Future Technology Summit London 2015 schedule

How 3D Printing is Enhancing Education & Providing Steam Opportunities: The Create Education Project

A lot has been written in recent years about 3D printing and its game changing potential and this is starting to have an impact in classrooms across the country. In 2014 we started the CREATE Education Project to try and help people take advantage of the opportunities that 3D printing offered and 2 years in it seems wise to see how things are progressing. We will look at some of the challenges being faced and champion some of the amazing work educators are doing to engage students. With 3D printing a key enabler in wearables, robotics, IOT and becoming a key part of design, engineering and manufacturing vocations are we setting up the next generation to succeed?

Rural Community Projects in Ghana using Mobile Phones & Drones

Rural areas of low-income countries present several challenges. We have already carried out successfully a project in rural areas in Ghana about prenatal care using mobile phones and remote ultrasound machines.

In the already existing network, we are now delivering rare medical supplies using drones, setting up a company called Medrone. We use drones endowed with artificial vision, allowing avoidance of obstacles which are not visible giving GPS coordinates.

Delivery of medicines to areas with inefficient infrastructure is our current focus but we are open minded to other opportunities. We believe this novel transportation mean can have a positive impact.

Alessandro was born in Italy, but he worked in several universities and research institutes in Europe and Africa. He holds a PhD in Medical Imaging and an MBA in international health. He is currently working as a researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology and as a lecturer at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. He believes that Innovation is useless unless it is brought into practice. In fact, he worked in a cooperation projects in Ghana about prenatal care (www.docmeup.org) and he is currently following a projects using drones and artificial vision for delivering medicines.

Empathic Disruption

Outline: Modern healthcare is the act of doing healthcare to people and not with them. Andiamo uses 3D scanning and printing to deliver disabled children's orthotics in a week rather than 6 months. What happens when you build a company where empathy is the core of everything they do?

Naveed has worked almost exclusively in startups both in the public and private sectors. His background in tech, operations, and project management combined with his experience as a parent of a severely disabled child led to Andiamo. A medical equipment service startup co-founded with his wife Samiya . Their aim is to reduce wait times for medical bracing for children with disabilities from 6 months down to 48 hours by using 3D scanning, 3D printing, and medical data.

Spatial intelligence and 3D sketching

Gravity Sketch is a tool to create 3D digital shapes in a quick and intuitive way. Our tool is a multi-platform software that can interface with a tablet, a computer or a virtual reality headset to help you understand and manipulate a 3D shape based on your spatial awareness.

Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences states that people, throughout their lives, become stronger in some of the nine intelligences. People in creative industries such as design and engineering have developed a stronger spatial intelligence, however the available tools are based on linguistics and logic and neglect the spatial awareness needed in order to design intuitively.

Taking into consideration the basic human behaviour of quickly communicating ideas in 2D and augmenting it with the possibility of moving them in space and connecting them with other 2D lines to create 3D drawings as simple as sketching on a piece of paper. What would take 3 hours of making and 1 year of learning in regular CAD software, takes 5 minutes and 20 minutes of learning in Gravity Sketch.

Pierre is a London-based Innovation Design Engineer. He is a Masters graduate of the RCA’s Innovation Design Engineering programme (MA & MSci) and INSA de Lyon (MEng). Before joining the RCA, Pierre worked as packaging engineer for L'Oréal. His experimental approach combined with a user-centered design has proven to drive highly disruptive ideas towards reality. This passion for innovation led him to co-found two startups, Skipping Rocks Lab and Gravity Sketch. He has given a number of conferences about his projects including a TEDx Talk in Athens. Pierre likes to take on challenges where both his technical and design skills will be necessary to deliver radical innovation.

Prognostics and the City

Rob will talk about machine prognostics and make the link to how the high levels of connectivity will lead to improved reliability and availability of city infrastructure. Explaining how previous experience implementing solutions in high-end sectors and seeing the benefits, formed the vision for Senseye and their product PROGNOSYS. Lowering the barriers to entry through the use of machine learning and embedding domain knowledge that makes a complex problem space finite and turning prognostic capability into a commodity.

