 Fantastic, we are live. So welcome everyone and so I am here to welcome you to the Limitless Careers Week and this afternoon's panel is on robotics and artificial intelligence. So we're celebrating National Careers Week in the UK and these sessions are organised by the Institute of Physics and there are fantastic opportunities to find out more about the types of career that doing physics can open up. So I am Dr Clara Barker. I am a material scientist at Oxford University and my something's just gone off and back. We always have technical issues. So yeah, I'm Dr Clara Barker and I'm joined by four fantastic speakers from all over the world of science. Their jobs look at robotics and AI in all sorts of different ways, but they have one thing in common, doing physics help them to get there. We'll hear from each of these speakers, have a chat about their exciting careers and then it's over to you for your questions. Please send the questions over the webinar chat function and we'll do our best to answer them. So I'm just going to briefly introduce today's speakers and then I'll allow them to introduce themselves. So first we have Dr Luke Davis. So Luke is a passionate about the knowledge of physics and how the knowledge of physics can explain nature. He grew up in Warwickshire and Oxfordshire before attending Swansea University and completing a PhD at the University College in London. Luke currently works in the University of Luxembourg using mathematics, physics and computers to understand the science behind controlling organisms, both living and the robotics of the future, tiny nanoscale devices. Matthew Gondry is a robotics and remote handling engineer working for Jacobs, an engineering company. He studied physics at university and now specializes in designing, building and controlling remote inspection and intervention equipment. Robots are usually mainly used in the nuclear industry to conduct work which is hard to reach or in dangerous environments. Matthew Watkins. Matthew is an engineering technician at Imperial College London working in the physics department. A former apprentice, he assists researchers with the designing and manufacture bespoke parts for projects of the cutting edge of technology, ranging from prosthetic legs for ballet dancers to prototype iron thrusters. Outside of the workshop, Matthew loves nothing more than baking and playing volleyball and cricket. And fourth, we have Raquel Valesco. So Raquel is the head of product at Viver City Labs, which is an AI startup in the transportation sector that helps cities and councils to manage the movement of people and traffic. It is important to Raquel that what she does has a positive impact both on individuals and society as part of her role. She's helped develop an AI based system to improve traffic lights. Raquel has a master's in physics from the University of Oxford and an MBA from London Business School. But she originally chose to study physics because she wanted to be an astronaut. In her spare time, Raquel loves to be in the water as much as possible, particularly swimming and sailing. So shortly, we'll hand over to speaker one, which is Luke, to start our session. Please do remember to send in questions and don't forget to include the speaker's name if you've got a specific question for that person. And with that, over to Luke. Thank you, Clara. So hello, everyone. So as Clara says, I'm a physicist. So I'm a doctor, but not the one you come to for medical problems. But come to me if you have any physics problems. Can we go to the next slide? So I love physics. Everyone who knows me knows this. And I think one should be should be proud of what they do. And I seem to love physics so much that what I do other people think is actually not wrong. So that's OK. So I was at Swansea University starting my physics journey. And then I went to University College London. So if you can you go to the next slide, please? Yeah. So here's just kind of a group of us starting the first students part of this kind of physics of biology. So they just asked us to take a picture in front of the stairs. And we sort of looked like an awkward band. But there you go. Can we do the next one? Yeah. So I started to to wonder about biology. So on the left, there's this cat. Let's just call him Tom. And the funny thing is that Tom is actually made up of millions and billions of these tiny balls called cells. They're kind of just gooey things. And inside the cell is another gooey sack containing things like DNA. And I spent a lot of time looking at how things go through this purple sack. And actually I had to basically work on for four years looking at hairy tubes. So that's how I got into biology. You go into the next slide, please. So what do I spend my time doing? I use a lot of math, computers, so like writing code, telling computers what to do in order to learn something new about the world. And I spend a lot of time thinking about physics. So these are kind of my three tools I use as a physicist. Next slide, please. So what I look at now is something called, well, it's biology. So if you were to look out the window or to walk in a park, walking your dog or something, sometimes you see kind of a group of birds and they sort of follow each other. And it looks kind of weird, right? But it's also pretty amazing. This is called flocking. And it happens in fish as well. So in the next slide, I'll show. So sometimes if you watch like a nature documentary, you'll see these are called schools of fish. They don't actually go to school. They're just swimming together in a group. And all of these these kind of grouping behaviors can be understood using physics, bizarrely enough. So can we go to the next slide? So yeah, so we have Alex is just a bird. We have Zoe, the fish. And if you look at them individually, you can kind of pretend they're an arrow. So Alex, when he flies, he flies in a direction. So Alex is flying in a direction. And also when Zoe swims, she's swimming in