The RMIT Professorial Academy serve as ambassadors, advising on issues of importance to RMIT and the community, driving thought leadership and impact.
About the academy
The RMIT Professorial Academy was established in 2018 to bring together RMIT’s best minds in research, education and engagement to:
- Serve as a source of advice on issues of importance to RMIT’s future and the communities we serve;
- Stimulate strategic conversations across RMIT and externally through Fellows acting as Thought Leaders; and
- Advocate and campaign for value creation and impact as Ambassadors.
The Academicians are known as Fellows of the RMIT Professorial Academy.
The Fellows have been appointed through recognition of their sustained outstanding performance and awarded with the Distinguished Professorship title before being inducted into the Academy.
Pictured left to right: Distinguished Professor Elena Ivanova, Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth, Distinguished Professor Rachel Caruso, Distinguished Professor Milan Brandt, Distinguished Professor Barbora de Courten, Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu (Chair), Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski, Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky, Distinguished Professor Julian Thomas, Distinguished Professor Baohua Jia, Distinguished Professor Andy Ball, Distinguished Professor Suresh Bhargava, Distinguished Professor Jie Yang, Distinguished Professor Mike Xie and Distinguished Professor Tianyi Ma. Absent: Distinguished Professor Larissa Hjorth, Distinguished Professor Helen Lingard, Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell, Distinguished Professor Jason Potts, Distinguished Professor Ma Qian, Distinguished Professor Cuie Wen, Distinguished Professor Charlie Xue, and Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo.
Distinguished Lectures
The RMIT Distinguished Lecture Series is sponsored by RMIT Professorial Academy (the RMIT Academy), which aims to:
- Promote excellence in research and innovation, learning and teaching, and engagement; and
- Engage with industry, community, business, government and the public through leading open strategic discussions on key issues of relevance to the local, Australian and global communities.
On the Origin & Nature of Digital Economies
On the Origin & Nature of Digital Economies
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 00:00
Xinghuo Yu, Okay, welcome everyone. I'm glad to see you here. Many new faces. I'm Xinghuo Yu. I'm the chair of RMIT Professorial Academy, and I'm the host of this event. So this is part of the RMIT Professorial Academy's activity, delivering a series of distinguished lectures on various topics of interest, broader interest, not just simply academic interest, but also in the social and industry interest.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 00:31
If I start firstly, I would like to acknowledge the people of the Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we are meeting today. I respectfully acknowledge their elders, past and the present and the present. So today we shall hear from Distinguished Professor Jason Potts a lecture 'On the Origin and the Nature of Digital Economies'. I'm pretty sure that this is a topic of interest to many people, including yourself, while we are leaving it. So before we start, just get a bit of housekeeping matter. So this is an in person event, so, but it will be recorded, and we will have the lecture first, and then we follow on the Q and A. So hopefully we finish by wrap up by four o'clock, and then we have a refreshment outside we can continue to networking afterwards.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 01:20
So let's start to the lecture by introducing the speaker. So Distinguished Professor Jason Potts is co-founder and director of the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub and the chief investigator in the ARC Center for Excellence in Automated Decision Making and Society. He's an evolutionary economist whose research examines the institutional causes of technological change and innovation. So his current research is focused on crypto economics and economics, economies of generative AI. He is editor of the Journal of Institutional Economics and his most recent book is The Innovation Commons: On the Origin of Economic Growth. So without further ado, please join me to welcome Professor Potts to deliver his lecture.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 02:13
All right. Hi everyone. Thank you for coming along. I appreciate this. This is not in anyone's work plans to be here today, so we appreciate this. Look. What I'm going to do is, for the next 30 minutes, I want to talk you through the high level view of the work that myself and the team have been doing over the last five years. And what I want to try and persuade you of is a particular lens on how to understand digital economies. And I do this from the perspective of economics and sociology and political science and so on, just social science in general. But I want to, I want to present you a sort of a way of seeing digital economies that is not the standard way in which we present those and I want to sort of make the case about why this is an interesting perspective.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 02:59
So let's start with the universe and everything. So digital economies, I think that the proper way to sort of understand this is actually to start with with physics and digital economies are made of information and knowledge, what we sort of, what we want to start with as a general theory of what what is knowledge? What is information? And we get that actually out of the sort of the fun, the foundation upon which we're sort of building, this is actually coming out of new physics. New physics is sort of a thing largely built by in constructive theory with David Deutsch and assembly theory, with Lee cranna and others. What it's basically arguing is that we can think of information as a fundamental property of the universe alongside energy. And it's that, that foundation that I want to start with, and I'll just sort of plant that idea there. Why that's significant is economies are fundamentally made of knowledge. An economy is a structure of knowledge for organizing things, that's technology and people, that's institutions.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 04:33
The fundamental the knowledge that we have determines what is scarce. I mean in practical terms, of course, the scarcity, but that scarcity is constrained by the knowledge that we have. What an economy is is an organization of knowledge to enable us to use what we have to overcome scarcity conditions and so on, this fundamental way of seeing an economy as a particular structure of knowledge that is constrained fundamentally by the laws of physics.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 05:00
Is the sort of the general framework I want to sort of place, place. This idea an economy is a structure of knowledge for solving problems. The types of we can define three classes of problems. There are problems that can be solved for given knowledge that we have. That's the economy that we live in. There is new knowledge that we can put into an economy, that's innovation. And then there's whole new economies that we can build, or new types of institutions that we can build. And that's that's where I want to go with with this argument. So fundamental idea, economies are structures of knowledge, and therefore they evolve. They evolve through time as knowledge grows and changes. So knowledge is the fundamental sort of unit that we want to think of economies in Chris pointed out that no one likes looking at big walls of slides, so I've agreed to have some pictures in this.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 05:51
So Kea, the that's knowledge in physics. Now let's put this in terms of all of time. Economies were invented about 5000 years ago. They were invented in two ways. One was agriculture, more or less the Neolithic Revolution, when we figured out animals and plants and ways of organizing our knowledge of the environment in such a way to provision our needs. The other thing we invented then was writing and laws, rules, kings. Two bits of knowledge gave us economies. One was technology, agriculture at the time, the other one was writing. Why is writing the beginning of economies? Because it enables us to coordinate asynchronously.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 06:48
If I can write something down, I can coordinate with someone who isn't here in space or time. They can come later. It's the beginning of contracts, the beginning of identity. It's the beginning of money. It's the beginning of economies are fundamentally built from two technologies, or from physical technologies and writing technologies. Writing gave us cities and kings and so on. I want to put that there, because I'm going to come back to it. The other great revolution is very, very recent, when we learned a way to write in such a way that we can talk to machines. But the history of economic time is essential. We can array this as a history of institutions. As institutions sort of begin with control of resources and people, then philosophy, the invention of the mind, the invention of reason, the invention of ways of processing and using knowledge, ways of controlling violence. The point, next point I want to make, is that this long sort of five, 8000 year history of economies, the big story recently isn't the Industrial Revolution. The big story recently is organizations. That was the sort of period, from more or less first century, first millennium through to very, very recently, was just this invention over and over again, of organizations and organizations. What is an organization? It's a way of coordinating humans and knowledge to be able to do more things than individuals previously do. That gave us nation states, that gave us corporations and so on and so on.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 08:25
The story I want to tell is that a third millennia that we are now in, sort of 5000 years after the invention of economies, the big breakthrough is digital writing. We think of that as it's a weird way to frame it, but computers is essentially a way of talking about how humans and machines can interact. All right, so this deep view of economics is fundamentally a story about knowledge and its evolution in the universe. Knowledge takes two fundamental forms, technology, organization of atoms and things and institutions, organization of people, both of those, we can expect to see progress in so there's technological progress and there's institutional progress. Institutional progress is the weak part of that story. We haven't seen much of that institution technology and institutions co evolve together. That is economic dynamics, from a fundamental perspective, that is the long, deep story of economics. Everything else is just noise,
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 09:26
Albatross. All right, so what's a digital economy? Then, let me start with the wrong answer, the wrong but popular answer, the wrong but popular answer is a digital economy. Is computers in the economy. And the standard way of telling that story is that once upon a time, there was a dimension of electricity, and electricity gave rise to semiconductors, and then semiconductors to computers and networks. And this technological trajectory that gradually got. Into the production parts of the economy and spread through, eventually giving us new consumer products and productivity gains and new types of jobs and so on. That's the standard. 99 economists out of 100 will maybe even none. Yeah, many economists will look at that. That's how we would describe a digital economy. What they're describing is an industry or a sector. Why it's good is it's describing a fall in production costs and benefits with that. But that sort of way of looking at an economy that's that sort of standard way of the latest technological trajectory that has been unusually effective in shaping the world has sort of subsequently given rise to digital strategies, and then we try and measure the size of the digital economy and so on. All right, the standard view you want, the extreme view of that world economic forum has done their work for us, where they describe digital economies and all of the things that this possibly touches. Just everything. What that tells you is that that's not a theory at all. That's just a way of saying, Look, computers, they're everywhere. It tells you nothing about what a digital economy actually is, what why is interesting and significant and important to eat.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 11:20
All right, what is a digital economy? Digital Economy isn't digital production. It's not new commodities that said epi phenomena. We get that. It's not denying that that exists. I'm saying that's not what a digital economy is. What a digital economy is digital institutions. Now this is an idea that we at blockchain innovation have been developing for about six years now. Have written books about this sort of laying out this argument where we focus this on blockchain as one of the sort of key technologies for that. But the argument I'm making here isn't blockchain as the basis of this that was just one layer that was doing some administrative record keeping. The argument here is we are going through a transition the time, the period that we live in now is historically interesting and revolutionary, because we are going through this transition to a new type of economy, a new type of economy that doesn't just have computers in it in the same way that it has cars in it, or steel mills in it, or other sorts of industrial advanced industrial products, that's that's an that's an industrial economy, or a post industrial economy, even a digital economy is when the institutions of an economy digitize. We start getting digital money. We start getting digital contracting, digital organizations, digital identity. Now that's a stack of just where we get just a few of those. It's not a digital economy. It's just an industrial economy with digital money. A digital economy is when we move. We get to a point where that full stack of institutions that order or that, that coordinate, all of the people, the identity and the management and the just all of these sort of facts that the governing economy, when we cross that threshold of full stack digital technologies, giving us full stack digital institutions, then we have a digital economy, right? My argument is we're pretty close to that. We don't have it yet, but we've got, we've got the we can see the beginnings of it in the same way. Sort of imagine Adam Smith, 1776 looking out rural Scott, rural Glasgow, and seeing a pin factory. And imagining a future where, you know, I can see an industrial economy forming. He was describing in an agricultural economy with some very early points we are. I think we're right now where we are globally in that same point.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 13:48
Why is that significant? Why is a digital institution significant? Because it's computational. Digital institutions enable computation at the level of economic coordination, in a way that analog institutions, marketplaces are an interesting one. They've gone from analog to digital in our in our lifetimes. That's the Australian Parliament from a few weeks ago. It hasn't there's there's all economic institutions have started off analog, and have been analog for at least 8000 years. Some of them are going through a transition right now of becoming full stack digital. Digital Economy is when we complete that transition, thus making economies fully computational. What does computational mean? It means I can't tell the difference between a human and a machine. They're all functioning on the same level. Again, if we were two years ago, that wouldn't have been such an interesting point to make, but those machines are getting very, very good at mimicking humans. This is where, again, we're at it at a transition point. All right. Are some reflection on this. I'm not describing the future yet. The point I'll make here is that this digital transition to digital economies actually looks more like developing economies. These aren't advanced economies from the future yet. The form they're taking right now is actually much closer to sort of a frontier. A frontier economy is a better metaphor. Think it's away from the rents and the political accumulation that has happened. It's on the frontier. It's freer. It's a developing economy, in the sense, that hasn't advanced yet and spent centuries refining itself. It's still these new digital economies aren't from the future. They they look and feel like frontier developing economies now, but they're they're rapidly progressing, so that the mental model here is these new things are developing economies, but they're on a sharp upward trajectory in terms of how we sort of think about these.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 16:00
Fantail. what does that mean? What it means is that the mental model for the answer the question, what is an economy? I described an economy before as an economy as a structure of knowledge that's used to create to solve economic problems the most useful metaphor for how to think about what is an economy do is an economy is a computer. It's a social computer. It computes with people and things. This is not a new idea we've had. We've had this insight since August 1945 thanks to FA Hayek, who pointed out that the thing about markets, what we know ask the question, what is a market? A market is a way of of is a form of computation. What it is doing is it's computing over property rights to create to compute prices. The humans then coordinate their action with respect to the prices. A market is where most of the computation in an economy exists. That's why we describe it as market capitalism. The markets are doing the compute and computation in a modern economy. That's been true since the beginning of markets. Markets go back 1000s of years. Markets are computing across property rights. Those property rights, they sort of began with on land, and they gradually moved on to other large, other things, but that sort of that development of property rights, enabling market computation, enabling price dynamics, is how we think of a modern economy doing computing as a form of distributed compute.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 17:52
All right. Why is that a problem? Because how do we get more to have economic evolution, to have economies get better, to for economies in the future, we they, we need to get more compute into them. That's how we make them better. One way to do that is just more markets, or make markets run faster. That's what we do in finance, right? So finance is sort of the frontier of advancing market economies, because we can just make those markets run faster with faster clock cycles. We look around for ways of putting more markets into things. What that means is more property rights into things. We have to establish ownership over and more objects. All right, so that's one trajectory of how to make economies better. We can add more compute into hierarchies and organizations. We can also add more compute into commonses. And the argument I want to make so is that the thing that digital economies enable is they enable us to drop much, to drop more compute into an economy, but to specifically drop it into Commons, is into a commons. Commons is a class of institution that has is the oldest of all institutions. That's the That's the basic original tribal one. They were out competed by hierarchies and markets, because hierarchies and markets are just far more efficient than Commons is the problem with Commons is they don't scale. They're effective in the small they're terrible in the large. Markets are amazing at scaling. That's why market economies out competed other forms of Commons, other forms of economies, but digital objects exist really well in the Commons, and the reason they do is that their non rivalrous nature, you still have to solve the problem of incentive for creation in a commons, but once you have things created, a Commons is a very efficient institution for holding and using digital capital. Digital Goods and so things, right, all right. So the problem we need to solve is, how do we drive more compute into a commons? And that's what I think is going on. This is the argument. I want to elaborate this a bit. But what is fundamentally going on with digital economies now is that they're advancing and accelerating the types of compute that they can do because of what's happening in the commons. I'll explain as well that this is also feeding back into markets.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 20:33
All right. So we have two things going on. We have digital driving the rise of the commons. The Internet, is you just exhibit a on that. But the problem with Commons is, is that they're Commons. Is right? They suffer all of the governance problems of Commons, is they don't scale very well. They specifically don't have prices in them. They they they're difficult to get business models out of them. There's a there's a bunch of problems, very, very obvious problems with Commons is, yet there's a huge amount of of economic activity is starting to sort of emerge in them. So way to think about the significance of digital economies is that they're enabling economies to develop in terms of compute, that compute is, is being driven into the commons. And what is happening Commons is, is an idea that Ali only actually sort of developed. First was, was this idea of contribution systems? So there's a claim here, is that there's a new type of institution that's emerging, and it's kind of a hybrid markety commonsy thing. We call it a contribution system. An example of a contribution system, or is we see this a lot in the defi space. We see this a lot in crypto, these types of things. But what a contribution system is, fundamentally, is it's like a market in the sense it's open and permissionless, anyone can come in and do something in it. It's decentralized, and that people aren't sort of coordinated. There's no sort of central coordinator. So it's clearly it's not a firm, it's not a hierarchy. But what a contribution system is doing is it's enabling groups of humans to come together and do stuff together, and it's using algorithms to to provide the valuation process, to coordinate value, to register when things have happened, to build records of this person did that, then starting to build up abstract information about economic activities that have taken place On a thing they have the property, the nice properties of markets and that they extensively use local knowledge, and people decide themselves what the best contribution is. They scale magnificently. They work small. They work large. They're sort of internet like objects. They're distributed permissionless production, so a new type of production, like a firm, but without all of the problems of firms around hierarchy and scale.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 23:08
All right, so new thing, more bulk examples of contribution systems, actually, Bitcoin, Ethereum, just immediately examples of this. The one that earlier has been studying contributing to this as well, in part, is a an open source software project called sourcecred. So a lot of this stuff comes out of open source software, out of open source software development, things, a bunch of these things. We're just going to point to them over here, that we're we're seeing very, very early stages in, often, in the crypto space. What they're doing is they're these ones tend to be digital, digitally native. So this is why we're seeing them. Seeing them there first. Often they're open source. So open source projects. But what we're seeing here is a new type of institution emerging, one that is, that is, that is has some really nice properties. It's permissionless in the sense that anyone can come in and join them.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 24:18
That's good for access. They're creating a new type of value, an intersubjective value. This is not exchange value. They're not markets. This is not they're not planned, they're not firms, but they are producing output and creating economic value. Weirdly, they're throwing off property rights. Because the fundamental thing that a contribution system does is it's it's it basically uses the algorithm to keep detailed records that are that are agreed upon have consensus mechanisms to agree of who, who did what, when, of who did what, when, right. Descriptions of outputs, descriptions of things, um. Those descriptions of this is a thing. This is what did it. This is where its boundaries are. This is the rights attached to it, and so on. Those things are the elements of property rights. Now property rights are that plus enforcement. So it's not a complete property rights system, but it is an intro. There's an element of a group of people coming together, arriving at consensus about facts associated with distributed production. That's new, right? This is something that is part open source software, part defi, part search out, you know, algorithmic search. But this thing is coming together in a way that's, that's that's giving us a new type of institution to enable economic development. New types of capital are emerging from this.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 25:50
All right, so example of what I think this is, the point about property rights here is that that long, 1000 years from the first millennia through to relatively recently, was fundamentally a story about the development of property rights and the sorts of economies that you could build on top of those. Feudalism was one particular formulation of property rights around a manner. There was definitely some things that didn't exist, some exchanges that couldn't happen, and coordination, the long history of the second millennia is essentially a story about the development of property rights and the development of organizations that enables economies to be built. In that story, markets and governments are the two things that are co evolving. It's a market capitalist economy fundamentally depends upon strong, functioning governments to provide property rights, rule of law, enforcement mechanisms, all of the underlying sort of administrative mechanisms upon which markets work. The problem with that is that they're not as big as the world. They're only as big as nation states. Problem with that is that only some of those nation states work particularly well with that. So again, we have the long second millennia. Is a story of property rights and states co evolving. My claim here is that the third millennia that we are now in will have a different dynamic, and it's basically civil society and Commons is that are evolving, or markets and commons that are evolving, andbecause contribution systems and other sort of Civil Society mechanisms can provide the underlying consensus and agreement about facts, who did what, when? What's of that? What are the boundaries of that?
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 27:49
We the more if those things are purely digital objects, then cryptography becomes our sort of enforcement mechanisms and protection. But what we have here is a fundamental story about a shift in the underlying sort of just mechanics of how economies are built, that they are built from civil society, plus markets. Commons is other sorts of objects that sit on that. What's the natural scale of that? As small as this room, as big as the world, there is no natural scale to it. It's completely scale free. And I think this is the sort of claim about the type of world that we're entering in
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 28:26
Blue duck. Another example of this is that this is going to give us a new type of capital we've been involved in. I have been involved in a process recently where a group of landowners over in Northern California going through a process of ecological regeneration, and what they're trying to do is basically incentivize people to come in and help with that process. So it's a production process, help us fix the land right? It's coming out of civil society. It's not it's not led by a team that's doing it. It's just they're trying to build institutions to enable anyone to come in and do that. But you come in there and you help build beaver dams or whatever there, what the goal is is to create property for you in doing that. How do we do that? Satellites, the whole low Earth orbit economy is revolutionizing what we can do with that, IoT sensors, just the full stack of digital institutions where, what those digital institutions are doing is facilitating information about what happened, where to a thing, such that a group of people can agree that that happened.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 29:34
That's what governments used to do, still do, but also used to do. And the idea that we can build tech stacks that exist globally are open access that can potentially do that, that enables us to sort of take on big, new, interesting problems, ecological regeneration. To solve it by creating new types of capital, claims about ownership and contributions to that. These aren't private property rights. You don't have right of exchange with that yet, maybe, who knows. But the point is, you've got a sort of living evolving record. That is, it has consensus around what exists there. So new types of capital are forming. This is, this is not capital in the sense that we've there's not industrial capital, but it is capital. This is an evolution of capitalism that is taking place, but what it is enabling us to happen is it's enabling far more sort of complex ownership contribution at global scale in this process. So again, just emphasizing here that this full tech stack of blockchains and defi and IoT and low Earth orbit satellites and so on, all part of the same system that is, that is sort of coming together and evolving. Again, I throw this as just an example of some new things that we're seeing. This isn't this? This is there are many more things like this. All right, so that's some of the background to this. Let me sort of finish now with some sort of three big ideas that I think this points to.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 31:20
Kakapo. The first one is the idea of institutional progress. So we know what technological progress is. We know what material progress is, as GDP growth. We know what moral progress is, expansion of rights and so on as we proceed, what is institutional progress? Because where we started was there are two fundamental things in the world. There is technology and institutions, and together, they make economies. And we've got a very clear sense of what technological progress looks like. It's innovation. What is institutional progress? We don't have a clear concept for that what we have instead, and this is the long period that Douglas Northam, the Nobel Prize winning economist, just said the thing that happened in the second millennia was we figured out property rights and that enabled us to build modern economies. And the answer was, so, thank you, Douglas. What should we do? Choose good institutions? And sort of modern economics doesn't have a concept of institutional progress. What it has is an idea of, there's good institutions, you should choose those, and there's bad institutions, and you should not choose those. The difference is developed economies, broken economies. So we have this idea that there's, there's good institutions to choose. What is a good institution, strong property rights over as many things as possible, right? So we have a clear concept of what that means. What we don't have is the idea, okay, what is, what is, what is even better? One look like my argument. What better looks like is more computation. How do we get more computation? You put more computation on more things. Where do you put it? Anywhere you can where's the biggest place to put it? In the commons.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 33:14
The other thing that will I'll note in passing, is that institutions are often degenerative. And you know, half of modern economics is just describing basically degenerative institutions or extractive institutions, or how or rent seeking, or just ways in which politics ruins economics. It's not obvious that institutions just keep getting monotonically better. In fact, the standard story is, you're lucky if they're good. Generally, they're degenerative. Also stronger institutions tends to mean a more powerful state, and more powerful state means now we have to control the more powerful state. So this is why having our institutions come out of the commons is good because that's that's that it has a it scales, in essence. All right, so we've got this idea of institutional progress. What is that? That's kind of what we've been working on for the past six years in different ways. Dorothy and Chris have written some books on aspects of this. We've talked about things in there as well technology of freedom. We've had a number of different ways of thinking about what does institutional progress look like? Concretely, there's a number of different versions of it with different political aspects. The Balaji version, the sort of digital libertarianism exit to Bitcoin. We have the sort of Glen vial and Audrey Tang, sort of version of it, where we sort of try and push digital tech deep into governments enable them to function better. There's lots of different ways. I think there's a lot of arguments. Discussion and interesting proposals about different ways of using tech to improve societies. What my point here is not to sort of take sides in that they're all interesting and good, but to point out to the meta phenomenon here, what we are describing is institutional progress is something that we want, that we want to try and proceed to develop. So I think this is a good framing, a good lens for understanding what's actually going on with these tech stacks as institutional stacks trying to improve the lives of all the humans.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 35:36
Another one, another implication. How do we get into the future? So the standard way we get into the future, for the last 5000 years is with tech. We invent new ideas, innovation, and we follow those ideas into the future.The other way, the more modern way, is planning. We come up with a plan for how to get into the future, and we implement the plan. That's organizations and governments sort of drive that. So innovation, organization planning. These are our ways into the future. There's a there's a fourth way. So the other way is common knowledge. We imagine ourselves in the future. The other way is we pull institutions from the future. And this, this notion of, you know, what is an institution? Or an institution is a set of rules that coordinates the people. Okay, where does it exist? Everywhere. When does it exist in the past? Culture affects institutions now in the present, it's governing us. Now. In the future, a lot of new institute institutions also exist in the future in the sense that we're behaving with respect to we expect them to be there. Another pathway to get into the future is just to start behaving with respect to institutions that are in the future. That's what that is. All of those things have in common, that they're fundamentally, none of them are real. They're all they all exist in the future.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 37:14
So this, this notion of basically thinking of institutions, of institutional progress as an answer to the question, Where does the future? How do we get into the future? Is another way of thinking about that. What that then raises is, okay, what are, what are these? What whose future? And this is where I think that, you know, the the I think the correct way to think about this is in terms of the future is, fundamentally should be, in an ought sense, a commons. We'll allocate it back in different ways, where we where that's not working. But fundamentally, that's the sort of ambition that we would want from that third idea, third idea constructor economies. So I started this talk with, with with, with Deutsche sort of theory of constructors. I'll leave you to go and explore that in your own time. But the the the implication here is that for the last 5000 years, one of the most expensive bits of technology you could build in the world as an economy. We didn't build them very often. We only got 192 of them at the moment on Earth, because you need a lot of land, you need a parliament building, you need an army, you need legislators and lawyers, and you need a lot of capital and resources to build an economy to make the property rights system work. So we tended to build one big, giant one, and then try and make and try and solve all of the problems within it. How do we do that? We have to add politics over the top of that to get that to work or deal with externalities in the process. That's, that's, that's human history is that story of economies are expensive, therefore we don't throw them up very often.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 39:12
The institutional digital revolution, the one we are going through right now, what is fundamentally changed is the economics of building economies. They are cheap now, in a way that they weren't 10 years ago, 20 years ago, inconceivable. More than that, I think we're at this. We're at a tipping point where the moment the ones we can throw up, we can throw up and build an economy. They're developing economies. They're not very good, they're a bit they're a bit minimal their frontier economies, they will get better because of institutional progress. And I think the the third millennia, that period. So the second millennia was the invention of organ or the development of organizations, and being able to throw up organizations, including things like nation states and the third millennia is we can throw up entire economies. We can throw up our money, an identity system, a contracting system, a full stack of things. That's new at the moment. It's just a weird bunch of mostly Degen crypto people doing that, but we're starting to see more. We're starting to see this spread. The sort of open source people are starting to do it. We're starting to see this sort of more and more experiments in this process of throwing up economies. That's what contribution systems are. Is a classic. Is a very clear instance of a group of people coming together, seeing a coordination economic problem, and throwing an economy over it again, primitive economies, very simple at this stage. But again, organizations in the 11th century were also very primitive objects at that stage too. That's this is what is new. This is the argument that the digital revolution, a tech revolution, full stack of digital technologies is driving an institutional revolution is enabling us to do this weird new thing. And we are, we are, like, decades into this weird new thing. But this is the, my sort of answer to the question, what is a digital economy? Why is it significant? Does it enables us to, for the first time, throw up economies relatively cheaply. Where do we throw them? We throw them over any aligned knowledge. We can see any group of people trying to solve a problem. Throw an economy over it. Previous answer was, throw an organization over it, or throw politics over it, get a voting block or an organization. We still can do that, but we've got a new solution that, on some margins, is significantly better and scales right? That's what's new? Woodpiction. All right, so what is a digital economy? I've given a bunch of sort of new concepts for it. Digital stack gives us an institutional stack, facilitates computation, enables us to sort of throw up new types of economic objects. This is an institutional revolution. We're seeing it. We saw it first in web three, because that was where it sort of the first stalks poked through. Obviously. That was 60 years in the making, computers, training, transistors, computers, internet and so on. The full stack isn't this isn't a this isn't a blockchain story. This is a this is a distributed computing story. The distributed computing is the satellites in the sky. It's the sensors and the objects. It's the cyber security that's protecting it all. It's the full digital stack that's giving us a new type of economy, that gives us a new social science, a new social science that's fundamentally focused on questions of of how that is coordinated, the measures of this process, new types of hyper objects that we can sort of start to see, pulling this all together. This is, again, this, this. This isn't sort of specific to particular fields or particular technologies. It's a it's a high it's an amalgam of all of these things into a new thing.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 43:30
Why is this good? Because it it opens up for the first time in 8000 years, institutional progress. This. That's the, that's the rocket ship we're on now. His massive advances in leaps in institutional progress. Our job is to figure out how to measure that, how to understand that, how to integrate that. Why is that good? Because of what it competes with. This is the beginning of the end of politics. Why did we need Why is politics so important? Because politics was how we solved all of the problems that economies couldn't solve. What were they enormous problems, but mostly ones that that sat outside of property rights or or nation state sort of sized objects or information costs. So there's a, there's a fundamental sort of pivot shift that is happening in the social space that is coming from this, this weird tech stack trajectory gives us a new concept of an economy, an economy not as a sort of political economy, nation state plus territory plus people plus governance, but new concept of an economy as a network, a sort of a web of Institute of rules that is thrown volun thrown over a group of people who either voluntarily will join that and then design their own incentive mechanisms within that space. So that idea of a new conception of an economy as this sort of mycelium type object, as opposed to a the animal concept of a territory that you had that you defend the economies that we've had for the last 8000 years. They're fundamentally animal economies. You Wolf, but you you have a territory, you defend it. You defend the resources in it. You try and create rules to enable people not to kill themselves. All right, there's a bunch of work that we've been doing on this. I won't sort of bore you with that, but the point is that this is, this is our new way of seeing what of what digital economies are. And I think you know, what we're wanting to work toward is trying to sort of elaborate and develop that vision, that broad vision. All right, thank you very much.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 45:55
So thank you very much for the fascinating talk. So now I'll open to the floor for any questions and comments. Maybe let me start right from the engineer point of view. But ask all this, I want to look at fundamental you say the economy is a computer. But from our sort of experience, computer is very deterministic way of looking at the things, mechanic way look at things. But then if you look at the economy, and for example, the stock market, it is not rational, it is not deterministic. So how do you recount because we try, we are now moving more towards ask a question, towards social science, because we just can't explain it from mechanic point of view. So how do reconcile this?
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 46:44
Thank you, good question. So an economy performs computation. So there's I'll define the universe of computation as a deterministic computation. So a computer, in the engineering sense, is also is a rule. System is a set of rules that you put in some inputs. It computes the finite state. Machine computes an output state, right? So the rules determine the output. Those rules the stack of software that begins with the machine code just above the level of bare metal, and all the way up to the programming languages and so on. But rules determining transformation. An economy is a computer in the sense it's also made of rules. Those rules are the rules of the marketplace, describing the order of flow, or whatever, the behavioral rules of decision making that people are taking inputs and putting outputs. It's a stack of rules that had in the same way a computer is a stack of rules from bare metal all the way up to the programming to the operational languages. An economy is a stack of rules. Some of some are legislative, some are habits and routines. Some are decision heuristics, some et cetera, et cetera. But clearly not. Clearly, these things aren't undeterministic, but they're also the other thing about an economy compared to a digital computer, is economies are, by definition, decentralized computers. Those rules they exist in all of the parts, sort of a Polygram of rules. And the processing is happening massively in parallel. So an economy as a computer is a massively distributed, parallel computer. That's the sort of marketplace, fundamentally, is the way in which we get efficiencies out of those massively parallel, distributed computers as we turn them into centralized computers. That's an that's a marketplace as an exchange, is we all agree to put all the bids and asks into this, pass them through this one mechanism that'll compute, compute a price, price as an output. So just this notion of so, that description of those rules, many of those who are human behaviors, they're fuzzy. The more that we can make those rules specific, computable, embed them in code, the more that an economy looks like and functions like a computer. But I think just just just that, that insight in the same way that we can speed a computer up, we can add more and more layers to the to the to the software stack, what an institutional progress looks like is that we can, we can develop and modify and improve and add complexity to those rules, to that rule system. It's just that has traditionally been very, very difficult to do because most of those rules were very difficult to code in. They had to be either legislated or built into physical capital. They couldn't do. They weren't they weren't software. Okay?
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 49:59
Thank you very much. Any questions from the floor?
Audience question 50:03
Hi, Jason, sorry to be difficult, but isn't this just communism? I mean, you've, you've described a social science that's got no prices and no profit motive in it. How is it actually going to work in terms of motivating people to participate in your economy? It it seems, you know, there could be a lot of the dems. It's Nirvana fallacy going on here.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 50:31
Sure. Um, so the main control variable we've got here is design of the institutions. So, we can, we can experiment with what, with different institutional rules to create incentives within this. I mean, I, I the, you know, communism is one set of institutions where we all look out for our fellow human beings and act benevolently for their for their good. Well, someone else implements those, those rules with force. It's one one space, one point in that space. The what we're seeing with contribution systems is just people experimenting with different versions of that, so different ways of putting in incentive mechanisms, different ways of putting in payoffs, just exploring that full space. So, I mean, I don't think that's a fair or accurate characterization. Okay, thank you.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 51:42
Okay, go there first, and then go there first.
Audience question 51:48
Thank you. Something I'm kind of chewing on, because I'm working on something adjacent to this is thinking about how we can take these open these ideas from open institutions, these evolved governments and so on, and translate all the rich data from these open institutions, say, democracies and the like, into something that is code or something that is encoded. So what sort of research or what sort of areas of like study allow us to accurately capture all these decisions in this fuzzy, intersubjective world into, say, in the crypto world, tokenized incentives?
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 52:25
Yeah. I mean, that's good question as well. That's, I think that's where we're up to now. Is that a lot of the energy from the crypto space was just trying to figure out how to do that and try to find business models within that, often, not all of those worked, but I think this is the research program we have now is to try and essentially figure out which institutional rules are working in meat space that can be sort of codified, distributed, put into a network phenomena. Some will survive that others won't others. But one of the severe things that we've, we've been playing, talking about, is just, it's not just the institutional rules now that we want to look at, we've got 1000s of years of institutional rules that we can mine, looking for ones that might, might might be useful. And again, this goes back to the point that Sinclair was making, is that my defense of the is this communism, no, what this is is a kind of experimentalism over the institutional space. Where we are now is a tiny little corner of institutional space now. It's one that's been optimized for the historical pathway we've been on. We know a bunch of institutions that don't work. We know a bunch of them that have failed in the past. But I think what institutional progress looks like is not sort of a confident assertion that this institution will work. It's an experimental testing of let's try and build this one, because it's cheap. We can do this now. We can. We can experimentally build institutions, see if they work, if they work, scale them up, if they don't drop them a lot of the problem, the reason the sort of a lot of the history of the 20th century was basically economies are very expensive to build. Whatever sort you build, communist capitalism, they're both very, very expensive things to build. So you you sort of you build them, then you try and optimize them from that the ability or the new thing that we can do is we can treat economies much more like startups, much more like organizations. We can just throw them up and see if they work. Now that will require effort and financing and political will to enable those sort of things to happen. But the argument is, this is what has changed with digital technologies and digital institutions, is that the costs of doing have dramatically fallen. Therefore we we can be more experimental with with that process.
Audience question 55:06
A follow up to that so this is still on. Are there any generals, market incentives that immediately pop into mind, or economic or institutional incentives or structures that immediately pop into mind that do translate well from meat world into digital world?
55:22
digital world.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 55:26
So I think, I mean, the main one that we've been focusing on is just just tokenization. And what tokenization is, is just recognizing that creating a little cluster of very specific institutional rules is traditionally incredibly expensive, because you have to get a stack of administrators and accountants and legislators and so on to agree with that. Tokenization is just the ability to encode that directly, just as we'll just put it in and see and very tokens can be have arbitrary complexity with that. So I think the this is why, whatever you think of de-fi decentralized finance as an experiment in creating new types of finance, but it has been as magnificent as an experiment in new types of institutions. And it may well be that a lot of the lessons that we get from that almost have nothing to do with finance, but everything to do with this, this type of spin up capital or spin up types of economic organizations. So, I mean, I think that's, that's the thing I find most interesting right now, in terms of what we've learned from digital economy, from market economies into digital markets, into where we can go next.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 56:45
Sorry, wow, there's more questions. Okay, we have some a little bit time, so let's, let's explore it.
Audience question 56:54
Thank you. That was great. My questions about the slides, about the birds, that's not a very well formulated question, but I guess it's about the transition from current, what we currently think of as a conventional economy, GDP and interest rates and sort of the metrics of the industrial economy, to the story you're telling here. It strikes me historically, because you you began with this, this deep history story, although when we look back at macro, the macro story for human wealth has been good, but often those transitions from, say, foraging to agrarian weren't particularly good for the people at the time you know were working longer hours for worse food or satanic Mills, etc. So the question is, really to invite you to say a bit more about the current ways we measure the health of an economy, which often looks bit dire at the moment, and how you see this transition kind of interacting with them.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 57:53
That's interesting. I mean, so the reason we measure GDP in the first place is because planning right. It's we won't need to know how big an economy is. That's that's information that is an input into planning purposes. What you care about is your own welfare, not the welfare of the nation state. The size of GDP tells you roughly how much military power and economy will have. It tells you sort of, it tells you sort of information about its diplomacy and sports capabilities at the Olympics, but it doesn't, it doesn't actually give you any useful information about about your own sort of welfare within that, I think, the the types of so first of all, these new cheap network economies that we're going to be Throwing out, what we need ways of measuring them and them, but they're also much less permanent. They will throw them up for whatever purpose we need, and then they'll collapse as they solve the problem that they're trying to solve. What we need to keep track of then is which economies you're participating in, because in this world, you'll participate in many of them. We need to keep track of your your interaction, your your web of interactions with each one. We need to keep track of the performance of you know what they're doing, and so on with that. But this is sort of much more like sort of tracking social networks, or just just networks in general, I think so we don't have measures of this. We, you know, we only started measuring economies in 1940. As I say, they've been around since, you know, 5000 BCE, right? So you don't need to measure economies for economies to work. And I think it's this the same sort of point here. However, we do want ways of trying to understand what problems they're solving. I want to know which ones I should be joining. I want to know what contributions I've made to that. I mean, I think this is kind of pointing to sort of new problems for social science is in trying to better understand how we measure, identify value these new types of objects. My point here is that, you know, saying social networks, they're real. I mean, it's, of course, they're real. They've been around. My point is, they are economies. They're a new type of economy, and we need to sort of try and understand, you know, we need a new way of understanding them. I think they've got interesting new types of capital inside them. I think there's, there's interesting welfare implications of them. The main thing I like about them is they're voluntary. They're not coercive. So they've got some nice, some nice properties. But this is the sort of claim that I think economics isn't finished. We're not we're not at the final point where there's just a few more decimal places to fill in with economics. A new type of economy has just emerged. We need a new economics, and that economics needs to fundamentally be built in such a way that it's deeply institutional, so therefore intersects with accounting and law and so on. At a fundamental level, they're deeply communicative, and, you know, they're they're social networks within that exchange standard exchange processes, of course, still happen with this. And because these things throw off property rights, they will, these will drive market development as well. But the main point, the novel thing, I think that's happening here, is first 8000 years of economies Commons is weren't very effective. Now I think they're about to become incredibly that's the conjecture on this. But, yeah, I think there's just a lot of work to be done in trying to understand these now.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 1:01:47
So it's a four o'clock, I'll probably have to close up. But just before I close, I saw some maybe just last two questions, maybe Jody, you have any question, too? And then this gentleman first, Jody, Jody first, you know. And then we go. Sorry about that, but you can talk about to him afterwards, right during the tea time. Got to be quick.
Audience question 1:02:11
So you've you've talked a lot about this ease of standing up cheap economies, and you've talked about, this idea of the Digital Commons, and so the ease of standing up is new economies relies deeply on the existing capital infrastructure. And so what stops these digital commons from suffering the same fate as the traditional Commons? And that is sort of a digital enclosure?
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 1:02:41
Yeah, good question. That's kind of the I think the problems that we're dealing with right now is that we've we've got these new emergent economies, but they are clearly built on top of existing ones that that don't like the things that are happening within them. Again, we see this very clearly in the blockchain space, the a lot of this is open source software. A lot of the energy that from this came from open source software. And the lesson there was, you just build your own infrastructure again. And the extent to which what we're going to see over the next, I mean, I didn't put a time frame on its years, decades, centuries, whatever is this sort of reconstruction of new types of capital and infrastructure that is, that is built entirely to live in this type of world at the moment that doesn't exist at the moment, we've got a mix of both. And I think you know that these are the these are the new social science questions around, how do we get from here to there? If this is good, what are the pathways we get to that? What are the pathways that will block that? But I think this is the specific way in which the next in our lifetimes are going to be very politically and economically interesting. Is this fight, this this fight of whether these new frontier developing economies can fully separate off and grow into real economies themselves, or whether they will be fundamentally sort of locked into or stuck with or tied to the existing economies that we've had for the last 8,000 years. I mean, history suggests that's probably what's going to happen. But a lot of the energy that we're seeing here is this attempt to actually build these frontier economies completely separately. But I think these are the problems of political science right now. This is this, is this, is this. This is the research agenda for political science based upon this idea of a new type of economy that is emerging right now.
1:04:46
Okay,
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 1:04:46
Okay, our last question to that gentleman.
Audience question 1:04:52
Wow, honored to be last question. Jason, thanks, amazing talk and you and the team always opening the mind into lots of new things. You mentioned some similarities developing between human and machines, and I was interested in any comments you have on the perturbations that might make the transition to the digital economy faster or slower. And particularly anything you see interesting around this, that point that there's a indistinguishability between humans and machines.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 1:05:23
Yeah. I mean, the the single most interesting technology, I think that's that is right at the cusp, is economic agents. Is basically llms behaving as agents, or being able to drop llms into things such that they can behave as economic agents. They can have bank accounts or crypto wallets, or they can make decisions or an action, but just that's that's a new phenomena in the world this. Now, last time we had economic agents, you might remember, back in the 15th century we got joint stock companies. We built these new types of economic agents, these legal objects that could act as if they were human. That was the single biggest thing that happened in that 1000 year period. We've just done it again, but this time, these things are fast and cheap, and I can drop them into anything I like. So I think the answer that is we've got 8 billion odd economic agents in the world right now, plus another half a billion in terms of organizations, we're about to see a massive explosion in the number of economic agents, and every single one of them will plug into this economy, not the other one. That's where the growth of this will come from, because digital economic agents want to live in this world. They do not want to live in a in the old industrial economy world, because they can't. They're illegal there. It's very difficult for them to be there. So I think that's, that's the dynamics of this is going to come from that. But again, that's not blockchain. That's AI that's driving that. Again, emphasis on this full digital stack in the way it's interacting. Yes, thank you.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 1:07:05
Okay. On that note, please join me to thank Professor Potts for the stimulating thoughts, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in another Academy event. So we got a refreshments outside we can continue the discussion for sure. Thank you.
Distinguished Professor Jason Potts 1:07:23
Thank you.
5 August 2024, presented by Distinguished Professor Jason Potts
We are today in the early phases of a profound transition to a digital economy. In this lecture I will set out a new theory of where it came from, what it is, and why it matters. My argument is that a digital economy does not mean computers everywhere, but is the transition to digital institutions. A digital economy is a new type of economy – fundamentally different from an industrial economy – owing to the way in which these institutions (e.g. digital money and assets, digital markets, contracts and platforms) are composable to coordinate economic actions and compute value. In a digital economy 'the commons' is a far more powerful institution than in an industrial economy. This gives rise to new types of capital (as forms of 'hyperobjects'), new ways of organising production (in what we call 'contribution systems'), and new sources of property rights (as 'tokens'). The cheap new resource in a digital economy is not data per se, but rather the ability to spin-up a full stack economy from within civil society. This new institutional capability is the most disruptive factor of our time. Furthermore, alongside the technological, material and moral progress that the industrial era advanced, this leads to the prospect of institutional progress and the beginning of the end of politics.
Shaken and Stirred: The Art of Miniaturising Chemical Processes (Honey, I Shrunk the Lab!)
Shaken and Stirred: The Art of Miniaturising Chemical Processes (Honey, I Shrunk the Lab!)
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 00:04
So welcome everyone. I'm Xinghuo Yu, the chair of the RMIT Professor Academy and the host of the this events. So firstly, before we start, I would like to acknowledge the people of the Kulin nation on whose unseeded lands we are meeting today. We are respectively acknowledge their elders past and present. Okay, so today we shall hear from the Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo's lecture on the Art of Miniaturising Chemical Processes, I think this is a topic, which would be of interest to many of us is how to make something so small at the chip level, or even nano level, to still make it functional, which is think about its appears to be interesting ideas that is very hard to make it work. Okay, so before we start, so let's get through some housekeeping matters. This is hybrid the event. So we have people here today, on site. And also we have people online as well. So we will have a presentation first, followed by the question and answer and answers for for those who are here, you can ask the questions directly to the presenters. And and for those online, you can put your question in the chat. And we will basically ask on your behalf, those very popular ones to the end.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 01:35
Okay, so let's start the lecture by introducing the speaker Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo is a professor of chemical engineering with a specific expertise in acoustically and electrokinetically driven microfluidics for engineering and biological applications. He's the author of over 20 research, manuscripts and publications and 25 patents. And he currently serves as editor in chief of the American Institute of Physics journal Biomicrofluidics as well as on the editorial boards of several other journals. So without further ado, please join me to welcome Leslie to deliver his lecture. So over to you.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 02:27
Okay, well, thank you for coming I on hindsight, though, it wasn't great to put things just off the cuff there realize that but, you know, we're very thankful for you to be here. I think I see some of the students here. So I take that knowledge, the people who who do the real work, I just get the pleasure of telling you all about it. It's a bit of an old picture, we take a new picture soon, right. But you're, you'll see some familiar faces in the crowd. And I think the main thing is to introduce to you the people who done the work that I'm going to tell you about it's a bit the research is that I'm going to tell you about is probably a bit older now. It's something that I started off my career with. But I thought it's a nice story to tell you because that's sort of a back end to it, we we spent 10 years on it. And so you can see the the phone their narrative, we've moved a bit into a different field now. So some of the students that see here, their work is a bit different. But I'd like to acknowledge to the people that I've started my career with. So James Friend, I came to RMIT with him from Monash. Some of that work was done with him, um, getting rest was a student when he was doing some of this work, now he's an Associate Professor Haiyan Li, also was a former postdoc of mine. Now, she's a VC fellow here. So you can see that, you know, the people who have done this work, they they've done really well and they keep going. And that's to their credit, not mine.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 04:27
Okay. So, this talk is all about making small things, right. Small matters was the other title I call it but you know, we came up with what I thought would be a more fancy title. I used to have to go and to, you know, motivate the top but after COVID It seems like you don't need to do it anymore. Everyone knows about point of care diagnostics. Everyone knows, or at least realizes the need to do Okay, everyone knows the need to have to, you know, to do these things. So I guess I've got my work really easy. So, well COVID testing, you know, if you need to find out, if you have something, well, you have tests for it. And so I suppose now where to from here? Right? Why, why? Why go further, we've got all this fantastic stuff that tells you, Well, you have COVID in this, it's even within 15 minutes? Well, it's only for certain things, right. And, you know, it took a lot of money. And because of COVID, we've gotten to where we are, before this, we had mainly pregnancy test kits. But that was what's driving the field, the holy grail of being able to do disease detection, you know, with something as cheap, small, you know, and simple, right? And hopefully, well, the Holy Grail is, of course, cancer, you know, if you can do it in five minutes, or $5 a pop, then, you know, I think we're on the way, right, so, you know, that's a, that's what this is all about, I think the next big thing is also in eHealth, and AI, so be able to connect all that to the doctor's clinic, diagnosis and, and also put the smarts fluid with artificial intelligence, that's where we think the field is going. And all of this relies, I suppose, you can see now that it's putting complex chemical processes onto a chip, right. And so if you think about a lab, you know, what goes on in your lab, then all the different things you need to do, you know, from the sample preparation, to the reactions, the separations, and every, every single thing that you need to while you do in the lab, every single piece of kit that you have in the lab, you need to put on the chip, right to be able to do these things, of course, you know, this is getting a bit more complex than the conventional lateral flow immuno assays that you you have with the the COVID tests. But the idea is can we do it, you know, much more sensitively, right, because, you know, how much false positives do we have with the COVID test? The rat tests, you know, compared to the PCR, until now, I don't think there's a good answer for that, you know, whether you actually have COVID or not, you know, the false positives, the false negatives, you know, with that red test, it's just that, you know, we don't have anything better. So we all use that and assume more, you know, that what results you get, whether it's positive or negative, that's the best thing you have. Right.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 07:58
So, but can we do it more sensitively? Alright, so if you've been to our lab, it's probably a lot more chaotic than this. Okay. But the idea is, you know, whatever you've got in the lab, whether it's the centrifuge that will reactors, the separators, the pumps and valves, and every single thing that you have in the lab, how do we put it on to, you know, a tiny device, a chip scale device, or something portable, and at low costs, and does the job, you know, in a finite time, all right, so if you're a chemical engineer, like me, then you'll think about things in terms of unit operations, okay. So, this is what we learn in chemical engineering 101 things in a think about a factory, right? Everything is broken down into different units of operation, right. So the reactor, the separator, and so that's how I think about things right. So, you know, where from how you go from the inlet, you load the sample, you meter it, you do the mixing the reaction, the separation, and then you lose your detection, okay? could be it could be, you know, a detection of a cancer cell, it could be a detection number, virus, whatever it is, you know, you've got these steps to do and all of these steps you need to put it onto a chip, this is not ours. I just thought there was a my reference there, but you know, this, this was a nice example of all the different things that you put on. And, you know, you need to be able to pass the sample from one unit to another unit. And so you need to miniaturize all this and there's this whole field that has come out from the you know, over the last 30 years, it's got the lab on a chip or the micro fluidics community, it actually came out from the computing, right? So being able to make these chips, right, and millions of them with photo lithography, right, being able to replicate things at scale, and do it really cheaply. So that photo lithography process gave rise to this whole field. But it's a bit more complex than then then just putting, you know, making I guess, silicon chips, or, you know, putting circuits because now you have to do, you know, to worry about fluids, how to handle them, how to handle bio particles, like viruses, or cells and things like that. Right. But you know, it's a, it's a great example of, you know, where things can go. And you see, the kind of creativity that gets involved. I mean, somebody's using a Lego servo motor to come the footstep, right.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 11:08
So as you get that this talk is about small things, how small, right? So we're right down here, mainly in the nanometers space. Okay, so if you think about, say, a fluid drop, that's about one millimeter in diameter, that's about a microliter, you know, so we're down the span of skills, that's coming into it with, you know, fatigue, for example, channel, right, a fluidic channel, you know, that you can put on a chip, that's about the size of a human hair of All right, so you can hopefully, you know, get a sense of the scale, bacteria and cells will be a bit smaller than that, you know, about a micron or so. So, there's also this whole field that's coming together about nanofluid devices, all right. Whether that's practical or not, you know, that's a different story. But you know, it's possible now, to get to skills commensurate with DNA, for example, okay.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 12:23
It's not a new concept. So I take you back to the 50s, or the 60s, probably most of you weren't born then. Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, for his work on quantum electrodynamics. This was the kind of visionary visionary that he was right? Because he, he gave this this was a lecture at Caltech, I think. And he said, the title of this talk was, there's plenty of room at the bottom, and he was at back in the 50s, or 60s, he was suggesting, you know, being able to put the whole Well, you probably don't know about Encyclopedia Britannica, because you're too young for it. I grew up with it. These days. Yeah. Wikipedia, you know, when I, this tells you how old I am, I suppose. Because, you know, when, when we grew up in, in school, you know, if you had to look something up, there wasn't Wikipedia, you had these, you know, 20 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And there's only so much you can have, but you know, that took a whole whole shelf, you know, in my room. Right. But you're suggesting why don't you? Why can't you do this, the whole entire volume? On to a head of a pin? All right. All right. So but the problem, I think, with going down scales, you know, it's all good. And well, to think about it, how do we miniaturize? Unfortunately, the difficulty is that the physics is all different. All right. So the physics that we have day to day, right, or that we experienced day to day that we're familiar with, are very different at small scales, the dominant physics, it's not that you know, the physics changes or anything, but the dominant physics is different. Okay. So things that you and I used to, okay, so think about how do we move fluids, okay, so you have a water thing? Right? You put it on top of your roof, you know, down comes the water through your pipes to say gravity. All right. So that's what inertia of gravity drives fluid motion and the scales that you and I think about, all right, but at very small scales, gravity becomes less and less important. And because there's so much for example, surface area, right, say, surface area to volume ratio goes as what L squared over L cubed. So that's one over L. Right? So As you go down in L, that effect becomes a lot bigger right surface area to volume ratio. So things that you know, are influenced by surface area, for example, if you have very small pipes, then you have a lot of surface area, and hence viscosity that then retargets your flow. Alright, so, viscosity, surface tension also scales as the inverse of a length scale. So, as you go down in length scale surface tension effects, you know, go up, right, and we know that surface tension retards flow as well. So, things that are at small scales, it's these dominant forces that, you know, become really important, much more important than at the law of gravity or, you know, the some of the things inertia that drive flow. So, it's actually very, very hard to drive flow or manipulate flow of bio particles at small scales. Okay. This is a great example. gecko, right? So you have, why do you think lizards can climb walls? And that's because they have a lot of these tiny hairs on the feet, I think, you know, somebody will think something like 1000 of these hairs in an area of a millimeter square. Right? And because of that each hair, you know, has an adhesive force. That's probably about 10, I think micro Newtons, right? So you begin to see how you know, the Vander Waals forces, things that we don't think about these at easy forces at very small scales of attraction. Allow, you know, things to be very different from you and I, you know, unless you're Spider Man, you can climb walls, right, or water strider, you know, because they can walk on water, because, you know, well, surface tension, right at the small scales, things that you and I can't do. All right.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 17:03
So for the rest of this story, I thought, instead of trying to, you know, talk about every single thing, I thought I'd give you an example how to shrink something down. Okay. And this was something we worked on, early on between 2005 and 2015. Right, was trying to shrink down a centrifuge, because that's what like I said, you know, if you want to make some of these devices, right, you need to think about putting shrinking down each unit operation, and centrifugation being one of them, which is, you know, an important part of any chemical process, you need to be able to miniaturize that, and then put them on a chip. Right. So how do you do that? When the physics is so different, right. And you'll, you'll see that, you know, even the concept of centrifugation becomes, well, tenuous, at small scales, right? Is that is centrifugal force that we use to, you know, when we spin things, even relevant at small scales, right, that doesn't do what we wanted it to do, like, you know, if you have a lab centrifuge, right, for example, if you had a test tube, and you with this shoved one of these things into a centrifuge, and you were to spin it, you can you can separate red blood cells from plasma. Right. And this is what people do before they analyze, you know, blood. Right. So how do you how do you analyze blood? When you're on a chip, you know, you need a centrifuge, but at the small scale, this is driven by density differences. But again, like I said, you know, it doesn't translate that way, when you go down scales, right? You can't rely on density differences are centrifugal forces to do that at small scale, so even shrinking down that whole centrifuge becomes, you know, well, at least it's not just our take this and just miniaturize it, you have to think about doing things in a very different way. All right. And the idea is, you know, if I can put the centrifuge on the chip, and then it goes into my device, then maybe you know, together with the rest of everything else, then maybe I have something that does something meaningful.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 19:26
Okay, so this is the bread and butter of what we do. It's got surface acoustic waves is a mouthful, so I'll call it SAWs. You know, the, you actually use it every single day of your life, but you probably may not know it, okay? It's a 10 nanometer earthquake, if you think about it that way. All right. So, if you look at that amplitude, you know, it goes up and down. This way it goes up and down. 10 nanometers, okay. The reason why I say you use it every day of your life is because it's in your mobile phone. Right? There are four or five of these devices sitting in your mobile phone. And it's been used for signal filtering and in telecommunications for about 60, 70 years now. Okay, but it tells you how small and cheap they can be made because Okay, forget Apple. Okay, Apple rips everyone. Okay? So let's say Nokia, you buy a phone, Nokia phone, how much is it? $200. Okay, you can be rest assured some of these chip components cost less than 50 cents a pop. Right. And that's because you're able to mass manufacture them. So it tells you how small and cheap they can be made, right? If you're old enough to remember the the touchscreens, your bank ATM that you have to stamp your finger and before it even works, that also uses some acoustic waves because where you put your finger interacts with a wave root causes reflection. And so that's how it detects where there's some cars, raindrops sensors, that activate your windscreen wipers, they also use those kinds of waves. Alright, so it's not new technology. But nobody's been crazy enough to think about, you know, driving fluid flow and things like that until the early 2000s. But this is how we, we made them, it's a bit easier then of course, the chip like going through your mobile phones, it's actually a piece of electric material. So a piano electric material converts electrical energy to mechanical string, okay, or vice versa. So, what we do to make this nano earthquake is we are down to automatography. These finger like patterns, okay, finger like electrodes, alright, and your client Acpo. So just like the shifting of tectonic plates, this ricin earthquake, you know, you put an Acpo, here, the fingers go back and forth on this appears electric material, and not just this amount of upgrades. So that's essentially how it works. Now, they were able to control through, again, the fabrication process, the thickness, and the gap of these fingers, the gap and the wave of the stream. And that sets the wavelength of the better, all right, and you all know true speed of sound in the material. That's related to a resonant frequency. Okay, so just for some magic numbers, 10 nanometer amplitude, but the the wavelengths are a lot longer. So these are 100 microns. And that translates if I tell you the speed of sound is about, you know, 5000 meters per second, then you can work out that the resonant frequency to put on with your AC field is about 10 megahertz. Alright, so those are the magic numbers. 10 megahertz, 100 micron wavelength 10 nanometer amplitudes. Okay, but so here's the question. Alright, this is the test whether people are awake. If I tell you 10 nanometers, okay, that's great. It's going up and down centimeters. Below velocity is about one meter per second. And we can measure, right this wave is bigger, if you're, you've got a beach, right? And you see this moving going up and down this way. It's going down, up and down one meter per second, by the way, it's only 10. What's the acceleration? Okay, that's physics one on one. 10 million times a second, I'm going one meter per second. It's 10 million G's. Right? So at least very small scales, you can see that, you know, the acceleration is phenomenal. And that's the point. Right? That the that's why these waves are so powerful to be able to be to, to be used, or to be exploited. And these scales, right? Now, the thing is this. This is vibration, you know, it's like sound, right? So, but the difference is this, unlike sound where I'm talking to you and the sound goes everywhere, right? It's a boat phenomenon. These waves are localized on the surface, right? And so basically, what you have is a very, very efficient way of keeping things on the surface, instead of being very lossy. Okay. If I talk to you, you know, in this room, the sound was everywhere and dissipated. But here, everything's localized on the surface. And it's maintained there until in eats a liquid, and then it leaks up that energy and then we're able to drive streaming, or flow. Okay? And that's what you see here. Okay, so here's a drop, for example, micro liter or nano liter drop that I put on the chip, right and just for illustrative purposes, you can see that, you know, the drop, the waste leak into its, its into the liquid phase. So you have a very, very efficient way of transferring energy from a solid to liquid with very little loss. And that's why we can do things with, you know, just one watt of power or less. Right? Do some of these fluidic manipulations, okay. And the idea is, because then we use a lot less power, maybe then we can get away with a chip to dry everything with battery powered circuits. Okay, because ultrasound has been around for a long time. But ultrasonic transducers are large, you know, think about your sonicator, you know, in your lab, right, involves 10s of, you know, what's the power, maybe 100 Watts, it's not easily miniaturize, okay, you need to put it on the bench, you need to plug it into the mains, right? If you can do things with less than a watt of power, then maybe you can drive things with a battery powered circuit. Right. And that's the idea of being able to do miniaturization.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 26:31
Okay, so I digress. Alright. But that's the, the technology that, you know, we tried to see whether we can replicate, you know, the centrifuge, but on the small scale. Okay, so that's the Grail, Holy Grail, how can I use these acoustics to then drive centrifugation? And then together with everything, put it into a, a chip scale device? All right, so centrifugation of maybe I'll talk about rotation? How do I drive rotation? Because if the wave comes up, if you think about, you know, sitting on a beach, right, and the wave comes at you, it just wishes, okay, you you just go wherever the wave comes, right? So how do I create the centrifugation? Well, I break symmetry. Okay, so one way to break symmetry is I can put that drop part of it in the radiation pathway, part of it outside the radiation pathway, that will drive rotation in the drop or break symmetry, I can make an asymmetric cut in the chip, such that reflection on one side of the job is different from the reflection on that side. Rotation, oh, I can pull the gel and thought, half of the way whatever, on one side, but not the other side. Anything that breaks symmetry is going to drive rotation. Okay, and it's easier than you think because symmetry is hard. Right? And so, you know, just to prove the point Yeah, one millimeter steel balls that we can we'll take all right and this was a work done by Haiyan Li in the back in 2007 Okay, and then you can play fun and games with it you can do mixing you know, by introducing chaotic instabilities these are for example, this is a say just for scale this is a millimeter across okay.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 28:34
So, and what you see here are fluorescent particles, okay. And they are dispersed to begin with, and you can see they get concentrated into a point. In fact, this concentration is 1,000,004 Right, and the lights up, you can see it like a Christmas tree. And so if you can think about, you know, doing detection that way, for example, during concentration. So just as a very quick example, here, I guess this was because Melbourne was at one time they were interested in detecting Cryptosporidium, which is a organic thing kills lots of people, when you have them in drinking water. So if you can detect them, then you can deal with the contamination. So we lay out the Cryptosporidium for less for the rest of them, we labeled them we can see you know, trying to detect something that small is right so you can barely see their fluorescence. Right. So imagine because only a few Cryptosporidium can kill lots of people. You want to do detection, a very, very insensitive levels, right at very small quantities. But how do you detect very small quantities because you can't see them? And just like a sensor, if you can't see them, it's sensor can see them in your, the sensitivity limits are very low. Right? So but if you spend a lot better, spin them to a point you concentrate them. Right? So that's the thought process. If I can do sample preconcentration, then maybe I can get around sensitivity levels of the senses. Okay, so here's the question now. Right? As concentration, as I told you, but, you know, this obviously behaves like a centrifuge. Right? I told you that the physics doesn't apply. So say, for example, that the picture that I showed you where the blood red blood cells concentrate, and separate from the plasma, in a real center, we'll send you that concentration works by density differences by centrifugal force. If I told you already that the physics is very different, then how does this work? How am I doing the concentration? Well, we came up with a theory, right? This was I was ready to publish this was really happy with myself. And this is, this is a lesson of getting ahead of yourself. Right? And then I discovered problem with doing literature search, you know, you find things that you don't want to find. Right? So they discovered that this guy actually published it first. 100 years ago, right? It's called the Einstein tea leaf paradox. Okay, you can actually find this paper, Google Einstein tea leaf paradox. Yeah, so damn, right. But so let me ask you, guys, it's hard these days, because everyone uses tea bags. Right. But I guess when I gave this talk, people feel really Alright, so if I were to stir tea leaves, and then you can go try this at home tonight. And you can stir in a teacup because they have to spend if I stir tea leaves in a tea cup? Do they go in? Or do they go out? So let me take a poll who says they go in? Three or four. Who says they go out? Three or four, who doesn't care? They, it's a paradox, because you expect centrifugal forces to excel them out. Right? Just like if you're to drive a car around, right your body gets pushed outwards right. But the tea goes inwards. And this was what Einstein explained. This is my horrible way of sorry, you can actually see they actually come up after a while you can see eventually failed several cents on the future.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 33:31
So, and this has to do with fluid mechanics actually, if you have think about the automobile to that station, right. And you think of your spoon stern the I guess the analogy will be fluid trapped between two layers, one stationary and one rotating face. And this was actually done explained by George Batchelor in 1960-something Bachelor of Laws. And essentially what it is, is because there's this what we call in fluid mechanics, and no slip boundary no slip means a station. Okay, so to balance the momentum, radial force pushing radially Okay, so the closest way I can think about it is like a funnel. Okay, so like a tornado, you've got a rotation, but then you've got everything funneling in. It comes in. Well. The you probably see this somewhere here right. It funnels in the site that has to you know, it can't just stop okay, it needs to conserve. So it spirals up central spiral. But because if you have a stagnation point that your particles are I'm not levitate, but it gets. Alright, so this is a very simplistic explanation, I didn't want to get into more details, but you can actually see that funnelling sort of motion, probably better here. And occasionally, if you're not careful, you can see this central spinal column there. Okay, but I didn't get the, you know, the acclaim because of Einstein beating into it by about 100 years, but 2005 turns out to be the year of physics, right? So you put Einstein to your papers, Sunday media, essentially, so we managed to get some press releases out of it. But you know, 100 years ago.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 35:49
Okay, so and then, you know, it's the rest is all fun and games, we showed that, you know, you can do different play with different forces, because the sound waves has has this radiation force, just like, you know, if, say, Concorde, Sonic Boom, were to hit you, okay? You will, you know, you, you feel that pressure, we can play around with that the different forces and we can do particle separation. So, for example, not particles, outside, outside, small particles inside, so we can then play around with size differences to actually separate this was this, just to show the content, right, so the small ones. And you can do that separation, a bit differently from a centrifuge, but conventional centrifuge, you can also, you know, pull cells in, and the reason why we're doing this was to make spheroids. So, spheroids are 3d sort of bodies, because cells tend to grow as mono layers on a 2d plane. But in order, for example, if you want to have cancer cell mimics, right, you need tumors, if you want to study tumors, for example, you need to make these Orgonite bodies or spheroid bodies. So making them is usually true, it's a hanging metal, where they put cells in the drop, and you rely on this force to pull them in. But that's not very uniform or controllable, we do it and control that using, I pull themselves together. Just as a few more demonstrations, we can, instead of concentrating, we can do the opposite, which is mixing. Mixing is actually quite difficult at small scales.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 37:46
Here was a device that we tried to do for detecting pesticides in water. Here, we're actually using a chemiluminescent reaction. So the pesticide would react with a chemiluminescentry agent. And if it's present, it will light up like a Christmas tree. We can do it in this car, we tried to show that we can do integration, right? So the palms, the factory, the photo detector, and do this. All in a very small package. A few dollars compared to this is the gold standard flow injection analysis, which is a monster of a device sits on your bench of about $100,000 You can do it at one or two orders of magnitude better than industry gold standard. Okay, then the rest was fun and games, we can spin a drop, then you can spin this on a drop. Okay, so you're getting very sleepy. And everything I say it's nice and wonderful. Right? So these are, that's a five millimeter This weakens on the microphone, as well. And the reason was not not only to drive impellers No, but there was some work going on in the micro fluidics community where, okay, if you can miniaturize things. So well. Maybe you can patent them on CDs, right? Because the problem was everyone miniaturize the chip. It's only this microfluidic chip. But they don't show you underneath the table. There's this big huge and all the amplifiers and signal generators. They don't show you that. Right? You need to put everything on the table, but it's not so easy to put a hole pump, no amplify a signal generator onto a small device. Right? So someone came up with oh, what happens if I go you know, compliments, right? So here's a CD if you're old enough to remember what a CD is. And you know, I pattern my fluid channels on a CD and use actual actual centrifugal force because I can put it in a CD player, right? and spin, alright. But that's, that doesn't really address the problem because you know, you still need us CD player or centrifugal motor. So we decided if we can spin this robots, you know, putting channels on the on this. And that's what we did. And we spend it as well. And we can do the mixing the concentration and stuff like that. So I won't bore you with the details. But this is just to show you, you know, things, the fun and games we have. Okay. Before we came to, I mean, it's all good. And well, this is slow down, of course, just to show the impact. But, you know, it's great for publishing papers. But then what about real world devices, right? So in our lab, we try to go all the way from discovering new phenomena, explaining them to actually trying to build something that's meaningful and get it off the top. Right, but easier said than done, especially if you're an Australian, I'm sure you know. But there was one fundamental problem, I discovered that I didn't realize. Right.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 41:10
So you, so we had this, what we'd like to say that great technology. And then we go and talk to people. It doesn't go down so well. And I realize why the inertia and it's a bit more nuanced than just whether your technology good or not. So if you go to a bio biologists lab or something like that, okay, they have these instruments. Okay, and there are actually quite merit to them. Okay, it's called plate reader. Okay. So, okay, for those of you who are not familiar, all right, so if I wanted to discover a new it's actually quite primitive, this discovery process of the media, the scientists. So it's not combinatorial chemistry. I mean, it's not a lot of combinations. And I hope that you know, one will, you know, right? So that's the idea of coming into Taurus, right? I can do millions and millions. And that's why the drugs cost, you know, on average, a billion dollars to come up with a new drug 10 years ago, because you have to try and get it. So the idea is use these micro wells. We have a picture here. Okay, there these titre plates, right. So each one is a well, and the standard is a 96 well plate, we can go up to, you know, 384, even 500 something, right? And the idea is, okay, I have a reagent, I put down another reagent, and I look, whether there's a reaction, okay? And you put it into this, what's known as a plate reader, okay? It's not cheap. And it reads the output, okay? And I am saying, we've got these microfluidic chips that can do better. But nobody wants to know, because they've invested so heavily on, you know, the these expensive machines does that inertia of using new technology, because I'm unfamiliar with it, I need to retrain all my technicians, I need to do things differently. And so nobody wants really wants to adopt new technologies, even however good it is. So I just, you know, discovered that this was the fundamental issue rather than, you know, the, the challenge being the technology is actually the perception. Right? But the perception is what you know, makes the difference. So we thought, okay, if mountain doesn't come to Mohammed, Mohammed has to go to mountain. Alright. So at that point, we thought, Ah, maybe let's not try to push all this new technology to people who, you know, not going to appreciate it anyway. Can we do things? Can we do what what with what they have start from there and work backwards. Right. So but here's the thing, right? So these things are quite primitive in terms of liquid handling. So you have these robotic pets that come down and dispensing into each well. It's slow, it's mechanical, it's susceptible to mechanical Um, you know, whatever mechanical. And if I could mix it, I could bring my contaminated and you know, stuff with that. But there's actually no good way of mixing, oh, I put the whole thing on our little shaker and I shake the whole tray. But I can't individually address me to update on this. Well, I'm not yet aware or I want to mix it so much here in less than two weeks. Well, I caught, right. Or at least with this technology, okay.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 45:38
The next best thing is what this company that side actually make a lot of selling this. So they have this ultrasonic transducer that goes under each Well, each thing and they mechanically move. Right? And then they plus the ultrasound mixing. So they make a lot of money. So we thought, okay, can we use our devices? Turns out again, now somebody beats us to it. Right? So this was sort of Olympus analysis, right? So the idea was still okay, for these devices under the wealth, right? And couple of the energy in and just like we can do certification and all this sort of thing I can, you know, do it. But the problem is this, right? Here's my device, here's my device. If I want to address that, well, I have to use two devices, and I address everything in the path. Right, so that's not gonna work either.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 46:45
So we decided, okay, we, we thought this was the work of Professor Alvarez, you know, we decided we had to do something different, not the surface acoustic waves, we had to come up with something different. Today, that was one of the backside of things. And in that process, he discovered a new sound waves. Right. And so they I say this was a new class of sound waves and the first for a very long time. So let me try to explain is, this is a surface acoustic wave, and by nature of a surface wave, and you see the nominal upgrade on one side, but because it's a surface wave, all the energy is localized on that surface, if I look at the backside of it, there is no image on the underside of it. Okay. That's a bulk wave where, you know, the, the energy goes throughout the whole thickness of the substrate. But we discovered that, you know, there's an asymptotic regime in the middle, right, that nobody thinks about, right? When you match the wavelength to the thickness. And suddenly, it's this weird combination of surface wave on one side and the foot wave on the side, which, okay, I guess, we could have call it red waves after, but then we will get stoned for heresy. So we came up with this name surface reflect about waves, which is it on hindsight, effectively. Anyway, it was a new wave. So but now you've got the properties of a surface, but you can harness the backside of it. Okay. So then the rest is just flipping, right. So we created these devices, so we address them from. Okay, so we address them from the underside the electrodes on the underneath. But because it's a hybrid surface, bulk wave, it goes through the material and on the backside. And then we can make them small enough and 3d printing this housing so that we don't have crosstalk and we could put one under each well. And then you know, the rest is just electronic circuitry, because then you can address if I want this one or not this one, I can address them simultaneously. And then we showed it, right. So for example, this show there's no crosstalk we left all this untouched, and we just concentrated in one of them. We could do the mixing as well. We can also inject the trough on individual wells. So this hopefully, well is Mohamed going to the mountain, okay, we work with new technology, but something that people are familiar with comfortable with, they don't have to spend lots of money buying new equipment is already there. It's incorporating them into existing tape readers and so on and so forth. So that's the hope.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 49:56
All right, so the and then the rest of things I just thought I'd just show you before I finish. Sorry. You know, because we've got 10 million G's of acceleration, we can also nebulize. The nice thing is that, you know, at high frequencies, it doesn't denature cells or biomolecules, right, because there's no time for the field reversal so quickly that there's no time for example, to stretch DNA apart. So I can actually nebulize from the chip. If this was a Trump vial, I can pull the truck through and not realize it or create aerosol drops that you can inhale. And so this is something for example, with talking to some people about in, for example, the the mRNA vaccines, let's talk about delivering them in by inhalation either to nose or the lung, for example. So, you know, we conventional inhalers or nebulizers. You can't do it because they wrecked the the molecules apart. Because to create aerosol drops, you actually need quite a lot of energy. So we've tried to commercialize this. Thankfully, there was some funding to do it. And we've done some animal trials. This was actually a land trial with the Murdoch, Children's Research Institute where we delivered a monoclonal antibody to treat respiratory syncytial virus in neonates. Okay. So with that, I think I've probably bore you enough. So thank you very much. Hopefully, we've shown you that at least in terms of a centrifuge, you know, with April, it may monetize it. And hopefully, we'll get some work towards making wearable devices through integration of other things, too. Thank you.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 51:59
All right. Thank you very much. Please join me. Any..thanks for that fantastic talk, quite amazing. Any questions, comments?
