'm really excited to be here tonight to introduce our project on humanising machine intelligence to you but I'm afraid I have to start with some bad news about human intelligence and that is that we really suck at making decisions we're really bad at it this comes down to a lot of different sources one of them is that we're terrible at dealing with uncertainty we're really bad at reasoning about with them and about probability and we make bad statistical inferences all the time one of them is base rate neglect that's why there's a picture of a librarian up here you heard the one about the librarian and the doctor we're being kept to a clock so I won't tell you the joke but it's not all about cognitive defects it's also moral defects we're biased in various ways and often now there's a lot of talk about implicit bias often we are consciously biased we don't necessarily think it's wrong but we are in fact acting out of bias but often there is also unconscious bias someone just seems like a good bloke someone you could get along with so you think well I'll hire that person usually that's going to be out of some reason that's similar to you in some respect and we systematically overestimate our abilities this is something that I've been guilty of a few times you are coming home after a long flight you reckon you can do the drive and you start out like this and you're lucky if you don't end up like this so this is where machine intelligence comes in right and so when we say machine intelligence we're referring to machine learning driven data analytics on the one hand and autonomous systems on the other the kind of things you find in self-driving vehicles companion robots and this holds out this wonderful promise of being able to improve on human decision making it could help us reason efficiently under uncertainty because you know AI is basically applied probability theory it could enable us to eliminate bias because why should a computer care about how you look or where you come from and it could even drive us home when we're sleepy but the reality is not all that great there have been some fantastic stories about the use of AI in medical diagnostics but if you've heard about stories recently in in society they've tended to be pretty bad ones so Cambridge Analytica for example used machine learning to manipulate voters into incredibly consequential elections we've got the use of facial recognition systems this picture is from China but it's also happening in Australia and in the UK and it poses great threats to civil rights just a few days ago on September 4th California got rid of the cash bail system now cash bail is a really regressive policy it penalizes people who are worse off the algorithms that they're going to be using to make risk assessments instead there's a lot of worry about those entrenching further discrimination as well and obviously in Australia we have had our own RoboDep fiasco this is fairly low level machine learning but it was not low level consequences and again for the most vulnerable as far as autonomous systems go the news is also not that great so there's lethal autonomous weapons that have caused a great deal of concern there was a decision in the European Parliament just the other day against them and then also we had our first fatal crash involving a self-driving vehicle at the start of the year so how do we solve this problem how do we realize the promise of machine intelligence to improve on human decision-making without sort of falling into these pitfalls now a big part of the story is definitely regulation and governance and that clearly is something that needs to be looked at and in fact the 3a Institute and you's doing a great job of progressing on that but we think it's not enough to only retrofit ethics and machine intelligence we think it's also necessary to have machines make decisions that are morally right by design so that's the idea behind the project to humanize machine intelligence design ethical machine intelligence systems it's our lovely logo and it's really important to be clear about what the stakes are here because there's no putting the genie back in the bottle machine intelligence systems are here they're being used the alternative to a world with ethical machine intelligence isn't a world without machine intelligence it's a world with unethical machine intelligence which could have potentially catastrophic consequences so this is not just a grand challenge this is a necessity but what is the research that we need to do in order to realize this goal well we sort of conceived of it and this has been a project that's really as the Vice Chancellor said it's really bubbled up from the different disciplines all working together it's something that we've worked out in collaboration with one another and we've got three phases discovery foundations and design the discovery phase is about identifying what the risks and opportunities are that are associated with the adoption of machine intelligence systems this is something that you've got to have the social sciences for so that's a big part of our project the foundations phase is about asking whether machine morality is possible what it would take to realize it this is about looking at the fundamental nature of morality and rationality and for that you've got to have philosophers but our goal with this project is not just to understand the world our goal is to change it and for that we need to design ethical machine intelligence systems and for that we need computer scientists including Bob Williams and he'll take over now thank you sir so we have three parts of our research agenda the first is discovery it's to work out what we should focus our foundations and our design parts of our research on one example is how can machine intelligence disrupt democracy's Seth's already indicated that that has happened what is the specific question algorithms shape the way we see the world they shape the way others see us so understanding and controlling those algorithms better is central to the control of the democratic process so the question is how can you do that using refined machine intelligence systems like any new technology machine intelligence will change social relationships it's happened in the past it will happen again one example so if you use machine intelligence to do automated decision making about who gets welfare benefits for example then that involves putting people into categories which categories what are the consequences of such categorical choice you can't just look at it from the perspective of the algorithm you have to also look at it from the perspective of society or more to the point to the people that are being put into those boxes we need to make such machine intelligence more sensitive to those concerns like other new technologies the steam engine for example machine intelligence will change economies from high finance to your household budget how will it affect market interactions and how does machine intelligence impinge upon the nature of work there's many ethical and fairness concerns to be dealt with there these are all in the realm of our discovery theme within foundations the problems big and it's gnarly it's illustrated here all right how do we implement machine morality given the uncertainty complexity and disagreement that you always find in moral problems they're a big tangled mess and they look different depending upon where you stand we're not pretending that's going to go away we have to grapple with that complexity and we have to be able to embed it into the machine intelligence systems and the way you have to do that is machine intelligence systems work on mathematics that's the way they're built therefore you need to turn this moral mess into equations that's part of our research agenda specifically we're looking at technically what it's called is a sequential moral decision theory not just making decisions once but making them in sequence existing machine intelligence systems do this already but without ethics without morality that's something that we have to do philosophy has to catch up and then finally we have to think about opening the black box right rather than thinking of machine intelligence as this inscrutable algorithm that somehow affects our lives we need to understand what it's doing in order to be able to do that you need to be able to have the machine intelligence systems make their values explicit how can you represent the ethical choices that a machine intelligence system is making and finally as Seth says we wish to change the world and that means going through to the design stage and so we will do this with our partners who you'll hear about shortly it's a fast-moving area and so we don't want to lock ourselves down immediately to particular case studies but in two broad areas that we'll be looking at in the area of autonomous systems get thinking of all of the problems arriving with self-driving vehicles and in particular think of the complicated interface between what the machine intelligence system does and what the human does and then put an overlay of ethics on that it's a complicated problem we need research to solve it and then in machine learning decision support algorithms making decisions about people we need to build algorithms for risk assessment with an explicit representation of the values and the morality and it's not just about fairer outcomes it's about building systems that have a process that you can trust and believe in so to tell you who is going to do that let me pass over to my colleague Tony thank you Bob and hello everyone so who are we we're scholars from across ANU and we've been hand-picked by set our project leader we each bring disciplinary expertise necessary to address the problem of how to design machine intelligence so it actually represents our best selves and each member of the team has a standout track record we have three ANU future fellows we have philosophers who regularly publish in the world's most prestigious journals and we have computer scientists who are winning