a direction too. And as a physicist, we like to simplify things a lot, almost very weirdly. So I'm just going to picture them as just arrows. So then a group of them looks like the next slide. So when I see these things, when I walk in the park, I literally just see lots of arrows. And this is very simplistic, but actually it's quite powerful because if we can use simple models to understand how biology works, we might be able to make machines and robots ourselves. So if we go to the next slide. So just on the left is kind of like maybe a typical, what a robot looks like. We think it's very human-like, but it doesn't need to be human-like. It can be a tiny machine that can swim around your blood or clean up your house. Or you can even have a cyborg fish that helps prevent issues due to climate change and things like this. So that's my presentation. Thank you so much, Luke, that's fantastic. And so I will remind people that you can ask questions in the Q&A box and also to our panelists, it might be that there's a few comments in there that you want to sort of answer before we go into the Q&A session. And with that, we hand over to Michael Gandhi. Hi, so I'm not using slides, but I'll start talking about how I kind of got into my job, what I do, and then show you some examples of gear I've got here. I studied physics, like most other people on this call, and I have to admit I'd originally intended to be a teacher, but I was doing some summer work before going traveling, and I started working for a company called Amec, and they were at the time a major construction company, and they had just bought a nuclear company, which is the bit that I now work for, and they were looking for people to go over and be graduates, so I got that opportunity. I have to admit the fact that they offered me more money than the teaching course would, had a lot to do with the decision. So I moved over here, and I got very, very lucky in that I moved over at a time when technology was moving on, robotics was just starting to come into things, cameras were getting smaller, computers were getting cheaper, and everything was just kind of, it was the perfect storm for moving on to new technologies and progressing things through. So an example of what I'm doing is, you can see, I've got a crawler there, and those are used for going into, as was mentioned, environments that are either too dangerous or too expensive to send a person into, so the nuclear industry is the big one, but also done work for oil and gas, gas mains, things like that, going into explosive environments. The physics side of it allowed me to, as I'm not a straight mechanical engineer or electrical engineer, my physics background allows me to kind of work as a bridge and link those multiple fields together, so the robotics side and the mechatronics is ideal for a physicist really, because you've got that knowledge of electronics and the knowledge of mechanical engineering, just not as in-depth as some people. The kind of things that I do, so I would say about 40% of my time is robotics, about the other 40% is convincing people that they don't need to use robotics to do something and that there are simpler and cheaper ways of doing it, but that itself requires a lot of knowledge on why you shouldn't use various technologies in places. Things like the thing that's sat next to me or if I just do that, the bigger one that's parked just behind me. Well, some of them are robots, some of them aren't, so some are tele-operated, which is what you see on robot wars, so kind of just a person driving it, giving it commands and moving around. Others are self-guided, so they move through the environments, conducting experiments, taking measurements, removing samples, that kind of thing. I don't know whether you can quite see it, but if I do that, just in the corner there, you can see a QR code on the back. So that's one of the big problems for robotics and nuclear is that the nuclear environment can kill the electronics, so they can cause reactions that you're not expecting, and the robot can do strange things. The QR code is actually all about taking the robotics out of the robot, which sounds backwards, but... And we use kind of cameras and an external computer to plot the course and give commands to the robot. It's still autonomous, but it's outside of the dangerous environment, and it's just sending very simple signals through to that to make it move around. I have to admit, I absolutely love my job. It's new challenges all the time. Sometimes it's a small camera system, or a robot that's an inch across other times. It's things like the one behind me that can pull a couple of tons and move around with a laser cutter on it. So that's me. William, thank you so much, Matthew. I'm just gonna go into the Q&A later, but there was one question of the robots that you showed. Have you made them? So the big one I made parts of, it's part of a team working together. The smaller one, yes, done a lot of work on that. Originally came, somebody else had built it, and it came along, but we then, I ended up rebuilding it for another job, and it's a bit like the old broom. It's the same robot, but everything about it's different. I know that one well. Thank you so much. So next we're gonna move on to Matthew Watkins. So Matthew, go ahead. Yeah, so hi, everyone. I'm an engineering technician at Imperial College London, currently working in the physics department. I've been at Imperial for about five years now, and I came here sort of straight after school and did an apprenticeship. So at school, I was always very good with sort of the hands-on practical side of things, whether this was the experiments in physics or manufacturing within engineering or DET, but I just sort of developed my love of all STEM subjects, science, technology, engineering, maths, all of those subjects while at school. So that's why even though I was off the place at Swansea Uni to do a mechanical engineering degree, I decided to