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 52:12
I told my students that the they have the role reversal, here.
Audience question 52:17
I wanted to put something a question to you. It didn't. It didn't work the students up to them. So with your centrifuges, and you talked about the unit operators, or the the units, whatever they call it chemical engineering. So how once you've centrifuge it to a point in a little droplet at the bottom, so how do you connect that concentrated, whatever particle that you're that you're concentrated it to the next cell unit operation? That could be a little bit tricky, right?
Audience question 52:58
Yeah, that was something we went up against. So the first thing is that, you know, droplets never work. I mean, I've we showed the concept of droplet but as you know, thermal side of things evaporates. I mean, these are the micron size micrometers it evaporates in no time. So, to do that close. So we made a well, the idea was to actually drill through the substrate to aspirate whatever particles, we concentrate and have a flow through the system. So that's one one way to do it. So you connect them to channels, just like you would do in a normal process. But the fabrication becomes quite intricate, because now they have to drill through this material.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 53:49
Okay, so we got to actually online question they said, Yeah, this is fantastic talk. So what's next?
Audience question 53:55
What's next? Well, I show you is trying to actually, you know, get people to think about it differently. And that's the challenge, right? The technology, technological challenges is one thing, but I think the big thing is driving the perception page in the people who actually use these things. Right. So that's, that's one of the big challenges that we find. So to be able to put something together and demonstrate, you know, if that's what they need, you know, a fraction of the cost. But as you vary the challenge of Australia in taking fundamental research to you know, something that can demonstrate very little funding. I think that has always been our in our fields you've done demonstrating medical devices with the other technology. One of the other things right, so maybe I'm doing sensing, for example, you know, there's a lot of great work doing photonic sensing outperforms lasers on the microscope. So, so centrifuges only one or the other.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 55:18
I've actually a question. I mean, I've seen some report on the, they're making this the nanoscale, like a robotics type of thing and move around. So I guess that's actually start touching the boundary of physics, I guess. I mean, is this Are you this is things is towards that direction? Maybe in the Nano, that will be different physics, I guess, right.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 55:40
Yeah, it's two different strands of technology. So we try to do things with a mechanically moving solid state. There's also the mechanical engineers that try to make micro robots, nanobots that depend on mechanical actuators. I mean, both sides have advantages and disadvantages, I think, mechanically moving parts, you know, they're prone to wear and tear and failure. But you know, they can be more precise. So I think people are, it's not just one way to skin a cat. And there's really cool robots around. You know, like, you know, things that gets you watch Futurama or something like that you see swimming micro robots that go in whatever.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 56:32
Okay, thank you very much. Any other questions. Okay, if there's no chance, okay, sir.
Audience question 56:51
So if you couldn't get the mountain to come to you, and when you went to the mountain yourself, it didn't work out? Why didn't you go for a different alternative kind of market? For example, people? So what if you tried a different group rather than going commercial and trying to get commercial people who have existing technologies? Why don't you go for someone completely different, like a completely different market?
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 57:16
Well, I guess, if I was clever, I knew who to go to. I think that was a simple, brutal answer, I think, because the people will use these things for at least two logical fallacies to work with these partners. But you're right, you know, who says that? You know, we have to do things in a certain way, just because the there may be alternative applications, right, that we haven't thought of. And so that's the clever people like you. There may be other fields or other agents, which I mean, I remember that like the nebulizer we had a talk with NASA. Right? How do you actually use the the nebulizer drug delivery to be positioned satellites, because in space, like all you need is a tiny momentum to actually turn the whole satellite, you don't need much more precise. So we're talking about actually using aerosols to improve impinge on the satellite. So you know, you're right, that there, there are probably others you just need to be.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 58:30
Okay. Okay. Active.
Audience question 58:37
Very quickly, I didn't actually say that was, you know, your career, you're, you know, the world, you know, world leaders in this field. And you've developed this platform technology. And this is where the tension between you've got this platform technology, which seeing what are the applications and you found some great applications just then moving the users along with you? That's hard, right? So the other model is, you speak to the users, what's the gap first, and then develop the technology for that? And some of the big companies were making those those for example, well plates. So how did you did you actually do work from beginning with any companies for some of these things? Or was it always just you've got that you're a world leader in this surface acoustic wave technology and how you're applying it?
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo 59:19
I think that's where we don't do so well, to be brutally honest. I mean, that's where we have to come talk to you guys, right? The ones that connect the industry, we tend to work more from the fundamental side, discovered new phenomena and try to develop things out of it. It's great for publishing papers. And it's something I enjoy, actually do it. But we don't do so well on the other side of actually going out there and talking to people and I think our problem is there's this disconnect, right? Because you go out there and you're so everybody who we talk to right? Inevitably a person is All right, great, cool stuff. Cool gadgets come back when it's ready. Right? And so we're always too far on this TRL level, if you want to use semantic value, right, we are always at TRL, two or three. And when we go out there, it's always, you know, they, they love it, but they say, you know, how does this apply to develop this thing? And then you come back? Right. And I think this is also it's not wrong approach. But in Australia, it's hard to do that, because where's the funding from ARC is a third fund beyond this TRL two, three to go the next step. And that has always been our, I guess, our limitation. So you're right, in terms of can we start from the other side and work backwards? This is something
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 1:01:03
What Gary means you need to work more closely with the Enabling Impact Platform. Okay, all right. All right. I think Tom is up and please join me to thank Leslie for the fantastic talk. Thank you. And looking forward to the to see you in the next lecture. I think it's going to be next year. So we have some refreshment. Yeah, we'll have some refreshment outside. So continue to discuss the things about interstate and do the networking. Thank you very much for coming.
Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo
Thank you.
8 Nov 2023, presented by Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo.
The ability to translate conventional laboratory operations, such as sample preparation and handling, reaction, separation (e.g., centrifugation) and analysis, onto low-cost portable handheld platforms offer tremendous opportunities for many applications across healthcare and environmental monitoring. Yet, miniaturising seemingly simple processes in the laboratory onto chipscale devices is not a trivial exercise, owing to the vastly different physics that dominate at small scales. In this talk, we show how a unique form of sound waves that resemble nanoscale earthquakes can be utilised to facilitate such miniaturisation, and hence the development of practical technology for medical diagnostics and therapeutics at the point-of-care, or environmental monitoring in the field.
The Federal Government's "Closing Loopholes" IR Reform Bill
The Federal Government's "Closing Loopholes" IR Reform Bill
Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth 00:00
Welcome everyone in the room and online to this RMIT Distinguished Lecture Series panel discussion on the reform legislation currently before the Federal Parliament, the Closing Loopholes bill, and I'll explain what that means in a minute. And what it will mean for the rights of platform workers. Right to begin with the Acknowledgement of Country RMIT acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nations as the traditional owners of the land on which the university stands. We respectfully recognize elder's past, present and future and at RMIT. We recognize and respect the unique culture and contribution that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people bring to our communities.
Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth 00:42
We have a wonderful panel of guest speakers here and hopefully one more to arrive, who will no doubt enliven this discussion. So with me, Dr. Fiona MacDonald, our former RMIT colleague, welcome back, and now Policy Director, Industrial and Social at the Center for Future Work of The Australia Institute. Neil Farrow, Director of Corporate affairs for Higher Up, a leading national disability insurance scheme registered online platform which employs all its workers. One of the reasons we invited Neil. And also, the missing person is Michael Caine, National Secretary of the Transport Workers Union of Australia, a leading advocate for the employment rights and safety of gig workers. So Michaels delayed on a flight, flying Qantas, he thinks there's a fair chance it's industrial sabotage, and I can't believe he's flying with them still, actually, but he tells me that hopefully, he'll be around with us soon. I'm just gonna turn my phone down because I can hear some feedback. That's better. Alright, so thank you all for joining us today. particularly pleased to see some of their students from my labor law class this semester, I must have done something right to get you to come to this event.
Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth 01:55
But before I invite our panelists to speak, I'm just going to set the scene briefly. So the closing loopholes bill is the Albanese government's second major industrial relations reform following last year's secure jobs better pay act, and that legislation introduced measures to improve gender equity, and increase wages through multi employer collective bargaining among many other changes. But according to the industrial relations minister, Tony Burke, many Australians aren't receiving the full benefit of those changes, because of certain loopholes that remain in our legislation that allow pay and conditions to be undercut. And there are a number of loopholes that the current bill seeks to close, including in relation to casual employment, and also, very importantly, in relation to labour hire arrangements.
Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth 02:50
The one we're focusing on today, was explained by the minister in introducing the bill into parliament in September, as follows. He said, currently, gig workers have no minimum standards at all. When a gig worker claims employment rights such as the minimum pay in an award or remedy for unfair dismissal. The first question they are asked by the Fair Work Commission or the Fair Work Ombudsman is are you an employee? And if the answer is no, all of the workers rights fall off a cliff. And it continued the amendments in the bill will close that loophole and turn the cliff into a ramp by giving the Fair Work Commission powers to make minimum standards orders for workers on digital labor platforms. So what the government is trying to do here is to counter the business model that sits behind most task based platforms like Uber, in rideshare, like Hungry Panda in food delivery, and like Mable in the care sector. And that business model, is the insistence by most platforms, that the workers who provide the labor that's essential to their business operations are not employees. Instead, gig workers are automatically assumed to be entrepreneurial, independent contractors. And to establish employment rights, they have to challenge this mis classification, which is what it is in most instances in the courts. But only a handful of gig workers have been able to do that in recent years. Even though, for example, in one case involving Deliveroo. When delivery was operating in Australia, they exited the market late last year. But when a worker tried to bring an unfair dismissal case, the Fair Work Commission said the work contract was drawn up unilaterally by Deliveroo without any negotiation or consultation. And that Deliveroo had done this with an eye to maintaining its position that its workers were contractors and not employees, and therefore evading employment regulation. So there's been a lot of research, including by people in this room, looking at the effects of this contracting model on platform workers in Australia over the last decade or more. And what we've found is that the effects on workers have often been devastating, including widespread underpayment compared to award minimum rates of pay, exposure to abuse and sexual harassment by customers, and higher safety risks, which have led, for example, to the deaths of food delivery riders in Melbourne and Sydney.
Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth 05:47
So what is the government trying to do? It's not seeking to eradicate this business model, the contracting model at the core of gig work. Instead, it's proposing a compromised solution. And in the minister's words, again, he said in many countries, the answer for these types of workers has been we'll just make them an employee. We are not doing that, we are going to accept the form of engagement as contractors. But what we are asking is within that form of engagement, surely there are some minimum standards that are appropriate. So the regulatory scheme proposed in the bill would enable what are described as employee like workers engaged by digital labor platforms, which also has its own definition in the bill. And unions representing them to apply to the Fair Work Commission for three different types of regulation. They can apply for a minimum standards order that sets terms and conditions for their engagement relating to matters like payment, working time, insurance, consultation, and representation. But not importantly, these orders could not regulate overtime rates, or rosters or work health and safety. So this is where we see some acceptance on the government's part of the arguments around innovation and flexibility, which have driven the adoption of platforms here and overseas for some time now.
Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth 07:22
The second type of pathway into the Fair Work Commission for employee like workers on platforms will be that they can seek remedies to address unfair deactivation by a platform. So effectively, we're talking about dismissal or termination from what would normally be employment, and you would normally have an unfair dismissal remedy. And we know that many platforms, particularly in rideshare, and food delivery, probably also Fiona will tell us in the care sector, they do manage employees or workers rather, in ways that are very much like employment through algorithms through monitoring performance standards through customer rating. And often workers can be kicked off the platforms without recourse, when they have transgressed what the algorithm has been telling them to do. So this is giving them the right to seek remedies that are similar to the remedies that can be obtained for unfair dismissal by employees. And the third part of the scheme would be a modified form of collective bargaining. So unions representing platform workers would be able to negotiate with platforms over terms and conditions that should apply to those workers. That could be above what might be set out in minimum standards orders. But this will be a call it a modified form of collective bargaining, because it will be different to that which applies for employees under the Fair Work Act. It will be a consent form of collective bargaining. So platforms won't be forced into collective negotiations, industrial action won't be available in support of collective bargaining in that context of gig work.
Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth 09:15
So that's what the bill is trying to do. The government wants to provide these rights to platform workers who have low bargaining power, low authority over their work, or comparatively low pay. So questions will arise as to which good workers meet these tests, and which ones will fall outside the new system. The loopholes bill is currently being considered by a Senate committee due to report on first of February. So we won't know if the government is able to secure passage of the bill until February or March next year. But one thing is certain there will be a massive campaign from most platforms to persuade crossbench senators to vote against the bill. And if they do what they've done overseas, particularly in the context of proposed regulation in California a few years ago, they will spend a huge amount of money trying to get all of you as consumers to also lobby senators to not pass this legislation. Uber has already claimed that food delivery prices could rise by 85% if the bill becomes law, which is another thing platforms do is tend to scare monger and exaggerate the possible effects of regulation and hold the threat of exit from the market over whichever government in a particular country is trying to level the playing field in this sector. So we'll hear from our guests now. And I'm pleased to see Michael finally arrived already made the joke about Qantas, probably deliberately sidetracking you but thanks for your efforts in getting here. So each of our guests is going to speak for about 10 minutes, and then we'll have time for some q&a. And if you're listening and watching online, you can post questions in the chat and Roberta and I will select some of those for discussion.
Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth 11:06
So I'm going to start with you, Fiona. You've done extensive research on the position of gig workers in the care sectors of the economy, perhaps if we can start by your view on whether the bill provides enough protections for platform workers in your opinion.
Dr Fiona Macdonald 11:22
Okay, thanks, thankfully. Is that thanks. Thank you, Anthony. And I'd like first also to acknowledge the traditional owners on the country we're on, the Wurundjeri people of the Eastern Kulin nations. And I'd like to pay my respects to elder's past, present and emerging.
Dr Fiona Macdonald 11:45
So does this legislation do enough for care and support workers? It is potentially does a lot. It has the potential to provide some really important protections for caring support workers. With the Fair Work Commission having the power to set minimum standards and unions being able to negotiate consent agreements. These protections are very much needed in this sector. I don't think the platforms that do operate in this sector to which this legislation will apply have argued that their workers mostly paid above the award, and that their workers are free to work when they want. And truly independent contractors. That's just not the case. There's plenty of evidence that shows that many, many workers on those platforms don't earn the equivalent to the relevant award wage once other benefits, that's just superannuation and entitlements are taken into account, let alone other costs of running your own business. And all the unpaid time that is spent by workers getting work, organizing paperwork, following up things that's just not paid. So the protections are needed. Platforms control workers pay the way they work. And when they work in very many different ways and less somebody's use of algorithms in terms of how workers access, how much access workers get to work, where their profiles appear on the platform's website, how easy it is for them to get work, but also, by another a whole range of means that I haven't got time to go into. But there's no doubt that these workers are not independent contractors. Many of them are vulnerable workers. The workforce is a highly feminized workforce and the platform, parent support workforce has an over representation of migrant workers, and of younger workers and migrant workers on temporary work phases. So that's in comparison to the broader care and support workforce, which is already a highly feminized low paid workforce with an increasing migrant share of the workforce. So does the does the legislation do enough? Does it provide enough protection to I don't think it does for those particular workers? I don't think the case that these workers are in any way really different from employees actually holds up very well. I think perhaps it does. If you're talking about workers on rideshare workers or food delivery workers, these workers are very, very like the employees that they work alongside in the same care and support markets. The proposed benefit of control doesn't doesn't apply and they workers really don't have flexibility. Flexibility is a really good one to think about because it's not like workers can change their regularly change their times or decide at the beginning of the week, which day they want to work. It's not like these workers can decide on the day when they when they're going to work. work is not transactional work, most care and support work is long term work in a relationship with an individual person requiring care and support in their home or in the community, those relationships for that work to work well for the person receiving care and support and for the person providing it. They're both built on trust, trust and responsibility, workers end up with obligations to the people they're working for. They don't just ring up and say I can't come. And the fact that these are, they become quite close relationships and ambiguous relationships. That's, that can be very positive for people, both the people who are being cared for, and the people, the workers providing them with care and support. But it also puts, they can be really ambiguous relationships, workers have obligations and often are asked by can support workers who are trying to stretch their dollars to change their rights to work for less that's so common, to stay longer to just work for weekday rates on a weekend. And given the vulnerability of the workers and the isolation that they're in workers. It who is ostensibly independent contracting arrangements on those platforms, can find themselves readily exploited, even when that's not the intention of the person that they're providing care and support to. So yes, the legislations needed, I don't think these protections are needed. But I don't think these workers are different enough from employees to be on a ramp to be halfway between independent contractors with no protections and employees with a full set of protections.
Dr Fiona Macdonald 16:35
From a broader perspective, the legislation doesn't actually capture all platforms in this sector. There are some platforms that do look more like marketplaces than the platforms that will be impacted on by the legislation. And these include large global firms like care.com. These platforms are subscription based, they maintain, they just connect workers and people requiring care and support workers. However, they do exert a significant amount of control over how workers work and how much they get paid for their work. workers don't pay for subscriptions don't have to pay subscriptions to be on those platforms. People looking for workers pay Subs, Subs, the subscriptions. But workers do have to pay for membership, if they want to put their profile and get their profile in a position where it can be seen on the platform. And they do have to pay for subscription fees if they want to add a personal message to their profile. And in this sector, getting a job is very much based on personal image. And image manipulation is a really, really big thing. It's not, you know, you don't get to you need to you need to sell yourself, you need to sell your image as a person. So this is this is really important to people. The other thing that that forms charged workers for is often mandatory background checks. So it's not like workers, you know, workers can potentially actually pay and get no work on these platforms. So these workers are also highly vulnerable there. They need to maintain high star ratings, and there's no mechanism for them challenging and unfair rating. So that leads to workers arriving and finding the job is not what was supposed to be arriving and finding that, you know, they're asked to do something completely different. They're asked to do something that takes much longer. And just doing that without complaining to maintain the star rating, because they've got no way to challenge a rating if it's not fair. So these workers are vulnerable to and this this legislation doesn't apply to them.
Dr Fiona Macdonald 18:43
Finally, if we standing a little bit further back and say, Well, what is the problem that this legislation is trying to solve? Now, I think this legislation kind of started out trying to solve the problems in the transport sector with food delivery and rideshare workers. I don't think if it had started out trying to solve the problems in care and support sector, I don't think it would have started here. Maybe I'm wrong, but the problem in this sector is and platforms led the charge in facilitating the massive growth of independent contracting. That was also facilitated or the demand was created with the with individualized funding in care and support systems. So this market I'm talking about is publicly funded disability support and aged care. Um, in that market. Wages, there's a ceiling on wages because the funding is based on the minimum, that is a reasonable minimum award rate that workers should be paid plus on costs, plus a little bit to enable service providers to keep their organizations running. So any kind of competition in the market with private providers competing to provide for services is often on price in some parts of this market, so providers are trying to cheap to trying to keep their prices low. And that leading that kind of charge to competing on the basis of lowest price was kind of led by the platforms, who were able to do that by taking workers on as independent contracting, and taking the share of the funding, that the government pays for an hour's disability support work, for example, that should cover a ward wage plus the relevant on costs, like casual loadings, and superannuation. And all of those things, insurance, blah, blah, those costs, plus any other any other costs of money above that the platform just takes it off, because they don't provide training, they don't provide any of those benefits. So they can take, take that funding and pay their workers a bit more than they might get on the award wage, but not as much as they should get.
Dr Fiona Macdonald 21:06
So while the platform started, that there's been this growth, there's a whole range of different organizations that are now intermediaries or third parties that play a role in in between people receiving care in support or seeking care and support workers and the workers themselves. And they are in a position to take to take money in the middle. There is also just so there's this private providers in there all these other intermediaries that won't be impacted by this legislation that will continue to support the growth of independent contracting. And what I think we'll see is this continuing in formalization of employment across this sector, where we have a whole heap of workers who are providing care and support to people in their private homes, in isolation, away from the reach of effective regulation of their wages and conditions. And it's, it's exactly what we've seen in many, many countries overseas, where care itself publicly funded care provision is poorly regulated, which it is in our aged care, and in particular, in our disability support systems. And where employment regulation is poorly, employment is poorly regulated, which is the case for independent contracting in this sector. So I think, while this this legislation is welcome, and it provides welcome protections and important protections, it's nowhere near enough to actually address the issues that need to be addressed in this sector at all.
Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth 22:51
Thanks very much, Fiona. So some of those issues you've raised in relation to her sector providers, we'll come back to when we hear from you, Neil, but in between those two, Michael, I'll come to you your union. And Fiona touched on this has probably had the most influence on the shape of these reforms. So why do you think this regulatory model is the best option rather than fully extending employment rights to workers in the gig economy?
Michael Kaine 23:21
Well, thanks. Thanks, Anthony. And, you know, that's it's, it's a big question. It's a good question of first thing I want to say is that would kind of first add my acknowledgement to the traditional owners and extend my respects, the first thing I want to say is that this really follows from what Fiona said, the platforms that are using this type avoidance mechanism, want us to believe that the gig economy is on the one hand, both generic and ubiquitous that is, you can only really address it through regulation at a very high level, because it means different things in different places. And on the other hand, wants us to believe that it's sui generis, that it's unique, and that it deserves its own separate form of regulation. And that's like a five pea and thimble trick, you know, it's so generic. That is, it covers so many different forms of work that you can only ever and you should only ever regulated at a very general level. So these platforms, which ultimately results in very light, touch regulation. And in the same in the same breath, they say and hang on a sec, you can't regulate it. You shouldn't regulate it on an industry by industry basis, because it's unique. Its platform work and platform work is unique. Neither of those things are True, they are falsehoods, and we can't let them get away with it. So first thing to say is I totally agree with you. Separate industries needs to be dealt with, in, in different ways with a different mindset. And of course, I'm hopeful that the Fair Work Commission will be able to do that when it applies these these new laws, but I'm not going to talk about your sector. That's your area of expertise and, and everything you've said rings absolutely true. And I'm sure Neil's got some, some thoughts about that.
Michael Kaine 25:32
I'm going to talk about gig transport. And I'm going to deliberately call it gig transport, because good companies would have us believe rideshare companies rideshare, companies would have us believe that they are good companies, they're transport companies, right? They're transport companies that are using technology to give out work in a different way. But the same work that existed that is taking people or things from A to B, it's existed since time immemorial. And and that has to be borne. borne in mind. The second thing I want to say, Anthony about the question before I get into the substance of answering it is I do think gig transport, it is the best model. Now, if people had listened to you, Anthony and your colleagues, when gig work first started to infiltrate our economy back in, you know, in a big way, in 2011 2012, that might have been the point at which in the gig transport economy, we should have said, as governments hang on a sec, if you're going to set up these businesses, you want to make sure that these workers are employees that have the full suite of employee rights, and you want to structure your business in that way, let's cost the price of doing business like this in that way. And if we'd done at that time, perhaps there would have been some hope in getting us there. But for a variety of reasons, I think that the approach that the bill takes now is the best one for now. And I just wanted to make that clear, because in my union heart, I would like all these workers to be employed, of course, I would have the full suite of rights that we've all fought for as a community for decades to build up would be the Nirvana. But we're not there. And just a little bit context about our union, our union has traditionally approached these things, this question of worker rights. differently from other unions because of our history, back in the mid 19th century, our union was born in different places in in the colonies. And it was established by gig workers. That is there was no set apparatus yet to regulate an employment relationship. Workers came at men that time came with their horse and cart, their own horse and cart. And they waited at points of work, whether it's a tram was in South Australia, or the ports in the development and construction the ports in Sydney and Melbourne. And they'd wait. And they had, they'd hoped that on any given day, they'd be offered a piece of work to be able to go about their business. And from that time, the Transport Workers Union and its various iterations has represented workers who are not employees. And we've built structures and legislative frameworks to support those workers. The the most long standing of those is, is a system supporting truck drivers who are independent contractor owner drivers in New South Wales, which has existed since 1979. So so just that little bit of that little bit of background. In other words, we came to this challenge with the change of government and the fact that the gig economy had already been on a massive March and it's too late to take on the notion that Anthony, his colleagues had originally said we should which was jumping and make sure this is properly protected. That ship had sailed. But we come to it from a position where it's okay. It's not great, but it's okay. We can deal with it in another way. And why do we have to deal with it another way because what is happening at the moment is effectively this. Businesses are allowed to operate in our economy and deem workers to be independent contractors. That's effectively what's happening. And of course, that deeming has been buttress by the decisions that I'm sure many of you are aware of in in Jemsek and Personnel Contracting of the High Court, where the High Court took a very black and white legalistic reading of the law and actually moved away from a holistic approach to the relationship of engagement and Of course, I hasten to add that I'm very much in love with the High Court at the moment, because of the Qantas case, but but on that particular matter, they haven't helped. They haven't helped us at all. And so we've got a situation where we have workers deemed contractors.
Michael Kaine 30:19
Now in road transport. Problem with that is that standards are non existent. And when you have people who are running around our suburban streets, or carting materials around our roads, where they don't have appropriate standards, when their rates are too low, when they have to work too long or too fast to make a living for themselves and their families when they have to skip maintenance, simply to put food on the table. The consequences are literally deadly. There are hundreds of trucking truck drivers that have lost their lives in the last number of years because of these pressures. There are 13 Gig workers in rideshare, that have lost their lives in recent years. And that's the one we know about there's a massive underreporting problem. There's an underreporting problem, because of course, as independent contractors, these workers, and their work is not automatically considered to be work that is captured by our workers compensation systems, our occupational health and safety systems. So the notion of reporting these companies have taken a very blurred, blurred view of to the extent that one horrific case baraque Dogan, a 30 year old engineer moved here to improve his English was killed in April 2020, under a truck doing work for Uber Eats. But his death went unreported for a year until it was uncovered through really through the union and through some investigative journalism was uncovered. It was actually working at the time. So this is this is a system is actually leading people to their deaths. And it's not a system at all is the problem. So status quo deemed independent contracting, you can basically just engage workers assert that they're independent contractors, and the only way that that can be disproved is that you take a legal case, take a legal case, taking the Fair Work Commission, perhaps Fair Work Commission's appeal to take it to the federal court, federal court, he'll take the high court and up with a high court decision. What's the sum total of that even if you're when you've proved that an individual instance, is an employment relationship? Nothing that's going to have an effect on the market. And of course, that's really important to remember.
Michael Kaine 32:43
Because there's been a variety of regulatory responses to this deeming is independent contractor deeming around the country in and around the around the world. And Anthony's alluded to a couple of them. Let me just put them in some brief categories. Have we attacked this problem internationally? Well, some companies have said, Oh, let's have voluntary codes and social dialogue that can ensure that workers can talk with platforms and somehow come up with a better set of terms and conditions, you can tell from my tone, I'm skeptical. This has happened in some European countries. I'm skeptical, not because that never results in better outcomes. Sometimes it does. But even if it does, it results in outcomes as between a set of workers and one or at the most two platforms, and you've still got the rest of the market pushing down standards and pushing down standard. So it's not a market solution, even at its best. Then you've got the second second type of regulatory response where, where countries, for example, England, have applied their third way or their third category, they've they've got a definition of worker in their legislation. Some of you may be aware of this. And there's been some success of gig workers establishing that people performing this work are workers for that purpose. But of course, the worker category is a diluted form of the employer category, point number one, point number two, because it's written down, the definition is written down. That definition then provides a pathway for avoidance as soon as you put something down in writing, writing an aesthetic, then good companies are very quick, very quick to just reorganize themselves to be away from that. Now, that's the same with individual cases that I was talking about your when an individual case. Or you won't even when an individual cases an individual case will go through and and the Fair Work Commission, for example, in the Gupta case, will will muse throughout that case and make make determinations throughout their case that yes, there is in fact an actual contract between the worker and the good company, even though it's an independent contracting arrangement. You're not just Is the benign intermediary agent that they tried to run. Even if you get some progress like that, in the Gupta case, you are still in trouble. Because what happens is the company just changes its contract. And that's exactly what Uber did, after the Gupta case, changed its contract, and further embedded the independent contracting regime.
Michael Kaine 35:28
And then, of course, you got a final, real big category of regulatory response. And that is yet you're deemed these workers to be employees, or you deem the employment contract to be the primary, the primary remedy, or you have a presumption that a relationship is an employment relationship. These are not necessarily bad approaches. But there are approaches that have been a lightning rod, or coordinated massive economic opposition from those companies. And the EB-5 example, California example, that Anthony mentioned is is the principle one, but there's also a pending EU directive that comes into effect in early 2024. And we have to see how that's going to play out presumption of employment is going to play out, not necessarily a bad outcome. But given how ubiquitous this work is now in the form of work. There is going to be a fear in governments that that presumption, or that deeming approach is going to lead to companies exiting the market. And that's going to be a political problem. Fedora exited the market in Australia, when the TWU won a first instance, Fair Work Commission case, unfair dismissal case, showing that a worker was an employee. And of course, Deliveroo saw the writing on the wall in terms of legislation coming and left the market in Australia. So there's a political problem here. It's politically fraught now to take a deeming approach. And why why is it then that that there's been success in, in this independent contractor model success in the in the sense of, you know, being able to maintain such an exploitive model? Well, again, it's deception. It's the flexibility myth that Fiona was speaking about, these companies have been able to exploit workers on the one hand, and on the other hand, have workers advocate for them on the basis that, that they need this work, and they need to be able to access it, when they want to access it. And of course, everyone's proud of the work they do. There's a sense of pride. Some people have to do these work, this rideshare work and food delivery work. Because they're desperate, some people choose to do it because they like to do it. But whatever the reasons are, when you're doing a particular task, that's your job, it's part of your life, it's part of who you are, you don't want to be told that it's not a good job directly. And if you're told all the time, that it's exploitive, then that's kind of indirect way of saying to someone, you're doing a rubbish job, you're not worth you're not worthy. And that's something that's really dangerous. And this has been meanly, meanly taken advantage of by these companies, who've had them these were given the workers the narrative, that hang on a sec, this is our work, we want the flexibility to be able to do it in the way we want to do it. And of course, that's that is conflating flexibility, and choice. It is perfectly good for workers to be able to choose hasn't the pandemic shown us that that is we come out of the pandemic and all of a sudden there's this newfound assertiveness of the workforce to say, well hang on a sec. If I want to perform work in a particular way from a particular place, well, why should I be able to do that I'm still putting in more in fact, if you give me that freedom, I might actually do a better job for you. It's the same kind of dynamic, but that is very different from the flexibility miss that the company is perpetrating.
Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth 39:45
Can you make a couple of final comments?
Michael Kaine 39:47
Yeah, sure. So, So let me just recap before I make final comments about why this is the best thing at the moment, status quo If you're deemed independent contractors, the responses to that have problems, significant problems, there are the voluntary, they provide a pathway to avoidance through definitions, or they're a deeming approach, which has real political barriers in terms of being able to successfully implement. So we have to get the balance, right, we have to be able to build rights for workers in a way that doesn't deny them the choice that this way of giving out work has actually provided them. That is, we can't ignore that. It has actually provided them the choice some level of choice, but the choice has to be real, it has to be built on a real capacity not to be compelled to work too long to make a living a real capacity to have appropriate protections. And that's why this bill gets it right, because it doesn't abandon the centrality of employment. There's a new employment test, which, overturns in a sense, Jamsek and Personnel Contracting, which goes back to the reality. So you've got to get through that gate first. And then it ignores light, light touch approaches, it ignores a static definition. And it provides the Fair Work Commission with a toolbox of capacity to be able to inquire into the form of work and assess what is the level of dependency here between this worker and the entity that is giving out the work. If that level of dependency is very, very high, that is a akin to an employee, then this worker should get all all or nearly all of the rights that employees receive. If the level of dependency is something else, then the commission has the capacity to inquire into the work and apply and establish rights, obligations, protections that are attuned to that level of dependency. That is what the gig companies, on the one hand don't like. Anthony I'm finishing. They don't like because there's no escape hatch. It doesn't matter what business model they apply, the Fair Work Commission could inquire into it and has the power to establish standards. But on the other hand, they do like it. Why? Because in a breathtaking turn of events recently, we've got big good companies coming out and saying hang on a sec. We've got competition, undercutting us. Now, that might sound crazy, but these are now really massive entities, Uber DoorDash, Menulog, Amazon flex, and there are now more granular offerings that are starting to come in and nipping at their heels. What do they want? They want market stability, how do you get market stability, where the best started in Australia, in the labor market, we have an award system, we established the equivalent of an award system for independent contractors who are highly dependent on those that engage them. We stabilize the market, we provide rise to workers, and we ensure we do that without providing an escape hatch, but still seem to work as your insistence on having some choice is okay. Thanks, Anthony.
Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth 43:24
Thanks, Michael. So Neil, you mentioned a couple of times now Higher Up is an outlier, in a sense in the approach to engaging workers, unlike other platforms, you treat them as employees rather than contractors. So what's the rationale for that approach? And how will the bill impact your company?
Neil Pharaoh 43:44
Look, I think it's I think it's very interesting being here today, I'm Director of Corporate Affairs at Higher Up, we have about 13,000 odd workers in Australia. We're a member of Australian Industry Group on any normal equation, it would be the unions on one side and the employers on the other or you know, those sorts of dynamic arrangements here. But there is something very unique about the fact that we're sitting here together and all saying very similar things. The Hire Up story is quite interesting, was founded by brother and sister Laura and Jordan O'Reilly. Back in 2015. I had a younger brother Shane, who had cerebral palsy. And so that was the sort of the impetus and the drive for them establishing Higher Up. The biggest difference though, is when they founded higher up, both of them were of the view of how they should engage workers and you know, the the idea at the time was make them independent contractors, no cost, no responsibility, no care, and Jordon tells the story of speaking to a support someone who needs support down in Hobart in Launceston actually. And she was a person with severe disability and she had about six or eight Nepali care workers working for them. And Jordan rang up these care workers and it's like, You all need to get ABNs and then you can start working and you know, that's the way to go and, and these care workers turned around and said, what's an ABN? Okay, now fast forward 10 years later. And the latest study coming out of the NDIS quality and safeguarding commission shows that despite the fact that there are 15 platform providers in the NDIS, higher up is the only one that employs that staff, yet 70% of people working on platforms in the NDIS think their employees, there's something fundamentally wrong with that dynamic. So here, I stand in front of what would normally be an audience where, you know, ferociously disagreeing with, you know, my union friends or academics as a big employer, yet coming out fully in support of these reforms. So the most unique thing about Higher Up, and the thing that annoys all of the other gig economy platforms, the most out of our existence, is we prove that choice and control and flexibility comes from the technology, not the exploitation of workers. Okay, we are a tech enabled disability, registered disability service provider, we provide all the same choice and control workers can opt into shifts when they want, they can opt out of shifts, they can roster to suit their own criteria. So all of the benefits and flexibility that you hear pronounced by the care sector in the transport sector, and the rideshare, all those things still exist, the only difference is when they're engaged by us and our 12,000 strong workforce across Australia, they're engaged as employees. So as employees, they get an award taxes, super workers compensation, and you can actually combine all of the best of technology with our existing industrial relations system and provide a responsible model for technology companies. Our very existence at Higher Up is problematic for the gig economy in Australia, we prove that it can be done and all of the arguments over having choice and control and flexibility taken away, are there. We fully support this legislation because it gives minimum standards to all workers. Now my mum was on the NDIS for a number of years she she had motor neurons disease before she passed away, I would be horrified if those workers were being exploited in her final years of life. These are the people who your taxes are paying for across aged care and disability and Veterans Affairs on a cost model that's based around employment, where instead what we're seeing is the owners of a large number of gig economy platforms, extracting the profit, as Fiona has alluded to, across this space. You pick up the paper today, the age or the Sydney Morning Herald, and the CEO of Menulog, the founder of Menulog was in the paper today. What was he in the paper for his $250 million house in Sydne. Our largest competitor, the founder, their $22 million house and an island in the Caribbean. You know, this is literally the extraction of profit and privatization of profit and the socialization of losses.
Neil Pharaoh 47:50
So this goes to the heart of my big point today. And, you know, as an employer, as a as a big employer in Australia, this is quite unusual. But Higher Up is increasingly calling this out is the big lie. It is an absolute lie to say that people don't deserve employment protections, just as the Minister, Minister Burke announced that, you know, you have the choice as a six year old kid to work in the coal mines in the 19th century. That's the same proposition that we're facing today in that people who are in exploitative or potentially exploitative positions difficult, financially precarious, particularly in the care sector. It's low paid, and it's feminized, those people are given a choice, but it's an artificial choice. And that really goes to the point of these discussions around the gig economy. And the big lie that it is. So we've been more public and calling it out the concept that's been called out by all of these platforms, and I said, there's 14 other big platforms in the care sector across age care and disability, we're increasingly calling out their arguments are rubbish. It's a big lie. And we really need to get more diligent at calling this out.
Neil Pharaoh 48:54
So for decades now, we've been seeing a slippage of rights and entitlements. Now, follow this to its logical trajectory. If government and the crossbench doesn't pass this legislation, we're already seeing further slippage is in other areas. So what I mean by that is Woolies and Coles and are actively replacing their employees with Uber Eats pickers as independent contractors. Where will the line stop? Where is the point where you say, Okay, I'm going to set up you know, Higher Up is regularly asked by some less scrupulous operators, can they use our platform to avoid, you know, regulations? It's like no, because they're all employees. But this is happening at scale across Australia. And that the hardest thing to come across is most of the people working in the care sector are not genuine small businesses. Now, the few that are absolutely encouraged them in innovation and competition is a key part of any business in any sector. But when the NDIS surveys, over 1500 workers in the in the disability sector, and 70% of them think they're employed Ways we have a problem when we go out to Aboriginal communities across Australia, and we see that some of our competitors have been through offering ABN arrangements for what was previously informal care. And then at the end of that period, we see 5, 6, 10 Aboriginal Australians being declared bankrupt because they thought their employees and didn't put their their money away for taxation. When we see our competitors say that they offer full insurance in inverted commas, noting that you can only see the insurance policy after you sign up on the platform, and that their insurances are a 10th of what workers compensation payments are across any other jurisdiction. Everybody here should be really worried. The gig economy as it stands at the moment hurts workers, it hurts users and taxpayers, and it hurts the general community. We've heard lots from Michael and Fiona about the workers. But I'm going to focus around users and the taxpayers in this instance. So I drove here today I live out in regional Victoria live out in Kyneton, I'm an employee of Higher Up had I had an accident on my drive in today, it would have been Higher Up's workers compensation that covers my return to work. If I was an independent contractor who pays for that accident on the road, all of you do through higher registration charges through the Traffic Accident Commission. All of you do through higher taxation because that person's fixed or attended to in a public hospital. So this is the most insidious argument about the gig economy is the profits are privatized, but the losses are socialized. I'll repeat that one more time when I have an accident or any of our staff in any circumstance, noting that the care sector is the second highest incidences of workplace health and safety across Australia. Instead of it being funded by a closed scheme. It's funded by the Traffic Accident Commission or a public hospitals. That means you all pay more in rego, between five and $10 per Australian, per year in higher rego charges, you will pay more in high taxes, because it's a public hospital scheme that gets those people back to work. And those workers don't have returned to work policies, they don't have returned to work support, they don't have trust and safety seems to bring them back into it. Not only that, and to Fiona's point, this hurts healthy competition in the economy. Higher Up by definition is 22% more expensive than our nearest competitor. Why? Because we pay workers compensation, we pay superannuation, and we pay payroll tax, those three things alone, create a 22% price differential, give or take a few and each state or territory a little bit different. So from a competitive perspective, as far as Fiona's alluded to, it puts downward pressure on the entire marketplace, you're not competing equally, you're not competing on quality, you're not competing on innovation. And in the care sector alone, there's around 50 to 80,000 people now working as independent contractors, that's your taxpayer dollars, funding contractor platforms to then socialize their losses back to you in the form of higher taxes in the form of higher rego, you know, it's a really insidious scheme. And if you have a look at who's fighting or opposing these loopholes, they're not exactly the people who have ever shown any interest in the best interest of their workers, or their business or the community and in the care sector, their values that we hold, front and center.
Neil Pharaoh 53:27
We argue that the care sector similar to some of Fiona's points is actually more employment like than any other sector, you're paid by the hour, it's taxpayer money, the cost model is based around employment. All of these things point to an employment relationship. Our biggest fear of employee-like is if it is not high enough, it will cause everyone to drift to employee-like, so our concerns around the bill is that it doesn't go far enough. Okay, because why would you stick to an employee when you can go employee-like and save them money. So you've really got to be cautious around the unintended consequences, particularly in the care sector, where it's regular shifts, the profiles of the workforce, a feminized industry, you know, traditionally lower paid, what we're almost doing in this instance, is removing any form of regulated or controlled labor and pushing it back into cottage industries which are dangerous for workers, dangerous for clients and dangerous for safety across the board.
Neil Pharaoh 54:25
So now this cat is out of the bag and organizations like Higher Up and are the ones that parliamentary inquiry, Sidekicker, Humdrum. There's, there's quite a few technology platforms who are now starting to employ their workers. Now the cats out of the bag and we're calling this big lie for what it is. And we're hopeful that this will start to end some of the bad old days of worker exploitation in this area. There is nothing in this bill that any good employer in Australia needs to worry about. Now, I'm the Director of Corporate affairs of what is potentially a top 40 employer in this country. And there is nothing in this bill that any good employer needs to worry about on casual conversion on labor hire loopholes. You know, on labor hire loopholes we looked at, we have a small business that provides our workers and employees to other disability service providers. And we're like, oh, we might be called No. Labor hire loopholes doesn't actually apply to genuine labour hire firms. It only applies to firms that are deliberately constructing arrangements to undercut enterprise agreements. Qantas has 50 of them, I think something like that 50 different, you know that the labor loopholes won't impact good employers, the casual conversion won't impact. The gig economy reforms are absolutely there to raise the standard across the board. You know, as the Minister said, when he announced this bill up in Canberra, slavery was cheap. It doesn't mean it's right. Okay. And it's quite interesting seeing who's coming out over all of these. So our biggest concern and taking a slightly different angle, but supporting everything Fiona and Michael have said, is what happens if government in the crossbench doesn't pass this bill. If the crossbench doesn't pass this bill, it is de facto endorsing and enshrined in Australian law, that employment doesn't count. It is actually in shrining, and telling the leaders of Australian business that parliamentarians are happy with the status quo, indeed, happy for everyone to be gig economy workers. You often hear it's hard to get a home loan at the moment, all of you will be in that position. At some stage, I would hope. It's even harder to get a home loan, if you're an ABN contractor, or a car loan. You think the problems that we're having around cost of living, you think the problems that we're having around home accessibility are going to get better or worse, if you're all independent contractors. It's a really important trajectory to consider in relation to these reforms. We fully welcome the Closing Loopholes bill, it creates certainty, which would shape the economy in a positive way. And I'll pick up Michael's point over the hypocrisy in this space. Some of the big platforms that we regularly compete with, say, our workers are paid X number of dollars an hour and hire pony plays this. First of all, they compare apples to oranges, okay, our rate is excluding super, and everything else entitlements, theirs is inclusive, and then platform fees come out of that. But the irony of their comments saying their workers are all very well paid is if they're very well paid, you've got nothing to fear from this legislation is putting in minimum standards. If your workers are so amazingly paid, and so amazingly, looked after you should be welcoming these reforms. Because they're putting a floor they're not putting a ceiling. So there's some really hypocritical arguments coming out here. The other thing we all need to do and sharing with our friends. It's the technology that creates flexibility. It's not the exploitation of workers that does really key difference that we see convoluted and mixed into this space.
Neil Pharaoh 58:00
So Higher Up saw through this big lie and this rubbish that comes out of the gig economy platforms back in 2015. But Higher Up was not the first unions were seeing it for years, academics were seeing it well and truly before us. And as I said, then you said the NDIS Quality and Safeguarding Commission, the regulator in this space, revealed the big lie when they said that 70% of all workers they surveyed on care economy platforms, thought that their employees. Now can tell you what higher up share of the market is that best four or 5%, there is no plausible way that of the 2,000 odd people they surveyed that curiously, they might have all come from the only large platform that's employing its workers. Slowly we're all coming to the same conclusions and seeing through this big lie. And that is really what the heart of this issue is. If you're not an employee, and you're not a contractor, the question remains what are you and what standard should apply in that space? Hire up believes in the care sector, employee-like is not good enough. But at least it's a first step to making sure. The other thing and I'll picking up on what Fiona said here, this is a taxpayer funded scheme. It is your taxes paying for this. It's a cost model based around employment that is being exploited by a large number of private equity backed firms who have no interest in the long term care in the Australian space. The creation of employee like work won't answer these questions forever, but it will close some of the loopholes that have allowed to grow for such a long period of time. And reiterating that a couple of points that Michael said that I just like to reflect upon. If this is legislated as fixed term or fixed word or parliament does it. We have seen time and time again, every effort for any form of regulation in our sector. You only need a sliver or a crack and the gig economy platforms that use digital sham contracting at scale, Ram a truck through it. It is absolutely imperative that you've got someone like the Fair Work Commission, who is able to capture the dynamic arrangements. In the time I've been Director of Corporate Affairs at Hirer Up, just over three years, our contractors, our contracting competitors have changed their platform Terms and Conditions dozens of times, every single time you get a change in the law, they squirm out of it move somewhere else. It is literally a mass exercise of privatizing profit, and socializing losses. And every single one of you is paying more money as a result of these reforms not being passed. So when you turn around and have a look and company say, it's gonna get more expensive. Again, I go back to the Minister's comments, slavery was cheap. But not only that, all of you will actually pay less in your taxes and rego, if this section of the economy is regulated, if the section of the economy isn't regulated, the trajectory for your rego and taxation will increase, because there might be three 400,000 gig economy workers operating across the three primary sectors transport and care and food delivery. But I can tell you that if this isn't passed, it de facto sets the standards that in 10 years time, 2, 3, 4 million workers will be in that category. And that's the trajectory. So in an unusual position, as I said, a large employer, a member of AI group, very active in a number of instances fully agreeing with both Michael and Fiona, possibly arguing even further around these reforms that don't go far enough. But it's really important for all of you to spread the message as well, because all of you are paying for it already.
Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth 1:01:40
Great. Thank you very much, Neil. So we'll have time for a couple of questions. I just wanted to make a quick couple of comments, on my own views on the bill. I think aspects of what the government is trying to do with this new jurisdiction for employee-like workers is very innovative, and maybe even world leading as the government has claimed. I think trying to replicate unfair dismissal jurisdiction and rights for these workers is really clever in the way that the Bill does that. But the other thing, I guess that's that's good about the Bill is that it doesn't say that if you're a platform worker, you have to pursue this new jurisdiction, because the government is also addressing the problem in those High Court decisions that Michael meant mentioned around the definition of employment. And returning that to a test that looks at the reality of work relationships, rather than the contractual terms that people enter into, which in the gig economy are forced upon you in order to get the work. Because that's being done as well, it would be open to unions in the care sector. I know it's the Health Services Union, the Nurses Federation, I think the ASU has some coverage United Workers Union, those unions could run cases, not in this new minimum standard order provision for employee like workers for for platform workers, but they could run cases trying to establish Full Employment Rights Award coverage, collective bargaining and the right to strike and I if legislation is passed as it in its current form. I fully expect that some other unions will. And maybe even in certain cases, the Transport Workers Union would say, well, we don't want to pursue this this specialised jurisdiction for platform workers. So I think there are some ways in which it does both jobs, addressing the unique features of the gig economy, but also giving more active unions the opportunity to push further to establish rights for workers. And in that sense, that is a good settlement, and addresses some of the issues that Michael raised around only fixing on employment rights. We could see an amendment through the Senate process that takes away that choice, which basically says, No, if you're a platform employee-like worker, you're locked into that jurisdiction, and you can't take the other path. I fully expect to see that amendment being put up by some of the platforms and their representatives in the coalition probably. But anyway, we've heard from all three speakers fantastic. We have have gone over a little over time, but we do have time for one or two questions. I'm aware of one online, but does anyone in the room have a question?
