 Well, good morning. I suppose the one thing about this panel is this one is very much gender-independent in topic-wise, because we're talking about technology, and technology doesn't really have a gender per se, I suppose, but a little bit of audience participation just to start with, and then I'll introduce the topic groups. Who has, and I'm sure almost, who has a smartphone, all right? Okay, I want you to close your eyes for about 10 seconds, and imagine that the only thing you could do on your smartphone is make a telephone call, send an SMS message, or play a very simple game called Snake, all right? Now I know a lot of you would be breaking out in a sweat at the moment at the thought of that, because, you know, you wouldn't be able to use Facebook or Instagram or anything like that, but the reality is in the year 2000, that was our world as far as the technology of smartphones was concerned. I remember when I first started my masters in IT, there was a topic that we did called Future Technology and Social Impact, and I remember quite vividly watching a series of concept videos of this thing that they, I don't even think it had the name smartphone at the time, but they showed what would life be like if we had a mobile connected device which had computing power and all those sort of things, and 16, 17 years on, all of that and more has become a reality to all of us and many, many people in the world have two or three of these devices, let alone just one. So back in the year 2000, if we were having this discussion, maybe the smartphone would be, what is the next big thing in technology? So hopefully in today's session, I would like these highly experienced people that I have the honour of leading this morning to help us decide or give us some information about what maybe three, four, five new technologies that are going to change the world in the next five or so years and we can keep an eye out on them just for interest sake or maybe even might spark an idea of some sort of new entrepreneurial venture for you today. So the other thing, as I was researching this group, I discovered that collectively our panel members have over 80, that's eight zero years of experience, yes I think that is actually worthy of applause, either creating new technology or using new technology to create a business. So in alphabetical order, because I found no other sensible way to sort of do them without sort of showing some favouritism, we have, I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce your last name. It's fanatic, you can do it. Can I? Okay, Bhattacharya. Perfect. Oh, very good. Dr. Badushi Bhattacharya, I was a little bit reticent at this because when I heard about your background, I thought, oh awesome, she's a rocket scientist and I thought, oh I better not say that, she might feel a bit offended and then I read your bio and you officially classify yourself as a rocket scientist and as a guy that sort of loves space stuff, that's pretty awesome as far as I'm concerned. So she's a rocket scientist and entrepreneur. Most of the very popular space missions from NASA that you've heard of, Bhattushi's had her fingers somewhere involved in parts of those missions. And she currently is the CEO and founder of the Austropreneur's Hub, which is Asia's first space technology incubator, and the CEO and founder of the Bhattacharya Space Enterprises, which is an organization which helps educate and train people in space science and related technologies. We have Beverly DeLore, she's a computer scientist with experience in software engineering and management roles around software engineering. She's the head of technology at Space Mob, which is a co-working space, which you might think what technology is involved there. The whole thing that makes Space Mob different is that they deeply embed aspects of technology in how the members of the co-working space can work and interact with the space itself. And then we have, I was going, I had here Doctor, but I just suddenly found out it's soon to be Doctor, soon to be Doctor Oshikana, who seems to have packed an amazing amount of things in a ridiculously short career. She's an author, consultant, advisor, editor, and entrepreneur. Have I missed anything? No, totally unfocused. And she started her career in the financial services industry, advising very large financial service companies on how to automate many aspects of the financial trading processes. And she advises governments and companies on issues around technology and social and economic impact. And she's currently the CEO and founder of ADO, which is an artificial intelligence advisory firm and incubator. And she also founded 21C Girls in Singapore. And I like the story about how that happened as well. And we finally, we have Natalie Ting. She's a software engineer and entrepreneur. She briefly worked in the telecommunications industry and then went straight off into a little startup at the time, but suddenly had a very big impact, a company called Moby Pocket. And they were one of the founding companies in the e-reader technologies back in the early 2000s. And then a little online retailer you may have heard of called Amazon decided that their technology was pretty darn cool and bought it. And then she moved off into, because entrepreneurism seems to be her thing, moved into a couple of other companies and she's now with Upvise, which is a cloud based software as a service application for businesses. So what I thought we'd start off with, we'd start with the present. So what do you think is, what technology or technologies do you think is having the greatest impact on society today? Definitely? Or whoever wants to start? Yeah, I think, I mean right now, because we're in the co-working space, so I