go to Imperial to do a four-year apprenticeship. So yeah, my main role as an engineering technician is to support the research that's done at the university, whether this is with the professors or the students, but my role is to sort of design and manufacture scientific apparatus, which can help carry out this research, which is sort of at a cutting edge, which is what's so fascinating about everything I get to get involved with. Some of the projects I've been involved with being prosthetic legs for ballet dances, like Clara said, been involved in an iron thruster. I worked with a group of students on a static hybrid rocket test rig, which is just a system which would allow the students to adjust multiple variables and see how the overall thrust would vary, whether that's more oxidizer for you all or whatever variable they wanted to test. I've also been fortunate enough to work with quite large organizations like the European Space Agency and CERN with their Large Hadron Collider. So a good example of a project I've worked on, which links quite nicely to the robotics theme is a deployable heat shield for a Mars lander. Hopefully Toby will get some slides up. So this is basically an origami-based heat shield, which can compact down nicely into a small space. So whenever sending anything up to space, you've got to consider weight, volume, because all of these things are massive costs. So a heat shield, which is quite a large system, it's incredibly useful to be able to compact down into a small space. So this is just a prototype sort of feasibility, sort of checking the feasibility of this project. But hopefully if Toby goes through a few slides, we'll be able to see how it unfolds. So my role within the project for the first physical prototype was only to design and manufacture some of the components within this, but it was also to implement the mechanical system. So to open it out, we used linear actuators. We also needed to know at what angle the system was at, so how much it was open. So this was done with linear encoders, which would allow you to calculate just how big it was open to, because obviously the bigger it is, the slower it will go through a Martian atmosphere. So yeah, I hope that sort of gives you an idea of projects I was involved with. Amazing. Thank you, Matthew. That's really cool. I love that. And I think, yeah, it probably strikes a balance with things that we're hearing about at the moment. And before we go into the Q&A, so we have Raquel next. So Raquel, please. Yeah, sure. I think I just have two slides, which I'm going to show you guys a little bit more about what the company that I work for dies. I'm going to go to the next slide. So I work for a company called Devacity, where a small tech startup, which uses a branch of AI called Computer Vision to basically detect and classify moving objects. And what we do with that data, I think so we create sensors like the one you see here. And then there's the next slide. I'm going to talk you through some of the data that we create with those sensors. So what we do is classify objects. And we work basically with councils and transport authorities to help them better understand not only how road spaces and cities are being used, but then also how to take that data and make better decisions about how to optimize these road spaces. And then I can get mentioned in my bio file that we're then taking this data and building another type of algorithm on top of that using a branch of machine learning called Reinforcement Learning, in order to actually use this information to better control traffic. So if any of you kind of have been running late for school or been stuck in traffic, this is what we're hoping to solve. Or even just pressed a bit of traffic light and you're the only pedestrian and you're just sitting there like you've got a red man and we all jaywalk. I know that that's something we all do. We're hoping to create safer ways to move people around the city much more effectively. So in terms of the data that we create, we basically, it's like the one that we're showing. So we can detect different types of road users. So different types of vehicles, pedestrian cyclists. We track them through the field of view. So we know the types of movements that they're making. We can detect if, for example, if a pedestrian and a cyclist have had a collision or a near miss of almost collisions, look at how we can improve safety for all road users. And then most recently, actually, so the image on the top right is an analysis that we've started doing almost to the day a year ago for local government. So we worked really closely with the Department for Transport to provide data on social distancing. So were people actually adhering to the two-meter rule? How did distancing actually change, especially in city centers around Canals? And it was a really exciting year to be in this industry, actually, because we were able to really be at the forefront of the decision-making around some of the restrictions and lockdown guidelines. So what I do specifically, so I'm probably the furthest removed from the technical of all the panelists today. I started working in research and development in geophysics. So I studied physics, but that went into oil and gas. And then very quickly realized that I really love the deep technical. I actually love working with different types of people. So really enjoyed working in multi-disciplinary teams. And my real passion ended up being actually translating science to the other parts of the business. So what I do in product is basically work really closely with our researchers and our developers and work really closely with our end-users, our clients, so councils and local authorities to make sure that we are creating solutions that actually solve the real problems that they're facing. So I worked with basically everybody in the business, which is a really fun place to be. I basically talk for a living and know everything that's going