RMIT Professorial Academy

[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]

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.

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

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.

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.

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 densification of, for instance desk areas, going backwards to assigning a particular working space to a particular person and then not being there all week.

CLOSING: Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu

OK, thank you very much, I'm just trying to look at, it seems to be there is no further any questions posted, so for that I think we can stop here, so thank you very much Lee for very interesting talk and all the best.

CLOSING: Distinguished Professor Lee Parker

Thank you bye.

Transcript of Distinguished Lecture by Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu held on 29 September 2020

Welcome:  Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti

Welcome everyone, my name is Billie Giles-Corti. I am the Urban Futures Enabling Capability Platform Director at RMIT University. I am delighted today to welcome you today to our Distinguished Lecture Series today being presented by Distinguished Professor Xing Yu. This forms part of a series of lectures that we’re putting on as part of the Distinguished Lecture program and I do encourage you to look out for further advertisements of what is coming up.

Before starting I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands of which were all meeting wherever you are across Australia or across the state they were in Melbourne the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded land the University conducts its business. I respectfully acknowledged the ancestors and elders past present and I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands and ancestors of the lands of borders across Australia where we conduct our business as a University.

Before starting I just want to do a little housekeeping for those of you who would like to ask question when we get started, there's a Q&A session down the bottom on the band on the bottom of your screen please choose the little icon which has got the question mark in it and that's the Q&A session. So, post all of your questions into that and we look forward to having a session of question answers at the end and will have about 10 or 15 minutes for that

So, without further ado it's my great honour and pleasure to today introduce our distinguished professor for today's lecture Distinguished Professor Xing Yu is an Associate Deputy Vice Chancellor of RMIT University and he's the Chair of the RMIT Professorial Academy. His main research interests include control systems intelligent and complex systems and energy systems. He's received many awards and honours for his contribution to his field over the years, this includes the 2018 MA Sergeant Medal from Engineers Australia, the 2018 Australasian AI Distinguished Research Contribution Award from Australian Computer Society, and 2013 Dr.-Ing. Eugene Mittelmann Achievement Award from IEEE Industrial Electronics Society. And importantly too, with an h-index of 70 according to Web of Science with nearly 19,000 citations, for many years now since 2015 Xing has been named as a highly cited researcher by  Clarivate Analytics which is was also known as Thomson Reuters. He's a fellow of the IEEE, Engineers Australia, Australian Computer Society and also the Australian Institute of Company Directors. So, it's with great pleasure that I welcome here today to give his distinguished professor's lecture on Engineering Cyber-Physical Systems: A Nature-Inspired Simplexity Approach. Over to you Xing.

Lecture:  Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu

Thank you very much, it's a great pleasure to give this lecture.

This lecture is actually entitled the Engineering Cyber Physical Systems. This cyber physical system has been a buzzword over the last few years, you know, everybody is talking about it

What I'm going to do today, is basically trying to share with you some of the experiences of dealing with the cyber physical systems and give some kind of brief introduction. One particular purpose of the talk is basically to show the potential whether there is in the future we can collaborate in this area, not just simply within science and engineering but with social science and business and even more beyond that.

So, cyber physical systems are just by term is a basic cyber physical system, with an integration of cyber system and physical system. This is actually, everybody regardless if you are scientist, engineer, or social scientist, we all have some to do with it. The internet is basically the thing that brings so much change to our societies, our own lives. And it’s the same thing right, internet brings all the changes to how the physical system is run, making it much more efficient, cost effective and much more environmentally friendly and socially responsible.

So I just want to show some examples of the systems I’ve been working with just to show the complexity, how complex they are. The one we’ve been working on is most of them is industrial systems, so here is one with a typical example of sugar production process. We can see that it starts from the field, and once it is matured, you harvest, we come into the sugar mill and the sugar was produced, shipping overseas and arrival on our table. So, this is the whole process.

But if you look at the whole supply chain, it’s much more complex. When they come into the sugar mill, it’s actually going through lots of process, chemical process, there’s shredding the pieces, extract the juice (we call molasses), then you put in chemicals -so you crystallise the sugar, then you extract it, and then we’ve got sugar. The by-products will be fertiliser or become fuel to generate electricity.

So, just imagine if we, and these days the sensors are very cheap now, if we are able to install the sensors everywhere on this system, we basically know who the system operates. The challenge is how to make the whole production much more efficient with less, cost less and produce more. So is actually the challenge we have right now. In old time we could not do that, in the old time I remember we started working in the top left part is the scheduling of the loco to go collect the sugar canes from the farmers. And we also did work in the middle, bottom up is the crystallisation process which actually controlled the chemicals and controlled the production line so that we have consistency of sugar crystals. Now I think this system can be made much more efficient.

[7:34]

Another topic is the Smart Grid. I’ve been doing that since I came to Australia and since I can to RMIT just less than 15 years ago. So, this is another type of system and quite different from what we talked about sugar production. The supply chain, this one is different, in that you have a different physical system. You have a thermal plant, a nuclear plant, microgrids, electrical vehicles, wind farms, solar panel – everything combined together. You can see the Smart Grid is actually forming an energy highway and they coordinate all the components are working together to generate the energy to use less fuel and to make it more efficient. In the future I think we will reduce or eliminate the use of thermal plants or even nuclear plants.

So, one of the challenges of this type of system which is different, I always use chart, is that this is the people outside electrical engineering, do not very much understand well in the way how this whole energy system. This energy system is very peculiar, if you consider Loyw Yang  power stations and there’s another power station Stanwell power station in  Central Queensland, how do you operate the whole network? These two machines, two generators, two plants, has to be synchronised, means they have to rotate at the same speed. So, this is very much like this acrobat troupe operation– you see these two bikes are the generators and the rest of the performers are considered either users or smaller generators or something to do with like electrical vehicles. So, this kind of dynamic balance become critical, so this actually is one of the most difficult cyber physical systems that we ever built, that human ever built. How to make it efficient and that’s very important. Last night I watched Q&A and they are now talking about using gas as an alternative intermittent energy source until we reach fully renewables. When you have those and in the future when we have fully renewable energy, the stability issue becomes even more. So there’s lots of things that needs to be done.

The other hand is the social dimension, even myself, I am not a social scientist. But, if you look at these physical layers, the physical connection of all these generators and solar panels, wind turbines all together, there’s actually another different kind of network on top of that. Apart from the information technology, communication network, on top of that you also have these companies, for example on the supply side you have different companies generate energy and you have different companies who maintain the transmission towers and the distribution. We have retailers like AGL or Origin that sell energy to us as consumers. In the future, if you have solar panels on your roof, you may be able to sell your energy, so you become supplier as well. There is an economic complexity here and there a social dimension here as well. So cyber physical system, the system we are talking about is a really complex not necessarily just fully focussed on how to operate the physical world or physical setting, it is also to do with the other participants in the whole system. 

So here is a  kind of classification of topics we wrote a few years, this paper was quite highly cited. It is basically one of the key things to maintain in a cyber physical system is the information communication and knowledge and of course the intelligence. There’s a couple of main issues, there are architecture issues. I’m not talking about buildings; I’m talking about software architecture is actually building the whole communication and computation and interaction systems. We have communication technology as well, and we have modelling of cyber security and also how to deal with the intelligence, how to deal with data.

[12:14]

Let me just pick a few things to challenge you, for example in architecture the enormity of this whole cyber physical system puts lots of challenges. Or the particular thing what we know that the computer language, C++,or hyphen or Java, are not able to do is that their design principle on the, what I call the event sequence of things, if you design a sequence of events, they have to occur in sequence. But if you look at the control system, like the power system we are talking about, about the network, you can’t control remotely – if the control signal arrives late, it’s is useless. What you have to do is drop it and go to the next one. So, the current computer architecture cannot do that, so there is lots of new work that has to be done in that area.

Communication is another thing. In the internet, we use the internet quite open, but those control systems they need a signal feedback of a millisecond or even faster. But you cannot drop any communication, so the current infrastructure of the telecommunication cannot be directly used to control the whole system because we always have the jams, stuff up, drop out, so those things are not allowed when you develop a new generational communication system to have this kind of security of transmission becomes critical.