Audience question 1:01:55
This is a question for Michael. From the Transport Workers Union. My name is Dr. Elizabeth Shea. I work at RMIT University as an academic. Yeah, so congratulations, firstly on the High Court decision in 2023 on adverse action, so that was really great to see and I think well done. Excellent. Okay. And my question really relates to, I guess, an earlier legal dispute in 2011, where the Transport Workers Union argued for site rights clause, which then was denied by the flip Fair Work Commission at that time in the workplace determination. I'm just interested in your views on how this particular bill that we're discussing today, would impact on that type of negotiation. If the when we talk about collective agreements. And yeah, those type of issues whether there'll be have a have an impact. Yeah.
Michael Kaine 1:05:13
You're talking about the Qantas case, the 2011, Qantas determination, something I've tried to put completely out of my mind. The look, I think, I think the way that this bill deals with that is through the labor hire reforms, that is the same job, same pay. So part of the reason that we needed to pursue those reforms before was because well, in that case was because when Alan Joyce got his feet under the table in 2008, the first thing he did was renege on the Enterprise Agreement that had been struck with the workforce. Enterprise Agreement seven we were up to in Qantas at that point. And at that point, nearly everyone in Qantas was a directly hired worker engaged directly by Qantas Airlines Limited a permanent employee, mostly, with little sporadic instances of labour hire, which we, you know, quite industriously insured only really dealt with what Labour has should deal with, which is those peak seasons that occur, peak moments that occur. But Joyce came in and set up immediately, almost weeks after the ink wasn't even dry on the agreement, set up a labor, an internal labor higher firm, a wholly owned subsidiary, and engaged all new starters on that subsidiary, he organized that subsidiary. When he organized that subsidiary, he created an another one and engaged all new hires on that subsidiary and created an internal set. And then, of course, when that wasn't good enough, he started to outsource the work. And in 2011, what we were trying to do was stop that in its tracks. But the laws really wouldn't allow us to do it. You had to do it by agreement. And it was pretty tenuous about how you could what types of limit you could put on contracting out contracting arrangements. So this labor hire loopholes bill is important, because what it does is it says, you've got an agreement with a union, for example, you've worked on that agreement, you might have built it up over years and years. You can use labor hire, but only for the traditional purposes of labor hire. And that kind of reduces the need for that type of site rates clause in the future. Great.
Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth 1:07:43
Thank you, Michael. And we'll just make this the last question, I think, because we are a bit over time. So Sandra Martin online a question for you, Fiona. A recent productivity commission report on aged care employment was basically a product endorsement for Mable and other care platforms. How can we combat the intense campaigning from Mable against the Bill that will inevitably occur?
Dr Fiona Macdonald 1:08:06
I think taking that example of the Productivity Commission, one of the first things we need to do is ensure that there is more transparency and accountability around platforms; platforms, businesses and their engagement of workers. So that productivity commission report relied on the relied on Mable to provide figures on who they employed, who they engaged and what their pay rates were. And there is there has been no other source of information, apart from bits and pieces that unions and others have gathered from what's on what's on public online publicly, a lot of the information is not online, you've got to sign up. It's actually difficult to get to now. So some of the state legislation that Anthony I think you're involved in commenting and putting in putting into the Victorian legislation that actually wants the provides for our platforms to be more accountable and transparent and to report on their operations and activities. I think that's really important. That's the first step in countering Mable's campaign. I think some of the other ways in which we might do that are actually probably addressed in your some of what Neil said in terms of the work that the platform's do to engage consumers on their side, the more that we have an understanding about how they work and can and in and make sure that all consumers are engaged in the debates that can also make a really big difference.
Neil Pharaoh 1:09:49
I think Fiona has raised a really important point about consumers in the care sector what most people don't realize when they engage independent contractors in aged care disability in Veterans Affairs, those contracting platforms push the liability to the participant. So we have instances where someone with severe and profound intellectual disabilities is deemed to the employer or deemed the employer under workplace health and safety laws. That is such an insidious thing that we really need to get out there around consumer behavior, because you have people in aged care disability or Veterans Affairs, where the contracting platforms literally push liability on to not just the worker, but on to the consumer. And this is a really dangerous precedent that impacts everyone who operates this space, and something that needs to be focused on going forward as well.
Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth 1:10:42
Great, thank you very much, Fiona and Neil, for those final comments. So we will draw it to a close. I want you to please join me in thanking our three guests, speakers for generously contributing your time and your ideas today. So thank you very much. I have a small gift for each of you in a minute. Thanks also to the RMIT Professorial Academy, Professor Xing Yu and Roberta Matai. For hosting and supporting the events and all the work you did in organizing it, Roberta, much appreciated. And also the RMIT Center for Business and Human Rights, the Work in Transition theme, a number of colleagues here from that group. Thanks for attending. And also thanks to Daisy Gardner and Jonathan co lead from BHRIGHT for promoting the event. Thank you all for attending. Please feel free to stay on for chat in the room next door over a tea or coffee if you have time. Thanks everyone.
31 October 2023, moderated by Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth.
The Albanese Government's Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill was introduced into Parliament on 4 September 2023. The Bill proposes major reforms to the regulation of platform work in Australia, including powers for the Fair Work Commission to set standards and settle disputes for employee-like workers. These are world-leading reforms which address mounting evidence that work for many in the gig economy has become unfair and unsafe. In this RMIT Distinguished Lecture Series panel discussion, our speakers will provide union, industry and policy perspectives on the likely impact of these significant reforms in the food delivery, rideshare and care sectors in particular.
The discussion will be moderated by RMIT Distinguished Professor Anthony Forsyth, whose 2022 book The Future of Unions and Worker Representation: The Digital Picket Line devotes several chapters to gig work and policy/reform proposals. Discussants:
- Michael Kaine, National Secretary, Transport Workers Union of Australia
- Dr Fiona Macdonald, Policy Director, Industrial and Social, Centre for Future Work (Australia Institute)
- Neil Pharaoh, Director of Corporate Affairs for Hireup, a leading National Disability Insurance Scheme registered online platform which employs all its workers
Accelerating Materials Discovery for Better Health and Life
Accelerating Materials Discovery for Better Health and Life
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 00:08
Ready to go. Okay, thank you very much. So welcome everyone. I'm Xinghuo Yu, I'm the chair of the RMIT Professorial Academy, the host of this event.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 00:19
So firstly, I would like to acknowledge the people of the Kulin nations, on whose unseeded lands we are meeting today are respectively acknowledging the Elders past and the present. So today we shall hear from Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky, a lecturer on accelerating materials discovery for better health and life. This is, of course, is the topic of interest to many of us. If I understand correctly, this is about using high performing computing, to study the molecular interactions for understanding and also more important creating the new material for health and life. So it's very important. So we're really looking forward to it.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 01:03
So before we start, we just go through some housekeeping matters. This is a hybrid event. So we have people online and on site as well. So for those who are here, on site, you can ask questions, as usual, but those online so you can post your question to the conversation part at end of the session, and then we will pick up those popular ones to ask the presenter, I will ask her on your behalf until the session finishes.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 01:39
Okay, so let's start the lecture by introducing the speakers. So distinction Professor Irene Yarovsky is the leader of the Materials Modelling and Simulation research group in the School of Engineering at RMIT. She obtained a PhD in 1995 from Monash, and substance, secondly, worked in industry, for example, in the BHP and BlueScope. Still, I'm not sure whether you're working on the Colorbond or not but certainly that's there. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. So we see, you know, we all have some Colorbond on our house, so we'll see how good they are. Okay. So she's interested in the interactions between biological systems and nanomaterials, and their biomedical and industrial applications. Professor Yarovsky was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, UK in Chemistry in 2016, and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering in 2021. So without further ado, please join me to welcome Irene to deliver lecture. So over to you Irene.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 02:51
Thank you very much Xing for the introduction. And thank you, everybody who came here and who joined online. I hope I will entertain you for the next hour. So yes, we are trying to design new materials for better everything. And I was thinking of a common theme that goes across many projects that we have run over there almost 25 years or maybe not at RMIT. Actually, we just found out 25 years next year. And the common theme of everything that I've been working on in this time was to work on interfaces, interfaces, of materials, and the interfaces, between materials are all around us, they are within us, and they are between us and the environment. And they come through the life materials that make human bodies so make, which make plants and animal bodies. And of course, there's still materials still life that's come from underground, inorganic materials, we call them and organic that make the life molecules. So all of these come the interfaces of all three states of matter is solids, liquids, and guests in all the combinations that are possible liquids on solids, guests on solids, etc. And these interfaces are sometimes only weakly bonded, and we call it physical bonding. So you can actually slide materials again against the chair in one another. And that's a physical bond. We'll call it a weak bond and chemically bonded when there is an interface formed, so to say So there, there is a covalent bond to chemical bond formed between the two phases, and it's impossible to just disconnect the materials without extra chemical reaction to be polite.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 04:56
So while life is about interfaces for everything interacts around us and within us, as I said, everything is also made of atoms. And these atoms make up every material we know of. And they actually come to a particular place to form a three dimensional structure of every material. And so, knowing the three dimensional structure in atomic detail, that is the X, Y and Z coordinate of every atom in every material, let us understand the properties of this material. So, this three dimensional structure determines the properties of the materials. So, how they interact, what are they? What are their properties, how strong they are, what they will be interacting, how they form, etc. So, our goal is to actually understand where these atoms are located.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 05:51
So, the new -ish newish, so to say, field of engineering, called nanotechnology, that appeared about probably 30 years ago, it's all about putting atoms in the right places and the right places are the places that provide produce the right properties that we actually want. And so to know this, right places, we apply theoretical modeling, that's where we belong in our group. And that's what we're doing. To put it into perspective, what is nanoscale? What is nanotechnology? one nanometer is 1, billionth of a meter. And the distance between the main you know, the life forming atoms, carbon atoms in covalently, bound carbon based materials is one about 1.5 angstrom. That is 0.15 nanometers. So that's just to give you a bit of a feel for the scale of what we are trying to model. And so what do we do, we use the fundamental laws of physics. And we use the high performance computational power to calculate that structure in resolve to atomic detail. And from that structure, we calculate the properties of molecules and materials. Why we're doing it? We're doing it because knowing the set of results structures gives us this foundation to design better materials. So notice how the structure is related to properties, we can modify the structure slightly, and predict what the new purchase will be like. And this will be guiding our partners in manufacturing new materials. What do we achieve? By resolving the atomic structure with understanding the detailed molecular mechanisms that drive properties and performance in application of, of the materials? And what are the benefits. So we used to think that we want to reduce the time and costs for experimentation, directing the experimental efforts towards the most promising materials from our predictions with optimal structure and optimal properties for the particular type of applications that our partners may be interested in. But we as scientists are mostly interested in this last benefit. So we want to understand what is actually happening, we want to understand the fundamental chemistry and physics that is involved in driving this three dimensional structure of materials to the practice.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 08:22
So a little bit more of the context. So what is happening at the interfaces between materials, so lots of things happening? And they're happening at different scales. They start happening from angstrom resolution to pique my femtosecond timescales, and of course, all the way microscale that we can observe and feel and touch in our everyday life. So, how do we create our models? And how do we know how what to model and what length scale and timescale to use an our model, when we look at the three dimensional structure of atoms, so, we go from a particular task that we have at hand to understand a particular phenomenon that we need to understand better and this this basically informs our choice of the model and the scale of the model. As you can see, a different time and length scales, different methodologies must be applied. So the electronic structure calculation that tells us where the electronic structure of atoms is, is like the very fine that's the finest resolution methodology for very small systems. And then we go up, we can introduce atomistic detail and we go further up we can introduce the so called coarse graining where groups of atoms are combined in as an interaction site and they interact in larger scale models. So the complexity of the models the saturation, so the size of the models the number of ingredients that we can include in the models grow from Atomistic from electronic interactive mystic intercoast, growing and then larger scale models. So this is not saying that the actual phenomena in materials or biology happen at this scale. This is to say that we can model at this scale, and we need to select, build the models first and then simulate at this scale to make them feasible, the whole exercise of molecular simulation.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 10:29
So, just a little bit more of what we're actually doing, how we're actually doing it. So, there are two major groups of methods that I'm going to talk about today. So, the first is the quantum electronic structure methods quantum mechanical calculations, QM. I want to introduce a little bit of this jargon to those of you who are not so familiar with this QM and density functional theory methods, DFT, you may have heard from your colleagues or in literature or use them. So, these are the main electronic structure methods that are currently used. And as you can see, the one shared actually the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. And this is the these are the workhorses of quantum chemical calculations. So, wave function based methods remain the benchmark and the most expensive computationally expensive that most rigorous precise calculations for molecular geometries and the energetics of chemical reactions, where you can actually refine to the great degree of very small differences in reaction energetics such as very high for example is shown here. density functional theory methods are less expensive, they represent the energy of the system is a function of electronic density through the Kohn-Sham equation, and this is an example of the electron density map of a metallic about metal interface and with an impurity disturbing the electron density the single atom impurity them. So the applications of density functional theory are more, you know, widespread, because they are capable of modeling larger systems, including bulk materials, they surfaces and interfaces in the more computationally efficient manner.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 12:25
And this is the next one is the main workhorse of our calculations for larger systems, called Classical molecular mechanics and dynamics, again, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for development of the methods a bit later 2013. But in our professional lifetime, which is very supportive, I guess, for all of us who are doing this kind of calculations. So in these models, molecules are represented as particles connected by mechanical springs. And they are also charged, and they interact through mechanical loads, like for the bone stretching, for example, it's a mechanical hook law for bond, bond to angles, it's bending function and for the torsion rotations is the Torsion function. And then there are also the so called non bonded interactions, through electrostatic and Van der Waals, dispersion dispersion forces, where the atoms are repulsed or attracted based on the column or different kinds of functionals, describing the Van der Waals, like Lena Johns potentials. So once you've defined the energy of the system in this way, what you can do, you can find the local and global minimum minimum of this huge function for your atomic systems where you've got the position of every atom resolved, and then you can follow the Newtonian dynamics because you can calculate then the, the force from the energy and the you know, the mass of each, when you calculate the acceleration, and then you follow this system, you integrate acceleration, you go to the lowest to bottom, and then you integrate once more into the trajection. That's the trajectory that will follow in our simulations.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 14:19
And this is the example to put it all in a context for you of what this molecular system can look like. In this particular case, it's an interface between the solid and soft meta in the liquid. It's an a nanoparticle protein interface nanoparticle here is functionalized by these moving like grass moving chains, they are covalently bound to the nanoparticle surface, and the protein is physically binding to the surface and its all surrounded by the molecules of water, which we can't see because we didn't display them for this animation. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to see anything else. So Water imaging water molecules everywhere around this structure. And so this is the example of classical molecular dynamics trajectory that we follow visually, and then we can analyze for the positions and special interactions that taking place in the systems. So the energy landscape, what we call, it usually looks much more sophisticated than this one. And we use lots of tricks to actually follow this to the best of our ability.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 15:33
And I go back to this slide, we just published the review and confess reviews this year, where we describe some of the very new methods that are enabled the sampling, what we call the sampling the following the possibilities of the molecules involved, to be discovered in molecular dynamics simulations.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 15:57
So now I will go back to my own journey, you know, and their own is less traveled by most of, you know, not too many of us, did what I did not by choice, but it just happened to me. So I worked straight after my PhD, I joined the industry, and I spent about six years in industry working on very complex interfacial systems that were of interest to this industry. So BHP for those of you who know, it's the biggest minerals company in Australia and possibly the world. So they are doing lots of things, you know, they are at that time, it was one company now they separated steel and petroleum, I simply so look, at that time, they were, you know, doing minerals and petroleum processing and discovery. And also, the most famous product of this is ColorBond steel products, you know, that they do to this day as a BlueScope Steel. So I was involved in modeling and like all these different processes, most of them actually. And they shown here the Yes, mouse, yes, so at the bottom, so looking at the structure and how the composition of the materials and conditions they are put under in the processing of this materials in this company, relate to the structure and properties and structuring practices, what they wanted to find out. And all of these properties listed here, describe the physics of interfacial phenomena. So that's what I was doing there. And when there was an industrial downturn in Australia, so they decided that they wanted to close their research laboratories here in Melbourne. And they still wanted to continue understanding the molecular properties of the materials. And that's how I ended up in RMIT. And so, I brought most of these projects listed here to RMIT. And I'm not going to list them all now, but but I will be describing some of them briefly, so what I can, what I want to focus here is that I want to maybe share with you my impression of what innovation was like, all considered, like in industry and what it is considered to be innovation in academia. So basically, in industry, few things, they're concerned about performance, and efficiency of the materials and processes, so that they don't get customer complaints, and they don't need to pay too much for a warranty. And they need to be all of the materials they produce, they need to be compliant with every environmental regulation that is around and that has to be of low cost, every solution needs to be very local. So for example, if you want to paint your roof, and there are beautiful paints around that are used on Ferrari, some on Bentley, some even you know know on Toyota, you're you can use them they will be much more you know, what's possibly superior to what you know, humble Colorbond is colored with however, the cost is not sustainable for this product. And mind you the Colorbond is actually performing better than some of these expensive car paints, because Colorbond is exposed to the environment and it doesn't stay in the garage. So and it lasts for the warranty is in current warranties 25 years or so. So which is pretty good. So that's the industry side of innovation. So they want to maintain their products at low cost and develop new products, but also keeping the cost down. In academia. And it's always so urgent pretty much. In academia, we are more interested in developing, you know, fundamental understanding of what we're doing new methods for developing this fundamental understanding. And we also need time because we're also training, right so we're training our PhD students in the training our early career researchers as they join new projects. However, there are common grounds for us this industry is sustainability because they want to sustain their building their business, we want to sustain our academic cooperation as well, we want to work with them. But we also want to do the things that we think are important. But that's where we find the common grounds. And I was lucky to be able to find the partners in industry that are actually that show great understanding of what we aiming to do here in academia, and the value what we do, and they gave us time. And I will give you some examples of this.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 20:41
So the first project that came to RMIT, from industry was to do with ironmaking. And the ironmaking, currently is in Australia, using the blast furnace. And making technology. And this is a very, very energy consuming and carbon consuming way of producing iron. And in the early 2000s BHP was built has built this plant that semantical, which is shown here, it's called Hot Briquetted Iron plant. And this is the briquette that comes out of this plant here in the red. So this is the briquette, so it's real, so you can touch and feel it. And it's much more, it's much, much easier to handle as well as produced, this technology doesn't at all require any carbon whatsoever. So their iron ore is in a particular form, and that goes through the train of these reactors from left to right. And it's bubbled by their natural gas and air and on the way from one from the left reactor down to the right reactor that I know is getting reduced by natural gas. So there is no coal whatsoever no need to produce to heat the oil to produce coking coke material etc. So, the problem with this and their temperature here, last furnace temperatures reach about 1500 centigrade, here temperatures up to like 700. So, this is huge, huge, huge advantage. So, problems as the particles go from one reactor to another, they stick to each other, they stick to the reactive parts in the dead, so called deadzones.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 22:31
So they come to me and say well, can you tell us you know, like what we can do to reduce this adhesion. And so we started, what was probably the one of the longest projects in RMIT, from 2000, till about 2010 actually, to understand, to model and understand their structure of iron surfaces and how different impurities can affect the adhesion of iron surfaces. And we use the set of this impurities that are listed here because of their previous experience of BlueScope, BHP Steel at the time that some of this particular sulfur helps to reduce attrition, but they didn't know why. So we wanted to understand this. And there was a whole team of people involved in this project. And we produced quite a few publications. And most importantly, we produced new methods to actually look at this phenomena. And this involved both were applied more or less, they have an issue of molecular dynamics, you know, for the one of the first applications, very early applications at the time. And then we also had new classical potential has been developed and the free energy methods for calculating the energy or buying surfaces and interfaces. And also, as we look at this process here, again, if I can. So this is actually the animation of doesn't work anymore. Sorry. Ah, yes, that's the animation of H2S reaction with the surface of ion where you can see that hydrogen is dissociating from H2S molecule in the molecular form and is leaving the surface when sulfur is getting embedded into this surface of ions. So that's your probably new way of producing hydrogen these days. And actually was the yesterday's announcement of hydrogen hub open next to Whyalla plant in South Australia. I think this could be looked at so at the very least, we'll probably get more citations because this HBI reactors are now back on the agenda. So that's very interesting. So they they will be redeveloping them and yeah, so let's see, oh, any of the team interested you know, please go ahead.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 25:00
And so, another project that was brought to RMIT's at the same time, also very heavy a very dirty sort of metallurgical application was about selection of metallurgical calls for blast furnace operation. So as we know, we keep hearing thermal coal is good to get I'm sorry, metallurgical coal is good thermal coal is bad. So, this was to find the metallurgical coal specifications that make it good and understand why is that and so a BHP was sending us samples of dirt literally, like chars and soot particles from separation, and post students here team was trying to put this up to slice them for the high level, high resolution electron microscopy experiment. And he managed to do this and he did a very good job with reverse engineering of the structures of this chars.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 25:55
And he produced some really beautiful models of amorphous carbons, shown here, and on the way also methods to produce nano porous carbons, you know, like, which were not related to so much to BHP Steel technologies, but, you know, contributed to the methodological developments at the time.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 26:16
So with that, I will move to the Colorbond saga that's also started about the same years and about 2000 RMIT initially through some small student contracts, and then a student scholarships rather, and then a couple of Linkage Projects. And then then ARC Reserch Hub came about so Colorbond as I mentioned, is a multi layer, multifunctional coating that has many functions built in. First of all, it must look nice, you know, that's the first and most important function of it, and then it has to stick to adhere really well to their steel substrate, and they use couple of coatings, metallic coatings zinc-alum in some of our engineering people use working in this area and then the on top of zinc-alum goes pretreatment layer, they used to use chromium pretreatment, and this was forbidden, banned basically like some years ago, due to environmental effects, and you know, like human health effects, and I was involved directly into this development of chrom-free pretreatment layer, and then on top of this pretreatment layer, both epoxy coat and then a topcoat that does look nice. And then this topcoat must be anti glare or have anti glare properties as neighbors apparently didn't like the glare from some roofs. And also, they must be anti fouling so they shouldn't get dirty. So we've done a lot of work on every one of these interfaces. We are well in RMIT, and drained a lot of students and early career researchers, I think the main outcome would be the chrome-free epoxy coating. And that probably gave us the reputation that they still want to continue working with us to this day.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 28:12
So however, I want to give a little bit of insight into the different projects, also for BlueScope Steel. So that is to prevent the topcoat of carbon from contamination. So this in this instance, it's a contamination from atmosphere. So the dirt from atmosphere, they had a problem in Southeast Asian countries, where the detrimental sphere was depositing from environment, you know, like every 3pm in the afternoon was the tropical rain in Southeast Asia. And then all the pollution from the atmosphere was getting on the Colorbond, the Colorbondwas buildings were getting dirty, like in the middle of weeks and months. So this was a very big problem. And we were asked to help resolve this problem. And so we reserved to in about what's called biomimetic and like looking at the natural materials that actually don't attract dirt, and they were natural plants actually saw was Lady's Mantle. It has a hydrophilic coating on top of the leaf. So hydrophilic means water loving. And it what happens with this is that when water droplet comes to the surface, it wets the surface and lifts the dead particle app. So that's one mechanism. And then the Lotus Leaf has a different mechanism. Because it has a hydrophobic surface of water repelling surfaces, the water doesn't spread on it, but actually rolls over it as a water droplet comes in. And it takes the hydrophobic particle with it and the surface stays clean. So that were the proposed mechanism that we wanted to mimic with the chemical structure of Colorbond topcoat. And so we've developed the models of Colorbond topcoats And we've started to started to introduce their functionalisation on the on the topcoat, you know of the hydrophilic, or hydrophobic nature. And we were testing this modified surfaces at the atomic detail with different models of atmospheric contaminants. And these atmospheric contaminants come from the previous work in physics department, as you remember.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 30:26
So, having done that, we actually evaluated their strengths of adhesion, when you've got the modifiers on the top surface. And we found that if you keep the surface modified and rigid, you know that you can reduce the adhesion up to 25%. However, the surfaces are not rigid, and they are not their own surface, they are actually relaxing with time. So that means that atoms are moving, they're not staying rigid. And what happens is that the surface is experiencing what's called the hydrophobic recovery. So when the surface with the modifier, is relaxing, the modifiers get attached to the surface, and then they move on down the surface. And that's called the hydrophobic reef recovery. So when you modify the top of your surface with some specific chemical residues, you must find some ways to keep them on top and exposed to the environment. And that's what was lacking in this technologies. So what we proposed is to introduce, so basically, we've modeled this effect, and we told the company that that's what happening because they were modifying the surfaces during the day and overnight, they went down to the regional so they didn't maintain the properties.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 31:45
So, we actually proposed to introduce surface crosslinking, which we implemented in their surface crosslinking atomistic, surface crosslinking procedure. And then we sampled the surfaces across link surfaces for hardness and an adhesion using the simulated nano indentation process. And this will lead to new methodologies that we developed to just sample this carbonaceous imitation of the surfaces. And this was quite a serious contribution to the computational field.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 32:21
We also introduced new methods to predict wettability using molecular dynamics. So you can model the spread of water droplets on the surface represented in all atom detail at the nanoscale, and then translate this nanoscale weighting into the macro scale weighting that you can actually measure in the laboratory, which is also a methodological contribution of significance and my view.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 32:46
So this chapter of Colorbond was closing with their huge article in Chemistry in Australia. And also a special issue in 2016, when we farewelled Profesor Ian Snook, and we dedicated our last paper on this topic to Ian. So I want to pay tribute to Ian, who was my teacher and advisor until 2013 at RMIT.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 33:21
So from this, I want to switch completely to a very different project, which was happening about the same time. And we've been approached by the CRC for Polymers to help them design model or less, you know, molecular monolayers to go on the water surfaces in dams and in open water storages to protect this water from evaporation. And the reason was that we were at deep, serious drought at the time. And it looks like we're coming to another one and I was shocked to learn actually that we lose 40% of water to evaporation from our water storages in Australia. And so the idea was to actually save this water by putting a single molecule self assembled mono layer on top of the surfaces and cover basically like molecularly covder, rather than physically cover, the water surface. However, the solution was not effective because when the wind was blowing this monolayers were just blown out of the water surface andthey were forming on the shows.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 34:36
So we were asked to look at different variations of this Simona likens that molecules that will strengthen their interaction with water surface and to do that that's the original molecule that was used, introducing more oxygen functionality into the anchoring side of this chains. The idea was to to interact deeper with the water and to be more stable on the water surface. So we've done a lot of work on, actually, you know how to model these systems. And then from small systems, we went to larger systems. And we looked at all of these monolayer candidates, and I think that was your onus was on that. Yeah. And none of this works, however. So the next solution to look at was to look at them crosslinked polymerised at the bottom, one or less than the rest of the bottom, and a PhD student also, this was the core of the PhD here. I looked at that, and it didn't work either.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 35:45
And what did work of was the new technology called the dual layer, where they're super effective polymer was introduced under their self assembled monolayers on the surface, and it formed like a cushion under their monolayers and protect, stabilize the monoliths, due to the trapped water in the interface. And these interactions were stronger and they actually maintain the stability and so we have published. [...live stream interuption...]
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 36:47
Contamination atmospheric contamination happens in Southeast Asia, it doesn't happen in Australia, what does happen in Australia, we we see lots of fungal growths on the roofs of Colorbond. And so we've got a new hub, a research hub, and now task and this, how we actually with some of the people in this room, to understand how to protect the surfaces from biofouling. So just briefly, what is biofouling if there are microbial contamination and growth of biofilms on surfaces. And it's not only Colorbond, of course, affected by this. Even more importantly, there are like marine organisms, contaminating the shipboard homes and architectural coatings, and in there, it's very common and water treatments, etc. So and now more likely was the nanomaterials been introduced in medicine, you know, like it's a tissue replacement, as well, scaffolds and bone replacements and medical implants. It's a very big issue also for biomedical biomedicine. So, we wanted to help resolve this, because we thought that because these bio fouling is initiated by the initial protein adsorption on surfaces that so these microbes actually deposit microbes on which they then grow biofilm deposits proteins on which they grow biofilms, we thought that maybe we can design the way that proteins don't absorb on the surfaces, and then it will help the growth in a longer term. So, the common ways of doing this is to use chains on the surfaces. So, you know, like big tech support for those who know or polymers on to protect this surfaces from protein absorption, or it's reduced for various degree of surface roughness, you know, like using biomimetics and like the LMS doing her research, we propose to combine the two in one and to do it all at the molecular scale at the Nano scale.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 38:55
So, for that, we design prototypes surface models, where we use very short chains, you know different lengths, slightly different lengths, as you can see, but they still different in introducing the surface roughness and terminated by hydrophobic or hydrophilic functionalities and see how these chains can possibly trick the protein absorption by you know, confusing the polymer making the surface not the hydrophobic or not hydrophilic So, it will be confused and the reason we wanted to do this in I need to mention is that those proteins that are used by microbes are actually very clever, they set the contact angle on any surface hydrophobic or hydrophilic like to 60 degrees. So you need to tweak them somehow from absorption.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 39:50
So and we have done this, like a lot of simulation in this space and we understood we tested right against several protein absorption types. And we understood how the hydration and the dynamic of ligands determined their cooling capacity of the functional surfaces. So we actually came up with the so called protein resistant surface design rules were we prescribed pretty much in a very good level of detail, the optimized chemistry links and spacing between different type of ligands on the surface, and the main thing here is that you must have a ligand that will move continuously on top of your surface like in a sweeping motion to make the protein to pay additional penalty if it wants to stop this motion. So like in simple terms, but this worked, because our collaborators in the University of Wollongong, they actually made the surfaces. And they also showed experimentally through dynamic AFM technology, that when you use the ligands, in this kind of design, you've got the diffuse layer. And that's our model here showing like like diffuse layer of the water on top of the surface that doesn't let continuously moving and doesn't let the protein to absorb. And that's very gentle, very structured.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 41:26
So we also tried to use machine learning at the time, like before everyone was talking about artificial intelligence. So in 2018, we already submitted this paper, where we actually thought that because no one used this extra criterion that we introduced, the dynamic movements of the chain continues dynamic of the chain. As for the protein design probe for the protein repellent, surface designs, we thought, what if we use this additional criteria to add this as a descriptor in existing models, there are previous models in like a so called Whiteside model that didn't have this kind of property as part of the design rules and tried to predict on the same data set in like what will be the protein or repellents capacity. And we found that by aging, this only criterion, like additional criterion that we know from physics, you know, helped improve this model greatly. And that's a big learning for me about machine learning, which I'll tell you briefly.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 42:33
So basically, this is the end of my Colorbond revelations. What I want to make, as a final comment on this is that this model actually led us to work on their nano material biomolecule interface for very different kinds of applications. So for nano materials for medicine and bioengineering, where we have enough knowledge and experience on methodology developed to be able to model the systems before most people jumped on them. And so we are now working for quite a few years with the group at Imperial College London, where I was introduced to them in 2006. As someone who can actually look into this kind of systems for them. And we've, since then we've had lots of projects together and they transplanted translated into Discovery Project, but on the way we have lots and lots of different projects. So for anyone who is interested, please visit our website to see our publications. And I will only talk about one type of nanoparticle that we worked on with them our gold nanoparticle Why gold for nanomedicine is very common material to be used. First of all in it very easy to functionalize the surface of gold nanoparticle put ligands that make it compatible with biomolecular environment. And so this ligands this chain molecules can be modified to form different functions to permit membranes or to recognize targets. And also they have optical properties when the gold nanoparticles are very tiny on the three nanometers in diameter, they're called Nano classes and they actually have inherent fluorescence. So, this fluorescence can be used to diagnostic technologies. And when they are larger than three nanometers they also they also have optical properties they change color as the size of these particles increase and this property is used for also for diagnostic technology. So the principles however, behind this properties are not not always understood, not quite actually often understood. Sorry. Okay, anyway, do you I couldn't get rid of this. Okay, sorry. Anyway.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 45:15
So our role was to understand how this allegation of these gold nanoparticles can be used to enhance the desired interactions and to eliminate non desired interactions because they were also happening. So I'll probably skip this project. This was our first project looking at this stripey nanoparticles. And I will go straight into this. This is the project that looked at the ability of gold nanoparticles modified with a particular type of peptide to permeate membranes for drug delivery applications. So the type of peptide that was used here is called TAT, that's the extract from the human HIV virus. And it's famous for having, you know, like loads of positive charges, and this peptide sequence, which brings it to the surface of the membrane very easily. And then the idea was, if you put lots and loads of these peptides on a gold nanoparticle surface, you will have it will drive it through that membrane surface as as an agent, however, it's sorry, it didn't quite work with our experimental partners. And they said, they came to us and say, Well, can you tell us why it doesn't work? And what should we do to actually enable this nanoparticles for me the membranes, and so what we did we model this nanoparticles with the systematic in a systematic way, looking at different surface densities of the peptide on the surface of the gold particle, and I looked at the properties that are specific for specifically favorable for membrane permeation, such as the exposure of the positive charge on the surface and the dynamics etc. So we looked at all these properties, and we identified that a certain concentration range, these particles show favorable membrane permitting properties. And our collaborators made these particles with this particular surface density on that particular type, size. And it worked and showed them our permeation improved. So this is like direct prediction of the highly performing self emitting nano particle design. And just very briefly, plasmonics sensing, that's when the gold nanoparticles of light, relatively large sites, they modified with ligands of some sort called epitope. These epitopes must recognize, like the nasties and solutions they used for sensing technology, so COVID will ring a bell here. So if you've got antibodies in biological fluids, and if these antibodies are specifically interacting with the ligands, on your surface, they will bring this ligand and we'll bring these particles together through bonding antibody bonding between the particles, and then the size of this gold surface will increase, and you visually see in front of you. So the solution color changes from red to blue. And so this is the nature of the visible sensors. So we were asked to look at the series of these epitopes of this ligands and identify the best performance performance performing ones. And this was done and we identified the specific features of this antibody of this ligands and also identified the best performer through the series of molecular dynamics simulations.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 48:50
And the last one, that's the example that I want to use. It's very recent workup this year is where we looked at the pH responsiveness of small gold nanoclusters, less than three nanometers in diameter. So that's the nanoclusters are made of only 25 Atoms of gold. So it's functionalized. This it can be functionalized, as before, we said with different type of peptides, and this peptide sequence can be designed in a way that when this particle reaches the acidic environment, it actually fluorescence brighter. And this is very important for cancer diagnostic technologies because cancer cells are acidic.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 49:35
So that's what I want to finish off with the final slide that I hope I was able to convince you and demonstrate that we can actually use different scale of theory and calculation to predict useful properties for our experimental and industry partners. Although our models are usually simplified, but they're still able to guide them through the design and production. And we, in the future, I think the future of this field would be to build large data sets, combining experimental and modeling data together. And based on these data sets, use around machine learning technologies, with physics and form descriptors, which is a very essential part of a successful application of machine learning to design new materials. And with that, I would like to thank very much our supporters, our computational the whole array of computational, huge computational facilities in Australia, centrally in Canberra, and in different states, we're using all of them. And our funders, I only was able to cover briefly all these green projects, we have more if you're interested, please come and talk to us. Over the years, and and most importantly, of all, I would like to thank every everyone who contributed to this research, and from our postgraduate students, most of them in their good positions, right now. And our research fellows and the green names are here at RMIT. Right now, some in my group, some is an independent academics in different schools, our key academic and industry partners, and of course, my teachers who taught me not only their science, but also something much more important than that. That's actually the most important interface of all is the human interface that actually brings harmony to our work in life. that's it thank you very much.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 51:54
We have a few minutes for any questions.
Audience question 52:06
Since the verification of these models, apart from the one you put the other verifications experimentally, other law schools in particular example, the the models.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 52:33
Oh, yeah. Well, they, yes, they are, they are the actual fact that these dual layers were successful in, you know, like their stability was greatly improved in the laboratory. And then they go for field trials. And this are there.
Audience question 52:49
Any any field trials?
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 52:51
Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't have them to show but you know, like, I know that it worked. You know, like, that's why we published this paper, you know, like, on the mechanism of improved stability of this project to see. So usually the best outcome we have the best evidence is that when something works, and it feels right, so it works in the field, and it works, like some of my work on the coatings, as well, the designs that we proposed, actually worked, and, you know, like, I have shown some examples. And with Imperial work as well, you know, like them, the particles that we predicted, they permeated membranes, much more. And, you know, this was the evidence, however, you know, the comment I would probably make is that we tried to incorporate as much as experimental evidence in building the model in the first place. And then on the way also to, you know, do lots of checks with the experimental and industry partners as much as we can. But even like, of course, our models are still, you know, pretty theoretical. But the trick, I guess that's the art rather not the trick is to design the model that is fundamental to their core process that is happening and thriving the phenomenon, the realistic phenomenon, and then translate this core science into the actual, specific application. So while it works for me, you know, like, I hope it works for others.
Audience question 54:12
Thanks, Irene. Thank you.
Audience question 54:16
Any more questions... It recorded, so yeah.
Audience question 54:27
Thanks. Sorry, right now, wonderful presentation, really enjoyed it. I guess my questions around whether or not you look at sensitivity over the models, because I guess the experimental world, the practical world is full of imperfections and so forth. And I'm just wondering whether or not as part of your modeling is sort of factored in some sensitivity analysis when things don't quite sort of line up where you'd like them to theoretically.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 54:55
Yeah. Thank you for the question. Very good question. So then acutal have the last part of them presentation about, you know, like designing, you know, goals for biomedical, there are two aspects of it. One is to design the functional ligands that will recognize the target that will drive that remember and etc. The other part is to actually design the anti fouling ligand that will protect this functional one from exactly what you said, from the crowding solution in the real biological fluids, for example, lots of small molecules, lots of imperfections, you know, and that's actually our latest discovery project that we starting right now. But that's a big issue, you know, the fouling of functional materials in a realistic environment, there are methodologies that look into this, and we will be testing them, but that's the big issue. Yeah. In terms of their Colorbond, you know, like, I think, you know, the youth issues, so that it's sort of like inherent in our research, that that's what we fighting, so they're adsorption of all these impurities, etc. That's why we have to deal with this chars and soot, etc. But yes, it's, it's a big thing, you know, like, especially for refined applications and biomedical world. Definitely.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 56:15
Okay, thank you very much. Any more questions? I actually have a question, I know that you modeled all the molecules, you know, and then you you build a connection between them. So I guess the computation model will be a very higher dimension. So when you do the simulation will be very time consuming right now, you have to rely how that is that any sort of restriction? If you have enormous power, I guess you can do more than Yeah,
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 56:45
In fact. Yeah. Thank you. Good question. We using as I mentioned, we're using the high performance competition facilities like, national computational infrastructure in Canberra, which is an also in Perth, we are where they build the biggest in Australia, like, computer. So we're using all these facilities, we have what's called merit grants on these facilities, and plus RMIT's, also co investing in some of these, we're also having a share of this, thank you very much RMIT. And but, well, it's, it's a matter of like, what is enough? You know, like, of course, you know, if I had, you know, one to five more people in the group, I could use more, because this is basically, the limiting factor is people to be able to process the brain brain process, you know, like, there is the answer as well. So, I'm not a big fan of accumulating large sets of data and like doing shallow analysis of them. So like, I think now, books, they're trying to do the proper understanding of what's happening. So it takes time. So it's both computational power when people power. So I think people even more important computation, we can get more if we want. So, I know that there is a big move in Australia now to invest even more, however, when an example, you know, everyone COVID struck, you know, and we was, you know, we had a huge drive, you need to do something in the COVID space and the limb network, you know, helping to even do this simulations we got one COVID paper, we call it out of this. However, at the same time, in the United States, you know, they were doing the whole virus model, you know, we were only doing like fragment of protein, in intervals, the best we could do in a reasonable time, while at the same time, you know, like papers for imaging from other countries where we're, you know, like doing something we couldn't even think of, to be honest. So, you know, it's never enough. But you know, like, I'm a big fan of actually making sense from what we have, rather than just generate more and more and more. So yeah, wait, so probably KBR. We don't know that they are both here.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 59:10
All right, I think so our time is just up. So please join me to thank Irene for a fantastic talk. And I'm looking forward to see you in another distinct lecture very soon. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky 59:28
Thank you. Thank you, everyone online. I don't know if there were questions online, but if there are so please email me or come over to to talk. Thank you. Thank you.
Tues 26 Sept 2023, presented by Distinguished Professor Irene Yarovsky.
The role of computers in our everyday life is ever increasing, from basic arithmetic to complex data analysis and major contributions to physical sciences, engineering, medicine, and business processes. We employ high performance computing to theoretically model interactions between individual atoms in natural and man-made materials to facilitate and accelerate the design and engineering of new and improved materials for optimal performance, controlled environmental responses, robustness, and safe exploitation in industrial and biomedical settings. This talk presents a historical perspective and examples of our molecular models that empowered advanced materials design in collaboration with RMIT's industry and academic research partners through an in-depth understanding of fundamental intermolecular interactions in realistic environments.
New frontiers in vaccines and nanotechnology
New frontiers in vaccines and nanotechnology
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 00:00
Okay, so thank you very much. Welcome, everyone, to this distinguished lecture. I'm Xinghuo Yu, I'm the chair of the RMIT Professorial Academy, hosting this event. So, before we start firstly, I really would like to acknowledge the people of the Kulin nations on whose unceded lands, we are meeting today, I respectively acknowledge to their elders past and present. So, today what we are going, we are going to hear from Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski a lecture on New Frontiers in Vaccines and Nanotechnology, which is, of course, is a topic of interest not only to research and medical science, and engineering research, but also so much more to the public. All of us has interest in giving or experiencing the past few years. So, before we start, let's just go through some housekeeping matters. This is actually a hybrid event. So, we have people attending the lecture in person. We also have quite a number of people attending online as well. So, for those people, here and you can just as usual, just raise your hand after the lecture ask your questions. For those people online, you can post your questions to the conversation sections. At the end of lecture, we will look at popular questions and then we ask one by one to the presenter. Okay, so let's start the lecture by introducing the speaker, Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski. She's internationally recognized award-winning researcher and her focus is on understanding the immune systems in older individuals and development of practical immunotherapies and vaccine targeting cancer and infectious disease. In her role as Enabling Impact Platform Director at RMIT, she has promoted, is promoting the establishment of multiple cross-disciplinary University-wide ECR-led networks including a Bioinformatics Network, an Entrepreneurship Club, and a Mental Health Working Group, and among many others. So, without further ado, please join me to welcome Magdalena to deliver her lecture. Over to you.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 02:43
Thank you, thank you. And thank you for establishing this lecture series, which allows us to really share some of our findings but also share our passion for where the field is going in particular areas. I also want to acknowledge the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University, their Ancestors and Elders, past and present and emerging. And I also wanted to share some wisdom that I read from a book written by Uncle Paul Gordon and Paul Callahan called the Dreaming Path. In this beautiful book, they talk about how we all have different stories. But if we are following a dreaming path, we are united and heading in the same direction. So, I think that is so relevant to research, we may all bring different aspects to particular strands of research. But if we're heading with the same dream in mind, we're all heading in the same direction. We're all together.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 03:57
So, before I start, the first slide in case people run off to do all the things is the acknowledgement side. And I want to acknowledge both our group here at RMIT that cancer research and vaccines research group at the School of Health and Biomedical Science, College of STEM, but also are very many collaborators across all of Australia and globally across multiple institutes, and our funders, and more than anything, I want to acknowledge the volunteers who participate in our human clinical trials, because they are giving they're giving not just their blood, they're giving their time and they're showing their confidence that we will actually make good use of every single precious drop of blood. So, thank you.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 04:55
So, today, vaccination, oh by the way, um, I have divided the to talk into four sections, and I'll just give a little summary at the end of each section. So hopefully, that will wake you up at the end of each section. So, vaccination, we know this, right? It's effective other population level. And it can both prevent disease as well as provide long term protection. And in fact, you will see on the very right-hand side here, just take it off an NIH site, how vaccines have all by eradicated a number of diseases globally, and this is something we often forget. We really in, in certain countries around the world, we really don't have polio, diphtheria, we don't have measles. There may be pockets where some of these diseases particularly measles occasionally emerges. But we have all by eliminated major infectious diseases that used to kill hundreds of 1000s of people. So, it is an effective demonstrated strategy at the population level. Now COVID-19, most vaccines prior to COVID-19, were a little bit of the pathogen, that is the infectious agent, either attenuated so the virus is, or bacteria is inactivated. So, it's no longer pathogenic, it can hold on to cause disease, or bits and pieces from them mixed in with something called an adjuvant. An adjuvant is something that I'll talk a little bit more about it later. But generally, it's something that just irritates your immune system says, there’s something here you need to you need to pay attention to, it calls attention to it. So, before COVID-19, there was literally just one adjuvant license for large scale global views. And that was alum. Now, what's, what were some of the limitations of that? Well, pretty much limited range of diseases that you could tackle, because you had to know the pathogen, to attenuate it, or to find the beat of it, that actually would induce the appropriate immune response. Most of the alum adjuvant tends to induce antibodies, and antibodies can give you one type of protection. So, protection is to be limited by antibodies. And the way that the vaccine field had moved was incredibly slow. So literally taking at the minimum, when I used to lecture us to find that it was a minimum of six years for even a small tweak to a new vaccine to come and be translated into use. And if you talk about a brand-new vaccine, it used to take conservatively, 15 years, from big, exciting laboratory results to actually being able to implement it. So, the timeline used to be very slow. And it means that even responses to new strains, your strains of a virus and your strength and strains of bacteria used to be incredibly slow as well. Now, also, and I'll talk a lot more about it. So, I want to explain what it is now, but all these vaccines would not consider nonspecific effects.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 08:31
Now, new opportunities since COVID-19, and they're new type of vaccines that have come with it. The nanoparticle ones. And literally, most of the vaccines that have come online in COVID are nanoparticles, one way or another. They are adaptable to diverse targets, diverse antigens, diverse pathogens, they, some of them, can also induce cell mediated protection. And the immune system has two arms, antibody and cell mediated so now you're finally able to engage both arms. And they tend to have more agile, streamlined production and therefore can respond in a more agile way than say six years to a new strain coming on. So new frontiers don't ever talk is not about this. And I'm not in a I'm not I'm not here to plug any vaccine. I'm here to talk about the new frontiers. What's next what's after this? And the new frontiers that I'm particularly interested in are personalizing vaccines, making vaccines really consider the individual it has been, and they are being given to and harmless, beneficial nonspecific effects. And you are not by yourself in this room saying What do you mean beneficial nonspecific effects. Even people who are deeply in the area of vaccination research, don't know what beneficial nonspecific effects. So, I'm going to tell you about it. So literally, it's like putting your immune system in a gym. And that workout for your immune system has to be right for the environment you live in, to get the beneficial effect. So, there's kind of no point exercising your arms, if you live in an environment where you have to run away from a tiger. Right? So similarly, with your immune system, the way in which you gain this nonspecific effect is by exercising the right arms of the immune system, and legs. For the environment you you're living. So nonspecific effects were initially discovered by epidemiologists, when they were studying vaccines in Africa, particularly Professor Peter Aaby, and Professor Christine Stabell Benn from Denmark. And they found this amazing thing, which was that vaccinated babies in certain areas of Africa and they primarily work in Guinea Bissau. When they were immunized, their mortality would dramatically drop. And this was not just from the disease they were vaccinated against; it was all cause mortality. So literally, from gastrointestinal from lung disease, when you've got an oral polio vaccine, so it was just like, what's going on here. And since then, there has been a lot of activity in this area. And it's been validated, who has validated that nonspecific beneficial effects exist. And that also said, we don't understand them, we need to understand them. One way in which this is just a bit epidemiology, but one way in which nonspecific effects are actually being harnessed right now in the clinic, is with some vaccines, like the BCG, the tuberculosis vaccine, and the tuberculosis vaccine is being used at the moment in the clinic, as a treatment for bladder cancer. So, it's a bacteria vaccine used to treat a cancer. So, you couldn't think of two pathogens that are that are more different.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 12:53
So, what we found, however, is that this workout to the immune system differs the depending on your biological sex, and gender, and these are just some publications with our collaborators and ourselves. Where we've seen this pattern again, and again, the early changes in all the genes going up, or all the genes going down expression of the genes in the immune system differs. Whether you're male here at the bottom, I think it's on a female at the bottom. It's the DTP vaccine, just an example from a paper and in green is transcript transcripts of the DNA going up. In red, it's transcripts of the DNA going down. And these are females, and these are males 24 hours after the injection. So how a vaccine affects your will depend for the nonspecific effects, whether you're male or female, in fact, generally, how your immune system reacts to vaccines, not only for these nonspecific effects, but generally, there will be differences between males and females. And this goes all the way through the lifespan from babies to older adults. So, the message here is that these nonspecific effects of vaccines, the potential beneficial harnessing of them, has to also consider their sex and gender specific. Overall, female females particularly in the older age, tend to be more what were called inflammatory. So, they tend to for most vaccines have higher immune responses, higher India's higher levels of antibodies. And at the same time, they tend to get more inflammation and you can, you can see that because of say you get a sore arm well. Oh, no, doesn't want to go forwards? Can we get help? Okay, so we all have better things to do. So, I'll just keep talking. And then you'll see my pretty slides, right? So. So in older women, there's a particular phenomenon called inflammatory. And so, it's, it's a made-up word that now has made it into the scientific vocabulary, right? Maybe the battery died?
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 16:03
Okay, so you get more inflammation when you're older, inflammaging. But the problem is inflammaging is actually associated with a lot of not so good outcomes for older individuals. Loss of mental capabilities, cognition, frailty, in older individuals, which is, again associated with accidents and great, and healing that may be impaired. So, and this is not trivial for us, we are experiencing in many countries in the world, we're experiencing longer lifespans, which is a good thing, I'm all for it. But that does bring with it. The fact that we have some populations where literally a third of the population will be over 65 by 2050. So, a third of the population is now in this basket, where the immune system may start having these inflammatory effects. Moreover, given that, as we get older, our are preparing control mechanisms for our cells go down in the body. And our immune system changes with age, we are fully expecting, and it's predicted that there will be an about 50% increase in cancer as it was estimated in 2010, to 2030. So, we're going to have more cancer, and we're going to have an aging population and many of the diseases that are associated with older individuals. What happens to the immune system it's so central now that little diagram that is for the scientists in the audience and, and online.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 18:10
But generally, what we are having with the immune system is that because of the way that the immune system immune cells are generated from factories, like the bone marrow and editing places like the thymus, less naive, inexperienced immune cells are generated. So, you have your generate less possibility of seeing new things. So, the immune system gets a narrower attention span, and it fails to recognize new dangers more and more. We also, as we get older, with changes on what the immune system recognizes, the immune system gets a little bit confused, and it tends to hyper react or react to things that shouldn't including our own self. So, we all know that things like say rheumatoid arthritis is increased in older individuals, so autoimmune diseases. We are also and this goes back to the inflammatory Xing point, the immune system also stops hyper reacting in the wrong ways, just producing cytokines that are actually too many of them, and not quite right for whatever it is that the body is being confronted by. All of this means that in older individuals, there are massive implications for vaccines. And we have actually seen this, interestingly enough, during the COVID pandemic. So, when individuals had their course of vaccination. And then just analyzed month and months later, this seven-month cut off was particularly interesting. And if you were under 60 years old 29% on only 29% will experience what's called a breakthrough infection if you're vaccinated, but it was a very long time ago, you may still get infected. If you were over 60, that caught up to 93% of individuals experiencing a breakthrough infection. So massive implications of your immune system changing with age as to how your immune system sustains memory, remember self and how it can manage a new infection or disease.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 20:52
So, one of the studies that we're doing at the moment is called vaccine immunomodulation. Throughout the aging lifespan, it's a phase two randomized clinical trials, and it's looking at flu vaccines and theory, etc. Tetanus vaccines in our beautiful volunteers in Tasmania, and the volunteers give us blood samples over and after vaccination. They also give us stool samples. And I'll come back to that in a minute. Or sell to us that we do questionnaires for cognition and mood and, and various all those other aspects of their initial clinical profile. And then, what do we want to know, and I was just discussing previously would saying that these days, we have such an opportunity to really maximize the information we get from each one of these incredibly precious samples. So, what we do our multi omics analysis, what do we want to really achieve with us before I show you what analysis get done by us and others more and more globally? Well, we want to understand the immune system. We want to understand how it reacts, and how it reacts to different vaccines. In this particular trial, we're trying to understand how it reacts to two very commonly used vaccines in older individuals, flu, which is actually recommended, and certain formulations given for free and DTP, which is recommended.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 22:37
So, we also collect these stools, because we know that there's a massive interaction between the immune system and the gut microbiome, and it's a two-way street. So, your state of inflammation may influence what bugs you have in your stomach, beneficial bugs, microbiome, and your microbiome will in turn, act on your immune system. And more and more, then there's additional consequences because the immune system interacts also with a brain, the immune system interacts. If you have a disease, for example, cancer, so this triple axis of immune system gut microbiome. And the brain is something that is becoming more and more intricately linked, as we keep doing research, and we need to understand this in a cohesive way.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 23:36
So multi-omics, what do we do with every precious bit of sample? Well, we analyze all the cells that are circulating in the blood, the immune cells, we analyze the microbiome, we analyze from the cells that are circulating in the blood, we're trying to see all the genes that have gone up and all the genes that have gone down, and we do it at a single cell level. So, in diverse cells, different genes will come up and down. And we're looking at the cells individually 100,000 cells, and we're looking at about 60,000 transcripts in each cell. So, the amount of data that it's generated, and the insight is just extraordinary. Obviously, we're also looking at antigen specific antibodies. And epigenetics. Epigenetics is a very exciting one for us to look at. Because it tells us not just what they're what hasn't responded, but what is the potential of the DNA to respond to something. So, it's not about a DNA sequence. It's about little bookmarks that we put, as we as we grow older over our life, we put little bookmarks in our DNA. This gene I'm using a lot. Let's put this mark here. This gene I really don't want to be using. So, I'll put two tags there to see teed off. And more and more, we're understanding what these texts do and how to find them. And we can map them. So, it's not just about an individual responding for something, you can look at their DNA and say, this individual will tend to respond to a vaccine stimulate with production of high levels of TNF, which is highly inflammatory. And you can do all this without doing anything to the individual or even looking at the TNF itself, you just know that that person has that tendency to react in this way. So, epigenetics, we're also looking at the potential influence of other infections, like cytomegalovirus, which is very common in our population. Literally, all of us, not all of us, but let's say in and anything between 50 and 80% of individuals will have our cytomegalovirus just integrated into their bodies. And this will affect the immune response. Okay, and then doing cell assays on those and those donated cells in the lab.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 26:12
So, I'm not, I'm only going to give you one little result for fun, hot off the press. But I think maybe the question for us is more about, okay, so if you're, if you're older, should you get your vaccine and it there have been three vaccines given in Australia for flu, the standard flu vaccine, in 2017, did not really work very well in older individuals. And the US at that point, had also changed their formulations. Because said, no, actually, older individuals have a different immune system. So, they've changed it. And there's two other vaccines now. And Australia has followed suit, there's the high dose, which is basically the same vaccine, but just four times more, four times more of the vaccine in the vial, and the adjuvant to the vaccine. So, it's a standard dose, but you add something to wake up the immune system more in an older individual. And now those two they are what they're calling augmented vaccines are available for older individuals. So bottom line is both the augmented and the high dose flu vaccines work better in older individuals than the standard low dose vaccine. So that's what my mom's getting. She's getting, she's getting the high dose. But we were interesting to see, well, if we were to think about harnessing those nonspecific effects and start getting the immune system of older individuals to the gym, to get them working out aspects of their immune system to basically resist overall infections and other pathologies better. Is there still going to be a difference between all the young, sorry, between the different vaccines in terms of the nonspecific effects I gave? And would it be different in males and females, so hot of the press, we actually have looked at all the genes going up and down in our volunteers. And here you can see the standard dose and in orange, it's females, and in green, it's males, it can see, and blue is genes going down, and red is genes going up. And you can see that there's a number of genes that clearly in males are going down, and then females are going up and vice versa. So, there's a different pattern for the standard vaccines. Same thing happens for the high dose vaccine again. But interestingly, the adjuvant its vaccine is far less clear pattern of difference between males and females. What does this mean, we're still in the middle of this, analyzing it. So, I'm just sharing an early preview. But bottom line is in terms of nonspecific effects, we may have to really consider which vaccine and if we're going to be giving it to males or females.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 29:34
So, conclusions from part one, the nonspecific effects of vaccines can affect multiple gene pathways and our age and sex dependent, and it gives us the again, this is a from tears joke. Not what's there but what do we say next? So, what do we say next? Can we rationally engage these nonspecific effects? Hey, do new things revitalize the immune system of older individuals by working it out in the roadways? Is this just a pipe dream? Or are we able to do a little bit of more in-depth research and start addressing some fundamental questions. So, to get to the next section, I just need to give you a little bit of immunology. So, this guy here, oh girl, the dendritic cell is the Sentinel of the immune system. It eats things, ticks, ticks them up as they come into the body. And then particularly particles, and if there's an adjuvant, or some other danger signal present, these cells get very revved up to travel to the lymph node and tell the rest of the immune system what's going on and activated. And in this way, we activate B cells and plasma cells to produce antibodies. And we also activate this older part of the immune system, the cellular part, and particularly cytotoxic T cells. And why is that interesting or important? Because we know we all know that antibodies will block whatever pathogen comes in from infecting a healthy cell. But once a healthy cell is infected, and the virus, for example, has taken it over to make it a factory for itself to produce more and more virus cells. It's literally it's hiding from the antibodies. But the Cytotoxic cells can see molecules on the surface of an infected cell and kill it. So, we're basically stopping the virus from being able to expand and replicate in the body. So can we, can we do this rational thinking about vaccine creation. And number one, when considering vaccines, and advanced nanomaterials is safety, safety, safety, safety, safety, safety, safety, safety, safety, and I can keep going on. That's number one. The rest for us, I would want to make sure that it is efficacious, not just in one group, but we actually identify materials that will be efficacious in different individuals that have different immune systems, I gave you the example of old and young, but there's other groups, for example, pregnant women have a very different immune system and other considerations, safety, safety, safety, safety, safety and safety that we need to take into account. Also, and this is a frontier, we would want to engage these exciting new nonspecific effects. So, for some time now, we have been interested in just going very systematically and rationally about vaccine design. So, most vaccines that appeared to have appeared and are in use actually are pretty random. They initially were used because historically that we use the inactivated the pathogens themselves, that were seen to be saved in a large population, and they kept being using, but perhaps we have an opportunity to just think it through. So fundamental properties of nanoparticles, nanoparticles are between one and 100 nanometers. And just to put it in scale for you, and I noticed that there's some network technologies here in the audience, but I will do these anyway. So, the difference between a one nanometer width, and it's 100,000 times smaller than the width of a hair. If you think about the width of a hair, it's 100,000 times smaller than the width of a house. So that's, that's this guy. And we were wondering, well, what can we start systematically investigated, and the first thing was size? And strangely enough, at the time we were doing that that question had not been asked, what is the right size for a vaccine?