on and basically try and drive the strategy of the company based off of our technical understanding and technical abilities, but also really getting my ear to the ground to try and solve the transportation challenges of our cities. Yeah, I think from my perspective, physics for me gave me the ability to really have those deep technical conversations with our research team, but also I was able to marry it with more of my soft skills and some of the, I guess, business acumen that I gained from a business degree later to be able to sort of sit very nicely in the middle of my company. Amazing, thank you. So thank you everyone. And I see that the questions are basically popping off. We've got loads of questions going on and I know that some have been answered. I'm gonna start with some sort of general questions for everyone here. And actually we've had a few questions about what sort of subjects people studied, what degrees, what A-level subjects. I know that Luke's already been asked specifically about biology. Interestingly enough, I think I started doing electrical engineering and then I moved into material science and physics. And it sounds like everybody here went almost the opposite path, but yeah, so what did you do? And do you have any ideas of what you'd need to do to study in order to be able to do robotics or AI in universities? Shall I go first? So it's a good question. I think it's easy to worry too much about what should I study? I think take a step back and think, if I was to build a robot, what would I need to know? And in general, we know that using mathematics, even though a lot of people find it hard, if you stick with it, it's very useful in science. And also we know that robotics are present of basically just computers. So knowing something about computers will be handy too. But I think the most important thing is to have imagination. I know it sounds very general, but really you have some curiosity and just pick the subjects that you want to understand and that you like, okay, I'm curious about English. I'm curious about history. I'm curious about biology. So I took a mixture of things like English literature as well. So I think just follow your curiosity and it will take you somewhere. Yeah, I'll echo that. I did my A-levels in the UK. Here my accent, it's not British. But I had the choice between chemistry and history. And I decided that even though chemistry was more aligned with maths and physics, I really loved history. And I thought, why I've got a good foundation in the sciences, and I took French in history as well. So I didn't do very well, but I enjoyed my time doing it. And so you can always pick up the technical skills later. Even in terms of the degrees and framing your career, the people that I, my few physics degrees, the people that I work with who are doing AI specifically, AI like deep AI research, most of them have either engineering degrees. One is actually an urban planning degree. He's always been passionate about smart cities. And so he's taken that passion from an early age and translated it into deep AI research. So really it is about being passionate. You can pick up the very specific subject matter later down the line. So I'm going to agree with what everybody else has said. I actually think being interested in something is a lot more important than what you studied as search. Because you tend to learn more and deeper if you're interested in it and you look into it in your own time. Now, the one thing I would say is you probably want maths. You know, all the others really are optional. I did maths, physics, chemistry and electronics, but that in itself is a bit of a cheat because physics is applied maths and chemistry and electronics are applied physics. So what you will find at least at ear level, sorry, Luke, at least at ear levels and that kind of level, what you learn in maths will help you with your physics. What you learn in your physics will help you with your chemistry and your electronics. You already know a lot of what you are learning. So it allows you to pick up that little bit extra. As it gets deeper, I will back off and say they are not just one after the other, but at kind of ear level while you're just learning it, and I know some of you probably aren't doing ear levels, you're doing level ones or twos or whatever it is. They just build on each other. So I would suggest pick two that support each other and pick one that you're just really interested in. The other thing I would say is you don't necessarily need to go to university. Please, teachers, don't shoot me. We have a lot of people working here with me. We're probably about 50, 50. So people with degrees and PhDs and people that have taken the apprenticeship route. A lot of it is really trying to figure out how you learn. Do you learn better from books or do you learn better from actually getting your hands on and doing it? The, yes, you will potentially start on more money if you do your degree, but you'll also start with a lot more debt. You know, whereas people that start on an apprenticeship, it may take them... Sorry. It may take them a little bit longer to get up to that value, but my last boss had never done a degree. He took the apprenticeship route and worked his way up. That's me. Next. Yeah, I'd like to add on to what Matt said, really. I mean, physics is quite a nice subject with the amount of different routes you can enter into the field, really. And even by doing different subjects, so I'm coming in with more of an engineering background, I can bring a lot more to the stuff we do here. I mean, I struggled a lot more with the exam side of things. I always found I was better with the practicals, whether, like I said, with the experiments in physics or chemistry or any of the sciences, I always found it far more enjoyable when far more entertaining, actually getting my hands dirty and doing the physical thing rather than necessarily just reading out the book. So that's why I went down