Modelling simulation is another issue. Modelling simulation is basically using the data to make a sense of what happening in the past and what is going happen in the future. And given that there is so much data and how do you do it efficiently is very important.

Cyber security is another one. All these cyber physical systems have or continue to pose a significant challenge to the existing methodologies we are having or learn from our universities.

This is the interesting part, I hope we have some social scientists here, as most people in the cyber physical system research are mainly scientists and engineers, which is to look to the social sciences because the cyber physical systems require to respond to the humans, to the users, to the societies, so they have to know what happen there. So what happen is right now the kind of study is usually, for example in the smart grid scenarios, what we usually do is we produce a questionnaire. And we try to understand our customer what is their appetite, preference, attitude. We do a survey, and we use that to guide the whole cyber physical system setting. But we don’t know, one thing we don’t know is from our personal experience, the preferences, the attitude those things can change over time through the social changes. So how can we understand that? On the other hand we know there is lots of research in the social science aspects to understand how humans behave, the political influence, economic influence, the human societal change. So I think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done while we have these two systems coming together, we can overcome the divide between them. So this is something we can look at in the future.

[16:01]

One of things I expect to occur after that I will, I have been talking to social scientist, probably in the future I will talk more to look at whether we can bring the knowledge of cyber physical systems into the Smart City, and how do we help to design the Smart City to be much more smarter and environmental friendly, energy efficient and cost effective.

One of the challenges from what we said, one of the keys things I mentioned is that sensors have become so cheap, so  you can install very easily. You know exactly what happened across the whole system, whole network. The problem is that you collect so many, so much information, what are you going to do with it? There is the information, the size becomes very big and very complex, so what are you going to do with it. So, while the challenge is, I think, if you look at all the methodology, I mean the science engineering methodology, learn from our undergraduate for example, electrical engineering things, they all focus on microscopic details. For example, robotics, how we look at the model dimensions, the dynamics, the 2-dimensions, how we look at the interactions between the models and look at all different aspects to build the model are studied. But if you think about there are hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of those kinds of dynamics involved, what are you going to do with it? So, nothing, there’s no effective way so far to deal with this kind of large size, this has actually become a huge challenge.

Another thing in dealing with cyber physical system in particular those dynamic balancing types of cyber physical system, you do need efficiency and effectiveness. you need to get a solution within a reasonable time. If you can’t get it, there is no use. So, how do you do it quickly and effectively? It’s a big challenge

So, you know we talk about data. Somebody might say “Okay, let’s have some sort of smart algorithm”, “Let’s have some AI” those helping us solving this larger, huge size of data. But there’s a theory probably against all our enthusiasm, we call ‘no free lunch theory’. So the ‘no free lunch theory’ basically say, that the computational complexity for solving, assuming you have algorithms, for solving a large scale problem cannot be reduced, just cannot reduce, regardless of whatever algorithms you may use. Somebody may dispute that – somebody say “ok, what about genetic algorithm, evolution of computation”, but those algorithms are computation algorithm. Those algorithms give you the likelihood of getting closer to optimal solution quicker but will never guarantee that you will find to optimal solutions. So, if you really want 100% assured that optimal solution can be found, the time cannot be reduced. This is one of fundamental theories of computational algorithms.

We have heard a lot about AI right? So, what is it? We want to look at whether AI or something we can use to solve the largest, huge data sets and complexity.

So, this is actually the current general understanding of AI. AI is fundamentally, when it started in the 1950s the purpose, in 1950s the AI term was coined, is basically trying to created machines and algorithm just like a human does - can perceive, can learn, can reason and can act. So if you look at those aspects, surrounding that there is quite a few issues. One issue is machine learning, how do you learn, and how do you use machine learning. So there’s a difference, of course cannot be just like a human. Just like an aircraft, you cannot, the early attempt of making an aircraft, is like trying to make a bird, which you have its wings to flap - you can’t, there’s no physical way to do that. So of course, we humans come to an ingenious method, we actually not have flapping wings, but have fixed wings but we use a jet engine to push through using aerodynamics, pushing through. So machine learning, machine thinking is different from humans. And there’s also the researcher cognitive science that is very important. Understanding our psychological and learning, reasoning ways, and also there’s understanding of the brain. So this is a more mechanical way to look at whether the brain is like machines, constructed by a number of small parts. There’s one element of truth, in that the brain does look like that, it’s a composition of billions of neurons and they interact together to generate some of the mechanisms, so we can remember, we can learn, and we can perceive. But of course, the brain is more than that, there’s still more things to be done.

[21:44] Computer science is alongside with AI and the logic is trying to use AI to understand the logic, using the logic as a way to build the AI system. There is also another one, there’s a long debate about AI, will AI become human, or overcome human, or kill human, there’s sci-fi movies, and the natural language is another important aspect.

[22:11]

So, this is something I did with some of my colleagues almost 20 years ago, that is basically trying to build the human brain. If you look at that, it is like a brain. There is something called a knowledge base which is our brain, which is like what do we learn stored in the brain. Then there is inference which actually the reasoning, the way we reason: you know, if this condition, then what, then the consequences. So, we actually use that information in our brain. And then you have this dealing with input and dealing with output, and then you look at whatever output as compared to what is expected. If there’s a difference, then you adjust the knowledge. So you can see this is actually the way we humans we do.

So, those actually the early AI, this is much more knowledge based is most very popular in the 1950s 70s, the golden period of AI is these are things that become very popular.

[23:19]

So, we use that and we actually solve some of the problem a while ago, which proved to be very effective. So, this one of the problem systems we designed. I used to work in the Central Queensland University, as you know, that in the area of Rockhampton, you know that is called the capital of cattle, capital of Australia. So, one of challenge when we were talking with the Department of Primary Industries was this particular weed called Parthenium, this grows aggressively. One of the problems is it grows aggressively in the farm, and cattle eat it cause the stomach upset, of course they eat less and won’t grow fast. So, this is a big challenge in terms of production. So, what we did at the time, which was the last 90s, at the time the process you would have a few human expert from the Department, and when the farmer has some questions to see what they have to do with their land, and they go in there from their experience and advise them what to do. But the problem as any other university, any other organisation, just like what do we have, they have financial pressure. So when those people retired, you won’t be able to keep their knowledge. So, what do we have to do? Is we have this ARC Linkage basically to build this human brain to record their knowledge. And we want to do more, we want to take advantage of weather information and also take advantage of soil dynamics and to help build a system.

[24:56]

Basically what you have to do, is you have four options if your land is infected by weeds. You either move the cattle away, or you just process the soil – recondition the soil, or you use chemicals, or you use biologicals ways and introduce weeds. We all know, none of those are perfect, you know, they all have pros and cons, the question is to balance.

[25:23]

So what we did is, we used that artificial brain, I would say artificial reasoning, I mean I won’t say computer brain, is build this software system to be able to record the knowledge, integrate all this information together eventually.

[25:40]

So this is eventually the product. The product that we had is basically is an advisory system. You have the farmer come in here and look at, we actually have satellite image here, so we can zoom in on the farm. The farmer comes in here and look and play around with it and say if I have my soil, my condition is this, if I chose this method, what is the consequences? If I don’t do anything, what are the consequences? This system is basically helping them make decisions. One of the problems, you can imagine is building the system. But building the system is so expensive, and we know that the concepts, the cognitive title terms, changing over time, so it’s very expensive to maintain this type of system. So that’s why you know since the 1980s, the golden period of AI, this area hasn’t progressed fast, partly because of this manual cost of developing systems. And we’ll talk a bit later about how machine learning can help solve the problem.

