 Okay, so welcome everyone. I guess we can start, right Joe? Yeah, great. So my name is Sandro Scandolo. I'm the director of the research division here at the ICTP, and I welcome again all of you here in the afternoon for this afternoon session. The theme of the session is science and development, but this is going to be broken down in four different sessions. The first one will be lighting and the future. So this is a session that has to do with science and education. So we're right actually at the core of what is the ICTP mission. ICTP, as you heard this morning, is we are an international organization that deals with research, but at the same time we're also involved with training and advanced education of scientists coming from the developing world. Let me just briefly take this opportunity to say a few words about what we do actually at the ICTP. The director of the committee has already mentioned a few of these things, but let me just remind some of them to you. We actually don't have anyone strictly speaking among the staff members working in the field of optics, but we have a number of initiatives done in collaboration with colleagues and with other institutions. We have actually two small labs. Optics, in spite of the fact that ICTP, the TPS of ICTP stands for theoretical physics, it's always been recognized that optics is a fantastic opportunity to also provide some hands-on training for scientists coming from the developing world. And of course there is a lot of demand for that. So we have some collaboration with colleagues at the synchrotron radiation. There's a small lab dealing primarily with femtosecond ultrafast lasers, essentially also in collection with the free electron laser facility that has been built a few years ago at the Letra. These are normally programs that allow us to send our associates, the ICTP associates, who come here to visit ICTP to receive also some practical training, hands-on training in optics. And also, of course, I can't forget to remember the winter college in optics, something, an activity that's been going on for many, many years. And this is sort of our flagship educational program in optics. We also have a small facility working with x-rays. We have an x-ray tomographer here in the small lab here. Primarily they're involved in study having to do with cultural heritage, paleontology, material science, non-invasive testing. It's a small lab, but it's quite active. And of course, we also do a lot of training there. I should also mention, I don't know whether, Joe, you mentioned already our collaboration with UNESCO, with the active learning in optics and photonics, ALOP, which is actually something we've been pushing since a number of years. I see Ana Maria here in the audience somewhere. And in addition, I'd like to mention an initiative that we started recently of encouraging younger researchers from the developing world to visit the synchroton radiation facilities around the world. It's a program that is supported by the formerly IXU, now the International Science Council. Most of the program is actually run here by ICTP. And so we are essentially giving grants, travel grants to scientists from the developing world who have an interest in learning how to use advanced light sources around the world. And almost all the advanced light sources around the world have decided to partner up in this project. So without, I don't want to take too much time to the actual session, even though we have one of the speakers unfortunately is unable to be here, David Samson, for family reasons. So the actual number of speakers on this session is four. I'm going to introduce them one by one. But let me just remind you that the session today will try to address the diverse challenges in science and education and trying to cover photonics for sustainable development, improve the awareness of lighting quality, education, sustainability. We try also to bring around the same table people from the public and the private sectors. We'll have also some representatives from the private sector. So I guess we can start with the first speaker of the session. Let me just say a few words. This is Crisinda Plankovic. Crisinda, she's the director of education and community service at SPIE, the International Society for Optics and Photonics, where she oversees education, outreach, membership and public policy activities. And she also manages strategic initiatives of SPIE at the national and international level, including the International Day of Light. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. Hopefully you had a great lunch and got to get outside. It's beautiful out there. Joe and John asked me to speak a little bit about the role of photonics in advancing the United Nations sustainable development goals. And John touched on this briefly this morning, but there's really a lot of opportunity around optics and photonics. And the International Day of Light is very closely entwined with this. So we wanted to spend a little bit more time going through it and talking about how optics and photonics can really help advance these goals. The sustainable development goals provide a worldwide opportunity for science and technology communities to come together to help address many of the societal challenges with global and science policy interfaces. So this here is the complete list. There's 17 goals. The 2030 sustainable development goals were actually released in 2015. It was adopted by all of the United Nations member states. They're really a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and for the planet. There's 17 goals and each has specific targets. If you go to the website on the UN website, they actually have specific goals around each of these targets that they're working towards for 2013. But photonics can provide really practical, cost-effective solutions to meet many of these challenges. Areas like energy production, sustainable development, and of course health care are areas where photonics has really made huge advances and improvements. I'm going to highlight just a few of these areas. I'm not going to go through all of them. But as an organization, SPIE has actually put together a series of posters about optics and photonics and the sustainable development goals. And we did find a connection between each of these goals and optics and photonics. So John showed you a little mini version of this. I wanted to give you a little bit more history about it so that you can see really how closely these projects are intertwined. In 2015, of course, we had the Year of Light and the Sustainable Development Goals came out. Development Goals came out. But we were talking about what might a logo look like for the day of light because we already had a Year of Light logo and we didn't want to lose that energy. And actually Jorge Rivera, who was here somewhere, said, wouldn't it be great if we could somehow blend those logos? And I said, oh, that's going to be too hard to do. There's so many colors. The brilliant artist at SPIE said, I have an idea and was able to put together this fabulous logo that has been really well received by the community. It really shines and it really combines the two projects beautifully. If you haven't seen them, it's actually available in 33 languages on our website. So you don't have to use the English language version. That doesn't work for everybody. So the first topic I wanted to touch on was hunger. The world population is projected to reach 9 billion people by 2050 and experts expect agricultural consumption to increase by nearly 70% during that same time period. Climate change, of course, is impacting agriculture and in some cases drastically where people rely on glacial waters and monitoring the atmosphere to predict extreme weather and help farmers improve yields is really becoming more and more important. Hyperspectral imaging and deep learning. Farmers can monitor fields to determine the health of their crops. They can also minimize fertilizer use, the use of chemicals for pest control and weeds and can use their water more effectively and efficiently. Drones like this have become quite common in farming. They can produce precise 3D maps. They can remotely monitor the moisture of the soil. They also can do things like use reflective data from vegetation to determine very specific information about nitrogen levels in plants. So there's a lot of different things that can be monitored remotely. But also spectroscopy. I know some of you actually in this room work with spectroscopy and food and food safety. Things like sugar and water in key crops like rice and corn can also be monitored. And we're going to have a talk a little later from Kather about using lighting for farming and indoor farming which can actually extend the seasons of farming beyond the normal seasons and it can help cultivate even for indoors so that you can grow food year round. Health. According to the World Bank and the World Health Organization half the world lacks access to essential health care services. This is an area where photonics can really support the global community and the area that we really were looking into most was telehealth which used to be called telemedicine but it's evolving. Optics plays a key role in simple diagnostics and monitoring but it also plays a key role in advanced treatments things like neurosurgery, dermatology, dentistry and vision correction as well as heart surgery and even reconstructive procedures. But of course affordability, accessibility and availability are ongoing problems around health care services and these are issues for individuals, for governments and for countries. They're really wide-spending and telemedicine can help address a lot of these issues. They can help connect patients through video conferencing and remote monitoring to provide access to medical services that wouldn't otherwise be available in rural or remote locations. Smartphones of course may well show the way towards the democratization of health care in developing countries because they give access to experts who can consult as well as portable devices like ultrasounds that can be used and results can be sent back to doctors in other locations. This could also help address the looming shortage of providers both in the developed and the developing world. There's increasing concern about the number of health care providers available and access to them. Education. Education is almost half the world's population. 3.4 billion people are using the internet and we know that about 1.4 billion of those are using smartphones. So really internet connectivity and access to inexpensive photonics devices is going to bring quality education to people everywhere especially in the world's poorest or most isolated regions. Online learning can work as an equalizer giving people in remote access schools access to top teachers and top resources. MOOCs, which many of you've heard on of massive open online courses like Coursera and edX provide access to really good quality curriculum and institutions and there's also supplemental resources like the Khan Academy that a lot of teachers and parents are using to educate their children and help with homework. And then there's the emerging area of AR-VR for education. We know just recently Facebook and Snapchat said that they're going to add new AR functionality and companies like Google have products, Google Expedition that can help students access the global world from home. They can have immersive trips into other parts of the country and make learning more engaging and exciting. Water. Half of the world's population will be living in water-stressed areas by 2025 which isn't that far off. This has been impacted by climate change and increasing water scarcity but also population growth and urbanization. We also know that about 2 billion people use drinking water from a source that's contaminated with feces. Despite impressive gains made in the last decade billions worldwide still suffer from health problems that are related to the lack of access to clean water. Contaminated water can transmit diseases like diarrhea and cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and even polio. Low-cost water treatment systems by solar panels that can decompose organic pollutants in water and solar-powered well pumps have proven to be sustainable low-cost solutions that photonics can help with. These can provide drinking water and irrigation water in off-grid locations and drought-prone regions. Research is also ongoing into the development of LED-based portable systems for point-of-use purification and access to self-sustaining water solutions really opens new opportunities for off-grid industries also in rural areas and places where there might be disasters going on and disaster relief efforts. And of course we know solar-powered water desalination and water treatment is sustainable and becoming more and more affordable. Energy. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that the world energy consumption will grow by 28% between 2015 and 2040. And we know renewables are expected to be one of the fastest-growing energy sources and a big part of the solution to these challenges. The cost of solar PV continues to fall as it becomes less of a new technology and the learning curve is overcome. Also solar energy is becoming a significant factor in just mainstream energy providing. In the U.S. in recent years it was the largest form of new energy added. Solar PV and concentrators systems that make electricity available where there's no grid have really had a significant impact. We know that lighting is a huge user of electricity about 20% of electricity is used for lighting and that's mostly produced by fossil fuels that electricity. And LEDs, they're well-suited for remote areas. We know that they can help provide light for study but also they're highly efficient, longer life and they're very robust. It really opens up new applications and brings the cost of photons down. Infrastructure. From 2016 through 2030 the world needs to invest 3.8% of GDP or an average of 3.3 trillion with tea a year in economic infrastructure just to support the expected rates of growth. Emerging economies account for some 60% of that need according to the McKinsey Global Institute. In August of 2018 many of you will remember the Miranda Bridge collapsed in Genoa, Italy killing 43 people. You can see the picture up there. This tragedy could have been prevented potentially if the bridge had been equipped with networking tools and sensors that would have provided continuous structural monitoring and alerted people to coming problems. In Greece they actually have a six-lane smart bridge that has over 100 sensors on it that monitor the condition of the bridge. When it was open in 2004 pretty soon after the sensors detected abnormal vibrations in the cables that were holding up the bridge and that led engineers to install additional weights to dampen the cables and potentially save lives. We can't talk about broad infrastructure without talking about broadband. Broadband access is really a critical piece of infrastructure and the percent of people with fixed broadband connections in the developed world is more than 30% but we know that in some major countries in Africa it's still less than 1% and that's really where we see some of the greatest need is in the rural and developing areas. Smart cities add digital intelligence to existing urban systems and make it possible to do more with less. According to the McKinsey Global Institute they can accelerate emergency response times from emergency vehicles by 20 to 35%. Smart cities can shave an average of 15 to 20% off of people's commute times and they can also cut greenhouse gas emissions by 10 to 15%, which in a large city is very significant. They connect applications and put real-time information into the hands of users to help them make better choices. A lot of us have heard, of course, of the Internet of Things but this is really taking it the next step to the massive Internet of Things. It's connecting things on a new massive, wholly interconnected scale that enables devices to connect and communicate constantly so that they can function as one whole unit. These interconnected systems sending information and gathering sensors can really be used to come up with some more refined data to help improve decision-making. As cities around the world push on with their ambitious plans around this and more and more devices become connected the capacity and demand on networks is going to grow. Photonics, which is often heralded as the next era of computing can replace electronics to offer light speed, super energy efficient data processing which will be needed. Some countries like Singapore are even moving towards a smart country model so that's in the future for us. Finally, I'd like to talk a little bit about climate. This is something that really optics of Photonics plays a critical role in monitoring to achieve the goals of limiting climate change to 2%. The countries would need to triple their level of commitment made under the Paris Agreement. This is a pretty significant investment and that's according to the UN's 2018 Environmental Emissions Gap Report so we know that if we don't make significant changes we're not going to meet that goal. Remote imaging is increasing use and understanding about changes in the environment also weather and things like fire and floods. Light-based technologies are really critical for monitoring and predicting consequences of climate change and they're extensively used to map radiation emitted from the Earth's surface using radiometers, scanners, and sensors placed on satellites. More than a dozen government agencies and companies are planning to launch satellites to measure concentrations of heat-trapping gases like methane which is blamed for about a quarter of the man-made global wording according to the Environmental Defense Fund. These organizations are really looking to track nations, industries, companies, and even individual facilities to see who the biggest contributors to climate change are. I wanted to highlight one of the SPIE Startup Challenge winners, Bluefield Technologies which is one of several startups that are entering the sector and they plan to have their first gas-measuring microsatellite in orbit by the end of 2020. So really this is about partnership and the impact of photonics and other technologies depends as much on the actions of government and as it does on the innovations of engineers and discoveries of scientists. We need to find ways to work together to realize the sustainable development goals and expand the reach of technology advances for the greater good of humanity. And I just wanted to remind people who haven't seen this quote by Bonke Moon, global citizens build bridges rather than construct walls. They look beyond the narrow prism of the national and personal interests and work for a better world and we are the global citizens. Thank you. This might be a general question relevant to all the U.S.-based societies doing outreach. How do you navigate the rather skeptical outlook of U.S. politics when it comes to things like climate change, the role of the U.N., the co-operation, the need to actually talk to people from different countries when you're based in the U.S. but you have this international outlook? Well, I also work in public policy as you mentioned and we really talk about photonics when we're talking about climate and monitoring and collecting data. So we're not going into congressional offices or policy makers talking necessarily one way or the other about global change. We're going to be saying photonics plays a key role in collecting the data and we really need the information and to be able to communicate it. So I think that we have a really valuable role to play and when we've come in with those kinds of comments it's been really appreciated. Thanks. We'll move on to the second speaker of the session, Brian Liebel. Brian is Director of Standards and Research for the Illuminating Engineering Society, IES. He guides in this role the IES standards process in collaboration between all lighting organizations for a global and united approach to addressing lighting education and research. He's also a professional engineer with degrees in architectural engineering and environmental design and he's recognized for his work in lighting design electrical and control engineering lighting education and so on and so forth and his research professionalization is the effect of light spectral power distribution of human vision. I really look forward to hear from you, Brian. Thank you. First of all, I'm very honored to be here at this International Day of Light. It's the first time that our organization has been able to present to this body and just we're a little bit different here than a lot of the discussions here. We're going to talk about illumination and engineering, which is different than a lot of the photonics and the physics and stuff and what do I mean by that? What defines illumination is that what we're doing is we're taking radiant energy and converting into what we call the light that the human's envisioned but it's much more than that. It's the light that enters the eye and how it affects both the eye from this aspect of the direct impact as well as the visual environment that that light's reflectance on surface creates and how that affects humans in their daily lives from the perception of how their behaviors might be, whether they can perform visual tasks and also right now we're learning much more about how it affects human health in general and so that's the process we're going to talk about with illumination and then engineering simply put it's creating solutions to create a higher and better quality of life and that's the purpose of our society is to get people together to talk about these things. I'm going to talk about two challenges that we have in our industry. The first is metrics and the second is education and I hope with this group of people we can have more discussions afterwards about it. Now the thing about illumination is that as I said the construct that's built on the idea that normal lighting metrics are factored and weighted for the human eye and here we have what's called the V-Lambda function for those of you who are aware of it that is called the visual response function of the human eye and what we do is we take light units let's say if we have a spectral power distribution of an even type where you have even distribution across the different wavelengths like the sky this is a daylight kind of distribution that if you weigh this the 555 nanometer is the maximum in that V-Lambda function and then it tapers down so that if you have a light source with more green in it or that green will be weighted more than the blue in that light fixture and that's how we determine when you get a by a light bulb and it says so many lumens it's based on taking that basic construct of radiant energy and converting it into luminous flux we call it and it's based on this function the V-Lambda function and so the idea behind the V-Lambda function is that it's representing the human visual response to light but we have to really understand the construct of how it was developed to say wait a minute is that really right because it was developed over a hundred years ago with the studies that were done on a very narrow field of view a two degree vision field of view that's foveal only and in the foveal there's only two types of photoreceptors a few S-cones short wavelength cones but most of them are long wavelength and medium wavelength which means that blue is underrepresented in this function it does not contain any S-cones any rods or IPRGC now how many of you know what an IPRGC is raise your hand if you know aha so this is one of the most dynamic things that we have in our industry right now the IPRGC is a photoreceptor that was discovered in 2002 and we only have about 15 years of knowledge about how it actually works it affects vision and it affects health and it's a key thing that entrains us circadianly it's what resets our time clock it affects vision from visual acute as well as the way we actually measure light in our eye so this construct that we've been working with a hundred years is not accurate right now and it's going to cause some profound problems and it will as I'm going to show you basically this is a psychophysical spectral response done with 52 subjects under 30 years old over 100 years ago fully adopted in 1924 and we are still using it yes there's been some modifications but we really need to look at this more and so fundamentally what it says is that out of a full field of view that we are looking at with our eyes right now that the view that we use for lighting measurements is really that much think of it that how we measure light in daily life if I were to take a light meter in this room I would say that's what it's based on and any of you that want to really know I brought a very expensive prop to show you it's this 2 degree aperture come look at it for yourself that's how we define light for vision and so right now we have a very big problem what I'm showing here is a spectral power distribution curve of a typical LED light blue pump because that's what has made it so efficient along with the phosphors and so if we take a look at this and that's the LED light source and if we look at this as the V-Lamb the function which we are typically using and then we take a look at the different function which is the melanopic function of the IPRGC which affects health and vision you will now see the effect of that that there is that much light energy in every light that we are using that is not being accounted for in our system of light measurements all you young people come over to our side and help us solve this problem because this is going to be the thing that we are going to be working on for the next decade and how to resolve this right now in the light and health community when they are looking at how to define metrics for how the impact of light at the eyes of protecting human health we are having a very difficult time resolving metrics because we aren't measuring this but that's not really why I'm here I submitted a paper to talk about something completely different and so I want to talk about now lighting education this is a sort of question I say what planet are you from and so I'll ask the question for those of you who have been in this career for some time how many of you when you went to university said I'm going to study light raise your hand if that's what you went to college for none of you and that is very common it's common in our society maybe maybe 1% of the people in my society of the 8000 actually went to university to study light why is that well when we go to university we somehow discover this the magic of light we discover it through perhaps studies and religion and culture perhaps our studies in visual arts and theater perhaps through studies in astronomy or physics or chemistry or biology or medicine or vision or architecture which is how I discovered it or energy or the environment or food production any one of these things that you go to university for everything is touched by the light at some point and you learn your little bit about light in that way it's as if you are living on this planet my planet of architecture I learned about light through the way the light interacts with the atmosphere of my planet I learned about how it affects my planet through visual environments and the way I can create spaces and make things beautiful and make people comfortable and productive that's how I learned about it and everybody learns about it from somewhere else Sean Johnson wrote a thesis in 1994 turned into a book where he called light a peripheral science and I read that and I was just shocked by that term but I realized how right he was and so my challenge in thinking of this and what I submitted to really talk about is light is so central to everything that we do and rather than let it be relegated in parts and pieces of other programs and learn through the prism of the planet maybe we should try to teach lighting from the vantage point of the sun and say we want to educate the next generation of people in light to know the facets of how light affects all of these maybe we should think about lighting as a study in science in engineering and art as a subject matter in different societies that are here put together a global collaborative program with universities that have specialties in it to teach a new generation of lighting professionals around the world our organization has started a work on this in both of these programs from the metric side as well as the education called globes and that is global lighting objectives and what we want to do is to collaborate with people around the world organizations around the world to see how we can in fact create this next generation of lighting professionals in illuminations our field but for the betterment of all society thank you very much what are the probably preliminary indications of the effect