think definitely anything that interacts with the space, the physical space. So this is like IoT stuff, right? I think these are the things that we can definitely use in my current industry right now, where we can incorporate devices that monitors the usage of the space, probably even temperature, or even the smell of the whole office. So for me, that's something that's very right now. IoT, and also artificial intelligence, because IoT's are just the eyes and the ears, they said, of technology that gathers this information and data. So you need something to analyze all this data and make it more intelligent, which is the artificial intelligence. So all this data will just be very much analyzed by this artificial intelligence programs or applications out there. Yeah, I would say that, at the present, we think that there are two main things. One is the mobile phone, despite people thinking it's kind of a last century tool, is actually much more powerful now, and is responsible for a lot of the data that we're getting, and a lot of the way we connect to emerging market consumers. And apart from that, the other thing is that data, and naturally leading into artificial intelligence. How are you collecting data and what are you doing with it? I've been just consistently impressed with some of the innovations that I'm seeing from health care to agriculture to transportation. And I think there's enormous amounts of potential there. And every time you think it's the future, you realize that it sees already right now. So in that sense, we are talking near future, present near future, even in this panel, I think, to a degree. Thanks. Well, I think I'd like to say that it's first internet and then mobile, and to put everything into a more historical perspective. I know everybody here has a phone, and you can't, as you were saying, imagine that before this, you had phones just to call people. So first internet, that happened. The very first network, networks connecting people around the world was around in the 1960s, ARPANET, the US military. It really existed, so that was 60, 50, 1960s. Just to show you that things take time and technology. Quite often the technologies exist, the physics, the science are already there, but it takes a maturing of the whole environment in terms of, for the internet to become what we use every day and to change our lives, it took, so 1995 is Amazon. I don't know if anybody can remember that, but Amazon is now just above 20 years old. Before that, we, our generation, lived with no e-mail. Your personal computer was, in the 1980s, you had your first big PC, so obviously no laptops. It all happened really very fast over the past 20 years. So in internet, it is the major, I think, technology that has had an impact on our whole society. If you take a really, you know, more bit of background on this, it has changed our lives so much because it makes us a global world. Before internet, people had to, you know, call each other. You didn't have access to any information easily. Today you just, you know, you don't know something, you just type in Google and you find the information straight away. And it's useful in so many areas, well, especially in coding, software, when you're looking up a problem. There's always someone somewhere in the world who said exactly that same very specific technical problem, so you find the answer instantly. Way back when you had your problem in your little office, trying to figure out how to fix that bug, maybe take a few weeks to figure out either on your own or trying to discuss with someone. So it's changed our lives because it makes people, companies go so much faster with all the information that we have at our fingertips. And it's changed our lives because we can communicate all over the world with anyone, someone in France, someone in Singapore, someone you can work on different continents. And you can also have these kind of... You don't have to work in a traditional way anymore in a company, like you all go to the same place and you all just work together there. You can actually have more agile kind of companies where you'll have... And that's what we do in our advice right now. We're based in Singapore, but we work with Australia, we work with Europe, France, we work with people in the US. And it's completely changed the way companies work. So internet, I think, is really the first major technology that has an impact today. And after internet came, of course, the mobile. And that's not that long ago, too, because when we started Upvise 10 years ago, there was no iPhone. So we started our company. There was those Nokia phones. I don't know if anybody knows the brand anymore. It was the major... Nokia was the major phone manufacturer from Finland, and they were number one, and no one had anything else under Nokia. But you could only just call, you could type your... It was called T1, you know, you had a predictive text. But people would make a really good job of that, actually. You could type your... Like today you use a WhatsApp or whatever, but you would type all your messages just with nine... The nine keys, and you'd make up all your words like that. So that was only maybe 10 years ago. It's happened so fast, and it's had such a huge impact on what we do. And even 10 years ago you would be using Facebook maybe just on your computer, because it was not on mobile yet. Now, you know, everyone uses your mobile for everything. I think it's just to put it in perspective. It's all happened very fast in the past 20 years. But the major impacts are from the internet and the mobile internet. So, thanks everybody for coming out for giving us your Saturday morning, your whole day Saturday actually. The program here looks really great, and I wish