awards for their collaboration with industry as well as for their fundamental research crucially we have leadership with strength and depth we've managed projects and indeed departments that have multi-million dollar budgets so the individual researchers are great that doesn't sound very modest does it I'm sorry but I think that it is we do have wonderful individual researchers but importantly we're more than the sum of our parts it's easy to draw nice pictures with neat arrows that go between disciplines but here it really does mean something yes we come from very different parts of the campus but because we share a commitment to humanizing machine intelligence and because we share a second language or indeed for many on the team a third language and that language is decision theory we've been able to construct a project together that no one of us and certainly no one single discipline group could be able to carry out alone each stage of the research discovery foundation design it requires input from all three disciplines and will benefit from the expertise of all of the team members so this is fundamentally and necessarily a collaborative project and we're the team that can do it now in partnerships as Bob mentioned now humanizing machine intelligence is a global grand challenge and we've already identified and made plans to collaborate with partners around the world and I'll say something about a few of those within academia our nearest and dearest partner will of course be our own 3a Institute and members of our group have had conversations with the superb leader of 3a here professor Genevieve Bell about how our project can actually complement of the important work that's being being done there and we're very grateful to have Genevieve Bell on our advisory board we'll also work closely with the Cambridge Center for the future of intelligence and anticipation of that collaborative work I signed a memorandum of understanding with the Cambridge Center for the future of intelligence about two weeks ago almost two weeks ago on behalf of the ANU and we've had very positive exchanges with institutes at New York University at Harvard and MIT at Johns Hopkins University among other places within civil society we've been talking with the Templeton World Charity Foundation about a call for applications that we think is perfect for our project and one of our team members has just been awarded a large grant from the Future of Life Institute within Enterprise I've been working on a project about building trust in machine intelligence that's been funded by Google alongside the head of content in AI for Google Asia Pacific one of Google DeepMinds co-founders now its chief scientist was supervised for his PhD by a member of our team and he's single he signaled DeepMinds interest in how our project develops and we have strong links with Element AI which is Canada's version of DeepMinds in government we've already had interest from DFAT and Data 61 will of course also be a close partner as we move forward but an important question remains what do you actually get if you back us what will our big outcomes be at its heart this project is about creating the basic research that will shape the next generation of machine intelligent systems over the seven years of the project we will generate exciting new knowledge in our core discipline areas the new knowledge without which humanizing machine intelligence would simply be impossible we'll design deployment ready ethical machine intelligence algorithms and a methodology for developing others for new use cases and last but not least will build a self-sustaining HMI center which will provide much needed regional and international leadership and now I'll pass over to Seth to wrap up I have a last word and now that we've seen it as a hard time limit I'll be quick so while we've been designing this project I've had this mantra in my mind do what only you can do I've been thinking about what it is that the ANU really is the place to go for where government or industry look for leadership from us we think that has to do with the basic research that we do the fundamental new knowledge that we create and so then where's the question where's the problem where you really need this new knowledge where you have to have a long-term vision right we have to do this kind of fundamental research humanizing machine intelligence is exactly that problem so what's the team that you need we need a team with empirical expertise theoretical expertise applied expertise that's what we've got the engine is running the wheels are spinning Margaret we are ready to go so thank you for a fabulous start and scene setting for the evening we have two roving mics and we have about eight minutes now to actually have Q&A from the audience and so please could you raise your hand just tell us who you are and where you're from and please ask the the team questions I'm Mike Smithson in psychology so naturally my question is going to be well where is psychology in this and in particular where is the expertise for cognitive computational modeling which would seem to be essential for generating the kinds of algorithms translations of ethical systems into equations and the like that you would need in order to actually make this happen reach out just forward with your left hand with your left hand it's that guy yeah so Colin is a philosopher of psychology he's last few publications have been in psychology journals he's fantastic on the computational theory of mind and he's published work on modeling b-consciousness using neural neural networks he's our go-to guy for that kind of thing and he's absolutely on top of it of course as we build the project up we're going to look to expand in various ways hiring ECRs in areas where we need to expand but yeah Colin's our go-to guy for that hi my question is for Seth I'm I'm a physicist given your opening statement that we humans we are bad at making good decisions and we are corrupt morally in so many ways why would you want to humanize machine no this is a good point this is a good point the point is though the thing that Tony said about our best selves right you want to capture our best selves and obviously this is that these are the ways in which we fall short but of course we also aspire to be so much better in all of these respects and all of the moral ideals that you would want to input into these systems are they're ultimately human as well so our flaws as well as our successes are both part of us we want to capture the successes in the humanizing side definitely yeah my name is Jochen Trumf I'm from engineering so I was missing a statement about data in all of this so algorithms are limited by the data that can that they can operate on and other than being bad at making decisions humans are also not very good at sharing data or at least sharing useful data and so the question I would have I would imagine that be situations where the best solution is actually to not allow a machine intelligence algorithm at all so for example because there are fundamental restrictions in terms of the data that you can get so do you have any comments on that I think actually you can do that yep I'm sure so of course machine intelligence does rely upon data and of course you don't want to always use a machine to do everything we did not assert that we don't believe that some of the questions that we'll be looking at will be actually drilling directly into what your question is about what are the characteristics when is it sensible to use a machine to make certain decisions can you characterize how well they can make the decisions what is it about the sources of data that affect those decisions when you bring the ethics into it it gets a lot more gnarly because you have the phenomenon that if you want to train a machine based on data which is effectively the historical record then you might not be happy about the moral stance that was taken making the decisions which that data records nevertheless there is value in attempting to do that so we've got to try and unpick all of those questions as part of our research program thank you up the back oh quick one now Ron pays chemistry so this project will be designed and run by intellectuals academics you know full disclosure I think I'm one of those and what we have learned from I think from from historical experience is that when experts intellectuals seek to design optimal models for organization of society morality and things like that it leads to catastrophic tyranny so how do you avoid that temptation even with the best will in the world it's a great question I think it's a a really big concern on the sort of the regulation the governance side of AI how these systems are going to be used our focus is on a design a set of design problems and like Bob said when we go into the discovery phase we're identifying the design problems where we can make where we can make progress that's going to definitely mean that there are some areas where you don't want to be going into and that's absolutely fine nonetheless there are still going to be these systems that definitely going to be around there already here so you have a choice between whether you have ones that are more ethical or less ethical Tony you talked a little bit about the working with some of the big companies in this and that is one way of course to bring some reality to the rather abstract things that we tend to do at the university but I've the the relationships as described sounded a little ethereal maybe you could give us a sense of the reality of how we might work with them in detail and share information data their platforms etc I'll be here so you can hear me I actually think that there's an answer to that that responds to the previous person who asked a question as well that it's not just going to be academics who are working on this that it's important at every stage in the process and I think we went through the three stages the discovery the foundation the design we're going to be working for partners so with partners so I'll be leading