of this new photoreceptor on our health what are they are there any ideas of how this does impact us oh well the main thing is through the circadian entrainment that is well known if you take a look at this original study you found two things it was the pupil size as well as circadian entrainment and so right now when they're trying to find how to correlate as an example light levels to affect people if we're not including that blue those light levels could be wrong and so in terms of this the health effects of this are pretty profound I'll give you one example let's say that as an example you have are restricted in an elder care facility what we are learning from this is that if you are put indoors for a long duration time and not getting enough outdoor light not getting enough stimulation of light both in quantity and spectrum as we're measuring here that can have a drastic effect on health for people with dementia as well as Alzheimer's because they're not getting the sleep that they need at night not getting entrained properly and that can create other mental problems and actually an acceleration of the disease that's just one aspect of it from the purpose of what we do in our illumination as an example we all hear about glare and what a problem it is especially at night time for driving and so forth and that blue light causes more glare well yes that's probably true because it's not in our measurement system is it we have avoided including it in our system and so it isn't accounting for it and so these confounds are happening in our industry all the time in terms of how to solve some of these problems because our core metric doesn't have it so these anecdotal stories that we have about how the blue light disrupts sleep and causes all these problems now it's starting to become in a position where we can quantify it and hopefully fix it yes that's exactly right we know that the effect is there and it's profound how do we move on from here it's a very preliminary stage so it's definitely beyond the anecdotal now so this is not just anecdotal stories this is real hard this is very hard science the light and health community is very concerned about this in very serious John we'll probably talk some more about this I have to make a follow up too thank you Brian John is director of the division sorry John is director of division 6 photobiology and photochemistry of the international commission on illumination it works on both detrimental and beneficial effects of optical radiation on people he's also been collaborating with WHO on basic safety standards for non ionizing radiation and he's on a number of national and international standard committees covering optical radiation safety and the beneficial effects of light sorry George thank you yes I'm going to compliment what Brian talked about but I'm now more concerned about the public and the public education so we're going to go on a bit of a history lesson first of all in terms of CIE many of you will not be aware of CIE our strap line is that we're advancing knowledge and providing standardization to improve the lit environment so we've been around over 100 years in our Belanda curve but we need to go back a bit further than that because one of the concerns we've had in terms of the application of light and light technology into people's homes or workplaces is that people haven't looked back at what has happened in the past so when Newton said the reason why CIE further you can stand on the shoulders of giants really what should have happened with lighting technology is as new technology came on people should have looked back and seen learned lessons from the past and I'll show you an example of where that certainly didn't happen another thing we're dealing with the public is the concept of common sense now I spent my career dealing with common sense and fortunately in English law it is defined and it was defined in the 1880s as what the man on the Clapham reasonably expect okay now that also needs to be a definition of what that means there's a picture of a Clapham omnibus but this concept of the person in the street who has education this is not someone who's not educated who's educated who's going about their everyday life what we expect them to know and this concept is used in number of British Commonwealth countries certainly Australia and Canada when we look at this in terms of lighting lighting evolved over thousands of years and for most of its evolution it was a flame and for most that evolution we could stare at it and indeed whenever you have a flame a fire or a candle or some low luminance source people like to stare at it which is very nice but we reached the point where people can't do that and if you're interested in London still has gas lighting in the royal parks and they are stunning to look at but there is one near horse cars prey which is the largest gas mantle lamp we believe in the world and you have to be very brave to go and stare at it because it's in the middle of a traffic roundabout but even incandescent lamps it evolved over tens of years and people adopted protection measures when the luminance levels got too high when it got too bright effectively so we would have frosted incandescent light bulbs and we put in lampshades so we couldn't actually see the source not very good for energy efficiency but they stop us from being dazzled by the emissions from the source now of course we take a 100 watt light bulb and most of us even the younger ones of you will remember light bulb was described in terms of electrical power to drive them 100 watt light bulb we only get 5 watts of light out and therefore 95 watts is heat and you phase these out and tell people they can't have them 95 watts of heat from all their light bulbs and their electricity bills go up or gas or oil heating bills go up because they now have to heat another way fluorescent lamps again there are lessons that were learnt when these were first introduced that over time have been forgotten fluorescent lamps produce a reasonable amount of ultraviolet and when fluorescent lamps are first installed they have plastic filters on them that ultraviolet and if you look at any of these sources and fixtures over time you'll see why you would be glad that that plastic filter was there for what the UV does to it we also had the first problem introduced in terms of a temporary modulated light signal so flicker and particularly in terms of machinery so when the public is suddenly encouraged because of government initiatives to improve energy efficiency to have alternative technologies they first of all are very suspicious especially when the government is subsidizing the product now maybe other cultures are different but I tell you in the UK when the government is subsidizing something everyone is very suspicious about why they are doing it and these were given away free by utility companies energy efficient yes lighting quality rubbish and that was the problem people are very wary of these devices you turn them on they sometimes flicker before they came on and then it took a while for them to build up to the reasonable luminance but the other challenge in terms of lighting quality is the emission spectrum from these so you would buy something in a shop go home and in the dark look at it in your living room in a different color so lots of problems with these so when LEDs come along everyone is very wary the public learn they are being educated from their experiences so why are people now promoting LEDs at us when the last attempt with compact fluorescent lights was not very good the challenge with LED lighting was that you had a huge number of electronics companies producing light products when they did not have that prior history of lighting and lighting applications and you will see many sources where the individual emitters are very small which may look nice when they are low luminance but when they come high luminance they are incredibly difficult to manage I stare at a conference facility where I run courses quite frequently and they always give me their latest refurbished room because I know I will be very critical of it and I turned up this room quite late at night open the door, turn the light switch on and there is a complete bank about 2 metres high about 20 centimetres wide of LEDs straight in my face and that destroyed any night vision that I had but the architect thought it looked good but they had never seen it in the dark and there were no problems there so we don't like light in our face and we need to address that so from the cyclist's perspective this technology is fantastic you can see a long way from anyone who is on the receiving end of it it can be a real problem these head torches are fantastic and again you can see where you are going but if you go on a run, a night run the last thing you want to do is to face someone else and wipe out your night vision the public also like to blame things when they don't feel well and in my work life as opposed to CIE I deal a lot with people who are suffering adverse health effects due to lighting and whereas these traditionally have only ever been in the workplace we are now seeing them at home so the public again are very suspicious about what is going on and something else that is going on is the more efficient you make a lighting source therefore you are telling people it is reducing their electricity costs the more lights they actually buy so in this particular kitchen environment there are many many lights a lighting designer would probably say this was a very bad design but we were dealing with a member of the public who had this work done in their kitchen but they could not go in the kitchen with the lights on and we were asked to go and have a look I can be prescribed to buy a clinician to go and have a look and when we got there we discovered this individual could identify problems in some rooms and not in others and it turned out that the lighting was actually going on and off 100 times a second and we now have a very simple tool for testing this and I like this facility here because it shows up fantastically and you want to see this later on if you have a spinning device it is a flickering light because it is a strobe and this may well be a nicely refurbished building but I would not permit it because the lighting in here is going on and off probably 100 times per second which if you are looking at that screen is not an issue but if you are near the back with that screen as a lower component towards your eye then it will be an issue and the symptoms range from the grains to I just don't feel very well now John asked about lighting and the circadian cycle etc and Brian answered that very ably but we are very concerned about some of the messages that are coming out from people doing this work and trying to apply it to products so if you take a cross-section of people everyone's 24 hour cycle is quite different because of their activities but also biologically and there is no one answer fits all but the only thing that we know is that if you get very high light levels i.e. from outside at lunchtime you can probably use your phone in the evening and it will not affect your sleep quality now from a public health perspective that's quite good for children if you didn't go out to play at lunchtime you can't use your phone in the evening and that very simple message works but the only thing we know for a fact is that at night you should have ideally no light we also know that blue light impacts our myotonic levels as we go into the evening which is why again why would you sell a blue LED night light for children's bedrooms so there's two issues about that one is it'll affect the circadian rhythm the other point is that very young children's blue transmission to the retina is about 10 times higher than what it is from a 20 year old so if you put that blue LED night light into a child's bedroom it'll be bright so what I say is how the technology develops in the future common sense should be considered in its practical implementation and one final point on that is as we've moved towards LED technology Brian showed you the spectrum there is no UV and there is no infrared we have evolved under a broad spectrum from sunlight what is the impact of taking those wavelengths out of our exposure and that is currently being looked at so thank you for listening thank you John I'm sure we'll consider changing all the lights here in this room now there's time for a question from the audience there's a question down there are there any countries that are taking it incredibly seriously in terms of light and well-being and health because I met an architect the other day who came into the senior common room at Imperial where I work and he was like this is the place in the entire world because he had worked in Amsterdam where they're very aware of it so are there some places that are doing really well and some places that are doing really badly? I don't think you can say across a country that's true but certainly in Netherlands there seems to be quite a lot of work there are small pockets of individual countries that have taken this very seriously including parts of the UK my understanding in this kind of field is that unless there's something which is implemented in a building code basically nothing happens really because if it's going to cost anything architects and builders just do what they've always done is that really the case or is there some voluntary movement to solve the problem without changing the codes and is the European union thinking of doing something seriously about this? There's a huge amount of work going on on this IES is working on CIE is working on this ISO is working on this SEN in Europe has been working on this the problem is there is no simple answer based on the science that is robust enough what we can say at the moment is there are things you shouldn't do and use common sense for the other things which is very difficult to write into a code or standard and are there I'm guessing a lot of the studies and case studies are being done in rich northern countries and yet the the growth of infrastructure is also happening very rapidly in developing countries and is there any idea about what technologies are being used in developing countries are they getting the best latest technology or are they getting the older technology which can no longer be used in the wealthy northern countries? One bit of that I think you'll probably find out in the next talk what you need to do is put it in perspective as well because if you have no access