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 34:31
We were particularly interested to see that dendritic cell that Sentinel of the immune system that it have any particular preference from for gobbling up any particular particle size. And when we gave the dendritic cells, different particle sizes, lo and behold, we got a surprise, it does have a preference doesn't consider all particle sizes to say, between 40 and 100 nanometers is the optimal size. So that actually isn't optimal. size for a vaccine. And then when we were able to alone or collaboratively conjugate different things that we wanted the immune system to see for a vaccine, it's a protein, it's a peptide. What we found is that basically, we could induce massive immune responses, including both those CDA T cells and high level of antibodies. Without doing anything else. We didn't have to add an adjuvant, we didn't have to do anything, as long as we got that specific size, right. And the type of immune responses that we were able to induce were able are the type of responses that could tackle pathogens that still need vaccines, for example, malaria with antibodies, and the one B cells, or cancer where CDA T cells play a major role. And we went down a pathway in terms of seeing and confirming that this principle will induce good immune responses in larger animals, as well as is capable of being scaled up.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 36:14
So size, the proof of principle particle that we were using at the time comparing all the different sizes, then we thought, okay, but what if we use the same size, but use different materials. Now, not all materials worked. But we did find a whole range of materials where if we got the right size, this particular example is just an iron oxide core surrounded by a sugar. And we were able to confirm that they're nontoxic, non-inflammatory, and they're taken up preferentially by the dendritic cells, then we did induce immune responses that were comparable to our gold standard particle. So, these are the iron oxide core ones, these are our gold standard ones, and in fact, comparable to an adjuvant, that is still experimental, but it's one of the most powerful out there. So yes, the principles do translate across different materials. What about shape? Let's get, let's get more ambitious.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 37:15
So, this is a very recent collaborative paper with the collaborators in Queensland. And bottom line is shape methods as well. And we found that these little guys, the rods, were the ones that were inducing the best responses, and this was against a bacterial infection. So not everybody can make particles in that tiny little size. So, what about larger particles, and in fact, there's a whole literature out there. And people are busily and happily making vaccines that are larger size, and they still work. So why, and we believe that that is, because a lot of these approaches don't just use the pure particle, they use the pure particle, and something that will target your vaccine to that little guy that the dendritic cell. So, for example, receptors on the surface of dendritic cells, like danger signal receptors. And what happens when a particle gets taken out by these receptors, it also puts molecules on its surface that makes it interesting cell more active to interact with the rest of the immune system. So that's an alternate way of getting to the same place. And in fact, we've played a little bit with that, even with even with magnets and 20 had our iron oxide core particles, we can also put them in places where we can artificially attract the vaccine to the injection site or to the in the culture to the dendritic cells. So dendritic cell targeting can be an alternate for larger particles. But then, that's okay. But then we have to put these vaccines in the body and what happens in the body? Well, what happens in the body is that all of our fluids, including blood and length, have a lot of proteins floating in them and a lot of antibodies. So, what happens therefore, is that particles get surrounded by a corona of our own proteins, which can include our own antibodies. And that is particularly relevant for nano medicines that use compound called PEG and that includes some of the current mRNA vaccines, because there is limited data on repeat administering Question. And PEG is found in a lot of products, cosmetics, your shampoo will probably have PEG, medical contrasts for medical imaging, drug stabilizers. So, the question is, are we upregulating when there is an injection to the vaccine, and we also have regulating the response to PEG as well as whatever the vaccine is carrying. So, in this work, collaborative work and led by a DECRA fellow in the team, David Ju, we found that, yes, absolutely, there is upregulation of antibiotic antibodies upon injection with either the Moderna or the Pfizer vaccines. And when we then see whether coating the vaccines themselves in the SiRNA from even ICM individuals would change the way they interact with the immune system. They did. So, we have more internalization. And this is just one example by yourself all the monocyte like it eats it more internalizes it. So, do we know, what are the consequences of this? Not really, it could go either way. It could be that the vaccines, the more you administer them, the antibodies will actually clear them before they have a chance to induce an immune response against what do you want them to induce an immune response against. Or it could be the opposite. It could be that because they're coded by antibodies, they internalized by cell types that may provoke an even higher immune response. We don't know at the moment. But what we do know is that it's important to ask fundamental questions like this. And in fact, in another collaboration, we have collaborated with a group, which has shown some alternatives that are non-pegylated. And it's possible to make plexes with RNA that don't contain PEG and at the moment, we're studying other areas of collaboration with additional groups to go down that path and found alternatives to pick. So, but in the meantime, what are now Pfizer, Novavax, they're all being injected in large scale human trials. So, we want to understand what does happen with repeated immunization with the different vaccines doesn't matter. What you were immunized in your first round, to what then you get boosted with, does it matter for your antigen specific response? Does it matter for your antibodies? Does it matter for your T cells? So, we're involved in large scale human trials across all of Australia, with our collaborators in PICOBOO 1 and PICOBOO 2, to basically start addressing these questions.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 43:13
So, conclusions back to nanoparticle interactions with the immune system hugely dependent on fine differences in size and shape. fundamental principles can translate across nanomaterials and species and interactions can be modified by protein Corona or by adding dendritic cell targeting ligands. I need to know how I'm doing for time. Okay, so the next one, even more controversial, if, if that can be which is can nanoparticles have beneficial nonspecific effects? So, vaccines can have beneficial nonspecific effects could nanoparticles happen? And therefore, all the mapping that we've been doing of immune potency, could it also be harnessed for nonspecific working out of the immune system? So, this is very controversial because the literature on nanoparticles very much comes from the field of pollution. And very much comes from the fact that ultra-fine particles and these are nano particles, so they're less than 100 nanometers are the ones that are clearly epidemiologically associated with increased cardiac and lung pathologies. So, no doubt about it, nanoparticle inhalation of pollution is bad. But when you put the microscope on this, these effects are affected by size, shape, charge chemistry, and majorly by the adsorbed contaminants on these tiny particles.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 45:01
So can we look deeper. And we just wanted to find a material that was as neutral as possible to start doing our research. And strangely enough, we found polystyrene, which had been demonstrated to be inert and nontoxic in mice cheap and rats. And in our own studies in vitro, on that dendritic cell, the DC, we found that it did not these materials did not induce inflammation, or reactive oxygen species, which is another bad thing to induce. So, we were very excited to see this result, we're basically giving the nanoparticles in the lung. Polystyrene nanoparticles in a particular size range in the lung, didn't cause any inflammation or anything else. But also, when then there was a challenge with an environmental allergen. Basically, this pre administration prevented the elicitation of an allergic response in the lungs. But at the same time, it did not affect the ability of the lung to clear an influenza infection. So here, we have a very nonspecific effect once more one month earlier, if you've worked out to your immune system in the lung, and then a month later that long, which normally would have responded with allergy, allergic inflammation response, they'll send it to that. And if instead, you're challenged with an influenza virus, it clears it and if anything, clear, so they're a little bit better than if they hadn't received the particles. So, in this particular context, absolutely, it is possible to work out your immune system also in organs like the lung. So, nanoparticles physic physical chemical crash that can be mapped to optimize immune responses, and nanoparticles by themselves could potentially be explored in this way to provide these broad nonspecific effects. So old age does not mean need to be scary. It can be a little bit fun. So, I do have another four slides. Yeah. Is that okay? All right.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 47:41
So, coming back to this. We were talking about personalized vaccine, all young, male, female, and harnessing non beneficial nonspecific effects in vaccines and in nanotechnology as new frontiers. So, this is I'm telling you about things that are happening right now. It's, it's not even an opportunity. It's a little bit beyond that. But end of the day, why are we doing all this, and these are just a few slides to tell us something that we are very committed about at the Cancer Aging and Vaccines Research Group, which is ovarian cancer. Now, ovarian cancer is the seventh cause of death of cancer in women. The problem is most women present at an advanced stage of presentation. And then there's very little that one can do. The light detection, survival is only 5%. And the majority of women get detected at that stage. So, we also know that the immune system is absolutely critical to control the tumor and the tumor cell infiltration that which immune cells infiltrate the tumor will tell you about the survival. But we also know most of our patients are older women. And at this point, we have like we discussed before of myopic, very narrow focus of attention adaptive immune system, and a very inflammatory hyper reactive, innate immune system. So, in ovarian cancer, if we're going to be doing anything to engage the immune system productively, we also need to understand the immune system of older individuals. So now you can see why the lab is called Cancer Aging and Vaccines.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 49:47
And briefly, what we do is we engage big data analysis like that slide I show you about big data and different sources of big data for early detection and for personalized therapy. We're collaborating with Engineering and Cesar sitting there in the back, Cesar and Arnan for not only finding biomarkers which we do ourselves, but also really think about the translational process down the line to make this accessible to women to be able to test themselves, or to be able to test themselves in the clinic. And these, we're very excited that we found some biomarkers that do enable earlier detection. And we also have found some biomarkers that enable us to personalize therapy. So, from a drop of blood, we are coming to the point where we can tell you whether this drug, or this drug is the one that you should take, that will give you the maximum benefit for survival. So, we're talking about drugs that would only work in 30% of women. Now we can tell which 30% and they can take the correct drug. This kind of practicality, I'm just pointing out one paper there. It's even for women that have cancer right now that are advanced stage. You can imagine somebody being in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of Australia, and Antarctica, we have actually found that some biomarkers in blood can substitute for the initial alarm bell for things like an MRI scan, in terms of sensitivity and specificity. So, the practicality is always in our minds as well to provide benefit to women. The other part of this journey in terms of engaging anything we can really to help women with ovarian cancer as to collaborate in innovative new treatments. And we are collaborating with School of Science and another distinguished professor, Professor Bhargava, on some gold compounds, as well as the Hudson Institute and other and obviously the Walter and Eliza Hall for new drugs and new immunotherapies. This collaboration with WEHI is really very exciting, because we are able to engage multiple immunotherapies. And it's double blind. So, we don't have the results as yet. But we're really going in-depth with the big data to try to understand why some women respond to the immunotherapy and some women don't. And we're analyzing the immune system to an unprecedented depth, as well as with WEHI and Claire Scott's lab, analyzing the tumor tissue itself to an unprecedented depth. So, we will gain enormous insight, regardless of the results. And one of the insights that we are already getting from these results, is to find new targets for vaccines in these big data, logical human trials, and, you know, we have new targets. And as I discussed with you before, we actually have a commitment to develop new nanotechnologies. So, if we put these two together, our aim really, across our projects, is to develop effective cancer vaccines, which basically means all of this that we've worked so hard to create becomes irrelevant, because hopefully, this person will just not get cancer. So, thank you.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 54:17
We have a few minutes. We have a few minutes for questions from the floor.
Question from audience member #1 54:33
Thanks, Magdalena for the very inspiring and interesting talk. Just I have a few questions, but just ask one question that the first part on how the immune system is age dependent. I wonder if you step back even is that whole aging question there, right. Can you do you know what happens to the immune system and why the biochemistry of it and then can you I think you've discussed a little bit at the end. Can you reverse that? And sort of its sort of it's an aging question.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 55:06
Oh, 100% Yeah, we're getting close to understanding the regulators of aging and in. In the words of Indiana Jones, it's not the year it's the mileage, and, and your immune system, how it's worked out. So, the experiences that your immune system undergoes, are as important as when that happens. So, this cumulative experience, and I mentioned the field of epigenetics, we are starting to see that particular epigenetic profiles are associated with better aging. And particular epigenetic profiles are associated with a better functioning immune system into old age, and the two tend to go together. So, because again, the immune system cells traveling all over your body all the time checking everything out, involved in repair mechanisms. They are, they are so fundamental. If you can affect the immune system, there's definitely possibilities for helping age better. The day, there was a second question there, sorry.
Question from audience member #2 56:20
Thank you so much. Great talk. Just one simple question about the nonspecific effects, beneficial NSS. So, you shed some light on NSE is caused by nanoparticles about from the pollution, but can the mRNA LLPs containing vaccine causing disease?
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 56:49
That's something we need to look at. Okay, they don't know if people don't know at the moment. And that's why I say it's, it's a new frontier. And this is this is something that the who has acknowledged that entities exist, and beneficial entities can exist, but in terms of how many people are looking into that it's, it's still it's a new frontier. Thank you.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 57:19
I can afford one. I actually have a bit of question. I'm still early, later on this, you know, then I mean, it's fascinating to talk about the shape and size of the molecules, nano particles, and that you can see the positive side. On the other hand, you kind of introduced alum of material into segments, you’re some of what it's what kind of procedures you have in place to ensure that kind of safety?
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 57:57
Oh, absolutely. And look, there's a whole slew of tests that you have to do for safety, that are separate and yet, there's formal acute toxicity, chronic toxicity. And there's actually even if it goes that way, there's actually companies that do that. So, you know, the researchers, it's hands off. There's, you know, you test it, and you tell me, so there's a whole process. To do that in the lab, we have our own kind of shortcut version of things so that then we know what to focus our attention on to further progress. Inflammation, reactive oxygen, oxygen species are very core. And more and more these days, it's about this big data approaches as well.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 58:54
Thank you very much. We have just one minute left, anybody have any burning desire for the last short question. So, if there's none, please join me to thank Magdalena for fascinating talk. Thank you very much. Looking forward to seeing you in another distinguished lecture. Thank you very much.
Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski 59:14
Thank you.
21 June 2023, presented by Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski
Given the immune system changes with age, increased longevity often brings increased susceptibility to infections and cancer. Males and females further often show different immune system profiles in response to vaccines.
To optimise the application of vaccines and therapies across the lifespan, we need to both understand how current vaccines work in different individuals against diseases such as COVID19 or Flu in human clinical trials, as well as defining how fundamental features of vaccine components such as nanoparticles (size, shape or protein corona), affect their interactions with the immune system. Such studies include using big data tools for studying new beneficial non-specific effects (NSEs) of vaccines.
We further have a specific interest in helping women with ovarian cancer, the most lethal gynaecological malignancy, across the spectrum of needs, from earlier diagnosis to more effective treatments, as well as the long-term aim of developing cancer vaccines, collaborating broadly across disciplines.
The connection between metallurgy and nature
The connection between metallurgy and nature
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 00:09
Hello. Welcome everyone. I'm Xinghuo Yu, the chair of RMIT Professorial Academy, the host of this event. So firstly, I would like to acknowledge the people of the Kulin nation, our hosts and ceded lands we are meeting today are respectively acknowledging the Elders past and the present. So today we shall hear from Distinguished Professor Ma Qian about the connection between metallurgy and nature, a fascinating topic of interest to many of us. So, this lecture is actually part of the activity of the RMIT Professorial Academy. This academy consists of the RMIT's Distinguished Professors who play a particular role in the university in terms of promoting the university in terms of advocating, advocating changes for the university, and also advising the university and future directions and opportunities.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 01:05
So, before we start, let's just go through some housekeeping matters. So, this is a Teams Live event. So, you will not be able to ask a question directly to the speaker. So, what you should do is please post your questions in the Q&A sections. So, at the end of the lecture, I will pick up those popular ones ask the speakers, until the time is run out of the lecture is finished. So, so let's just start the lecture by introducing the speaker. So Distinguished Professor Ma Qian is the deputy director of RMIT's Additive Manufacturing. He published extensively including 290 journal articles, one monograph and three eight books, and he was regarded as a highly ranked metallurgist. He is a Fellow of American Society for Metals International and currently serving on editorial boards of well-known journals, such as Acta Materialia and Scripta Materialia. So, without further ado, please join me to welcome Ma to deliver his lecture. So over to you, Ma, over to you
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 02:21
Oh, Thank you, Xing for the introduction. Want to see my full screen? Yeah. ah, I hope everything works well and go to the full screen.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 02:46
Okay, good afternoon, everyone. And thanks very much for coming to this lecture. My name is Ma Qian, and I feel words about myself. I finished all my degrees and the former Beijing University of Iron and Steel Technology of the name you can guess that the university and then at the time, was focus on metallurgy and then after I finished my PhD in 1991, I joined Tsinghua University. First as a postdoctoral fellow and then as a faculty member. I was at Tsinghua almost four years none of the iron are left to China at the end of 1994 then obviously Japan, Singapore and then came to Australia in 2000. I joined the University of Queensland because of the CRC. From the completion of my PhD being doing research on metallic materials, so I'm a metallurgist. I was trained as foundry metallurgist. I joined RMIT, in 2013, and almost nine years at the end of 2013. So, in Australia, the University of Queensland is still my longest employer and next year RMIT will become my longest the employer.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 04:20
Today before I discuss the connection between the metallurgy and the nature of steel, I needed to briefly discuss the scope for metallurgy, because metallurgy the turnover has implications have continued to evolve. I think the metallurgy considerably in this talk. Still mean extracting metals from ores, but also but also include the size engineering of metallic materials at different length scales. would include the design and manufacture of normal metallic materials. In my presentation today I would like to go through with this view topics that is the who designed mentality on Earth? who made all the metals we know? I'll give a few examples about the connection between nature fundamentality and different length scales. Then I conclude my presentation, I do have a few minutes of discussion.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 05:34
So as a metallurgist, I was curious to know the start of metallurgy where all the metals we've been dealing with come from? This is the motive for myself. Now hopefully you will appreciate my motive. Now this presentation or this lecture today is part of the general size it's not about the depth or deep size. So, it's not about the connection between metallurgy and nature from a personal view, and this is one of my favorite topics.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 06:14
So, who did who discovered metallurgy on earth? We know that metallurgy has been critical towards civilization and all civilization began from metallurgy. So, I would like to share with you this picture before we answer who discovered metallurgy. This is the Turkey Pavilion at the Expo 2010 in Shanghai, China, fantastic design. What I'd like to draw your attention to the design of the art wall of the Turkey Pavilion, which has lots of implications I'll show you in the next few slides. So, this area, or this place, had a horrific moment, not sure how many in the audience know this place in Turkey, it's a very important place in the history of metallurgy and the civilization of human beings. Let's look into that.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 07:26
So, this is where the Catalhoyuk is in Turkey. And that's Turkey and this Catalhoyuk case in a World Heritage Site, due to its critical importance in the civilization of our history, yeah, the history of our civilization. And the Catalhoyak case probably the largest, primitive, primitive city settlement, we know we know today between the so-called New Stone Age and the Copper Age. So, this is the side of the settlement and from this layout of the settlement, now, you can understand that where this design inspiration came from, yes, the design of the outer wall of this Turkey Pavilion pays from the lay out of this Catalhoyuk settlement. So, this is not part of the thing in high story, and I put in a picture here. Now, this is the copper or copper bead discovered in this Catalhoyuk in Turkey in the settlement. And this picture is the promotion picture used RMIT for my lecture today and I explained this picture first. We have the same length scale, the scale by one millimeter they each picture. Now, this is in a hollow titanium tube printed by one of my students at RMIT's Centre for Additive Manufacturing. To put a saw in the side and the inner diameter of this hollow turning alloy tube is less than one millimeter is 0.85 millimeter and the wall thickness about upon 0.3 millimeter So, this is the image here. This the hollow tube 3D printed today. It may represent the additive metallurgy and apparent status of additive metallurgy today. This one is not a copper bead is the entire settlement for the kind of oil settlement. And it's a highly pure because you have purity, which absolutely didn't exist in Asia and people researchers attributed the base and to the, to the birth of the metallurgy, and they were very cautious, they use the word same proponent for the birth of metallurgy. The reason for that is, there's an argument about the high purity of this copper bead. And the argument is that this could be the consequence of a big domestic fire, where extreme heat of the fire has extracted the copper from the high purity copper ores. For example, reduce the that I run the as carbon, this charcoal, this timber under the this is possible theoretically, if there was a domestic fire and there was intense heat then this reaction is quite possible. So, they were unable, they concluded this possibility. So therefore, an a same as upon too, the birth of metallurgy. So that's the conclusion of conditional. But anyway, this is regarded as one of the most important materials or copper materials, which point to the birthplace of the metallurgy.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 11:54
So then other one, so another birthplace is Iran. And I just show, I'm just going to show you just one picture. This is Iran and all these areas, this shows the smelting of copper, it's always related to the copper, how to code to work the copper and also the mining districts. So, this this area, so the collective everything is either suggest that was a very advanced so many years ago. So apart from power from this Turkey, this Catalhoyuk and the next most likely place, birthplace of mythologies, you're wrong. If you are interested in dates, probably you can look up the law a lot of these history with metallurgy before they serve 4000 BCE. And I think that's this tool most likely what place but places of metallurgy.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 13:06
So, they put everything together and then you put it this copper bead, we put it this settlement is the theme of the Turkey Pavilion at that time, was the cradle of civilization, days. That's very important, Catalhoyuk, you're having you're having a chance to visit Turkey, I strongly suggest that they will one day to pay the visit into this this area, particularly if you're interested in metallurgy.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 13:39
So now who made all the metals we know? I think is the next question. This, this is interesting. We are metallurgists. And we know that metals are extracted from the ores, and so the answer looks pretty simple, pretty straightforward. In fact, it's not. I would look at it earlier we discussed the copper and then we look at gold. And gold is the second metal used by human beings. And also, is not the word its origin was unclear until 2013. When I say that it was unclear its origin, which means that gold should not exist on Earth. As simple as that. So that exists, where you probably you where did it come from? And I use this word in one of the earlier slides and that's another name similar name is called a Copper Age. This was usually which means by the four hundred and four nearly 530 years ago, in mainland England, one of the better items of copper and gold appear together. So. So for those who don't know, in Australia very well. And, in fact, the largest, heaviest largest a golden nugget, was discovered in Victoria, Australia. And a long time ago, this replica of the Golden Nugget and his codename for this golden nugget is called a 'Welcome Stranger Nugget'. And so that's the that's the gold. And Australia is proud of, of this very, the largest golden nugget is a miracle.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 15:51
Excuse me Ma. Can you lift your voice be you know loud? That’s because some of the, some of the listener found it difficult to you know, the to listen and speak a bit low, I guess. Just a bit closer, I think.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 16:03
Yes, yeah, it's this better?
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 16:05
Yea, I think so. Yeah, that's better. Yeah.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 16:07
Okay. I'll do this one. Yeah. And, okay, I think we're looking at Gold and Gold is the second metal used by human beings. Now, as mentioned earlier, it's already on its unclear until 2013, and this picture shows two editors from Scientific American.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 16:31
Excuse me. We just couldn't see your face now. So yeah, yeah. Oh, you just the speaker louder? Yeah, that's better. That's good.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 16:39
To me. I think it's gonna be enough. Maybe in a second or changing the position. And yeah.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 16:51
Xing would have worked
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 16:53
Yeah. This is good. Yeah. Okay.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 16:55
Okay, Thanks Xing for the reminder. Yeah. So, before we look at the origin of gold, and this interesting YouTube video, and these two gentlemen’ they are good scientists from Scientific American. Scientific American, and you may know that is probably the most prestigious popular science magazine, you know, it's very influential. They wear, both the gentleman wears a lot of gold. It's a very eye catching. This was this really was unveiled shortly after 2013. And you can see that happened neutron star collisions created gold, created gold. The reason for that is, let's look at this one. And I show this picture to illustrate this, and this was discovered only in 2013 gold and cannot be created within the star, according to the all the phases, and that this is formation, its creation requires a more radical UAT like in a short gamma ray bust is GRB. There might be some jargons in the next few slides but not many. And the observations of this GRB, this gamma-ray burst was called from in 2013, and this provides direct evidence that gold resulted from the creation of two neutron stars. So, you can look at this website, there's a lot of stories about the origin of the gold this was accepted and now, it was very, very interesting. We know, we seem to know gold so well, now that everyone is aware that gold should not exist on Earth.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 19:10
And then we are looking at another metal which is a lithium and lithium is interesting and is another metal and many of my colleagues and myself have been focusing on research on light metals. And lithium this either made what we know is critically important is for the battery and in fact lithium and also was created by the exploding nova, similar to neutron explosions, also from the universe. And our meshing data briefing told that most of the lithium is created this way that's only probably a trace amount of lithium existed in this beginning according to the physicists and if you are interested you can visit the website of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan that's very official website there, they list all the story of the discoveries. The origin of lithium was made clear by 2015 due to this publication in Nature. So, it's not a long time ago, similar to the clarification of the origin of gold.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 20:34
And I'll quickly show this one, the lithium was fabricated it was created from the isotopes of the two helium and the plus the beryllium beryllium is not a lot of metal and so this the way whole lithium was created is this really interesting is all due to these isotopes of this helium and really.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 21:08
Just spend a few seconds on this one and the so called 'Big Bang Theory' and it's good for metallurgist who know what we have in the beginning of the universe. In the very beginning of the universe, essentially, there were only two elements hydrogen and a helium. And there are also some trace amounts of these lithium and beryllium. Other than that, there are no there were no there was nothing else. So effectively, we could say that in the beginning, they were just hydrogen and helium, and nothing else. So, everything else was created by explosions. Let's see.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 21:50
So, if we will look at the periodic table, all the metals now, I think, ignore lithium and beryllium. These are two light metals, because, yeah, there were trace amounts them in the beginning of the universe. But effectively apart from Helium, or hydrogen or helium is everything else, all the metallic materials, but now that they were created by the explosion is of a different stars or nova explosions. So that's the that's the theory. I think if you're interested in this one, you can look up more information and data. This the current understanding, as metallurgists, it was useful to know where they came from. That's my ultimate mission.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 22:46
Next one, we look at the connection to nature and a different length scales. I'll use three examples to show the connection. And from my understanding, my understanding is still superficial. And I clearly the connections are numerous. You can look at the connections from different perspectives. So, I'll look I'll select three designed for us to share my perspective. The first why is the connection via the Voronoi pattern. The Voronoi is named after a Russian mathematician. Before we look at the connection of metallurgy and nature, we'll look at a few buildings in Melbourne and in China.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 23:38
This one is the Melbourne Recital center, it's not far from RMIT, it's easy to walk there. This is the Voronoi painted this beautiful architecture. Beautiful building as you saw the back this Voronoi painting. This is Voronoi painting you have the first impression you have with me by the Voronoi painter here. And then we have another one. This is even closer to RMIT it's on Swanston Street, the Melbourne Swanston Street Winter Garden. I've been past here quite a few times, its very eye catching. If you pay some attention to this, all the internal structures, how exactly follow the Voronoi pattern, it's quite interesting. Next time for my colleagues at RMIT Additive Manufacturing Center colleagues, you can walk there and have a look at the design, where is the pattern, very fascinating. Now, that's the next one. And probably the best example is here. You are all familiar with this one. That's the Beijing water cube for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. This is the water cube. If you have a look at the design there it is typical of the Voronoi patterns and this beautiful design, the entire art wall the outer surface has followed the Voronoi pattern. It is quite interesting and for metallurgists we probably we want to connect that connect the pattern with the with the metallic materials, if I put this one in and yeah, if I put this one it, this inset, and this is magnesium alloy made by class team. We call this grain structure. This is a type of desired grain structures. Each grain is in a crystal, what I say is a single crystal, although it's not always we have this beautiful equally as grain structure, this this grain structure with all of our design and mechanical properties. And so, if you compare these and this, they are very similar. The similarities are remarkable. So, metallurgists, many of our colleagues, including myself have been trying very hard to create these types of grain structures in different types of metallic materials. By additive manufacturing, right combination or casting by welding. The architects have usually done on this for us, and this is a remarkable example of connection.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 26:45
Let's look a bit more, more from nature. The nature design of Voronoi pattern, we are all familiar with this. The giraffe's fur that has this beautiful pattern, this Voronoi pattern. Next one, this is more popular the mud cracks. There's good implication behind the mud cracks probably not many of us are aware of this one, I hope you will remember this one. Behind the mud cracks we see that in many many places and in many areas behind them are cracks. They are a Voronoi pattern. The other one is the dragonfly's wing; it is beautiful and a Voronoi pattern. It's very interesting. I will discuss the difference. This is another amazing example of the next one. The next example is more interesting, it is in your kitchen. I didn't know that before until I saw a promotion picture for garlic. That's garlic. And that picture has nothing to do with all put up there. And nothing to do with the Voronoi pattern but when I saw this picture. Well, I thought well, this is a beautiful Voronoi pattern. In our teaching actually we deal with Voronoi pattern every day in our teaching. But not everyone teach garlic. But interesting. You might find other fruits or plants have which will have a similar pattern, and it's really interesting and that's all of these patterns to be happen by chance? Or why nature has made all these patterns? is interesting question I don't think that the answer is clear enough.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 28:43
So, I managed to compare the difference between these two rules. Let's look at the nature's rule for the Voronoi Voronoi pattern. It tends to follow natural tendency to find the nearest neighbors may not have only one nearest neighbors, the shortest path, the best fit and also probably, I think this also important to cater for any survival needs particularly for the dragonfly and maybe the giraffe. And for metallurgists, and our rule is simple. It was made per year by Gibbs, and it means that the system tends to reach a state where the Gibbs free energy should it be minimal under the conditions when the microstructure or the grain structure is created. So powerfully different rules however the patterns are very similar almost identical.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 29:51
But know what if there's any answer to the for this pattern on the giraffe's fur or what functions do this pattern offer? And for this one, really no answer or some of you who might be interested to find them out in the future. It's a very interesting question.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 30:16
And now for metallurgist, we tend to look at this issue from the Gibbs free energy perspective, now let’s look at the Gibbs free energy. And so, we all the, the people in the audience who started the material or something in the earlier in metallurgy and all this Gibbs free energy and in Gibbs free energy, you can calculate your own Gibbs free energy, your body temperature, your water your body volume. If today, if you don't feel well, that means that your Gibbs free energy is higher than normal, you should manage to lower your body temperature to reduce your Gipps free energy. You can calculate your Gibbs free energy every day, make sure that you keep your Gibbs free energy as low as possible or they're you're really in a very healthy condition. That's my interpretation of this one. And for the Gibbs free energy, the Gibbs free energy is minimal, it has the lowest the wiring trying to have a base mathematically that's a stable state. And for metallic materials and I showed this earlier, and these are all the crystals and the boundary this was formed by casting by solidification and the boundary between them is called solidification growing boundary and there are crystallographically we will categorize them for example, like these two grains, that's the boundary that goes around to them and crystal the orientations are different. These are the crystals however, for this, they are not crystals and why should the why the nature, why has nature created all these patterns? And has nature reinforced the strength of the dragon the dragon fly wing no idea, or I think it remains mysterious. But for metallic materials were reasonably understand them, by using their metallurgist rule items that use three energy, I think there's still serious phenomena between them and they have heavy inequality, highly links or connection between them. So that's why early I said that, at this point of time, it's still superficial.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 32:55
And next one, Voronoi pattern, Voronoi design is commonly used for 3d printing, you can make you can make a design in Voronoi, Voronoi pattern through 3d printing this is the 3d printing prop. This one could be called a conformal lattice design. This another one, a rabbit and a skull. So, all these materials can be easily designed today in following Voronoi pattern and theme and realize then by 3d printing. So, this has become well sanely important design method for 3d printing because it's not only for form, actually for real commercial products. So that's the first example of for the to discuss the connection between nature and the metrology.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 34:18
And so, the small ice crystals or this solidification alters the formula. Looking at my time I quickly finish this away. And for the type of water, they contain many, many particles, millions and millions of particles, very small, down to the nano size for the deionized water that has removed a lot of impurities and small particles. Then for the type of water the ice crystalizes, the formation of ice water property, and a minus one or two degrees, this the minus 30 for the deionized water. However, if we let deionized water, run through the filters with the size of 200 nanometers, and would have further reduced the ice crystallization temperature. If we let this water run further run through the filters with the 100-nanometer bias crystallization, hydration will become lower again, so at the lowest temperature, and that has been reached by the scientist, minus 48. So, by doing so, by let by letting the water running through the field tests, we have a removed all the fine particles. So, all the particles and the particles larger than 20 nanometers in diameter have been removed as a result be getting more and more difficult for ice to form. That's the removal of dust particles for water.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 34:19
Next one think the connection or the solidification of a water. Now this isn't a classical example, metallurgists know this very well. First of all, we look at the water, how important are the importance of the water in nature, in fact, as the size continues to develop, and the depth the depth, and it appears fair enough, the importance of the ice crystals in nature is a far more profound than we thought before. A few simple examples. I'll put the picture of the lightning in here and put in a picture of the moon halo here. So, the rain snow, hail stones, larvae and the moon palos. They're all due to the small ice crystals in nature. Without small ice crystals in nature, there would be no such phenomena. In fact, that the origin of why lightning happens this was not clear until last year, it was a new developing moment. And looking at story, very surprising, as closely, all I could say is entirely due to the small ice crystals. And this is why I'm not sure this this oldest saying appears to be popular in all the in China and other countries. Google alone, if you've seen a ring around the moon, it means rain or snow comes soon. It appears to statistically appears to be correct.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 37:31
And the production for artificial rain is very popular. And it's based on the adding particles into the moisture heavy class, and we call that cloud seeding. And the particles introduced is normally less than three millimeters, three micrometers. And these particles are silver iodide. And as well as seeding the cloud, they'll be easy formation of small ice crystals. And this small ice crystals will keep growing until they become so heavy for the cloud. And then the gravity will draw them towards fall towards the earth towards the surface. And if all these particles, these are small ice crystals, when they during their falling towards the ground, if they made of the warm air, there'll be remounted to become raindrops. They can grow larger to become hail stones or depending on the condition is cold, warm, warm air through a cold air flow and that's the that's the way this. The theory behind it and a straightforward that is the silver iodide and the ice crystal they have the similar crystal structure they have the similar lattice parameters. So, they're almost identical.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 39:00
So, I know we do this in the commercial production of aluminum alloys and magnesium alloys. And for example, all these particles the broader particles are chromium particles in the commercial production of a large group of magnesium alloys we added these small zirconium particle and many many zirconium particles similar to this. This was nowadays done mostly by the drones. The particles less than three micron similar here is all 1 to 3 microns probably. For the commercial products of the aluminum alloys with do a similar thing and a different type of particle it's probably called a TiB2 particle and a few other articles. The size is similar, and I'll quickly finish a few more.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 39:54
So, in this here, we look around the ice crystallization if we want to form the principle on the ice materials or ice crystals, and by removing the particles, its formation becoming, it becomes incredibly difficult. By introducing the particles, its formation becomes much easier.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 40:19
For next one, this is more interesting, we look at the amorphous eyes, they are amorphous Is this a different type of solid ice material. And I'll quickly go through this and that and the either the International Space Station and the temperature there is the highest temperature is 131 degrees Celsius, the minus lowest temperature is minus 157, and the International Space Station and each day would experience 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets. So, the temperature change is extreme from 121 to minus 127 and in the oddest ways further in space, the baseline temperature is believed to be at least one very close to the zero power away. So according to NASA, scientists believe that although unheard on Earth, the amorphous ice is so widespread, in the interstellar space in outer space. So, it couldn't be the most common form of water in the universe. So that's the that's the theory and the theory for the amorphous ice, it's very difficult to make the amorphous ice on earth.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 41:52
However, people have made them one of the few first ice samples, by applying high pressure, the green colour is simply the formation of highly pressurized process and then and then we're looking at this one and this the modal for the highest crystallization or the ice nucleation this substrate material can be any particle can be metal. And that's the water. And this process, we call that a nucleation. And, and this substrate material can be any material. And at this content angle is important. Unless this contact angle is 180 which means that they're not going to be in contact with each other, unless the contact angle is 180. Otherwise, this substrate material where they start particle or metal surface will be defective promote the formation of ice crystals. So, like at the silver iodide that has a very small contact or angles, the smaller the contact angle, the better the efficiency of the substrate material would be to promote the ice crystallization and the scientist in order to do that. They put a pure crystallized silver substrate, and also pure copper substrate to produce the amorphous ice, and they were successful, this was published in 1960. And the substrate temperature, the silver substrate temperature was lower to minus 160 degrees. And then instead of a promoting the formation of ice crystals, it resulted in the formation of ice, amorphous ice, a totally different type of solid. So, this come from the hypothesis that the amorphous ice deep in space, due to the colder substrates these colder substrates are really cold, the minus 160, and we call in the deep space and the temperature is pretty low close to the zero. And so, this is the, this is the, this is the theory for the formation of the amorphous ice. Why are scientists are so interested in investigating ways of being secure in the metallurgy in order to understand the universe and where the where the amorphous ice came from, how they form in the universe. happy to clarify that that. And for metallurgists that has somehow, in my opinion led to a major development in rapid solidification where the temperature was so low the solidification which means from a liquid or solid, had been arrived in many seconds.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 41:52
Interestingly, as you look at the connection to nature, I use this promotion picture from China. This is in the Botanic Garden in Yunnan. This is a very well-known place, they call it Xishuangbanna. I'd like to have the tourists promotion pictures. This Victoria water lily I think is probably known to many people as an amazing water plant and one water lily leaf is capable of supporting two or three people. This young lady here I said yeah, sitting at the centre of this water lily leaf and at this to the this the beneath the structure the lattice structure beneath the more than number one very similar to the Bombay plants we have manufacturing. So, this is for the, for the water plants and also a deep in the sea this probably another example, for the high strength lattice material.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 42:27
That's called a rapid solidification, that rapid solidification technology today is a well-developed as being commercialized for many different applications. But this was developed with this, the first workshop developed the was held in 1981 in the United States, the coordinator was the same Chair of the Department of the Material Science & Engineering of MIT, Owen, he was very famous for mining transformations as well. And this is this, this is the first workshop, which focuses on the rapid solidification technology. I draw your attention to this or put on a note or copy the note here, and at that time rapid solidification processing, was a classified a concept of technology, and it should not be transferred to foreign nationals in the United States, or abroad without a validated export license. Today, this is a common industry technology, however at that time, it was a classified technology concept, but it's very interesting. And this technology was developed to realize rapid solidification or to produce our amorphous alloys. Xing, I think our maximum of three to four minutes to finish everything.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 46:49
And so, this is the you're interested in well up the mind the mind understanding is that this largely benefited you that's remarkable connection between the mythology and sighs deeply the universe Oh, I know. Also, amorphous alloy amorphous metals we have talked about the amorphous ice. It wasn't used so widely but they have key rule is certain high technology applications. This is a one example in the digital light processor, this is the amorphous titanium aluminum hinge and spring tips, this was awarded the ASM Engineering Materials Achievement Award and has exceptional resistance to the particular fatigue.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 47:47
So, the last example I would like to share with you is connection through topology. And for those who are interested in additive manufacturing, I think that you are very familiar with these three jargons, metal lattice materials, architectural materials, or metamaterials, these are the popular names, they are whole research topics in additive manufacturing,
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 48:18
So many, many different designs and topology, this is the is the unit of sale and the many many designs that we can combine them together to make a new product. For the conventional methodology, we focus on all the material science engineering, all the size engineering on metallic materials, we focused on composition, processing microstructure, then we evaluate their mechanical properties or other functionalities. Now the thing additive apology, we're adding another dimension which is the topology. So, what is mean by topology? These examples might be good examples of a topology. Let's go for this one. So, these materials if we assembled them today, they'd be called lattice materials, meta materials, they can be made even metallic materials, ceramic materials or polymeric materials are a very popular name and a popular area.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 49:26
This is called the Venus flower basket; this is really keeping the sea high strength. This is the lattice material is all made of the silicon oxide, more and more importantly, or amazingly, the strength of this porous material or this lattice material, it's more than four times the strength of the solid silicon rod and fracture toughness, it's five to 10 times the fracture toughness of the silicon road is much stronger than all three. So, as I draw the joy of recycle the slide, and we can make all different types of materials, including using the solid strut, and hollow strut and a piece of the hollow strut in the beginning I mentioned the hollow strut, the hollow tube. That's for this purpose for making this this metal material to change the topology and we are not here many of my colleagues are working on this, including myself.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 51:26
And this is amazing, I think our last three slides and on they contain, they contain a lot more elements like this one, they found amazing 200 by 200 by 200. This whole structure contains more than half million little struts, and some amazing. So, in terms of that and we need to control the metallurgy and metallurgical defects and the microstructure and the alloy response to the laser of the electron beam and that depends on an ad source for additive manufacturing. And that is from the light metals to the refractory metals of their being in manufacture across the board.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 52:39
So, concluding remarks and I think a metallurgy began in nature and we will continue to thrive in nature to advance our civilization. And my prediction is that metallurgy on the moon will be coming soon and be prepared to do metallurgy on the moon. All right Xing, I think I had to use a few more minutes. [XY - All right] Let me acknowledge you and the Australian Research Council support to my work on the metal additive manufacturing and additive metallurgy. And many of the examples are based on this, the RMIT Professorial Academy for the invitation and organisation and RMIT's Center for Additive Manufacturing many of my colleagues, team members, and my university lecturers, and my supervisors and mentors, and authors of various sources of information you see this in this talk. Thank you very much for your attendance and your interest.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 53:48
Thank you very much, Ma for the fascinating talk. We have just a few minutes. We've got a question from the audience. Let me raise it seems the Voronoi pattern in different fields is formed based on their own rules. And we found approaches to change the rules and it results in different patterns. Is there any example in our modern industry
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 54:12
That's a wonderful example, and we were on the same wavelength, that's why I put it on a slide for sure nature has rules. That nature has rules was my case. Nature may not agree with me, I feel a bit more confident, then let me get back to that one, that is a wonderful question, I appreciate this. Appreciate this question yeah yeah well, I'm not asserting that nature would agree with me. I made this guess from nature, but I think for this rule metallics rule I think that's probably true. And for anyone who's interested in this, or in the giraffe, or in the dragon fly? I think it would be extremely interesting and informative to find out why the dragon fly wing needs this structure? Are these boundaries? Are these boundaries just for decoration or just they've helped to make the wing stronger, more flexible? And more importantly, of similarly, for the giraffe fur? Why do they have this? And get back to your answer? I don't know. I think that remains mysterious to me. I think we both need to continue to explore the principles behind of that. Yeah. Thank you for this good question.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 55:53
Okay, thanks. I just took the liberty of the chair, you mentioned about this. Many of the elements in the word that was because of the condition, right, that the, you know, the explosion, so you seem to support the Big Bang Theory. I mean, but is that I mean, we, in my understanding, I'm not canvas, my understanding, we have 113 elements in the element, a periodic table? Are they the only 113? Are you think there could be many, many more? Yeah.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 56:24
Wow. And let me get back to the, another good question. This debate will continue. And then well, according I think the speaker by a theory, I have kept reading papers of materials are the big bang theory. And over the last few years, I think it was very controversial now it becomes less much less controversial. And I think now maybe can say that it's the most widely accepted theory for the origin of the universe. And according to this theory, yes, in the beginning, there were only helium and hydrogen. And it's interesting is the other light, lightest elements. And therefore, if you consider this to trace elements, trace amounts of lithium and beryllium, this will foster four lightest elements. So, there were no heavier elements. So according to the theory, and all the other elements were created by the collision of the novelist all the new transplants explosion. So that's the theory and I think that's yeah, that's probably the most largely accepted theory for the universe not my area. I don't have the wisdom to make any suggestion for that. I just thought you should use this to the title audience to the metallurgy is my motive who was here wants to know where we came from as a metallurgist myself. Thanks Xing. Okay.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 58:15
Thank you very much. I think on that note, we just need to be close, time is up, we just need to conclude the lecture. So, thank you very much, Ma, for the fascinating talk. And thank you, everyone for participating. I hope to see you at the next lecture. Thank you.
Distinguished Professor Ma Qian 58:31
Thank you, Xing, thanks, everyone. Yeah, see you next time.
Mon 7 Nov 2022, presented by Distinguished Professor Ma Qian
Nature is the greatest metallurgist. All metals we know or use today were part of the stars in the universe at one time or another: fabricated by nature, for example through the merger of neutron stars. Metallurgy has continued to evolve from the ancient art of extracting metals from ores to materials science and engineering, which now includes the study of the physical, chemical, and aesthetic properties of metallic materials at different length scales, as well as the design and manufacture of novel metallic materials.
Today, metallurgists continue to learn the art and science of metallurgy and fabrication from nature, down to the atomic level compared to the original mythical connection, thanks to our enhanced understanding of nature.
This lecture explores the connection between modern metallurgy and nature through a series of examples, incl. Voronoi patterns, macroscopic igneous rocks, microscopic columnar crystals in 3D-printed metallic materials, and the dual role of substrate materials in ice nucleation in nature and metal solidification.
Urban design, transport, and health: Are we creating healthy and sustainable cities worldwide?
Urban design, transport, and health: Are we creating healthy and sustainable cities worldwide?
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 00:09
Welcome, everyone, to this RMIT Distinguished Lecture. I'm Xinghuo Yu, the chair of RMIT Professorial Academy. I'm the host of this event. Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the people of the Kulin nation whose unseeded lands we are meeting today, I respectively acknowledge the Elders past and the present.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 00:31
So today we shall hear from Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti about urban design and transport and health. And some of the serious question we'll be asked is such as Are we creating healthy and sustainable cities worldwide. So this lecture is part of the activity hosted by the Proffesorial Academy in fulfilling its obligations and as Ambassador advocator and thought leader for RMIT. So before we start, so let's just go through some housekeeping matters. So this is a team lives live event. So you will not be able to directly ask any questions by microphone. However, just please post the questions in the q&a sections during the lecture. And at the end of lecture, I will pick up the popular ones and ask the presenter on your behalf. Okay, so let's start the lecture by introducing the speaker Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti is the Vice Chancellor Professor fellow. For over two decades, she has been studying the impact of built environment on health and wellbeing. She currently leads the Healthy, Livable Cities lab at RMIT is and is the chief investigator of the Australian Prevention Partnership Center. So she has published over 400 articles, book chapters and reports. And by citation is ranked number one, the top 1% of research in her field globally. So without further ado, please join me to welcome Billie to deliver her lecture. So over to you Billie.
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 02:07
Thank you so much Xing. And it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you everyone for joining. It's great to have people to listen to the work that we've been doing. Before I commenced my talk, I would like to also acknowledge the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation and the traditional owners and custodians on the lands of which you are all sitting today, as we present throughout the university. As our group, we recognize that there on an ongoing unseeded sovereignty to the lands and waters on which we conduct our work. And we also acknowledge the wisdom of the ancestors and elders and caring for and protecting country over millennia. It's something that we tell hold dear, because that's exactly what we're trying to do with our research is to create research that will protect our country.
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 02:56
So I'm going to be presenting today on work that we've been doing. globally. There's real urgency to transition to healthy and sustainable cities. We know that cities, of course, are the powerhouse of the economy, and they provide opportunities to employment, to education, all the things that we need for, for living and to help people prosper. But by 2050, the world's population has estimated will be 70% of the world's population will live in cities. And when they're poorly planned, as we see here on the right. They foster unhealthy and unsustainable lifestyles. They expose residents to a whole range of environmental stressors, air pollution, noise, and they also cause biodiversity loss. We've seen more biodiversity loss in recent decades than we've ever seen, putting it throughout the ecosystem, and they widened inequities. Now, cities already generate 75% of global energy related emissions. And it's important to note that 86% of global co2 emissions are from the higher income countries and yet the people who are most at threat with climate change, have got less infrastructure in an economy to cope with it are the lower income and middle income countries. So we have a big responsibility in high income countries. Now we've seen in recent years, a number of reports that come out, of course, the UN Sustainable Development Goals put fairly and squarely goal 11 is around cities. And also, there's another goal to do with climate change. We're seeing the World Health Organization put out its Shanghai Declaration on how we should be promoting health in the face of the of the UN's sustainable development agenda. And it has a big focus to say that healthy city should be our focus that that should be the marker of a healthy and sustainable city.
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 04:46
UN, the World Health Organization has also put out its roadmap for reducing non communicable diseases as a sustainable development priority tied to goal three in the UN Sustainable Development goals. And in 2018, the who also released its report, its global strategy for more people to be more active for a healthier world. If there's one thing that people can do for their health is to be physically active. I can't tell you how important that is. And more recently, in 2020, the World Health Organization released another report that said that as a, what we need to be doing is not having health separate to environment and climate change, we needed to bring this agenda together, and that we needed a transformation that will not only create healthy communities, but also create sustainable communities into the future. And of course, alarmingly, we've seen the IPCC report that came out recently, he tells them 21, and and the recent report that came out this year on how we should mitigate climate change, which includes a big focus on the role of cities, and the sorts of work that we're talking about here.
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 05:54
Now, in 2016, I worked with a global group led by Mark Stevenson, University of Melbourne and co-led by myself and Jim Salas. There in the middle in the yellow T shirt, where we we did a lancet series on urban design, transport and health. Now, it was an important piece of work because it tried to take a systems approach to the way we think about the way we need to design cities. What we said is if we want, we're concerned about the downstream impacts of the way cities are built, their impact on road trauma, respiratory diseases, chronic diseases, all the things that cities can contribute, it's no point focusing downstream. If we want to change cities to be healthier, we needed to be thinking about the upstream determinants of what causes the causes. So for example, we propose that we needed to have eight, I focus on eight urban systems that needed work in unison to create eight, urban and transport planning and design interventions. We call them the eight DS, three of them were regional planning interventions, destination accessibility, distribution to employment, demand management, trying to control where and, and what conditions cars can drive, but also local urban design, the design of the street networks, the density of housing, distance to transit, the diversity of housing, the divisive diversity of shops that are nearby. And desirability, this came out to be very important issue in many of the lower and middle income countries, particularly around crime, but also around greenery. How attractive is it to walk. And these are important because they affect transportation choices, which is the focus of the first series. What we argue, though, is that what will get measured will get done and what we needed to create a set of policy indicators, do we have the policies in place to create these cities, cities that will promote health? And what's the spatial, spatial indicators, which would actually measure what's actually on the ground? And I'm going to walk you through that would be you know, how connected the street networks were, you know, where the how far people live to transport, how walkable the neighborhoods were, these were the sorts of things we thought needed to be measured. And this is what we recommended. Now, we, in our own group, the healthy livable cities lab at RMIT, had started to work on this sort of work, and we wanted to do a proof of concepts. We asked ourselves the questions, do we have the policies and frameworks in place in Australia to deliver healthy and sustainable communities and what was the impact of these policies on the ground. And so we started mapping the livability of Australian cities, we looked at a number of different areas of underlying determinants or domains of livability, access to public open space, access to public transport, walkability, housing, affordability, access to local employment, the food environment, the alcohol environment. So we measured these things. And then we published a report creating livable cities report in which we actually measured and met and could show the walkability of our cities, X people's access to public transport. And we related that back to the policies. And we concluded that we don't have the policies in place in Australia to deliver healthy and sustainable communities. And even if we did, the policies were not strong enough. And we were delivering suboptimal outcomes for Australians. fine if you live in the inner city, as we see here in Melbourne. But if you live in the outer suburban areas, people have very poor access to amenity, as you can see here by that walkability map, you can see in the middle, nice and green, very good, but out on the fringe, anything that's yellow through the red, people would need to drive. Now we wanted to not just have that data sitting on our computer, we wanted to make it available for policymakers and practitioners to use and we established the Australian Urban Observatory. It was just led now by Melanie Davern, in the Center for Urban Research, and that provides provides data all this data or these maps back to our policymakers and practitioners for their use. And we also with work led by Lucy Gunn created a series of court scorecards And we did this for Australia's 21 largest cities. So we upscaled what we had done for our report. But we upscaled that and went to 21 larger cities and these 21 larger cities were in the national cities performance framework by the federal government. So it tied very much to policy, we've done all of our work to try as much as possible to policy all of our indicators have looked at policy. And so they speak to policymakers. That's the whole purpose of our work. But we wanted to go global, because we've had the lancet series in 2016. And so in 2018, I attended the International Society for Physical Activity and Health Congress in London. And I got in touch with a number of the previous authors of the first series, who were going to that conference. And we set up a meeting with, we set up a couple of sessions where we wanted to invite people to pay to come on board, and to work on a global study, it happened to be in 2016 18, that the World Health Organization was at the conference and they launched their their global strategy on increasing physical activity, more people, more active for a healthier world. And it had a big focus on the environment. So it's a really a well aligned in terms of global policy, suddenly that the World Health Organization was pushing. And I'm very much tied to the Sustainable Development Goals. But at that meeting, we invited people to join a collaboration, we said that we wanted to identify and measure health related policy and spatial indicators, the sorts of things that I mentioned that we wanted to we had proposed in our first series. And we wanted to do this worldwide. And we wanted to set ourselves up to publish a second series. Now, we had no guarantees from the lancet that they would, that they would do this. But we, we had spoken to them. And they said, well, we'll consider it if you do the work. And then we went to a number of meetings, there was a first of all, there was the international physical activity and environment network meeting at that conference, it has only over 60 countries involved in the network. And we also sought other collaborators. And as a result of that, we told people what was going to be involved. This was work, led by one of the strategies led by Melanie Lowe, who's now at the University of Melbourne, she was with our group, initially, and then she's gone to Melbourne Uni. But she was responsible for the policy review. And we told people that what they would need to do is to look at the existence and the quality of policies. And each of these areas, or the areas that are listed there, these it'll align with our what would sit in the first series of the Lancet. And then we had, we wanted to create an map city level indicators. So we wanted to do the measurement and map them across so we could actually see what was going on in cities. And this was work, work that was led by people in my team, Jonathan Randall and Carl Higgs. And we we told people that what they need to do is buy a survey, assess the data that was available, and we sort of gave them clues about what was going to be involved. And the starting point was for anyone who signed up had to complete these online surveys, that would help us give us the information that could tell us how well we could try and measure these things globally. So we wanted to our goal was to facilitate the development of this global system of policy and spatial indicators for healthy and sustainable cities. We established an executive, so we had a executive, as you can see here, they're all from all over the world. We've had, and we used to meet once a month. And together, this group oversaw the development of the project, we ended up with 80 collaborators in 25 cities, 19 countries and six continents. And here are the cities detailed here. Now that group, the executive studied executive have met every month for since 2018. We've been meeting and working together, it's been an amazing collaboration. And they through them, we have worked through the policy team and through the spatial team, have been working with our ad collaborative collaborators across the world. So we wanted to first of all, I suppose in terms of the second series that we're aiming to do for the Lancet, was to look at is it feasible to measure policies in cities worldwide? And if it was, do cities have policies in place to deliver healthy and sustainable cities? Because we didn't know whether they did we found in Australia that they don't. So it's quite feasible that they're not going to do that globally, either. We looked at, you know, other thresholds. So if we're going to create cities that are healthy and sustainable, do they have thresholds in their standards for urban design and policy features that would achieve active and sustainable lifestyles and this was very much tied to the World Health Organization's launch of their new global strategy. We wanted to measure whether or not the policies that are in place across the world Old got to achieve these active lifestyles which the World Health Organization was saying was so important. We then wanted to ask the question, is it feasible to consistently measure spatial indicators of urban design and transport features worldwide? And are there inequities in the distribution of these, these features in cities? We really want to say well is, you know, are we creating health supportive features in cities or not? And who's got access to them? Who are the winners? And who are the losers? And then we wanted to ask, Well, what next? So we wanted to open the way for a third series by asking the question what next to create healthy and sustainable cities? Now what I'm going to do is talk you through the results of our of our research that took over that went on for three and a half years, basically. So first of all, the first paper was led by Melanie Lowe, she was a former PhD student of mine, and then became a research fellow, and has led this work globally, which is a fantastic piece of work. And in this question, we're asking the questions, do we have the policies in place to deliver healthy and sustainable cities? Now, as I mentioned, if we want to create healthy cities down and downstream, we needed to measure the upstream determinants of health and sustainability. And so we wanted to do a comprehensive policy assessment. And we wanted to know, one, one question, are there policies in place to deliver these healthy cities? And we wanted? Is it best practice policy? Is it consistent with the evidence on planning healthy cities? Is that is a clear and specific actions? And is it measurable with budgeted policy targets? And so what we did was we worked with all the collaborators in each of the cities to help to collect these data. And the sorts of indicators we measured, were aligned with the first series nine 2016 series, we looked at whether there was integrated planning across all the different government departments that create cities, are there policies to encourage and support integrated planning, air pollution, policy, destination accessibility to people have access to public transport? Basically, what are their policies around the distribution of employment across the whole city rather than just in the inner city? Is there demand management for controlling the amount of parking that's available that restricts where cars can drive is a is there other policies around the design of the street networks, the density of housing, a distance to transit, and what was the investments in transport infrastructure, particularly after transport infrastructure as opposed to roads. So we started to look at all of these areas. So first of all, what we found was most importantly, as you might expect, that there was a lot of variation across the between the cities in terms of what they had access to. So for example, in Belfast here, we have here the the top result there is that it had 24 of the 24 policies that we looked at, it had all of them. But here we have the overall. And then on the right there the quality of those policies, we found that only 3939 of the 57 policies were high, high quality. And you can see the variation there, you can see that Sao Paulo, for example, had 16.5% of the got a score of 16.5 for its policy present, and a 30 out of 57. Not that difference to Sao Paulo. But you can see Bangkok, which is also a middle income country, a lower middle income country only has seven policies of the policies present and only had a score of three. So have very poor policy environment, we see that Sao Paulo provides a bit of a role model for other cities to produce a better outcome, because it does have a bit of policy framework. I found important policy gaps, some thumb sinks or presents some things we're not, we found that there was a lot of inconsistency with planning of the evidence around planning healthy cities, particularly around things like the levels of density that cities required about things like promoting driving, as opposed to providing active transport. So there was a lot of inconsistencies. And we found that there was definitely an absence of measurable policy standards and targets that many cities might have a policy, but they don't have, they're not aiming for anything in particular. So it's not measurable. It's sort of like a motherhood statement. And they didn't have targets that they were aiming for, which means that it's easy to say we want to have good public transport system. But we're really the rubber hits the road as people say, it's when it says the policy say we want 80% of people to have access to within 400 meters of a public transport stop. And we want to achieve that by a certain date. So this is a sort of thing of a measurable policy standard and target.
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 19:46
We also I mentioned that the World Health Organization, had religious launched its new strategy, and we wanted to explore what are the minimum thresholds for urban design features to achieve the world Health Organization targets to increase physical activity by 2030. And this work was led by Esther serene professor at Leicester serene who's at Australian Catholic University. And she led a team. It was based on work that had already been undertaken. I mentioned there is this network called the iPad network, the International physical activity and environment network. And so we were able to leverage that data and involve 10 countries involved. 14 cities involved adults focus on walking, it was the right sort of study to actually answer this question. And so we were able to leverage this data to answer this important question. And why it was so important is it showed that there were definitely thresholds that we had to get to, if we wanted to, in this case, she looked at there's a number of different thresholds she looked at, but she wanted to look at what are the urban design measures, that would increase the probability of people achieving 150 minutes of total walking per week. And she found that for density, this is population density per square kilometer. And what she found was that we needed to get up to densities of at least Around 6491 people per kilometer. Now, in the Australian context, that's around what we use, we work in hectares in Australia, it's around 25 to 26 dwellings per hectare, which is exactly what we had found in our own studies in Australia of what's needed. But we're currently building around 14 dwellings per hectare on the fringe of our city, if you want to have a sense of what 25 to 26 times per hectare, it's sort of a little bit lower density than Fitzroy. Fitzroy, is around 3520 per hectare. So it's not, we're not talking high density here, by global standards, we're talking in pretty modest density. And so we can see here, that's the lower threshold. But we also saw that there was a threshold for intersection density, intersections, density affects the connectivity of the street networks, and either makes it easy for people to walk or difficult. And so we found that there was also a threshold. And that's that that is important because that affects the size of the blocks in a neighborhood. It affects, you know, whether you've got cold or sex, or a post or grid pattern network, that's all important. So these are the this said we needed to get to about 122 intersections per kilometer. But we also in this work was important, although were inconclusive, because there weren't enough high density, very high density cities. In the study, there seemed to be an upper threshold for density beyond which you started to see a decrease in the amount of physical activity that people were doing. And the same applied for street connectivity. So it's not all this more density is good, and just keep on building density, there may be a sweet spot, to encourage people to be physically active or to have more active and sustainable lifestyles, there may be a sweet spot that we needed to consider. Now, the next thing we wanted to look at was, you know, what's the spatial distribution of these health supportive environments in cities, and do urban dwellings have equal access to health supportive environments in cities. And this work was led by led by Jeff Bowen, with Jonathan Randall and my team and and colleagues, Jeff is at the University of Southern California. And he led this team and the team worked together. Now, we wanted to do this in a very different way to the way we would traditionally do. Our geospatial work, we wanted to source data that would allow us to validate against local data. But in particular, we wanted to access the Open Data community to use open data, because this is something that would allow us to work more internationally, if we could prove that it's possible to use open data, that it's a valid source of data compared to data collected by governments, this would allow us to upscale the work to be even more in a bigger study. So we the also the other thing that they wanted to do the team, they wanted to use an open source framework that would allow a software framework that will allow other people to use the tools that we create, to replicate what we've done either to repeat in the city, the 25 cities that we've been already working in, or to upscale that globally to more cities. So there was a couple of ways that we wanted to work with this particular paper. And then we wanted to do create these indicators of urban and design. Now these are very small maps, and I don't expect that you'll be able to see them in detail, but I just wanted to point a couple of things out to you, first of all, the legend. So what we see here is the pink, the pink means that this is these are this is a These are maps of how walkable the neighborhoods are. And the walkability is created by the density of the density, the street connectivity and access to daily living destinations and it's created into a Zed score. And then we can map it to compare cities. Now what anything that's pink is good. So that's really what I want you to focus on. Anything that has dark blue is not so good. They will be the low walkable neighborhoods and people will be expected to drive. Now there's a couple of things about these maps, which are important. First of all, we have a look down here at the bottom, these are all the European cities. And what you can see there's a lot of pink in these maps. And that's not surprising. They are the more traditionally designed, walkable neighborhood, they were designed for walk, walking, and most of them, and you can see the great potential for people to walk in this. And it's not in every city. But you can see compared to the other cities, where there's less, less green, that this is definitely these are walkable neighborhoods. What's really important, I think, for Australia, is that we see quite the opposite pattern in Australian cities. These are the Australian cities, you can only see in a very small amount of pink. That's because most of our cities are not walkable, they are designed for driving. And it's a similar pattern that we see for the US cities that are up here. Very little green a little bit in Baltimore. But in most of the other cities. What some in in Phoenix, which is the one in the middle, there's no Green Party, any pink at all. Mostly, it's green. You're what you expect. We've we've we've created cities for codependence cities in the US, and now in the Australian and the US context.