the discovery phase I'll be working with partners from industry as well as from government for example and other academic bodies there we're actually identifying what are the risks and opportunities of using machine intelligence so we need to start with that in the discovery stage and there we'll be working with partners in industry to see what are the problems that they actually want to solve what are in civil society what do people see to be the dangers what are the perceived risks and we'll bring that actually in from the discovery stage and move on to the foundation stage so these partners are going to be working with us at every one of these three stages any final questions if not please join with me in thanking a fantastic first combination we'll just take a short moment while we hand over and mic up the next team for those of you who've arrived late on the left hand side of the room there are plenty of seats on the other side of the auditorium if you'd like to make your way over okay I'm pleased to welcome to the stage the second team to present this evening on restoring climate with enhanced earth systems thanks very much first of all I would like to thank you all for making such a celebration to celebrate my birthday that's really nice of you thank you very much and now let's get serious this drought has really hit our family hard climate change is making the droughts more severe so what we see here illustrates is climate change is posing a major risk as we all know to agriculture and food security and current industrial agriculture actually also releases emissions on a scale that helps to intensify climate change the outcome of this is a vicious circle of intensifying droughts and other climate extremes and you know droughts and flooding especially so importantly this cycle can be broken and we can break it through regenerative agricultural practices so the next slide shows you how something like this can work there's 10 years in between these two slides and this is on the Lusplato in China which is near Mongolia it's about one third of the size of Mongolia and there's two and a half million people in this area that were scraping by on a subsistence level on soils that were entirely degraded by millennia of unsustainable grazing and use and the soils were washing away into the Yellow River which actually gets his name from that then they started a project they started to improve the land they started to terrace the land with the hands of millions of people and they planted trees and crops and these trees and crops they covered 5% of the area of the Lusplato and the land there started to improve very rapidly and the trees helped and the terracing helped to retain water and the water retention then helped to grow good crops and we should say that what you see on the left is entirely due to what humans have done this used to be a very fertile environment before the degradation started so 10 years later then these two and a half million people are well fed and they have actually got a tendency of the land which is one of the carrots for them to get into this scheme and they're even growing high value crops that they are selling so in this way regenerative approaches help with water retention productivity increase and resilience of the land or in the agriculture to droughts and flooding but more importantly when applied scientifically they can also draw down on a permanent basis very large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere and that attacks the root cause of climate change so this is critical because zero emissions is nice but it's just not enough we need to go there soon as possible no question but in addition to zero emissions to avoid dangerous climate conditions we must draw down about 200 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere this is so much that it requires us to enhance the operation of earth systems natural earth systems and regenerative agricultural practices are an essential component in this so how does re-greening a landscape draw down carbon well i'm showing here three but it is actually a metaphor for the entire global carbon cycle and in that tree we can see here or in the carbon cycle we see enormous fluxes of carbon in going in and coming out and these fluxes are almost balanced but they are also 10 times larger than our emissions per year so these fluxes per year if we can start to play with those by locking in more draw down and constraining the release then we can start to make a net influence that net influence typically goes into the soil and that's typically what you see in these regenerative practices now Australia has got about 100 million hectares available and suitable for this sort of application and most of it currently has limited productivity and very impoverished soils for carbon and nutrients and all of this agricultural land is colored here and the intensity of the color is indicating harsher conditions now our projects will seize the opportunity that we see illustrated here to improve practices on a major component of this land we will never cover everything because there will always be people that don't want to join but it will be in a close partnership with the Australian farming and forest management community we estimate that Australia alone if we go that way in re-green Australia then we can capture up to 10 percent of the global requirement of carbon capture so it's a big game but for doing this we must develop precision infrastructure and management tools and for that I hand over to Justin thanks very much Elko so what you saw in the Loas Prato was brute force that was people taking their lives into their own hands what we'd like to do in Australia is apply scientific approach at large scale and that requires us to focus on a single pixel and each of those single pixels has a step one which is land improvement and reversing the degradation the terracing may not be as extensive as you saw in the Loas Prato we don't have those mountains but we do have soils that need to be broken and ripped apart so that water can infiltrate the other thing is to capture the water and recreate catchments with dams so that we have the water held into the into the landscape then renewable energy with pump hydro and irrigation can put nutrients into the trees and grasses and to get them through that establishment phase so with this land improvement we can then move on to the management stage and management interlocks four essential ingredients in a multi-layered approach so we need to integrate cropping pasture and trees into an agro ecosystem for capture carbon capture and agronomic output we'll work on the below ground the microbial system to fix nitrogen and gather phosphate and this will increase the drawdown into the land now to store that permanently we need to char the biomass that will grow on our farms and and put that into the soil which improves nutrient and water holding capacity and the fourth key ingredient is a new target for our mining industry that is rock dust mineral fertilization this is bulk slow release fertilizer that can add nutrients to accelerate this system so what does it look like in practice this is digital agriculture at scale we've developed uh experimental systems over the past four years in partnership with the Finner School and the National Arboretum this is a gigavision camera that allows us to see all the trees and the forest blocks develop uh in response to seasonal changes we also fly drones over the system so we can look at size shaping color and plant response to the climate and to the unique soil types these data rich layers with ANU tech launcher students have developed visualization systems so that we can see this high dimensional data in in real time and virtually so we can look at the response of the trees and the climate there's going to be soil temperature and layer information and the next stage of this project is to generate these models on each of those pixels that that Elko showed you across the 100 million hectares of cropping pasture and forest systems we'll also be partnering with biocarbon engineering a new disruptive drone company that will take these plans and fly their drones to drop the right seeds in the right environments and we have precision genetic technologies to identify what is the right seed for the right environment so as we take this to the farmers we'll be able to develop models the second phase for the tech launcher students is develop models that are personalized for farmers and I now hand over to Aurora thanks so a big question is how are we going to facilitate implementation of these enhanced earth systems on a scale that can actually make some sort of global impact and one of the answers to that is through modeling and we have three types of modeling there's the biophysical social and economic so for example the experimental modeling Justin just showed you an example of that so there would be a video or a visualization and we can make that precise to each farmer's piece of land and then we can tell someone here's what your land will look like here's how this will affect your pocketbook so we'll use these three types of modeling in an integrated way in order to inform farmers investors and policy makers but more than that we can also use modeling in order to support people follow on so when farmers take up these this regenerative practice we can use use modeling to tell them this is what you should do next year and into the future so they feel supported in the process another key to facilitating adaptation is to demonstrate to the community that economic benefits and environmental benefits are not at odds with each other but they are actually mutually reinforcing and that's not something that is always intuitive so we see here four different types of agricultural practices in Australia and you see that the regenerative agriculture is in that top corner and so we see profits on the top cost-intensive practices on the bottom carbon emitting practices on the left and carbon drawdown practices on the right and the yellow