to light to give you some light even if it's rubbish as we would have had then that's better than nothing and also depends on your lifestyle if you have a predominantly outdoor lifestyle rather than a factory or an office lifestyle it's less important so it is actually tending to be a northern hemisphere western problem having said that of course there are other issues in the Far East where people don't go outside where myopia is endemic so you never see in distance you're not exercising your eyes you're not getting the right light level and I know the Chinese government has put in a huge amount of effort to try to solve that problem because if everyone's wearing glasses that costs a big cost I'll move to the last contribution of this session this will be given by Prasna Khanna Prasna she's the head and director of the Signify Foundation Prasna started her career in the media and mass communication sector she had collaborations with CNBC and BBC and she then moved to the development sector with roles at LEAF and Greenpeace International her current work at Signify addresses directly the global challenge that almost 1 billion people in the world have no access to electric light at night and her role is to catalyze renewable transformations that enhance the quality of people's life by enabling consistent access to quality light replacing harmful fuels Prasna Thank you that last question was just a wonderful bridge to this it couldn't have been better actually the last two questions first of course referring to Signify yes in the Netherlands we're very aware because it is the home and that's where Philips Lighting 128 year old company learning to reinvent Signify because we're trying to move lighting to beyond illumination what can lighting do before the IT sector this is really not part of my speech but I just feel compelled to share it because the second last question there it's about what lighting before the IT sector disrupts lighting and it has disrupted the banking sector with the Google wallets of the world and all the others it is about how can we how can lighting disrupt IT am I I'd love to have this with my kids but perfect, amplify and that's what we're doing I mean there are some wonderful new innovations that you may have heard of we have LIFI where you can transmit data through where the illumination falls there are all sorts of wonderful connected applications of connected lighting across the world specifically in contexts where data is very very useful in leapfrog for example in refugee camps and all sorts of areas so thank you very very much for inviting me to participate today and to listen to me you said something very interesting earlier today about how we use we all use our filter to interpret reality and for us at signify and signify foundation reality has been 128 years of lighting the world and what has not really been talked about today and was with the last question is people who live without light if I would ask all of you and I'm assuming a lot of people who do live and work not you my friend but in the northern sector northern hemisphere of the world what is the first thing you do when you step out of bed in the morning typically whether it's the summer or it's the winter then you go to the bathroom when you do the same thing and then you go to the kitchen at school and they study under light you go to work and you work under light you under livelihood and then you rush home lit on lit streets and when you come home you have a family and in the warm glow of your light you have dinner together and then you switch your light off at the end of your productive day well for a billion people in the world and more this really is not a reality and when you don't have light what really happens in these communities is those who are vulnerable to abuse become even more vulnerable light is a deterrent to violence to crime as we all know that's why we light up public spaces for us so for what signify foundation does what we at signify use our CSR resources towards is to enable sustainable access to light sustainably and how do we do that so you know where do you how do you start off saying okay we want to bring light to what we do best and we want to do it for the world around us how do we start off saying do we just bring these lights and drone them into all these places what's the strategy that we should use and we spend quite some time really trying to understand we don't want to do the traditional philanthropic developmental intervention strategies because if those were to be successful today pardon apologies to my colleagues in Geneva and in New York and in London that is not a successful intervention Africa won't be five decades later and billions of dollars later where it is if charity was a successful way of bringing sustainable interventions so what we do and I'm not actually going to go deep into this because I'd like to emphasize more on the work we do in the education space is we have mapped out the access to light value chain a lot of time today has been spent on the technology you know a certain this luminaire on top of us is not relevant in a village in Uganda in Mbali there you need a certain type of technology you need to it needs to be robust to withstand the local environmental conditions it needs to be affordable to be affordable you do not have the privilege of the luxury of having iteration rounds in your design and your development there's a certain conditionality to it it needs to be frugal frugal manufacturing coming up with different design ways of ensuring there is quick iteration rounds learning so that the technology is really meeting the needs it's not coming from a lab that is based in Eindhoven but it's coming from the people who are going to be using it they use it to tell you you know I really don't need the light I like bright light I don't like your concept of warm glowy light I want to light up three rooms with this one light and I put a partition in between and this light half of it goes there and half of it goes there so there are these sort of feedbacks and insights that you want to use in your design designing of these solutions so the first is we need to get the right technology we need to get it right once we've got that right and there are a handful of companies globally that actually are pushing the boundaries in the space you may have heard of a few there's D-Light, M-Coupa, Mobiso unfortunately went bankrupt recently Phoenix these companies are taking on the massive burden of bringing light to those billions of people who don't have light we then say let's say we have the light we've got that lighting design we need to bring it there are there any supply chains you need to bring it from the manufacturing facility to the port to the harbor over the ship from the ship to the port get the clearing agents get the policy in place so that there is tax exemption so the light is still affordable get that light onto a truck from the port into a warehouse all bearing in mind solar has a shelf life it's like a banana 6 months you need to recharge battery goes into deep sleep you need to then put it on a boda boda or a donkey at the very last mile but you know what those distribution channels exist because believe it or not if there is water if there is no water in those communities there is Coca-Cola there is Heineken all these companies have reached those last mile communities so if there is a will there is a way are we able to re-incentivize the same distribution channels to actually bring a lighting product to those so that's what we've been doing at Signify Foundation we've been trying to address the barriers of the distribution agents face towards adopting a new technology into their bouquet of offerings so when you're a small term entrepreneur a small entrepreneur in Kampala what is your biggest barrier inventory inventory capital do I have that first 5000 to buy my stock of light and then bring it out there do I have sales agents who understand this technology this solar sensitization needs to happen we really don't understand this so this is where we come in with our resources we work with these we identify partners across all these specific geographies who are able to and we give them seed capital we'll give them we'll try to address their barriers to growth and sustainability of their business by including a clean technology lighting solution into their offering they can sell Coca Cola they can bring light the third pieces you've brought the let's say we've cracked it we've got the technology we've got the distribution cracked and there's this beautiful bouquet of offerings of solar lighting everything from a lantern to a home system to a to a larger system that can light up four rooms of a classroom all in place does that dollar a day family is that do they have is it in their financial storage are they able to afford this fantastic technology but to them guess what microfinance institutions have been there for decades of or not more already bringing financing solutions to families they are making solar water pumps affordable farmers are able to buy seed new technologies by breaking down the cost of that of that into smaller sums over an extended period of time and who are we to judge you know an MFI institution in operating in Brock is huge in Uganda for example they charge anywhere from a 25% to 40% interest rate but is Barclays bank sitting there are any of the larger banks there servicing that market unlocking that potential so what we do is we work with these MFI companies to we absorb their first loss which by the way historically our data says there's 98% repayment rate rate of loans so there's extremely high discipline and repayment and respect to financial access that you see in these communities which is quite for us it was quite a learning to have what we also do is we pay for these MFI's to develop the FinTech you know it's a solar loan it's a product that needs to be developed like any other technology that needs investment and there's development for it the solar loans as well the FinTech to make a product to train their people to be able to disperse these loans do a credit analysis there's some funding required that's also what we use our funds towards so we support in the FinTech and to end leapfrog from paper straight into bringing that entire end to end buying of the product to recovery of the loan completely cashless because cash is sticky as a lot of us know what we also find extremely useful when I live in the Netherlands and we have media marked as a key place where I can buy my electronics when something doesn't work I bring it back to them to their customer service center and I demand my money back or they have to respect the warranty are we able to offer the same level of service to these communities just because they should be grateful they have light so what we do is we wherever there is a business being developed for lighting to bring that solar technology into this space we support in the development of training institutions sometimes it's a very it's a these are slow burns very often we've seen it's 18 months to 2 years incubation to develop this entire value chain but you see you know we had for example in Uganda again I keep coming back there was one of our partners what that was busy doing solar installations and they were training their own people to become to start doing solar they had the training capacity they needed a little bit of help in creating the syllabus structured approach an 8 week training program we funded them they spun off into an academy a training lighting training lighting academy the only conditionality we had was it must be 50% women for which they were initially extremely apprehensive and actually the star women who have now all become their trainers so we what we've seen as you train unfortunately gentlemen you train the woman she lights up the village you train the man he runs away to the city gets a new life so that was I went too deep into it our goal is because we're a listed company and we report back on what our claims are so this is audited our goal is to light up in lives by 2020 and when we mean lighting up a life it means that there is a product that has been brought to them in a sustainable way it's not a handout that's not considered for us lighting up a life by training 10,000 lighting entrepreneurs this means anything from business to technical skills trainings because just having technology and having the skills to implement the technology is not enough customer service bookkeeping market activation all of that is part of creating a robust economic marketplace so that local need is met through local supply and not from these outsiders who come in the last few minutes I'd like to dedicate to what we do as seemingly seems to be like of you know it's really this sounds very charitable lighting up schools bringing we came up with a brand new concept of lighting libraries solar lighting libraries what we do here it actually is subtly a wonderful way of solar sensitizing families in a community where an entrepreneur is getting trained where the technology is coming we are investing we will light up a set of schools we provide when we light them up we give them solar lighting for the classrooms which is typically 3 to 4 to 5 classrooms children start studying as early at 6 a.m. many of them are residential they go home very late at night what we do is we will install solar lanterns with the panels that are hosted at the school the children are able to check it out like a book take it home what through our data we saw that actually that lantern was not just used for studying at night but the mom used it for cooking the dad and the mom went out to feed the cattle at night or they went for sanitation use they would take that lantern so it had multiple uses what happened was the family started getting trust for solar they also start to understand they start to save the money because every day they invest in kerosene they are in 2 weeks of investment not investing now not buying the kerosene they can afford that lamp so this has been a wonderful market activation strategy for us what we see is every time we've had a solar lighting library you have the parents asking where can I buy one of these so there we train the solar entrepreneur which I would I'm really unashamed gender bias here we have 90% of our solar entrepreneurs that we support our women because solar as well is how many of you have ever bought a solar product and then just bought it off the shelf it's a consultative sales process you need to