the apprenticeship route, because on my apprenticeship, it was four years long, but I still got to continue my studies going along, doing one day a week at college, where I continued learning. I also got to learn so much on the job. It's so nice being able to see something in a textbook, go, oh, I understand that, and then go to work the next day and actually apply that. It's very rewarding seeing that side of things. One other nice thing about doing apprenticeships is just because I've done this, doesn't mean uni's not an option down the line. No doors are closed, so there's no sort of set out route which you have to take to end up within physics. Everyone can go sort of all the manner of ways you could do a degree and then go on to an apprenticeship. There's also multiple different entry levels, whether you wanna go in after GCSEs, A-levels, or after a degree, there's so many options out there. Yeah, and I definitely echo that. So everyone's got different experience, like I said, I did engineering as my first degree, and then I ended up in material science. For those that are wondering, I didn't even study my A-levels. I actually dropped out of school and didn't complete, which we could do when I was younger. I know that the rules are slightly different now, but I didn't actually finish school. So there are different ways. I will say that if there are certain degrees, if there's a specific degree, a specific place that you want to do, then there might be requirements. I know to do material science at Oxford, you have to have done physics and chemistry, I believe. So you do have to do a little bit of sort of research on the course that you want to go on. But as you've heard, there are lots of different routes, and certainly you can sort of make it your own. And I'm actually gonna sort of, the next question sort of leads on from this, is people are asking about, are there sort of internships that they can do to learn more about robotics and AI, or are there any programs and softwares that people at school can be learning and looking at as a hobbyist? Are there any internships or programs or courses that you know of that you would recommend? So not an official internship, but I know, so I like to play around with Raspberry Pis. These are these tiny computers. And I know on their website, they have a lot of free projects. So you can get a Raspberry Pi for 30 pounds or bucks. And there's projects. For instance, you know, making like a full like a thing that tries to walk or something. So there's free things and they're pretty cheap. So there's free material and the actual hardware is pretty cheap. So that's things like that. I am very nearly did a year in industry. I did a gap year anyways, but I just didn't play it differently, but I did get a placement at an engineering firm for a year. And I have friends who did similar things and really enjoyed it. And you get a better sense of the types of roles and the day-to-day as well. You don't ever get a similar experience just by talking to you after an hour. So it's an, and I felt much more prepared after having taken a year before uni. And yeah, so I highly recommend anything like that year in industry or gap years in placements to look into. So you'll probably find that a lot of companies are doing internships and please don't send me a thousand requests, but I know we take on summer placement students and things like that and most of the groups will. A good thing to potentially try do, I don't know how many of you know about LinkedIn. It's kind of like professionals Facebook, but if you set up an account on there and have a look through for groups that are discussing robotics or things that you're interested in and just ask on there whether companies have got summer placements going or things like that, because you will never find out, there could be companies just around the corner doing robotics in a small shed somewhere, five minutes from your house and you'll probably never know about it. So really, you want to be just casking around seeing what's there. The other thing I would say is get involved in your local maker spaces and things like that. A lot of those will teach small programming and give you access to 3D printers and things like that. And they tend to have good connections with local industry as well. So they tend to know what summer placements are available or at least who to talk to to try and get them. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know much about internships, but I was quite lucky when I was at school, I did several work experiences and I found that very useful. We're actually going to a company to see whether I even liked the subject and learning more about it. And while I was there, I'd be able to see what my interests were or from those experiences, they're able to guide me far better into the route of the career I wanted to end up in. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I know that around the country, there are lots of coding clubs and engineering clubs and things like that. There's all sorts of clubs going on and universities will do maybe summer school projects. And yeah, I know that when we were able to do this, of course, things are very different at the moment, but there are summer, there are school project placements in universities and things like that. So there's lots of opportunities and lots of things out there. And hopefully there's some in your area. And actually talking about that, Matthew Gondry, you did sort of mention sort of something around the corner from you. And Ms. Denan asks, we have a Jacobs around the corner from our school, is that the same Jacobs? Now, I don't know which school Ms. Denan's at, so I guess where is your factory at? So the lab that I'm currently setting is in Warrington. We do have robotics groups dotted all over the world. For example, I'm not involved unfortunately, but we've got people involved in robotics for NASA in America. And I can't remember whether we