Rob is the Chief Technology Officer at Senseye, with a BEng in Mechanical Systems Engineering. He has spent the last 20 years designing and deploying asset management and condition monitoring systems within the aerospace, defence and transport sectors. Having a mechanical engineering background in the software sector has enabled Rob to bridge the gap between the end user and the software teams he leads. Now in Senseye this experience in guiding the vision for the development of PROGNOSYS the first complete machine prognostic solution, fit for the Industrial Internet of Things. Rob is passionate about maximising asset and equipment usage but believes in keeping things simple.

3D Hubs: 3D Printing Accessible to Everyone

3D Hubs was founded out of frustration that the industry was not delivering on the promise of 3D printing to decentralize manufacturing. In 2013 3D Hubs started its mission to connect all 3D printers globally into one online platform and make them locally accessible. By connecting everyone to nearby 3D Printer owners, 3D Hubs is accelerating a future of local and on-demand production. Today, 3D Hubs is already providing over one Billion people with access to 3D printing within 10 miles of their home.

Charlotte Downs — acts as the London Mayor for 3D Hubs lending her skills and expertise with Cinter to develop and grow the quickly emerging London 3D printing community. Charlotte is Managing Director at Cinter, an upstart engineering and design consultancy. Her focus: sustainability, systems, and supply lines. Charlotte’s background is in the fashion industry, she has led marketing campaigns and managed business for a high-end fashion brand. She has also served as ambassador for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and provided UX design and service/systems expertise for Onefinestay. Now as a Designer, Engineer, Tutor and Materials Scientist she wants to empower and engage learning across tech, additive manufacturing, disruptive technologies and future industry to benefit and promote positive economic and environmental change.

Toward Zero-Power Computing

Present computers consume too much energy, producing a large amount of heat during computation. This condition is limiting the development of future, more powerful computers and constitutes a bottleneck for the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) scenario. How can we dramatically lower the energy consumption of computing? What is the minimum energy required by a computing device? Can we build a computer that operates without spending any energy at all? These questions today have new answers and “zero-power computing” has left the pure speculations to enter physics laboratories. In the meantime we discovered that what we though to know about reversible computing is wrong…

Luca Gammaitoni, is Professor of Physics at the University of Perugia, in Italy and the director of the Noise in Physical Systems Laboratory. He is the founder of Wisepower srl a university spin-off company focused on micro-energy generators. He obtained the PhD in Physics from the University of Pisa in 1990. He has developed a wide international experience with collaborations both in Europe, Japan and the USA. His scientific interests span from noise phenomena in physical systems to non-equilibrium thermodynamics and energy transformations at micro and nanoscale. He authored over 200 papers on top-level scientific journals, few books and10 patents.

BuffaloGrid - Power & Connectivity in Frontier Markets

Connectivity is the biggest factor contributing to economic growth in frontier markets. But access to power is limiting people’s ability to connect. We want to see a world that is connected. We want to provide power and connectivity to the 1.2 billion who need it most. So we are building a 21st Century utility company for the off-grid world.

Daniel Becerra has over ten years of experience working on design and technology projects. Daniel has a first degree in Industrial Design from Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and an MA and MSc in Innovation Design Engineering awarded by the Royal College of Art and Imperial College, London. Daniel was one of the founders and the design director of Artica Technologies, a company which created a multi award winning low-energy cooling, ventilation and heat recovery system. Since the sale of Artica in late 2010, he has been working on the development of BuffaloGrid another award winning solution to bring electrical power as service to the off-grid world. BuffaloGrid is expanding to 2 continents during 2014. Daniel has previously run his own design consultancy and workshop in Mexico and has undertaken work for a number of prestigious clients including: Rolex, BMW and the Mexican Government.