understand it it's the trust you know for a lot of the families they're putting 2 weeks or 3 weeks of their earning into this cost of the product they're taking on a loan for this so it they need to have trust with the person who is bringing it it's not to just be you know let's buy it and run away and never see that person again so there's a consultative sales process that actually women are really good at so this is what we're leveraging you know women are driving this here we have lit up about 80 schools there are some pictures there's far more beautiful ones that we have as well what we also do because we're you know a lighting company that does indoor outdoor lighting all sorts of lighting we also light up play areas outside schools and what this does is it takes away these schools are situated in the communities when you shut the play area outside you are you know in the in the face of it it's to light up that area so the children can have an extended hours of playing but actually it turns into what we have seen market places we've seen them being rented out for weddings for every Thursday in Kisumo there is a market that comes around because there's lighting in that village you have rugby matches happening in Ghana in Accra that space being rented out by the school to have rugby matches you have livelihoods being generated on that corner because people are able to sell small refreshments when the games are happening so the the presence of lighting is just not the intervention itself but it's what it triggers outside so really taking light beyond illumination and that's what we do and I think that's it that's that's all love to hear some questions if there are any thank you Prasna we have time for one question one quick question yes mine is not a question I want to appreciate her and also encourage those who are developing these lighting technologies to copy the model this is also called entrepreneurship you don't just give free donation but you are developing affordable solutions for those who could not afford and it's not actual that they can't afford but they need to justify why they are spending on something cause probably for the importance of that small light they are willing to save for the next one or two years to get something even much bigger than that yeah thank you so much quick question yes thank you very much my name is Kedindji Murungi from Kenya I was happy to hear you mentioned Kisumu quick question I've heard you mentioned several countries in Africa which is one of the best project that you have handled in Africa that you are actually proud of thank you so I think my favorite project it was the most challenging and difficult one for us to take on it was to bring we had a lot of discussions with I inherited UNHCR as a partner principally I'm against charity so it was a difficult partnership to actually you know we're typically seen as cow by a lot of the developmental sector so it was we invited the UNHCR team and said this is our extent of what we do we have a design innovation sales marketing HR tell us how can we help you and at that time they identified that in the refugee camps on the border of Burundi and Tanzania and when I say refugee camp it's 12 by 12 kilometers and there are four of these you know there are 250,000 people per camp there's a high incidence of gender based women who spend on a daily basis for young children and for I wish I had I could show the image but young children and women to gather firewood so they spend eight hours a day the little kids out there fetching firewood I have to say the first thing I did when I came home I showed my 11 year old son and I said buddy you be happy you're not doing this and do not talk to me about an Xbox so what and that's the time when they're most vulnerable to abuse or when they're out you know when they need sanitation so what we came out with was let's light up these areas but again being principally against charity what we thought is can we come we worked with the design teams and we came up with the concept of can we make this in a way that encourages livelihoods so the system that was designed it's called a CLC community light center and what we do is we just take the container that we ship the product out in you know typically it's the panels the battery the charge controller and then the luminaries the holes we do we source locally that is placed on a centralized container the panels and the batteries it lights up anywhere from a thousand to six thousand square feet square meters sorry as big as a football pitch and then the women are trained to run clean technology livelihoods there we provide them the seed capital to start renting in a refugee camp in many villages you don't grain for the month you buy for the day you buy oil for the day you buy rice for the day you buy vegetables for the day so people don't have the mindset to take that whole lantern and buy it for the whole month so she starts renting out and we do a whole set of phone charging people want to stay in touch with the families so we did these kiosks which are which provide some sort of an economic stimulation it's livelihood opportunities while lighting up critical pathways which were identified as the most dangerous and a typical space where the gender-based violence would occur I think that to me was a write-off by everybody but I was very proud that we managed to do that and we are not scaling that up to Uganda which of course as you know is a far more easier context when it comes to refugees I think we need to stop here we're already quite late and I'd like to thank all the speakers Brian, John, Kristinda and Prashna thank you very much for your contributions just to be formal now that I took five minutes out of your talk I just want to introduce Kather Simson who has been doing remarkable work in applying photonics to food science and also was the director of this year's Witcher College and Optics we've heard much about on the same topic thanks Joe and first I want to say thanks to everybody for coming and thanks to the organizer for inviting me and giving me a chance to talk about what you're doing I'm going to talk today about I'm going to talk today about physics to feed the planet actually this is kind of a busy slide hopefully by the end you'll see the relationship between exotic lasers dairy and sperm and maybe some other things as well and maybe I should have titled it photonics to feed the planet rather than physics physics is a bit bigger photonics is a relatively new word it really means the ability to manipulate light to control light to create it to detect it and basically to exploit it for our uses when I think about how technology is evolving if you think of the 20th century as the century of electronics it's now become so ingrained in everything that we do everybody in the room has multiple electronic devices on them somewhere everything in the room is run by electronics it's become really integrated into our society that was the 20th century the 21st century I think is going to be the century of photonics and so we're already partly there and having the international year of light in 2015 the international day of light in 2018 and 19 is a reflection no pun intended is a reflection of the importance of light in everyday life the technology of light photonics now for me I'm a little bit biased so I am a laser scientist I happen to think that the invention of the laser in 1960 is what's really made this all possible it has been every bit as transformative as the invention of the wheel on society and it will continue to get even better than that and I would like to also suggest that many of the devices that you think of as electronic are actually photonic devices so who has a smartphone raise your hand if you've got a smartphone you actually have a very sophisticated photonic device in your hand or in your pocket over a hundred of the steps in making a smartphone use light in one way shape or form everything from cutting the case to welding the battery and so photonics is already here it's just not quite as acceptable or accessible to the everyday person as it will be in 20 or 30 years now I learned a lot about where photonics is in the world by hanging out with the international year of light people for the sort of two years that we were involved and going to events and seeing that light is involved in everything from reducing gengivitis to we just heard about reducing inequality by giving access to light to places that don't have it right now simple things like CDs solar energy, removing tattoos this one in the middle right here is some of our outreach that's actually demonstrating to primary school kids how the internet works using jelly or jello for those of you who are American and harvesting light for energy so light of photonics is pretty much everywhere and it's a huge business it is now so integrated that it's actually hard to come up with these numbers so if you talk to the people at SPIE who came up with these or photonics 21 in this case you'll find that they have to dig and dig and prod and probe because they really integrated into everything that we do and so I like this number right here in New Zealand dollars by 2020 which isn't too far away photonics is estimated to be a $1 trillion contributor to our economy now some of you may be sitting here saying well geez she's five minutes in and she did say photonics and food and so far I haven't seen a whole lot about food so let's talk about that here's the story I want to tell we live in the environment of the sun we are bathed by sunlight all the time it gives us warmth it gives us energy it gives us light it gives us the ability to see right it is also the source of our food so the sun is a big reactor nuclear reactor it's generating a ton of energy and that energy is coming to us via light light is something that carries energy and information and that energy that the sun is creating 8.8 minutes and 20 seconds away from us is transmitting that energy to us via light plants turn it into something that is a more palpable form of energy we either eat the plants directly or the animals eat the plants and then we eat the animals and so in some sense the sun is providing our food for us the sun is providing our food and the problem is that there are a lot of people on the planet okay so you can see that that over time population is growing we are past the point of maximum population growth but as scientists we kind of understand this curve of it the growth rate will continue to drop off that means we are going to level out but we are going to level out at a whole heck of a lot of people 11.2 billion people and you know what is really unifying around the world everybody wants to eat every single person that is born wants to eat and right now we have trouble feeding the people who are on the planet today so this is a 2009 Scientific American article so in 2009 we had about 6.8 billion people to feed those people it required cropland on the order of the size of South America and just forward where we are going to be in 2050 or so you are going to have to add the size of Brazil in order to feed all those people and we don't have that much arable land and what is worse than that is that we have increasingly begun to realize that the arable land that we have we have been destroying so farming in many places in the world has actually stripped the land of its ability to produce food on a maximum level so this is a real challenge the story that I'm going to tell you is that if our food is basically coming from the sun our energy as most of it is coming from the sun and it's being converted into the plants and animals that we want to eat that sustain us what we need to be able to do is somehow convert that energy more effectively into these products and that actually is what photonics is doing now and so I'm going to talk to you about three different types of three different ways in which photonics is improving our ability to essentially convert sunlight into something that we can use more directly and of course these are all directly linked to the UN sustainable development goals that Crisinda was talking about earlier and I'm not going to go into any detail on that because she already did it quite ably okay so the three projects I'm going to talk about one is very very directly linked to this idea that we can more efficiently and effectively harness energy from the sun and turn it into plants and the other two are and that one is actually not something I do very much of in my own lab it's something I'm really deeply interested in at the moment and the other two are going to be things that I've extracted from some of my own research that links photonics directly to more efficient use of animals and so the first one is all about the rise of these vertical farms I love this I love this photograph this is 2009 and this is utopia I mean everything from strawberries that are bigger than your head isn't that great you're going to harvest energy from the sun you're going to very cleanly look at that's the cleanest city I've ever seen you're going to convert all of that energy into plants that you can grow clean water and in 2009 this article is about how vertical farming is on the rise we're using more and more of it there are lots of advantages to this type of farming so typically vertical farming is hydroponic or aeroponic you get increased productivity because you get increased density you go up in the third dimension I'm not going to read all of these but they include things like either reduced need for or no need for things like pesticides and herbicides you expand the growing season and you get accelerated genetic gain that's going to be a common theme through this presentation one of my favorites is that you can start to think about distributed farming bringing your produce or your farming closer to the people who are going to use it so you leapfrog over distribution chains that's really nice the problem is well and so you wind up with farms that look like this so this is actually a vertical farm plenty is the name of this company you've got banks of LEDs everything is done inside so the holy grail of course is that you would love to be able to take sunlight convert it into electricity use that electricity then to run your vertical farm and then you can have a farm in say Chicago or you could actually turn this room right here into a farm that would be exciting and it has been growing so remember I said that article was 2009 2009 that's down here and look where it's gone since so roughly $2 billion