24
BAMOS
Dec 2018
Event
Summary
Science Meets Business 2018
Andréa S. Taschetto
University of New South Wales
“Science meets Business 2018” was held on 11 October in
Brisbane. This one-day event brought together academics,
professionals in STEM and business leaders to discuss and
promote interaction between universities and the industry
sector.
The event was opened by the President of Science Technology
Australia (STA) and UNSW Dean of Science Prof. Emma Johnston.
The theme of the event was “High Tech and Big Data”.
The program was split into four streams that shared case studies
and discussed opportunities in the areas of Medicine, Space,
Agriculture and Cyber-security. Throughout the day, speakers in
these four streams talked about the current status of Big Data,
future needs and challenges. Everyone seemed to agree that
Big Data is “the next big thing” in innovation and industry and is
already shaping our research and business.
A workshop event for STA members held the day before covered
a variety of topics relevant for science and business engagement,
such as science communication, data analytics and media
success, diversity and inclusion, managing associations and
charities in Australia, and Industry Engagement.
Exciting talks, such as the Emerging Opportunities in the
Space stream, demonstrated the challenges of Big Data for the
global next-generation radio telescope program, The Square
Kilometre Array (SKA). The Deputy Chief CSIRO Astronomy and
Space Science (CASS), Dr. Sarah Pearce, showed why and how
Australia is innovating in this area. Australia holds the cutting-
edge technology in radio telescope with the SKA. As a climate
scientist, I found the challenges of data analysis and storage for
SKA incredibly daunting, being orders of magnitude greater
than in our community. Progress in this area will transform how
universities, governments and industries deal with big data,
particularly when accessing, storing and processing real-time
data.
A pitch session led by Catherine Kitney (Fishburners) and Sally-
Ann Williams (Outreach Manager Google Australia) worked on
practical strategies to improve the way scientists communicate
their research to the public and business. According to the
speakers, scientists tend to approach industry the same way
as they approach the ARC for grants, in most cases there is no
‘Proof of concept’.
The session exercised how to pitch the problem, emphasising
the desirability and clearly articulating feasibility and viability
of the proposal.
In the agriculture sector there are several emerging
opportunities. Talks by Dr Catherine Ball, the Founder of
World of Drones Education, and Dr Stuart Minchin from the
Environmental Geoscience Division, Geoscience Australia,
showed new technologies to help government and industry
monitor and understand changes in our environment, thus
providing insights for future planning and management. One
example is the ‘Digital Earth Australia—DEA’, a digital platform
that provides live loading spatial information recorded by
satellites to detect changes in our environment in unprecedented
detail, including coastal areas, cities, mangroves, crop health
and ground cover. Products like water quality, soil erosion, crop
growth, among others are available for public access at about
10m resolution. This high-quality data will help government,
industry and individuals to improve decision-making and plan
for the future.
Another successful case of engagement between entrepreneurs
and researchers was given by the Director of the ARC Centre of
Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics Technology, Prof. Mark
Hutchinson. An objective measure of meat eating quality was
created by MEQ Probe: A medical science technology used
for breast cancer detection and surgery has been applied to
measure tenderness of the meat.
The event ended with an inspiring talk by the Chief Digital
Advisor Microsoft, Rita Arrigo, who discussed creative and
inclusive opportunities arising from big data. Touching
on topics like mixed reality, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and
Intelligent Cloud, Rita showed why and how these are changing
the way we learn and work. Some examples using the Internet
of Things technology and Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning
are ‘The Seeing AI Project’, ‘Captionbot.ai’, ‘ProjectMurphy.net’,
‘Microsoft Hololens’, to cite a few. The ‘AI for Earth’ offers funding
opportunities to engage scientists and business on climate,
water and species, for projects using Microsoft Azure Machine
Learning.