 So, Marito, can you tell me a little bit about our boss, your company? What makes telepresence robots, so the controller's face is displayed on the screen and they can remotely move the robot around to interact with people. So the controller can go and speak to whoever they want, they can look wherever they want, they can explore where they want and so it makes it really fun to not be in a place but still have a presence and still make an impact. So who is the robot designed for? So we found that kids with cancer in hospital are taking these up and so even though they're maybe receiving treatment in hospital they can still go to school because they're there in hospital and it's a lot of work to get ready and go to school, takes a lot of energy. Otherwise they may be receiving treatment in another city far away from their school so they can have a robot at their school and from their hospital bed use their computer to remotely control the robot and go to school. So how realistic an experience is it for them? Can they see all of their colleagues in the class? Can they talk to their friends? It's a really fun experience for them, they can make the robot go as high as 1.7 metres tall to speak face to face to their teacher or they can go as low as 1.1 metres tall and work amongst their classmates during the exercises and it's really fun for them because they can roll up to the front of the classroom and see exactly what the teacher is doing on the whiteboard, turn towards the teacher, turn towards their friends, move around at lunchtime to sit with their friends and socialise and it means that they're not left behind even though they're receiving treatment for three months, six months, nine months in the hospital they can still progress with their friends and receive their education. I know you're focused now on children with cancer, but is there more kind of impact that will come in the future? Will you be able to use it if there are different scenarios for kids, for example, that have profound disabilities and might not be able to go to 10 school? Yeah, so it's also really useful for people with disabilities. We've actually created a brain control interface for the robot so that someone who's paralysed from the neck down can just use their brain in order to move the robot and so all you have to do is think and once you think over a certain threshold that we've allocated then the robot moves forward and then you blink twice and it toggles the brain, it toggles the main controller to turning left and again you just have to think over a certain threshold and the robot would move left. So it means that people with a disability can control our robot without their hands but we're also doing a lot of research into robotic arms and adding a robotic arm to our robot so that people with disability can have one of these robots and have a carer remotely use a robot to help them in their day-to-day life or someone with a disability could use their own robot to move it around and have it help them in their own life so that they have like a robotic arm attachment in addition to their wheelchair. So it's really about empowering people who otherwise might not be able to take care of themselves and might be excluded from those activities we take for granted. Yeah, exactly. It's about giving people independence so that they can do things by themselves so that they don't need to rely on another person so they don't have to wait for someone else to get there. I've heard stories from people with a disability how they say, well, I was walking along the pavement and I saw a hat on the ground and all I could do was kind of sit there and look at it and wheel myself around it and look at it from different angles and then wait for five minutes and no one else is there so in the end I just kept going. Whereas with the robotic arm they could reach down and pick it up and choose what they want to do with it. So with the age range is there sort of an ideal age range with children to start being able to use this and having the capacity to use it? We're still experimenting so we're getting it out to kids who are in the early teens right now and yeah we'll do more testing and see what the take-up is like and maybe expand our age range depending on what the response is like It's very, very easy to use. It's like playing Mario where you're just moving Mario along and he jumps and you get to experience a different world. It's exactly like that. Now this isn't your first foray into artificial intelligence. You've had a very successful career prior to this as well. Can you tell me a little bit about the project where you were working to assist people who were blind so for example when they do their grocery shopping that they're able to select the items themselves? So in 2015 I attended the Graduate Studies Program at Singularity University held at NASA Ames in California funded by Google and there were 80 students from over 40 countries 44 were women and over 10 weeks we learnt about exponential technologies to improve the lives of a billion people within the next 10 years and so we had talks from 150 people from all these different industries about the latest in medicine, space, in food in 3D printing, in biology, medicine, AI, robotics and then at the end we were told now that you've learnt about all of this go out and solve a problem that impacts the lives of a billion people within the next 10 years and so my teammate and I we thought about all the technologies that we'd seen and spoke to people and we decided that we would put this technology of image recognition on a phone so that people who had visual impairment would be able to identify objects in the real world and so since then after a few prototypes we launched it last year where you can identify 6,000 objects in the real world animals, everyday household items, plants, animals different kinds of fruits so you can recognize 6,000 of those just by pointing your phone at that object in real time so it doesn't require a cloud server so you don't require the internet and so it can do 8 recognitions a second and it just means that you can use it at the bottom of the ocean you can use it in space and it just gives people who are visually impaired this independence to navigate a bathroom by themselves for example without needing to touch where the toilet is or the basin or the waste basket they can just go in and use their phone and figure out where all that stuff is So what do you think the future of artificial intelligence is? Where are we headed with all of this? Yeah I think it's a real game changer there's a lot of opportunities there a lot of potential to disrupt industries legal industry is something that we've spoken about here if you take a task and you divide it up into all the different components then you can say well out of those components we can automate this part of it or that part of it just today at CALF we were talking about M&As and how G has recognised that there's 120 different tasks to that and through segmenting all those tasks have realised that you can automate 50 of those and so AI is really about taking care of the tasks that are really boring and menial so that we're freed up to do more high level tasks that are more exciting Well thank you so much for your time Marita