just in North America in the vertical farming industry and that's a nice one of those hockey stick kind of curves right what is causing that what is the rise of vertical farming where is that coming from well I'm going to argue that actually the vertical farm things indoors is coming directly from both the advances in phytonic technologies over the last 10 years and the decrease in the cost of those same technologies and I'm going to walk through that discussion right now so this is a graph that I really really like it goes from 1300 to basically today and it's looking at the price of artificial lighting over that time period so not sunlight this period of time sort of before here we're talking about fire here we're talking about candles you've got tallow candles made from animal fats this nice transition right here you can probably predict what that's from that's from having coal gas or town gas so you're piping gas into houses or using kerosene and that drops the price of lighting quite dramatically the incandescent bulb is invented right around actually sort of this 100 years invented but you know that's when Edison kind of filed his two important patents and then we get halogen bulbs and LEDs and so you see a dramatic drop in the price of artificial lighting and that leads to pictures like this images like this which are now pretty common so here you've got produce growing in bays you've got artificial lighting that's got a certain wavelength palette to it that's chosen to make these plants grow faster or better or cleaner or with better nutritional outcomes the troll is and you've got now science programs all around the world doing experiments that kind of like the ones we heard about for people trying to understand what kinds of lighting makes us feel better and perform better with plants and so people are beginning to understand that you know red light works better for some leafy vegetables and blue light works better for others and how do you control that lighting how do you deal with all of that how do you make these plants behave the way you would like to this is just one example and if you go online and you google vertical farming or indoor farming or artificial lighting and farming you find that there are quite a number of companies around the world that are exploiting technology the reason people are still skeptical is that it's still quite expensive so the reason that you've got all of these companies coming up now you know you're in that kind of we're in the transformation point so you get start-ups coming along they work really well for a while but they might crash and burn some last a little bit longer and what you're hoping is that you begin to build up stable companies that then drive this technology to the capital of Chicago trying to drive that using solar energy and she was selling lettuces for the same prices organic vegetables as the organic lettuces on the shelf and that's in the local supermarket that's the tipping point when the produce becomes inexpensive enough that people want to buy it and your ability to create the electricity that you need becomes cheap enough that you can really tailor it and run your company like this then we've got a sustainable industry and so we're there okay we're there now all of the companies that I showed you on that previous slide are using electricity generated by a grid and that's part of the reason that they're so expensive now I spent the first little bit of my talk telling you that the sun is the most useful source of energy that we have we're not going to deplete the sun is that it's generating a whole lot of energy out there and no matter how much of that energy we use on Earth we're not having a negative effect on what the sun is generating so we can do quite a lot with that and so that leads us to the second part of this equation so we can generate the artificial light we can do it pretty cheaply if we could harvest solar energy and do that cheaply and efficiently boy we would be great so this is a really nice paper called now 2006 by Nate Lewis and Dan Nocera and they looked at how energy was used around the world and came up with what we call now the 15 terawatt problem so if you look at the amount of energy consumption this is the rate of consumption around the world what you see is that we're right in here somewhere to power the planet we need about 15 terawatts of energy and the only way you're going to be able to get that sustainably that amount of energy is by harvesting the sun now they're chemists and they've got all sorts of interesting chemistry in this paper but one of the things that I really like to think about that helps calibrate how you think about being able to use solar energy is this in one hour if we could collect all of the solar energy hitting the earth in one hour we could power the entire world for a year that's today okay? that's one hour we could power the entire world for the year there's a tremendous amount of solar energy at our fingertips that we're not harvesting at the moment now we need an improvement in technology and this slide is very busy as well but I also really like this slide because it's got so much science in it so NREL one of the labs in the states puts this out every year this is showing us from 1975 to 2020 here how different types of solar energy harvesting technology have improved their efficiency and you can see here this is silicon cells so I just had solar energy put on my house and so we're using this kind of technology and that's these blue curves we're hovering now at around 25% it hasn't gone up very far over the last, you know, 10-20 years the real advances have been made in these multi-junction cells so they're up now almost at 50% which is just amazing and then there's some really fun little things happening with new discoveries in materials so that's perovskites that came up just very recently and boom, they just take off so this is how solar energy technology is improving at the same time the cost of solar energy has been dropping like a stone so if you look in 1975 it was $100 per watt to use solar energy and over time that's dropped like this now there are two drop phases and I'm going to talk about both so there's the one that goes from this really big number down to here but notice getting you down to here didn't actually promote a whole lot of uptake so you know the people in here who are taking up the solar energy those are your very, very early adopters they're the ones that don't care whether they're going to get an economic return or make the money or save the money they're doing it because they like the new technology and they want to save the environment it's this drop in the last 10 years that's really accelerated the growth of solar energy uptake around the world now that's very useful there's a marvelous paper that talks about the origin of that so if you talk to people in the industry about why solar energy has gotten so cheap you'll have people say oh well the cost of silicon has just dropped and you're thinking well how much could the cost of silicon possibly drop is it really going to do that and these guys did a really interesting study where they separated out all the different costs this is the only equation I've gotten here all the different costs associated with solar energy and talked about what it was that led to that drop in price and if you look over the early part of that curve where you're going from remember we had a really high value in cost and it came down low still not much uptake most of what you were gaining there the reason the cost was dropping was efficiency in materials so up until about 2000 it was right it was kind of you're getting better efficiency you're getting better materials but you're really on the back of R&D support driving down the cost of solar in the last block that bit that dropped it down to where we really started getting some significant uptake you saw something different it's economies of scale it's our ability to manufacture solar energy at a useful price and that's what means that homeowners go out and buy solar panels for the house they put solar water heating systems on their houses and farmers start thinking about running their farm on solar energy so it's economies of scale plant size things like that that lead to the drop in the price of solar energy and policy so we still have quite a lot of government R&D supporting this so we're right at this cusp where we've got now excellent light sources all the LEDs that are growing the plants inside these greenhouses and we're also at the point now where our solar energy is robust enough but also cheap enough that you can start to imagine that kind of utopia where you harvest energy from the sun and then recreate the sun in your farm to be able to grow plants more efficiently and so you begin to see companies like this spring up so this is from a Philadelphia newspaper called Patch the world's first solar powered indoor vertical farm so they've put solar powered panels on top of this warehouse unfortunately this kind of thing also happens so you get headlines like the CEO of this farm is either a farmer of the future or a fantastic fraud it's not the farming used of things like stealing $350,000 from a school for autistic children and stuff like that so these guys are now shuttered at the moment that makes me grumpy because a year ago this is a really great example today it sucks but the high end product that's where you're getting a lot of the drive that's where you're getting people really breaking in anybody recognize this plant anybody want to give it a go I'm seeing some giggles no one wants to admit to recognizing that this is cannabis if you google vertical farming in Canada the number one hit you get is cannabis so cannabis has been grown under LEDs forever legally and illegally they're very very good at it and now in places like California you have companies that sell a high end product okay and so the link the high end product it's a relatively expensive product and the experience over the years of growing it means that you end up with companies like Candescent leading the industry so Candescent just put solar panels on its cannabis farm now they can't get insurance to put it on the roof so they've had to build carports but it works very exciting and one of the reasons they do it is because of the confluence and in some sense cognitive dissonance of different industries so you've got the cannabis industry being extremely energy intensive so this paper in 2012 in 2012 it was estimated that in the United States 1% of all of our power went to growing cannabis and the people that tend to be in California so engaging in this type of activity tend also to be very environmentally conscious and so they want to reduce their carbon footprint they want to reduce the electricity that they use and so this is a really interesting development so it's happening we're seeing it all over the place this is one of my favorites so this is a farm in the desert of Australia it's in South Australia and it's a quite successful solar farm they don't use any water from the ground they pull all of their water straight out of the ocean so it's salt water they use concentrators so these are all concentrators solar energy up here they do both photovoltaic and photo-thermal collection they then run a whole series of greenhouses so they're not doing as much of the LED side of it but they are doing all of this harvesting they use the energy they use the sun desalinate the water they dump the salt back in the ocean they use the water in their greenhouses they also create power so that's the photovoltaic part that power is used to control the temperature inside those greenhouses and they also well that's the heating and stuff here and from that they make delicious produce which is exciting so all of this advances in photonics I hope that I've convinced you that being able to conduct it, distribute it, change it do that cheaply and efficiently is actually having quite an impact on indoor farming vertical farming which is directly related to all of these sustainability goals right? less water use, no pesticides controlled by the farmer it's all, it's distributed everything that you need is on site you don't need a grid, all of that sort of stuff just fantastic so I've talked about this one I'm going to switch gears and talk a little bit about a couple of things that we're doing in our lab that's linking high tech photonics in some ways to improving the primary industries so when I moved to New Zealand in 2011 I really only ever had done fundamental science so the thing that made me want to be a scientist was trying to understand how molecules convert light into more useful forms of energy and right now those of you who are awake are doing that right now that is converting light the light that's being generated here and traveling to you into rotational motion so that's the first step in vision so you've got a molecule that does that in 700 millionth of a billionth of a second and then all of the consequences of that change in its shape are what make your brain go oh I just saw some light and that's what I used to study and I moved to New Zealand it turns out that in New Zealand there's a lot of influence on research that really emphasizes having an impact outside the lab so yes you do good fundamental science but you also are kind of pushed towards applying that science towards something and so now 10 years later not only do we still do all the fundamental stuff because you can't do good applied science unless you do good fundamental science but we also do quite a lot of applied science in micro machining for industry and we have spin off companies that do things like sort sperm by sex for the dairy industry and point of cow diagnostics and those are the things I'm going to talk about today so photonics is helping with muscles we have projects in this space muscles and meat as well I'm not going to talk about that at all but I'm going to make the link between how photonics exotic lasers and milking can help one another and how we can deal with reproduction I should say that it's been a really interesting experience to move in these directions I imagine when I moved to New Zealand that we would be primary industries champions so I think that we should have a robe and at least I should wear my underpants on the outside or something right because you can't be a champion and the types of work that we're doing in this space also lead to things like this so in 2017 there was an election for prime minister this is our old prime