[26:50]

So briefly, this is a very quick history of AI. I actually taught the course in the late 90s. I remember every time at the end of my course, I always say this ‘overpromises’ at the time, pretty negative. The  way is that, AI, the term of AI at that time is a bad term. Bad term in the way there were so much promises, so many promises, for example the early expectation of automatic and natural language translation never occurred, never happened by the end of 2000. The prediction of this kind of grew in AI, Herbert Simon said that a machine would be world chess champion within ten years never occurred, so people were disappointed. I remember I even applied for an ARC grant, I avoided using AI or using intelligence systems, because I worried about if I use the AI people will say ‘oh well, that is a failed attempt.’

[27:59]

But of course, we never realised, nobody realised, that in the 21^st Century suddenly these days AI becomes a password, every time you apply for grant you have to mention AI. So, what happened? So, one of keys that happened is the competition of power. That’s a lot of ways of how do we calculate? That’s actually we have the old models, the reason we failed because we just did not have the fast machine to do the computations we couldn’t get the solutions, now it is possible.

[28:35]

Another thing that has captured the public imagination is human verses machines. You have AlphaGo, is actually beating the human player, the top human player, the goal, I used to play when I was young, was very difficult. There were so many possibilities, but the machine did so well, they learn so fast they can play. So, that actually brings future AI to come back again.

[29:01]

So, if I look at what happened in AI, this is my estimation and my view, and agrees with many others with similar views. If you look at all these areas, I think machine learning is the one that developed so fast and most successful, actually getting all the name and gaining the fame for AI. As we know, AI comes with components, far away from the development to the stage of being very useful.

[29:37]

So, one of the challenges we have is, depending on how you see it, if you look at the philosophical aspect, AI was meant to be a simulator of human. So then you have a philosophical problem, are humans able to use the brain to recognise the brain itself? There’s a philosophical problem. Computation problem is another issue, you we thought ‘today’s computer is very fast’, but just remember that Einstein said that ‘nothing will travel faster than the speed of light.’ And all computers rely on electrons, travelling through the media. So, electron, the speed of electron is only a fraction of the speed of light. What that means is in the not too far future, the speed of the computer will saturate, you cannot improve any further because we have used the physical limitations, so this is a challenge. But of course, we now look at disruptive technology, which is called Quantum computing, which promises to be that way, but of course, how do you implement it is still far away. So there’s actually a challenge with computer, we cannot create, the computer cannot be faster and faster, there is always limitations, so we have to have different way to deal with this.

Another thing is the human brain is still a black box, we still don’t understand. Whatever AI is doing will be black boxed as well. So, for AI to really be like humans is still far away.

[31:14]

The questions is, yes we know AI is still far away but what are we going to do? We have still had these large-scale complex problems to deal with. So, the trick is then, what are you going to do? You have to look an alternative, find a different way of dealing with complexity.

[31:37]

The wild idea that has been advocated over recent times by some of the futurists, who call this ‘simplexity’. So simplexity is basically simple solutions for complex problems. But you cannot interpret in a narrow way – simple solution is actually not simple at all. Simplification is not just the simple trucaction, it requires that we choose, refuse, connect, and imagine, in order to act in the best possible manner. When we say ‘simple’ we mean, we already understand what that means and the consequence of that. So this is actually a way for future influencers to solve this kind of very large problem.

[32:30]

So, one example I always use, and my apologies to social scientists, for science and engineering we all learn from undergraduate, from the first year undergraduate, is the Taylor Expansion. So, Taylor Expansion is the way, I reckon is the way, that shows beautifully the elegant way of expressing the complexity and simplicity. So what it says is, for any complex function, you can always express that function into the series. If that series has for example the first item, and the second item is the first order approximation, third item is the second order approximation. So it depends on what you need. If you don’t need a very accurate solution, you can use the first order approximation, you can get solution very quickly. If you are very fussy about accuracy, then you take it in more terms, so they give you the balance of the real, the actual term, the actual functions and approximations. So, this actually one of the beautiful things we need when dealing with complex systems.

[33:39]

Another thing is that, one was the complex system, but if what you want to know has nothing to do with such a complexity, so the things may come pretty easy, right? So, if you look on the left and on the right, there’s all very complex, left there’s a complex biological system, and on the right is very complex lungs. But, if you want to ask me in simple terms say, ‘what do they have in common, what are some of the key things?’ I’ll tell you is ‘fractal’. So, trees are known to be a natural fractal. Fractals have these self similarities, if you look into any small part of the tree, you’ll see the reassemblance  of the whole thing. So if you only want to know that, you don’t worry about all the rest of the complexity, the environment and so on, you don’t care. So, it depends on what you want to know. So this is just one example.

[34:37]

Another example, this is another interesting example is this kind of relationship. If you think about the world, I think we have 60 or 70 billion people around. If you think about relations it become very complex right, it become unimaginable. But there’s a theory it’s call a ‘small world network’. The relations network is basically a small world. What happens is we have a six degree of separation theorem that says: if you pick up anybody, 2 person, in the world, on average in no more than 6 connections you get to the person. You know, that’s we call it a small world. You say, ‘oh, I know this person’ or ‘you know that person’ and eventually you are connected. It happens so often. So if you understand the relationship, it actually is relatively simple. Forget about the 6 billion how many people, but if you look at it, it’s pretty straight forward, it’s pretty simple.

[35:32]

This is what we call a power system, a power network. Almost all the power supply, this kind of generation power system is like that. This system is call the Scale Free Network. Regardless of size, doesn’t really matter the size, there are always a few nodes that have more connections than others, and the rest have less. So if you understand these properties and you want to attack some of the problems, you might just attack jus those few nodes. If you understand that, the rest of those, neglecting them wouldn’t cause you too much trouble, then you’ll be ok.

It’s just like an election. One way you can try and spend lots of money to approach everybody, but you don’t have to. If you know a couple of key people who have a huge following, if they promote for you, it becomes more efficient. But if you don’t ask 99% of people to vote for you, you only ask for 50% plus 1 person to vote for you, it’s much easier to deal with a few things. So that’s actually the balance between the simplified solution and the non-simplified solution. If you understand the relationship and the demand is not that rigid then can always take a simpler way to solve it.

[37:03]

Here’s is one of the examples we have done in recent years. This is AUSTRAC, you’ll probably know is a financial agency dealing with money laundering networks. Some of the work they’ve done is with Westpac is one of the typical examples they did. So, we collaborated with them, with computer science professor Jenny Zhang, we collaborated with AUSTRAC to basically develop this system to find the money laundering networks.

The concept is pretty simple, but the problem they had was they had millions of transactions every day and they believed that there would be money laundering network in those undetected. So if somebody, if we know some criminals, and through some criminals dealings you found the network, that’s easy – that’s actually the daily job they do. What they want to know is that those who are unknown.

So, we did is, if you look at human intelligence what we want to understand is, we want to understand the patterns of typical money laundering networks. If we define the patterns, found by whatever mathematical ways or computational ways to find the indicators, the KPIs, we have a number of KPIs defined. Then you will have a very high likelihood to pinpoint some of the network, you do it. After you define, you let the computer do the search, you leave them to run – that’s the best they can do, they do the best. Eventually we can shrink millions of possibilities into a couple hundred or a couple thousand. So then a human expert can look into that and find it.

[38:53]

This principle is quite simple, but if you look at the impact, it is quite large. Actually, it was reported in the New Scientist, it had quite a good result. But the problem of those project is after you are finished, they take your student, or the program and they never say anything. So, the only thing you know of how they are successful is whether, if they are most successful in detecting a money laundering network and reporting it in the media.

[39:28]

This is another point of dealing with complexity. The brand of course is very good and very competent with dealing but it doesn’t mean you have to have high intelligence to do sophisticated things.

Here is an example, just look at fish. Fish doesn’t have much brains, you know, whether they have feeling is still questionable. Fish by simple interaction with neighbouring fish they form beautiful patterns. So if I only want to form these particular patterns, I understand how they, I call it ‘collective intelligence’, how they collaborated to form this form. Then I can solve the problem, so this one example. 

[40:15]

Another example is when you have so many different components, how do you make them collaborate to perform very sophisticated tasks?