New Targets for Pain Control

Over the last few years, several new pain killers have been approved for use, are in early clinical trial, or are progressing well through development. Despite this we are still largely dependent on drugs based on willow bark (aspirin and derivatives) and poppies (morphine and other opiates). In our work in analgesic drug development, we have taken a completely new approach of targeting the process the body uses to generate many different proteins from a single gene – alternative RNA splicing. Using this approach, we aim to use endogenous systems in the body to treat neuropathic pain.

Lucy is a neurophysiologist with expertise in sensory neuronal function in disease states. Starting out as a dentist, Lucy studied for her undergraduate (Dentistry BDS, Neuroscience BSc (Hons) and postgraduate (PhD, Pharmacology) degrees at the University of Edinburgh. She has worked at the University of California Davis (’94-’96), the University of Leicester(’96-’98), the University of Bristol (’99-2013) and now as Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham. She has expertise in the areas of chronic inflammatory and neuropathic pain, and in human taste perception in health and disease. She is co- founder and consultant to a spin-out drug development company Exonate.

Interfacing the Brain

Popular neuroscience reinforces a view of the brain as a machine: a very complex machine, but nonetheless an entity essentially mechanistic in character and purposeful in design. Attempts to interface technology with the brain -- either directly or via the senses -- generally labour under the same misconception. Here I explain why the brain is largely opaque to mechanistic interfacing in a way that is not limited by technological sophistication but by biological reality. Positively, I show how seeing the brain in the right light could let us make better use of personal technology.

Parashkev Nachev is a Senior Clinical Research Associate at the Institute of Neurology and an Honorary Consultant Neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square. His research deals primarily with translational aspects of cognitive and behavioural neurology, in particular with the development of novel methodology for distributed investigational and therapeutic devices.

The Inevitable Marriage of Solar Energy and Transportation

The talk will deal with future mobility in general and specifically solar powered cars. Solar cars have always been seen as unlikely combination and only feasible in the distant future. With the introduction of electric cars, light materials and better solar panels combined with some clever thinking, that future might arrive earlier than many people think. If we want to live in a world in which sustainable mobility is available for anyone at extremely low cost, solar cars are the way to go.

Lex Hoefsloot (24), Co-founder of Solar Team Eindhoven. Solar Team Eindhoven is a team of 20 students of the Eindhoven University of Technology. We built the world’s first solar powered family car. The car participated in and won the World Solar Challenge 2013 Cruiser class. Early this year, the car won a Crunchie (‘Oscar for technology’) in San Francisco.

The Future of Smart Cities

It is estimated that by 2050, 75% of the 9bn population will be living in cities. Meeting that energy demand in the urban environment requires a new solution within the energy mix. Wind and Solar are costly and inefficient in cities due to shadowing from high-rise buildings and limited roof space, as well as temperamental weather conditions. We at Pavegen have the solution - using an innovative, unique flooring technology to harness energy from footsteps.

Jonathan is Head of Business Development managing an international distributor network in over 10 countries worldwide as well as leading the Business Development Team at Pavegen. As a result of his tenacious business acumen and harnessing his MSc in Sustainable Development; Pavegen has worked and partnered with an extensive list of large blue chip clients including; WWF, Adidas, Centrica, Nike, Siemens, & Network Rail. As a confident and inspiring orator, Jonathan has attended numerous speaking events across the globe. Highlights include TEDxLondon ‘City 2.0’, GREAT Festival of Creativity in Istanbul as part of the GREAT Britain campaign.

Three Pillars of Successful General AI Development

Why hasn’t general AI already been developed? Our answer: in order to successfully build general artificial intelligence, it is necessary to have the following: 1) Correct cognitive architecture; 2) Correct neural network modules within the architecture; and 3) The right training environment, which we call a “school” for AIs. It is necessary to test if certain abilities are present before the AI moves on to more complex stages. This school allows the AIs to engage in gradual learning – to build new knowledge on top of existing knowledge. This school for AI also involves ethics, as this is where AIs learn to value the things that humans value, to behave ethically, and to consider the safety of humans. The focus of the presentation will be primarily on point #3, and will cover GoodAI’s development process, approach, setbacks, and successes.