minister who rocked up into our lab called the day before and said the minister for science and innovation and I want to come and announce the next funding successes for the place where most people get their funding that's my son so the deal was that because we were going to head out on a little vacation trip and we had to cancel that because you know when the prime minister says I want to come to your lab you say yes sir absolutely sir so he got a selfie and the moment where he just reached up and put his arm around the prime minister went like this anyway so you know we're having an impact now the first company I'm going to talk about we started in 2011 and it was because a dairy investor came to me and said you know there are five problems facing the dairy industry can you help and one of these was the ability to sort sperm by sex okay so the challenge is that for her to make milk she's got to have one of those but not all of those have the same value and the single most important genetic determinant that dairy farmers would like to control is the sex of that offspring okay so they would like to be able for example to breed the top half of their herd and generate only females because they tend to replace about a third of their herd every year and they want better performers and maybe breed the bottom half of their herd against males and sell those off for beef okay our company is designed to give them that opportunity how does it work well we use microfluidics so sperm are a little bit twitchy they don't like to go through nozzles and things like that and so we put them in a microfluidic system because all the flow is laminar so you're in flow streams you don't have a lot of shear stress on the membrane so that microfluidic chip is kind of a human hair we stain them off chip for DNA content and so you just use a stain that is there in proportion to the amount of DNA that's in the head the X chromosome is a little bit bigger than the Y chromosome so when you make the cells fluoresce the females are a bit brighter than the males which is really easy to remember and so we put them on our chip we use a laser to orient them in the channel okay so sperm are also very strangely shaped if we'd known this we probably wouldn't have done this project because this is a real pain there are about 10 microns by 5 microns by 1 and in fact these faces are so parallel that the head of the sperm acts like a wave guide so for those of you who know how fiber optics work when you make a sperm head fluoresce about half of it comes out in a cone 30 degrees like that and the other half comes out in just this sort of isotropic sphere that you expect flash fluorescently stained sperm move they swim by rotating they basically flash really brightly at you okay now we're looking for 3% differences in fluorescence so that's a really a big challenge to sort out and so we use hydrodynamics that is the fluid flow and also a laser to orient those sperm relative to our detector we use a second laser to induce them to fluoresce and then we use a third laser this is where the key novelty is here to actually nudge them in the channel so for those of you who are wearing glasses as the light travels through your glasses it changes direction a change in direction is an acceleration F equals MA right so you've got forces that are depending upon whether you're near or far-sided they're either pulling them off your face or they're pushing them back onto your face really tiny forces but we're exploiting those in our system here about a year and a half ago this is what it looked like there's the chip in the middle you see we've got light sources coming in and out we've got nano pumps and sensors in here it's basically the business model is that you make this thing for about $10 and you sell it for about $1500 and you have an instrument all the rest of this sits inside a box about this big and someone who's a high school graduate and has been trained can use it not bad eh how does it work? when a particle flows through a laser beam there are two forces so I described it as that change in direction F equals MA you get a force that pushes the particle in this direction and you get a force that pulls it into the beam so anyone who's ever heard of laser tweezers has heard of the types of forces that we're using here and it turns out that the Nobel Prize last year Ashken won the Nobel Prize for discovering exactly that the fact that when you interact in a transmissive way so the light is passing through these objects we're just refracting that you exert a force on those particles interestingly the other two people who won we use their the type of laser that they want for to make those chips so they make the mask that we use to then do the photolithography this is cool so I'm going to show you how this works now this is not the one that we showed a potential investors in a second if I can get it to start where's the mouse oh there it is there it is we don't show this one to investors you're going to see why in a second and I can't show you sperm themselves what you've got is 10 micron beads that are passing from one side to the next the reason we don't show this to investors is because they don't like it when we slam them into the far wall and they kind of skitter down the side that's not good for the cells but it's really nice for us to be able to see these big differences and of course we're physicists and engineers and all of that stuff so we track them all I can tell you that that was about 250 piconutans worth of force so to calibrate you if you put an apple in your hand that's a newton you hit a hammer with a nail no you hit a nail with a hammer that's about 500 newtons a major league baseball player hitting a fastball 36,000 newtons 450 times 10 to the minus 12 newtons this is why your glasses don't fly off your face if your glasses are drifting down your nose it's not because of the force of the light very small forces now why would you do this well it turns out I was completely had no idea nobody in the OECD well not nobody very very few people in the OECD if you're a dairy farmer has like a bull in a paddock 90% of dairy cows are born through artificial insemination a technician reaching way in there up to the elbow and depositing purchased sperm it's a huge industry 2 billion dollars and that's just in the OECD alone there is a way to sort semen by sex today it's called flow cytometry it's got about a 3% market penetration now for us a new start-up company that means that this is a highly addressable market these guys are all using high-tech artificial insemination and they would love to have a better product and so when we were developing this technology we had partners in the artificial insemination industry that said that within five years we would probably have at least half the market using our product really really exciting and this is the origin of Joe likes to say that we changed the GDP of New Zealand by 0.2% it's based on estimates like this so you could give farmers the ability to make more milk very rapidly and also reduce the price of having them do it now for me and for the purposes of this talk let's get us back to how we are going to change food and farming with photonics the real advantage here is going to be in the developing world so India has more dairy cows than anywhere else on the planet so 45 million or something like that at last count eight Indian dairy cows to make the same amount of milk as one U.S. dairy cow so think about that the impact on the environment is roughly the same per cow the per cow impact on the environment so that means to get the same amount of milk I've got to do eight times as much damage to the environment in India as I do in the U.S. roughly and so if we can help accelerate the genetic gain in places like China and India by giving farmers a tool that lets them only breed the top half of their herd against females so you get this accelerated genetic gain then that would drastically improve our ability to feed these people without damaging the environment and why would you want to do that well it's because milk is an amazing food it really is a wonder food okay five percent of all energy this is global in the world comes from milk or milk products ten percent of protein it is the number three provider of protein and fat in most diets around the world and so many of the developing countries are trying to grow their dairy industry this is kind of a frightening graph what happened to the oh there it goes somehow we've lost the y-axis so this comes from the OECD FAO report and which is a really nice report if you're interested in this stuff if you think about going from 2017 to 2027 this is a snapshot of what they think the dairy industry is going to do for different countries and the size of the bubble is the size of the dairy industry today so if I start at zero if I were sitting right here it would say that if this were Cather's country and I had a little dot there that I wouldn't change either the number of cows or the amount of milk per cow and the U.S. axis is number of cows and I already said that India has more dairy cows than anywhere else and look where they're headed in the future they're headed to grow the number of cows in India which is not a good thing it's not a good thing at the same time you don't want to tell people in India that they can't have as much milk what you'd really like them to be doing is increasing the milk per cow so that's what China's looking at so China actually expects to have a smaller dairy herd a smaller number of cows this is what you want to do and the ability to sort sperm is going to drive in that direction that's really exciting so where is engender now well actually right around 2017 we met a really important technical milestone we won a whole bunch of awards we were looking at a series B fundraise to get us to the next level commercialization we were actually looking at maybe being a biotech or agtech firm that whole razor blade model you make your money on the chips and all of that and we got acquired so a company that we had worked with came in and bought us so this is a company out of the Netherlands and it's really been fantastic so we got acquired by a company that is really all about providing the world with a better source of dairy and by better sustainable better for the cows better for the world and so they're much more lined with I think as an academic my own value stream so now my job I've taken three years off from the university I'm there one day a week I'm chief science officer of engender trying to take that laboratory contraption to an actual product is very very exciting okay so the second story I'm going to tell you very very quickly here so this is not going to go into a whole lot of detail on this one is really about trying to give farmers how to identify the top of their herd so right now most dairy farmers get a herd aggregate kind of average of productivity in terms of milk fat somatic cell count all the types of things that you'd like to measure and that means that they can't look at this herd and go well Bessie is my main fat and protein producer and buttercup here has an utter infection and I need to take her out and treat her and then put her back in and you know Maisie over here right on the edge of a nutritional collapse so dairy farmers what they really really want is they want to turn grass into milk product using cows and that means they want every single calorie that they can that the cow is eating to turn out into product and that means that most cows are run right on the edge of a kind of nutritional not really collapse but you want them to be healthy but you want them to be productive right and so Orbus our technology again a microfluidic technology is designed to give farmers that ability to go in and we call it point of cow diagnostics to go in and on a cow by cow level identify or measure and report on the reproductive status the nutritional status the health status and the productivity of every single cow every milking or whatever rate the farmer wants now this can't be the same what this can't be the same kind of technology as engenders right so that photograph I showed you of the engenders chip that's not a lab on a chip that's a chip in a lab and something like that would never work in a dairy farm so what you want is to be able to put a reader write a spinner thingy under here use a centrifugal disc the reason you use a centrifugal disc is it means you need no pumps you get rid of all of the pumps and sensors and all of that you're using the physics of spinning a disc and the robust technology that every single one of you has in your car which is a CD player so a CD player is basically a very sophisticated motor system and an optical system and we just adapt that add some high tech to it this is a strobed picture who had the strobes this is a strobed picture of one of these centrifugal discs working you put milk in the center you spin it out at the end you want and you can see that we've got milk going into different reservoirs we're separating out the fat putting the cells down here and I can't show you in much more detail than that to be honest farmers want this the global cost of utter infections is $35 billion a year missing impregnation in places like New Zealand and in some other places in the world where you do cyclic you do seasonal production of milk in the US it's like a factory you do it all year round and in some places it's really important that you get pregnant the first time the cows get pregnant the first time and if you can identify those ones that are really the top performers you can increase the productivity of your herd you can increase the amount of money you make just by breeding the top ones against top dairy bulls and replacing the bottom ones so you make every single season your income goes up because every single cow is more productive we use a lot of spectroscopy and imaging this is just another picture of the same thing these discs are made a bit of a different way but I'm not going to talk about that at all you know we came in third place in the SPI startup challenge last year so things are taking off that was really fun and where are we headed well first we're doing fat protein this is what causes how you diagnose utter infection the big one here is progesterone so right now we want to be able to tell farmers when it's time to inseminate their cattle so that they make sure they get it right every time the competing technology here believe it or not is to put paint on the back of the cow and when the