[40:29]

So, if you look at ants. Ants live in a very complex social colony, even though they are very simple, the brain is small. With those social colonies, with the rules they perform, and they can form very complex patterns. So this tells us the lesson – if you look at nature, if you want particular things to be done, we might just borrow this collective intelligence of how they interact. You set up a small colony, or small society, and you set up a rule or law and order, just like a human society. Then you penalise anybody who does not follow the rule, you support or give a bonus for those who follow the rules and the society will move. So the intelligence agents like us, will respond to that demand. That is one particular way to deal with this kind of complex system.

[41:25]

I’ll show you an example of one thing we did recently, and we are still doing it. If you think about the microgrid, a microgrid is a small power generation system, for example in remote areas, they generate energies but sometimes they do connect with other microgrids to form these clusters.

If you think about each of them are individuals and consider each has intelligence. What you do is, the principle is pretty simple. You set up this community of this group of multi-microgrids. You set up social expectations, what do you want to achieve? Cheaper energy, efficient, no interruptive, and cost effective – and you develop the social rules. Let them react to each other, so eventually the system will perform as you like. That is actually one of the things that you need.

[42:21]

We did a bit of simulation and also with industry settings, so actually you can do that. Some of the papers we wrote, that have been highly cited, I think this is the first time we introduced this kind of freedom, to give itself the freedom to those microgrids and design how they talk to each other.

The current way we deal with this type of system is basically top-down. You design the rules, I call it socialist, you design the rules and ask them to follow and you achieve it. But in the future, this needs to be more like that.

[42:56]

Another thing we did using the same idea, is dealing with the trading. Now, we all know that if we want to create a deal we talk to our supplier, you know AGL or Origin. But what we believe is, you can deal with your neighbour directly or anybody in the network without anyone. So it’s the same thing like the community, you set the law and order, the interaction, the way how they interact, the system will automatically deal with it. You put in your preference and the system itself can respond to that and interact with others, and eventually deal with it without any intervention from the central retailers, there’s no need.

[43:39]

The concept can be applied and if you show the data. This is the data of how we build the peer-to-peer breeding mechanism and have these agents talk to each other. Eventually you deal with the system like when the grid electricity is cheap I store it in my battery. When it is expensive I sell it or particularly buy some energy from green sources, green energy sources, renewables, or not. I think this whole idea can be applicable very easily.

[44:15]

Another example is this example of dealing with complex networks. If we have thousands, tens of thousands, millions of nodes together, let’s say in a human community, how can you control it? You have to look to nature. One of the inspirations and motivation we found is that is quite long, is the honeybee hives. Very few individuals, about 5 percent of them can guide the group to a new nest site. So, what that means is, I don’t care about how many bees are there, as long as I identify those 5 percent and I control them, and they will control the rest of them. The question of course is how to find those critical bees, that becomes the research, mathematical research, completion of research. So in recent times we have been using and developing algorithm with my colleagues at RMIT, we have Drs Mahdi Jalili, Lasantha Meegahapola, and Peter Sokolowski and others to develop those algorithms that find the best driver nodes so we achieve the goal with minimum effort. So this work is continuing.

[45:45]

I’ll have a couple of minutes concluding before we finish and answer some questions. What I’m trying to say, is that cyber physical systems or let’s put cyber physical social system are the future. Future is about machine’s interaction with humans. Machines that interact with societies and then they interact and collaborate together to achieve economic, social, and environment goals. Of course, having that system increases the huge complexity apart from the discipline wise, we need to talk with each other, understand. We need to find way to deal with the complexity in size and different properties. Certainly, as I said before, AI is still far away from giving us the tool to completely solve these problems, so we have to look elsewhere. So, we need to look at nature and find those ingenious easy way to solve the problem. Because if the problem does not require a big data, having big data means nothing, big data means nothing – it just depends on the problem. Basically, it requires to look at the problem, we study it, understand it very well and just use enough information to give enough solution of what you are required to do.

The second point I would like to make is that, certainly what we have already discussed, is forming these new methodologies so that there is a movement around the world to look at this kind of simplexity to deal with, in particular, spatio-temporal aspects of the problem in a very timely fashion.

The next point I want to make is that there needs to be a balance between optimality, timeliness and complexity. Optimal is good, optimal solution, but you or anybody who has studied optimal research will know that optimal solutions can only be found in the place where the invisible and the visible solution one day collide. What that means is that an optimal solution is never robust, meaning that any small change and the whole solution collapses. There is, in the industry, there is a movement that is going towards a much more robust solution, meaning even some of the initial condition changes, the solution, the structure solution does not change.

Another thing is the timeliness, you can not look for optimality without considering time. In the industry system, time is very critical, you’ve got to respond by that time, if you don’t, useless. So then we need to understand the optimality and complexity, and understand how you have to sacrifice to achieve our goals, which I think is very important. I believe that in the future, there will be a new generation of theories and methodologies for cyber physical systems and cyber physical social system are emerging. I think RMIT is well placed. In here we have quite a few ECPs, that look at inter-disciplinary research and hopefully we will do something great in that area. This is a very exciting area and I believe we have an exciting time ahead.

I think I will stop here and I’d like to thank all of my associate colleagues, students for a few of the works reported here. So, we will now be open to questions and answers. Thank you very much.

[49:27]

Q&A:  Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti

A collective clap here. Thank you very much Xing, that was very, very fascinating. We have a number of questions in the chat, so perhaps I can go over to that and apart from being very congratulatory and thanking you. One of the questions is about:

“AI based on systems are modelled are model by past experience just like human experiences. Will you agree that the lack of popularity? of this system is due to the lack of any mathematical valid?”

[50:05]

Response: Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu

This is a very interesting question, very hard to answer. A Mathematical proof is one way, but the problem of mathematic proof is that once a situation becomes very complex, it very hard to prove, it’s very hard to prove. I’m not sure how to answer the question. I think the one of the reason of AI, there’s two streams, if you look the mathematical approach, you look at the rigorousness of the proof and the complexity of the proof. But there’s another way if you look at the computer science, you look at the computational studies, you use the cases to show that in most cases it works until some other counter example. I think there’s a discipline difference in dealing with the issue. I think that AI, as I mentioned, the reason why AI became a bit of a problem was because when there’s too much focus on knowledgeable system and when we don’t understand our brand too well, there’ll be limitations. I think in future we’ll have to find another way to deal with the problem.

[51:29]

Question:  Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti [off-screen]

Now, I’ve got a question here about

‘Traditionally engineers perform analysis and design based on mathematical models in the form of state space do you think this approach is applicable to CPS?’

[51:46]

Response: Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu

Yes, I think we have to move away from the state space you know, that is always my point. I think that engineering science has developed in a way has become so mathematical but less intuitive. Just imagine in old times when in 1950s when people studied the power system, they used the flow – coming through in the door and out of the door, and the difference to judge whether the system is stable or not. But, if you look at that approach you ignore the dimensions. But if you go to the other way around, look at the dimensions, you look at the microscopic details, you’ve got the whole picture. I think we are moving way; I think in the future there will be a middle where you look at the physical flow point of view, ignore the dimension. But when you’re dealing with the required details of the machines to study, then you go into the models. I think in the future there will be a mixed model of dealing with this problem.

[52:51]

Question:  Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti [off-screen]

Ok, there’s a question here about replacing people, and I’d like to come to that as a social scientist, probably one of the few online. But one here a question:

‘For data analysis, for example, on the results from engineering experiments, do you think deep learning or for city CFD simulation statistical samplings, do you think deep learning can replace humans to perform the post analysis?’

[53:17]

Response: Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu

This is actually always, let me put my view on machine learning. I say that machine learning is not too new in the way, remember when we study our mathematical modelling, we start curve fitting. You have millions of data, you could have hundreds, thousands of data, you use the simple curve with a couple of parameter variables, you simulate it very well. So, as an engineer we are doing the data compression machine learning all the time, but we don’t talk. The problem we have is that we don’t deal with the large size. If we know the model, the model, I interpret the mathematical model as the data compression model. It’s understanding the data, coming from the data, understand it and formulate in a way, very precisely describe the function with minimum required key information. So, I don’t see the difference between computer modelling and machine learning. Machine learning may be coming too big on the data side, focussing on data, but in fact, they sort of interblend. If we know machine learning, if we don’t know the data we can use machine learning. Machine learning tell us the data property, if we know the data then we don’t need the machine learning.