Marek is the CEO and founder of two Prague-based companies: Keen Software House, an independent video game development studio, and GoodAI, a general artificial intelligence R&D company. Keen Software House is best known for its sandbox best-sellers Space Engineers (1.5mil+ copies sold) and Medieval Engineers. Marek started the company as the sole programmer but later took on a leadership role when he transitioned to CEO. Marek has been fascinated with artificial intelligence since childhood. After the success of the Keen Software House titles, Marek was able to personally invest $10M USD in a new general AI research project trying to build human-level artificial intelligence. The project, now known as GoodAI, was announced as a company in July 2015 and has grown to a team of 30 people.

David is a freelance journalist and broadcaster across consumer and enterprise technology, cybersecurity and mobile. He has written for The Metro, International Business Times,TechRadar, CNET, Wired and Computer Weekly.

He is ITV Good Morning Britain’s regular technology expert, a cybercrime-buster for BBC Watchdog, consumer champion on BBC Rip Off Britain and co-host of Challenge TV mobile technology show Planet of the Apps.

A Future of Medical Avatars: Personalised Medicine, Digital Healthcare and the Rise of the Digital Patient

We are witnessing the dawn of a revolution in healthcare. Using computer models, we'll be able to create 'virtual twins' for each of us, that will be the most up-to-date version of ourselves in medical terms. These will become digital patients in hospitals; enabling doctors to tailor medical treatment and test drug efficacy virtually, before giving it to us & make predictions way into the future of potential outcomes - in a nutshell, manage our disease and provide truly personal healthcare. This talk will explore this possible future showing what is already happening today.

Vanessa Diaz is a Senior Lecturer in Bioengineering at University College London and is an expert in computational biomedicine, being one of the co-authors of the first book on the topic (“Computational Biomedicine”, Oxford University Press, 2014). Vanessa is mainly interested in the development and use of multi-scale computational tools and models in digital healthcare, especially in the cardiovascular field, which is the main focus of her scientific work. Vanessa has also been a champion of the development of a “Digital Patient”; a “virtual twin” concept, key in personalised medicine and she was the PI of the project “DISCIPULUS”, which was tasked by the European Commission with developing a roadmap towards the digital patient. Vanessa is also the lead of the “Multiscale Cardiovascular Engineering” group (MUSE; http://www.ucl.ac.uk/muse) in UCL.

Face Recognition can Now Work in Utter Darkness

This talk will present a new advancement made in enabling face recognition technology to work in darkness. The technology identifies a person from their thermal signature and matches with ordinary photos. Cross modal face or general image matching between the thermal and visible spectrum is a much desired capability for night-time surveillance and other civil/security applications. Due to a very large modality gap, thermal-to-visible face recognition is one of the most challenging matching problems.

In this talk, we will present new technology based on deep neural networks in bridging this modality gap by a significant margin. While showing its effectiveness on a much harder face recognition application, the new advancements made can be easily adapted and applied to general thermal-visible image matching, potentially opening doors to many new and exciting applications. We will discuss interesting directions that can enable this technology to work in real-time and with minimal computational resources making it very practical for various applications. We will also discuss some associated privacy and legal aspects concerning the use of this technology.

Saquib Sarfraz is currently working as a senior research scientist & lecturer with the computer vision for human interaction (CV-HCI) lab, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. He is the team lead for the work in the direction of face recognition and also member of several related funded projects, where he is working on facial analysis & tracking for identity, age, and gender classification. He obtained his PhD in Computer Vision from Technical University Berlin, Germany in 2008. Before moving to KIT, he served as assistant professor (2009-2012) at the electrical engineering department of COMSATS Institute of Technology, Pakistan. There he founded and directed the Computer Vision Research Group (COMVis). His research interests include video surveillance, forensic image analysis, face recognition, multi modal biometrics, and general machine learning.