arrow demonstrates that really all three of those quadrants have motivations for moving towards regenerative agriculture because remember when we improve the soil we get better growth and growth means profits and it also means drawdown another thing to remember with this modeling is that when we improve the soil it also improves resilience so even that top quadrant that's making profit but is emitting carbon they have the they have the motivation to adopt regenerative practices as well another benefit of taking this sort of approach is that the dominant driver of change here is really from the bottom up and we don't have to wait for a top-down initiative so as you saw in that very first video from the farmer talking about the drought farmers understand that extreme weather conditions are caused by climate change and those farmers want to be able to do something just like everyone we all want to be able to do something personally and individually and so what we're providing then is a pathway here's what you can do here's how it'll change your land here's how it'll change your economics of your farm and furthermore you're actually going to be doing something that's going to have long-lasting effects and improving climate security and that sort of message offers empowerment and also reassurance that gives the bottom up approach real power and I'll now hand back to Elko to close right thank you very much Aurora so just to summarize then I've got the entire project pathway here so essentially we start off with a project where it uses a lot of what's currently being considered as waste we're looking at mining waste we're looking at farm waste and we're looking at wasted land and it then optimizes the use of those resources in a scientific manner and rolls out the application in partnership with the landholders and business it creates increased farm productivity and resilience to climate extremes and eventually it reduces operational costs because it starts to pay for itself it becomes a self-sustaining cycle and the final outcomes that we get from this are increased food security improved biodiversity and conservation improved water retention and availability and carbon drawdown that helps to attack actually you know those are all the the symptoms of climate change that we are tackling but carbon drawdown actually attacks the root cause of that climate problem now in the next slide we have the composition of our project we have three spheres of principal activity which are very strongly interlinked and all the time interacting the various staff members are listed around there and we have our agreed partners listed around here and I must to my shame admit that I've forgotten to put the CSIRO there and Utah's I hope there's nobody from there here but they should be on there as well and then at the bottom we have the advisory board where professors Hansen and Beerling are international heavyweights in the science, academic sector and Damien Dwyer and Helen Degeling are heavyweights in the resource sector and then we have Michael Peale he is a director in Commonwealth going and he's actually here in the audience with us we're very happy to have you thank you so thank you again I'm sure you agree another cracking presentation you are going to make the judges work hard but over to the audience please hi I'm Sophie I'm a farmer from Yass I'm wondering about goats and stocking so goats and stocking so there's there's a problem with goats that they will eat everything the problem is that we have we have to have some time to get the growth larger than the grazers and before we can actually let the grazers go and eat it all up but once it is established there actually is a role for managed pastoring so if you work with larger herds and the larger herds can be managed in pastoring together and we will get the sort of you know the soil trampoline the urination the defecation on the soil which brings nutrients into the soil it's basically moving around in a controlled manner larger herds rather than dispersing occasional animals you know two per hectare or something like that and that actually works an awful lot better it's been proven to work for example even in places like South Africa Ethiopia and so on that these in very arid environments help to bring vegetation back and to keep and maintain good grazing land without actually having to burn it and so it's definitely something that fits into a picture like this as well Douglas Roarsen director of research services so how are you going to work with individual farmers and throughout the program because this looks like a project that's crying out for co-production methodologies absolutely so some people in the audience might be familiar with the diffusion of innovation or social adoption curve which would tell us that there are going to be innovators who want to start doing this right away and then there will be early adopters who maybe we can influence through that group of innovators so we network out through that group and then there'll be a more difficult group of the early majority and so a few principles I guess that work in our favor there are that we see that people want to adopt things when they can see the effects and that that is definitely the case here and they also want to adopt an innovation when it's something that is close to who they are and I think that both of those are the case for farmers so we'll be using that modeling taking those to to farm shows and another idea we have is making sure that we work with farmers in an area so that a single farmer doesn't feel like an outcast for taking up the adoption but that we're talking to people who land all borders each other so they can make the decision together because we we hear that there's sometimes a concern that if I adopt this it might be causing harm to you and so I don't want to do anything different because I don't want to be seen as this social pariah so I don't know if that answers a bit what you were talking about. Jeff Baker from CSRO across the road I'm a retired fellow but it's not not what you the question is not what you might expect it's more to do with the Australian farmers are grouped under many many industries and they're all represented by RDCs Research Development Corporation so there's wool there's cotton there's grains there's meat and and so on but there's no mention of those in your presentation how are you going to bring them into it and also find your way for making recommendations that fit with all the recommendations that the farmers are receiving from all those other bodies? I can try to answer that one so we currently work and are funded by the Grains Research Development Council and they've helped us set up on the New Campus Phenomics Climate Facility where we can use the same technologies that I showed outdoors indoors to try to manipulate and advance new varieties so we have an in with the GRDC they also already operate these millennium national variety trials and we've been talking with them about how to install the infrastructure to get the the digital farm up off the ground the the other agency that coordinates with the RDCs is the NCRIS Plant Phenomics Facility that I used to be part of and so we've started these conversations to roll out the precision agriculture and our contribution is to not neglect the below ground contribution to really make it a regenerative precision agriculture. It's a long conversation with the RDCs that that they're all everyone's kind of hovering around at the table now trying to integrate the new technology and we're hoping to make it kind of a complete models that actually can include climate models. There was an idea. Jenny from Research Office Joint Colleges of Science I have a question for you about the plant side because we're talking about you know grow things to change you know positively impact the environment but at the moment everything's changed was a bad situation so will you cover any research in terms of developing new plants that are more resilient to the environment change? So as far as precision breeding is that what you're asking? Absolutely that's kind of the mainstream science that's already being done. We've got climate ready crops for annual cropping systems but the little attention has been paid for trees that's part of the current research little attention has been paid to perennial crops but there's enormous native biodiversity in this country both in eucalyptus and acacia when partnering with CSIRO's tree seed center across the way and we're using genomic selection to pre-select the best varieties for the best environments. That's all part of this that I didn't show. Thanks for asking. One final question. Jochen Trumfegen from Engineering I have thought whether I can ask this politely but by Germanic nature is getting in the way so I'll just ask it bluntly. So you've partly answered this in the answer to the last question but I kept sitting here and thinking are these guys in the right scheme because it sounded a lot like you actually have the answer so my question is what is the fundamental unsolved research challenge in this because I didn't get that from your presentation. Okay so the fundamental research question is here is how do we optimize the system? The system at the moment is being implemented in an ad hoc basis in a lot of places yes that's true and what we are seeing is that some people beginning to to combine certain measures but it's never in a scientific monitored way and it's very dangerous because in terms if you also want to you know not just do the cropping the foot production you can easily do that and push away the climate influence and you could really make some damage on the climate influence if you start making wetlands for example because then suddenly you start pulling away one unit of CO2 and you start releasing one of methane which gives you a one in 30 worse condition for climate change. So what you really want to do is optimize the system and you go through these various layers and these the precision monitoring for each soil condition