I could stay and attend some of the sessions myself this afternoon, but we're doing another training workshop. In terms of what I think has been the most major change in the past, I'll just even go back more than a few decades, just in the past few centuries for all of humanity, is our access to information. So, that has done so much, not just on a technical level, but on a social level, on a psychological level, to put us on a whole different mindset. If you think about your average 10-year-old today and how much they know, if you compare that to a scholar from the Middle Ages, somebody from a renowned university, that 10-year-old kid has access to and knows more stuff than the scholar would have back in the Middle Ages. We talk about pop culture, the kids, anywhere you go on vacation, you hear the same exact songs in the restaurants. We all have access to the same information, the same cultural norms, and I think that's really what's revolutionized things, and we're at a really exciting point right now in terms of human civilization just to the point where everybody globally is coming online. We've got, and I have to bring in space, we've got satellites that are providing internet across the planet to rural areas of Africa, to all over Asia, South America, and that is going to be a game changer. So, anybody in this room who's under the age of 40, I think 20 years from now, for you guys, you'll be working in a very different world. Those of us who are a little older will still be working, but I think what you will see and the world that you will be part of is very different because of just the incredible amount of information that you just have right there in your phone. So, it's a really, real game changer and I'm pretty excited about the future. Thank you. Yeah, I think the, Natalie's point about the internet, like just creating that foundation of connectivity that everything else is based on, and I've read a bit about history of science and you look at the history of science and certain things, there's always a, a technology had to be developed before a scientist could then discover something new which led to a new technology being developed which led to another scientist discovering something new. So, I suppose on that point, what do you think are sort of those, you know, expanding on say, the internet and things like that. What are those foundational technologies that we either are emerging now or we, you know, that you've heard of that are coming around the corner that will be the basis for that whatever the next big thing that we're going to tell everyone is so they'll make a million dollars at the end of the thing. So, what's happening? Okay, in my opinion, I may be biased. I think artificial intelligence is now going to become a commodity that has to be processed. And right now, you need a lot of experts to process it. So, I'll give you an example. One of the platforms that we're building is a micro insurance platform for Asian farmers. So, Asian farmers are very vulnerable. They live on one dollar to four dollars a day and in the Philippines, for instance, they're 20 to 25 typhoons a year. But nobody will give them credit and nobody will give them insurance because it's very hard to estimate the destruction. Even the largest microfinance bank has to go and send hundreds of people there to manually check how much crop was destroyed. But we are using satellite imagery. So, we are using hyperspectral imaging, microwave imaging, thermal imaging to understand and do early loss detection. But for us at the moment, that means subscribing to very expensive satellite imagery but then also we have five experts in our team who are computer vision experts and then SAR experts and other kinds of satellite image processing experts. I think what we'll see now is that as more people make cloud-based platforms, we'll see kind of a commodification of this. And then I'll have to find a new business model, but it's all for the good, right? We're all kind of running ahead and the technology is automating everything. So one of the things is that we are constantly in a disruptive mode. I think maybe space is the only thing where you have a lot of time still because it's still early days, maybe, kind of. But for somebody like me who's been in tech my entire life, I am making the very machines that I have to stay ahead of. So I think that's a kind of a mindset thing, but also it's a the commodification of everything that you build and to be okay with that and not to be married to anything that you build is something that can't be disrupted, I think is really important. Yeah, so I think for my case, I think your question is more like what should be in place first before this advent of things happen? I think always the reservations for companies or even governments is cost. Like, transitioning from an old platform to the new platform can cost a lot. And given that, I think having more players, more providers of such services would lower the cost, and that's the good thing because technology will allow us to do that. I mean, if more people, so for example, IoT devices, if more people are developing these devices, then governments or companies can have a way to do this, like roll it out easily. And cloud, she mentioned about cloud. So everything right now, you don't have to build it by yourself. They are like cloud services, services that you can just subscribe to, and then you can just use it in your company. And that basically lower the cost of maintenance, lower the cost of training people, and I think that's the first thing. I think having more players, having more people creating the basics of technology so that we can advance more and help people more to advance in that area that they wanted to