[54:44]

Question:  Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti [off-screen]

Here’s a big question of where we are going with this field:

‘What do you think is the future big thing in cyber physical systems?’

[54:55]

Response: Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu

A couple of things, it depends on what type of cyber physical systems. If you look at this kind of dynamics type of cyber physical systems, there’s lots of fundamental challenges, for example, I mentioned about communication, foundation of the platform, you know the language of the platform. There’s lots of challenges, communication there’s lots of challenges as well. But in terms of big picture, I see it moving toward much more cyber physical social system – how do we interact to understand how the social system evolves. I actually did a bit of reading of the social system and my conclusion was actually there was not much difference, because when you look at social science, they look at the evidence, they look at the modelling, they look at the reasoning and they reach the conclusion. I mean, it’s just the language is slightly different. There is some way, the question we have is how those two sides of the research interact to make it, let’s say the cyber physical system much more efficient, perform better, and for the social system to understand better cyber system, so the social system development will consider that fact, so the both of them will develop together. So, that one I see has a big future.

[56:13]

Question:  Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti [off-screen]

Ok, big discussion going on about complex systems, modelling, in social science, it’s a really huge thing. But the devil is in the detail, I find, easier to say than it is to do.

‘Where do the business and regulatory environments and community sentiments fit into the virtual and physical environments of CPSS?’

[56:36]

Response: Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu

Well, at the present time, it depends on which level. Let’s say if you look at the energy, I call it the energy despatch, economic despatch. Economic despatch is a planning process which locates, let’s say because you have so many generators, you locate the task or workload to different parts and

ask them to produce. So those kinds of social dimensions, economically coming on top of that, this will be could become constrained. That's one of the way, is coming from top down from the social economic constraints. Then you using this kind of optimization to consider those constraints and provide those kind of workload location to the others. On the other hand is, I think there's the both ways, on the other hand, I think those kind of social economic modelling.

Constraints, when people formulated that they have to consider the characteristics of the physical system because some of these physical systems just cannot do. So, I think they both side understanding, we need to have this kind of bold understanding so you would have a much more effective social economic goals and to achieve why that physics system can respond to it.

[58:00]

Question:  Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti [off-screen]

I'm conscious at the time is almost run out and I just wanted to add in a question building on that last question, because one thing that you didn't really consider is ethics, and I think there's a lot of discussion at the moment around a I didn't, in the philosophy section, you didn't as a limitation of AI, you didn't really consider that. I just wonder just building on this last question that came about community sentiments and how that fit into all of this.

‘Can you just comment on the ethical dimensions of using these approaches, and if you can see any and then what the solution is to bring that to how to solve these things.’

[58:46]

Response: Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu

Yeah, this is actually a good. This is probably an oversight of mine. I mean, I struggle between explaining something to non-scientific engineers so, trying to find a way to explain. Certainly, this is, I think this problem would be the similar to the problem of, let's say you, let's say you studied nuclear.

The technology can generate this nuclear power, but the problem is the user, how to use it. You know, the engineers, how to use it. They use it for peaceful purpose for the benefit of society or use him for wars. So, I think it comes down to another dimension is the people who study AI and you say AI to create the things whether that's, the purpose is ethical or not. I’m not sure I answered your question, but I just thought that if I compare that way, it eventually comes down to the individuals, practitioners, ethical standard., the applications to do the work, ethically.

[1:00:01]

Closing:  Distinguished Professor Billie Giles-Corti [off-screen]

Yes, I think this could be a very good debate, but I'm conscious that it's time and on behalf of all of us Xing, thank you so much for a fascinating lecture. It's really been terrific.

Thank you to everyone for your participation and for actively engaging in the questions. I think it's been a terrific session and I'm sure there would be interested in a follow up, particularly with the social scientists. Well done, thank you so much and bye everyone, bye for now.

Closing: Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu

Ok, thank you very much. Thank you.

Transcript of Distinguished Lecture by Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell held on 13 August 2020

Welcome:  Distinguished Professor Xinghuo Yu

Hello, good afternoon, welcome everyone to the RMIT Distinguished Lecture.

I'm Xinghuo Yu and I’m the Chair of the RMIT Professorial Academy and I'm the host of this event.

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 present.

So today we shall hear from one of RMIT’s Distinguished Professors, Arnan Mitchell, who will deliver his lecture on some exciting work he's doing.

This is a part of the Academy. The Academy has a role of advocator, thought leader and ambassador for RMIT. In particular, we are actually organising a number of other events, for example, forums, and the writing of Discussion Papers on issues of importance to RMIT.

But, before we start, let's get through some housekeeping. This is actually a Teams Live event. You are not able to directly ask any questions during the lecture, however, on your right-hand side there is a Q&A panel. You can leave your questions there and at the end of the lecture I will, on your behalf, ask those popular questions to the Presenter.

Without any delay, please join me to welcome Arnan. Arnan, over to you.

Arnan:   Can you hear me?

Xing:    Yes

Arnan:   Thank you Xing.

Lecture:  Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell

I'd also like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people of the Kulin Nation on whose unceded land I actually have my home and this is where I'm talking to you from today. I would like to add my acknowledgement of their ancestors, past, present and future.

And I'm greatly encouraged by the discussions in the last weeks about a Treaty in the Victorian Parliament.

Thanks for inviting me to give this presentation today and I titled it ‘Precision medicine, positioning satellites and turbo-charging the

Internet’. So, I kept a lot of my options open, but really I'm going to talk mostly about the turbo-charging the Internet part of it. I'll say a few things about precision medicine and positioning satellites at the end.

But first off, I wanted to discuss why I love light. I've been interested in light since I was a very young child. Particularly looking at television programs by people like Carl Sagan and hearing about Einstein, and I was particularly fascinated by the stars and space.

But it wasn't actually the stars themselves that fascinated me, it was the fact that light could come from these stars, travel across space over millions of kilometres, traveling hundreds, maybe thousands, even millions of years to get to us, and they could actually retain all the information about the stars that they came from, so that we could see the stars.

I've got here a picture of the Milky Way and this is from Alice Springs.

But I've also got a picture of a star and the star is being blotted out here. But you can actually see - this is aggregated over 7 years – they are actually exoplanets – these are planets that are orbiting this star and this has taken

130 years to get to us. So somehow the light has managed to travel across space and hasn't lost its information. That hasn't faded out and gotten scrambled along the way. It has managed to actually retain all that information, and this fascinated me.

Also, you can look inside with light and so light can tell you an enormous amount about how our bodies work. For contrast here, I’ve decided to look into the eye and this is a picture of a retina and you've got a microscope image

through the eye of the retina. But if you then take a cross section of the retina, you can see all the structure of the retina and then if you do confocal microscopy, light can tell you actually about the structure of the cells and actually even what's inside the cells. And what this tells me is that a beam of light can have an enormous amount of information in it. So one

beam of light can have all of the information about thousands, maybe millions, of cells at the same time. Putting those two things together, light is a really good medium for communication. And so what I've got here is probably one of the most basic means of communication you can have. This is a signal lamp and the means of communication here is very simple. It's essentially like Morse code, so you have the light pointed at the person you're trying to send a signal to and then you open the shutters and close the shutters to make the light go on and off. And this is still used in the Navy today. A very basic form of communication. But it really would only go over the horizon and

so this is really sort of a last resort means of communication.

But, fortunately, there are some other properties of light that we can use to make communication more effective. Anyone who's been swimming would have seen the effect of total internal reflection. And you can see here somebody in a swimming pool and their reflection in the top of the swimming pool because the

water has a higher refractive index than the air above it. It's possible for the light to reflect perfectly off that interface.