cow is becoming receptive other ones will mount her and scrape the paint off so I think this can compete with that and that's we'll be able to test for almost anything so the ultimate goal is to be able to identify milk is an incredibly complex fluid and we have a lot of expertise in identifying the various components in milk and that's partly because we do a lot of work with milk companies like Fonterra and so ideally you'd be able to go in and say you know what that cow makes milk that's really good for Greek yogurt and that cow right there is one that we want to make so you can begin to tailor your herd and people think that you can see it now 15 years ago you'd go to the grocery store to buy some juice and you'd get orange juice or apple juice maybe grape juice now you go in the juice section and it's like I want grape juice with a little bit of strawberry flavor and some mango and some other exotic thing in it the milk industry is going in the same direction some people think that 5 years from now 10 years from now you'll go into the supermarket and you'll say oh you know what I would love to have some milk from France today or that region in Italy that's got that particular grass and whatever and so we'll be able to help them achieve that okay so I have talked to you now about three ways that Photonics is helping improve how we feed our planet the first one is a very straight forward you know what to harvest the sun's energy and help plants turn it into energy for us okay and we use Photonics to do that on both the collecting end and on the deployment end these two are more about using light in kind of ways to do things like generate force and help make our animal reproductive system better to give farmers tools for improving their herd productivity and then using light to help farmers identify which members of their herd are the right ones to breed for increased productivity I want to talk a little bit about just the people because of course the goal here physics to feed the planet we're not actually feeding the planet we're feeding the people on the planet so this is all about being able to make people's lives better the people who do the work here so this is the engender team they're the semen demons these are the key people we have a bunch there as well this is slightly out of date I've had to step down I was chief science officer of both of these companies but now I'm a director of this one but we've got a team here including a student who went to OSAs entrepreneurship class because he wants to be CEO he's now chief he's just taken my job he's now chief science officer of this company so what we're trying to do with these companies you know we generate a lot of graduates in Photonics in New Zealand we run a lot of jobs in New Zealand New Zealand's first industry is the primary industries that's the thing that leads our economy and so what we're trying to do is provide jobs for people as well so they leave they take the company with them whether it succeeds or fail or fails you still train a whole lot of people to be innovative creative and to think about how to solve problems whoops this is the group as a whole that's I like to show this in the northern hemisphere in Christmas because this is the Christmas party that we had in my backyard and with that I will just say thank you very much for your attention thank you very much Kather that was a wonderful talk I hope you realize how many puns you made during that talk I counted about six really good ones too we have time for quick questions so thank you for your talk it was very inspiring I have one question how do you deal with this part of population how do you convince them all those people who go to the supermarket looking for organic and natural stuff that all that you presented us it's no harm for their health but it's actually improving their quality of life that's a really good question which is how do you transform a culture in some sense into embracing the kinds of technology that we're talking about I think with indoor farming in particular we have a really good story to tell there and that's because many of the people who go and are willing to pay extra for organic or grown in a special place or in a special way whatever it is those are the same people that are against pesticides they often talk about a return to old farming people never go back we're never going to go back as a society to manually plowing fields and all of that sort of stuff so if we can present it in a way that says look you're going to get a better product your food is going to taste better it's going to be better it's going to be better for you it's going to reduce the impact on the environment and it's going to reduce the kind of what we think of as chemical high tech I think you've got a really good story to sell so I'll give you an example I visited Driscoll's berries have you heard of Driscoll's berries in fact probably anybody who eats kind of OECD countries is most likely eating a Driscoll's berry and they're very interested in this because right now the way they make their money is they sell a strain of raspberries they sell it around the world farmers grow it up and all of the berries if you get a punnet of raspberries they're all genetically identical because they've come from these plants imagine being able to grow raspberries for only flavor where you no longer have to worry about hardiness against pester disease you don't have to worry about the fact that if you grow them in California you're going to have a rainy season and a dry season so the produce that you get out of these sorts of hydroponic and aeroponic farming is of higher quality it tastes better you can grow it up for types of things that you can't select for today and I think that's what's going to change that side of the world on the other side the animal farming there are many people who think that we shouldn't be farming animals and I have some sympathy with that but I think that at the same time we can't tell certain parts of the world no no you can't have access to meat because that's associated with prosperity and so what we have to be able to do is provide them access to that that meat that source that milk without damaging their own environment and that's I think the story that you tell around those second two okay I think we'll you can catch Kather at the coffee break and the reception because she'll be all over the reception let's thank Kather again that was a wonderful talk now John, John Taylor oh there you are I was looking everywhere so John Taylor is going to present a video so I'll just give it to you Hi so on the International Day of Light we are all celebrating together and many of you in the audience are in the science community and we have become really good at celebrating as a group and on top of that the next thing we look at is outreach and how we can celebrate outside of our community but I work at the optical society and what I realize we typically do is we look at youth education outreach which is critical and we have to make sure that children are educated on optics and photonics and how important light science and technology is but there is this big demographic that we weren't reaching which is people who have finished their traditional education and they're probably non-scientists who are taking all of the technologies that they're using for granted so the thought we had starting to plan for how we would celebrate the first International Day of Light was how can we reach this group that isn't interested which is really hard so about the same time an art space in Washington DC opened called Art Tech House and they specialize in creating immersive installations that feature light art or light technology so they're filling up their sessions they're paying to go this audience that we would love to reach and wish were captive for us is participating in in their art space so with the American Institute of Physics American Physical Society and OSA we partnered together with Art Tech House this gallery and it's where the story of this documentary begins we Art Tech House brought in an international light artist called Nanotech about knowing it their light art is in some car commercials this project and the documentary you're going to see which was created by AIP's inside science program is some perspectives on the project itself and that we were able to connect the artists with members of our community and scientists and engineers and introduce them to a new medium and corning fibrins light diffusing fiber for one of the pieces that we have been able to use otherwise and if you take away anything from it it's kind of, it's very dark in a way a documentary not the topic, just the style you'll see but if you take away anything there's an opportunity that's beyond even communicating with this audience that it's reaching the artists themselves that suddenly getting to work with scientists and engineers there was a potential multiplier effect and they talked about their work with the press and shared their new knowledge of the science behind what they were using and the other one is that this is just the beginning that there's an amazing opportunity for us to connect with these art spaces that are popping up all over the world using technology that is so essential for development and reaching the audience that eventually will, well not even eventually hopefully will vote for representatives who support science and we can ensure that light science technology stays in the, becomes more in the center stage of our arena so with that I have no idea how to switch this to a video but he does Light is absolutely fundamental to understanding the galaxy our solar system and the universe Light in general is such a good material to work with you could light up a material with it it could also be used as a sculptural material something that will appear within space it could be something that could be atmospheric and ambient it could also limit a space it could contain a space it has so much to do with how people feel within a space technology is becoming an incredible tool for artists to use to create incredible experiences for us for this project it's drawing in a space the space itself becomes dark and then we have white lines and we create the most contrasted environment as possible together on a project in Paris it was like a commission for painting in an entrance building so we did a phosphorescent painting so it was a small introduction to light it was in 2013 he was also doing music and he wants to more create his own environment including the sound and that's why we work on installation with translucent screen where we can kind of change a space for me I was more in drawing and video what interested me it was more his notion of space and specialization I think it came together pretty naturally in a sense where when we started non-attack it was already our whole life I mean it's not because we we started making living out of it that it started being our life just at some point we realized we were only doing this and it became our job I hate to call it like that but yeah it became our job and we're just sacrificing everything else in life so we never had the impression that there was a transition the moment we released the first project was already part of our life it's funny because it's the first light we worked with and basically the idea was we really liked how like fluorescent tube looked like so basically like neon tubes but we disliked the fact that it was impossible to deal so I think in our aesthetic we work a lot with geometry or like with white and also with line and I think you know playing with space and how we make the space disappear appear create that illusion building thin bright lights International Daylight has been declared by UNESCO as being the 16th of May this year and going forward and it allows us to revisit many of the themes from the International Year of Light to understand the important role that light and light enabled technologies play in our day to day lives so the International Year of Light was a year long celebration of the importance of light in our fields in culture in science in health in climate and energy 13,000 events took place across the globe in 147 countries and it was the first of its kind the International Day of Light celebrates actually the demonstration of the first laser that was on May 16th 1960 and that's why we have the International Day of Light on May 16th I think people should take away from the International Day of Light some appreciation of power that light has for making human life better so we're in Paris now studio the whole idea of this 0.1 installation that we're going to do is to make material the thinnest as possible so when it's off it's almost invisible Me and my partner Tati we kind of missed every time we felt like something was missing in DC in the art scene but for us what we wanted to do is to have our own art space where we can curate the art shows that are very relevant of today and also bringing artists to inspire locals the space is dedicated strictly to arts and technology the art is that use technology as a primary medium to create and we're showcasing this type of artworks with the help of science and technology and tools like what we have today makes possibilities limitless what we're showcasing here is that you become a part of the art you become a part of creation you can create that whole movement the whole interaction and understand in a better way and emotionally be more interested in intrigue if you make sound design to an immersive light installation it could be a playground to create so many narrations in a lot of places we'll have a blank computer and just sit and write music and program light that kind of setup also creates that kind of organic relationship between sound and light what's most important for us is that everyone can relate to our installations so any age, any social environment just to put them in front of an immersive experience there's some kind of magic as long as you start working around you'll see different kind of layers coming out and I think it's simple but at the same time you can look at it from so many sides and so many perspectives that we like the complexity of it really wonderful alright that was great so I like to inform you coffee is out there thank you very much John for that wonderful presentation so let's go out for a coffee break come back at quarter till and then we'll continue so we'll come back for Saroon's presentation on photography right after the coffee break first thing