for each climate condition that is available and keep on monitoring to actually adjust to the anomalies that are coming your way in terms of climate anomalies and then you can start to work make sure that you hit the balance where you've optimized production and you optimize your carbon drawdown without actually starting to make you know do damage where you start feeding methane back into the atmosphere. It's basically in integration and with precision so that we can scale it instead of having every farmer have to discover it on their own. Our time is up but please join me for to thank the team for their presentation. All right now for something completely different. Our third presentation this evening is on social cohesion inclusion and diversity. Good evening my name is Kate Reynolds and I'm the team leader of this grand challenge on strengthening social cohesion for the prosperity of all Australians. Our task tonight is a leadership team myself Michael Zekulin and Babita Bart is to make our case. Our position is clear social cohesion is vital for the economy quality of life and democracy. We need to find new ways to strengthen it because it is under threat. Our grand challenge maps a pathway forward and in this presentation we are going to outline our position in more detail. Michael Zekulin is going to talk about social cohesion and why it's a grand challenge what is the nature and extent of the problem. Babita will take stock of why current what are current efforts and how what are the issues with those and then I'm going to spend more time describing our research project in detail and then in closing we're going to talk more about why ANU and why this team. Over to you Michael. Well social cohesion is the key to such prosperity. Social cohesion is vital to a society it increases trust it creates a sense of belonging it increases engagement and participation within the larger community. It is about living together harmoniously with all of our differences. A large body of data shows that controlling for certain factors strengthening social cohesion decreases crime rates discrimination and polarization and improves mental health community action and resilience. This is an important takeaway. There are tangible benefits which come from strong social cohesion. There are also serious consequences when it is neglected or it weakens. When it goes down bad things can happen. Global events and data show us that social cohesion is weakening. Think about Brexit. Think about political polarization and the subsequent paralysis of political institutions in policymaking. Think about the rise in xenophobia in nationalism increased tensions amongst groups within societies and electorates. Yes there are complex phenomenon that underpin many of these trends but the bottom line is that beneath them all lie questions related to national identity discrimination fragmentation and a lack of unity all of which are related to social cohesion. If we look at the different data sources that are available across time we can observe downward shifts. The World Values Survey shows that there are fears about immigrants and foreign workers and these are increasing over time in different places around the world including in Australia. The same patterns show as well applied to religion. If we look more closely at Australia we see the Scanlon mapping social cohesion survey and this demonstrates a downward trend in social cohesion between 2007 and 2017. Finally if we look at a survey from the Australian Bureau of Statistics two indicators of social cohesion trust and participation show a concerning pattern. There are indications of increased distrust of other people across time and a lack of involvement in groups which relates to participation. These trends are compounded by the fact that Australia is growing faster and more diverse than most other countries. We are growing at a rate faster than the majority of other countries in the OECD. Considering all these indicators we see a storm brewing close to our shores. There are serious cracks emerging in our social fabric and the data is showing that social cohesion in Australia is at risk. Ladies and gentlemen we are at a crossroads and the path we choose today affects Australia's future. This is not meant to be alarmist. This is not an exaggeration. We can remain on the path that we are currently on low investment in social relations and assume that social cohesion will occur naturally over time. Recognizing the potential pitfalls that are on this path including heightened marginalization discrimination and risks of violent extremism. Alternatively we can choose a second path. We can learn from other countries and do so with urgency to advance Australia. We can pursue a new path one which actively looks to new ways to strengthen social cohesion and involve all Australians in the process. Just as political leaders talk about the need for physical infrastructure when it comes to population growth we argue you also need to invest in social infrastructure. Diversity is real. Cohesion is a choice. I'm going to turn you over to Babita who will talk to you about the current state of social cohesion efforts. Thank you Michael. Many of you in the audience will recognize that we need to invest in the social fabric of our community. We need to strengthen social cohesion. Policymakers, business leaders and community organizations we have interviewed also agree. There are four exciting developments that are happening. First at the policy level this year the government has announced new funding for social integration through a community grant program. There is a recognition that we need to do more. Businesses guided by corporate social responsibility are investing in the communities to create long-term social impact. Third at finance investors are willing to accept lower rate of return on investment if it results in social benefit. These priorities are leading to new fund for projects related to social impact. For example earlier this year ANZ raised 1.2 billion for social investment bonds related to United Nations development goals. Fourth at the community level new innovative business models such as social enterprises are emerging. These organizations combine business model with the social mission. Increasingly government and businesses are interested in social procurement purchasing goods and services from social enterprises that bring benefit to the wider community. These are innovation but money from this program is not flowing to social cohesion because there are many barriers. Now what are these barriers? So there is a lack of tool to measure social cohesion. We have clear economic indicators to evaluate programs but we need comprehensive robust and holistic measurement for social cohesion. There is a lack of high quality research to work out how to prevent social cohesion decline or how to strengthen it. There has been too much emphasis on getting something done quickly rather than being research driven. Research efforts are small scale sporadic and weak. To attract investment and resources for social cohesion we need strong evidence that a program is effective and has an ongoing benefit. Efforts need to be scalable which requires long term financial support. These are new financial instrument that could be leveraged to strengthen social cohesion but these need to be carefully structured based on trial and field evidence. Summarizing these point these are there are exciting things that are happening there are innovative shift in policy space but what we need is new measurement tools to reliably assess social cohesion. We need a research led approach and we need new financial mechanism to sustain and scale social cohesion efforts and our research program that Kate is going to outline addresses all these issues Kate. This team has developed an integrated research enterprise for social cohesion knowledge understanding and education rescue. Rescue incorporates five programs of activity the five S's, synthesis, stock take, solve, scale up and share. Importantly rescue is interdisciplinary it breaks down barriers between disciplines and harnesses the breadth of expertise methods and approaches to find new solutions. Due to time constraints we are unable to talk about all aspects of this research but we do want to highlight the most high-risk innovative elements that get our team excited. We are excited about synthesis it involves members of our team developing new interdisciplinary measurement tools that assess social cohesion. With these tools we'll be able to assess community vulnerabilities and capabilities. Imagine if we could click on a map like this one and get up-to-date information about social cohesion. Such information is vital to government and community groups to inform planning allocate resources and assess progress. We're also excited about solve. We will discover new interdisciplinary solutions to strengthen social cohesion that are effective efficient and robust. We will use ABS and Scanlon data to identify Australian communities that are high and low in diversity. We'll have a sample of 90 communities which will be divided into clusters of 30. Communities will be randomly assigned to intervention and control groups using randomized control methods or RCTs. With a focus on participatory methods we will visit communities and map existing efforts with respect to strengthening social cohesion. There may be social enterprises at work, community groups with integration grants, local government programs, drop-in community hubs and anti-racism programs in schools and workplaces. We want to know which of these have been effective and why. Integrating this bottom-up knowledge with top-down expertise we will co-design and implement new interventions that enhance or supercharge community efforts. Given current gaps in the research and our team's expertise initial interventions will have three foci. The first will be on social business enterprises and entrepreneurial skills. The second, marginalize youth from minority groups specifically indigenous and