pursue is what we need to have. So in my area, when mobile clouds was really past technology now, I think VR, virtual reality is really promising. It's been a lot of progress over the past two, three years. The first VR headsets were quite expensive and Mark Zuckerberg came in, Facebook bought up Oculus and Samsung now you can actually buy relatively inexpensively now. You can get Samsung Deer VR headset put in your smartphone, so you don't have to buy both, you use your smartphone as the engine for the VR headset. And more and more you're seeing interesting usages of VR. The first, of course, is in entertainment games, all the 3D experience movies that are in 3D and my kids love it because we bought the first version, the second version of the Samsung Gear headset and you can see your... So that was two years ago the first version, you could just see the sample, media, nice movies, you're on a helicopter and then suddenly you have someone overcoming above you, so it's really exciting all those things, but those were just samples and now I just looked into it again and in the new version you can actually, so many apps that came up, you can film your own 3D movies and view them in your headset and you can even go to Tizer Us and you buy a Google Cardboard VR headset, it goes for like $30, $36 and it's a VR headset, so you can view all your 3D pictures or videos, you can install a whole set of, there's hundreds of apps nowadays and applications will have an impact I was saying obviously video games and movies, but also, you can imagine in professional areas like in construction, like what we do in advice, you could imagine that the guy who's on the field needs to maybe follow a procedure, a safety procedure quality process instead of just looking it up on his phone and using a rather small screen and clumsy interface, you could have your headset and view the complete procedure in a much more comfortable way you could imagine also if you want to visit because we have an application in our suite which is defect tracking in apartments or new condo units when you want to track all the different defects that, you know, you just take a picture and then you send it back to the owner to say, oh, this apartment there's a problem here, but you could imagine viewing your virtually viewing visiting an apartment visiting any place and then filming your own your own to report on what you see, you could use you could film your own 3D movie and then send it back for reporting. So I mean I think there's a lot of potential in 3D and VR and obviously a lot of the major players are into it right now so I think we're going to see a lot coming up there. Okay, so this is where I get to talk about space. I get very excited when anybody asks me about space or my kids so great to be here. Let me ask you guys a question and I'll just tell you ahead of time the number of people that say yes to this over the past 3 years in Singapore has gone up in a way that's really been impressive. How many people here have thought about being an astronaut either now or in your childhood or have considered space as a potential career path? Wow that's awesome. So it used to be I would get maybe one or two people raising their hands I don't know if they were embarrassed or if it was really just not the case that they saw space as a feasible thing for the future but for those of you who raised your hands and for everybody else what I really want to convey is space technology is real, it's happening and it's global and we have a really great opportunity for Singapore to get involved at this point. So space tourism this group probably knows Elon Musk and SpaceX I don't have to explain who he is you know Elon is sending people to the moon to fly around the moon in 2018 he's talking about putting people on Mars by say 2030, 2035 even if he doesn't get there by 2030 or 35 the number of innovations he's going to need are going to have to come from you guys. People are going to have to come up with sensors, software psychological tools sociological methods to manage people traveling in space for so long and all of this has to happen very soon because if we want to meet our goals we have to have the tech in place and my hope is that everybody here gets themselves into a position where they have tech that can be acquired and built upon by people like Elon Musk and Richard Branson and all the others so I would say space tourism is happening and it's going to be a thing and I'd say the next five years and the other thing I want to talk about is asteroid mining I don't know how much you guys know about asteroids but they're from the early solar system so the minerals that are in asteroids are very easy to mine they're not geologically processed like on earth they have to grind stuff up, yeah so that's right it's very pure in space and we know what the rocks are made of because we have telescopes we can take measurements and do spectroscopy if you spend let's just say ten million dollars getting up there and you're able to bring back a billion dollars with a B with a material you're going to come out doing very well and all of this is possible because we have the miniaturization of electronics you talk about your cell phone being the size of a computer from 40 years ago we have satellites you can hold in your hand that weigh 1.3 kg that are up there taking images of the kind that Aisha was talking about this is happening right now and I really really do hope that you guys take space seriously as a career and if you want to talk to me about this afterwards I'll just go on and on I better stop I would definitely definitely add that this is an incredible area for young people to get involved in you know being an artificial intelligence I often ask