And you can see here the same effect but with a laser beam. There's a laser beam bouncing off the surface of water in a drink bottle, and then the same effect here. But now you have a stream of water coming out of a hole in a bucket and there's a laser beam being shone into that and you can see that the laser beam is bouncing off the sides of this and actually following the stream of water down. And so this is sort of a classic undergraduate physics experiment to teach students about total internal reflection.  But it's the basis on which optical fibres are working.

Here's a very nice picture of some optical fibres of the sort that you would often see associated with stories about photonics and light-based communication, but the actual optical fibres that we use are much less beautiful. They look a bit more like this and you can see here, there's a single optical fibre, and that's about the width of a human hair. And actually the light travels in, just in a very, very small part in the middle of it and then it's wrapped in plastic and other protective coatings. And actually when they are out in the field, they look even less beautiful. So you can see here some optical fibre coiled under a manhole and this is the sort of thing that you might find if you opened a manhole on a street corner in many streets in Melbourne.

The question that I'm going to answer today is how am I talking to you? I'm presenting to you a video and you're able to see me. You are able to see my slides. You're able to hear me. So how does this work?

I'm not assuming any prior knowledge here, I'm starting at a very basic level,

and I encourage you to ask questions in the chat function, as Xing suggested.

I'll start at the basics and hopefully we will all get through there. So my video is turned into bits of data. The video is actually made up of zeros and ones and to just illustrate how much data there is, going right back to basics, this is the ASCII code, that text is represented in zeros and ones. Here's the letter A and here's the binary sequence that corresponds to that in the ASCII code. Similarly, this is how text is coded into binary. Here’s a photograph of me from a few years ago and, if it's not too horrifying, I've zoomed in here on my eye so you can see the pixels and each one of those pixels, each square, the representation of red, green and blue is actually given about 8 bits each. There's 24 bits total for each of those pixels. And then let's say you've got a million pixels in a photograph like this, that gives you about 24,000,000 bits of information.

So just to give some idea of magnitude and some context, a single character we

talked about ASCII codes 8 bits an email maybe 7000 words, that seems to be the average email, that's about 500,000 bits or 500 kilobits. A photograph like I just showed you, a megapixel photograph, is about 24,000,000 bits, so 24 bits per pixel in a million pixels.

A Teams call like this one, on average this is sort of medium resolution, it's about out 10 billion bits per hour, so that's 10 gigabytes per hour, or about 3 million bits per second. So 3 megabits per second.

A 4K Netflix video, you've really got to have about 25,000,000 bits per second to watch a 4K video. And the top rate you can get on the NBN at the moment as a domestic customer is about 100 megabits per second, so that's 100 million bits per second.

I was curious to see how my house was connected to the optical fibre network in Melbourne. So the video that I'm talking to you at the moment, the laptop that I'm talking to you on, is turning that into a sequence of zeros and ones

and then sending it wirelessly to my wireless router that you can see here. Now that's connected by a cable to my NBN modem and I'm on hybrid coax here so that goes on a copper cable - but it's an upgraded copper cable. Not like the phone line, it's cable television quality. And then it goes to this NBN box here and then actually goes out to the telegraph pole. You can see the

sort of mess of cables up here, which is where everyone's Internet goes onto the network.

I wanted to follow this down to the end of my street and see when it connected to an optical fibre. I went to the end of the street and sure enough, on the corner of my street there's a manhole cover and under that manhole cover there will be optical fibres and probably a few lasers as well to convert the electronic signals from the copper cable into optical signals. However, I couldn't see how it was connected to the cable on the telegraph pole, so maybe that happens somewhere else - the mysteries of hybrid fibre coax!

Anyway, let's assume that happened very close to the corner of my street. So what happens then? The lasers under that manhole cover are being basically switched on and off by the electrical signals and the pulses of light - the bright pulses for a one and dark for a zero - travel down the fibres and

travel at the speed of light.

Now, these optical fibres are a bit like highways or freeways and this is the freeway up to the airport in Melbourne and they’re very very good at getting the information from one point to another, but they're not great at rerouting it. If you need to have an intersection, for example, you really need to sort of go into another electronic circuit and then come back out again on optical fibre - let's just think about the light getting from one point to another on the freeways. There are these fibres going all over Melbourne and so my video is coming down this fibre and somehow gets to you and gets converted back into an electronic signal with the detector and then enters your house and probably reaches your laptop via Wi-fi.

But what if you are watching this video and maybe some of you are watching this video from outside Melbourne or perhaps you're even outside Australia? You might be at RMIT Vietnam or elsewhere overseas. I've given a talk about a month ago in Canada and I've got a talk at the end of this month in Mumbai in India. So how will my presentation get there?

If we look at this, this is a road map of Australia, so this is where all the major roads are around Australia and you can see there's a major road between Melbourne and Sydney - the Hume Highway. And right next to it I've got the

major optical fibre links around Australia. And you can see here this is actually provided by Aussie Broadband which is the provider who I'm with and you can see there's this major link here between Melbourne and Sydney. And it's got about 100 gigabits per second capacity. That's not the capacity of the fibre link, that's the capacity that's available to Aussie broadband. The fibre link has a bit more than that.

So first my video is turned into zeros and ones in my laptop, then at the

corner of my street it's turned into light and sent down an optical fibre, then somehow that fibre connects to the major trunk line between Melbourne and Sydney and gets to Sydney. So then what happens if my talk is overseas, for example? Is this a fibre here under the water? It looks like there might be one between Melbourne and Perth under the water!

This got me thinking, are there fibres under the ocean? And sure enough, there are! This is a picture of a fibre laying ship. This ship is loaded up with optical fibre cable and it's actually completing the optical fibre that leaves Sydney in Coogee Beach in Sydney and actually goes all the way around Australia - 4000 kilometres - and comes out in Perth.  This is the ‘Indigo’ fibre network and it was actually only opened last year. This is a pretty modern piece of infrastructure.

The fibres would have to be pretty robust. You can see this is a pretty substantial cable that this guy is pulling up the beach here. That's much bigger than a human hair, so what's going on, why is it so big? You can see here various different grades of fibre and so probably this is the sort of fibre that person was carrying, and so you can see right in the middle there are two fibres, there's two fibres in the middle and then they're surrounded by metal and then there's actually a copper casing, and that copper provides a little bit of protection. Most of this is armour just for strength, but the copper actually provides power because there's going to be some amplifiers and repeaters along the way here. Then, there's some more amour and it can be quite substantial armour depending on where the cable was going to be.

Google discovered that sharks bite the fibres. Apparently, they don't often get through them, but they can actually be attacked by them so this is a this is a video that you can find on YouTube if you're interested to see the whole piece of footage.

There is indeed a cable running under the ocean here and this was only really put in there maybe a year ago. But, how's my talk, is there one that goes all the way to Mumbai in India?

This got me thinking about, OK, which fibre is my talk going to go to when I do speak to India? There's actually a website that you can look at – I’m going to show this now - this is a website which is like Google Maps but for optical fibres under the ocean. I'm just going to do an experiment here … hopefully you can see that … so this is the Indigo fibre network that was installed in 1999, but if we look over here, there's a number of fibres coming off Perth and going off to the rest of the world. If I click on this one, you'll see the longest piece of optical fibre in the world. This is 40,000 kilometres long and it's probably the largest piece of infrastructure ever created. So this is just mindboggling that there's a continuous piece of fibre that my video is actually going to travel down and actually end up in Mumbai. But it could go all the way through the Middle East and end up here in Germany along the same piece of fibre. Now this piece of fibre is pretty old by Internet standards. It was ready for service in 1999. They actually started building it a lot earlier. It was finished building in 1997 so this I thought was quite remarkable and it made me think “What was it like? What was this fibre like back in 1997?” (So I'll make this go away … )

The Internet was pretty different in 1997, so back in 1997 I was a PhD student at RMIT. I remember there wasn't any web browsers. Web browsers existed, they'd been invented maybe five years before, but they hadn't really caught on. I remember going to the library and most of our literature was still paper, so the papers literally were made out of paper, but there were some computers in the lobby and you could actually every month a box full of CDs would turn up and you could actually look at some of the papers digitally. But the Internet just was not fast enough to actually bring you the papers that we just take for granted - let alone videos.

