 All right, welcome back to stage C in just a few moments we'll have Chris Wright Excellent Chris Wright who is come from Switzerland and we'll be talking about reinventing invention And I hear tell he's an inventor himself. So he has a lot of experience with this So thanks very much Chris and please round of applause to welcome Chris Thank you. Thank you for that So, yeah, just a bit of an introduction is that I've been working for this small company in Switzerland For the past kind of two and a half years Called I prova and what they're doing is is kind of trying to take a new approach to to inventing and inventions by By trying to work out what what is the science of invention sort of how do you invent? Efficiently and effectively and also how do you use new tools that are available to us now? to actually augment the human invention process And just a bit of a disclaimer. I know some of these slides have the company name all over them But I'm not trying to sell the company the talk is gonna be more about the kind of background of What is an inventor? What are inventions? How do we? How do we make them and how can we facilitate that process using AI? So so the first question is Is what is an invention? people seem to have quite broad-ranging conceptions of What an invention might be? And usually people think of some some famous products like the light bulb or something like that That is an invention in itself, but an invention should be really conceptualized as well Yeah, I had a more conceptual level. It isn't a product like a cattle or a car These things actually consist of many many small nuggets of inventions and this is sort of the the elementary particle for for an inventor is the inventive step is Is What's what's the elementary new thing? That is in your idea that hasn't been seen before in in in human knowledge and so that's that's the one of the first definitions of of an invention which probably the best or most Widely accepted view of invention is is from patents and of course patents protect inventions and The invention therefore has to fit several categories Several criteria The first one is that they have to be new so novel it can't been seen before you can't reinvent the wheel The second is that they have to be useful You could easily invent something new that solves a problem that doesn't exist you could You could invent something for traveling between Mars and the next galaxy or something like that And this would not be a current use it wouldn't be currently useful because we haven't gotten to Mars Or in fact you can invent magic and that's not useful And but it also has to be non-obvious So this is a this is a really important step and it's what kind of filters out a lot of the a Lot of the patents and a lot of the inventions that are not actual inventions. They are new but they're not But they are obvious So if I know about a microwave for example, and I know about cars just sticking a car on a microwave Combines the two things in a new way. Nobody's done that before maybe but it's obvious It's just a kind of microwave together. Nothing new has been added there the the the two elements create Not just for not more than the sum of its parts And this actually brings me to the to the most elegant description I've found of invention Which is at the bottom there that of the slides that two point two plus two Needs to equal five or more for it to be an invention you need to have started with these ingredients and you need to combine them in a way which creates a Product that's more than the sum of its parts and that that really to me is the most elegant way of defining the invention But how do you come up with one? What is what is this light bulb moment that people talk about? For me that that that describes this this addition. So if I'm the first person to consider putting these two Elements together that have never been combined and I think we'll okay, so I'm putting two things together maybe that's slightly interesting, but The invention is when you realize That there's something more to it that you can do you can create that That some new system or some new mechanism which has never existed before that That increases the value of that product or invention So the second question is who is an inventor? Can Eddie maybe invent people have this conceptualization of perhaps an inventor as a crazy guy in a shed that? Inspiration just comes to them out of nowhere out of the blue And this is a this is a perception that I want to kind of try and dispel over the next 20 minutes or so And what I want to try and get across is that anybody can invent anybody can be an inventor it takes a Human mind or at least an intelligent mind to to put things together in a clever way But there's a lot of smart people in the world and they're all trying to solve all of the problems that humanity is facing So what differentiates an inventor? From someone who doesn't manage to create that invention and the answer is The invention triggers the information that they have if you look back through history. It's always Not the smartest people who are the most successful inventors. It's the people who have access to the most surprising the most useful and the most distant information from different domains Create the most disruptive and amazing inventions so So this is known as this can be illustrated by the inevitability of invention And these patterns seen throughout history where you have inventions that are that are made Simultaneously in completely different countries or different continents with No collaboration whatsoever The invention is created by that by different groups or different people Who have the same input information? So again, it's sort of reiterating that the and that the inventors are not special What special is the information which quite is the information? So this is an example here of the CT scanner where Of course, they're at the time in the 1970s and 60s there were There were huge advances leaps and bounds happening in terms of high-performance computing and there was also research and growing knowledge on x-rays and x-ray imaging And so these two people Godfrey Hanfield and Alan McCormack Both Independently came up with the idea that we could combine these two things and we could design algorithms for high performance computers to actually Resolve an image in three dimensions using a series of two-dimensional scans around a person So this was a fantastic invention But it was inevitable given these advances in this information that was becoming available From the x-ray field and from high-performance computing. It was this combination of two distant fields that created the CT scanner And the same can be seen Time and time again throughout history. There's lots and lots of examples So these this isn't by any means exhaustive, but there's some famous examples But of course Newton and Leibniz both independently invented calculus. The same information was available to them in mathematical papers in Different places around the world Alexander Graham Bell and Alicia Gray both filed a patent for the