An innovative and digital savvy music consultant with front-line international release experience in a major label, booking agency and artist management. A highly organised individual who enjoys strategic planning of a campaign from inception to close, whilst having the ability to communicate to a team with clarity and authority. Combining foresight into new trends and an ability to build strong commercial relationships with forward thinking brands to deliver successful campaign strategies.

Charlottes passion and interest for all things music and interactive has lead to setting up 13 Mile Music, a music management and consultant company.

3D Scanning - Get yourself a mini-me

3D Hubs was founded out of frustration that the industry was not delivering on the promise of 3D printing to decentralize manufacturing. In 2013 3D Hubs started its mission to connect all 3D printers globally into one online platform and make them locally accessible. By connecting everyone to nearby 3D Printer owners, 3D Hubs is accelerating a future of local and on-demand production. Today, 3D Hubs is already providing over one Billion people with access to 3D printing within 10 miles of their home.

Grass-roots maker, technologist and entrepreneur, Andy Lewis is what London’s crucible of creativity is all about. Starting in the early 1980’s as a programmer, Andy’s CV reads like a history book of technology. He’s worked on the first Acorn Atom single board computer, for large semiconductor companies, explaining the intricacies of silicon chips to engineers from Russia to Australia and the USA and assisted in the development of around 3,000 products from Digital Video Players to cellphone cameras and guitar amplifiers to automotive lighting systems. If he doesn’t have a good idea how it works, it’s probably magic!

In more recent years, Andy has turned his attention on the 3D space, first in 3D printing, and he still runs a London based 3DHub, printing "whatever people want" but more latterly to 3D scanning and online content. He experimented with the first-generation Microsoft Kinect and used it to build a rig for scanning up to 3 people at a time. He’s scanned dead fish for rock bands, conkers for fashion designers and his results consistently delight the clients of Pot8oSH3D ( Potato shed ), the 3D creative consultancy Andy founded in an old shed on a farm just North of London. Currently Andy is talent scouting for a 3Dweb "virtuality” project, when he’s not scanning, printing and ( rarely ) sleeping!

3D Hubs is world’s largest and fastest growing network of 3D printers. By connecting everyone to nearby 3D Printer owners, 3D Hubs is accelerating a future of local and on-demand production. Our network consists of 20,000 printing locations worldwide, providing over one billion people access to a 3D printer within 10 miles of their home.

Curious about 3D scanning? Want to find out what it's all about? We'd like to invite you to the 3D Hubs Scanner Party at #reworktech!

This is your opportunity to get yourself a 3D printed Mini-Me or get grandma’s tableware scanned and restored to its original glory. During the event you be able to scan objects, or get yourself a 3D selfie scan. We’ll give you a quick overview of how 3D scanning works and provide a voucher for you to print your scan in all its glory at a later date. Spaces are limited so RSVP to [email protected] to secure your spot.

360 Video & Virtual Reality: the Future of News?

Virtual reality could one day transform the way news is reported by allowing people to experience events as if they were there themselves. And it’s happening now – with 360 films recently released showing conditions in war torn Syria and the Calais migrant camp. But what are the technical and editorial challenges and what social and ethical issues might VR raise? We’ll look at recent examples, including 360 degree experimental films produced by BBC R&D/BBC New Labs to explore the possibilities of immersive news and current affairs.

Zillah Watson, a former current affairs producer, leads future content and storytelling projects for the BBC Research and Development. Current projects include developing VR and immersive journalism for news/current affairs; curation of web content; and developing web-native ways to navigate dramas and soaps. She recently produced and curated Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America archive for BBC Radio 4, which was nominated for a Sony Award. She was head of editorial standards for Radio 4 for five years.