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 26:30
Now, we also looked at, you know, I've mentioned about these population thresholds that that Esther had worked on. And we wanted to look at well, given that high income country density is so important because not because of density itself. But where you've got density, you're more likely to have more shops and services. And that's the shops and services that people use to be able to have active and unsustainable lifestyles. And I mentioned earlier that one of the big problems is that the high income countries are generating most of the greenhouse gas emissions, but the low income countries and the middle income countries are most at risk. And what's interesting about this is what we see here in terms of the levels of density, that are meeting the who is target to decrease by 15% insufficient or increased by 15%. Insufficient physical activity, we see that in middle income countries, 97% of people live in neighborhoods where the densities are sufficient. Whereas in high income countries, only 37% of people live in neighborhoods where the where they they have enough density to a decrease in a physical inactivity or increased physical inactivity. So what we're saying here is that one of the big problems is that high income countries, which are the great emitters of greenhouse gas emissions, are being built in a way that the densities are so low that it doesn't encourage people to be physically active by walking it, what they do is they encourage people to drive as we saw in those maps. But this is just another way of putting in and was important from who is perspective, because they do have these targets that they want the world to achieve by 2030.
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 28:14
So in terms of our empirical findings for the study, we found that it was feasible to measure city planning policies, that urban policies in the cities that we were we've studied, they lacked measurable targets and and standards. And this is important, because we've identified that there definitely are thresholds for urban design features that would encourage active and sustainable lifestyles. Most cities are not got anywhere near those sorts of levels of targets. We found it was feasible to create spatial indicators of health supportive environment. But we also found that there was substantial inequities in our cities, both within cities and between cities. But we wanted to go one step further with a series and we wanted to pave the way for another series, and to put on the agenda, some of the big issues that are around in the 21st century that need to be really addressed urgently in cities, as we've seen with the IPCC reports, and we wanted to look at this a little bit more seriously. So we asked the question, what next? Well, we looked back and thought, well, what's happened since we published in 2016. And we found that the evidence has grown, grown, and it's also grown stronger. So there's many more longitudinal studies now, which from a public health point of view, or a health point of view, are the strongest study designs. So we find that Before, there used to be a lot of cross sectional data. Now, there's a lot of longitudinal data, the evidence is still the same story that we can create healthy and sustainable communities and they would promote health. The evidence is stronger about that. But what's very alarming is that we also identified that air pollution and highlighted that our air pollution is poor. fourth largest respect for global mortality. But we continue to see the silly image on the right of the way we're building our cities, we still create car centric cities. And many people are living in cities where the air quality is hazardous by who standards, which is really harming people's health. Now, this is important from many points of view for children. For older adults, for general population in Australia, more people die from air pollution, then double the number of people die from air pollution than die on the roads. And yet we have a big focus on reducing traffic fatalities, of course, but air quality is actually another driver of ill health, respiratory diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and we also have an aging population and air pollution is also related to cognitive health. And this is a growing as we have an aging population is an emerging priority issue. We found that many of the features, the urban design and transport features that we've studied in our series are linked to dementia reflectors, and this is a growing problem in our cities. But of course, the urgency for integrated city planning has has become palpable. Now, we know that cities generate other major generators of of emissions, but they're also been directly affected by emissions. So we need to have integrated city planning that will mitigate and adapt to climate change. And this is becoming more and more urgent. Now, the other thing that's happened, of course, in recent years, and that's what we wanted to emphasize, is of course, COVID. And that has highlighted just how vulnerable we are in cities. What the evidence is telling us, it's not density as such, that's a problem. But certainly, people who live in crowded housing are in crowded conditions, they were much more vulnerable during the pandemic, even if they're living on the fringe of the houses crowded. That was a that was a bigger risk factor than density by itself, where people lived in housing that has poor air circulation, and even alarmingly ambient air pollution where people lived in in environments where the ambient air pollution is high, they are more at risk, because the COVID could sit on the on the polluted air on the other particles. And so it becomes very important to mitigate to reduce air pollution from that point of view as well. The other alarming thing I think what we've seen during the pandemic is this migration to the suburbs and regions, the potential to you know, throw out the baby with the bathwater, as they say, around density. But density is really important because it will reduce the need to drive if we have because there's shops and services nearby. But the people have migrated to the suburbs, and that's yet to be seen about what will happen in the future. They've also migrated to the regions and that's putting pressure on infrastructure and house prices. We've seen people being displaced to lower income households, because people from the inner city who can now work from home or from cities are now living in regional cities. We also found during the pandemic that if you lived in amenity rich areas, you probably did better because you had access to all the things that you needed for daily living nearby. But of course, what we showed you you can see those walkability maps is there's definitely inequitable access to amenity rich areas where there's shops, services, and all the things that people need for daily living. We also saw some positive things we saw during the pandemic rapid transformations telecommuting, which we think is health supportive road being a space being reallocated to walking, cycling, and commerce and recreation. How we saw pop up cycle lanes been a peripheral elation of them throughout the world of pop up cycle infrastructure, which has been fantastic. And we also I thought was a fantastic commitment. The C 40, C 40 is the global network of mares, particularly of the mayors of the mega cities. And they have made a commitment to build back better, that they need to build better cities and a real commitment to building 15 minute cities. That would promote health that would be much more sustainable. That would reduce emissions. And it would be more equitable, that people would have access to creating a city of villages, which is really very aligned with what is happening in Melbourne. Melbourne is going to focus on the 20 Minute neighborhood, same sort of idea to smaller buffer. But the question, I think what we asked ourselves is we think it's really important that we do transit to we do move to a 15 minute cities 20 minute neighborhoods But how do we optimize the complexity, that we can get this awfully wrong, we need to be thinking about how to optimize it to produce better results for our cities that will protect human health, ecosystem health and planetary health. And as a result of that, we propose a new framework, not a new framework, a modified framework, a much more complex framework, more factors that need to be considered if we want to both promote active transportation at the expense of driving, and public transport. And we promote public transport and active transportation at the expense of driving, but at the same time, protect people from these other bigger impacts, and protecting human health, ecosystem health and planetary health. We needed to have a bigger, broader, broader framework and to re emphasize things.
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 35:47
Now, I don't have time to talk you through the whole thing. But I do want to just point out a few of the additional pathways that we've added into this. First of all, we we, you might remember that in the first series, we proposed that we needed to have eight integrated urban systems that work together to create the the eight urban and transport planning design interventions. But in our new framework, what we've proposed is that we actually need 11. And we've added in some additional policy areas that need to be considered. And that would create 11, the 11 DS, we added in. So we've got the three regional distance, interventions, destination accessibility, distribution of employment demand management. But we've added in disaster mitigation, we can't ignore that with climate change. And then we've considered not only five local urban design features, but now we've added in seven. So we've got the design of the street networks, the density of the housing, destination proximity, which we found was so important during the pandemic, that people things approximate distance to transit, the diversity of destinations, but also the diversity of housing. How desirable is how safe it is, but also green, but also distributed, that what we found is that we have many inequities in our cities, that has definitely been shown up in during COVID. So we needed to distribute these destiny, these interventions across cities.
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 37:19
Now, why is this important? Well, I just want to point out a couple of the pathways. For first of all, I mentioned that one of the biggest issues around with urbanization is the impacts on biodiversity, which is really affecting our ecosystems. And there's been enormous biodiversity loss in recent decades because of urbanization, which is affecting a whole range of things, but in particular, in this case, a range of infectious diseases. What we're proposing is that we needed to have nature based solutions to help protect tackle this that cities need to have policies that will protect nature, and propose nature based solutions. Not only would that make our cities more desirable, it will increase access to urban greening, but it would also prevent biodiversity loss. And it would reduce energy loss because greener environments would be cooler, which is very important, given the hidden effects that we're all experiencing, where there isn't enough greenery, which is important, because that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are related to climate change. And climate change has a whole range of impacts on the health and well being of residents of cities. So that's one example of one of the pathways we also added in that we could be using nature based solutions for disaster mitigation, with flooding, using nature based solutions to mitigate against flood with air pollution, which is obviously a major factor that needs to be considered in our cities through all the driving that we do. In particular, this is important because it affects greenhouse gas emissions, and it also affects then downstream returns or health effects, respiratory diseases, heat stress, and also major chronic diseases. But if we're serious about addressing air pollution, we need comprehensive air quality policies, which really tackle some of the big issues. That includes the way we're building our cities to reduce the need for driving and the ability to drive, focusing more on walking, cycling, public transport use. And that's important because of course, it's the cars that create the traffic that generate the solute pollution, or create traffic congestion, all of which affect health. So you can see this is the sort of thinking that we've put into the series and there's another other pathways, which are argued in the paper. Now, we've also argued that if this is going to be achieved, it'll only be achieved if we have good and integrated governance and in particular, government departments working across vertically between different levels of government, but horizontally across the different levels of government to achieve the best outcomes. And a big focus is that we added in distributed that we needed to really focus on equity. This was a really critical factor in our cities that it wasn't fair that we were producing cities that were so unequal as shown up through in COVID, that some people were able to live quite well during COVID and others are not. Now our series is emphasized our call to actions we've included in here, what's needed for global agencies for national, regional, local governments, for policymakers and practitioners.
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 40:37
We've we've talked about the need to benchmark and monitor progress and cities. And at the moment, we're talking to who the World Health Organization about the potential for them to use some of our indicators to create this global system of indicators. We want people to use and expand the tools that we've created. So we've created tools that people can use are all open source. We've, we've I mentioned that we need to transform urban governance, horizontal integration across government departments, but also vertical integration between different government departments. And we need to strengthen our policy environments they need to be governments need to be using evidence to support better cities planning policies, but they also meet a monitor implementation. Even if you've got a policy, what was shown very clearly in Australia, is that people have policies, but they're not being fully implemented. And as a result of that, we're producing terrible outcomes. And for high income countries, we really do need to support low and middle income countries in disadvantaged communities who are the white going to be the ones who are most at risk. With climate change, we've had a call to action also included civil society, citizens and the research community on that you can have a look through the series, there's a range of calls to action for but most of all, we argue that we needed to be creating and using open source data, we found that that was as real, it was as valid or more valid than routinely collected data from government, mainly because it's probably collected more frequently. So we need to encourage citizen science programs and government could do that. But we want citizens to get involved in this. We as academics, if we want evidence, informed policy, we need to create policy and practice relevant evidence, that's really critical. And that can only really be achieved if you're co designing with policymakers and practitioners. So it's a call to action to academics to work in a closer way with policymakers and practitioners. And for funders. It's very hard to do a study like this, we actually did it on the smell of an oily rag, we didn't have new funding, everyone just jumped on board got excited about what we were doing. And we all did it within the funding that we had, we didn't have new funding. But we've shown I think the importance of this type of work. And we believe that research funders should prioritize, or at least seriously look at multisector, multi outcome, multi Country Studies. And that also goes with a review, as many of you might be on the line today, people who review grants need to see that these sorts of studies are really important and worth funding. But most of all, we wanted cities to use evidence to inform policy and also to benchmark and monitor implementation. And so we, To this end, Carl Higgs, who's a data scientist, public health, PhD student, candidate in our group did some incredible work, where he automated the development of report cards for the cities. He did 46 report cards in the 25 cities, because he had to have that he translated them into 16 different languages, which were all checked by our local collaborators. And the reports, benchmark and monitor cities against each other. So they can they get their own report, and they can see how they fit. Compared to other cities. This is the one for all manakin. In the Czech Republic. We've got indicators there telling them, how they compare in terms the availability and the quality of their policies. This is obviously the one for Hong Kong. And then we've also have maps in our in our report cards, which show in this case, it's the walkability relative to the other 25 cities that are in this study. So you can see, and these have been launched in local launches through our collaborators in the 25 cities. So we've already done I think about 10 Different launches. And there's more on the agenda to come in the future. We launched in May. And we also want to, we also have launched the an observatory. So we have a global observatory of healthy and sustainable cities, where we've got the report cards. This was led by Deb Salvo at Washington University. She's led that work and we've got some we've got a website, it's got our scorecards, it's got a launch of our series but also invites people to join the 1000 City
Challenge, we want to make this upscale our work and go to the 1000s of the challenges is getting ready for our third series. So that's really the work that we've been doing on for about the last three or four years now. I want to acknowledge the enormous team that's been involved in this, you know, you don't do a study like this without nervous collaboration. And so this is one lot of the collaborators. This is the rest of the team. So it's been an enormous team effort across the world. And I also want to thank our funders, we've had funding for both from RMIT, but also from our, for our team, but also from our group, that prevention, the Stroke Prevention Partnership Center, which has supported our team that's contributed to this study. And I'm going to stop there. And thank you for listening. If you're interested, the series can be available here. That's the first link where the series available, if you want to have a look at the website, that's where the website is. So thank you. I'll come back
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 46:01
Thank you very much Billie for the fascinating talk. So we, anybody, if you have any questions, please send to the q&a. And we'll ask Billie. There's couple of questions coming in already. So before we touch on those, just let me just take the privilege as a chair to ask first a few questions. So you mentioned I can see that one of the slides you mentioned, you measure the degree of policies by the number of policy developing country for example in Thai, Thailand, but have you looked at I mean, the depths, they may have a one report, but they cover much more broader aspects than just I mean, is that any sort of measurement of those kind of in terms of extent of the of the area, they cover the you know, the depths that they covered?
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 46:58
Yeah, so what we did was we looked at a whole range of policies. So we looked at urban planning policies, we looked at transport policies, we looked at urban greening policies. So it wasn't just one policy document that we looked at, we looked, we, we were there through our local collaborators, we went through and we tried to find the policies because they might be in different areas. So we we did a comprehensive search of the policy environment in those cities, to find out whether they're available. And actually what's really telling I didn't show I didn't have time to show you. But if you compare I mentioned about Sao Paulo, compared to Bangkok, Sao Paulo had a reasonable, you know, compared to other cities, but a better policy environment, actually, than Australia. But if you looked at the policy environment, Sao Paulo, compared to Bangkok, the policy of art was better in Sao Paulo than Bangkok. And the outcomes on the ground were better as well. So you look at the outcomes on the ground through the spatial indicators thing, I see that there's a lot of lot of people have poor access to lots of things in Bangkok. And they're both sort of middle income countries. So it's not like they're the high income countries. So I think what's great about this is it shows that it's possible if you've got a better policy environment to produce better outcomes on the ground for the people who live there. So that's a good result. And what we would encourage and that we were hoping through what we've said through the World Health Organization, or these global agencies is to help countries to improve their policy environments, you know, to show them what's possible, and then to work with them to produce a better outcome in those cities. So I think the high income countries have a responsibility there, but also these multi lateral agencies have a big responsibility to and what we've shown us what happens when you've got poor policy and what the outcomes on the ground and what's the potential to produce a better outcome.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 49:00
Okay, thanks. So we've got a question here. So will there be a time when Melbourne's urban growth boundary will be fixed, not continued to be pushed out, expanded and overridden?
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 49:12
That's actually completely true. I mean, we have a big problem. I mean, what's alarming? Actually, when you look at the Australian cities, we do really badly like, if you take, you know, take a global perspective, we are not doing well, and just continuing to push out on the fringe of our cities is really damaging on many, many fronts. We are I'm encouraged to say, and I've been involved in the with the Victorian planning authority, they've been putting together guidelines for the new developments. And there is a big focus now on trying to create increased densities, but it's not density to have a density sake, its density so you can get amenity. And so, you know, because when you've got enough density, and I'm not talking high density 25 to one It's been hectic with, I think that's actually I think they're pushing for 20 dice, which is a lot more than I've got. Now, it's not enough, in my opinion. But nevertheless, it's better than it was. It means that you can have a bit of public transport, you can deliver public transport services, and it means that you've got enough people so that shops can be nearby. And that's really the critical thing. People don't walk because of the density they want, because there's somewhere to walk to. And they can have better public transport so they can get out of their cars. I think COVID and the working from home has really highlighted just how important local neighborhoods are, people have come to value their local neighborhoods, because many white collar workers at least can work from home now. But I agree with you that the growth, the urban growth boundary, we really do need to make that fix and just say we're just not going to build our cities at the size of our cities. And those maps are a little bit misleading. Because if you look at the legends, they are all of different size. Our cities are ridiculously large, by global standards.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 50:59
So here's the question relating to COVID, from Lee Parker. So given the ongoing duration of COVID. And it's already evident long term hybrid and decentralized of his walking impact on city offices. What is your ongoing research agenda for examining this impact?
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 51:18
Well, the impacts of people working from home, I've I haven't gotten a research agenda around that at all. I haven't been I haven't put any more new grants in on this. But we're, we're up scanning to go global with the the 1000 City Challenge. So I'm a bit distracted with that. But I do think that there is as we, as we see, the more people are working from home and wanted to continue. So I think there there is an important research agenda to see that what will be the long term impacts of this, and also the long term impacts in our regional cities, because we've just published a paper or just about to publish a paper on this where we've shown that very interestingly, that in the larger capital cities, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, people who are most disadvantaged, live in the least livable neighborhoods, the ones where there's less amenity, and that means they have to drive, which doesn't make it affordable living, because they have to drive so much, they have to run a two or three cars, in the smaller capital cities. And in the regional cities, it's actually the opposite, that the more disadvantaged areas are in the most livable areas. That's because they're like, if you imagine an original city, they live in the inner city, where probably people who are wealthy and might want to go and buy a property on the fringe, we need to ensure that that continues. What concerns me about COVID is that in regional cities, at least, is that people have moved to the regions and displaced. Those people who may be renting the inner city properties, property prices have really escalated. And that means those people were displaced, I don't know where they're going to go. So what we've argued is that we need policies to reduce the risk of the suburbanization of disadvantage in those smaller smaller capitals, smaller capital cities and and the regional city, then you do that through inclusionary zoning, there's lots of things that you can do, but there needs to be policies that avoid people getting kicked out of where the amenity is, because it's it is house promoting, and the people who are most at risk are the people who are the least least advantaged. So yeah, it's a complicated story. But I'm that I don't have a research agenda around COVID. But it is an important area to pursue.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 53:45
Okay, here's the question seems to be coming from a student is the urban design planning related to the specific policies of Melbourne government departments? For example, if I want to make an urban design and the development is planned for Melbourne, what should I consider?
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 54:03
Well, they should have a look at the Victorian planning authority. So there's different ways to think about the city. So there's the established areas. And then there's a new areas though, the Victorian planning authority now has precinct structure, plan, review, precinct structure, plan guidelines about what it's trying to achieve with it, the outer suburban areas, and the new areas. And so you should look at those to look at what are the guidelines, so they've tried to make them a bit more prescriptive, put these measurable standards in, and as a result of that, hopefully produce a better result over time. So that would be one way that you could do look in the established areas, the 20 Minute neighborhood concept. That's another thing to look at. And that is that also includes you know, guidelines. How far should people live from shops and services? 800 meters is what they've said. And which is based on our research actually, which is exciting. And, you know, so that's another sort of document that you should look at. Because that's trying to change the existing activity centers as as a way of achieving a city of villages. That's quite challenging because, and I think cycling, the 20 Minute neighborhood focuses on walking, I think they need to incorporate cycling, because in the established areas, the activity centers are not close enough. They are, you know, the further apart, we worked out, on average people in Melbourne, up until a few years, it years ago, they had to walk 1.4 kilometers to get to a supermarket. Now, that means that, you know, you're not going to get a walkable environment in that case, if that activity centers have supermarkets. So I would look at the 20 Minute neighborhood both in established areas and for the new areas and the precinct structure plans, guidelines for you no guidance about what the design requirements are.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 55:59
Okay, so we're just about a couple of minutes to the end. So I'm just curious. I have one question. I mean, the work you have done is, I think is around 2016. Right. I mean, but from since then, if you look at political, geopolitical situation, this is this is just a completely different world. But how do you see the long term I mean, in terms of because you actually rely on this global access, you know, to this country to compare but that situation is quite a quite a very worrying. How do you see your future work, you know?
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 56:29
so our work is not. We published the first Lancet series in 2016. With a second public, the recent publications were published in 2022. So this is recent work. I'm really encouraged by the, you know, the C 40. You know, the mega set the mayors of mega cities. We see it in Paris, we see it all over the world, the World Economic Forum, are all talking about the 15 Minute city. I think people have recognized I mean, there's climate change, there's equity issues. And, you know, it's not fair that we build our cities that think that everyone that lives on the fridge, has an affordable housing with no amenity, that, to me is completely unfair. We need to think differently about the way we build cities. And I think that there's a appetite to do things differently. I'm encouraged. The danger is that people think the the the pathway to get there is just density, but it's not density. I call it delightful, livable density, because it's not density for density sake. It's density with amenity. And that's a really critical thing. If we don't have we build density without amenity, it's just high rise sprawl. So it's really the density with a manatee so that people can get out of their cars, people are going to walk want to live in their suburban neighborhoods more. If, if the same trends continue, post COVID People are going to want to work from home more. That means they want to go out for a coffee, they want to have local, you know, access to collaborative working spaces and things like that. So yeah, I think I'm feeling optimistic. Call me an optimist. I don't mind.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 58:08
Yeah. Timing is really up. But we've got a question coming. So this is quick one. So regional city like Adelaide are really benefiting from an influx of Melbourne, Sydney, COVID migrants. Does your research suggest any major benefits or challenges of this trend?
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 58:24
I think that is a major benefit. I think it's a tragedy that we don't have more people distributed throughout Australia throughout the cities, you know, Canberra, Adelaide, as was mentioned, all these other cities, smaller capital cities, they could have more people we don't, Melbourne and Sydney are going to trend. I mean, they're on trend, or they were to become mega cities. More than 10 million people by 2050, both Melbourne and Sydney are on trend or just just after 2020 fit 2056 I know will probably been a bit delayed now because of reduction in in immigration. But that will change because we have to have immigration. So we will go back to having immigration if we could distribute those people across our cities and not perpetuate sprawl. Like, for example, Perth, is 170 kilometers long. That is dreadful. They've got two and a half million people 170 kilometers long. That's really wrong. We shouldn't be building cities like that, in the 21st century. We need to protect human health, ecosystem health, planetary health, and that is not the way to do it. So to me, it's great that people are going to other cities. We just need to make them as cool as Melbourne, because Melbourne's a great city. But, but we also need to make sure that those cities are sustainable and and do it in a way that's going to produce a good result for our country.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu 59:44
Thank you very much Billie. We're just about arriving at the time we have no more question. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, everyone for attending. We'll see you next time.
Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti 59:53 Thank you so much. Yeah.
Wed 10 Aug 2022, presented by Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti
This talk will describe the journey and present the results for our key questions: Do we have the city planning policies in place to deliver healthy and sustainable cities worldwide? And are there inequities in access to health-supportive environments within and between cities? Our work was recently published in The Lancet Global Health series on Urban Design, Transport and Health.
Optical microcombs: measuring almost anything – from earthquakes and tsunamis to the gases in our atmosphere to planets of distant suns.
Optical microcombs: measuring almost anything – from earthquakes and tsunamis to the gases in our atmosphere to planets of distant suns.
Transcript of Distinguished Lecture by Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell
Held on Tuesday 17 May 2022, 2.00-3.00pm
Optical microcombs: measuring almost anything – from earthquakes and tsunamis to the gases in our atmosphere to planets of distant suns
WELCOME – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Welcome everyone. I am Xinghuo Yu, the Chair of RMIT Professorial Academy, the host of this event.
First, I would like to acknowledge the people of the Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we are meeting today. I respectively acknowledge their Elders, past and present.
Today we shall hear from Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell about Optical microcombs: measuring almost anything – from earthquakes and tsunamis to the gases in our atmosphere to planets of distant suns.
This is part of the activities hosted by the Professorial Academy in fulfilling its obligations as an ambassador, advocator and thought leader for RMIT.
Before we start, let’s go through some housekeeping matters. This is a Teams live event. You will not be able to directly ask any questions via microphones. Please post your questions in the Conversation section during the lecture. At the end of the lecture, I will pick up those popular questions to ask the presenter on your behalf.
Let’s start the Lecture by introducing the speaker. Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell is Director of RMIT's Micro Nano Research Facility and the Integrated Photonics and Applications Centre. He graduated with a PhD from RMIT in 2000 and has been with RMIT ever since. He has built RMIT's capability in photonics (the science of using and manipulating light) over his 20-year career through national and international collaboration.
Without further ado, please join me to welcome Sara to deliver her lecture. Over to you, Arnan.
LECTURE – Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell
Thanks Xing. Hopefully you can all hear me out here and also online, I'd also like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri Willim people of the Kulin nation on who's unceded land I am presenting from and I'd like to acknowledge their ancestors and elders, past, present, and future.
I'm also looking forward this weekend to voting for a Political party who's going take action on the statement from the heart.
So, I'm here to talk to you today about optical microcombs measure almost anything.
I'll finish off with some of the many things that we're talking about. I want to start with a bit of apology and for my last presentation which you can still find on YouTube. There I promised I would talk to you about precision measurement, positioning satellites and turbocharging internet. I pretty much just spoke about the Internet the entire time, so this time I will talk at least a little bit about positioning with satellites and maybe a little bit of precision measurement. So hopefully this will make some amends for my presentation in 2020. If you're interested in that presentation, you can still find it on YouTube.
I'm also on social media, so you can have a look at some of the things that we're doing on Twitter and particularly on LinkedIn. This seems to be quite a lot of activity on LinkedIn. I have some web pages as well. I'll talk about those towards the end.
[4:27]
So, onto the topic of the presentation, most of this presentation is about precision measurement and particularly navigation. So, knowing where you are. It’s important for ships particularly to know where they are, perhaps within hundreds of meters, certainly within kilometres if they're trying to go across the ocean from one country to another.
In order for me to get RMIT today, I had to use Google Maps. And so, you can see maybe you can see I've got the laser pointer on here. This is the route that I took to come in today and Google Maps can position me to maybe within 10 meters. So that's pretty good. People talk about self-driving cars; I've got a Tesla. It almost self-drives. I wouldn't really trust it to drive on its own, but I would hope that self-driving car could know its own position probably better than a meter. Otherwise, you might end up crashing into another car. But there are lots of other things that people are talking about wanting to do or to autonomously, for example sort of measuring civil infrastructure like railway lines and bridges, having drones and other vehicles sort of operating under the ocean. And people are even sort of looking at robotic surgery. I tried here to get the least disturbing picture of robotic surgery I could find, and Racheal tells me this is still fairly disturbing. So, but there's a lot of ideas about having sort of automated positioning systems ranging from 10s of meters to kilometres down to sub-millimetres, which is what I want for any robot performing surgery.
[6:22]
OK. Can we do that? Let's have a go. Alright and. That better, getting better? Alright.
Specifically, how did I find my way to RMIT today and that sort of goes then to a question of how does my phone know where I am to or where it is to within 10 meters?
The answer’s a bit technical and perhaps a little bit more technical than most people would be aware and I should mention that I've deliberately tried to make this lecture accessible and not really assuming that anybody has any particular technical insight. So, if I say something that you want more explanation on please do feel free to put something into the chat if you're not physically here or ask me a question at the end.
So, in order for my phone to know where it is, it's actually receiving messages from satellites that are orbiting the Earth and it needs to get 4 messages from four different satellites to work out where I am to within to within 10 meters. It needs three spatial dimensions, so 3 satellites, measurements from 3 satellites give it three spatial dimensions latitude, longitude, and altitude. So, X, Y, Z perhaps. But I also need to know time because especially if I'm moving, I need to know whether I'm still where the satellites were telling me I was before.
So, this process is sort of illustrated here. This is a picture that I pilfered from the Smithsonian Institute. So, I think it's worth before diving into all of the technical details here to just sort of back up a little bit and go through the history of navigation and how did this come about?
[8:33]
So how do we get here now? A very, very brief history of navigation.
So, going back three hundred years, people really couldn't navigate very well. They didn't know where they were. This illustration is an illustration of what's called the Skilly Naval Disaster, and this is where a whole fleet of warships ran aground on the Scilly Islands in 1707. Four of the ships were destroyed, 2000 people were killed and it's all because they didn't know where they were. And they didn't know where they were to tens to maybe even hundreds of kilometres, so that so they just ran aground. And so, if they had better navigation, this disaster could have been mitigated.
[9:24]
So, the question then is how were they navigating? What was, I mean, there were, they were out in their ships of selling around the world. They must have had some form of navigation so I'm going to say approximately how this navigation was done. So, you needed to find latitude and longitude, altitude probably wasn't that important then it was most of it was happening at sea level. So, they needed to find latitude and longitude.
[9:55]
The latitude is relatively easy, so if you can see where the sun is in the sky and you know what date it is, then you can pretty much work out where you are between the North and South pole on the planet. And so, here's an illustration of somebody using what's called a sextant, which you can use to sort of measure the angle of things. So, you measure the angle between the sun and the horizon. And then you can use that along with the dates to work out where you are. So, for example in this illustration there's a location on the globe where the sun would be directly above your head at 90 degrees and then if your further north, then there's a slighter angle. So, you can work out based on understanding of how the Earth's tilted and some basic geometry where you are in terms of latitude.
[10:53]
But longitudinal is a much more difficult problem, so longitude is how far along the circumference of the world. So back then back three hundred, four hundred years ago, maybe even more people used to navigate using celestial bodies. The stars, the planet, the moon, the planets, the moon.
So, what they did was they had models of the where they expected the planets to be, and these weren't bad back then. So, people had a reasonably good understanding of how the how the planets moved around the sun and back then.
[11:30]
And also, the means to observe where they the planets are, and so this is actually a recent picture this happened about a month ago. All of the planets, this is a picture over New York, all of the planets lined up, lined up and aligned. So, you can see Saturn, Mars, Venus, Jupiter. So, if you could predict where the planets should be and then measure where you see them in the sky with a sextant, [12:02] the same tool that was being used to sort of measure the angle with the sun, then you could use that along with the model to determine where you were.
[12:12]
But not many sailors at the time had the astronomical knowledge to be able to work that out, so they had to use tables. And so, they're basically had monthly tables of where all the celestial bodies would be at particular times and on particular dates and what positions they corresponded to.
[12:34]
So that was workable, but it meant that you needed to have pretty skilled people even to look up the tables, you needed to sort of make all these measurements. You need to have a lot of skill to make up the make the measurements. But you're particularly needed access to these accurate astronomical models, and this is a picture of Isaac Newton who was one of the astronomers and spent most of his life coming up with models for how the planets moved around the sun.
But one of the things motivating him was there was a lot of money to be made in selling these this information to sales so they could navigate accurately.
[13:23]
So, when so when the Skilly disaster happened this motivated Newton and other astronomers to convince the British government to actually set a prize for a better system of navigation. And particularly, I think Newton was hoping that this would pump a lot of money into physics and astronomy. And it did. There was, there was a lot of people working on better astronomical models and improving the system but basically the prize was set at 20,000 British pounds at the time for half a degree of accuracy around the globe, which corresponds to about 5,000,000 Australian dollars today for about 50 kilometres of accuracy. So, it was it wasn't possible to determine where you were within 50 kilometres at the time that was, that was worthy of what was described as a King's ransom at the time.
And so, Newton thought that the solution was going to be better astronomical models, but there was another alternative.
[14:35]
So, if you had a really good way of measuring time, you could also navigate using the time and the way this worked was is illustrated in this picture. I've also pilfered this from the Smithsonian Institute. So, what you do is you set your time at your home port. So, in this case it's Greenwich and you can know that when it's 12 noon because the sun is at its at its peak and so you wait for the sun to be at its peak. You set that as 12 noon where you are, then you set off and you keep the clock at the time of where you left, and you measure when 12 noon is at your current location. And the time that the if you go halfway around the globe, it'll be night time on one side of the globe when it's 12 noon on the other side of the globe, so it'll be different time for noon as you go around in longitude if you note when it's 12 noon where you are and look at the clock that was keeping time from where you left. The time difference tells you your longitude. So, one hour is about 15 degrees and longitude 24 hours is 360 degrees, not a surprise. So, one minute of time difference is about quarter of a degree, which is about 25 kilometres. So, if you had a clock that could maintain time, in over a year in the harsh environment on a ship to within a minute, then you had an accurate enough navigation tool to win the longitude prize.
[16:25]
So now remember this is 25 kilometres of accuracy. My mobile phone is able to tell where I am within 10 meters, so more than more than 25,000 times more accurate. Sorry. 2,500 times more accurate. So, things have come a long way since then.
[16:48]
The contender for this longitude prize was invented by a celebrated engineer John Harrison. The story is described in this book, it’s one of my favourite books. It pitches John Harrison, the engineer as the hero and Newton and all the astronomers and physicists as the evil empire. It’s sort of a really ripping yarn. And it talks about not only. The history of science and technology, but a lot of the story about the personalities of the time as well. So, I heartily recommend you recommend this book to you.
This is the clock that he made the first prototype clock that he made that was actually sent on a ship and got close, it got close to sort of winning the winning the longitude prize.
[17:50]
So, with a really good clock, you can measure where you are fairly accurately, within 25 kilometres at noon each day. But it you might want to know where you are at other times so you can check in at noon each day where you are, but it might be important you can travel a fair distance in 24 hours, and it might be important to know to know where you are at other times. \
So, to do that you use what's called inertial navigation. So, you predict where you are based on the direction you're traveling in and the speed.
[18:23]
So, if you know the direction you're traveling and you can use a compass to determine what direction you are, where you are relative to the magnetic north. For example, with this magnetic compass.
[18:35]
And if you can measure your speed and interestingly the way that they measured speed at that time was, you can see illustrated in this picture here that, you basically had a rope, you had a log attached to that rope. The rope had knots tied in it. You threw the log overboard, it stayed with the water. And as the ship moved and pulled the rope, you counted the how many knots in a certain amount of time. And then you wrote the knots in a logbook. So, to record how the log was going. So, this is where logs are knots come from. And that gave you the speed of the ship.
[19:15]
So, with the speed, the direction and how long you've been traveling you could then work out what distance you had travelled and chart that on a map and you could check in every 24 hours how accurate it was and updated. There are systems today that still use inertial navigation so if you need more accuracy than you can get with GPS if I need more than 10 meters of accuracy, you can use initial navigation between readings to give you a little bit more accuracy.
[19:49]
Hopefully this video will work. This is a video actually of that prototype at the Greenwich Museum in London and I've visited, and the clock has been running pretty much for 300 years, so it's still running today. It's quite remarkable. You can see that it has pendulums, so it's got four actually, so there's, I can't see my mouse on top of this, but it's got basically pendulum's top and bottom that are counterweighted, and I'll just start that again, if I can. And let me just start that again.
The other point I wanted to make about this was the oscillations are happening about once a second, so this is what gives it its accuracy. It's got a very stable oscillator that's happening relatively quickly. So, the cycle time, the back-and-forth motion of those pendular about once a second.
So, if we compare that, so the question then comes up, OK. So why is that more accurate than navigating by the stars?
[21:15]
So, if we think about the solar system as a giant oscillator, so basically this is like a pendulum, the planets go around the sun and they do that in a cyclic repeatable fashion. So, the cycle time for the earth going around the sun takes a year of defining a year. Other planets can take quite a lot longer. So, the reference scale here is about a year.
The moon is also used for measuring time, so the moon takes about a month and the moon and month of the same word root. So about 28 days for the moon to go through a cycle. So, if you use the planets and the moon, you're comparing a year time frame reference to a month time frame reference and so that gives you sort of days of accuracy.
[22:15]
However, as the earth is rotating, that takes precisely a day 24 hours. The clock made by John Harrison oscillates every second. So, if you're referencing a one second oscillator to a 24-hour oscillator, then you get the precision that is required to sort of locate a ship within about 25 kilometres, and so this is significantly more accurate than navigating by the celestial bodies, the moon, and the planets, particularly because of the scale of the speed of oscillation.
[22:55]
I'm comparing all of those here. You can see that, OK, the clock is oscillating at a second. The earth rotation a day is 86,000 seconds. A lunar cycle, 28 days is about 2,000,000 seconds and the orbit of the earth around the sun is about 31 million seconds and other planets can take 10s of years to go around and so that's can be significantly longer. So, in principle using the Harrison clock and the day night cycle of the Earth as a reference should be about a million times more accurate than using the stars using, this the same sort of reckoning.
[23:32]
The clock thinks in seconds, so it’s oscillating in seconds, but we want to read it off in minutes and hours and days and so most of the clock the pendulums, important the oscillator that that's actually the pendulum's important, but another important aspect of the clock is what's called the clockwork. This is what converts that the one second ticking of the pendulum into a much slower movement of the hands on the face that actually gives us a readout in time that we can understand. And so, I'll come back to that later, this is really important with optical frequency combs and we'll get back to lasers as soon.
[24:22]
So, what happened next? Well, by the end of his life, John Harrison had significantly improved the clock. So basically, this is his third prototype there was a fourth prototype as well, but this is the third prototype that was actually presented to the King of England at the time to collect the longitude prize. But actually, James Harrison was never formally awarded this prize, Newton and all his cronies made sure that he wasn't able to collect this prize. And again, I encourage you read the book to see all the ends and outs of what happened there. He was eventually awarded all the money, but not the prize at age 79.
For more than 100 years, so this is 1773, this is what clocks look like then, looks a bit like a pocket watch, it is a bit bigger, it's about 13 centimetres across. This is what pocket watches look like in the 1900s, so not hugely different.
[25:30]
It wasn't really till 1969 that with electronics that things got significantly better. It was always even, even with the sort of modern clocks, it was just faster and faster and more and more precise pendula, but there was still ticking at maybe five or six times a second, not more than that.
So the next major breakthrough really was the quartz oscillator, and you can see one here. This is an oscillator circuit. It looks like a tuning fork that basically the arms oscillate but it's but instead of being read out mechanically with cogs, it's actually read out electronically and so it really took the advent of electronics to for this innovation to take flight. It oscillates, the original one oscillated at about 8000 times a second, that then ramped up to about 30,000 ticks per second. And that was enough for most watches to stay accurate to within about a second a day. So, this is about 30,000 times more accurate than the John Harrison clock that's ticking at once a second. This is 32,000 times a second. And this is for example is what drive, drive digital watches and I think what drives most quartz watches these days. So that's accurate enough to maybe get you within kilometres, or hundreds of meters, but many applications you want 10 meters.
My Google Maps, or if I want robotic surgery, I want a hell of a lot better than 10 metres for me. My self-driving car and maybe millimetres or submillimetre for robotic surgery.
[27:30]
So, the most precise clocks basically went away from artificial oscillators and went back to natural oscillators, so the natural oscillators that we're using previously was the planets rotating around the sun, the earth rotating on its on its axis, the moon going around the earth. But instead of looking out to the stars and the planets in the middle of the last century, people looked into to the atoms, and found that the caesium atom actually was a pretty good reference. So, the caesium atom has an electron that sort of has an electron orbit that if you ping it will oscillate very, very stably at about 9 gigs, about 9.1 1 gigahertz or 9000 million ticks a second. And so, this is 9000 million times potentially more accurate than the John Harrison clock.
[28:33]
And this is what the original prototype looked like in 1959, and there's been a sequence of atomic clocks developed since then that have been getting more and more and more accurate.
These are very similar to the sorts of atomic clocks that are actually used, or the sorts of clocks that are used in satellites.
[28:55]
Here's an example of the original Global Positioning System, actually is a US based satellite system. There's the Galileo system and that I've got illustrated here. Here's a picture of people assembling the Galileo system. This is actually a pair of these atomic clocks, so you can see they're relatively large but small enough to go into a satellite. And so, there are dozens of these satellites in orbit around the Earth now and are available for providing positioning systems, and so the advertised positioning is premium service 1 meter. You know general public 5 meters, so pretty good, pretty good.
[29:45]
So, this is the technology that actually enabled me to get to RMIT today.
[29:53]
So from once upon a time when people couldn't navigate, is this happily ever after?
I pulled out this new story from 2017 that was reporting on the alarming rate of the clocks failing in the Galileo satellites. So they're smallish about this big. They’re pretty complex and can be fairly failure prone and it's quite hard to maintain things once you've launched them into space and so there's still a way to go. Also 1 meter accuracy good enough to get me here to RMIT, probably not good enough for other automation that you might want, so there's still a way to go.
[30:40]
Now I still haven't touched on lasers and that's actually my area. So, I did promise you lasers.
[30:46]
The most accurate atomic clock demonstrated to date isn't based on caesium, it's based on strontium. Similar idea, it's not a microwave transition, it's an optical transition. So there are, you hit different atoms, they ring at different frequencies like tuning forks. But the strontium atom has a transition that is 429 9 terahertz, which actually is an optical frequency. You can see that you can see this with your eyes, it's sort of red colour.
But you can't measure the ticks directly. There are 429 million million ticks per second, so it's 420 million million times more accurate than the original Harrison clock. And this should be 40,000 times more accurate than the microwave atomic clock that was in the Galileo satellite. This should be enough to give you submillimeter accuracy positioning with something like GPS.
But the question then remains how do you ping this atom and how do you measure its frequency?
[32:02]
Lasers were developed in the sort of 1960s and 70s along with these atomic clocks and are the most precise way of generating an optical frequency and also measuring them and so, for example, this is a red laser, roundabout 500 terahertz and I've just sort of illustrated that as, OK, if you have optical power it's all concentrated at a particular frequency. This is one of the unique properties of lasers, they put all of their power at one frequency.
But you can't actually measure those oscillations directly. Nothing can really go as fast as the as the direct oscillations of the optical wave. We can see the red light, but we can't see the electric fields moving at the very, very fast rate that they're moving.
[32:53]
So, remember, this was a similar problem that John Harrison had with the one second oscillation and trying to turn that into something slower that actually meant something to us into turn the second text every second into minutes and hours and days that we could read off the face of the clock. And so, we need something like a clockwork for lasers.
[33:18]
So hopefully this works, and I might just turn the sound up on my laptop.
[video demonstrates hitting tuning forks to hear ‘beats’]
You should be able to hear exactly the same tone for both of these oscillators. And what the person's going to do now is actually detune one of them so it's slightly different.
Did you hear anything different? Should be able to hear the beating.
And now it's much slower.
[34:32]
So maybe that was a bit subtle. Let me just turn my sound down again. So, I'm not distracting myself.
If you have two tuning forks, and they're exactly in tune. If you hit them both, you don't hear anything, you just hear the sound. But if you slightly detune them, then what you can hear is beating between them so you can hear the difference in the frequency between them, so they can both be very high frequency. In the case of the tuning forks, there were around about 440 Hertz, so 440 oscillations per second. You can't actually hear those individually, but when there were detuned, you could sort of hear something that was maybe 5 or 10 beats per second, you could sort of hear [imitates sound] sort of sound that you could actually count off.
That's what the trick with the laser is. So, if you take two lasers that are pretty close together and listen to the beat between them.
[35:28]
So, we have one laser one frequency. If you have a comb of frequencies, so the lasers themselves are about 600 terahertz, but the spacing between the lasers is about 10 gigahertz, so about 50 or 60,000 times lower in frequency between them. Then you can actually measure the beating in between the lines using a piece of electronics.
[35:53]
And so, this is essentially a clockwork for light. So, it allows you to turn the direct oscillation of a laser beam into something you can measure using electronics, and so this was a revolutionary advancement for atomic clocks. It earned John Hall and Theodore Hansch the 2005 Nobel Prize. The work that they were doing in publishing was around about 2000 and were awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize. Theodor Hansch started the company Menlo, that actually commercializes this system. And so, you can see this is an optical frequency comb system to about as big as I am. And this is you can buy system from them today and there's a number of these in various laboratories around the world. they cost over $1,000,000. And this is John Halls team at NIST went on to keep breaking the world record for the best atomic clocks and so this is the strontium clock that I mentioned before, which I think still holds the world record. But you can see this is an enormous tangle of optical components on an optical bench. So, a very, very. delicate instrument.
So, it's way, way more accurate. These tools are extremely accurate. But there's still big there's still complex and remember the story about the atomic clocks failing on the Galileo satellites? There are some optical clocks on those satellites and they're also still fairly failure prone because they're made out of all of these discrete components.
So, we need something that's smaller, cheaper, and more robust really to really to make an impact.
[37:53]
Our vision is that you should be able to take the frequency combs system, for example, like the one that Menlo is working on here, but integrated onto an optical chip using integrated optics. And this is the area that y team works on is basically sort of printing photonic tools onto the surface of chips using similar technology to electronics.
And if you can do that, you should be able to make optical frequency comb systems that are as robust and cheap and compact as you would find in a piece of consumer electronics.
[38:30]
We showed two years ago, in May 2020, that we could use these sorts of chips for doing ultra-high-speed transmission and this is what my previous talk was about. Since then, we've done a lot of work on trying to use this for optical neural networks.
[38:45]
But we've also set up a collaboration with Andre Luiten at Adelaide University, who set up a company QuantX, to do atomic systems for measuring time, but also measuring other things, magnetic fields, and movement. And so, we've just been awarded a project with Andre to explore trying to integrate some of the components of his system which you can see in the background there onto a photonic chip.
[39:21]
So, enough about clocks. What else could microcombs measure well?
[39:30]
This is a little bit of a boring slide. I got it from the NIST website, but it I put it up here for a reason. These are all the standard things that you can measure and all the other things that you can measure can be made up from one of these things. So, you can measure length and weight and time, and you know electrical current.
The second here is actually defined in terms of oscillations of that caesium atom. So, this is the definition of time as it stands at the moment. It's not just a measure of time, it actually defines time.
[40:04]
What's interesting is that the oscillation of caesium atoms actually turns up in all of the other measurements as well, so this atomic oscillation that you can measure with a laser is actually you can measure anything with this tool in principle.
[40:29]
If you can measure the atoms oscillating, then in principle you can measure anything.
So just before I finish and I'm just about done, so there should be some time for some questions. Here's a few things that we've got in the pipeline.
[40:45]
One of the things we're doing with optical frequency Combs is we're working with some researchers at the University of Technology Sydney. Irena Kabakova is pictured here. She uses lasers and frequency combs to measure the mechanical properties of materials and actually living tissue as well. So, she uses laser light to excite vibrations in things like the cells of fish here and you can actually by measuring the different acoustic frequencies that are bounce back, you can actually determine what the mechanical properties are, how hard or rubbery the different parts are, and so you can essentially see the different parts of the fish here. But you can also measure things like if tissue has become cancerous, it changes its mechanical properties and becomes stiffer for example.
[41:44]
We're doing a lot of work with Advanced Navigation. They're in Australian company that sells navigation solutions to all of the automotive manufacturers and companies like Google and the thing that I particularly excel in is that inertial navigation. If you can work out what direction you're going in and what speed you're going at and how long you've been going there for, you can sort of chart a course of where you're going. There are situations where you don't have GPS, for example under the water, the satellite signals don't penetrate the water and go under the water. So, if you want to have positioning systems under water, you need to use some other mechanism.
In space, there's no GPS either, so if you want to have spaceships docking onto other spaceships, then you're going to need to have probably better than meter scale accuracy in terms of being able to position them. And again, there's no GPS to let you know where you're going so. We're working on tools with them to try and miniaturize their navigation systems and make them more accurate and more robust so that they can be used in these sorts of applications.
[42:57]
We're also working with astronomers. I can work with astronomers, like Jean Brodie, who has strong connections to the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Using that observatory if you can calibrate tools for measuring the spectra you can actually measure stars which are Suns in distant galaxies, or stars in our own galaxy. And if there are planets going around those stars, the stars will actually wobble in response to the planets going around them. And as the stars are wobbling, you actually get Doppler shift, so the frequency changes ever so slightly and you can detect the presence of that planet from the shift and then you, there's a planet there, you can time your measurement. So as the planet goes in front of the sun, you can then actually do a spectral measurement of the atmosphere of the planet and so these are very, very small numbers of photons coming from these standards and very, very tiny shifts in spectral, so you really need a very, very highly calibrated source to measure this. And this is one of the things we're using our frequency comes for.
[44:14]
You can also use the same technique if you can precisely measure caesium atoms, you can precisely measure other atoms. For example, you can measure transitions in methane or carbon dioxide, and actually do measurements of the atmosphere. And so, we're looking at ways of monitoring emissions you know methane emissions, for example, from cows, and also improving agriculture. So, for example using drones to monitor the emissions from fruit trees to see how healthy they are and whether the nutrients you're using are being effective and whether there are disease trees. And so, we have a collaborative project with the Food Agility CRC here on that.
[45:03]
And last but not least, we you can use the optical fibre infrastructure that's used for telecommunications to actually measure vibrations and we’ve been using some of our frequency time systems with the optical fibre network that's attached to our RMIT to measure vibrations and this is me and out in the field with Sim who's here in the audience and Megan Miller from a new and Voon Lai, who both are seismologists from ANU. We're basically calibrating the fibres by tapping very lightly on the ground here to see the vibrations turning up back in our lab, this is reported on the Internet. You can use this for measuring things like cars going past you can the cars going past and trams, but you can also measure earthquakes, so they've picked up a number of earthquakes through the system in our lab over the last few months. And you can also actually just use the sort of background noise and hum of the city to illuminate the bedrock and actually measure the shape of the bedrock around Melbourne and something a little bit like ultrasound, but on a on a city scale. So, you can use this for monitoring the integrity of tectonic plates, but also you for mining safety and mineral exploration.
[46:48]
We've just set up a website to describe some of the things that we're doing. You can now find this at this web address here and there's more information about that story with the seismologist there.
[46:53]
And you can also feel free to ask me questions now or if you don't want to ask me now, feel free to send me an email or follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Thank you.
Q&A – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Alright. Thank you very much for the fascinating discussion, fascinating lecture. Any question.
[question from audience - inaudible]
Response – Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell
I think this is sort of coming to the heart of the problem with the oscillator is it's OK. It's very easy to count oscillations like I can tell whether it's today or tomorrow. But it, but you're right, it's hard to pick exactly the noon day sun. I'm sure they had techniques for doing it. It's very similar to the astronomical problem of saying oh, now how far away are these two planets from each other? It's very easy to see whether it's summer or winter. You can probably you can come up with ways of doing it, but it's just not as absolute as counting ticks, yeah.
Question– Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
So, one question from the from online.
With the increased ability to detect / measure time on a smaller scale, have there been any unexpected ways that "time" doesn't match our expectations or assumptions of how time 'flows' or moves?
Response – Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell
So that that's a really, a really good question. So just to repeat the question is given accuracy. Are there any surprises so that is there any is there any anything that's turned up the that we don't expect?
I think the probably the answer is no, but the perhaps it is surprising that you can measure things like relativistic effects. So, Einstein predicted also proved Newton wrong. Einstein predicted that the only thing that was constant was the speed of light. That everything else changed the there's space could expand and contract depending on how fast you were going and time itself would, it would expand and contract. So, the Galileo satellites, the clocks on the satellites are accurate enough to actually be able to tell the difference in the passage of time not the measurement of time. The actual passage of time is different for the satellite as it is orbiting around the Earth than it is for the base station that's talking to it. So, you've got to constantly be correcting for who's time are we talking about? Are we talking about the time that the satellites experience or we're experiencing on Earth? This is all predictable like this is all, this all fits with relativistic mechanics, but even some of the tools we work on with advanced navigation, the way they work is as you rotate you have a coil of fibre, if you rotate it and even rotating it quite slowly, you can actually measure the difference in time it takes for the light to go one way around the coil then it does the other. And the time, the space itself has actually contracted in one in one dimension, which is, I mean you hear it when I heard about relativity and you thought ‘yes, that's good for black holes and the centre of the galaxy’, but to have it actually happening in your lab and being able to measure it is quite something.
Question– Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
[question from Prof Xu - inaudible]
Response – Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell
So, we work with a collaborator of ours that you UCSB who's an expert in photonic integration, this is John Bowers. He has been showing photonic chip lasers, and so these are the sorts of things that you can just print out in their millions that are costs of cents. But they have sort of millihertz stability, so they are incredibly rate, like the most accurate. Accurate enough to sort of make these sorts of measurements on atomic clock, so the lasers themselves can be quite practical. This is only really happened in the last year or two that you've been able to do this in sort of manufacturing facilities, so the lasers are practical.
One of the big challenges is interfacing the lasers to the caesium atoms or the rubidium atoms. And so, this is a project that we're working on at the moment with Andre Luiten is OK how, if you're going to integrate all this stuff together in some cheap printed circuit, how do you, how do you get the atoms in there?
Question– Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
[51:59]
[question from audience - inaudible]
Response – Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell
[52:19]
So, I guess science and technology again the engineers versus the physicists, I think there are some science opportunities like discovering habitable planets in other solar systems. That's a that's a big opportunity. Being able to measure precisely spectra using these sorts of tools, there's one particular piece of science called the sand gauge test, which is basically measuring has physics always been the same? So, there's a there's a fine constant that sort of measures how physics works and by looking at very, very distant stars, you can sort of measure the beginnings of the universe and basically look at whether physics from that time. So, we're working with astronomers to do that. So that's some of the science that's enabled by this.
Coming it back at the other end in terms of actually making these frequency combs, there's some quite sophisticated science and technology in actually generating the laser light in a way that is stable. Basically, making those oscillators that are a stable as atoms. The atoms come ready made. You've got to actually physically make an oscillator on a chip that sort of competes with it so that you can use the two as a reference from each other, and there's some quite interesting nonlinear physics in the way the light goes round the on the chips to that actually sort of generates the frequency comb.
Question– Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
[54:01]
[question from audience - inaudible]
Response – Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell
[55:08]
I mean, I must say I'm just talking of the top of my head, but I would think they would know the timing of that to easily within milliseconds. These are all very, very predictable systems. I mean, I should mention that there's an assumption built in that these things are cyclic. That basically the sorbet around the sun and the moon's orbit around the earth is cyclic. It's not quite, each cycle is a little bit different there are wobbles and other things that go on, but they know about these and are sort of building them into their models as well. So, my off the top of my head, I would be surprised to discover it was, it wasn't milliseconds that they would know when particular things like the eclipse were happening. In terms of the different websites, I imagine they're targeting different locations.
Closing – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
[56:02]
Okay, please join me in thanking Arnan for an excellent lecture. Thank you.
Closing – Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell
Thank you very much Xing. I'll be around for a few more minutes if you want to just come and have a chat with me, I'd love to do that.
Closing – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Thank you everyone for participating and I look forward to seeing you at another distinguished lecture.
END
17 May 2022, presented by Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell
From accurately tracking and estimating our Google Maps journeys to using biomedical imaging to gain detailed images inside our bodies, being able to measure things precisely underpins almost everything we do.
In 2005, two physicists were awarded the Nobel Prize for developing an approach – the optical frequency comb – to measure almost anything with unprecedented precision. This approach gave us the GPS we use on a day-to-day basis, however, it was also expected to change the way we measure many other things, from the gases in our atmosphere to the discovery of earth-like planets in distant solar systems.
Seventeen years on, the world-changing potential of optical frequency combs remains largely untapped, mainly due to their large size and complexity. Photonic chip technology – technology that can miniaturise entire lab benches onto a chip the size of a fingernail – may hold the answer. Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell discusses how photonic chip optical frequency combs could lead to 3D analysis of living organisms, map and monitor the geological structure of our lands and oceans, and allow brain-like machine learning to transform the behaviour of autonomous drones and satellites.
Ageing Futures: quality care and decent work
Ageing Futures: quality care and decent work
[Start of transcript]
WELCOME – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Good afternoon, everyone to our RMIT Distinguished Lecture. I'm Xinghuo Yu, the Chair of RMIT’s Professorial Academy and the host of today's event.
Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the people Kulin Nations on whose unceded lands we are meeting on today and respectively acknowledge their elders past and present.
So, today we shall hear from Distinguished Professor Sara Charlesworth who will deliver her lecture on Ageing Futures: quality care and decent work. This is part of the activities hosted by the Academy to fulfil its obligation as ambassador, advocator and thought leader for RMIT.
Before we start, let's just get through some housekeeping matters. This is a Teams Live event; you will not be able to directly ask any questions by microphone. please post your questions in the Q&A section during the lecture, and at the end of the lecture I will pick up those popular questions to ask the presenter on your behalf until our lecture time is up.
So, let's just start the lecture by introducing the speaker. Distinguished Professor Sara Charlesworth research is on gender inequality in employment, and its various manifestations, including in gender pay, equity, sex, discrimination, gender-based violence, and the and precarious and insecure work. More recently, her research has focused on aged care sector. She has participated in key gender equality policy reviews and debates and been invited to give evidence to a range of government inquiries including to the Royal commission into Aged Care Quality & Safety. She has also been an advisor to diverse government and private sector organisations as well as community and human rights bodies.
So, without further ado, please join me to welcome Sara to deliver her lecture. Over to you, Sara.
LECTURE – Distinguished Professor Sara Charlesworth
[2:05]
Many thanks, Xing. And also like to acknowledge and pay my respects to the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands I'm currently located. And indeed, and thinking about better aging futures, we can learn a lot about the recognition of many older adults by First Nations peoples as elders, as people to be held in esteem and as wisdom holders of the community, rather than a problem to be dealt with away from prying eyes.
So, the Royal Commission's emphasis on caring as a relationship goes to the heart of good quality care. Today I'm going to focus on current and future challenges in creating and sustaining caring relationships in aged care, or what is known as long term care, and draw on recent research to address to address two key challenges.
They are of ageism and the gendered undervaluation of aged care recipients and workers and ensuring that we have the necessary policy and regulatory architecture as well as work conditions and work organisations, work organisation to provide the conditions for quality care and decent work. I’ll also talk briefly to the growing migrant aged care workforce in aged care.
[3:25]
So, I'm drawing here on two main projects, the Decent Work Good Care project is a cross national study for aged care systems and as well as policy analysis and interviews across the four countries. I draw in particular on data gathered through a rapid ethnographic methodology. Our version of this methodology made use of between 2-4 4 insider researchers who had national expertise in the particular country and two to four outsider researchers who had expertise in other countries systems. We use this in organizational case studies conducted over an intensive period of up to a week on the ground and gathered data from multiple sources, including through observations, shadowing workers, interviews, informal discussions, etc, with managers, workers and our clients and residents.
The Markets, Migration and Care project, led by Emeritus Professor Deborah Brennan, was essentially a multi-level policy and regulatory study of the ways in which migration, employment and care regimes intersect in Australia and New Zealand to shape in particular the migrant care worker experience. Today I draw in our analysis of migration regulation in the Australian context and analysis of available data sets.
And really, the central theme of these two projects has been exploring ways in which care quality in the formal aged care system can be undermined, or indeed enhanced by the conditions in which frontline workers provide that care.
[4:55]
Researchers interested in the impact of employment care and migration regimes on the conditions of work, and care have focused on the complex interplay of institutions, policies, regulation, national and global conditions, and policy mechanisms that intersect in different ways in different national contexts. And as I will highlight later in the lecture, gendered norms about what constitutes skilled in aged care are reflected in all three regimes.
[5:31]
In Australia as elsewhere, Covid really revealed the fault lines in our age care system. And across the board, it's revealed the lack of dignity and respect accorded both aged care service users and workers in planning for the pandemic.
There was a lack of adequate equipment and infection control training. A lack of clarity about accountability of federal and state governments, the safety regulator, and providers. And the price of increasingly fragmented and precarious work with the lack of or limited access to paid leave became very obvious in terms of the workforce.
While the rate of covid infections and the death toll of aged care residents was regularly reported on in Australia, there was really relatively little recognition of the impact of covid on workers except by the Royal Commission into aged care, quality, and safety.
[6:27]
So, we see in this excerpt here. The Royal Commission undertook a special inquiry into the impact of covid, and in that report in the introduction, they actually draw attention to the impact or some of the direct impacts of covid on aged care workers which I think is very important and once again they underscore the importance of the close relationships that care workers developed with residents in this case, but it also applies to home care.
[7:03]
In Australia, if you can see here in the circle, that this is data actually on worker cases and deaths, and from a number of countries. The number of covid infections recorded for workers in residential aged care, in fact slightly exceeded the number of covid infections among residents, but you wouldn't know that from the media.
However, luckily, unlike in particularly the US and the UK, in Australia, residential aged care workers didn't die of Covid contracted at work. However, despite the fact that there are many more older adults or not come to this using home care services home care clients and homecare workers have not only been absent from most discussions of covid in aged care, but also in discussions of the future of the aged care workforce. So, in this talk I want to focus mainly on home care in an attempt to bring this vital and indeed growing sector of formal care into view.
[8:05]
But well before the COVID pandemic started, the Royal commission to age care, quality and safety recognized in its interim report the systemic substandard care in Australian aged care. And they note here key fundamental contributing factors to both unacceptable quality of care provided and also underscore the role unacceptable conditions of work play in the poor quality of care we have in our system in Australia.
[8:39]
At the Royal Commission, 85% of witnesses spoke about workforce issues. And I'm going to attempt to pay you two very short excerpts, one from nursing home resident Merle Mitchell, who unfortunately died a little while ago, and a worker, Kathryn Nobes, who both talk about the impact of an adequate staffing on the quality of care.
[9:07 Video audio]
I'd like to take this opportunity to revisit some of the evidence you've heard from a selection of our workforce witnesses so far. To do so, we ask the operator to play a video.
Staff don’t have time to provide that sort of support so if I need something in the middle of the night, because there's only one nurse responsible for 170 patients, I wait up very, very long time.
[9:43]
And I'm just going to take you to the worker here if you could bear with me. This is Kathryn Nobes.