muslim youth. The third, majority group mindsets regarding diversity and multiculturalism groups that are often afterthought in these kind of discussions. We will assess social cohesion before we do anything in these communities after we've conducted these interventions and a six-month follow-up. We'll run three randomized controlled trials or RCTs each 18 months long one after the other learning and adapting better methods and processes as we go. For those communities that don't fit this model we'll have community specific solutions using other methods such as large-scale comparative studies and ethnography. Imagine if we could have transferable scalable robust information on the factors that are core to strengthening social cohesion. Once we know what works we're excited about scale-up which is focused on a trial of social cohesion investment bonds to raise money to support social cohesion interventions. This is a high risk and high benefit endeavor. Imagine what is possible with new funding from bonds to support more social cohesion enhancement activities. For some of you here it might be useful to have a medical analogy of this research program. If we think of lack of social cohesion as a disease rescue through synthesis is focused on working out how to diagnose the problem. Who has the disease and where are they located? Who needs urgent treatment and where will prevention be most effective? Rescue is also is focused on developing and testing our drug, our treatments for this disease through trial and research in Solve. Scale-up is akin to a commercialization phase where new funding is established to distribute our treatments. As a team we are excited that rescue addresses obstacle to progress and offers a comprehensive program of research that means we can advance quickly. We have hope that these efforts will temper the coming storm and will make a difference. Before our time is up we also want to spend some time talking about why ANU, why this team. So I'll hand over to you Michael. Great well thanks Kate. Well I can tell you that the ANU in its 2017 annual report says the following to be enduring significance in the post-war life of the nation to support the development of national unity and identity to improve Australia's understanding of itself and its neighbors and to contribute to economic development and social cohesion. Social cohesion simply national identity unity and social cohesion is the mission statement of the Australian National University. We are very very excited, pardon me, we are very excited because we have a team of 20 members across five colleges and 12 disciplines. They have the experience, the expertise and the commitment to pursuing this grand challenge research and bringing it to a successful conclusion. We also plan to be joined by 20 postdoctoral fellows and 20 PhDs in essence training the next generation of social cohesion researchers. We also have the networks and the linkages to become the national and international leader in this area. Our team has existing and extensive networks and linkages with hard to reach communities. These networks ensure that we are project ready. In closing our project aligns with the ANU's mission, it is controversial and its benefits if successful will be shared by all rather than captured by some. It trains future generations of researchers and quite simply it is unlikely at the outset to be systematically funded at the necessary scale by private capital, national research bodies or government agencies. It meets each of the criteria of the grand challenges scheme and we hope you all agree that ANU should invest in rescue. Thank you. Thank you there's a hand up already at the back. Again please just introduce yourself or tell us where you're from and ask a question. Hello guys my name is Sonia I'm from business school and my question is how you will select the community for your research project. Thank you. A nation of data sources to identify communities that I have either high or low university and we'll be using those to select the communities for this project. So it's going to be a data driven selection process and we're on other areas where these kind of programs have been run. The data selection which communities are selected and using database approaches is quite critical to being able to get good evidence about what's working and why. That was Robertson director of research services. Similar question to the one I asked the previous presentation. Can you describe how you're going to engage with the community so you find the community through data analysis but this is action research really and therefore how are you actually going to physically engage with communities and ensure that the project doesn't actually cause disunity because there are examples where attempts to study cohesion actually leads to greater animosity. Okay well when we're looking to select the communities we have them listed off we gave you a brief sample due to the time constraints so we're looking to focus on some different things so we have our indicators we're looking for to drive us towards how we're going to select these communities. We are looking for specifics communities that are within what we call a high diversity where there's lots of different groups together we're looking for those that are low diversity and then we're looking for ones that would sort of fit outside any of the traditional urban or rural types of groups. Now the experience that our team has is that being political scientists social psychologists is that we have members of our team who have extensive interactions with these communities already for example we have two members of our team that are out in the field working with some of the marginalized communities that we identified for you. We recognize and we're very sensitive to the perception that top down is not well received by many communities and that's one of the concerns that we've identified. So this is about working with the communities from the bottom up what is it that they want what is it that they need and then identifying facilitating that exchange of bringing those two together. Hi Ronan from scope management so really here is how do you define a social coherence so what is the range of scope of that so politically socially or economically or everything another thing is what are the like clear outputs you want out of this project and how are you going to measure the outcome of that. So that was a definition of social cohesion so I think we've we've talked about using some of the key terms that are used in the in the wider literature that social cohesion relates to the trust we have in one another our sense of belonging in the community our willingness to help one another and our willingness to participate in activities within within those communities and I think increasingly people also want to see that happening across different ethnic and different kinds of groups within the community so it also has this idea that people are forming connections outside of their own ethnic and religious or class type groups. So that's the definition that we're using at the moment there is there is debate about the definition and the measurement and hopefully through this program we'll be able to bring clarity to the concept and how it's measured and then I think the second question related to the output so what well really it is what we're excited about so we're excited about having outputs where we will be able to quickly and easily assess the capabilities and vulnerabilities of communities around Australia using the techniques that we've outlined we are excited about finding new transferable solutions to building social cohesion so we want to identify the key factors that are important that communities could harness to strengthen social cohesion and there are some other sort of elements of the program we haven't been able to go through but the multiculturalism policy in Australia will turn 50 during the life of this grand challenge and we think there's quite a lot of work to be done using historical archival type work around multiculturalism policy working with government to really assess what has been effective where have the challenges been what might how might we revitalize that policy going forward and be part of that conversation for what government's action in the space of social cohesion should be going forward Hi my name is Tuofu from the College of Business and Economics and thanks very much for your presentation the question is in your research are you going to consider include a case study for example to ask people to share their experience that they find it hard to integrate into the local community thanks all right so I think that there are so many questions related to the communities how we are going to select the communities how do you how we are going to implement our program in the communities and what is the outcome going to be so I think I'll explain so when we are selecting communities we are selecting communities based on the level of diversity this community has we agree that Australia is heterogeneous right so we have we have identified based on ABS at this moment we have ABS indicators based on ABS indicators we have identified urban areas which is very heterogeneous and in those areas we believe that RCT is not possible because we cannot isolate our impact we also there are also leakages issues between treatment and control group so in these in these areas which are highly diverse we use super diverse in these areas we are going to implement longitudinal case studies and ethnography so that we can we can come up with recommendation how and what policies work so in these area in urban areas we are going to focus on social enterprises for example and in in here through longitudinal case study we are really going to identify mechanism inclusive business practices that creates social cohesion in the communities so this longitudinal case study will help us to identify inclusive business practices and other kind of new emerging mechanism because case studies are