telephone on the same day within three hours of each other Again reinforcing just how How time-critical these inventions can be as soon as the information is available to people people will make the link so it's the information that matters and And of course Edson with the most famous example of an invention the light bulb. There were actually 23 people who had built prototype light bulbs before him and in fact all of these Diagrams here are all patent diagrams for different people who have Invented a light bulb and these are just the different Embodiments for how they thought the light bulb would look So all inventions are inevitable, but all inventions are not created equal So in every field like cars or or Packaging or semiconductors in every field that people work in Incremental inventions happen So ideas are recombined within the field that developed incrementally people improve upon them and this Creates a growing wealth of knowledge and products and general improvement within that individual field And that's great and that actually creates the vast majority of patents that that that are put through all patents offices in the world, but These are not the most disruptive inventions. They don't change the world. They aren't surprising necessarily So actually it's been found by a lot of different studies and observed by a lot of famous people that The most disruptive inventions actually happen when Insights come from very different areas very different technology areas or knowledge areas where you get surprising or unexpected Insights from a from a completely far off Area and you're able to make a link between two very disparate areas that nobody else Could because you were the only one with that combined information So the the rarity of them is actually being able to have that knowledge from two distant fields And this guy Clarence birds eye is a is a fantastic example of this and he's got a really great story So here's captain birds eye of birds eye fame And he started the company and he also Invented modern freezers basically So frozen foods actually existed before mr. Birds eye, but he was they weren't very good They they didn't keep the food fresh for very long and they didn't take off. They weren't popular They were being used in New York And so Clarence was aware of Modern freezer technology thought it was interesting, but he was curious about it, but it wasn't his main Area he was a taxidermist actually so really interested in other forms of preservation of biological tissue And he was working for as a as a biologist for the US government. He got sent to Canada And in Canada, he was living there for five years while he was ice fishing he The the Inuit showed him how to ice fish in these in these in these rings You cut out the section of ice you fish take the fish out into the cold Arctic air and you take it home with you and It can keep for months and months and he realized that actually this fish stayed fresh for much much longer than Than the previous freezing techniques So he realized it tasted much much better than the techniques that they were using in New York And he did some investigation and he actually found out that it was the Combination of the wind and the and the instant flash freezing Of that fish that was brought out the water and it froze instantly and that was what did it That was what created the conditions for for keeping the freshness that created small ice crystals That didn't break down the cell walls of the fish and so it kept the texture and the flavor of the fish And so he subsequently went on to found birds eye patented Many over 300 patents in modern refrigeration, but if the original insight was this unexpected distant Distant piece of information that nobody had so nobody had those two Ideas in their head at the same time apart from this guy But he had to go to a northern Canada to find it which was obviously a bit of a trek and so as We progress through humanities and through history obviously Clarence was You know he was inventing maybe 50 60 years ago and as we Progress then the volume of information in every single field of human endeavor Is is is massively increasing so just the amount of information that's out there the amount of ideas products mechanisms Tools everything is just it's huge and it's much therefore much much more difficult to make these cross-domain links So someone who works all their life in electronic switches for example is gonna is never gonna know anything about Gearing mechanisms or something like that, but perhaps something in that In that field in that distant field would actually be hugely disruptive to what they're doing And at the moment that process is is completely serendipitous And this this one I'm describing here is the paradox of convergence. So as you have more ideas More information the availability of invention should increase because there are more combinations that are available to To create new ideas just more information the more combinations of them you can have so you should have more inventions But the invention disruptiveness and creativeness is going down and down over time and So why is this and the theory is that this is because there's this huge burden of knowledge that What people want is just this knife, but what they are presented with is this huge Swiss army like that has everything on it You don't know what to pick And so how do you filter down through that? And the other thing on the side is is of course the power of convergence. It's where we've seen one One obvious obvious example of convergence and incremental invention is with a car with the automobile So the past hundred years the car has been incrementally improved Getting better and better Going faster or further sounding better all of that and then this a disruptive Connection between two distant domains occurred and now this is what a car looks like in ten years After after ten years of change and so this has been a hugely disruptive massively rapid change Compared to the price past hundred years, and that's the power of converging domains And so of course you also have a increased demand for convergence because people are observing this is happening a lot with any technology With software and AI it's being applied to absolutely every domain available, but these aren't the only points of convergence And this is so this is just an illustration of how companies are kind of perceived their products and they're afraid of convergence So they want to be the ones to create this disruption But at the moment the process is still totally serendipitous They it's entirely reliant on good luck. So this analog front end of invention Just just doesn't keep up with the ability that that should be there to create points of convergence between domains So the obvious question is how can AI help? And what we know about AI is that I'm sorry wait now. I've missed the slide Just to highlight the Kind of drive behind what actually set up the company that I work for is Is this realization that we live in a completely digitally driven world? Data is everything the marketing