[10:03 Video audio]
In my opinion, there was insufficient staffing at the facility. We are told that everyone is individual and has to be treated with respect. As keyworkers, we completely agree with this statement. However, we repeatedly found ourselves with such a heavy load workload that we just have to manage this situation that we can't give the residents the time that we would like.
[10:30]
So, these two excerpts, really, I think, give a flavour of the lived experience of key care recipients and workers in our system of our age care and I think the particularly the latter one underscores the disconnect between the rhetoric of person-centred care and the actual reality on the ground.
[10:59]
So, I want to step back now a little and provide some background to our formal aged care system because in fact it plays a relatively small part in meeting the support needs of older adults.
Most older people who require support with the activities of daily living had that support provided by family members, overwhelmingly female partners, and daughters. Now, as you can see here, with population aging and increasing longevity, as people age large, there's a large and growing proportion who suffer at least one long term health condition.
This brings with it a complexity of needs for assistance with the activities of daily living as people age, especially personal activities with the greatest need overall for assistance with health care and mobility. And particularly for those aged 85 and over the need for assistance with self-care and cognitive and emotional tasks also rises sharply.
[12:01]
So, who uses long term care in Australia? In 2019-20, over one million people received support from formal aged care services although some people used multiple programs more than once during the year. But as you can see here many more people used homecare than residential care.
The Commonwealth Home Support Program is used by the most service users and it's a program that's supposed to provide entry level services and, importantly, is block funded.
A smaller but growing number of people now use the Home Care packages program, which has a consumer directed model of individualized care where a fixed amount of money per annum is provided for individuals for care and support on the basis of their assessed needs. Now this program was roundly critiqued by the Royal Commission as it's highly rationed, inflexible, and inadequate.
There are 100,000 people still waiting for a package who had been assessed and approved for one. And last year 16,000 people died while still waiting to be allocated services for which they've been approved.
From the data here from the Aged Care Finance Authority, you can see the importance of the use of aged care services by women and over across the board women make up two out of every three service users and the use of services by women increases with age.
[13:32]
This actually puts our use of long-term care in cross national perspective and as I said, if we focus perhaps here on the figures, I've highlighted the most long-term care is used now by our people 80 years and over. Institutional care is residential, What we know is residential care in Australia.
But in most OECD countries including the ones here, a greater proportion of our age care recipients use home care rather than institutional care.
And as you can see, Australia's use of residential aged care for the 80 plus population is higher in other countries. The shift to home care is much more advanced, for example, Sweden and New Zealand, as you can see there.
[14:27]
In its final report, the Royal Commission set out what the community expects from aged care in Australia. But this is a long way from the reality of what the community actually gets.
Government policy could arguably be, could be argued to be essentially based on a palliative model. And to put it crudely, it's about keeping people comfortable till they cark it.
Aged care policy can be compared with the policy aims of early childhood education and care and the National Disability Insurance scheme where at least the policy focus, if not the practice, is much more on supporting service users to realize their potential; there’s no mention of in Australian aged care policy.
But the community also gets is the real lack of accountability and this has been missing in action through successive federal governments and by providers particularly in accounting for the funding spent on the provision of care and there is really very little quality and safety oversight of the care that's delivered particularly in home care, as the Royal Commission notes here.
What results then is rationed, task based, rushed and substandard care.
So, what underpins the parlous state of our age care system?
[16:06]
Ageism is an important norm and this 2019 submission to the Royal Commission from abroad based National Coalition points to the important role of ageism which attaches a lower value and greater stigma to old adults, particularly those with long term health conditions or disability and that's very much reflected in our systems of aged care.
The ageist engendered undervaluation of older service users, who, as I've already explained are increasingly female as they age, and the gendered undervaluation of the work performed by the frontline aged care workers lie at the heart of our current system.
[16:52]
So, who works in age care?
You'd have to say that the quality of available data on the aged care workforce is a national disgrace, and that's for two main reasons. The level of accurate detail available and the reliability of that available data, and the inadequacy of data really reflects the lack of attention historically given to this important and growing sector of the economy.
In terms of Australian Bureau of Statistics starter, there's a lack of adequate disaggregation of industry classifications, particularly in home care, and also the occupational classifications set out are also use very poorly described are descriptors.
These classifications underpin available sensor starter. This makes it very hard to accurately identify the key characteristics of home care workers, and in particular the classification of home care workers has aged, and disabled workers may well include disability support workers who work with clients in private homes also.
The second set of data, the independently run four yearly national Aged Care Workforce census and survey data and the last one was produced in 2016, has been used as probably the best source of week of data we have on the age care workforce. But they were only run with directly employed workers who are a slowly declining share of the frontline care workforce, both with the rise of care workers employed in as self-employed in labour hire, or indeed as gig workers.
The so-called age key work for census that was run by the Department of Health in 2020 was run with providers only. They surveyed program by program and they say themselves that their worker numbers are probably overestimates as workers may be counted more than once working across a number of different programs and sights.
But what is clear from all the data sources is at the front-line age care workforce is overwhelmingly female and indeed an older group of workers with an average age of between 45 to 49.
From the NACWCS surveys, there is an evidence of a declining ratio of workers to recipients at the very time the needs of the older adults who use the system have become more demanding and complex. The NACWCS survey also show that over time the skill mix and long-term care has declined. There's simply a smaller, much smaller proportion of nursing qualified staff in 2016, than there was in 2003.
In Australia there are no mandated staffing levels or skill mix, unlike in early childhood education and care. Our quality standards only require staffing numbers are adequate and skill levels are appropriate and what that is left up to providers with really very little oversight by the quality and safety regulator as both the Royal Commission and also Professor Gabriel Maher from Macquarie have noted.
[20:05]
So, what do home care workers do?
This answer classification that you can see here really mischaracterizes the nature of home care work. It's classified as ANZSCO level 4, which in the ANZSCO classification typology is low skilled work, but in fact homecare workers provide a range of complex care and support by themselves in a client’s home with no direct supervision. This requires high levels of responsibility and judgment. There are distinct areas of skill where workers exercise knowledge acquired in formal training and through experience to carry out care work with a frail aged.
It's very different working with clients who are unable to undertake certain care for themselves but able to make decisions about their care they need, than with clients who are unable to make decision about their care at all. And this is an important distinction that's made in the much better homecare classification structures in Victoria, and local government are home care services.
Going to skills in home care, I draw here on a typology from Professor Lydia Hayes from Kent University, who identifies a series of types of skills, but if we look first at home health or nursing related skills and knowledge of complex conditions, some examples in home care for those concerned with what were described in the former New South Wales Award covering workers and the now defunct New South Wales Home Care Service as bodily and intrusion skills. These are assisting with bowel use, pig feeding wound management, catheterization changing colostomy and drainage bags.
Home care workers also need knowledge of how to manage client behaviours related to dementia or cognitive decline and also provides sensitive end of life care. Body works skills require specialist knowledge and skill to enable appropriate care for the different bodies of service users. Such as skills needed to monitor and protect skin integrity, adhere to hygiene and infection control policies, and maintain the dignity of the client.
For example, knowing how to undress, shower and dress a frail 90-year-old who was very stiff limbs in a way that's comfortable for her preserves her dignity and observes her preferences for how she likes it to be done requires skill.
Relationship building and high-level communication skills are also used. For example, building trust and ensuring clients dignity. Providing personal centred care, person centred care and enablement, and supporting different clients who may be experiencing emotional physical difficulties or conflict with family members.
Where domestic work meal preparation and shopping is provided, it's really just housework as a lot of people tend to think it is. It requires the capacity to adjust round very diverse clients’ needs and preferences and working with clients who may be very difficult or aggressive, or indeed reluctant to eat at all.
However, in this point is really important, the exercise of skills takes time. In the decent work Good Care project, we found that even in good providers that there's often insufficient time for the practice of skills held. The allocation of adequate time to care is crucial to the optimum use of both existing and acquired skills, knowledge, and competencies.
I'm now going to turn to some examples of care work that's provided by our age care workers.
[23:52]
So, in this example this field work, field work notes taken during the shadowing of a personal care assistant in a dementia aged care unit.
Most residential aged care have dementia units which where those in the most advanced stages of dementia are typically located. And this excerpt illustrates just one example of a tiny Filipino worker realizing the growing agitation of a much larger man and she's moving to try and deescalate his distress.
Selena had been helping a group of residents eat their dinner that she had to stop to address the situation with Alan’s distress and on her return she then had to work at speed to try and catch up, but in doing so she rushed several residents through their meal, which wasn't at pleasant experience for either them or her.
[24:59]
This excerpt is from an interview with a home care worker working with the palliative care client. She's describing the massage that she provides this woman in palliative care. So apart from the important body work she's performing, the time she's allocated is inadequate and now there is a process of negotiation to try and get that time increased which will incur an extra cost out of the home care pallid, package, allocated that client. However, until that's sorted, Helen like so many aged care workers ends up having to perform some of the care needed on her own time and this is something you hear incredibly frequently from age care workers. They're very reluctant to stop work simply because the time allocated to perform a certain task has run out.
[26:00]
The one certainty in aged care is that residents and clients die. In this excerpt from field notes at a home care organization illustrates the toll on workers.
While some services expressly forbid workers to attend the funeral of clients, at this organization workers who have been the primary care are allowed to do so, but they're typically have to attend their client's funeral on their own time.
What is striking in aged care generally, and this has been in all the aged care systems we've had a look at is the lack of system wide or organizational wide formal support or supervisory practice that might support workers through the death of people with whom they're formed close relationships.
I'm now going to turn to some key conditions of work, focusing primarily on wages and working time conditions.
[27:05]
So, in this table here, while obviously the pay rates for home care workers is higher in Australia in all jurisdictions entry level pay rates sit only just above the applicable minimum wage. And these wages are very low given the skills, level of responsibility and judgment required that I've described.
In Australia, any increase in wages for home care workers has only been achieved through the flow on from national minimum wage decisions. To date there hasn't, although there's currently one on foot, there hasn't been any revaluing of the work of home care.
Within the relevant award, there are three levels for our frontline homecare workers pay classifications are very rudimentary compressed, and there's just $1.60 per hour difference between the entry level and the top level at level 3.
The award not only fails to provide meaningful progression in terms of pay, but the skill classifications linked to the three levels also lack any relevant description and specification of the skills actually required in home care jobs, including at different skill levels and I've already alluded to Victorian local government and the now former NSW Home care service. But both those home care services do have decent skill descriptors and meaningful differences in pay rates between different levels.
Despite numerous government enquiries and the Royal Commission establishing the detrimental impact, low wages have on the attraction and retention of aged care workers, there has been an historical disregard and lack of accountability by successive federal governments for ensuring decent award rates in a sector for which it is directly responsible. The federal government is effectively the lead employer in our age care, and this works to limit and normalize the low wages in the relevant awards.
This disregard also reflects and reinforces a dominant sector logic or narrative that good, aged care workers are not overly concerned with low wages and poor working time conditions because they find meaning in their work. Which they do. But it's hard to imagine that similar assumptions will be made about government infrastructure spending in relation to workers in the male dominated defence support industry.
[29:44]
And now I want to have a look at just some key deficits in working time conditions and one of the most egregious is the lack of working, paid working time. So unlike in New Zealand and the UK, there's no employment provision in Australia that requires that home care workers be paid for the time they spend traveling between clients.
It's hard to think of any other Australian sector where an inherent requirement of the job that is traveling between clients would remain unremunerated.
Another key deficit is the on-demand work organization that typifies the sector. So casual contracts or permanent part time contracts with low numbers of guaranteed hours leave workers wanting more hours of work to provide sufficient income on which to live which creates underemployment.
In 2016, 40% of home care workers wanted more hours of work than they currently had, which is reflected in high rates of multiple job holding, which at 16% was three times then that for the total workforce at that time.
The other big issue is the way that short hours can be fragmented across the day. So, the relevant award not only allows casual workers but also permanent part time workers to be employed on very short hours that can be broken up over the day. This is the time and task based oriented allocation and charging for care services under the Home Care packages program has worked to further fragment working time conditions for home care workers which directly affects the quality and continuity for both clients and their workers. So central to building a care relationship. And the rates of staff turnover are particularly high in this particular program.
The award also provides employers with the capacity to flex permanent part time workers hours up from and down to their contracted hours at ordinary time rates, which creates considerable employer flexibility without having to pay a casual loading.
And this flexibility arguably acts as a disincentive to provide longer minimum part time hours to home care workers, which is the expressed preference of many in the sector. In many ways, designing work that creates this unused labour potential as perplexing as the sector is continually crying out for more workers.
Another widespread employer practice in Australian home care, it's not really found elsewhere, is requiring workers to nominate their availability beyond their contracted weekly minimum hours. That is, in order to be guaranteed a certain number of minimum weekly hours, workers have to be available for additional hours to that minimum. So, this practice of availability operates and on call mechanism, whereby an employee can be called and expected to cover shifts at very short notice. There's no additional payment for this availability and where worked, these additional hours are paid at ordinary time, not casual rates.
[33.03]
How availability works in practice is illustrated in the following excerpt from an interview with the person in charge of rostering at one of the home care sites, the Decent Work Good Care team spent time at.
So, the schedule is really describing what happens when they've got to cover 5 clients because a care worker has called in sick, and so while in theory the award requires mutual agreement to working additional hours, a workers nominated availability outside their contracted hours, in this case, the worker has said that while she normally starts at 8, she has agreed to be available from 7. It's simply assumed that she will be available and she in this instance she gets a call at 6 and being told, sorry you've now got to visit Nancy at 7:00 o'clock.
S, it really provides this function of availability really provides for just in time rostering changes.
I'm now going to turn briefly to the migrant aged care workforce for two main reasons. As I said, they form a large and growing proportion of the workforce, and providers are increasingly calling for temporary migrants to fill vacancies and to fill what scene is increased demand in the sector.
Migrants migrating expressly to work and what are deemed as low skilled occupations would normally be excluded under current Australia's migration regulation and transition from temporary to permanent status is only possible for skilled jobs, those jobs that are classified at ANZCO Levels 1 to 3, not for people who are in frontline care positions which are classified as ANZCO Level 4.
However, the government has recently extended the Pacific Labour scheme to so called low skilled workers and has very recently bought in 32 workers on temporary visas from the Kiribati to work in aged care in rural and regional Queensland, and this scheme is being expanded and is essentially an employer sponsored scheme where workers from Pacific Islands will work in rural and regional Australia.
[35:30]
So, this chart is to really show that while we don't talk or recognize migrant workers much in Australia, but compared to many other countries, we have a far greater proportion in our aged care workforce. And yet the issue of migrant care workers is as I said, the focus of very little policy or academic attention here, even from the Royal Commission.
One reason may be that many migrants working in aged care a permanent residents, unlike in some other countries. And until the tightening of migration regulation in 2009 with the shift to both temporary visas and tightened skill requirements, many of those currently working as frontline aged care workers had arrived as permanent migrants on family humanitarian and even skilled visas. However, overtime the countries where migrants now work as aged care workers, the countries where they were born has shifted dramatically to those from non-English speaking background countries. And while important post war, the United Kingdom and also New Zealand have declined as the main country of birth of our migrant workers, particularly in residential aged care.
And over the last 15 years, there's been a rapid increase in the proportion of migrant care workers from India, which you can see reflected for both in residential aged care and home care. And entrants from Nepal have also grown while entrants from the Philippines have remained pretty constant since around about 2010.
[37:10]
The characteristics of recent migrant starter which I'm using here is a Labour force survey and unfortunately we can only get reliable data at the aggregate care worker level rather than just aged care worker level. But it does provide information on migrant care workers who arrive between 2006 and 2016 and tells us what type of visa they held on arrival and as at 2016.
And as you can see here among workers who arrived during this period the top five countries of origin are India, the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh and together those five countries of birth are around, will account for two thirds of our recent migrants.
But as summarized on this chart here on arrival, almost 2/3 of our care workers in the last columns that you can see here were on a on a temporary visa, however those from the top five countries were far more likely to enter on a temporary visa than those from other countries.
[38:33]
The date of arrival also appears to connect to the type of visa held on arrival. So, in the first period from 2007 to 2011 we can actually see there's a higher ratio of permanent visas, however in the second period we can see that a much greater proportion of people who arrived during that time arrived on temporary visas and that really reflects, as I said, Australia’s increasingly strict migration settings.
Now, in many countries, migrant care workers are located in areas of the labour market was poor conditions than their locally born counterparts. So, we decided to see if that was the case in Australia, given we've got the protective factor of mainly permanent migration status among our migrant workforce.
And we've looked at two job quality indicators available in the 2016 National Aged Care Workforce Census and survey, casual status and under employment.
[39:46]
And the question we asked was: do these groups of workers have poor quality jobs against those two job quality indicators than their Australian born counterparts?
And what we found was that compared to Australian workers that home care workers from a non-English speaking background country were the most likely to be casual and under employed. Whereas English speaking background personal care assistants for more likely to be casual while non-English-speaking background personal care assistants were more likely to be under employed.
And when we ran a multivariate analysis and controlled for socio demographic and employment characteristics, we found that being a non-English speaking background migrant was significantly associated with both casual status and underemployment.
Now, because the literature also suggests that time spent in a host country has a mitigating effect on employment disadvantage for migrants, we also had a look at what, at what at what happens are over time.
And I'm sorry I was seeing around to other wrong slides
And our analysis supports the general trend of those findings elsewhere, but paradoxically, over time we found it casual employment in fact increases for non-English speaking background, personal care assistance while under employment increases generally for migrant home care workers.
We also found that holding a temporary visa increased the likelihood of casual employment for migrant personal care assistance and under employment for migrant homecare workers.
While working for a for profit employer which has been associated with much poorer working conditions in some countries like the UK for example was also associated with casual employment and underemployment for non-English speaking migrants, particularly homecare workers.
Now, with the growing demand for an increased age care workforce, it's highly likely we will need to increase migration to meet this demand. However, given our current migration settings, which position age care workers low skilled, the great risk for workers coming in on a temporary visa to work in aged care, which is reflected in the characteristics of recent migrant starter I've just looked at, is what Peter Mares calls ‘permanent temporariness’. Along with the additional vulnerability that workers experience when they're sponsored by employers as in the Pacific Labour scheme, and indeed a similar scheme in New Zealand has found has been identified as creating specific vulnerabilities for care workers who come in through their essential skills visa scheme.
[42:50]
So, I've spent most of the lectures setting out how the care, employment or migration regimes in Australia intersect and produce poor conditions of work in poor conditions of care, and in particular I've drawn attention to the lack of recognition of the skills required and used by age care workers in award skill classifications, and the lack of any meaningful wage increases up the limited skill classifications in awards.
But in conclusion, I want to acknowledge that in our decent work, good care project we have come across examples of good practices by Australian aged care providers. But these practices due in the main to the mission and commitment of this specific providers, such as providing longer hours or full-time work for home care workers involving them in the review of care plans for clients. In one case, higher pay rates through an enterprise agreement, training on paid time are unusual in the Australian context and have occurred in fact in spite of rather than being encouraged by the settings of our current Australian aged care system.
Now I want to briefly canvas extremely briefly canvas one alternative drawing on the example of New Zealand home care.
[44:06]
So, in this observation here, this is really an illustration, this comes out of shadowing home care, a home care worker across 6 clients. And we found that not only was this occurring in this individual service, but that the systems in New Zealand support the building enough time in home care and that through a number of factors.
There’s close government links with an oversight of service providers. So rather than having a centralized system as we have in Australia, very remote system, you have devolved district health boards, there's 22 in New Zealand, and in the better district health boards have introduced a policy called alliancing which is where that board works closely with, in this case home care providers, contracted to provide home care services to a particular geographical area. So, for example in one District Health Board where we spent area, we spent quite a bit of time, there are four home care service, two are for profit, two are non for profit, but the alliancing arrangement means that they have to share their data, they have to share clients and they are able to give direct feedback to the District Health Board through changes in policies. They also very interestingly encouraging much greater use of nursing staff. So, in home care services nursing staff will very readily come out to assist a home care worker where necessary, yet at a client’s home.
So, they're much more responsive services and they provided direct line for worker advocacy, as in this case for a client. So, in this particular case, Butri talks to the registered nurse at her service and says we need an extra time for Sandra because I need to be able to go shopping with her because she's got nothing to eat on the weekends because the Meals on Wheels service doesn't operate on the weekends. We need to make sure she's got enough to eat and that was very quickly put in place.
In New Zealand too, they’ve got a career structure that provides that came through and equal pay settlement, which also provided for paid travel time and it provides qualifications tied to the career structure with meaningful wage increases at different levels of that career structure and providers are funded to support workers gain qualifications.
[46:50]
OK, some key takeaways. Decent work is necessary but not sufficient to produce high quality care. We also need system wide decent systemwide, direct involvement and accountability by the federal government for the quality of care and the decent work conditions to underpin it.
And as I've mentioned, we've had some in this country some examples are good paying skill classifications and working time conditions in New South Wales, in the former New South Wales home care service run by the state government, and we have similar paying conditions now, and a dwindling number of Victorian local governments that these services are not sustainable because of the federal government hasn't adequately funded the cost of quality care. And that's really what we need to provide this system like with feeling.
[47:36]
So, before I end, I'd like to thank the list of collaborators on the two projects of which I've drawn a special shout out for Wendy Taylor, who's managed the very unwieldy, decent work, good project over four years and helped me with these slides.
And also, many thanks to Adelina Onicas who greatly with their design of this presentation, far more elegant than my usual PowerPoints.
[48:01]
I thought I'd end with its lovely image of a worker and a client in the New Zealand Pacifica Home Care service we visited with older adults, are treated as elders. We this very much an action also in their connections with local communities, including with different Pacifica community elders who actually don't use the service.
So, thank you very much. I'll leave it there.
[48:22]
Q&A – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Thank you very much Sarah for excellent talk you. When I listen to it. I mean, you know the more. listen you feel heavier, sometimes it's sad that people are not able to look after our aged people better.
So now we are into the Q&A section. We've got a couple of questions.
Here is one for you. So insecure work infects far too many workplace and it is particularly perverse in a wealthy country as Australia. In your experience with the Royal Commission, is there a meaningful discussion on the value of awards and enterprise bargaining agreements as key contractual instruments that set to the minimum platform for decent work in the aged care and like sectors. If there are discussions on foot, what is the general tenor, if not, do you see any reasons for the silences?
Response – Distinguished Professor Sara Charlesworth
Excellent, excellent question, in fact, they've been 20 inquiries into aged care across the last 20 years in Australia, so the Royal Commission was the last one and this has been the only inquiry that actually recommended wholesale addressing of wages and skill classifications. Now it's unclear the extent to which this will be taken up, the federal government says it supports this recommendation in principle. What that means, we don't know. There is currently a work value case being undertaken by the health services union, which is looking at wages only, which is looking at a $5 wage increase for both our home care, well really in home care, and residential care, it's not just for frontline workers, it includes also the other workers I haven't spoken about, the very necessary administrative and kitchen staff and cleaning staff, that particularly work in residential aged care.
Enterprise bargaining has proved quite a disaster in Australia. It’s particularly in the home care, it's very difficult for unions to organize, and the very few enterprise agreements that exist, the wage increases are either exactly the same as in the award or they sit literally cents above the applicable award rate as I said, the one exception apart from a couple of very good, aged care providers and Victorian local government, they are the exceptions to that. Their enterprise agreements provide significant wage increases. So, it's very clear that something has to be done, particularly in the sector and going right back to the beginning quote from the Royal Commission if you're going to have good quality, caring relationships you need a stable workforce to provide that continuity to enable those key relationships to flourish. Without with insecure work and particularly increasing the fragmented way workers organized that's very difficult to achieve.
Question – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Thanks, Sarah's, here's another one. What could the federal government do more to promote careers in each care and home care both to those new and experienced in the workforce?
Response – Distinguished Professor Sara Charlesworth
Interestingly without doing anything about wages or conditions, there are some promotion campaigns. There is some work being done by the relevant Age Workforce Council to say look, this is a really good sector of work to come to and that is true. And as I said if you talked to workers, they really do find they’re there not because of the wages or the conditions, but because they view this as important work. What they do mind though is that the community, and indeed the government, doesn't seem to recognize that in ensuring that they're properly paid so, it will be very interesting to see what happens overtime. But it will seriously need to be addressed and when the government does costing for the and there will be an increased cost if we go to have a quality aged care system, it absolutely needs to factor in decent wages and conditions and those conditions go to time.
So, one of the things the Royal Commission has mandated in residential aged care only, is they’ve mandated a certain number of care hours per day per resident, which is going to need increased number of workers.
But why aged care providers don't simply provide workers who are desperate to work longer hours with those hours is the million-dollar question. It seems quite bizarre that you wouldn't make, as I said, he wouldn't make use of this spare labour capacity that's clearly sitting there, but I think that there's a view, particularly we're moving to this home care package system that this is true, as my colleague Fiona Macdonald has written extensively about and the National Disability insurance scheme, the models actually drive the fragmentation of employment. So, we need to be rethinking how can we provide some good employment conditions and still will respond to the needs of individual clients for the care and support when they need it.
Question – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK, thanks Sarah, so here's another one. You mentioned the ageism and the genderism, I'm wondering if you have considered the intersection with racism given your findings regarding the workforce.
Response – Distinguished Professor Sara Charlesworth
Absolutely and very good question and that's certainly come out in workers we've spoken to, home care workers who tend to client’s home and has the door slammed shut in their faces: we're not having an Asian or we're not having an African come into our house, thank you very much.
And because the consumer directed care system now emphasizes choice and control, and so you say to provide us, so what do you do and they say it's kind of up to the client if they don't want this person, well can we force them to have this person? So, racism is endemic I have to say Xing and in residential aged care workers who are not Anglo, visibly Anglo Celtic have a tough time not only sometimes, from Anglo Celtic residents but also from their Anglo Celtic co-workers.
Question – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK, thanks, I've sort of have to jump in on this question because as a migrant who experienced this kind of working environment. So, I'm wondering whether culture has ever considered in the aged care framework, because different culture would see it quite differently would have different requirements. Has any kind of a customization, any sort of protocol or regime for taking that consideration into aged care?
Response – Distinguished Professor Sara Charlesworth
Well look in Australia because we are a migrant country there are quite a few what we would call ethno-specific services so that in fact, the unfortunate St Basil's which is the subject now the coronial inquest because of the appalling handling of Covid was an ethno-specific facility for Greek speaking older people. We know as people age particularly migrants, they often revert back to their mother tongue and then there is the real need for culturally appropriate care, but there's also a need for so-called mainstream services to be provided at, and once again some of the better services will try and do so, but when you spend when services spend so little on food and I'm thinking residential aged care and in some of the better providers we found $6-$7 a day per resident was being spent on food, what you're providing is it's very hard to make culturally appropriate, food. So, this is a huge issue and there are now certainly a lot of policies and the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia is very big on this and trying to have more done round culturally appropriate care food.
On the reverse side though, what some migrant care workers will tell you is that they find because particularly from some cultures, they come where elders are respected, they find the way the paternalistic way or the infant, infantilizing of aged care service users as quite offensive and foreign to the way in which they see older people. So that, yeah, there's some real tensions.
Question – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK thanks so we are approaching the time. Here is the last one.
How might we begin and encourage value alignment between providers, care workers and the residents? If policy is weak.
Response – Distinguished Professor Sara Charlesworth
Excellent question and this is why we need strong policy. We need as I said, the government has been missing in action. There's this fantasy that aged care as a market. Now, the Royal Commission interim report clearly said aged care is not a market it can't operate according to market principles.
We need an active, engaged government that actually takes responsibility for this particular, this particular domain and the example I use before of the defence support industry we this is a government are seen as a government responsibility to make sure we have defence capability. It should also be a government responsibility to ensure we have decent care infrastructure because it is infrastructure that actually support people in Australia as they age.
Question – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK, we have two minutes. There's another question.
In your observations of training for care workers, did you notice any existing formal and informal training in dealing with CALD clients?
C-A-L-D clients.
Response – Distinguished Professor Sara Charlesworth
On, CALD clients. Yes, which is that term people use for people who are culturally and linguistically different. I personally don't like it because it gives impression that the Anglo Celtic is that the norm.
There, yes there is sometimes some training and I know that one of the not-for-profit organization in Victoria, the multi-cultural women's health does quite a bit of training in residential aged care. To try and engender some recognition of culturally appropriate care, it's not there by and large, so the formal care that most workers have done as Certificate III or Certificate IV in aged or community care, some of them done specialties and dementia care.
When the Federal government survey providers at the end of last year at asked them, what provided training it provided a number of them said that it provided diversity and inclusion training. What that is, though, we don't quite know, but I think that they're given our aging migrant populations particularly our post war populations, there are, there's a real need for tat to have that training in place.
Ending – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK, I think the time is up. So, on behalf of the participants, thank you so much for excellent enlightening talk. And for the rest of the participants, I wish you have a good afternoon and looking forward to seeing you in another lecture. Thank you very much.
[Sara] Thank you very much goodbye. Thank you for coming.
[End of transcript]
30 November 2021, presented by Distinguished Professor Sara Charlesworth
The crisis faced across the OECD in the provision of aged care was made visible to the broader community during the COVID-19 pandemic. In making the link between the quality of care and the working conditions of the frontline workers who provide the care, the lecture draws on a body of collaborative research conducted over the last decade.
Funded by the Australian Research Council and the Canadian Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council these different projects provide multi-level insights into the ways in which the interaction of gendered care, employment and migration regimes can produce both unacceptable care and unacceptable forms of work.
These research findings also point to the systemic changes required to ensure that frontline workers have the economic security and time to enable diverse cohorts of older adults to age with dignity.
Cancer, ageing and vaccines
Cancer, ageing and vaccines
WELCOME – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Welcome everyone to our RMIT Distinguished Lecture. I'm Xinghuo Yu, the Chair of RMIT’s Professorial Academy and the host of today's event.
Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the people Kulin Nations on whose unceded lands we are meeting on today and respectively acknowledge their elders past and present.
So, today we shall hear from Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski who will deliver her lecture on Cancer, ageing and vaccines. This is part of the activities hosted by the Academy to fulfil its obligation as ambassador, advocator and thought leader for RMIT.
So, before we start, let's just get through some housekeeping matters. This is a Teams Live event; you will not be able to directly ask any questions by microphone. please post your questions in the Q&A section during the lecture, and at the end of the lecture I will pick up those popular questions to ask the presenter on your behalf until our lecture time is up.
So, let's just start the lecture by introducing the speaker. Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski develops new immune based therapies and vaccines to optimize vaccination for the elderly, as well as to develop and validate new diagnostics, prognostics and treatments for ovarian cancer. She published extensively, including papers in top journals such as Science, Nature, and Lancet. Many of Magdalena’s invention has also have also progressed to human clinical trials or commercialization, and she has led this translation process in diverse roles as inventor, CSO, CEO and Director in biotechnology companies nationally and internationally.
So, without further ado please join me to welcome Magdalena to deliver her lecture. Over to you Magdalena.
LECTURE – Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski
Thank you very much, that’s a beautiful introduction. I also want to add my Acknowledgement to the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the [eastern] Kulin Nations on whose land I sit right now.
I don't know if my slide is presenting. Am I sharing my slides? Sorry, just a question. Am I sharing my slides?
[Xinghuo Yu] Yes, there is a slide, but it may not be in the…yeah it’s ok now.
So, you can see the beautiful Mary Creek where we are which is the belonging to the [eastern] Kulin nations Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups and which we are privileged to be on today and from where I'm getting my talk.
[3:11]
As well as being the Director of the Biomedical and Health Innovation, and some of you may know me because of that. I also lead a fantastic group of researchers that are interested in cancer, ageing and vaccines at the Cancer Aging and Vaccines Lab at the School of Health and Biomedical Sciences in the College of STEM.
Now you may think you know cancer aging and vaccines; how do they relate? So, let's start with ageing and hopefully by the end of this talk we'll get a clearer idea of why we’re interested in those three topics together.
[3: 50]
So, firstly, we're all going to get old and in fact, not just individually but humanity is getting older and although this is not even across different countries, it's estimated that by 2050 in some countries like Spain, Italy, Japan, Korea, nearly a third of the population will be over 60, and in the older age groups because a life expectancy is also increasing, they may be even more significant increases in the percentage.
End of the day this increase in longevity, this increase in life does come with an increase in diseases that are associated with older individuals and it is estimated, the WHO estimates, that there will be a 50% increase in cancer globally from 2010 to 2030. So, that is quite significant, and we may ask ourselves: why cancer and why is it linked to an aging population?
Well, as we grow older, the errors and damage in our inner replication machinery, and particularly at the DNA level, just probabilistically increase its cumulative. So, over time you have more of a chance of making an error as your transcribing your DNA. Then we can also be mutations and reactive oxygen species cause damage and we know many, many of the environmental factors that can cause damage, for example, components of tobacco smoke and this has been known for a while now.
The other thing is that it's not just getting the damage, it's your ability to be able to repair and control that damage because it's the mutations that allow cells to keep growing, proliferating, and not be illuminated by the natural controls of the body that are going to eventually resolve in cancer.
And the immune system is critical to enable this control and the immune system changes with age. In fact, the relationship between immunity and cancer has been known since the 1800s. In fact, Virchow said cancer lesions appeared in inflamed tissue in 1863 and a much more recently, it was characterized that tumours were called the wounds that do not heal, as in they are wounds where that have an infiltrate of inflammatory immune cells.
So, already very early on there was a possible relationship and causation in terms of inflammation driving or helping drive and sustain cancer.
That's the bad part of the immune system. The good part is that and again it was Burnett in Australia who first said that logically, if the if cancers are appearing because it's inevitable that they appear because it's inevitable that they are errors, and there is damage, there has to be a mechanism to eliminate or inactivate such potentially dangerous mutant cells. He postulated that this mechanism would be immunological in character.
So, the immune system and cancer are deeply related from the beginning, both in terms of potentially promoting and sustaining cancer in terms of inflammation, but also in terms of being able to control and eliminate it.
[7:55]
So, before we jump onto more specific things, I just want to give you a very, very quick idea of the immune system because some of you may not be immunologists and obviously as an immunologist, I absolutely love the immune system and I hope many of you will be inspired after this as well.
So, first of all, the immune system has two arms. The first arm is the Innate arm and you can imagine it when an invader comes into the body, it's, they’re the first responders. And we have some cells there that are literally like bombs, and I put here a picture of a neutrophil and neutrophil is filled up with granules and it also eats anything that comes in its path. So, say your bacteria comes into the body. It will just eat it until it explodes from overeating and release all these toxic granules and so there's a lot of collateral damage, but it will eliminate bacteria and it will act very quickly.
As well as these first responders that just go for it, we also have cells appearing very quickly in this innate response that are designed to try to profile the invader and to call for backup. So, these cells again most often, are characterized by being able to eat, take up whatever it is, bacteria, virus, cancer cell. And after they eat it, they profile the pieces the bits and pieces from it by showing them on their surface. So, these are cells like macrophages, as well as myeloid derived suppressor cells or most importantly dendritic cells.
Now the dendritic cells, what they'll be able to do is to activate the rest of the immune system. The Adaptive Immune system, and the adaptive immune system, while it’s there, is to really target the response specifically to that specific invader to eliminate it in the best way, deploy, eliminate. But then also record the characteristics of that invader to be able to attack it far more efficiently than next time.
Now, the other function which doesn't get talked about often, but it's really important, is that the immune system is also designed to get down from this state of alertness and calm things down. So, let's say whether in the initial phase where neutrophils and other cells are going crazy, releasing lots of inflammatory cytokines, that's fine, trying to really eliminate whatever it is that is hacking us, in the next phase we need to not just deal with infection, but get back to homeostasis and get back to a calm state. So, as well as having cells, and these are T cells that able to say for example kill infected cells CD8 T cells, we also have within the CD4 T cells, cells that help other components of the immune system to generate the adaptive response, but we also have cells that just calm things down - regulatory T cells or T reg.
[11:34]
So, now back to cancer and ageing. So, what has been observed though is that even though there is an association of infiltration and particularly this innate inflammatory association with cancer appearing. When you look at different stages, it's actually an immune infiltration that is made of adaptive cells, can be associated with better survival. So, it's which immune cells infiltrate the cancer and their ratio, what they're doing, what they're able to do and how they cross react with each other will be critical to the outcome from cancer.
So, for example, your CD 8 cells will kill mutated cells, can't kill the cancer cells and your adaptive Tregs can turn off the T cells. Now their job is to bring things back to homeostasis. But if the Tregs get activated too early they’re bringing the body back to homeostasis before it has dealt with the problem in this case cancer.
So, how does this play out? As we get older? Well, we have age related dysfunction in our adaptive cells. So, we are generating less or newly formed naive T and B cells, so our ability to recognize new targets decreases. The T cells themselves are less effective and we have increased numbers of these regulatory cells, Tregs, whose job is to turn things off.
In terms of the innate immune system, they are more myeloid, that is from the innate system, then lymphoid cells being generated from the bone marrow. So, we're having more of these inflammatory cells. But they seem to be less active and I said to you before one of the key roles of some of the innate cells, like macrophages, dendritic cells is to eat things and then show them to the rest of the immune system, but with age, some of these cells have decreased capacity to eat or phagocytose. And they have increased pro inflammatory molecule production and we've mentioned that inflammation has been known for a long time to be associated with cancer. And now we know that one of the reasons that it is, is that some of these pro inflammatory molecules also are molecules that attract additional cells into the tumour environment. So, they're pro inflammatory chemokines.
And this pro-inflammatory chemokines may be attracting immune cells to the environment, but they're the wrong kind of cells. In my picture here we have a we have a pirate, so that that's now can we want to attract to the tumour environment. We ant to attract the cells that are actually going to deal with the tumour rather than just have a monkey on their shoulder.
So, immunity, aging so, what can we do?
[15:16]
We know that there's a skew in the ratio, so there's more T regs unless CD8 in old age, there's also less capability to recognize new targets, so our natural immune system is we're not really coping very way. So, somehow, how do we increase the CD9 to Treg ratio?
Well, just to exemplify why this is so important, if we have more CD8ss, they killed the tumour, if the Tregs come in, they turn off the generation of more CD8s, they turn off also the function of the CD8s, and then the tumour itself will be secreting inflammatory chemokines which don't only promote tumour cell growth, including tumour stem cells but also attract further Tregs into that environment. So, it really compounds. What's happening in actually is just not good enough. So, we need to increase that CD8 CD numbers and have them target the tumour.
So, one way of increasing CD8 numbers will be to generate CD8s with a vaccine and cancer specific CD8 T cells. Now, unfortunately as far as cancer vaccines coast traditionally they're inactivated or attenuated whole pathogens or have been in the past and will come back down to that in a minute. And also most of the subunit vaccines that don't use a whole pathogen, say a whole bacteria, a whole virus, other subunits have added ‘adjuvant’, and this is something that will just irritate the immune system, will make it wake up, but usually it's a pro inflammatory adjuvant and we just said that inflammation is bad.
So, what we want to do in cancer and for this in older individuals is to increase CD8s that recognise tumour antigens, decrease the Tregs somehow in the tumour environment or decrease their activity in that tumour environment and try to do the above without increasing inflammation.
[17:49]
So, could nanotechnology offer a solution? And we think so and e very much think that it can, and this is just an example from some of our work, this is now has expanded to other others studying this area very intensely.
A long time ago we actually found that defining the size, shape and charge of nanoparticles made them deliver the targets, the antigen to these dendritic cells and without adding any adjuvant, any prime inflammatory factors by delivering the antigen, the target we wanted to attack to the right cell in the body, right immune cell we could elicit massive immune responses.
And these responses were able in preventive models to prevent cancer challenge when two months after a single immunization, as well as rapidly clear that was within two weeks and already established cancer.
So, this has a result from our many papers over 100 will be in this particular area of vaccination in nanotechnology and multiple patents, but the point is that it is possible, and it already seemed to be possible some time ago. This particular couple of papers have been cited over 1300 times, so it is possible and now many people are constructing this to induce immunity and to do so without conventional inflammation because we want to avoid that, particularly in settings like cancer.
[19:40]
And talking about vaccination, if there was a time to talk about vaccination and to open this as an opportunity for cancer, the time is now. Just to give you a quick historical perspective, it was in the 1600s that we have a record of the first big campaign coming from China's Emperor Kang endorsing the inhalation of ground up smallpox scabs for protection against smallpox.
Following the generation of many vaccines and other approaches across the world, smallpox was eliminated around 400 sorry 300, almost 400 years later.
So, it's taken a while, but then if we think about measles, for which the campaign started much later, we actually were able as humanity largely eliminate measles from the world, particularly in the USA and the Americas by the 2000s.
Polio, which did include a massive eradication campaign, has been eliminated from the Americas and Europe in 2002. And although all of this progress has been very slow ad mainly focused as you can see on the list here in live attenuated vaccines and irritant adjuvants like aluminium salts. You can see that there are other things have started appearing. So, in the 2000s we have adjuvants MF 59 and a three approved for some influenza vaccines and I'll come back to those in a minute. As well as virus like particles. Now again these are nanoparticles, but they're made of pure protein and that's the basis for the papillomavirus vaccine Gardasil which is preventive for cervical cancer.
Also, more recently, very recently, what has been approved is a basically feeding your dendritic cells outside of the body, your own dendritic cells with some bits of the prostate cancer, prostate cancer, and then putting them back in your body to stimulate the immune system.
And this kind of dendritic cell-based therapies are of very active field of research right now and in India as recently as 2017 that has been approved for the treatment of multiple cancers. This personalized dendritic cell-based therapies.
So, there are other ways of inducing immunity order then attenuated or inactive isolated pathogens or combination with aluminium salts and progress has been slow until COVID. COVID-19 has galvanized the approaches that have gone and being pro quest to human clinical trials in parallel with hundreds of vaccines and new vaccine approaches now having been tested in humans. The ones that have really progressed further, which I have on the right hand side and which have been licensed for emergency use across different countries, I would note that they're pretty much the ones that made it except some which have still being based on some of the ones that have come out of China, which have still been based on inactivated pathogen the whole virus itself.
The other ones really have used in new technologies and in fact three of the vaccines that are now approved in Australia are all nanoparticles. They're all in the what I would quote, correct size range to be interesting to dendritic cells to eat them and show them to the immune system, and they're triggering some of them Novel danger signals which are not as proinflammatory as conventional danger signals. So, there is, for example, a molecule that senses danger inside cells called TLR 9 and that will sense the RNA in it and help stimulate the immune response but at this an alternative type of stimulation to really providing any large inflammatory danger signal. And I did promise you to mention Novavax and I would say that that's a very interesting a vaccine that's going to come at some point Which users are new adjuvant, but this new adjuvant again is not a conventional inflammatory adjuvant, and it again a particle and its tends to promote what's called lipid body cross presentation, which allows it to stimulate CD8T cells effectively without engaging conventional adjuvant pathways. That particular alternate way of stimulating the immune response also has been seen to be very effective in older individuals. So, we are we now have vaccines and obviously we also have the adenovirus based vaccines that we are seeing having efficacy in older individuals, which opens real promise for the development of cancer vaccines and within these we're also seeing some vaccine approaches that are avoiding or not needing to engage in a strong way, the conventional inflammatory pathways.
[26:29]
And one of the things I would like to also talk about, if we are going to be going to develop new vaccines, we have to really look beyond just what the vaccine does to protect against disease that you want it to protect against. And there might be opportunities to train your immune system in other ways. In cancer, what is very interesting is that this has been happening for a long time now, the BCG vaccine, which is a vaccine to treat tuberculosis or sorry to prevent tuberculosis is used as a treatment for bladder cancer.
So, one vaccine is having a different use and how does it do it? It's still being debated, but one could think that if this engaging some of these innate immune mechanisms that are able to really be somehow specific for the cancer and an active field of research. So, there are other opportunities, not just in terms of specific vaccine approaches, but also nonspecific vaccine approaches.
And linking back to what we were talking about, cancer aging and vaccines, we really need to acknowledge that vaccines and both in terms of specific immunity that they elicit, but also the nonspecific immunity will be different in different individuals. And on the left, which is showing some of our recent papers, but this is a very active field of research and come across all of these papers, what we are seeing is that it's not only age that is important in terms of vaccines, it's also sex and gender.
Females, particularly older females I have higher inflammatory responses so the so women are set up to have a more pro inflammatory profile in the immune system generally, and this can be linked to sex hormones or X linked genes as well as other factors.
Even the gut microbiota can be different come across sex and gender and the microbiota, the microbiome will also influence your immune system, so we are having an indirect but strong effect on the immune system as well. It's also not quite understand understood why but it has been observed that chronic infections with viruses and parasites are more prevalent in males and it has been posited that this will outer vaccine efficacy.
So, what we need to do to is to really understand both of the specific and nonspecific effects.
[29:44]
Now I'm just giving you one slide or some of the current work at RMIT. So, we're running a large-scale human trial to understand vaccination against the two vaccines used the most in the elderly, influenza and DTP vaccines and understanding how they're induced, how they induced immune responses come in with big data. So, looking at this whole spectrum, this whole training of the body by the vaccine in terms of being able to deal with infections with big data analysis. So, trying to understand not just this specific response, those influenza induced an antibonding is influenza, which is where many other trials still. But looking at whole body effects and effects on the whole, all of the genes that are involved in the immune system with RNA 6, epigenetics and profiling, also looking at the microbiome.
We're similarly running vaccine trials of COVID-19 vaccines and vulnerable populations to defect. Determine the effect of age, sex, and pregnancy on immune homeostasis and activation by COVID-19 vaccines, again using big data analysis. As well as his study of long-term effects of cover, 19 is not a vaccine study, but it's more to understand the effects of COVID-19 infection itself on immune homeostasis, inflammation and autoimmunity.
[31:23]
Because as well as others, we know where we are now in research. And in terms of what we hope to be able to offer to the next generations which is personalized vaccinology where the impact of your age, your sex, your gender, your background generally of your immune system, is considered when recommending or replying or developing vaccines, so they are truly effective.
[32:00]
So, back to cancer. Let's assume now we can make a vaccine, so what should we target?
And again, this is. These are just examples from our own research, but many other people are working in these areas and I've divided the targets in cancer into four.
One is immune targets that come from immune-privileged sites which is either because they were expressed while we were embryos and then they stopped being expressed, some proteins and then they are expressing cancer. So, immune system hasn't seen them. So, if they're shown to the immune system, it's going to be more able to attack it, because it won't thing that it's your own body. It's your own self and therefore they're good targets to attack. So, some of these molecules that are expressed in our body may be associated with cancers that are able to in turn suppress immune system. So, they would very good targets to get rid of.
We also have some autoantigens, because cancer cells are really our own cells and there are some ways of ramping up some antibodies that can recognize these self proteins which may not be expressed in high quantities in normal cells, but they're expressed high quantities in cancer cells, which gives them their specificity.
We can also modify the actual targets. We can change the sequences of the proteins that we put into the vaccines so that we make them more potent and we make the immune system more interested in generating an immune response against them.
There's also in the advent of personalized medicine. There's a personalized neoantigens, which means, as your tumour changes and mutates it generates new targets. So, if we can sequence those targets, we can have personalized targets for an individual tumour.
And that should expand our CD8s and hopefully change that negative Treg to CD8T cell ratio that we normally have.
So, let's assume we have them. There's a way forwards for the field to generate, to have a potent vaccine that works in older individuals and to identify the targets that we want to put in them.
[34:43]
There is still a problem. We can generate this CD8 cells, but they might just stay in the periphery and not migrate into the tumour. And why is that, well the chemokines, the inflammatory factors that are produced by the cancer cells, and the initially infiltrating cells tend to attract Tregs.
So, the cancer cell is attracting Tregs to its environment. And why is it not attracting CD 8 cells? Well, even if some immune cells are in there and trying to attract CD 8 cells the cancers, the cancer itself is secreting molecules, protease, that chop up the molecule that can attract the beneficial CD8s.
So, some approaches that we are doing at the moment are to try to re purpose drugs that block that activity of the cancer cells. So, playing mind games and trying to get ahead of the tumour so the tumour is destroying the molecule that prevents CD8s from migrating into a tumour. OK, let's prevent the activity of the molecule that blocks that migration.
We also have found new pathways by which to attract a CD8 cells into the tumour. And with that we should be able to change the ratio of so generates more CD8s it's in the environment and attract them to the tumour. And then what happens? Unfortunately, there's already many T regs in there and not just that the tumour cells as well as a Tregs express molecules that turn off the beneficial activity of the CD8s.
And in fact, the Nobel Prize in 2018 was given for this discovery. The discovery of checkpoints and the possibility of targeting this checkpoint inhibitor, checkpoint molecules with inhibitors as a cancer therapy. So, here you can say that say we have your CD 8 cell being blocked from killing the cancer cell because it's interacting with this molecule called PD L1. And monoclonal antibodies against either PDL1 or PD1, therefore, deep block the activity of the CD8 so it can kill the cancer cells that will stop inflammation from happening, which will also help the CD8 cells to keep being in that environment and not have more Tregs migrating in there so it's a whole dynamic structure.
Now we're involving a in a trial right now testing one of our prognostic biomarkers, and also at the end of the trial, together with our collaborators from WEHI, Astrazeneca and ANZGOG, we are using checkpoint inhibitors, so we have the whole combination stream to try to offer benefit to patients.
[38:18]
And offering benefits to patients is a passion for us and our focus is on ovarian cancer. And why are we so passionate about ovarian cancer? It's because it's got really high mortality and it's not just about having better cancer treatments. The problem is that it's detected too late and because vague symptoms and even if you pay attention to your vague symptoms, the are no biomarkers at the moment that you can go to the GP and say, Yep, you've got early stage ovarian cancer.
With early detection, survival is expected to be 90% but most women are detected light switch to revival is between 5 to 10% and after initial treatment most women over 80%, get a lethal recurrence.
And this is what's called platinum resistant disease and there are few other options for treatment.
So, there is, there are big needs in ovarian cancer not just to develop new treatments but also to developing diagnostics. And we believe that our whether the previous time period in cancer research has focused on personalizing treatments and diagnostics even to the genetics of the cancer as well as changes in genetics of the cancer, the next stage will be about individualizing treatment, also thinking about the immune system.
[40:15]
We believe and we run projects in the lab across all stages of early detection, personalized therapy and innovating new treatments focusing on including the immune system across all these stages.
And this is already yielding some really exciting results and our dream and enabled by collaborations, so we have a collaboration with Professor Arnan Mitchell on practical sensors, which we hope down the line at some point may enable diagnosis and in the clinic or even at home from a single drop of blood. And we find the biomarkers for early detection and we have some really excellent candidates and they develop the technologies which hopefully will make it very practical to really go that step of early detection.
And these same sensors may be useful personalized therapy, personalizing therapy and, again, either biomarkers that can tell us which drug will be better to use which individuals then from a drop of blood we can recommend the best treatment that will have the highest possibility of acting on that particular tumour in that particular person that has a particular type of immune system.
We're also collaborating with Professor Suresh Bhargava for innovative new treatments in terms of new drugs that are able to target this platinum resistant disease. So, even if everything fails in the initial stages, there is still a drug at the end that can be used and treat this a platinum resistant disease.
We could avoid all this though, if we were able to activate the immune system before hand to the targets that will then be able to protect from the very beginning against the generation, the natural generation of the cancer in the first place by having our immune system through that job even before the cancer starts, and that is really the dream for us.
[42:34]
Lastly, when talking about personalizing and when talking about the immune system, we really have to consider that the immune system and even if it helps us in diagnosis, here, I have a picture of a black hole, it's an artist impression of a black hole modifying the space around it, and that's how we can see a black hole. So, the immune system can be considered the space around the cancer and we can see the changes in the immune system and that can help us with the detection.
It can also help us in terms of treating the tumours. Having said that, the immune system is altered by a wide variety of factors, including mental health, and like we mentioned before, microbiome so behaviour, diet. If we really, truly want to understand the immune system, we have to be intrinsically multidisciplinary and understand our patients and our immune system as a whole. As an interacting system within an individual.
[43:48]
So, for the future and the way I see the future emerging for cancer generally not just for ovarian cancer. Is that there will be more of a focus on immunotherapeutic drugs. We are being told we live in the immunotherapy we are living the immunotherapy revolution in cancer and that is truly what we are seeing around us.
We were also seeing a lot of repurposing of drugs. Combining of drugs, personalizing treatment to genetic subtypes but also to immune status and that has me very positively excited that it will have a real impact and enable earlier diagnosis and perhaps in the future that may not be too far away. Promote vaccine development which will enable the new generations not to have to worry about getting cancers such as ovarian cancer.
[44:52]
And for that, we really need to focus, so the way I see cancer in the future is very much about personalized detection and treatment and a real focus on multidisciplinarity.
And Just to finish up so we have plenty of time for questions I wanted to mention one of the reasons I was so excited to come to RMIT Has been my other job.
[45:27]
Which has been the Enabling Capability Platform Director. Because that other job is about bringing together researchers across multiple disciplines to work on projects that engage externally for impact. And that is a tremendous opportunity for us to really understand how together across disciplines we can solve major problems such as cancer and aging and to really galvanise vaccines to be able to do so.
[46:12]
So, I'm just as my last slide I want to mention some of my collaborators and our amazing lab at RMIT who makes all of the research possible, but also keeps all of us motivated and excited to make a difference, so thank you.
Q&A – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Thank you very much Magdalena for that fascinating talk.
So, we have a one question come along, but I think there will be more in time. I just so this is a very general question is, I mean, it certainly gives people like me, an engineer, who have not too much knowledge about the vaccination or cancer cells, so this is certainly eye opening. So, without trying to be not sort of two political, but just in the way we are going, do you think that the way we are dealing with the current COVID is okay or too rigid, the way we’re proceeding, the strategy we have?
Response – Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski
I've actually been very impressed by how quickly vaccines were developed. And I thought I said it visually in initially we were talking about hundreds of years, then decades and this is just to develop of one vaccine and using approaches that are really not inducing the best type of immune response.
So, for example alum, which is an adjuvant put in many vaccines. The response is that it induces are OK and they’ll reach the threshold for protection, but there are many other better adjuvants out there.
But there has been no willingness to really, Say OK, what is the best adjuvant? Is there a way in which we can make things better there has been a lot of inaction? And while COVID-19 is absolutely terrible, but it has done, is it has moved the field forwards in terms of being able to look at vaccines in a comprehensive way, really put their safety under the microscope and accelerate development by an injection of funds. So, I think the opposite. I actually think the it has been one way in which humanity and multiple countries have shown that they can respond to a challenge that concerns all of us globally. So, I'm positive rather than negative about the fact that vaccines were developed so quickly.
Question – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK, thanks. We've got quite a few questions for you. So, here's the one that I have always wondered how much nutrition play a role in the prevention of cancer as well as recovery from these type of cancers. What role do you see nutrition playing in regard to cancer?
Response – Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski
That is a beautiful question. Thank you so much for that. It's very important. Both directly and indirectly so. if you remember our we were talking about inflammation bad when it comes to cancer and they are gut bacteria that basically promote factors that decrease inflammation in a healthy way. And having these prime anti-inflammatory bacteria in your gut is very helpful. We actually published a paper in that same unity paper that up that were just mentioned briefly showing that the gut microbiota and the composition of the microbiota actually influences responds to a cancer drug called cyclophosphamide, which gets used in lung cancer and which gets used in ovarian cancer. So, the composition of your my gut microbiota is directly influencing the patient’s response to chemotherapy. So, it's absolutely a place, a role, and it's important and thank you so much for that question.
I'm sorry and your gut microbiota, sent a side so the composition of your gut microbiota, in turn is influenced by the diet. So, uhm, particularly fibrous diet tends to promote the bacteria that can have these positive effects.
Question – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK, so here's the other one, so you mentioned the tailor the therapies, and I'm wondering if you think vaccine will need to be tailored too.
Response – Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski
Yes, that's a, that's a that's a big yes personalized vaccination. Having said that, it depends how much you personalized, so they'll still be groupings, but I would say even we're seeing it even now we have different types of vaccine recommendations that we’ve had for older and younger individuals, and that's fair because the immune system of all the younger individuals is different.
I would see in the future we can go a little bit more granular, but still it still won't be your own personalized formulation for just you, but that we can be more nuanced and have a real optimized safety and immunogenicity profile. For example, for pregnant women, or for example, for the immunocompromised and those things are already happening so we will have more and more personalization vaccines to particular groups and hopefully to particular vulnerable groups as well.
Question – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK, here's another one. This one praised your very informative talk. Let's go to the actual question, so you mentioned DPP4, and this could be a potential drug target to help and regulate CD8 cells. You also mentioned checkpoint inhibitors. I’m wondering what inhibitors of DPP4 or CTLA4 or PD1 or PD1-L1 exist and have been trialled for CD8 upregulation? You mentioned antibodies as checkpoint inhibitors?
Response – Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski
So, very specific and long question. So, in terms of your first part the blocking metalloproteinase activity, it’s an emerging field and at the moment there is a drug called Sitagliptin which was used to treat diabetes and that is something that we and others are looking to re purpose to inhibit DPP4. So, it's there has not been a large-scale human trial on that yet, but it's a safe drug already used for a different indication, so that's where there is a push towards repurposing drugs because that can give us an outcome faster.
But the second part of your question, a lot of the different big pharma’s all have their own checkpoint inhibitors and we have of course anti-PD1 and anti-PDL1 and it anti-CD84 or some other ones like anti-lag3 and different companies are progressing them separately.
Now there have been studies of these checkpoint inhibitors alone or in combination with each other as well as alone or in combination with other therapies. What has been emerging is that while the checkpoints can be absolutely amazing for some cancers by themselves, for other cancers, what's happening is that they are amazing as in they can give cures where previously there were no cures and cancer. They need to be combined with other drugs, sometimes existing drugs, sometimes novel drugs, to really provide maximum benefit to the patient.
Question – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK, thanks, here's another one. Quite a few is coming in.
Did focus, money and resources put into development of COVID vaccines, results in the boost for research and development of other vaccines?
Response – Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski
Indirectly, 100% indirectly. In terms of directly, no. If anything, there's been there's more competition. And so, but indirectly and what I see into the future, just having such amazing insights into the mechanism, by which different types of all and new vaccines work, safety profiles, how they work in different populations is going to give us information we're going to be working on for a very long time.
Indirectly, yes, in terms of directly, that's going to be for us to exploit as we go forwards, and hopefully it will be exploited in fields like cancer.
Question – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK, here's another question from engineer computer science is that you mentioned that you are taking a 'big data' approach. What methods have your team used and what barriers have you encountered with those methods?
Response – Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski
Yes, great question. So, in terms of big data we do RNA Seek, we do microbiome, we do epigenetics with cellular immunology analysis, like both cytometry, work with big data profiling for cytokines and chemokines, using things like bioplexes. Gosh, we also do, we are also setting up to do single cell RNA Seek so a few things there. We're looking forward to collaborating to do metabolomics as well, so anybody out here who's interested.
And what barriers? Well, we've had to. We've had to set up a lot of things at RMIT. So, but now they're running, so we set up an epigenetics laboratory, so it looks at the methylation and changes in their DNA and tells you which genes have a propensity to be expressed or not.
We set up a bio banking for human clinical trials as well, so that's running. So, a lot of these things in terms of barriers, I would say it was just about galvanizing and building. But now it's here and I wouldn't say a barrier everybody has been very helpful in terms of being able to set up these things, but it's just taken some time and effort to get things running.
Question – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
It's just about time, but let's just the last two question, but there is a small quick one, right? Is there opportunity to join the trial you mentioned earlier?
Response – Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski
OK. Email me separately about that. Yes, so the they are open trials. There's still recruitment happening in the trial time mentioned. Having said that each trial has its own set of parameters and it's the clinicians that will assess eligibility criteria, so email me separately.
Question – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Yeah, so this is the last one. There's quite a few others. I'm sorry I can’t go through all of them.
There have been recent developments in cancer therapies where small molecule drugs are tethered to protein degraders. Could, has a similar approach been taken with vaccines?
Response – Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski
Sorry, I just didn't catch the middle bit so similar approaches with small molecules that do what?
[Xing] tethered to protein degraders, P-R-O-T-A-C-S
OK, so. I think the question is about targeting approaches to the tumour. And absolutely and there are many, many ways of doing that, not just antibodies they are other ways of targeting molecules to the tumour itself, which are related to how things drain in the body. So, the vasculature of tumours is different, so some things tend to accumulate in tumours because of that.
You also can target specific molecules on the surface of cancer cells, of course, and get your accumulation of substances like that. You can also use combined imaging and treatment approaches what's called Theranostics, so again you're imagining and targeting at the same time. Now, once you have tumour destruction in a particular way, called necrosis that in turn can trigger more of the immune system being activated, so even standard chemotherapy at some point will involve a component of immunotherapy, even if it isn't directly designed to be immunotherapy. Hopefully I answered that question.
Ending – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Perfectly. I think our time is up there. There's still quite a few question we haven't responded to. So, what we do is we were collect those questions and then I think in the transcription I think we will ask Magdalena to prepare a response.