really good in doing that so we believe that it would be useful so it's multi method I think it's a point and that's related to it being multidisciplinary thank you final question thank you I'm looking here from computer science I have a question about most working Australians spend about less than one third of their life in residential communities how would you are finding a method and approach work in other communities such as social groups that are on that gather on a casual basis or workplaces would something you do potentially benefit say improving social cohesion at the A and U as a community well I think that's a very good question and this whole grand challenge has done that I mean it has brought communities discipline from different groups already together so we already see social cohesion there but but having said that because we don't really have clear indicator to major social cohesion at this moment this project will help us to really clarify through a very robust research design how to major social cohesion what are the antecedent of social cohesion what are the barrier and what are the outcome so we will have to wait for few few more years but in in terms of benefiting the community and you we can certainly see but in terms of benefiting the other communities we believe that social cohesion is the most important ingredient we have talked about economic sustainability we know about financial sustainability and environmental sustainability but we also believe that to to achieve these two core sustainability we need social sustainability which will be provided by social cohesion so thank you for that question so thank you on that note please join me for our final presentation today please i invite to the stage to tell us about zero carbon energy for the asia pacific thank you margaret good evening everyone my name is ember aspit and i'm the transdisciplinary research leader for our team we are super excited to pitch our grand challenge to you tonight zero carbon energy for the asia pacific but first we'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land and pay our respects to their elders past and present we'd also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land in northwestern austria and you'll see why shortly presenting with me tonight our professor carly catchpole a world-leading solar cell researcher and dr paul burk a successful young economist specializing in energy policy in the asia pacific professor catchpole will introduce our research themes to you but first dr burk will tell you why zero carbon energy for the asia pacific is the grand challenge of the moment climate change is the world's greatest challenge we stand at a decision point this graph shows alternative emissions pathways from now until the end of the century if the world acts rapidly to decarbonize our economies we still have a chance of restricting global warming to two degrees celsius if we do not we are on track for three or four degrees celsius warming this century and then more next century there is an imperative to get moving on decarbonization and to do so in a way that creates exciting opportunities for our economy and our communities the time to act is now we are in the asian century over the next two decades two-thirds of energy use growth will be here in the asia pacific in china india southeast asia and elsewhere if this energy is high carbon we are on track for dangerous climate change this setting provides australia with a tremendous opportunity if we could boost our energy exports while switching to a zero carbon energy export model we could gain an economic boom while also making a major proactive contribution to the avoidance of dangerous climate change australia is an energy superpower we are the world's largest exporter of coal and as of next year the world's largest exporter of natural gas both of these are carbon intensive fuels australia is also by far the world's largest exporter of iron ore and this is our largest energy product iron ore is used in very carbon intensive manufacturing processes in the production of steel are we serious about climate change if we are we need to get moving to switch our energy export bundle to a zero carbon one let's create a new economic model for australia one based on zero carbon energy australia can lead on this issue fortunately australia's natural endowments place us well to reach this vision australia is richly endowed in renewable energy in the sun and the wind our solar endowments are particularly impressive with just the land area shown by this blue dot we could generate enough electricity to supply australia's needs with the land area shown by the green dot we could generate enough electricity to supply the whole world's needs australia is very well placed to become a new type of energy superpower a zero carbon energy superpower our grand challenge team will undertake trans transformational research that will change the way australia trades with the world our research will proceed on four pathways first of all we will undertake research on the export of zero carbon electricity from australia to asia via subsea cables this is electricity produced in australia using renewable energy second we will carry out research on the export of zero carbon hydrogen rich fuels produced in australia using renewable energy third we will carry out research on the export of zero carbon refined metals and products finally we will do the work that will underpin the development of policy and legal frameworks for uptake of zero carbon energy in countries throughout the asia pacific this is our vision for zero carbon energy for the asia pacific i will now hand on to professor kiley catch poll who will explain how we will do this thank you poll we'll focus our research on northwest australia northwest australia has a number of important advantages firstly it has a huge amount of solar and wind available it has the potential for a 100% renewable electricity grid through pumped hydrogen and battery storage it has enormous mineral resources and it's close to major asian markets our research will have the potential for immediate impact through companies that are starting to develop projects for zero carbon exports for example our industry partner cwp renewables is leading a consortium to develop the asian renewable energy hub in the pilbara region this multi billion dollar 11 gigawatt solar wind and electricity storage project will eventually be the second largest power station in the world as well as providing electricity for exports to indonesia and on to singapore it will also provide electricity for new domestic industries in northwest australia so how do we achieve achieve as vision for zero carbon energy for the asia pacific first of all we need to understand the diverse perspectives of a wide range of stakeholders from traditional owners of country the foreign governments based on this understanding we will develop new ways to share the benefits to achieve a fair and sustainable energy transition we'll develop new technologies for renewable energy systems for hydrogen generation and for metal refining and we'll develop new policy and legal frameworks in order to achieve the required level of coordination and investment benefits that are shared with stakeholders and communities are essential for achieving a fair and sustainable transition first of all we have to make sure that we take advantage of the genuine opportunity for sustainable development that renewable energy growth offers to the traditional owners of the land will therefore work with indigenous people and other local communities to ensure best practice involvement in these new industries in particular we're looking at how to structure agreements between renewable energy projects and local indigenous communities that bring maximum benefit for those communities not just for the near term but for the intergenerational timescale of the agreement this work is very new and there's been almost no research done in this area to date we'll therefore work with leading indigenous organizations to share the results of this work as widely as possible so we can ensure maximum benefit for local communities we'll also be researching what determines social license to operate for large-scale renewable energy projects for both indigenous and non-indigenous communities and of course communities are not the only stakeholders who will determine the success of our zero carbon ambitions will therefore work with governments with companies and with energy utilities to understand their shared interests and work with them to maximize our impact there are a number of technological and economic challenges to transition to a renewable energy-based economy for example renewable electricity systems are completely different from traditional electricity systems there's lots of electricity available when the wind is blowing in the sun is shining and there's potentially deficits at other times we will research new ways to design and control renewable energy systems that balance the generation transmission and storage in order to achieve reliable and low cost electricity we'll also research potentially disruptive technologies for hydrogen generation and metal refining for example we'll be looking at new ways to generate hydrogen directly using solar energy which has the potential to be much cheaper than existing technologies we'll also be looking at new ways to refine metals that don't use fossil fuels as inputs but instead use electricity and hydrogen regulation and governance are essential for achieving the coordination of interests required for a successful energy transition and there are a few key areas that have the potential for particularly large impact so we'll be working on policies that can accelerate progress in these areas for example it is clear that there will be a lot more trade in electricity in the future to take advantage of the low cost of renewable energy in places where there's large renewable energy resources this will require new formal legal frameworks for international