This I thought was quite interesting. This is one of Amazon's first websites, so you can see this is from February 1997. It's almost devoid of pictures, so mostly text. This is the sort of content that was being sent down that optical fibre when it was first built. Later on that year Amazon did upgrade their website, so it's a little bit better. There's a few pictures, but still the pictures have been kept to a minimum, so you think most of Australia was on

dial-up. This is really what that fibre was dealing with at the time, but really, thinking 20 years into the future.

So the capacity upgrades for this cable and the cable, by the way, is called SEA-ME-WE 3. This is SouthEast Asia, Middle East and Western Europe, and it's the third iteration of that cable. The first 2 iterations didn't make it out to Australia. When it was first installed in 1999 it was about 20 gigabits

per second. That's 20 billion bits of information every second. That's about 40,000 emails, so probably enough for most of the people on dial-up. About 6000 Microsoft Teams meetings.

Now that's the capacity for the entire world. This makes you think about what we take for granted as bandwidth today versus what was available 20 years ago. In 2008, this was upgraded to 960 gigabits per second, so significantly faster, so 320,000 Microsoft Teams calls. And then in 2015 it was upgraded again and it was 4.6 terabits per second. Now a terabit is 1000 gigabits. So that's 1000 billion bits of information. That's enough for 1.5 million Microsoft Teams calls, which still, if you think about that, serving the world is probably not quite enough. So, this is actually getting a bit ‘long in the tooth’ - a bit old.  

Just for comparison the Indigo cable, the new one that was just installed between Sydney and Perth is about 36 terabits per second, so that's about 15,000,000 Microsoft Teams calls, which is probably enough for Australia.

So how did it get faster? How did it go from only being able to do 40,000 emails simultaneously a second to actually being able to cope with what we sort of expect today? And part of my talk to Mumbai will go down that fibre.

So to make it faster, well, the obvious thing to do would be to put in more fibres - and actually (I'll just pull up that website again), you'll see that if you zoom in here there are actually a couple of new fibres. There's the Australia-Singapore fibre that goes to Singapore. And there's another fibre which actually is the other half of the Indigo fibre network that went from Sydney to Perth, now goes from Perth to Singapore. So yes, people are doing that and as they're doing that, you can put in new technology so you can sort of improve the fibre so that it can have more capacity. And one of the things that people are interested in doing is actually looking at putting multiple cores in these fibres and so this is the records for capacity on any sort of fibre ever, so you can see that the most recent capacities are actually over 1000 terabits, that's a petabit, so these are getting very fast indeed. But if you want to put this in, you’ve actually got to lay a new cable, and so maybe this will happen in another 20 years.

The other thing you can do is you can just switch the light on and off faster, so if you if you imagine that your laser at one end, you're switching it on and off, you could just switch that faster, but there's a limit to how fast you can do it, and it's limited to some extent by the drive electronics. You may have noticed (or I noticed and maybe people who are as old as me would have noticed) that computers stopped getting faster around about the year 2000. Up until then, they were doubling in speed about every two or three years, but around about 2000 that stopped, and they've sort of stabilized, and similarly the actual electronic drive for information transfer that has also sort of plateaued. So, we really have to look at optical techniques to improve things.

Another technique that works really well is to use wavelength multiplexing so

basically what you can do - and I've just got a picture here of a prism and fans of Pink Floyd would recognize this, but basically if you have a beam of white light here actually that white light can be made up of all the different colours of the rainbow and you can separate them out using a prism or some other techniques and actually you could have multiple laser lines – all these different colours as separate lasers - and then use something like a prism to combine them together and then send them all down one optical fibre. This is how you can increase the capacity and an analogy is like adding multiple additional lanes to a freeway. Using this technique, you can probably have about 80 different wavelengths on the sort of fibre that was laid back in 1999.

But there's some other techniques that you can use, and actually the cable that was laid, the SEA ME WE 3 cable laid in 1999, was already playing some of

those tricks. It was already modulating pretty fast, and it was already using some wavelength multiplexing. But to get the capacity up, we need to do some other sort of techniques. You can try and use a bigger alphabet. That's another opportunity, so here is a picture. This is called an ‘eye diagram’ (don't be put off - I'll try and explain what it is!). This is basically a measure of the light, so the light that you're measuring at the output and if it's up here, it's bright, it's a one, and if it's down here, it's dark, it's zero. You can imagine the light switching between bright and dark, and so these are all the different options for switching, from staying ‘off’ or staying ‘on’, or switching from ‘off’ to ‘on’, or switching from ‘on’ to ‘off’.

What's important, at this point, is you can tell the difference between a ‘zero’ and a ‘one’, as this gets noisier or there's other distortions, maybe that eye will close and it'll be hard to tell the difference between them, but you can see there's a lot of space here, so for a really low noise system perhaps there's a lot of wasted space here, so you can actually use more levels in between. That's what you can see over this side. This is what's called ‘PAM4’ and it's four different levels of intensity, so you've got completely ‘off’ here and completely ‘on’ here and then you've got a little bit ‘on’ and then mostly ‘on’ and as long as you can tell the difference between those four different levels you can see there's a little bit of an eye opening here and an eye opening here - as long as you can tell the difference, you can actually now send an alphabet of four different symbols so you can send instead of just a ‘one’ or a ‘zero’, you've got four different symbols here. Now you can increase that to 8 different levels here so you can see that as an eye diagram and you can also, so that's changing the intensity of the light. You can also change the wavelength of the light and this is sort of an analogy to frequency modulation, so this is like AM radio and this is like FM radio and you can do both of those things together and actually end up with 64 different possibilities here and so you can see each one of those spots represents a different letter in the alphabet that you're sending, and as long as you can tell the difference between them, as long as they don't crash into each other, then you can successfully transmit those. These are the sorts of tricks that people have used to increase the capacity, and this is called coherent communication.

In summary, how do you upgrade an old fibre to make the Internet faster? You add more fibres, that's the obvious thing to do, and they are, but they're really expensive. They take many years to build. They cost billions of dollars. They are more substantial than actual roads so people are doing that, but it’s a big undertaking, and you probably want to be able to get about 20 years of life out of your fibre.

You can switch the lasers faster. Maybe there was a 4 times increase over the time between when the fibre was installed in 1999 and now, but it's pretty much plateaued – the electronics has pretty much reached its limit. You could add more wavelengths so there were several wavelengths upgrades on that fibre during its lifetime. There's a total of 80 available and with some tricks you can probably get that up to 160. But the biggest difference that was made really was making the alphabet bigger so you can have 32 times or maybe 64 or even 128 additional letters in the alphabet. This is really where the real improvement is, but the challenge here is you need 80 lasers and each of those lasers needs to be really low noise, both in intensity and in wavelength in order to be able to play these tricks. You need really, really, really good lasers.

The question I'm asking is “OK, that's great for these multi-billion dollar fibres that are going across the ocean where people are really trying to get as much value out of that investment as possible over a couple of decades, are we going to see these sorts of speeds in Melbourne coming to our homes”?

And, it's worth considering what sort of infrastructure you actually need at

each end of the fibre, so this is what you would find at the Sydney end of the ‘Indigo’ fibre. This is actually I took this image from the NextDC which is the data centre company that actually has the contract to terminate that fibre. This is from their annual report in 2020, and they highlight the Indigo subsea cable coming in and they've actually built this multi-story data centre to accommodate the data coming in from that fibre. This huge building is what that fibre goes into. The fibre itself actually plugs into this enormous machine here. For scale, that's about the size of a pizza box. So this is the equivalent. This is basically the modem that their data centre has to talk to that undersea cable and this is a product today, this is brand new. If I wanted this sort of capacity … in here there would be 80 lasers and 80 detectors, and all the electronics to drive them … if I actually wanted that in my home, I’d want to make this about the size of this, that's the challenge - I need to shrink that enormous piece of infrastructure and make it the size of the modem that I have in my house and so how do I do that? How would I shrink 80 lasers with the quality that they need to have and make it possible that it could fit under my television.