So, for that, thank you very much Magdalena for fascinating topic and also thank everybody else to attend the seminar, so thank you very much.
[Magdalena] Thank you for the opportunity. OK, thank you everybody for coming.
[Xing] Thank you.
26 October 2021, presented by Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski
Ovarian cancer is the fifth leading cause of death for women globally. Early diagnosis is key to improve survival, but there are currently no reliable screening biomarkers for early stage disease. Moreover, after initial clinical responses to first-line treatment, in most women the cancer comes back, often resistant to the first-line drug platinum.
We have found new diagnostic biomarkers, and collaborate with nano-engineers to develop innovative devices so women can in the future be easily and reliably screened at GP clinics or at home. We further work with clinicians and chemists developing new drugs and immuno-therapies to treat platinum resistant cancers.
Since most patients are older women, we further investigate the unique characteristics of the immune system of older individuals. These fundamental big data 'omics' bioinformatics studies are also providing new insights on how to optimise vaccines to protect older adults, for example against influenza and COVID19, as well as cancer itself.
Why Wi-Fi matters: the past, present and future of a social technology
Why Wi-Fi matters: the past, present and future of a social technology
WELCOME – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK alright OK let's start. Welcome everyone to our RMIT Distinguished Lecture. I'm Xinghuo Yu, the Chair of RMIT’s Professorial Academy and the host of today's event.
Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the people Kulin Nations on whose unceded lands we are meeting on today and respectively acknowledge their elders past and present.
So, today we shall hear from Distinguished Professor Julian Thomas, who will deliver his lecture on Why Wi-Fi matters: the past, present and future of a social technology. This is part of the activities hosted by the Academy to fulfil its obligation as ambassador, advocator and thought leader for RMIT.
Before we start, we’ll just to go through some housekeeping things. This is a Teams Live event, so you will not be able to directly ask any questions by microphone. So please post your questions in the Q&A section during the lecture, and at the end of the lecture I will pick up those popular questions to ask the presenter on your behalf.
Okay, let’s get to the lecture and start by introducing the presenter. Julian Thomas is Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, and a Distinguished Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT. He has published extensively; his latest book is on Wi-Fi which is the very topic of this lecture. His other projects include the Australian Digital Inclusion Index, Internet on the Outstation: The Digital Divide and Remote Aboriginal Communities, and The Informal Media Economy. Thomas was elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2017.
So, without any further ado, please join me to welcome Julian to deliver his lecture. So, over to you Julian, thanks.
LECTURE: Distinguished Professor Julian Thomas
Thank you so much, Xing and it's a real, it's a real pleasure. Let me just share my screen. I've got some slides, so if we just hang on a second I'll get them up for everyone.
Can everyone see my slides now? Can you see them Xing? [Yes, OK]
Thank you and yes, as I say thank you again very privileged to have the chance to speak to the Academy and everyone here at RMIT and beyond on this topic
[2.52]
As you mentioned, we've published a book recently about Wi-Fi and much of what I will be saying today speaks to the content of that book and is and really does come out of work and conversations that I've been involved with over a number of years especially with my colleagues Ellie Rennie and Rowan Wilken, who co-authored that book. But also, more widely with my colleagues in the Technology, Communications and Policy Lab in DERC, our research centre, and in the new ARC Centre as well.
We decided to work on Wi-fi because we thought it brought together some themes which we have been interested in, jointly and separately for some time round digital inequality's, their histories of new technology, new technologies, and how they're governed and regulated, the political economy of automation and locational media, among other things. Soo as well as thanks to you for inviting me to give this talk, I really should thank the University, our School and the College for providing a very a supportive and positive environment for us to pursue this work since we started at RMIT in 2017.
I feel like we've come a fairway with it, it's got more and more interesting as we've gone along. Partly because that context, in which we've been writing about these technologies, has changed so quickly.
So, in the talk today, I want to touch on a few things as concisely as I can. Going to talk a little bit about Wi-fi's history and what we take to be its most interesting features as a social technology as we say. The answer to the question of why Wi-fi matters really depends on who you are and where you are. I'll talk a little bit about that. But I think that it, it's had significance differently invariably overtime. So, when we think about the history of Wi-fi, we think that's very important for us because it gives us a very particular legacy of a kind of technical, social and policy innovation which we think is important.
We think that Wi-fi in the present is important because it has the potential to reduce vulnerabilities, to manage risks and to address longstanding and difficult problems around digital inclusion and digital inequality.
We think that for the future wi-fi I could offer some models for a more affordable, more mobile and accessible Internet, and we still think that is very important.
We want to touch on the question also of what we might call might be the social futures for Wi-fi, what might we really want to do with this?
[6.06]
But to start with, let's just talk a little bit about what we take Wi-fi to be, because it turns out to be a lot of things. It's more than the technology itself or the standard approved by the Technical Association for Wireless Communication, the IEEE standard. Wi-fi is a brand owned and controlled by an industry and industry association called the Wi-Fi alliance.
It it's also a set of standards, it's a set of protocols for how to connect, how to set up a Wi-Fi network. It's an institution, or really a few different institutions, I mentioned the IEEE which has a standard setting process. It's also that body than the Wi-fi Alliance, which is really driven by a different kind of intellectual property and trademarks and controlling the use of that term.
It's a bundle of contested, bitterly contested in some cases property rights. People may be familiar with the story of CSIRO litigation around patents for wi-Fi related technologies.
Wi-fi is also a set of conflicting ideas about what this technology should be for and how it should be used, and of course it's all that jumble of hardware and software which we have at home and at work, and it seems right now everywhere else.
The essential thing Wi-fi does is that enables shared low-cost mobile access to the Internet, and it began to do so before we had our low cost, ubiquitous high-speed mobile broadband in any other form. So, it's been very important in terms of making that mobile Internet possible, and everything that flowed from that
We can think of Wi-fi as a kind of infrastructure and by infrastructure, we're really talking about systems that are designed to move one something from one place to another. Wi-fi moves data from one place to another, it moves information. But the thing we find particularly interesting about it is that it also can shift agency and sometimes autonomy are from one place to another. I'll say a little bit more about how that works or might work as we go along.
It's an interesting and distinctive form of infrastructure. There's now quite a body of scholarship around the sort of social studies of infrastructure, spinning out of work on social studies of science and those kinds of areas. And people have written about how infrastructural systems are often embedded inside others, built into social arrangements and technologies. They're often at augmentation of other infrastructures, so for example we often find that communications infrastructures are often built on top of transport infrastructures, road and rail and so forth.
Infrastructures often appear to be transparent. They're somewhat invisible. You take them for granted, usually until something goes wrong. But one of the things that's interesting about Wi-fi is that it is different from that Wi-fi is visible, it's not really transparent as you can see in that picture, almost wherever you find Wi-fi, at least outside the household, you find brands you find signs, you find as on the 1st slide in our talk writ large some indication that Wi-fi is there.
So, Wi-fi is like a lot of infrastructure and can certainly be understood in many of those ways, but it also has some very interesting differences, and we'll talk a bit more about those as well as we go along
But the critical attributes of Wi-Fi are really from our perspective as follow. In the first place Wi-fi, at least in the home and in small businesses and elsewhere, is provided by users themselves, it's an add on an additional device and extension to a network which enables you to do other things, but it's generally paid for and provided by users themselves and the communities, as I said, it can be households, but this makes a very big difference.
The other thing about it, which is significant I think, is that it uses a part of the spectrum, which is open for everybody, it's common spectrum. In American parlance, it's unlicensed so that the rules around using the spectrum which we use for Wi-fi communications really don't go very far beyond the basic principle that you're not supposed to interfere with other transmissions.
But this is a really important point, and it's one that's made the whole thing possible.
Wi-fi is also low cost, there's so much of it it's very, very cheap. We could say that Wi-fi has reconfigured access to the Internet. This is a reference to the Internet studies scholar Bill Dutton, who talked about this in a different context.
Not only does Wi-fi change the way we access the Internet, it also changes how we access the Internet. So, if you think about how Wi-fi for example has really made smartphones possible. Even working alongside cellular services at it's always been Wi-fi and certainly was in the first phase of wife of smartphone our generations where it was, it was through Wi-fi that people could do things like download music, download apps, sync photos do all of those kinds of fundamental things. So, Wi-fi has changed, not just how we get data, but also how we how we use the Internet.
There's an interesting set of dynamics about how Wi-Fi evolves, I think. Partly because of those things that we've been talking about, the low cost, the fact that it's provided by users themselves. The evolution of Wi-fi has been a gradual proposition, it's happened slowly over a long period of time. But another dynamic running in parallel with that gradual evolutionary development has been some step changes usually driven by public policy and regulation and one of the key ones there was changes in regulation that opened up that common unlicensed spectrum for use with, by technologies, which turned out to be Wi-fi that goes back to the mid-1980s.
[13.32]
So, it's things that Wi-fi does. If you look briefly at how it's developed over time, we can review that as well relatively crisply, I think.
You can see a series of significant developments. Wireless communication of course, goes right back early 20th century and some of the critical theoretical work significantly predates anything from the 1970 or later.
But we began to say experimental wireless data networks from the 1970s onwards and ALOHA net, University of Hawaii in 1970 was one of the very first. I talked earlier about the decision to assign unlicensed spectrum which really made Wi-fi possible, that happened in 1985.
Also, an absolutely critical development are very different approach to assigning what is a precious public resource, that's the spectrum for communications. In the past, and in many cases spectrum has been allocated by government policy decision to particular users.
In the case of free to air television for example, in Australia it was really allocated on the basis of decisions about those licensees that government thought were most appropriate to deliver those services. Later on, from the 1970s, nineteen 80s and 1990s onwards governments began to assign spectrum on the basis of auctions, they would go to the highest bidder.
But this idea that you don't assign spectrum to a particular owner. You don't make a property right out of it, but you turn it into a common resource is a really important one because that's what's enabled Wi-Fi to develop in the way it has
So, alongside that, as I say, there's been a steady development of a gradual progression of work towards wireless networking through the 1970s and 1980s. NCR, National Cash Register company, their branch in the Netherlands began work on a net, a wireless network for cash registers in the 1980s, they wanted to market that in the United States and therefore adopted that open spectrum that was made available and started and that really started the process of devising the standards for wireless networks, local wireless networks which became what we now call Wi-Fi.
But universities have also been alongside those kind of commercial uses, critical areas for innovation We mentioned the University of Hawaii, Carnegie Mellon, really developed the first significant wireless campus network in the early 1990s.
Wi-fi doesn't really become a thing for consumers or small businesses until the very end of that decade. The turn of the new millennium when Apple releases the airport and tide of other devices following the IEEE standardization of what came to be called Wi-fi very quickly, the 802.11 standard.
So, that's the story leading up to about the turn of the millennium. If we look at Wi-fi now, the numbers really are extraordinary, as you can see, 16 billion devices in use, 4 billion devices shipped just last year. This is the single most used medium for Internet traffic anywhere.
You could even think about just the range of the extraordinary proliferation of devices that are now connected in homes. Some researchers think that we now have around 10 devices a household, but on average connected and they include all kinds of things. So, moving from the early connections for laptops printers, and PCS, those kinds of things in the early 20th century, we now have that extraordinary plethora of household devices of all kinds, and particularly in very prominently smartphones.
So, what's interesting there, of course is the tension between, what I've called, of rather gradual process of evolution and development, several different standards being released overtime, incremental improvements in bandwidth security, and so forth.
On the one hand, and on the other hand, an explosion of demand, and that has created the kinds of problems that we now all familiar with Wi-fi, the fact that it can be unpredictably slow, it can be it that the coverage can be patchy in any given household. There may be rooms where you have good reception and spaces where you don't, but of course people are trying to work in all of these. Problems about insecurity, the insecurity of the networks. Problems about privacy, problems about surveillance. So, in some smart city deployments of Wi-fi for example, there have been problems with tracking people through as they move through a city using Wi-Fi access points.
This is the kind of tension which has emerged around and the pressure points that have emerged around this technology in recent years.
[19.46]
Just the say a little bit then about why Wi-fi matters and why it is particularly significant at the moment. Two scenes you probably be familiar with them both. You may have seen these sorts of images before.
The one on the left is a is from the south coast of New South Wales, a photo taken in the summer of 2020 after and during the period of time where Bush fires were raging through that part of the East coast. And what you see there is a, is a free Wi-fi hotspot that's been set up by the NBN the National Broadband Network for people to access the Internet. It’s also got device charging points there, it’s got spaces for people to use the Internet and you can see it's connected to a satellite connection. That's the image on the left.
The one on the right wasn't taken very much later but that's related to a totally different catastrophe of course which is the COVID pandemic and what you see there is a woman called Beth Revis, who's working in the back of her car, she's using she's a writer, and this is in a primary school in North Carolina and she is using the Wi-fi to work outside the school there.
So, these are the sorts of scenes that we've become familiar with. In the case of the bushfires, critical infrastructure was destroyed, right cross the east coast of Australia. Regular cellular services regular fixed broadband, electricity and all, and we were destroyed and of course people needed to continue to be able to do that do things they needed to be able to continue to connect with friends, family, work and colleagues. They needed to be able to communicate with health services they needed to be able to do their banking and shopping and so forth. So, this was, and this is an essential service. Wi-fi was the fall back if everything else failed, it worked because it was so highly adaptable, so inexpensive and so many people of course have the devices which connect to it.
The story about the pandemic and Wi-fi I think is in some ways more complicated. And the circumstances of the person in the car here really reflect what happens when you don't have Wi-Fi at home and what do you do in those circumstances? In Batemans Bay the solution for Wi-fi was too was to get everybody together to build a community facility. In North Carolina it was all about keeping people apart and keeping people separate.
Wi-fi worked especially in people’s homes where it was possible for people to use that technology and where it was possible for people to do the home schooling to do the working from home to maintain social contact with other people. But of course, there were so many people who didn't have those connections and we're in the circumstances where they had to rely on a school. But what happened in the pandemic of course, was that when was that household Wi-fi became absolutely critical.
Public Wi-Fi evaporated or diminished, the Wi-Fi provided by the school is an exception. What happened much more often was that schools, libraries, cafes and other places where people could access Wi-fi if they didn't have it tended to go. So, whereas the public space after the bushfires made bought people together to use this at a Community level. With North Carolina, it was all about how people could be kept apart and still have some kind of access to this technology.
[24.47]
To talk a little more about the social dynamics of the problems, this is has caused.
And we can a couple of pieces of research here which I think are helpful. Who has Wi-fi helped and where do people need assistance? How have we managed with Wi-fi in the pandemic?
The figure on the left is a is a matrix of risk profiles for people’s exposure to COVID-19. And the bottom axis, the horizontal one goes from fewer digital resources, more unconnected people to more connected people on the right-hand side. On the vertical axis, we're going from bottom to top from sheltered circumstances to more exposed where we're tracking the degree to which people are exposed to a risk of covid-19.
You can see that there's a quadrant there which is the sheltered and connected, and these are the people that Wi-Fi helped most of all. As I say, somebody working out the out of the back of a car near a school was not really entirely in that category. They were exposed but connected and at higher risk. The strategy of course, was to try to work and stay in the vehicle.
So, it's a significant point that while Wi-fi was enormously important in enabling people to carry on with work with schooling with social connections through the pandemic, it wasn't there for everybody and it depended in fact on other people taking risks and being more exposed.
If we think about who the sorts of people are who were more vulnerable. You can see some of in the chart on the right which shows the social distribution of digital inclusion in Australia in 2019 measured by our project our digital Inclusion index project work of colleagues in our lab and Swinburne Centre for Social Impact. And you can sort of see there just how significant the differences are in digital resources across our society.
Whether you look at income or employment or education or age, there are stark differences so that when we are in the sorts of circumstances we're in now, some people are at vastly risk than others.
You can see in particular that when we look at measures of digital inclusion and we're talking about people’s access to Internet, devices to data, we’re talking about affordability, we're talking about the digital skills have, all of those things brought together in this measure. You can see that our lowest income households are particularly exposed and also people aged over 65. So, two key groups are highly vulnerable and significantly with significantly fewer digital resources than the rest of the population.
[28.22]
So, Wi-fi is quite important for this. You can see there's a little bit by seeing what sort of happened overtime here with this. So, so on the right here we've got you've got two charts which track the differences for digital inclusion, for the richest quintile of Australians and the poorest on the top. The income gap and down the bottom, the age gap. What you see is that hasn't changed really significantly. In either case, since we started collecting data on this for back for 2014, so why do we think that is? The chart on the left gives you some ideas about that. That shows the trends for digital inclusion when we divided up according to the different dimensions of access, affordability and digital ability. So, you can see there that access for Australians, access to the Internet, access to digital resources has improved steadily and significantly over the last 5-6 years. And that's because very substantial investments have been made in fixed broadband and in mobile broadband services.
When you look at the measure of digital ability you can see that has also improved but it's a lagging indicator compared to the access, compared to the data, the devices, the network, hardware infrastructure, all that kind of thing. The skills are lagging behind the infrastructure there,
But the one that's a very significant concern I think as affordability. That's our measure of how much of a person household income they're having to devote to Internet services and what they're getting for their dollar. And you can see that with some downs and some little apps, we're basically it's basically flat, so that hasn't improved, and we do think that this is exactly where Wi-fi is going to be particularly important because it is low cost because it is shareable, it has a very important role there, so that's where we see the situation in the present.
Wi-fi has considerable possibilities. It has made possible all kinds of things during the pandemic, which we would simply not otherwise have been able to do it. It has kept people together. It's kept people working, it's enabled home schooling for what it is worth. But it's also in the case that significant numbers of people have been excluded whether excluded from work having to be in a position where they're risks have been much greater because they've been exposed, or if they're older, have been isolated because they don't have connections. So, our point here is Wi-fi has been tremendously important Batemans Bay and in North Carolina in the face of quite different catastrophes. But there's still very substantial work to do.
[31.49]
So, turning to the future, then. We’re dealing here with this question of whether or not an affordable mobile accessible Internet is going to be possible as we move on with a rapidly accelerating digital transformation?
I talked a little earlier about the two paces, the dynamic of gradual evolution for Wi-Fi, combined with the occasional step change in especially in regulatory settings. And I think this is the kind of situation we are now in and where we need to work through. Wi-fi has gradually improved, it's gradually involved, but there is an extraordinary momentum around and increasing diverse density of connections, diversity of connections. So, you've got remarkable intensive and extensive growth in how people are connecting to the Internet and so how much, how much they're online and the range of things they're doing online. I have both grown very dramatically and of course COVID, the pandemic has played a major role in that.
So, on the one hand, you have that gradual evolution of the technology. On the other hand, you have this extraordinary explosion of demand. So, we you do not have a Wi-fi at the moment, which is necessarily dealing with this terribly. The sorts of problems that we talked about earlier that difficulties about managing network connections at home when children are online at school, when adults are working, when people are syncing photos, podcasts, everything else at the same time, when we're relying on this technology for social communication, connection and entertainment – it clearly that the entire system is under a good deal of pressure. Managing, yes. A much better than it might have been because of the NBN, certainly but under pressure, nevertheless.
So, there is change that is happening. And the other kind of critical trend which I think is congruent with this happening at the same time also enormously significant is a shift in how we are using these connected devices, so we no longer simply using our Wi-fi in order to connect to communication and information services. We're also increasingly using these systems for automated devices of the kind that are proliferating in households. I’ve mentioned many of them before, there's got an image there of a couple of smart speakers to give you a little idea of the kinds of things people now do with Wi-fi, which had rather different from the previous model of connecting a laptop to the web for the purposes of browsing for the purposes of email for the purposes of accessing of downloading files or applications.
So, it's a very different sort of sort of environment, but we're still using the old Wi-fi in order to try and do it.
So, the immediate strategies for the Wi-fi alliance and the companies behind the technology of Wi-fi and the IEEE standards processes around this, has been to develop the next generation of Wi-fi, which they call Wi-fi 6. They've rebranded Wi-fi brand and Wi-fi. In recent years in order to compete more effectively with cellular services. We're all familiar with the cellular typology of 3G, 4G, 5G. So, now Wi-fi has done the same thing. They've abandoned that complicated alphabet soup of different standards numbers and letters to go for something which is sensibly simpler, so they they've gone.
So, we now have Wi-fi 6, as I say a gradual evolution, but an interesting one in that it's intended to do a number of different things. It is of course designed to increase the bandwidth available to increase the perceived speed of services. It’s designed to manage that multiplicity of devices that are now connected much better than in the past. It's designed to improve security and it's designed to improve the energy use of devices, especially those that use batteries and more and more of them do.
It's designed also to attempt to develop some new domains and new technologies for Wi-fi. So places where in the past there hasn't been a lot of it, the idea is that in hospitals for example it may be that secure Wi-fi networks are used for automated systems through that, for the digital management of patients of systems behind them, the kinds of equipment that are required there, and also of course for patients themselves.
It's envisaged that Wi-fi could become increasingly important at live performance whether sport or other kinds of performance where people may want to watch and see things on a screen alongside live action. Clearly also advertising is likely to be involved in that.
So, they’re sort of immediate futures and we're already starting to see that sort of slightly improved version of Wi-Fi starting to appear. It it's more interesting is something else called Wi-fi 6E and trying not to get overly technical about this, but this goes back to the earlier discussion about spectrum allocation. What's happened here is that after very many years, the Federal Communications Commission in the United States has decided to allocate a substantial additional block of spectrum to their those unlicensed uses, which of course include Wi-fi so this is now being described by the Wi-fi Alliance as Wi-fi 6E, and is intent and is likely to increase the spectrum, the bandwidth available for Wi-fi at home and elsewhere, but around four times. So, this is partly also to address the kinds of problems we encounter with Wi-fi in our increasingly densely occupied urban environments, in blocks of apartments where people are living nearby each other and we're getting lots of interference across different Wi-fi networks on in mass transit and so on. This is an example of the kind of step change I was talking about that has the capacity and the potential to entirely change the kinds of things Wi-Fi can do.
There are a number of questions that arise out of those immediate futures that I think are challenging for the proponents of Wi-Fi. The Wi-fi Alliance has a slogan about the future of Wi-fi, which is about how Wi-fi is going to be, it's going to be everywhere. It's going to be for everyone, and it's going to do everything. That really needs to be picked apart a bit.
We’re seeing an increasingly complex relationship with cellular services and this plays out in many different ways. My colleagues Rowan Wilken and James Meese are beginning an ARC discovery project on the political economy and regulation of 5G and I think it'll be extraordinarily interesting to follow that work. Because of course 5G and 4G have both emerged as in many respects, preferred networks faster services than Wi-fi, more reliable in many cases. Clearly Wi-fi doesn't want to be seen perceived to be second best. And the whole idea of Wi-fi 6 and Wi-fi 6E is about competing with that brand, that 5G brand.
But the other point about this and this occurred to me actually a little while ago when we started writing this book about Wi-fi, the publishers sent it out to a few readers, and one of them wrote back saying ‘why are you bothering? Just write about 5G, that's really, all that matters now. Wi-fi is in the past.’ But when you explore this a little further, what we find is that Wi-fi isn't quite in the past, because in fact 5G and 4G are likely to make very substantial use of Wi-fi, and 4G already does. So, these are intertwined and interconnected services rather than simple competitors.
Some analysts, Cisco has reports suggesting that it could be that up to 70% mobile traffic on 4 and 5G networks may be offloaded to Wi-fi within the next couple of years because it's simply more economical and easier for them to do that when networks become congested than building their own surge capacity into purely 5G or 4G networks. That is an interesting coexistence there and co‑dependence. A lot of the technologies we find in Wi-fi 6 are actually also derived from those cellular technologies.
There are geopolitical dimensions. I've got a little map there you can see where 6E starting to happen and where it's not. It's very clear that in China and in some other countries, the argument is that spectrum which FCC wants to align to once given over to a spectrum commons ought to be sold to 5G carriers because that will be where the demand is. And there are also of course an ongoing series of questions about the relationships between Wi-fi and digital platforms and the platform economies that sustain them. Wi-fi was born before the big digital platforms as we know, that Apple Airport came out at a time when Google was about was one year old.
There seem to have been in fact, there have been various attempts to build platforms out of Wi-fi, particularly advertising supported ones, but apart from some isolated cases, that hasn't happened so far and Wi-fi remains a relatively adaptable ubiquitous and widely usable infrastructure that has not been captured by any single digital platform.
[44.21]
All of that raises, I guess my last set of questions which are really about what I would call the social futures of Wi-fi. What might it become if it is if it is shaped by policy and by design, not purely by commercial ideas or technical agendas closely associated with those?
I would say that in what looking at Wi-fi’s past, there have been examples of social futures at play. I think the Federal Communications Commission when it decided to allocate that spectrum for unlicensed use, was imagining a social, what we would call a social future, and certainly the vibrant community networking movement of the 2000s which drove the whole agenda around community and metropolitan Wi-fi participated in that sort of thinking. So, the question is now then, when we're seeing these more automated networks where Wi-Fi is no longer just about transmitting data, but also about generating it and using it in all sorts of different ways. How could Wi-Fi continue to support not just a basic infrastructure of basic data network, but also that key point that I talked about at the beginning, the distribute the redistribution of agency in an increasingly automated environment. So, I finished with one quick example of that Xing and then I hope we have time for questions. But coming back to the university as I said, universities have always played a critical role in Wi-Fi innovation, and faced enormous problems in terms of welcoming students back onto our campuses and managing risks for those people.
If you think about that quadrant of risk profiles I talked about earlier, what we're we all know that the people who are safe at home and have Wi-fi are fine, but when we have people who are coming onto campus, how can we manage this? So, I was interested in the work of colleagues at Melbourne University and Dethlefs and colleagues there who have written in the IEEE spectrum recently about ways which a university campus Wi-fi network could be used to show how people could be the movement of people across campuses could be used to make campuses safer for changing densities, identifying high risk zone, target cleaning and ventilation and so forth, encouraging social distancing. So, this seems like it could be the way forward of a Wi-fi we might want to see. A responsible use of this extraordinary technology which has both promised a great deal, delivered much and disappointed in equal measure, but responsible use that could help us rebuild our communities.
Thanks very much Xing. I’ll finish it there.
Q&A: Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Thank you very much Julian for fascinating talk, so while we are waiting for a question so much I just take that the privilege as a Chair to ask a few questions.
So, you mentioned the IEEE standard, if you look at the history you displayed how these standard it's was developed in a relatively peaceful period of time there is one country dominating all the technology. In my experience in the IEEE, you basically through quite democratic process have this kind of a common user come together to eventually develop standard so everybody share. I was wondering whether in the future these type of technologies that the development of the democratic process will be impacted by the confrontation of the superpowers. Because in the developing IEEE standard you see the domination of major vendors, they come here, they say that we want this standard, that's the whole or the product we produced. You have to follow so you do see some of the vendor domination but I'm just worried that in this new uncertain the word, so those kind of technologies which has benefited humankind would be sort of impacted, means that you would have a derivative from government say you're not supposed to use one, use this one so it's kind of a divided rather than united whole world together.
Response: Distinguished Professor Julian Thomas
I agree, and I think it is a really very significant risk. I think we're sort of seeing this a little bit already. We're seeing the emergence of a competing Wi-fi 6 developed and advocated for by Huawei which is using different part of the spectrum and has different kinds of features. As I say that I think Wi-fi 6E this new generation intended to use that new part of the spectrum. There is no international consensus yet that this is the future of Wi-fi. No international consensus in the sense of no global consensus, so we may the sort of splintering that you're talking about. The IEEE is fascinating. It has worked extraordinarily effectively in the circumstances you talked about, but I think actually, they are CSIRO cases were an example of how a particular source of innovation that which came from outside that group was very disruptive, and clearly there is the potential for a lot more of that in the future.
Question: Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
But how do you see this kind of Wi-fi technology drive, the narrow the gap between poor and the rich. Because you see the mixed messages, you see in Africa, in the remote area where there was no electricity, but they can do the communication right, they can phone, they just put the poles there, put a bit of battery, then they talk to each other. You’d think that probably that will narrow the gap.
But on the other hand, you see that urbanization, you know people moving to cities, how do you see those kind of technology driving this kind of social change? I mean, there's plus and negative thing, right?
Response: Distinguished Professor Julian Thomas
Absolutely there are, but I do think Wi-fi is a critical part of the mix, partly because it's so adaptable it's so low cost, and the critical thing I think is that it can be managed and to some degree controlled by communities themselves. So, for example, when we think about Wi-fi community networks in remote indigenous networks in Australia, and my colleague Ellie Rennie talks a little bit about these in the book, a critically important aspect of these is that to some extent, the communities may be able to manage these networks to control them themselves in ways which they may not be able to do with others. So, it's not just about providing the access, it's this point also that I was coming back to in the talk that what Wi-fi does or can do is redistribute agency and that is the that is the key, I think to the sort of social change that you're talking about. Giving people control of some of this technology and this is one way, it’s certainly not the only way, but one way in which they can do it. Yeah, for sure.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK, thanks Julian. I haven't seen any new question come along. It appears to be everybody is very happy with your talk and everybody questions about, yeah. So, if there's no further question, I think we're just about time with just a few minutes before the closing time. So, thank you very much, Julian for a fascinating talk and hopefully we listen to your talk in the future.
And also thank you everyone. So hopefully you will attend to the next distinguished lecture. So, thank you.
Distinguished Professor Julian Thomas
Thanks everybody, thank you very much Xing. Yeah thank you. Bye for now.
END
8 September 2021, presented by Distinguished Professor Julian Thomas
From café culture to home schooling, remote community networks, and smart cities, Wi-Fi is an invisible but fundamental element of contemporary life. Loosely regulated, low-cost, and largely overlooked by social researchers, this technology has driven the rise of the smartphone and broadband internet, and is now a vital element in the next wave of automation. During the pandemic, household Wi-Fi has been critically important for connected households, enabling new ways of working from home and maintaining social links.
At the same time, the closure of libraries, campuses and other public Wi-Fi locations has exacerbated disadvantage for people without ready access to the internet. This talk reviews the history of wi-fi, showing how a technology originally designed to connect cash registers came to play an important social role. It describes Wi-Fi’s immediate prospects, including its relations to high speed 5G cellular services, and its possible longer-run social futures, which may hinge upon its uniquely decentralised and inclusive capabilities for automation.
Transforming Australia's Biosolids Industry: advancing the next generation of waste
Transforming Australia's Biosolids Industry: advancing the next generation of waste
WELCOME – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Hello welcome everyone, I'm Xinghuo Yu, the Chair of RMIT’s Professorial Academy and the host of today's event.
Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the people Kulin Nations on whose unceded lands we are meeting on today and respectively acknowledge their elders past and present.
So, today we shall hear from Distinguished Professor Andy Ball, who will deliver his distinguished lecture on Transforming Australia's Biosolids Industry: advancing the next generation of waste. This is part of the activities of the Professorial Academy to fulfil its obligation as ambassador, advocator and thought leader for RMIT.
Before we start, we’ll just to go through some housekeeping things. This is a Teams Live event, so you will not be able to directly ask any questions by microphone. What you should do is please post your questions in the Q&A section during the lecture, so after the lecture I will pick up those popular questions to ask the presenter on your behalf.
Okay, let’s say a few words about Andy. Distinguished Professor Andy Ball has been active in research in the field of applied environmental microbiology since completing his PhD at Liverpool University in 1986. In addition to publishing over 300 scholarly publications and graduation over 70 PhD students, Andy has also developed commercial solutions for the remediation of contaminated environments, with three international patents. He has been awarded research grants and funding with a total value of over $22 M. Andy has held a number of prestigious fellowships and given over 220 keynote presentations both nationally and internationally.
Okay, without any further ado, please join me to welcome Andy to deliver her lecture. So, over to you Andy.
LECTURE: Distinguished Professor Andy Ball
Thank you very much Xing.
Thank you for that very kind introduction. I'm very honoured to be giving this presentation today. It is a great privilege to be a member of professoriate here at RMIT.
Today I'm going to talk to you about a project that really were being undertaking here at RMIT for the last 5 or 6 years. And it's about our waste stream or inorganic material that we really want to find continued use for as we go on in the future.
And so, it's about transforming Australia's biosolids industry and advancing that next generation of waste.
[3:11]
To give you a little preview of what I'll be talking about.
I’m going to be talking about what by solids are. It’ s a subject which not many people are aware of the term ‘biosolids’. In fact, interestingly, when we first were awarded the Training Centre, one of the branding people’s first questions were ‘do we really have to have biosolids in the title?’ It's something that I think needs some explanation and I'm going to get some help from my industry colleagues and particularly Southeast Water to explain that.
And then I'll turn my attention to explaining what are biosolids used for in Australia? What do we do with this product? I'll focus particularly on probably the biggest use, and that's the reuse of biosolids in agriculture. And then I'll highlight the threats which are potentially might affect the sustainable future of the agricultural application of biosolids. A really significant stage and really I reached the conclusion of the first part of the talk after point 4, and I hope at least some of the solution will be coming from point 5, and that's to introduce to you and say a little bit about the Australian Research Council Training Centre, The Transformation of Australia's Biosolids Resource, and say something about uniqueness. So that's my aim for the presentation and without further ado, I'll start with the first point.
[4.46]
And that is what are biosolids? Biosolids are defined as a stabilized sewage sludge.
[Dist. Prof Yu: Sorry, yes we only see a fraction of those presentations]
[Dist. Prof Ball: OK, let me see if I can. Hold on I may stop sharing for a second and improve the quality of. I will try redoing. OK.]
[Dist. Prof Yu: That's good.]
[Dist. Prof Ball: is that OK? Perfect. My apologies, I’m not sure what to what transpired]
[5.43]
To help me explain what biosolids are, I'm very pleased to have had the assistance of Southeast Water employee Andrew Gordon, and together with Aravind Surapaneni, who’s the Deputy Director of the Centre. I've been unable to take you there in person to a wastewater treatment plant, but I have some nice drone footage to try and explain to you what biosolids are and what stage their produce. This should at least give you some insight if you've never been to a wastewater treatment facility before.
[6.21]
So here we are, this is from a drone.
This is Mt Martha; a semi-rural wastewater treatment plant and you can see the drone flying over the main introduction. Some labels appear. So, this is where the main inlet comes - most of that water. On the right we have the aeration tanks and you can see the engine house, those microorganisms in the aeration which would destroy the organic material. On the left we have the primary sedimentation tanks and those both generates waste and solids. Then we finally get to clear water in a secondary clarifier, and again the solids from those three pre-process is or the basis of the biosolids that are produced.
This is Mt Martha and as the drone flies around here next area I can tell you it was constructed in 1978 is the main office. This Mt Martha plant treats 13 million litres of sewage every day. And we’re seeing all the sewage from the wastewater, from toilets and drains inside a building. Quite amazing, and to think that 99.97% of this water is just water – 0.3 is the actual concentration of other compounds present in water. So, as we can see, you can see it's our magnificent sight and it’s a site of the environmentally protected area.
We start to see one of the things that we use for the last stage of biosolids. These are
Solar Driers, affectively a greenhouse using the power of the sun to remove the moisture. 90% of biosolids is really moisture so if you’re going to transport it, you need to remove that quantity of water. So that's the last stage of the biosolids before, perhaps its application.
First of all, following all those primary and secondary sedimentation when you get like the clear water which is goes on for re use. All those solid materials in their water end up in these Drying Pans that you're beginning to see on the left-hand side here.
And this is where literally the biosolids are left to dry out in the sun. You can see the biosolids forming on the right-hand side. So, these are still sludge, which is beginning to be stabilized. And so, these Drying Pans take up large areas, but it's a rural site as you can see from some of the other footage, so it's quite a large area, so you can spread out that water. It's quite a shallow water, so you're trying to dry out as much of the water leaving behind that sewage as you possibly can.
And treating that much amount of water, 13 million litres a day of course, you're going to need quite a large area, so there's a whole series of lagoons here which are designed to to dry up those biosolids. So, they initially get some of that moisture out, so we try and remove that water from these particular plant sites.
And then finally we get to the area where biosolids are stored and that you see the top of the screen and the biosolids after drying. And there's some different ages, you can see plants growing up there on the left-hand side that have been stabilized. They will stay there for some 18 months to three years to prepare them for biosolids for other use.
[9.56]
So, you can see what 3% of all that waste amounts for a lot of biosolids, so you can imagine how that efficient that plant is, but to those who you who thought that the wastewater plants were very industrial, well it gives you a different side and shows you how much the water companies really invest in trying to get us an area that's as clean and pristine as possible.
Next question, how much biosolids do we produce? Well in Australia we produce 303,000 dry tonnes, which is actually just over 3 million wet tons of biosolids - and that was in 2010
That image of Australia and the right actually tells you shows you all the wastewater treatment plants around the country and you can see that there are focused in around main cities, but nevertheless you see them dispersed in central Australia and other areas, so we produce them in all of the states.
And on the left, that pie chart actually tells you where the main states for biosolid production. As you would expect it will be New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland and then smaller amounts in Western Australia and the ACT and Tasmania, and South Australia.
But nevertheless, we produce 303 dry tonnes per year to huge amount of bio mass. And where does it go? What happens to it is a key question?
[11.32]
So, what we use these biosolids for?
Well, 55% of all of our biosolids produced are put on agricultural land and I'll explain why that was in a second. 10% are used for composting, so if you go to Bunnings, sometimes some of the compost you buy there will have biosolids as a component of the composting process.
So, a little more is used in forestry. Unfortunately, some is still sent to landfill, which is something we really want to stop as we no longer really put that biosolids in the sea that was prevented some years ago. We really want to divert all of this organic weight or material away from landfill. And as you saw, those stockpiles, 23% is stockpiled because once we drain it and we dry it, we need to remove some of the pathogens that may be there. And of course, there are very strict guidelines how we prepare that material for reuse. And that includes looking at levels of contaminants and also pathogens, so it's very well-regulated industry. That’s ready for reuse.
So that's what biosolids are used for, by far the most, if you include agriculture and composting together, almost two thirds of all biosolids will go onto the land. And that's a very important role that it plays and it's about a sustainable role.
[13.09]
So, the reuse of these biosolids in Australia in agriculture. You see on the left the biosolids piles, the right it's being spread on the land. It's a significant opportunity and benefits and in the time of closing loops and circular economies it seems to make perfect sense that all the carbon and the nutrients bound up in these biosolids should be used to close that loop and be used for agriculture. and that agriculture urban nutrient cycle.
[13.50]
So, it seems to be a very appropriate application and why is it so useful? If we look at the next slide we will see that this is the use of fertilizers in Australia over the last several years.
You will see that green line is there's the amount the top line is amounting nitrogen. And nitrogen is a compound which is generally limiting in environments. It's the inhibitor that stops lots of organisms growing and changing that ecology. So, in growth in soils, the additional nitrogen will generally along with phosphorus and potassium, increase the yield of plants which in a fertiliser, in a crop system is of course what we've been trying to do. So, you can see there's more and more demand particularly for nitrogen in our environment. And of course, nitrogen is always very limited in naturally on the planet and especially the main form of nitrogen is nitrogen gas, which is not available for almost all organisms. There's just a few organisms which are able to assimilate nitrogen fixed nitrogen. So, the ability, nitrates and ammonia haven't been around in nature for a long time, so we have to be very careful how we add that nitrogen, so we don't cause any imbalances in our ecosystem.
But nevertheless, there is a great demand in Australia for nitrogen compounds and nutrients in general to improve crop yields. So, there's a big demand for fertilizers and isolates.
[15.30]
So, if we look at what is in a normal biosolids, that material you saw, you'll see that first of all things like nitrogen are present. Phosphorus, potassium the things we just highlighted in the previous slide, along with lots of other trace elements which are required for growth of plants and other organisms - Sulphur, copper, selenium, zinc, calcium magnesium, are all present.
Couple to that, pH is generally neutral so it's not going to cause a problem when you add it to the soil. And importantly, the organic carbon content is between 5 and 35%. So, considering us
Australian soils are very organic or poor in organic carbon down to 1 or 2%, the addition of organic carbon is really crucial step and normal fertilizers of course don't do that. They don't have an organic carbon function, but biosolids do.
So, when you compare their major nutrients in the right you'll see its nitrogen 2 to 6%, phosphorus up to 4%, potassium up to 0.75, and sulphur 3.5.
Does that make it a perfect fertilizer? No, is the answer. If you look at the normal fertilizer that you can produce chemically, then the nitrogen content is much higher, up to 46%. Phosphorus 22% and potassium 50% and sulphur 25. So, those compositions in traditional chemical fertilizers are perhaps very different than those you find in biosolids, but that's the same as most other animal-based manures. I'm sure many of us would add the dynamic lifter which is chicken manure or cow manure or even horse manure to gardens and they have very similar nutrient concentrations to biosolids. It probably doesn't surprise you because it comes through essentially in the same mammalian systems.
So, it's not a direct replacement for fertilizer, but it certainly has an important role to play in Australian agriculture and that organic carbon is really important. That talk gives what gives the soil a rich dark feature much like the biosolids itself.
So, for many, many reasons, biosolids is a very important addition, closing that loop, reducing our requirement for chemical fertilizers which are also are high energy processes, demanding processes, so we reduce our greenhouse gas footprint.
So, things look really good for why biosolids should be used. But there are threats.
[18.37]
And so, the reuse of biosolids has come under increasing threat in the last decade or so. And that's because along with those biosolids with those nutrients we find other products, we find metals.
We find organic compounds, pathogens of course, even nano-materials that are present in biosolids, which may present a potential hazards. And that will require assessment to predict and manage those risks and public perception about the quality of these materials.
Of course, it comes as no surprise whatever we use as a society we will of course find its way into our biosolids. It will pass through us or anything, we wash our clothes, or when you use the bathroom, the toilet will all be washed into the sewage which will go to the material and anything solid, well end up in this fraction.
So, it's not, it's really an indictment of what society is using, and I think your longer term we may want to look at those and we are starting to stop some of the use of the materials that are potential hazards.
[19.55]
But nonetheless, in biosolids or a series of products emerging pollutants that are present which are starting people, environmental regulatory agencies, are starting to question the potential sustainability of adding this material back to the soil.
So, we're looking at milligrams or kilograms of dry weight of biosolids, so it's relatively small concentrations but, nonetheless. They’re broken down on this figure as persistent organic pollutants in the blue. All chemicals that we find to moisturizers. And in our shampoos and then a whole variety of personal care products which are related to triclocarban toothpaste through to musks, and or antibiotics, all find their way there.
You can see that we find them all. Everything we're looking for we find. So polychlorinated aromatics, the first thing that blew his party to highest concentration. But you see quaternary ammonium compounds, QACs, poly biphenyls, sorry polybrominated compounds (PDBEs), which are present in furniture as an anti-flame retardant. We have polychlorinated naphthalene’s (PCN's), a polyfluorinated compounds, again in firefighting foam, which is something which is very topical at the moment.
We can see that we get a lot of compounds persistent organic pollutants. Their very name tells you that they don't breakdown readily, they go through the wastewater treatment plans in large quantities, relatively large. So, we certainly don't want them going through the food chain.
High concentrations of personal care products. So, anything we’re using in the shower, in the bath is going to find their way through there.
And of course, very low concentrations of some of these other compounds. But nevertheless, they have raised concern.
So, this is the threat these emerging pollutants are causing a lot of controversy in questioning about the sustainability of this really vital product.
[22.19]
So, back to biosolids and the reuse program. There's increasing scrutiny of these contaminants, additions to agricultural land. And this is not just unique to Australia, this is a global situation, global discussion.
Public regulatory concern is rising regarding these persistent chemicals. PFAS, these polyfluorinated compounds is at the moment centre stage in Australia because it's both persistent and mobile, and potentially carcinogenic. So, these firefighting foams with Teflon all coming or all PFAS compounds, and are cause for concern, and found in our biosolids.
The likelihood is there's going to be revision of fire solid guidelines by a number of regulatory agencies.
New National Environmental Protection Ecological Investigation concentrations. This whole new development could be applied to develop, revise biosolid guidelines which pick out some of these compounds of concern and will put limits on the application to agricultural land based around their concentration some of these pollutants.
So, we really do need nationally and internationally. We need to train to research and develop biosolids reuse so we can move forward as a biosolids industry and find a potential reuse.
So that's really the conclusion of my first part of my talk, and now I offer some way towards a solution.
[24.03]
And that of course, is the introduction of the ARC, Australian Research Council Training Centre for the transformation of Australia's biosolids resource. This is based at RMIT Bundoora, we’re in the first year and it is a five-year program. And it's the objective of this centre, it's about knowledge building capability. We're looking forward to the future of the biosolids industry and training the next generation of researchers who we hope will be the leaders, not just in research, but in the whole of the industry and will be across these multi disciplinary issues and play a role in resolving them.
So hopefully that will be the next management level of the industry and getting biosolids industry ready for the future. I'm sure legislation will be becoming increasingly stringent. We have to find new solutions. So that capacity and knowledge building is really fundamental to this training centre.
Of course, this research development so many of the industries are, have existing issues and it brought them forward through the process of application. So, we need a fully implemented interdisciplinary program over the five years that develops cost effective, obviously socially and environmentally viable sustainable solutions for managing biosolids. It's not t going to go away but predicted to increase with the population here in Australia. So, it's about finding every use.
I should say that this is, to the best of our knowledge, it's a unique centre. It is the only biosolids centre in the world, so although it's a global issue and we talk a lot with our international partners we hope that this will be the world's focus for biosolids resourcing developing solutions.
The third area is about sustainable strategic partnerships. We have some fantastic engagement with industry, with government, with stakeholders about research, development and technology. We're going to resolve these emerging issues in the next 5 years. We're not going to answer all the questions, but we really hope to address some of the key ones, and perhaps find a way for the centre to move beyond the next five years. So, it’s a really exciting challenge, really exciting time and I think we've got a great program of research. I'll just alluded to a few of these things for the areas and a great team, which I'll introduce at the very end.
[26.40]
So, this is the transforming biosolids, we did manage to keep the term biosolids through our branding, exercise and you'll see our logo on the left-hand side there.
And really, it's advancing fundamental and translational biosolids research, we want to train knew industry-ready researchers. We want to develop new applications and new market opportunities in the Australian biosolids industry. At the moment biosolid are an expensive product for the water industry to produce – if they give it to agriculture, they tend to get very little money for it. And so, it's certainly costs the water industry, the water corporations a lot of money and of course that means that all of us who pay our water bills and sewage rates also paid for these biosolids. It’s in the national interest to develop some solutions which perhaps leads to a value adding to this biosolids.
And we have three main research theme. One is improving the technologies; can we make a better product? Secondly, can we can we enhance the product, applications, can we find new uses for biosolids? And thirdly, and finally ensuring sustainability and we don't just mean that it's safe to use but also we need to think about social acceptance.
I alluded to before the fact that we would all use a cow manure or a chicken manure on our garden without thinking about it, we we've had buy a bag of at Bunnings. But if it was biosolids from humans, then of course that's a whole different perception in a very different thought process and of course, although they contain almost the same nutrients that origin of course they've been stabilized, it's still that question. So, we really have to address that in the Centre too. So, it's not just about engineering or science, but we need social science as well, so we've incorporated all that into our three themes. Below as a whole series of links to the Biosolids Centre that were developed through the website or through LinkedIn and Instagram, and Twitter, so we're trying to communicate to everybody to try not to try and get people to understand what biosolids are, and perhaps that once they understand the process, how they developed safety of the product and perhaps it'll start to gain acceptance.
[29.23]
So, let's have a little look in detail about the improving the three areas of the Centre.
These projects are just starting, we've been really fortunate enough to start hiring our post docs and our PhD students, so the projects are literally starting as we speak.
In terms of improving those technologies were looking at existing but also alternative ways of preparing a biosolids.
Improving existing treatment processes, can we make better product based on what we're doing so far? As well as finding whole new technologies to prepare the biosolids.
Some of the issues with biosolids for agriculture and the fact that you saw that material, it's wet 90% moisture as it starts, so you certainly don't want to be like Clean Away or Veolia or Sewers who are transporting could be transporting mostly water and that's expensive. So, can we make something with lower volumes and high nutrient capacity, so we get a high value product like a fertilizer.
We look at processing like anaerobic digesters, and advancement methods to help drying, hydrolysing, producing off-gases and liquefaction, hydrothermal liquefaction, so whole new product's energy production biochar formation from the biosolids. So, completely transforming some of the approaches to biosolid reuse.
This is of course something near and very close to a lot of water industries heart. It's very expensive. You saw the land that you need, so if you're storing biosolids, it's very expensive to keep finding land to store those biosolids, and that's what their water industry is facing with increasing legislation. So that's the rationale for why we have so much industry support.
So really thinking about technical commercial potential, but not just for everyone, just for an urban or city-based water treatment processes, but for the whole set, image of all those 280 wastewater treatment plants, we need to find solutions for as many of those as we can. So urban versus regional.
[31.48]
That's a tall order, but we have a great team of people. What we think about what sort of a product should look like?
So obviously we want it to be stable. It should be low in contaminant concentration and it should be spreadable using existing technologies.
But now we want to make it very low moisture, we want to improve the nutrient concentration, so it becomes much more like a fertilizer. We need to control those contaminants. Odour is a very big issue and of course it's the biggest complaint that wastewater treatment plants have received, or the regulatory agencies received from wastewater treatment plants. So, reducing the odour in the biosolids is important process and of course making it sustainable and safe as we go forward.
So that's, we have very good ideas and we have farmers who are part of our Centre too as well as transporters, fertilizer companies, composters, all part of what we're what we're preparing.
So, it's the whole of the industry, which is quite unique in the Training Centre. It really is focused on the biosolids chain.
[33.09]
Improving technologies. Well, in total, we’re invested, or $4 million are invested in this particular theme. We have 12 industry partners and four or Australian International University partners.
And this image is one of one of the new approaches, and this was, this is RMIT patented technology developed by Deputy Director Kalpit Shar and that's some of the core equipment that will be placed in that image on the right-hand side. Those of you that know Bundoora, this is building 211. And this is where the pilot scale biosolids facility will be built, which is part of the Biosolids Centre. So, that's will be ready in the next two months will be able to house pilot plant materials, pilot plant equipment developed here at RMIT, patented RMIT technology and allow industry to assess its suitability as we go forward for biosolids reuse. So really exciting times For RMIT and Bundoora and the Biosolids Centre. So, that will be opening within and the couple of months and very excited to get that and had a great deal of support from RMIT to get to that stage despite all the issues surrounding COVID.
[34.38]
The second thing is about enhancing product applications. So, can we Can we transform biosolids system novel fertilizers? Advanced materials for farmers. So almost are customized fertilizers for specific crops, so we could make a specialized product out of deferred lenses using new technologies. and in doing so we can develop more sustainable water treatment systems on farming systems by closing that carbon nutrient cycle.
Really, again, we really want the agricultural industry in Australia to continue using these biosolids. We understand there are some issues and we have to solve those issues to allow agriculture to continue. I think I roundabout, there's very few countries in the world that use biosolids for agriculture in the amounts that we use in agriculture here. So, we’re a world leader in this particular aspect and we hope through the Centre to continue to do so.
Yeah, this theme, we have $4.6 million, we have our 11 industry partners and three university partners at introduce you to them very soon as we reached the final few minutes of the. presentation.
[36.02]
As you saw before, that one of the big issues that the nitrogen and phosphorus content in the ratio, is it is still a little too low for most agricultural crops, so we have a lot of phosphorus in our wastewater, in our biosolids, therefore. We prefer or crops prefer, more nitrogen than phosphorus. So, we have to change that. So, we have to manipulate the biosolids and that as we go forward will create a higher nitrogen to phosphorus ratio and that would be, allow us several advantages.
We'll be able to reduce the biosolid application rates because at the moment to satisfy the amount of nitrogen required we have to have a lot more biosolids and therefore a lot more phosphorus than we really should, so by equalling out that ratio we will have the perfect amount. That will mean environmentally sustainable, because we're not releasing excess nutrients into the soil, and therefore perhaps into the groundwater, drinking waters into receiving waters and leading to process is like nutrification, so it's great for the agricultural industry.
And of course, we're adding the organic matter back into the soil, creating that rich stable soil which can absorb and maintain higher moisture contents.
We want to reduce those contaminant loading. I come back to that’s a key component. Yeah, microplastics, something I haven't mentioned, but that's also something that is finding its way into biosolids. Anything we use in society will be in biosolids.
Making it easier to spread. So, the moment that got powder that soil black is difficult to spread using conventional farming equipment. We need to improve that to make it easier for farmers to spread and to increase that grower acceptance. And one of the ways is perhaps by moving to co-granulation or a compaction, or a pelletisation process where we're blending biosolids with other nutrients to get the right ratio, and in that little image at the bottom will see Barwon waters pelletized product, which is much easier to spread, so we've already got some process and some progress on the way that we can move to enhance the product application.
[38.33]
Finally ensuring sustainability. No matter what we do, we have to be sustainable and we have to convince people that is a safe and good product to use - mass crucial.
So, this is considering a number of topics central to the implementation of any improved management that we come up with. It involves environmental protection agencies, so we can talk about regulations. Can we have national guidelines? Involving environmental agencies in every step of the way and that we should enhance our opportunities for getting any legislation, any agreement on a way forward.
We need to improve community acceptance. It's every water company, every regulatory agency accepts this, we need to be better at communications to the community, and we're doing that as. we can with the Biosolids Centre
We need to develop national guidelines as I said then a framework for evidence-based risk assessment. And it's all of biosolids under any products that we meet and measure public perception of these benefits of biosolid transformation. Really, we need to have social acceptability before this is going to be a product that can be value added to the water industry.
Again, 5.7 million cash here 12 industry partners and five Australian and international partners. And they said this isn't unique facility Centre, globally, so we've attracted a lot of attention and a lot of experts from around the world have. I've joined us.
[40.14]
So, as I move towards the end, I just want to highlight some of the acknowledgements and the key team and the cool management team are really set up by as I said, Deputy Director for Academic, which is Kalpit Shar here at RMIT. We have deputy director from industry, we felt it so important to engage industry, we have a lot of industry partners, you'll see that we seconded Aravind Surapaneni from Southeast Water for two days a week for the life of the Centre and he's been instrumental in really making sure that we're addressing industry requirements.
I'm really fortunate enough to have a Centre manager, again, RMIT were very helpful in creating this position, and Elissa McElroy is taking that Centre Manager. These three are really at the engine house supported by our three theme leaders, Damian Batstone from University of Queensland, who is in charge of theme one. Megan Ryan from University of Western Australia is looking at theme two, and Richard Stuetz from University of New South Wales, who's in charge of theme three.
We have a lot of CI's and I mentioned the two from RMIT, Dr Sarvesh Soni and Professor Lauren Rickards, who are both playing different roles but crucial roles in making sure that our projects are running on time and alongside the requirements of industry. Lauren's very much involved in that social side, social acceptance and looking at energetics and greenhouse gas emissions from those products.
[42.03]
So, our 10 projects are distinct projects but the all interlinked through those three research themes. We have a fantastic strategic advisory committee who really sit above us and tell us what's going on and where we should be. Training committees, communication, all these things are crucial. We're just organizing our first annual symposium at this moment and together with a launch, so hoping to launch in July when we’d really like the Minister for Education to come to Bundoora and open up the same times of our symposium. So very important here that I'm coming up.
[52.48]
And finally, acknowledgements, you can see all of the universities. Arizona, Imperial College, our international partners, the water industry has been sensational across Australia, and those in blue there, the light blue, are members who have just come to join us since we've started, so we're growing. Andrew Gordon, thank him for that drone image to help me explain what wire sides are and lastly thank you all very much for your attention. Thank you.
Q&A – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Thank you very much indeed for fascinating talk. We've got a few questions here, so you might just provide some response. The first question so what do you think is the source of pathogens found in the file solids?
Response: Distinguished Professor Andy Ball
OK, so that's obviously the main sources from faecal material, so from households a lot of faecal material and a third of the weight of faecal material are bacteria. And of course, many of them are very important commensals to us, we require these organisms, but of course we do have pathogens that travel through us, be that viruses, be that bacteria, eukaryotic organisms’ worms, for example, and so by far and away it's coming from human intestinal systems.
But of course, might also come from dogs, cat faeces and another animal faeces so far and away it is faecal material. That is that the key provider of the high number of pathogens that we find.
Question: Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK, thanks, Andy, here's another one. This is a long one so bear with me. A residual is obviously always expensive to trade after any wastewater purification processes, including brine treatment. In the past, it has been some resistance from water authorities, including Melbourne Water Barwon water to invest in an anaerobic systems for biosolids treatment under stabilisation. What is your view regarding most effective treatment system which have short treatment time and small footprints and indeed low energy consumption for treatment?
Response: Distinguished Professor Andy Ball
Thank you, I think I've got that question. Thank you Xing.
Anaerobic digestion is something that's it's a key area of one of our projects that I'm involved in and looking at the problems associated anaerobic digestion, but in terms of reducing the volume of biosolids, you obtain a renewable energy be biomethane or even as well looking at now biohydrogen and volatile fatty acids, it is an extremely effective a way of capturing energy from biosolids and transforming that product into a recalcitrant material, benign killing pathogens. So, I'm very much in favour of aerobic digestion
systems. I think they're going to evolve in the next 20 or 30 years. I think toward industry will look at the product side just came from most products, but of course, in the image I showed you from Mount Martha, this is our a rural sight and so without a solid component of a point 3% it's not enough to get a functional anaerobic digester there, so they are very much small footprint but usually used most beneficial where you've got a high throughput. Rural systems depend on those lagoon systems which I agree I'm not ideal and perhaps there is a way of moving those systems on anaerobic digestion would be a very effective way going forward and I hope some of our research will develop new value added products from anaerobic digestion precursors for plastics is one area we can produce volatile fatty acids which are fantastic precursors by manipulating the microbial system. So, I'm hoping will offer solutions for not just urban but rural use of anaerobic digestion as we go forward.
Question: Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK, thanks Andy.
To what extent do you think converting biosolids to biochar can solve the contaminant problems faced?
Response: Distinguished Professor Andy Ball
So, I think the research done by an RMIT person Kalpit Shar has shown that actually through biochar process that he's developed and RMIT patented. The levels of contaminants are significantly lower and if not illuminated by biochar process that he developed. And those that are still there appear to be non-biologically available, so they're locked in the char and therefore it appears that they might be a very useful product to reduce and even remove that some of those pathogens. Of course, this is early stages, we need to do more field trials, more research to look at that, but I think biochar is one solution. I don't think it is the solution and many others that we need to develop so that's why we're not reliant on one technology, but we're trying to look at the different requirements of the water industry. and biochar production is certainly one aspect that is gaining significant traction with the water industry at the moment.
Question: Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
I just have a couple of questions myself just from I'm an electrical engineer, so this is absolutely new fields to me. I'm just wondering, we know the environment impact how to process in those kind of biosolids. But what are the usual the business model? Are they sort of usually the government owned entities or are the privately-owned entities and are there those kind of cost benefit? Usually there's the issue of course with those kind of different model the impact on the quality of products.
Response: Distinguished Professor Andy Ball
Yes, so these water companies are state owned, the water corporations. So no, they have a duty to carry out all of these tasks and are funded from the State Government there, which consequently means that such as biosolids centres like this, these water industries are not competing against each other, which is really important where there's a great collegiality about the interactions of the water industry, and I think that's really born out in this Centre in the fact that, for example, you have 6 new companies from Tasmania from the ACT Icon Water, Sydney, NSW are joining us. That only leaves us with the Northern Territory to really try to get somebody on board and then we've covered every state. That to me tells you a lot about the water industry and how collegial it is.
Question: Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
How do we benchmark against the international other countries? Are we I mean, we all know that our water is pretty safe, you can drink from the tap water, but if you benchmark Australians, how do you rate it? I mean who is the best?
Response: Distinguished Professor Andy Ball
I think Australia would be right up there, I think in the last 10 or 20 years then I think European Union have funded a lot of research into developing new technologies because of course by 2050 Europe and these all these water corporations must be carbon neutral so they've really looked at the future and that's why we're trying to bring some of that knowledge to this Centre because I think in the future they will they have probably done a lot more research, but at this moment in time.US, Europe, and perhaps so I've got more research and but in terms of the legislation, Australia is right up there in terms of the highest quality of the water, and I think with this Centre we really hope to make it a focus for the biosolids research in global phenomenon.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK, thank you very much. It's just a very trivial question why water taste different in Melbourne and Brisbane. They all have slightly different taste; is it that because of the thing that geographically.
Distinguished Professor Andy Ball
Yes, you're quite right and anybody is so when I first arrived in Australia I found myself in Adelaide and that water was actually coloured quite yellow because of the hemic substances. So it's very much a reflection of perhaps the groundwater that it's come from or the rocks that reservoirs are stored the basis for a reservoir. So yes, there is a very much flavour from the local topography there. The structure of the rocks, yes, so you will see some variations that they're actually tiny when you look at the analysis. I mean, they're almost identical, but very small tastes, our palate is very partial to picking up and detecting differences.
Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK, thank you very much I can see, I don't think there's any more questions on we’re are already close to the end of the lecture. So, on behalf of everybody thank you very much Andy for fascinating talk.
And thank you everyone for attending and we hope to see you in the next lecture. Thank you very much
RESPONSE: Distinguished Professor Andy Ball
Thank you very much. Thank you everybody. Have a great day.
25 May 2021, presented by Distinguished Professor Andy Ball
The ARC Training Centre for the Transformation of Australia’s Biosolids Resource, based at RMIT’s West Bundoora Campus, brings together Australia’s leading biosolids researchers and key industry and government stakeholders to advance the management, transformation and reuse of biosolids in agriculture.
The Centre's focus is 1) capability and knowledge building, 2) research development, extension and training, and 3) sustainable strategic partnerships.
The expected outcomes of the Centre are to develop a group of new, highly-trained industry-ready researchers, and advanced solutions in three major themes: improved technologies, enhanced products, and sustainability. This will provide significant benefits in the economic value of new applications and market opportunities as well as deliver cost-savings – all in an environmentally friendly manner. This presentation will examine the rationale and expectations of the 5-year research and training program.
Managing workers’ health and safety in complex supply networks: The construction industry experience
Managing workers’ health and safety in complex supply networks: The construction industry experience
WELCOME – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Hello welcome everyone, I'm Xinghuo Yu, the Chair of RMIT’s Professorial Academy and the host of today's event.
Firstly, I would like to make an acknowledgement, next slide please.
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University.
RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business.
So, today we shall hear from Distinguished Professor Helen Lingard, who will deliver her distinguished lecture on Managing workers’ health and safety in complex supply networks: The construction industry experience. This is actually part of the activities of the Professorial Academy to fulfil its obligation as ambassador, advocator and thought leader for RMIT.
Before we start, we’ll just to go through some housekeeping matters. This is a Teams Live event, so you will not be able to directly ask any questions directly by microphone however, if you will be able to post any questions in the Q&A section and at the end of the lecture I will pick up the popular questions to ask the presenter on your behalf.
Okay, let’s get to the lecture start. Firstly, I would like to introduce our speaker, Distinguished Professor Helen Lingard, who started her career working for a contracting organisation in the civil engineering/construction sector in Hong Kong. Since moving to Australia, Helen has worked extensively as a consultant to organisations in the mining, construction and telecommunications industries. She is currently working with government and industry leaders in the development of an industry standard to improve worker hours, gender diversity and health in the construction industry.
So, without any delay, please join me to welcome Helen to deliver her lecture. Helen over to you.
LECTURE: Distinguished Professor Helen Lingard
Thank you Xing. It’s my pleasure to be here speaking to you today.
Thank you Xing. It’s my pleasure to be here speaking to you today.
Talk about today's topic at today's talk is managing work, health and safety in complex supply networks particularly looking at the construction industry experience. And this is important because the construction industry has some particular characteristics that can impact work, health and safety that make it a little bit different from other industry contexts. Therefore, there's a need to understand these characteristics in order to make sure that more integrated and effective health and safety management processes are implemented across this complex supply network.
Event support: Helen, I'm terribly sorry to interrupt you would you mind sharing your slides please?
HL: My apologies, I thought I already had; bear with me. I will go back. [mouse clicks] Is that sharing?
Event support: Yeah, just get you to go into presentation mode.
HL: of course; there we are
I'd like to acknowledge that this work isn't all done by me and that I have a wonderful team of researchers who work for me and with me. And this team of researchers includes these people you see before you, so they’re the team as of 2021. But I'd also like to acknowledge that some of the research I'm going to talk about today is work that has involved lots of other different people along the way, so I want to acknowledge that this is a team effort and my research is always conducted in teams.
[4.27]
The Australian construction industry is economically and socially very significant. It generates over $360 billion in revenue each year and produces 9% of Australia's gross domestic product. It employs 1.2 million people and currently we're seeing an unprecedented boom in infrastructure construction.
The construction is resupply network is complex. It includes manufacturing of materials, equipment, and components; services, including engineering design surveying, consulting and lease management; and then traditional construction trades. The ability to deliver the pipeline of projects, that I just mentioned before, is dependent on the industry being able to attract new workers and sustain a healthy and productive workforce - which makes work health and safety really important strategically to the industry.
[5:15]
The industry's health and safety performance is relatively poor compared to other sectors. The construction industry accounts for 9% of the workforce, but 12% of work-related fatalities. About 12,000 Workers compensation claims are accepted from the industry each year, which equates to 35 serious claims every day. More concerningly, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics Work-related Injury Survey data, the construction industry has four times the ‘all industries’ percentage of workers who have not returned to work following their injuries, so the construction industry percentage is 12% compared with 3% for all other industries. Which is concerning because that means potentially up to 1,512 injured construction workers each year may not return to work.
[6:06]
A more insidious problem, or an insidious problem experienced by the industry is the state of mental health within the industry. It's alarming to read the statistics relating to suicide among construction workers. So, the Australian construction workforce, if you’re an Australian construction worker, you're six times more likely to die by suicide than as the result of a work-related accident. And construction apprentices are particularly vulnerable, two and a half times more likely to suicide compared to other young men their age. We have a serious problem in the industry that is different from the safety problem around work as mental health and particularly the high rate of suicide.
[6:52]
Now the industry characteristics are worth commenting on here. The industry is one of the worst performing industries for gender equality, so women make up only 11% of the entire construction workforce, and only 1% of construction trades-based workers. And work is often physically and psychologically demanding, hours in the construction industry, particularly in project-based work, are very long. Workers suffer high rates of musculoskeletal injury, particularly manual and non-managerial workers. You can get a sense of what working in the construction industry can be like looking at this picture on the right, which shows a man doing some shotcreting. Shotcreting is basically a pressurized hose through which pressurized concrete is being pumped and he's supporting his over his right shoulder. Now, that puts a lot of strain on his body physically, but the hose, as he has to drag it to move along during this process, increases up physical load and that physical burden. And when we when we looked at this particular task as part of a study that we did, which I'll talk about it in more detail later on, we looked at this father and son team who are doing this work. And importantly the son is expected to experience bodily pain like his father felt in his working life. And there was an acceptance that was just part and parcel of doing this job.
[8:20]
So, the question is I guess, is the opportunity to improve and is the industry, really optimizing those opportunities to improve and seizing those opportunities? So, here's an example of an alternative method of doing that shotcreting activity, which involves a mechanized approach, and the operator stands and a user mechanized method of applying that shotcrete. This is used in other industries such as mining and my question, is this something that the construction industry should be challenging a little bit more in terms of some of the more traditional ways of working?
[8.56]
So, to the supply network and its characteristics. Constructions delivered in projects and projects by their nature a temporary management organization. So, a lot of different groups and people and contributors will come together across the life cycle of a project and work together just for the duration of that project. And then they'll disassemble at the end of the project and move on to the next project. So, people working in these projects are also embedded both in their own parent organisations and they’re also involved in the project-based work.
The organisations in the supply network are connected to one another in many different ways. And importantly organisations can actually be collaborators in one context and competitors in the other. So, you can see how the supply network complexities can play out.
The commercial relationships in the delivery of projects are often short term and arms-length. The industry relies heavily on competitive tendering and often the lowest price wins. It involves a multi-tiered subcontracting system as well, so work is subcontracted out to other companies to deliver certain components of the project. And within that whole environment, the arms-length nature of those commercial relationships makes achieving cultural alignment very difficult. A number of scholars have written about this and it applies to many different aspects of project performance not least, health and safety performance, which requires a high level of cultural alignment.
[10:31]
Just to give you a sense of the complexity and this is a complicated diagram and I don't expect you'll be able to read it in its entirety, but it relates to a piece of work that we did recently on behalf of the Centre for Work. Health and Safety in the New South Wales government. They asked us to do a qualitative investigation of looking at what are the factors that contributes a crane safety incidents in the construction industry. Now, obviously when crane safety incidents occur, they can be very, very serious indeed. And so, there's a real interest in how those incidents can be presented.
Having done a lot of focus groups and interviews with construction companies, with crane operators with clients, with regulators, and other industry participants and stakeholders, this diagram shows all the factors that were actually identified as being potentially relevant to crane safety incidents. And you can see that those factors operate at different levels. So, we have originating influences which relate to the commercial factors, to the regulatory factors, to factors around how well training and competency issues are managed, and the shortage of skilled workers in the industry, and other broader industry level phenomena.
And then the next level down is shaping factors which occur at the construction project level things like the extent to which crane operations are planned, the extent to which people are under pressure to get the job done, the extent to which work hours are very long, and standardized processes, and so on and so forth. supervision comes in there as well. And then the immediate circumstances which are the closest to the actual incident themselves, can be things related to workers behaviours, not following manufacturer’s instructions, maybe lapsing of concentration, materials may be using a crane that's too small for the task being performed. And then physical site factors like lighting, soil conditions, wind and weather, and so forth.
So, this just gives you a sense of just how complicated the construction industry is and how many different factors can actually contribute it to incident sort of things going wrong. And if that what's even more interesting I think about this is that the interaction of factors at different levels can in fact have a cumulative effect and create conditions in which serious safety incidents can occur. So, within this supply network complexity in this complex industry structure we need to be mindful of a lot of things.
[13:06]
To give you some policy context, the Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy in 2012 to 2022, identifies two priority action areas, both of which I want to touch on today because some of our research deals with both of these areas. The first one of those areas is actually a priority action area around improving work health and safety through supply chains and networks. So, critically very important and relevant to what we're talking about today.
Importantly, in that particular priority action area, they talk about the cumulative impact of different things that happen within complex supply networks that can actually create the conditions which give rise to safety and health issues; and commercial relationships critically important. And it also talks about the need for industry leaders to champion work, health and safety in supply networks. I'd like to acknowledge the work of particularly a number of public sector clients’ organizations in the construction industry who are really driving a lot of activity around championing and leading change in the projects they procure. Again, I'll talk a little bit about that as we as we get into the presentation
The other priority action area I want to highlight is that hazards should be illuminated or minimized by design. This is the idea that we shouldn't wait for things to emerge on site and become apparent as problems. We should actually look upstream when we're making decisions about the design of structures, the design of plant, the design of substances and the design of work and work processes and systems, to actually eliminate hazards wherever possible or reduce them by design decisions so that they don't manifest as health and safety problems in the workplace.
[14:55]
Now, I mentioned that there are some real leaders in public sector clients’ organisations in this work, health and safety space. Just by way of definition in construction, a client is the entity, individual or organization who the commissions and funds a project either directly or indirectly. So, if you like they’re the project sponsor, they’re the people who are buying the services of the construction industry.
In 2009, there was a big review of the causes of construction fatalities in the UK undertaken by Rita Donaghy. She concluded that public procurement is important because of its size and because of its potential for insisting on driving up standards including health and safety. Importantly, when clients have a considerable volume of construction work, that they're engaging in, they’re actually in an even stronger position to initiate major improvements in the supply network, than when they engage in single one-off projects. Which is great because that shows what significant opportunities currently available given the large construction programs of work currently underway in Australia. We see organizations like the Victorian Government Major Transport Infrastructure Authority establishing a very strong vision to provide a safe workplace, prevent harm, care for everyone affected by their projects, and deliver transport infrastructure projects that achieve world class construction safety performance.
In New South Wales, Sydney Metro has developed a health and safety model which establishes principles of working and expectations of the delivery partners, being the construction companies, they engage. They've established a number of objectives to achieve between 2021 and 2024 such as strengthening health and safety leadership capability, driving innovation to eliminate and reduce high risk work, and to transform the measurement of health and safety to improve performance.
So, we're seeing, we are seeing this initial major shift, I think, in the way that client organizations are engaging with the supply network to really lead the way in driving improvements.
[17:07]
However, very difficult and challenging context within which to do that, because the way the construction supply networks work can be very problematic. So, precious to win work mean that construction companies can sometimes that accept risks that they haven't fully priced. They might commit to timelines which may in fact be challenging and unrealistic. The industries described as having an optimism bias, whereby they assume everything will go right and projects when in fact things can go wrong that is outside the control of companies to manage, and that prevailing optimism bias can create pressures in project delivery.
There are also often quite significant financial penalties for time overruns in projects, and that increases the pressure on construction companies, once they win a job, to actually deliver it on time or be subjected to a fairly substantial financial penalty and that can increase pressure. Which then gets pushed in the form of long hours and demands and stresses down the supply networks right down to subcontractors who really experience those things but may not have the resources or the experience to manage the risks appropriately.
Here's a nice quote from a construction company CEO who we interviewed recently in relation to construction industry culture program that we're working with industry on, and he commented:
[18:35]
“You've got a client who wants their products delivered on time, but to win a job you have to win it on the right price and the right time, and sometimes we have an optimism bias. You never say to yourself ‘oh we're going to have all these challenges,’ but in the delivery you do. It rains, designs not delivered on time, there's a number of different factors that contribute to being under pressure.”
These pressures, that systemic pressures, that arise because of the way that construction projects have traditionally come together in the way clients and contractors and others have engaged in a commercial sense. They actually do have health and safety implications down the track.
[19:15]
So, moving on to the Construction Industry Culture Task force at work, which is an interesting piece of work that I'm involved with in collaboration with researchers from the University of New South Wales and the Australian National University, and also the University of Tasmania. What the Construction Industry Culture Task Force is trying to do, is it's trying to actually address the issue of long and inflexible hours of project-based work. Trying to rethink working time practices in project‑based work, with a view to improving health and well-being, giving people time for life so they can actually participate in healthy and fulfilling lives outside of their work activity, and improving gender diversity within the industry.
So, the current issues I've alluded to some of these already, I won't go through them again, but the future strategies are actually rethinking working time practices in project-based work. And there are a couple of trial projects currently running to evaluate the impact of changing from a five-day week. Now, to many, five-day week might not seem radical, but in construction projects, where work is traditionally a six-day week, moving to a five-day week is actually a big change. And so, these five-day week trial projects are running to determine what the impacts of those are on health safety and well-being and the impacts and workforce diversity, and indeed productivity and performance.
The opportunity to look at other alternative work time arrangements is also an important one because there are many different models of working time and it's important that we look at working time as a risk factor for poor health and poor safety in the construction industry.
[21:01]
We already talked a little bit about. I've already talked a little bit about the role that clients are playing. This work was funded by the Office of the Federal Safety Commissioner, who asked us to identify what clients should do across the lifecycle of a construction project to actually drive health and safety improvements. And so, we tried to establish this based on the available research evidence and specified what we thought clients should in fact do based on the best available evidence in the planning stage, in the design and procurement stage, in the construction stage, and in the completion stage of project. So, it took a life cycle approach. This particular set of documents was adopted by industry and has been used in the delivery of major infrastructure construction projects here in Victoria. However, it was limited in the extent that what it did was it specified health and safety management actions that clients can take within their own organizations, but what it didn't do was adequately acknowledge that those management actions take place within the broader context of a commercial relationship and the commercial frameworks through which projects are delivered.
[22:11]
Commercial frameworks can be loosely defined as the strategies and practices that the client uses to establish the commercial relationships that they enter into to achieve their ultimate goals and objectives in the construction projects. It involves choosing a contracting strategy, establishing what the project objectives will be. They are often articulated as key result areas, and the way that performance is going to be measured against those objectives. And then the financial incentives and the mechanisms around financial incentivization that will be applied to the meeting of those objectives. So, commercial frameworks are actually really important for health and safety and we did a piece of work funded by the major transport infrastructure program here in Victoria, looking at what commercial frameworks look like in case study projects in Australia in the UK and in the US, and indeed what were the characteristics of those commercial frameworks that were good for health and safety, maybe weren't working quite so well.
And one particular client health and safety director, and this was actually from the UK case study commented, that if you have a commercial framework that's old fashioned, if you've got people being bullied every time there's project performance meeting, if you're using a contractor, wag the finger at the contractor, if you wielding penalties rather than incentives, if the whole approach to the contract drives contractors into a corner and squeezes performance out of them, then your health and safety will suffer and you won't get the best out of your contractors.
So, I think this was telling because it was basically saying that some of the old-fashioned ways of doing business, in fact not working so well from a health and safety point of view. And that perhaps a more collaborative and less punitive approach may be warranted.
[23:59]
The research into commercial frameworks that I referred to that we undertook relatively recently with the Major Transport Infrastructure Program involved interviews with prominent client and contractor representatives here, but also in the UK and USA. It established that health and safety requirements are often included in contracts between clients and their delivery partners and that performance objectives to health and safety are usually established, including some minimum conditions of satisfaction.
Historically, there's been a was a focus on safety, but now I'm really pleased to say that there's much greater emphasis being placed on occupational health, and there are some real leaders in that space, with clients leading the way to drive health improvements in the construction industry.
Typically, performance is measured using a suite of leading and lagging indicators. That terminology is widely used in health and safety. But for those of you who may not be familiar with it, lagging indicators of things that have already gone wrong - rates of injury, rates of incidents that have occurred. They have actually area negative things that have happened on projects. Whereas leading indicators are usually more positive indicators of things that might be being done that may actually contribute to the prevention of incidents or ill health. So, the term leading, and lagging is an important one, and there's some, there's ongoing controversy I guess about how to balance those two sets of different types of indicators and their validity and reliability.
Financial incentives are also often used, or disincentives in relation to health and safety.
[25:42]
Moving back to performance measurement considerations. One of the things that came out from that particular piece of work was that there was real concern, particularly from the contractor side, about the use of injury frequency rates as the measure of their performance.
We were told that some clients put penalties into the contract and it's generally about the injury frequency rates. That's generally a lagging indicator. If you have a lost time injury frequency, if you have a lost time injury on your project, you could lose 25% of your bonus and companies become fantastic at hiding it. So, I guess that the notion of hiding it becomes that, and people told us is that, people become very adept at managing this statistic and it detracts from the management, the proactive management of health and safety, and so that was one of the messages that came out quite strongly. Another Alliance General Manager told us that the industries move from just statistical measure measures to more positive means of conducting business, and it should be about less about the focus of what we did wrong and more about what we could do right.
Interestingly, there is a push towards the use of positive performance indicators, and these leading indicators however, actually making sure that the leading indicators you're using a valid and reliable is really critical.
And interestingly, in this work participants distinguish between the viewpoints of financiers of projects and the viewpoints of the delivery authorities who actually manage the operational delivery of the projects. Whereas the delivery authorities were seen to be very supportive of positive performance indicators and leading indicators, and some of those less tangible things. The perception was that financiers were more focused on counting injuries, and as a more what they perceived to be more objective measure of performance. So, even just that comment from the participants that there was a difference there between financiers and delivery authorities suggests that the client’s organisations themselves are not necessarily aligned in some of the things that they're thinking and doing, and that clients themselves must be regarded as complex and heterogeneous organizations in their own right. There may well be different groups, financiers, delivery authority end user operators and so on, who might have different perspectives on what good practice with grades and management of health and safety looks like.
[28:15]
More comments on managing health and safety of the client contractor interface. Another piece of work we did was looking at a longitudinal case study of a large infrastructure program where we actually followed the activities of this particular program for a period of about 12 months.
And in this particular program, the client’s organization was introducing a lot of new measures that were designed to help the contractors to understand their health and safety obligations and actually respond to contractual requirements associated with lots of different aspects of the management of health and safety in their projects. And interesting enough, what we observed initially with some boundary issues, some tension associated with managing health and safety across the client contractor/contractual boundary. There was some blood responsibilities and some confusion about the extent to which clients should be specifying process requirements for health and safety, because one of the things that has traditionally been the case is that clients might specify a performance level that must be achieved, but not necessarily going that step further and actually try to offer advice or requirements around the processes by which that level of performance should be realized. So, there was some tension there around the process requirements in the sense of where was that blurring the responsibility between the role of the clients and the role of the contractor. What was really important in that particular piece of work, that it became apparent, that while the contractual requirements we're really important and they set really strong framework, scope and expectations for what delivery partners are expected to do in relation to health and safety, it was actually the relationships that delivered the outcomes. So, what we saw was that between the clients and the contractors, there was a lot of interaction, a lot of informal and social interaction, and informal issue resolution, and it was through those relationships and those less formal mechanisms of control that the client was really able to effectively achieve what they wanted to achieve.
So, that was a lesson that because contracts are useful and they're important but supplementing them with good collaborative relationships is actually really, really important. And this was reflected by a client health and safety Manager who commented that the most majority of work I do and the outcomes like get are actually relationship based because the contractual obligations really only give us so much.
[30:54]
Now moving on to the safety and design part of the agenda that part of that underpins the Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy. A piece of work that we undertook was funded by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health in the USA. We undertook it in partnership with a research team at Virginia Tech in the US, looked at when should health and safety be considered in construction projects. We did quite a lot of work to answer that question because it's quite a complex question and we interviewed project stakeholders. Actually, as design decisions were being made and we actually sat in design team meetings and projects and observed the interactions between the stakeholders, we collected a lot of data about when design decisions were made, by whom, how, and why and that data collection took place across 23 construction projects in Australia and the USA. We undertook 288 quite detailed interviews in order to really understand those design processes in all their complexity.
So, the research examined the relationship between consideration of health and safety early in the project life cycle and the quality of health and safety risk controls. So, our dependent variable in this study was actually how risks were controlled. And if you remember early on in the presentation, I said that the idea is that risks are illuminated or reduced so far as is possible by design decision making prior to actually work commencing. So, the idea was what we wanted to do was look at how many of those risks were actually identified, and actually, how many of them were illuminated, or how many of them were designed out before construction work commenced. So, that was that was the measure of the quality, and we developed a particular methodology based on the hierarchy of risk control which categorises risk controls according to their level of effectiveness, we use the hierarchy of control to actually really measure this and that was our dependent variable against which we compared projects and their performance.
[33:09]
And here's an example of some of the results that we found. So, this is just one of the projects, and it's not even one of the projects, It's just one elements of one of the projects that we looked at It shows you what's called a sociogram. It's based on social network analysis where over the life of a period of decision making, we actually measured and quantified who was involved in decisions, how involved they were and how important their involvement was. So, the arrows in this diagram, actually show the direction of information flows, the thickness of the arrows shows how prominent somebody’s information exchanges were, and I guess what's important from a network, complete supply network complexity perspective is that you'll see in this diagram that we've got in the top right hand corner, the architect and the client’s engineer, and in the top left hand corner of the constructor’s engineer. And typically, we think of design professionals as being architects and engineers. Yet, in fact central to this decision-making network was in fact the operator, it was a rail project – and the rail operator themselves were really critical of making decisions around design. And indeed, the client was very, very influential. The rail authority and the constructor and even the precast supplier, the supplier of precast concrete elements, was influential. So, it gives you a sense of design being much more complex than simply One actor, one actor who occupies a particular socio technical role. It's fairly abstract like the designer. It's more complex than that, in fact it involves many different participants whose interests and professional contributions all interact to shape decision making. The other observations make is that design work is really iterative and involves thousands of information exchanges and feedback loops, and trade-offs are an inherent feature of decision making, so trade-offs being made all the time. Design decisions are actually socially negotiated and in that social negotiation, health and safety implications are formed.
So, the key findings in this particular piece of work were that better health and safety risk control outcomes, and by better I mean the ones that did result in eliminating or engineering out health and safety risks, were achieved when two things were present in these networks.
Firstly, when construction contractors were involved early in the design process. So, the early involvement with construction contractors was really important. The second thing was when the construction contractor’s involvement or centrality in the communication network was higher. So, when they actually had some influence in decisions that were being made.
[36:00]
Research into reducing muscular skeletal disorders in the rail construction work. I just like to talk a little bit about this particular piece of work, again undertaken with the support of the Victorian Government Major Transport Infrastructure Program and Work Safe Victoria. What this work did was in partnership with the team from RMIT’s School of Health and Biomedical Sciences. We used a whole-body system of wearable sensors to actually measure what's going on in someone's body to store what somebody's body goes through when they engage in a number of different construction activities.
You'll see here on the left at this particular activity was steel-fixing. Steel-fixing involves a worker pulling wire off a reel, that's usually attached to their hip, bending the end to form a hook, shaping it around steel reinforcement bars that support concrete structures and then using a hand tool or a pincer cutter to twist and cut the wire. So, it's a very repetitive process. In the US, some research shows that workers who do this job actually make between 400 and 600 hundred of those movements each day. So, you can imagine if you're doing that every day, particularly if you're working in a posture like this to do that work, it takes a toll on your body.
[37:22]
So, we looked at the issues of tool selection and design and we were able to use the wearable sensors to compare the performance of three different tools while doing steel-fixing in a particular workplace environment. This is all done actually on site with live construction sites and real construction workers and real construction tasks, so it wasn't simulated at all.
We see the man here. He's using conventional pincer cutters and power the power tying tool at ground level, he's having to bend over, so his trunk flexion, his back spent quite dramatically and that's obviously not a good posture to sustain over a long period of time. The long handle stay-put or significantly reduce the extent to which he had to bend over. However, it still exceeded Worksafe Victoria's guidance, which says that working with the trunk inclination greater than 20 degrees for more than two hours over a whole shift or continually for more than 30 minutes is a risk factor for muscular skeletal injuries. Even that long handle stapler tool on the right-hand side, though he's spending less, he still bending in excess of what Worksafe Victoria would suggest what would be a safe extent.
The conventional pincer cutter tool was particularly bad in terms of risk movement because it involved a lot of wrist rotation, and wrist flexion and extension in its use. Whereas the power time tool in the middle, which didn't require that twisting and flexion and extension, actually had almost neutral wrist movements. So, we concluded from this data, I won't show you the data, but we concluded from this data set that the optimal solution for steel-fixing it ground level would involve a long-handled tool, like the long handle stapler, but with the power time device attached to it. So, rather than a stapler, a long-handled power tying tool. Interesting enough, a manufacture has actually made such a product and contacted me just last week to ask as if we could have possibly look at that and he could do a demonstration for us of that particular tool.
[39:34]
The same piece of work involved looking at jack-hammering and we see here on the left-hand side, a man who's engaged in breaking down the tops of concrete piles to expose the steel reinforcement bars to be able to construct the superstructure on top of those piles. Now he's breaking that down using a jackhammer which is held laterally horizontally, and it was taking, I believe, between four and five hours to break down one of these piles and you can see that there are several of them. He's exposed to noise, hand arm vibration, dust and musculoskeletal injury risk. Again, going back to looking at designing healthier, safer work process, on the right hand side, we see an alternative technology which is based upon a chemical method, whereby crack is chemically propagated within the pile at the desired level, desired height, and then the pile, the top pile cap can just be lifted off mechanically, using the crane or some other lifting device.
So, we see that this right on the right-hand side, the alternative technology is safer, healthier, does create better quality outcomes because there’s less likelihood of damage of the steel, increase production efficiency and it eliminates the need for jack-hammering.
[40:56]
Another piece of work that we did, which again it does involve talk, it does involve talking about participation in process redesign. Involved and ask the graphic study of participate re video intervention. Now this work was really interesting because it involved construction worker being engaged through facilitator in collaboratively scripting, acting and filming their own work practices, and then using that process to evaluate their ways of working and possibly redesign ways of working. This is an example of a scaffold erection processor, a mobile tower scaffold where you can see from the photo on the right that the man is actually erecting the scaffold and in fact, he's exposed to the risk of falling because there's no edge protection. So, the participatory video facilitator commented there was just one phase just for 30 seconds where they were unprotected, and I said I'm sure we can do something different.
[41:54]
So, that the way they went about it was they got the workers to go back to the site and they got them to rethink the way they erected the scaffold. The solution they came up with was to use mid-platforms and horizontal members to provide edge protection whereby people had edge protection throughout the entire erection process. The site manager was impressed by this and so the previous way of building the scaffold had been custom and practice with decades no one had thought twice about it. But once you saw it on the screen, it didn't look quite right and we just got the guys who've been doing it for years to try and find a way to fix it. And in the end they did.
I guess the story here is that it was actually the visualization of the process that these people have been doing this job for a very long time and the way of working it become second nature. But when they stood back and looked at the video of them doing it, that they made themselves it allowed workers and their managers to see things from a different perspective and better understand the dangers that they had previously not really recognized and once those dangers had been identified, then solutions could be sort.
[43:01]
Now, I can't really not talk about COVID because in the past year we've experienced an extraordinary time with the COVID pandemic and this is forced organisations to rethink the way they work, including construction organizations.
And in some instances, work has been radically transformed and one area in which that work has been radically transformed is in the opportunity for some project-based construction workers to work from home. Which would have probably been an unheard of prior to COVID but became an actual necessity due to physical and physical distancing requirements in order to keep work sites up and running during the pandemic.
So, what's been interesting here was it actually afforded us opportunistically to actually do some data collection to look at what was happening when workers were working from home. We were given the opportunity to collect data for eight weeks from project-based workers who were working alternate weeks, so one week in the office and one week at home.
And we looked at their mental well-being. We looked at how they were experiencing work and what was going on during that time. Unsurprisingly their mental well-being was in fact predicted by things that we know are related to mental well-being, so, physical activity, satisfaction with work, life balance, sleep quality, an engagement in work, and we know those things are all good for health and mental well-being.
However, we also observed that they were feeling pressured for time, work was interfering with social life and some long work hours were negatively impacting their work life balance. Again, not really particularly surprising there, but what did come out was that the context of COVID had actually increased the blurring of boundaries between work and non-work hours and increased online communication, increased the irregularity of work hours and this was particularly difficult for people with caring responsibilities. So, I think what this tells us is now we have this wonderful opportunity to collect this data, is that there are real lessons for the future and while working from home is very good for a lot of people, a lot of people find it actually helps them better balance work and non-work responsibilities, organisations do need to be mindful of the potential harmful impacts of these blurring of boundaries and therefore this will hopefully provide useful information to construction companies in the future I say think about work post COVID. Or think about flexible work options post COVID.
[35:37]
And lastly I would like to leave you with some of our thoughts about our future research agenda. So, one of the things that we've become increasingly mindful of and some of this is come out in the research that I presented to you today, is that we're increasingly mindful that health and safety needs to be managed across many project interfaces in the construction industry.
And while we've looked at the relationship between clients and contractors and we've looked at the relationship between different design team contributors, we haven't looked at this holistically in terms of what goes on in a complex project environment. So, we know that we need to manage health and safety across interorganizational boundaries and look at managing health and safety in this increasingly complex interorganizational landscape.
To date, most of the research that has been done in construction, health and safety has really only focused on intra-management systems which has taken us a long way forward in terms of what we know and how we do things, however we think that the next major step change in industry health and safety performance might actually be trying to look at these interorganizational issues and the degree of collaboration, integration and alignment that takes place across project interfaces.
And we're looking at the contractual relationships and the social interactions that take place as well as the way that communication networks and information flows and influence shape decision making, which then ultimately impacts upon OH&S outcomes for better experience by workers. So, this involves looking at governance structures of which through projects are delivered, as well as formal and informal social interactions, decisions, and ultimately health and safety outcomes.
And we, we are sort of thinking that this is actually really important, an important next step for knowledge and understanding what really happens in complex construction project networks and how that might impact on health and safety. In order to achieve this, we want to use a multi-level network analysis technique which would look at a complex network relationships at that in interface level as well as the decision-making level and look at the way that those two levels of these networks interact to produce health and safety outcomes.
[48:13]
For more information about our people, partnerships, projects and publications, you can find that on our website and I'm very happy to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you.
Q&A – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Thank you very much Helen for a very interesting talk. So, now it's QA time. We have a few questions pop up. One question, one question is: Is there an ability to access suggestions or templates for proactive commercial frameworks?
RESPONSE: Distinguished Professor Helen Lingard
Not through, not through our research because we interviewed a lot of people and were given information from perceptions and insights from project participants. But we were not provided access to the detail of the commercial frameworks themselves for reasons of confidentiality, in many cases. However, what we did do was we created research to practice output which included considerations and challenges to be thought about and dealt with in the design of a commercial framework and that was broken into three different sections. It was broken into considerations around how you might measure performance, and considerations around how you might incentivize performance, and considerations around the hierarchical versus collaborative approaches that you might use to influence behaviour across those across those boundaries through commercial frameworks. That's available on our website, as is the full, the full report, quite an extensive report and it does contain a lot of examples of good practice. It contains case studies that talk about projects where things were done particularly well, projects where lessons were learned, and it has it has a lot of detail in it there publicly available on our website.
Or if you want to send me an email, I'm happy to share them directly with you, but they're not templates so to speak.
QUESTION – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Are the key client management action documents available online (free) or are they required to be purchased?
HL: Sorry I missed that. You're dropping out I'm afraid
XY: You can't hear my question?
QUESTION: Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Yeah, the next question is are the key client management and Act Documents available online or they required to be purchased?
RESPONSE: Distinguished Professor Helen Lingard
Sorry no, they’re available online. And in fact, there are available on the Office of the Federal Safety Commission's website.
Technical difficulties
Event support: Yeah, we have another question in the Q and A there Helen and that is their inability to access additions or templates for proactive commercial frameworks?
HL: I think I just answered that question. Did you hear my answer or was there a technology problem? We have had that one.
Event support: Another one here that says are there key client management action documents - we've had that one too. I think you've done well with the questions there, Helen.
Xing had a question but I'm not sure if his technical difficulties are resolved.
QUESTION: Event support
Yes, I can see things question now. How does Australia's benchmark OECD, How does Australia benchmark against the OECD and other countries?
RESPONSE: Distinguished Professor Helen Lingard
I think Australia 's performances is good relative to other countries. Certainly, compared to the UK, it might become comparable; compared to the US were definitely a lot better. In fact, it's interesting because I think sort of the US industry does in fact look to us as a model for doing particularly things like safety in design very effectively. So, they often seek to learn from what's going on in Australia. I'm not quite sure, while we compare favourably compared to other countries, I think it's probably fair to say that there's still a lot of opportunity to do things better, and I think particularly in the occupational health and the mental health and.
Well-being areas, there's still a lot of room for improvement. So, that's why I think there's still quite a lot of work to be done, notwithstanding the fact that we perform relatively well.
QUESTION: Event support
Thank you and we've got another question that says. You spoke about some positives coming out of COVID, in terms of alternative ways of working, Can you elaborate on that?
RESPONSE: Distinguished Professor Helen Lingard
I think what COVID has done has actually made people maybe rethink a lot of aspects of their lives and the way that we work and the way that we organize things and it's actually shaking things up a little bit. So, while a lot of the impacts were negative, and a lot of people really did it tough and still are doing it tough, and it has been a terrible, terrible time for the many in fact, the construction industry is one of the industries that's actually maintained its operations throughout and has done so very effectively through being able to demonstrate that health and safety could be managed effectively.
So, what this is effectively done is it's actually made health and safety and much more key strategic issue in these organizations an it's an issue that's getting a lot of focus on a lot of attention. And rightly so, because in fact business continuity was absolutely critically dependent on health and safety, being able to be managed and demonstrably managed effectively during the pandemic.
But it's also made us think a bit differently about ways of working that might have seemed impossible before the pandemic, so the example I used about working from home or working flexibly, that is one of the significant barriers to, for example, women's participation in project-based roles because the six day, week and the requirements be physically present for very, very long working days, and not having a lot of flexibility to do school pickups or drop-offs or things that a lot of people with caring responsibilities, not just women, people with caring responsibilities need to do was really problematic for people in those project based roles. So, in fact what's happened is in actually understanding that people can work from home and they can do so very productively.
The other interesting thing about the piece of work that I mentioned that I didn't refer to was the fact that productivity was maintained over that working from home, meant that it show it showed us that you can give people that flexibility and still get projects delivered and still be effective in that delivery.
What I think the opportunity to learn from arises from is that because working from home was rushed, it had to happen so quickly because of the COVID pandemic, there wasn't a lot of time to really think about how that might work and what it might look like and how it might be done to best protect workers health and safety and well-being.
So, now we've got some data where we can look at that data and say alright, we know, working from home works for a lot of these people but what are the things that we need to be mindful of in order to make sure that it works for them in a positive way and that we’re managing the risks associated with it? So, things like making sure people remain socially connected to their workplaces even if they are working off-site, making sure people don't experience this blurring of the boundaries between work and family. Make sure after hours contact for example is minimized or managed properly. So, some of those things that were problematic in amongst the flexible working practices we can actually learn from and take that forward. I think that's a really good opportunity for the industry.
CLOSING: Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
OK, thank you very much Helen I think our time is up. Thank you so much for an excellent talk and very enlightening, certainly from, as an engineer, I actually learnt a lot and I’m sure many others may have the same feeling, so thank you very much for the excellent talk and just thank you everyone for attending and hopefully we will see you in our next distinguished lecture. Thank you very much.
RESPONSE: Distinguished Professor Helen Lingard
Thank you Xing.
21 March 2021, presented by Distinguished Professor Helen Lingard
Construction accounts for 9% of the national workforce but 12% of work-related fatalities. Every year some 12,600 compensation claims are accepted from construction workers for injuries and diseases involving lengthy workplace absences. SafeWork Australia identifies supply networks as a national action area for work health and safety (WHS) improvement and construction as a priority industry. The complex nature of the construction industry’s supply network requires WHS risks to be identified and managed across multiple organisational boundaries and interfaces. In this lecture, RMIT Distinguished Professor Helen Lingard will present findings from an ongoing program of research examining organisational, structural and cultural challenges inherent in managing WHS in complex construction supply networks. The lecture will consider how best to integrate WHS into construction planning and design and present lessons relating to clients’ use of commercial mechanisms to embed WHS requirements in the commercial frameworks used to deliver projects.
Accountability & the Office: Historical Factory to Contemporary Covid-19
Accountability & the Office: Historical Factory to Contemporary Covid-19
Transcript of Distinguished Lecture by Distinguished Professor Lee Parker
Held on 10 November 2020, Tuesday 10 November 2020, 11.30am-12.30pm
WELCOME – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Hello welcome everyone, I'm Xinghuo Yu, the Chair of RMIT’s Professorial Academy and the host of today's event.
First, I would like to acknowledge the peoples of the Kulin nation on who's unceded lands we are meeting today. I respectively acknowledged their elder past and the present.
So today we shall hear from Distinguished Professor Lee Parker, who will deliver his lecture on Accountability and at the Office. This is actually the part of the activities of the Academy to fulfil its application to advance and advocate as a thought leader for RMIT.
Before we start, we’ll just to go through some housekeeping things. This is a Teams Live event, so you will not be able to ask any questions directly by microphone however, if you have any questions please post them to the Q&A so at the end of the lecture we'll pick up the popular ones to ask the presenter on your behalf until the session finishes.
So, without any delay, please join me to welcome Lee to deliver his lecture. Lee over to you.
LECTURE: Distinguished Professor Lee Parker
Hello everybody. I suppose you'd be forgiven for wondering why an accounting professor would be looking at things like the office. Generally, you would expect architecture and design specialists and human relations management, and organization behaviour people to be into this sort of space. But there are a range of issues about accountability and the office which do concern us from the point of view of management control, corporate governance, cost management, efficiency, and indeed OH&S. One of my several areas of research is in the corporate social responsibility and accountability space, which includes occupational health and safety.
And, I guess the office has been largely neglected in much of the management and accounting research literature, because I suppose, for many decades we've been preoccupied with the factory.
But if you think about just walking around, for example the Melbourne CBD, particularly at night, and you look up into the multistorey buildings, then you see floor after floor after floor of open plan offices. When you think about the proportion of our economic activity that's really engaged in the service industries, then you could be forgiven for thinking that maybe today's office is the new factory.
Now certainly it's an intrinsic feature of our working life and a large proportion of the population is regularly physically situated in offices, for significant working hours with a whole lot of routines and rituals that often get involved in that.
We can go back to probably the 1850s and onwards to look for early predecessors of the offices that we've become accustomed to. So when you examine particularly, for example, photographic evidence of early office design, you see a trend running from the late 1800s into the early 1900s, where there’s a move from offices that were often configured smaller sized, many in that sort of comfortable salon or club lounge look. Then we see them growing in size and turning into what physically appears to be a virtual production line. And that reflected the office workforce growth that particularly expanded from the beginning of the 20th century. In those first 30 years, we saw huge growth not just in number of offices and size of offices, but also of course number of clerks, administrators and bookkeepers that were employed.
In fact, in the US, for example, between 1904 and 1919 firm or corporate size in itself grew by 30% on average and between 1900 and 1920, in the US there was an addition of 3 million new clerical staff into those growing firms.
If we jump forward to today then in fact professional office and clerical workers constitute the largest occupational group in the workforce in Australia with around about four million people working in professional, clerical and administrative roles.
Now there's been some research done in terms of the way in which the buildings that house this growth in office workforce went in terms of what I've called ‘reaching for the sky’. And there’s really some quite interesting historical research on the genesis of the North American skyscraper, which of course spread into so many cities, and we're quite familiar with the tall multi-storey office building in the CBD today that initially was in practical terms a response to this huge growth in the administrative and office workforce. It was trying to produce mass office accommodation on small geographic space footprints, but it was also then turned into something that became a symbol of corporate success. It reflected very much large-scale office interiors now.
That of course spread out into, for instance, manufacturing sites and other areas. So it wasn't just that the office was high rise, it was spread out physically at floor level as well. When we get up to the last ten, twenty years, then we see signs of the office starting to relocate and starting to reconfigure. That includes some extent of teleworking from home and we will return to that issue in terms of COVID shortly. With of course, computer technology, came the ability to work remotely and also the spreading of office facilities into regional and suburban hubs.
[07:48]
To understand the situation we're in now and the developments that we're seeing moving forward, We really need to go back into history again. So, if we look back at the scientific management era which really commences around 1880 and has its zenith through to about 1920, that was an era when consultants and practitioners and writers tried to reconfigure management as a science. The big focus was on systematic top down management for efficiency and producing engineering solutions for making, manufacturing and mining work more cost efficiently.
And you'll be familiar, even if it's not your area, with the whole notion of Frederick Taylor and his time and motion study work and Henri Fayol the French mining engineer in France, about standardized procedures and top down orders requiring staff to follow instructions. That became endemic through the manufacturing organisations, but in fact it was consciously transferred into the office. That happened with office redesign, office mechanization, and indeed, there are scientific management texts that are totally focused around that period on transferring what were thought to be the lessons of scientific efficiency in the factory to become scientific efficiency in the office.
Now this wasn't purely driven by private sector consultants, it was actually driven by government as well. So, if we look at the early 1900s both in the USA and the UK, governments became very concerned with public sector inefficiency. They started to look at scientific management as a way forward through that. In fact, in North America this became a badge of the progressive era where the whole notion of efficiency became the focus of both government and business attention. And in fact, it became such a focus that indeed, in some North American church pulpits, it was preached as a moral value: so it became quite endemic in social thinking.
Now, in recent decades, under what we call new public management, we've seen a resurgence of that sort of thinking. You don't have to be familiar with new public management to know that if you look at governments around the world, they have very vigorously engaged in downsizing direct service delivery by government outsourcing to non-profit and private sector organisations, commercializing and corporatizing their operations; very much moving towards government owned business entities and mimicking the whole private sector efficiency drive. Both the private sector and the public sector fed into each other in the early part of last century, and really, that's still persisting today.
So when we look at the history of office design and office efficiency, we actually see a real focus on space and furniture in communications and even staff physical movement within the office space, all largely focused (when you look behind the impression management) on time and cost saving. So, when we think back to the office as almost salon or club like design and we move forward to the mass production style of office design, we actually see a movement in the nature of how office work is conceived from being a professionalized administrative craft to becoming an industrial like task specialization exercise.
There is a real sense within the office, both in the past and today where the office is a centre of what we call ‘discipline through the record’. That's where whether the office can now be diversified and decentralized geographically, or whether it's still sitting in a CBD. It's all about recording, calculating. filing and reporting. Now if you're thinking this feels a little bit remote, believe me you can translate this right into your own university and its physical setup and its working set up. So these things carry far and wide. And indeed, I'm engaged in historical work on the office, contemporary research work, and projects that focus on universities as well. The name of the game in the office exercising discipline through the record is to render all staff’s actions to be calculable, and if you can calculate what they're doing and what they're producing then it becomes governable.
And so the office becomes a centre where you can attempt to control both the internal organizational world and the external organizational world where the record is an exercise in both social control an formal accountability, but I'll explain what that means a little more in a moment.
[14:10]
I'm going to jump forward now to what we call today's “innovative” office designs. One of the most commonly known now, that's been around for about 30 years, is the Activity Based Working office or the ABW. The ABW office has been heavily adopted in Australia. It was initiated by a Dutch consulting company in the 1990s. Essentially, it's like the open plan hot desking tradition, and there's a couple of photographs there. There are many, many ways which the office presents itself. Effectively, if I simplify it for you, if you're a staff member in an ABW office, you get a locker in which you can put your personal belongings and after that everything else is shared space. There are cafes, lounges , 1:1 meeting pods, stand up desks, small group meeting areas. It is entirely open plan, you pick where you're going to go and stand or sit, and with or without whom you're going to meet to do whatever you're going to do. Which means, as staff member, you might relocate several times in one day, but all of the space, all of the equipment, everything is shared.
[15:33]
Now, there's a rhetoric, and there's a reality about this. If I created a shopping list for you, what the consultants and the corporate doctors claim about innovative office designs is like this. They argue that it's trying to provide today's people with individual working freedom and flexibility. You can work how you want, where you want, with whom you want, in whatever situation. It is also claimed to enhance staff collaboration because people can move around, people and work with each other. We can people work individually. They can break into a meeting or break out of a meeting. Therefore its claimed that this provides a much more encouraging comfortable environment that improves staff satisfaction, that improves staff sense of wellbeing, and allows people to focus better on the task at hand. Whether it's a small group discussing something, or whether it's an individual working in a in a quiet area. It's also argued to appeal to the younger technology-oriented generation, where you walk around with your electronic tablet and your mobile phone, and that's it. It's the sort of fulfillment of the dream of the paperless office. The paperless office was something that was advocated and promoted 30 years ago. But in many organisations it has never really reached reality.
Now what do we know from the research that we've done that sits behind these claims? Well, what we know, and we know it from even published declarations by corporates on their websites, that in general the adopters are targeting a 30% reduction in their floor space and associated cost reductions: reduced energy costs, cleaning costs, storage space costs, insurance costs and lease costs. But it's about a third that their hunting for. They're also looking to reduce their churn costs. Now, if you're not familiar with that term I could probably explain it in a university sense. If you had a department with a particular profile where you had, say, 5 professors and three associate professors and 15 lecturing staff, and if the five professors were allocated 20 square meters each, and the associate professor received 15, and the other staff received 10 square meters each, there’s your space profile. And if you were setting up divisions or spaces, you'd configure the internal structure of the office that way. But what happens if that profile changes and all of a sudden you have less professors, more associate professors, more lecturers? You then actually face a whole lot of restructuring costs if you're going to adhere to those sort of space rules for different levels of the hierarchy. Now in fact, this new type of office design eliminates that issue because there is no space structure that's connected to hierarchical levels, so that if you experience a change in the hierarchical profile of your office staff, it has no impact. There are no additional restructuring costs. So that that's what that's really about.
Also it is found both in stated objectives and in what actually gets achieved that with respect to floor space occupancy, densification occurs. So not only is floor space reduced for your existing number of staff, but then it is found that gradually furnishing and people are shifted more into the reduced space. It is argued that over time it's possible to increase the number of staff on a particular floor space by approximately 20%. To give you an example publicly, the Macquarie Bank in Sydney has declared that it is saved already in doing this, $10,000,000 per annum in least costs. That's just the lease costs, not some of the other costs that I've referred to.
So, there's a new focus. It's another form of social engineering in terms of trying to socially engineer staff attitudes and behaviours and outputs. The focus is very much on output. In some ways the staff are still very much under surveillance because you're very observable wherever you are in this sort of office design. But at the end of the day, there tends to be a greater emphasis on measuring what your output is regardless of where you were, how you shifted around the floors and whether your supervisors could see you or not.
[20:46]
Now ABW as a modern office (and it's really just it's another form of the open plan office) has a management control agenda: reducing both fixed overhead and operating costs. That's been the case both historically with the production line open floor office of the say 1930s – 1940s and onwards, and today's redesigned office. It is less overtly stated as a sort of a front stage performance agenda, but it is quite surprising how often organisations on their publicly available websites state the fixed overhead and operational cost reduction as a backstage agenda. In that respect I'm referring to a theorist called Goffman, who wrote in the 1950s on front stage and backstage performances. Also, it's looking for efficiency and productivity increases at the same time, so it's trying to achieve reduced costs, reduced floor space, denser occupation of the floor space by staff, but then extracting more output out of them. But there is one further agenda. The ‘new office’ is designed in a very observable, welcoming, comfortable, wellbeing emphasis style. It's also to do with managing client customer relations where there's an interface between the client and customer and the office itself.
There is evidence starting to show up in some organisations where they find that the functional work needs to retreat back into a more traditional backstage hidden functional design. We see that in relation for example in professional accounting firms to taxation work.
Are these design developments new? Well, to some degree it is, but very largely while it looks different, its agendas and what it's trying to achieve reflects those historical scientific management agendas. Cost and efficiency control are very, very serious agendas, despite the impression management that organisations often put forward both to their staff and to the customers. So, it's very much a marketing and customer relations strategy, but the scientifically planned notion behind it does remain.
[22:36]
I and a colleague are doing some research at the moment on the big four global accounting firms. Looking at what they have revealed about their office designs and agendas both in Australia and globally. They have publicly pronounced that they are designing to try and enhance collaboration (staff to staff collaboration and client to staff collaboration) and improve productivity. And when they talk about productivity they’re talking about speed of task completion, revenue generated and faster problem solving. And again, they’re using different workspaces for different tasks as I've explained before, and they're looking for networking and efficiency improvements. And again, that that's not just networking between the inside and the outside of the organization, it's talking about networking with staff groups between senior staff and junior staff, and of course between staff and clients. So, there is a real focusing on the this, particularly in the language that's used, and the promotional language that's emphasized where they're really focused on the client and appealing to the client. So, they actually talk about labels like the ‘client experience’, or they talk about labels like ‘client collaboration’. They're quite open in terms of the agenda being to get the client feeling like they’re involved: in the deliberations and in the decision making. But that is also occurring between how they get different groups within the firm to relate to each other.
In terms of floor space reduction and densification in the big four global firms, we do have publicly declared data. For instance, Ernst and Young in some of their offices have decreased floor space by 25% and they've increased staff numbers on that floor space by 50%. Or, if we look at the Big 4 firm KPMG, there are examples they've given where they've decreased floor space by 35% and that they've removed what they call ‘dead zones’: so they've gone looking for areas that have low occupancy and they've removed those completely from their formal usage.
[26:16]
How does this compare to the present and past? And you might find I know it's only small for you looking at it on the screen, but that photo is round about the 1920s and of course I have a larger, sharper version of it and you really cannot count the number of rows all the way to the back of the picture. It just goes on and on and on. Notice it's a gender mix. Often the office of the 1920s and 1930s is portrayed as growing through the typing pool and that was an element, but there was actually quite a gender mix in the growth of the office. Those people are actually working on comptometers or adding machines, but it's a large group of people.
Certainly, there was some similarity between today's efforts at client impression management and the efforts of yesteryear. Where an office was visible to clients, there was a concern to make the client feel valued and esteemed, trying to reduce the barriers between the client and the firm and building client goodwill. So there were similarities. In terms of staff mobility visibility and surveillance, as I've said. In terms of surveillance it is really more on the staffs output because the staff within the ABW office are highly mobile. Nonetheless there has been a great focus on trying to govern where staff moved and how they moved in the past and today. Now today might look more flexible, but of course with COVID and COVID induced redesign protocols that may represent a return to a stricter control over how and where and when people physically move through office spaces that was certainly evident in the past. The retention of functional staff areas for which we see some evidence in some floors of organisations today, represents a reversal more towards the traditions of the early to mid 1900s. But, certainly space costs minimization and usage efficiency maximisation was a major agenda in the past, and it remains a major agenda today. Nothing's really changed despite any change in discourse or impression management discourse. Essentially, the game is one of implanting a commercial logic and a client focus into staff attitudes.
[29:07]
Now, what about the pandemic era that we're sitting in now? Of course, we need to remind ourselves that our current pandemic has quite a histgorical trajectory and you can see that on the slide in front of you. Some of them may have been more global than others, but it's not new and as we're told by public health officials, what we're going through now will happen again in some other form.
Now, what I can tell you is that when you look at the latest property research, central business district office space demand in the Australian capital cities is falling and it is actually projected by independent researchers to fall through to 2021 and 2022. Now, one has to be careful about this because property councils and some organisations are currently putting a very brave face on this. But the independent research shows that vacant space is increasing dramatically and will continue to go that way in 2021-2022 and that we are staring down the barrel of permanent longer term changes. There are some figures for central business districts as high as anticipated 60% vacant floor space across the CBD. We know from a lot of publicity about this that it comes from the lockdown period, the home working periods, and then the discovery by both individuals and organisations that quite a healthy degree of productivity and efficiency can be retained, even though staff have diversified out of the physical office through the transitions to teleworking. But also we're facing transitions to office redesign and office protocol reengineering.
These are significant issues and I can give you examples right from in the Melbourne CBD where there are some corporates with say a multi storey tower block that have run exercises evaluating how long would it take to get staff into the office in a COVID-safe way given that they've got to come in through main entrance doors and going up through the lifts and how long to get them out again. Some of the estimates for some of them are as high as three hours to safely get them in, and three hours to safely get them out, which is clearly not workable. So that increasingly firms are allowing for staff making longer term arrangements for hybrid operations where staff work at home totally, or part of the week or moving to hubs in regional areas. All of this has major social responsibility and occupational health and safety impacts. It's really an example where in terms of reporting on this, it's not just a matter of reporting what an organization has spent on office redesign or re designing protocols (because for example what you spent may not turn out to be effective), but it's going to become highly evident through a concept of accountability through action where you can actually see the visible corporate responses. It becomes physically evident to staff, it becomes physically evident to customers and clients both in terms of where the staff are, who's in the building, what the building looks like, how the furnishings have been repositioned, and so on. The problem we have right now, is that the open plan office and the activity based working office is incompatible in terms of infection control because it largely involves completely shared spaces, hot desking, shared spaces, shared furnishings, and shared equipment: all being major virus spreaders.
[33:31]
Now I'm not covering all the human relations organization behaviour aspects. But, if we look at these developments from, for instance a capital investment perspectvie, if one is going to reconfigure large scale offices to become safe from an occupational health and safety point of view, then for infection control one needs to reduce floor occupancy levels, build safe assembly areas and corridor and lift area control systems. You need redesigned and spaced out furnishings. Yet there are now arguments that over the last 30 years the amount of space per individual has been slowly coming down and down and down, and now it's going to have to go back up to, for instance 1980s, 1990s average levels. There are also a whole range of technology infection controls that are available, and I've listed some of them there. The protocols, as you can see, can involve split shifts, staggered start times, staggered break times, more frequent cleaning routines, protocols for sanitizing, training and communication programs for staff. So there are a whole lot of capital investments that are necessary to render the offices that we see today to be effectively COVID safe and yet that's being required in an era where we have economic downturn, we have organisations struggling for financial viability and yet they need to make these upfront investments.
If we look at a pre COVID and during COVID now, there is a suggestion that organisations may attempt to cling to their previous office cost control agendas with their low cost, high density, and flexible layout. Furthermore there is a sense in which when employees are allowed to spread out to for instance, suburban or regional hubs, work from home either wholly or partly that then there's a transfer of organisational costs to the teleworking or hybrid working employees, and that's an issue that's going to raise a whole lot of questions in terms of who bears that cost. Certainly even in, for instance, London in the UK we're seeing the spread of organisations getting out of CBD buildings and beginning to set up hubs even in regions up in the Midlands and allowing staff to work anywhere, for instance in England or Scotland and then just visiting the hubs periodically when they need to. So, the whole question becomes, are we looking at a question of public health versus financial self-interest? We certainly seem to be.
[36:38]
So, we face a changing office world where there's a growing tension potentially between corporate costs and staff occupational health and safety, and staff welfare and this reflects if you like a continuity of the historical agendas we've seen in the organisational so-called ‘scientific management’ of officers and their staff for efficiency and cost control. Regardless of how it physically looks, it is the new factory in a different guise. There are some really interesting research questions that are growing, for example to what extent does the open plan office reflect the open plan restaurant kitchen, where the chefs cook amongst the diners and the diners pay a premium to sit near the chefs to watch them at work? To what extent are we looking at something akin to pre-industrial revolution where the office starts remerging as a cottage industry that spread right through regional small group areas down to the individual home? I would suggest from the research we have to date that when we are looking at office design, office management and the role of the office in organisations today, it's a classic competitive playing field. It's money versus people. Thank you very much.
Q&A – Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
Thank you very much really for a very interesting talk.
I have a question, the thing you are talking about, perhaps these has assumption there, which is sort of it hasn't been explored Is the culture right? In different culture than certainly how people interact are different for example, in Asia, this is kind of hierarchy social upper ranks is sometimes it appears to be more value than in other countries. So, is there any study show that how culture impacts on the office, the way how people see the office and how they should be arranged?
RESPONSE: Distinguished Professor Lee Parker
Thanks, that's a really important question, and certainly in my research I've not gone there yet and I think it's a really good point because even when we look at, for instance, the work that accountants do, the diversification of the work the accounting profession does in for instance, North America, Australasia, UK, Europe, it is reflected at least in attitudes: for instance the Asian region where there are much more traditional views about that the role of who does what and how it gets done. It's a much more compliance and financially oriented sort of role, so I think you make a strong point there. Of course, this is where in terms of the office we really need multidisciplinary research teams to look at this because there it's a small group really internationally, but we really need HR and organization behaviour people to take a closer look at this. Of course, my focus has been very much on accountability, efficiency, productivity.
But even from the HR perspective I see some evidence where, for example, even in a Western setting where, for instance, junior staff may find themselves interacting more closely in sitting for periods next to senior colleagues in the hierarchy, they don't always feel comfortable about it. So I mean, I think there's several layers of culture we need to look at in this. There is the sort of ethnic culture, there's the national culture but there's also the organizational culture and some organisations, as we know, have a much more hierarchical culture even if they're sitting, say, in a in a western setting.
So I think you raise a very important point, and I think that's just further addition to the research agenda on this. I mean, I would emphasize that when we look at the world of the office, it's a relatively small cohort of research that we really have, even across the disciplines.
QUESTION– Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu
How do you see the future, you touch on a field or the potential future trend, what do you see, probably after the COVID-19 we won't go back to where we used to be, so what are the scenarios that you think that this is going to be very, very interesting because I thought I was touching on your point about this civilian, this kind of a monitoring performance because you see all the time that your performance is basically by measured by the time they bought from you, paid for you, rather than actually the productivity. But I guess in the future the predicted outcome will be become more important than the actual time
RESPONSE: Distinguished Professor Lee Parker
Yeah, that's it's a good point Xing because we can look back to the early period of scientific management in the 1882 to 1920 period. Of course, that's when the scientific management consultants really pioneered the whole notion of the piece rate of payment on production, and so in the future world (and of course, I'm no better at predicting it than anybody else) the working community have become so much more accustomed to communicating and presenting in the way we're doing right now and meeting in the way we're doing it right now. It means that people are much more flexible in terms of where they go and how they do things and how they meet. So there's very strong evidence that both in the design of work and the design of workplaces and the way in which people are managed, scientific management never went away. It's always been there. Now, it can resurface in various ways. So for example, if it's possible to measure what people produce as output, then in the post COVID world, we might see a reversion to more people being paid by output, and of course we've seen that in pre-COVID times. I mean, if we look at the public sector in Australia and we look at government owned business entities, a good example would be Telstra, where Telstra over many years has had its workforce pruned down and down, and down. So, the technicians working on the lines got sent out of the organization, but then they were taught how to create themselves as a small business and were then rehired back in as contractors.
So, we see loads of examples in Australia where organisations have shed staff and then staff have been put into small businesses and then recontracted back in and then paid not on time but on what they produced. Now there’s another interesting question about all this is. To what extent will we see change? I mean that's a very uncertain thing. You know, we hear stories this morning about this vaccine that looks promising with a 90% protection rate, maybe. If a vaccine seems to solve our problem in the next 12 months then one might argue that many organisations and people in society will relax, and they may try to move more quickly back to the good old days, possibly learning and preparing less for preventing the next crisis. If the period of having to be COVID careful lasts longer, then we may see some of these trends we're seeing at the moment in terms of social distancing, hybrid working, redesigning offices, becoming a more permanent feature. I mean, it's a very difficult thing to predict, but it certainly appears to be that organisations have been discovering even in the last six months that sometimes the productivity of their staff has actually increased with them being off-site and that it is potentially that we're going to see managers previously not in favour of teleworking now seeing that as an organizational advantage regardless of whether there's a COVID threat or not. So it's a very difficult thing to predict. Certainly in terms of, for example, office design at the moment in terms of COVID prevention, what's being envisaged is reduced d