still do, but we had people doing autonomous mining equipment and things like that in Australia. So there is a real spread. It just depends because we've got an awful lot of Jacobs offices, I'm afraid. I think it's about 700. I'm gonna ask another sort of general question. There's, again, a few questions asking, what are the best aspects of your job? What are the worst aspects? And what does your day job, what does your day look like? So maybe everyone can sort of give us an elevator pitch of the sort of what your day is like and what you like about it and what you maybe don't like about it. I'll go for the next one. Okay. Do you want to look? I was gonna keep with tradition. Go your man. The only tradition I keep too. So as a theoretical physicist, I mainly writing equations. So actually maybe I can put them in if you can see. So I work on a whiteboard as equations. Don't worry too much about what it is. So a lot of times I'm walking around thinking about something, then I try and write an equation or I do some coding. And that's pretty much it. And also lots of walks in case I get stuck on something. It's good to walk. So that's my day to day. And what I love about my job is that I'm thinking a lot about how the world works. I have to ask good questions. And I love the surprise. So if you run an experiment or if you do a calculation, you get an answer. Sometimes it's not something you expected. And that's great because it means, oh, actually I learned something new. And the worst part of my job, I guess at the moment, nothing. Nothing. I actually really enjoy being a physicist. Yeah. So for me, I guess it's the thing that I enjoy the most and the thing that I hate the most are probably the same thing, which is I never really know what I'm going to be doing from day to day because we're kind of a consultancy company. What I'm doing, our job is to solve people's problems. I've got this stuck. We need to fix that, you know, those kind of things. And so the work is highly dependent on what people want from us. So that, you know, our kind of approach is to what's on the market that we can buy? So can we just buy something that some of the companies built and use that to fix it? Can we buy something and modify it or like things I've got around me? Can we build something from scratch? So the day is very varied, you know, and a lot of it is actually talking to customers, figuring out what their problem is, and then going away and trying to kind of think of what I've seen or what scientific papers I've read or things like that that could help solve that problem and then getting together with a team of people and trying to fix it. I would say, you know, it's maybe 20% developing something completely new and the rest of it is just kind of learning how to implement things in different ways. Hope that helps. Yeah, so my role is usually working with people like Luke sort of who would have all the theoretical theory things and actually putting it into practice. And that's one thing I really enjoy actually being able to see a physical thing being developed with a whole group of people and working with a whole range of people from physicists, students, electrical engineers. Just everyone gets involved with projects to bring everything together and get something that actually works. I didn't work on this as much as I wish I did, but many of you may have seen the recent Mars lander, the rover Perseverance. Now, the amount of engineering science that's taken years of research and development, building on sort of mission after mission to develop what they have now. I mean, half of Mars landings have ended up failing, crashing down, which is why sort of, as important as the theoretical stuff is, so is the practical side of things to get a something that works. You can do all the testing you like to make sure you get it right on Earth so that when it's actually applied, it works and it needs to. Yeah, mine is very different. My day-to-day is genuinely changes so dramatically from one day to the next. At the moment, I am drafting two bids for proposals for potential clients, for new trials for our traffic control algorithm. I also generally basically are constantly either speaking to customers, bringing their challenges to our development, research and development teams and brainstorming ways that we can actually solve their problems. I do our product strategies, so then I basically take that away and say, okay, cool, what is the commercial opportunity here? How well can we actually address this problem? And then I work with our founders and our research teams to actually solve that for them. And then, yeah, what else? Mine is a huge variety of things. I do a lot of negotiation because I work more on the business side as well, but also a lot of data science. So I help clients with the data that we provide them to draw insights and say, cool, look at this new cycle in that you've put in. Isn't it interesting that it's only being used at night and not during the day? Why could that be? And so there's a lot of problem solving to what I do, but I'm very much on the people side. And actually with that, Raquel, so there was a question in the chat that was asking, do you think that your job will be able to help reduce the carbon footprint in cities and things like that? And maybe you'd just like to talk about that a little bit more. Yeah, of course it is absolutely. Our mission is to help build a more sustainable future for our planet. So especially on the traffic signal control side, sure you can imagine that by promoting pedestrians and cyclists and saying, reducing the waiting time will help what we're trying to do is create a shift in modes for people to actually be incentivized to travel by foot or by cyclists, whereas maybe it's, you know, we'll take you a little longer by car because we want people to use these active modes or alternatively as well, if we reduce the amount of traffic, you reduce the amount of time that cars are sitting