that sent to you is driven by data and and algorithms and Even the financial systems are completely dependent on on algorithmic trading and And huge amounts of data to find out these often very subtle or difficult to find patterns in vast amounts of data So we do this for really important human endeavor domains, but we don't do it for invention We're still relying on analog invention and human. Good luck so Just to illustrate this The head of IBM corporate strategy Colin Harrison had this quote from 2013 that actually he has no idea where inventions come from Even the head of one of the biggest leading tech companies in the world Five years ago was saying I don't know. I don't know. We don't know it just sort of happens So we we want to try and put a bit more science into invention and Try and find out how we can codify that science invention Into algorithms to try and invent faster and more disruptively than before And so what what we think that AI can do here is Is to really leverage The convergence so that there's growing information more and more information And actually it's this breadth of information Which is essential to creating disruptive inventions you want to know You want to know something from sport to be able to solve a problem in medtech or vice versa So the completely separate areas of science that very unlikely for someone to have those two pieces of information at the same time but Using the AI solution We can now address this problem. So just some very brief Summaries of some tools that AI is bringing is Natural language processing is of course enabling us to digitally process and comprehend Text in a in a completely new way that's totally Scalable and automatable so you can process all of human knowledge and understand it to some extent or or or Recognize patterns in it at least And the second one is machine learning where perhaps you can find patterns that people even people can't find they're more subtle You can't a person can't look at vast volumes of information to find these patterns over large scales, but AI can So if I'm trying to invent in a particular area What if I have access to exactly the right ingredients at the right time? Just when I need them and so that is what our company is doing It's taking AI software, and it's using it to process volumes of information from the internet and we then using that filtered information and Processing we're able to augment the human invention process so that Anybody so all the people in this this is our invention team and all the people in this team are I'm not domain specialists that they're not particularly knowledgeable about one domain or another But they have all invented or have they have patentable inventions in many many different fields so I personally have worked in In baby products in satellites in finance in all sorts of different domains, and I never thought I'd find myself in And I have patents being filed in those Because I was able to use this tool to find the right information at the right time. I didn't need this huge In-depth knowledge and education because I could use this AI tool to find just the information I needed at that time And just to illustrate the kind of power of this approach that's being applied is that The average inventor in their lifetime creates just three patents And this is actually incredibly expensive to companies as well They invest loads and loads into their R&D departments and the average inventor just creates just three patents, but it's worth it a Prolific inventor is a is a five sigma change from that So it's is 15 inventions So you're classified as a prolific inventor if you have more than 15 inventions And everyone who's worked for Iprovia has managed to become a prolific inventor within their first year of working there And I personally have over 40 patents in the last two and a half years So yeah, just to sum up that using these data-driven invention tools we can really massively augment the invention process and move Invention into the 21st century and change it from this analog process to a really data-driven Process so thank you Thanks so much. I think we've got some time for questions. So does anyone have any questions? All right, I'm gonna run around with a microphone Hi there And I just wanted to ask about what your feeling was of software patents and How you know, do they Enhance our society, etc. Or is it actually more detrimental to have software patents? I mean look at the Software wars that after all and Samsung have been in Yeah, so So typically Software patents are actually quite difficult to defend Because there's no There's there's nothing you can point to and say that this is a thing that we invented This is the crux of the invention and a lot of these a lot of these patents actually do kind of take advantage of the fact that You know that they kind of take advantage of the legal system rather than Rather than actually adding something definitely new But the flip side of that is that a lot of these algorithms are potentially very difficult to to create And they might be easily backwards engineerable So how do you protect that idea? How do you how do you protect that? So I I don't know and I don't I don't know if I have a solution to the problem But I do agree that it is a problem and and certainly some companies do abuse it for the detriment of society But actually our company doesn't doesn't work in software or or a couple of other domains simply because This kind of information processing that we do just works much better in the kind of physical sciences and technical areas like that. So Typically we would always have some Physical mechanistic element to any invention that we create So I've got to say my expertise on purely software patents is is quite limited Okay, thank you very much any other questions I've got one So a lot of the time There seems to be a lot of technology that's out there purely for the sake of technology How do you make sure that the inventions that you create are actually things people need rather than tech for tech sake? This is a good question because That's that's often one of the first things that you think of now that you have this ability to automatically generate Ideas that's just a fodder for patent trolls So the way we differentiate is just our the business model that the company actually works with Where we ask Companies, what are your problems? And we we we basically work out what the area they're trying to work in what what are they trying to solve? What are their problems? And then we find the most relevant? Kind of insights and triggers from just distant domains to match that project and then we So we create inventions that the that there is need for And we wouldn't work in a way that creates the Inventions first and then find someone to sell it to or to protect it from or things like that but In terms of will this happen in the future Maybe I don't know. I mean the capabilities there so It might it might well be a matter of time Okay, any more questions if not, can you please join me in thinking Chris for this very interesting talk?