trade and investment in electricity secondly policy has a huge impact on the uptake of renewables so we'll be researching what determines policy impact on the uptake of renewables in countries across asia taking into account local political and legal frameworks this work will build on ANU's world-leading expertise in economic tools for carbon reduction and it will also provide a benchmark for our work on the competitiveness of australian exports of renewable energy we'll also be looking at legal frameworks for hydrogen supply chains and basing based on our work with indigenous involvement we'll be looking at the role of state governments in supporting and empowering these communities to benefit from opportunities i'll now pass over to Emma to talk about our team thank you Kylie so a fair and sustainable transformation of Australia's energy relationship with the region truly is a grand challenge but why should it be the ANU that leads this transformation in short because the ANU has a breadth of world-class energy researchers working across disciplines and topics from governance and community to technology ANU has the depth of expertise in the asia-pacific and ANU has accomplished interdisciplinary researchers capable of making the linkages required to ensure that researchers transformative last but not least the ANU has the ANU energy change institute directed by professor Ken Baldwin which has the capacity to bring all of these people together in a strong and cohesive team in addition to cohesion gender and career stage diversity are important goals for our team our recruitment to date has already improved the gender balance among an energy researchers at the ANU we work hard to ensure that our project offers productive opportunities leadership experience and mentoring for early and mid-career researchers of all genders our project is about sustainable investments including in human capital our team also extends beyond the ANU the energy change institute already has an impressive track record of engagement including successful collaborations with government and industry our energy change our zero carbon asia-pacific research is deepening these relationships important players like cwp renewables and evo energy have already contributed expertise and funds to our research representatives from these companies sit along representatives alongside representatives from several government agencies and award-winning ANU academics on our active and engaged steering committee importantly our zero carbon asia-pacific research is also expanding our collaborations especially with community and indigenous organizations all of these relationships are important they help to ensure that our research is relevant up to date impactful to sum up a timely fair and sustainable transition to zero carbon energy in the Asia-Pacific is an economic and moral imperative we will research four pathways through which Australia could dramatically contribute to such a transformation for each of these our researchers will combine their expertise across a broad range of academic disciplines to produce truly groundbreaking research by working closely with our external collaborators we will ensure that our research has impact and delivers on the promise of zero carbon energy for the Asia-Pacific thank you um so thank you i'm sure there are questions from the floor from um management thank you very much for the beautiful presentation i want to ask how do you commercialize and compete with the big mining industry in australia oh excellent thank you i almost paid her to ask that question so one of the reasons that i was really excited to get part of this project is because we all know that in australia there's a serious political economy issue regarding the coal industry and i studied political economy and the more i've studied that the more i've realized that the best way to combat a serious industry lobby group is to help grow an opposing lobby group and so i'm very excited to be helping the renewables energy industry grow i'd just like to add to that in terms of mining looking at the metals mining industry they would love to have this energy they actually want it because it's going to be cheaper for them so they're very very keen on bringing that into their system philosophy uh on the Asia-Pacific end so there was a lot about stakeholders in australia but i was wondering about stakeholders in for example india or china which had the really big circles on the graph do you want to start yeah so a key focus of our of our work is to look at the policy and legal guidance in asia-Pacific countries including t1's india and china and to develop mechanisms that will help uh a transition away from coal mostly coal towards zero carbon energy there are some big challenges in countries like indonesia for example with subsidies for coal and for electricity consumption and there are some key reforms that we can we can help uh that would help to improve progress towards this coal towards zero carbon energy i could add a little on china so i mean the chinese are actually very progressive and doing a lot on this themselves right so i mean we're really focusing on what can we do as australia where can we have the maximum impact and of course one thing we may be doing is contributing part to the and a trans asian grid essentially that will help support the growth of renewables by helping to balance out energy where it's available when it's available hi i'm rachel clumbie from a new um thanks very much for the presentation i just wanted to ask what the time frame was for the project because it's it's massive so i just wanted to get a sense of the length of the the project i mean so that's an excellent question and um different parts of the project will have different sort of time frames to completion but what we're looking at is what can we do in a five-year time frame and so for the technology for technologies for example they're not going to be operating at scale at our entire iron ore is not going to be refined in australia with renewable energy in five years but in five years we could have made substantial progress on developing the technologies required to do that at an economically efficient manner on the other hand you know the asian renewable energy hub is being developed by our industry partners and so that really could be and will be delivering money in uh money money to them electricity to other people um and hopefully which is really important to us benefits to indigenous partners and so the sorts of outputs that we're looking at in the five-year time frame include things like guidelines for indigenous communities negotiating with renewables investors because this is not the only renewable investment coming to indigenous controlled land um you have some fairly adventurous technology which is highly contested worldwide so you know some holy grail of creating high you know direct solar whatever electricity to hydrogen that's highly efficient uh creating direct uh metallurgical refinery again without any um uh co2 emission what why should we think that we have the ability to be uh out in front of the rest of the world on those technologies okay so sure so for a direct generation of hydrogen uh both the US department of energy and a recent um Australian roadmap have said that direct generation of hydrogen has the potential to be much cheaper than existing technologies uh so we've demonstrated a solar to hydrogen efficiency of 16 which is the highest that's been demonstrated with a potentially low cost process so we think we have the potential to move that forward and to look not only at that technology but around those technologies to look at um how we can move it forward with a with a low cost process on the metal refining this is very hard and there's actually been not much work done in this area uh at all so far most of people have been focusing on using bio coke as as a replacement in iron ore refining this seems to us to be a dead end um because it's going to require a lot of biomass and it's going to have a large environmental impact so we're looking at technologies of pyrolysis and electrolysis so using electricity or hydrogen in those processes so there's certainly significant challenges but we do have a lot of expertise at a new on high temperature uh processing with with chemicals including reduction of iron oxide and manganese oxide so we think um we've got let's go to do something in this area um I just wanted to ask given the timeframe of the project looking towards what we're looking at in climate destabilization and the regions in the tropics where you are looking at basing this project what's your strategy for dealing with resilience of an increased uh effect major climatic events both in your production electricity transmission and delivery to some of those communities which are likely to be highly impacted within the next 20 or 30 years and how do you avoid having a situation where those communities become dependent on a arguably tenuous link back to mainland Australia and you and how you will protect that technology or develop it to be future proof um so so I'm not an engineer anymore but I do know that we have very good engineers both at ANU and in our industry partners who have obviously thought about you know you have to plan in that a huge tropical storm is going to come through on a you know every x number of years so that already the wind turbines are designed to withstand cyclones um the obvious and very good question is what happens if such a tropical storm takes out the the subsea cable and the answer to that is that ultimately you will need to have probably pumped hydro storage in a relatively significant amount on the Indonesian side of that cable and that's one of the working Paul and myself and um people working on communities and we have also specialists with um on the sort of anthropology of Indonesia is how do you site those pumped hydro sites without some dispossessing marginalized people in Indonesia okay please join with me in thanking the final team for the presentation