idle and the traffic light, that's just cars that are, it's just your mission, you're adding emissions to our problem. So by optimizing travel and also promoting active forms of travel at the same time, we're hoping to try and do our part to tackle the climate emergency. Excellent. And this one was sort of, this question was asked aimed at Luke and Matthew G, although if anyone else wants to input, of course, but what do you think are the challenges facing the robotics industry now and what potential challenges do you think will arise in the future? And of course, we're all worried about the robotic uprising of, you know, 2025. Well, Matthew, you go ahead with this one first. I'll think about it. So a lot of it is actually, depends which way you want to take the problems from, but part of it is kind of having the number of skilled people necessary to maintain the robotic side of things. And, you know, we need more programmers, we need more electronics engineers, that kind of thing. But at the flip side of that is the reason we need that is because you're potentially using some of those robots to take jobs, you know, that's an awful thing to say, but take jobs from people whose skill set is more trade and craft based so there's kind of, I think one of the major things is the ethics and the kind of the process of how we go for that switch, how we bring more robotic systems into work and businesses and things like that while not displacing people from their jobs and also upskilling people so they can maintain and use those systems because at the moment, if you would switch every job to a robot doing it, the economy would grind to a stop because here, lots of people would be at work and there'd be nobody to actually keep the robots running. So, yeah, thanks Matthew, the race is some good challenges. I'll go from a different approach, I'll say about kind of more of a scientific challenge. So just some perspective is that, so this is why looking at biology is interesting and useful because through millions of years of evolution, biological systems, so like a cat, us, a worm can do these crazy complex tasks. So for instance, me just going towards a screen like this and talking at the same time, it seems to us such an easy thing to do but getting a machine to do it is very hard. So that's why we take inspiration from biology. So if we understand how say the human brain works which we're very, very far from doing, we will be able to understand how we can build good robotics and AI. So there's that challenge, but I also think there's another challenge that we need to consider now in the modern world is our thing sustainable. So Matthew touched upon it in terms of the economic and in terms of society, but also are these robots going to be good for the climate? Are they gonna help us with climate change, climate breakdown? So you as young people have two problems with the science problem which we need imagination. We need people who want to question and say yes, I'll build whatever and try it. And also the people who also like Raquel who are actually looking at implementing it and also like Matthew Watkins and everyone building things and actually implementing in society. We need people on every corner doing a good job so that robotics is actually used very well. We actually had a question for Matthew Watkins. So you sort of mentioned deciding whether to go the apprentice route or university route. And the question is, do you have any regret going for the apprentice ship route? And I guess also, you know, is there actually anything that you say, actually this was better for me? What were the benefits for you personally for going for an apprenticeship? I've got no regrets at all. It's probably one of the best decisions I made for myself. I mean, apprenticeships aren't going to be perfect for everyone. Some people like, for example, my brother was very academic, high flying, getting straight A. So university was the way for him. But for me, although I wasn't terrible with the academic side, my skill sets were far more about practical application and sort of problem solving. And I didn't think I was going to be able to get that all at uni. This opportunity of the apprenticeship came up and it was just so perfect for what my interests were and everything like that. So if I sort of give you an example, my apprenticeship was like first year was full time at college. So I was still continuing my studies. I think I got a BTEC level three in that. So I did that for a year. And then the three years after I was on site learning on the job because it's a university. So I got to visit six different departments from mechanical engineering, material science, physics, aeronautical engineering. And I got a real taste of just how many different sort of interesting projects that are out there. And that's how I ended up in physics. I am now found that physics is just the most interesting one to me, the fact you can actually apply things and see things being implemented five, 10 years down the line. So no, I've not got a single regret about not going to university because the door's still open. That's the other thing. If I did want to go down that route, I can still go if I want to. Amazing. I'm so glad to hear that. And it just shows that there are all different paths or all different routes. And even when we were talking about subjects before, it might not be a linear path. Other opportunities might come in. Like I say, I started doing electrical engineering and then the opportunity came up to work for a company as a material engineer. And then I got into material science. So that flexibility is brilliant. And like you say, Matthew, you can still do a degree if you want to down the line. But I'm so happy to hear that you really enjoyed the apprenticeship. That's awesome. I'm going to touch on something that sort of, so the question came up and we might not want to answer this. But the question was asked, Raquel, whether you face any sort of