the question about automation and the loss of jobs with this space and space tourism, asteroid mining this all represents a whole new area of jobs for us as the traditional jobs are getting automated so my kids are coming to you can I ask you a question too is there a change that wants to be an astrophysicist so what can you do we have a number of workshops that we run we have one at the art science museum on the 8th of July that we're running on CubeSats and if she knows a little bit of programming then that might be a really good opportunity for her and I'm happy to talk to anybody who wants to know about being an astrophysicist and in this particular context if you want to know what it's like to be a female the only pregnant female in a room of 20 men then I can share lots of stories with you guys I've been given the sign which is winded up now so I'm going to ask the hypothetically put your money where your mouth is question so I know Natalie will have the direct experience of this but just Jeff Bezos just asked Alexa to buy whole foods for him or something something like that so let's just hypothetically say Jeff Bezos has decided to buy out your particular current ventures and you've all been given a billion dollar payout so you've had a big holiday because you've worked very hard and you can't let go of the entrepreneur or the spirit which new emerging technology do you invest your money in? I can start so we are doing space education, space training at this point and we're also trying to bring together the ecosystem not just in Singapore but in Asia in general so I would take that billion after I'd spent some on the vacation and I would really go into funding our incubator because we have so many ideas that come to us even in Singapore where 5.5 million people here you can't believe the number of people who send us emails saying I have an idea for space tech so we could just fund that I think we just go amazing places so that was where I put it well I'd put it in AI because I think it's really the area where we have not really reached the full potential yet and there's so much to do I get this question a lot what would you do if you had a billion dollars? I still do this exact same thing and I think all of us would because we love what we do and artificial intelligence we're just starting now but AI for impact and I think we do a lot of stuff for people we do it around smart cities sustainable transportation and as a company that has a luxury as we grow bigger to choose the kind of products we do more in health care we do more for the poor farmers of the world and I think really bringing up the bottom billion and really making a difference to their quality of life through artificial intelligence and democratizing access to those services and infrastructure is a dream of mine whether I get those billion or not I'm doing it first I'll buy an island islands basically but I think two things I really believe in IoT I think the World Economic Forum in their white paper on the fourth industry revolution is that right now we have 18 billion devices of IoT devices around in 2025 they are projecting it to be around 80 billion so that's how big this industry is going to be and for me that's a very steady growth actually it's exponential growth from 18 billion right now so I think that's a very good technology to focus on because one I think as an engineer I'm still coding like 80% of my day every day I think for me it's more of why I went through this I want to help solve problems and I think IoT can do that for even at homes like in your your freeges you don't buy freeges every one year usually it's 10 years, 5 years but having these devices like the amazon dash buttons can add intelligence to your old freeges or can add intelligence to your old washing machines and that's good that's something that I'm very excited about that it's going to be a long way to go in that the other thing is advanced automation of robots and humans shouldn't be a question at all it could be a collaboration of human-robot collaboration so right now they're doing or inventing machineries that help people to be stronger like people operating these machines to be strong, to lift up heavy things and I'd like to see that because right now here in Singapore if you go to McDonald's you go that all this kiosk has been replaced by this kiosk and it doesn't have to be like that it can be a collaboration between humans and robots so I think that for me is a very exciting field that I'm happy that people are looking into that kind of collaboration so yeah I'm just excited about it I'd just like to add one last thing which is that in AI and anything that deals with information you have to be very careful about cyber security so even though none of us are in that field that is critical and then the other one for AI especially is beneficial AI making sure that we are in control of the algorithms so ethical ethics okay so thank you very much so I will now if you got your list handy so we've got artificial intelligence robots and internet of things augmented reality virtual reality and space technology are the things that we should be looking out for in the next five years so thank you very much to my panel members it's been an honor and thank you to Eva for organizing this group of people for me to chair Dr. Bedushi if you don't mind helping us with the lucky draw thank you again Dr. Bedushi Aisha, Nali, Beverly and Steve for sending us through this conversation about what's next in technology and how we can leverage it and create innovative spaces in our startups and innovative ideas and how we can make a change in the world I only wonder in 20 years if we have the same event what would we be talking about on the panel then