sexism or adverse behavior in science. And I know that Luke also works with a group that I'm a member of Tiger's. So maybe Luke would sort of like to touch on this as well. Maybe not the sexism side, but you know. Yeah. Very, very also happy International Women's Month. Yeah, unfortunately I have in various degrees. So from small microaggressions on quite a regular basis to a couple of times where it's been quite blatant and in your face. It's something that the world is changing. It's not changing as fast as many of us would like. I would like to say that, you know, even though my degree was the lowest female to male ratio in my year, but it was never at university. It actually ended up coming in later. And it I think had ended up having to add more cultural differences that led to some of these comments. I'm happy to say it's becoming less and less. I also, I chose to leave a very large corporate company for partly for these reasons. I really wanted a cultural shift. So I worked for a small startup or 50 people. I know everybody at a personal level and it has never happened in the past couple of years that I've been there. So I think that companies that promote diversity inclusion are seeing that they are able to attract and retain talent because they have a zero. They don't have a policy, but this is just not something that they will tolerate. But yeah. So sorry. Sorry. I was waiting. Yeah. Just to echo what we're saying is that in general, we need, we need more women. We need more people who are different. And why is that? Because having a diverse, having a team full of different people, different perspectives coming from different places, different experiences is useful because one, it's fun. And two, you actually do science better. Like this is actually, it's scientifically known that science is better with a diverse workforce. And so if anyone is struggling to think of women in physics and sciences, there's lots. So there's a lot of websites. I might be able to put them in the chat. There's so many great women, scientists, that our world would not be the same without. So women, we should give women more roles of leadership to lead projects. And yeah, because they're just as good, if not better. Thanks. Yeah. And so there are amazing role models out there. I mean, the question also tagged me in as well. I know that as a trans person, I have experienced some discrimination. But what I would say is that that's less these days and that the world is a better place. And there are people like the people on this call who are working to sort of prove that. Strangely enough, I've had more discrimination from my tattoos than the fact that I'm trans, because I am absolutely covered in tattoos. And I will say you should wait until you're older before you get them. So we're almost running out of time. So I'm going to ask a very quick pop round of what is your favorite achievement so far in your work career? So this might be a big question, but I'm looking for a short answer. Using simple physics to understand biology. I'm going to go with an experiment I did that used 200 gym balls to test something with swarm robotics and lowering of equipment. I'm going to go with when I built a static rocket test because it was literally rocket science. Nice. You guys have heard mine. Mine is we're leading the charge on AI for traffic control. So we're the first people that have implemented it in the real world in this country. I actually have a patent on spinal implants. So if you have problems with your spine, there is a patent out there and you might have, if you need your back fixing, it might be one of mine. I don't get that much money from that. And I want final thing as a quick pop quiz. Do you have any role models and heroes in science and STEM? So it's strange because none of my family did science. So I read a lot of biographies of scientists, which really inspired me. So a lot of different scientists, but one in particular. It might be a bit boring, but for me, Albert Einstein was a key kind of learning about his life and how he approached science. Of course, no one's perfect, but I just liked his way of looking at the world. For me, it was John Glenn. So John Glenn being the oldest astronaut in space. I remember watching that last month live. That's really what inspired me to want to be an astronaut and go into physics. I don't know whether it's anybody specific, but it was watching the shuttle launches and things like that and just realizing the people on that shuttle, they weren't really pilots or that kind of thing. They were all scientists, multiple degrees, PhDs, that kind of thing. And just the level of knowledge they'd put into doing something that exciting and that interesting. Matthew? Yeah, not really a person, but a project. While I was at school, the Bloodhound SSC was being developed, SLR, whatever it is now. But that was a project I found so fascinating learning about. So that's what inspired me and got me into STEM and everything like that. A couple of my heroes, Sally Ride, the youngest astronaut in space, and also Jocelyn Bell Brunel, who is an amazing physicist and astrophysicist. And with that, we come to an end. So I'd like to thank our speakers. Thank you so much for sharing your experience to our students. Thank you so much for coming. Again, I'd like to thank Luke, Matthew, Raquel and Matthew for their fantastic presentations. I hope everyone found it interesting. Students, before you go, there is a QR code up on screen if you can do that feedback. If you can scan it and do the feedback survey, that would be fantastic. It's just a very short survey, so it won't take too much. Also, a final note, thank you for the teachers. Thank you for supporting the Limit Less Careers Week. And the IOP will be in touch shortly with links to other great career resources from the IOP and recordings of this week's online event. So with that, thank you so much. And I hope everyone has a wonderful afternoon. Bye-bye.