I now want to describe some of the work that we're doing on photonic chips to try and achieve exactly that goal. Here's a photonic chip.  This is the complete chip. This is a $2 coin, just for reference, here's a chip and you can see there's all this printed circuitry on the surface. This is all actually optical components that are printed on the surface, but it uses the same sort of technology as silicon electronic chips and you can see down in the corner here there's a ring and here's a zoom in on that ring you can see.

This is, it's like an optical fibre going around the corner here. It's a lot smaller than optical fibre and it's printed on the surface of a chip and then there's this ring that goes there around here as well, and so that ring is about a millimetre across. So you can just about see it. Just to illustrate what's happening here, if you have a laser beam that comes into this ring then most of the laser light will actually just propagate through on this waveguide

that keeps the light traveling along here. But a very, very tiny amount of the energy is coupled into the ring and goes around and when it goes round once a little bit more light will couple in and then it'll go around again and then two times that amount of light will couple in and then it'll go around again and so on and so forth. Now the light - I mentioned at the beginning that light can propagate for hundreds of years across space without losing the information that's on it - here it's actually propagating through a sort of a glass like material that we printed on the surface of a chip, but using all of the technologies that have been developed for computer circuits. This material is almost perfectly pure and it has very, very few defects, and so the light can propagate around and around that ring, maybe a million times, maybe even 10 million times all the while, every time it goes round building up more and more and more power so the power on the on the ring can be quite extraordinary.

If you think about a wine glass and when you sort of rub your finger around the surface of the wine glass, it starts to resonate and it sort of produces a note. And if you're careful and you stay within the resonance, the note will get louder and louder and louder so that's what's happening in the ring, but it's going around about a million times building up an enormous amount of power, and it resonates not just with one note. It resonates with the whole ‘comb’ of notes so it's like a chord of musical notes but we call this an optical frequency comb because it can have hundreds of different lines that will come out all determined by the geometry of this ring. You come in with one laser line, let the ring resonate and the resonance produces all these extra wavelengths that are essentially clones of the original laser line and have all of the properties of that original laser line and all the spacing

between them is actually defined by the geometry of the ring printed on the chip.

We can produce 80 lines this way and they have sufficient quality for us to use each one as an optical communication channel. And this is the way that we can achieve 80 lasers with the required communications bandwidth.

Here is the rainbow of 80 wavelengths we got out of this chip. We then used this and we started it at RMIT and needed to test that we could actually achieve the high-speed transmission using each of those wavelengths as a communications channel. We modulated information onto each of those laser lines and then actually sent it around a circuit out to Monash University and back to RMIT and showed that we could actually do this transmission. This is a piece of infrastructure that we set up to do these sorts of very high speed tests across Melbourne and it's actually using optical fibres that are already in the ground about the same sort of age as the undersea optical fibre - about 20 years old but we were able to actually achieve the world record Internet speed using this very old fibre because of the excellent quality of the laser lines that were coming out of this ring. And just as a caveat, this is the world's fastest Internet qualified from a single chip. This is the fastest that anyone's demonstrated using a single chip as a source and we've got a lot of media coverage from this. It was covered by the BBC, The Conversation, The Independent, and we were particularly pleased with the coverage we got in their physical newspaper in The Australian.

You can see, Bill Corcoran, who's from Monash who led that work, Dave Moss, who has a long history from the genesis of using combs for these sorts of things and myself in the InPAC lab here at RMIT. We're really pleased with that.

So, what's next? We are in the process of talking to a number of different industries about what to do with this chip, particularly, we're having some conversations with NBN Co. and they're actually interested in what the future of this Indigo cable might be. So, could we use some of our technologies to try and improve that Indigo cable? But maybe we could use some of these technologies for some of these lesser optical fibre lines here, so you can see the Indigo cables 100 gig. This one’s only 30. The one out to Darwin is only 10. So maybe we can use some of the technologies to improve that.

In the last few minutes that I've got left, I'd like to spend just a few moments talking about some of the other things that these chips can do. We've shown that we can use chips to achieve 80 laser lines in a very, very small footprint with very very, low energy. We've recently, only last month, it's been announced that we have a successful project to develop gyroscopes based on these chips, so you can use these photonic chips to actually measure very, very tiny movements, and the company that we're working with they are a company that works in movement sensors and they also work with another company called Airsight that does this sort of Lidar Imaging and the intent is that these gyroscopes will actually go on their drones and the drones fly around and map space and, for example, they can create a map and make sure that the tracks of the railway line are in good condition. This can potentially avoid derailments in the future. We think if we can integrate this technology using our microchips this would be an excellent opportunity to put similar structure on spacecraft and satellites because they will be very, very small, very, very lightweight, very, very energy efficient without compromising precision. You can also use this sort of technology for biosensing and so here you can see one of our photonic chips and using the photonic chip technology we're actually able to coil up the light is trapped in this in this trace on the surface of the chip and goes round and round and round this coil and comes back out again. And so you could imagine if you put a droplet of fluid on there, the light will interact with that fluid over a very long distance and so you can use this as a very, very sensitive sensor. In principle it's possible to use these sorts of sensors even to detect individual molecules in biological media. So we combine this chip with some of our microfluidics  (that's probably a topic for another presentation) we have the ability to make very, very sophisticated microscopic plumbing and we can combine this chip for fluids with a chip for light and actually make a lab on a chip system for interrogating biological fluids. And this chip, for example, was actually made for testing for Cardio Troponin but a very similar chip was also made for measuring antibiotics as contaminants in seawater.

The last couple of slides I just wanted to say, it might surprise you, and it certainly surprises a number of our collaborators, that we actually have all of the capabilities to prototype these chips. Certainly in Melbourne, now at RMIT, we actually have all of the tools to take a completely blank wafer -  we have all of the simulation tools, the design tools, the fabrication tools - to make fully functional chips and we can do that in a few weeks from start to finish at RMIT.

And this is exciting a lot of potential collaborators because we can now start looking at using some of these technologies and custom design chips for their needs and try them out. You have an idea, try them out a few weeks later, see what's wrong with them and iterate very rapidly in coming up with a solution.

But I think we can go one step further, one step further than doing this sort of research. I think we can have a manufacturing base in Australia and that sounds perhaps a little bit ambitious because the usual mode of manufacturing chips means that you're making millions, maybe even hundreds of millions of chips in order to achieve the economies of scale that really require the investment. But now the infrastructure is becoming a lot more accessible. You don't need to spend a billion dollars on a fabrication facility. Really you can get a lot of pieces of equipment and we have many of them already at the MNRF. They're accessible to sort of university size groups, so we can afford to, and we can work very quickly and make things. There's a lot of direct right tools that can actually make things from a computer design straight into a chip in a couple of days as where it used to be a very long exercise to sort of make these. We can actually make bespoke prototypes quite quickly, and I think that's really where the value is. So, we can make a few very high value prototypes and accelerate the development cycle to give lots of different Australian industries a competitive edge internationally.

I’m enthusiastic about it, if you're enthusiastic about this as well, I'd love to talk to you. There’s my email there, there's our website. We are looking forward to moving that onto the new RMIT Research website and you can also follow me on Twitter. Thank you!

Lecture by Distinguished Professor Elena Ivanova, RMIT Professorial Academy
Topic:  Combating the emerging worldwide epidemic of “super-bugs”
Presented on 3 July 2019 at RMIT University

Transcript

Speaker 1:       My name is Xinghuo Yu, I'm the Chair of the RMIT Professorial Academy. This occasion is around a very important task of this Academy which is about promoting the excellence on research, education and engagement, and also it is about giving advice and engage within the forum. Today it's my good pleasure to introduce Professor Elena Ivanova. She's going to present the fourth RMIT Distinguished Lecture. Just before I introduce her, I'll just give you a bit of introduction of the RMIT Professorial Academy. This Academy was established by the Vice-Chancellor in 2017. The purpose of it is basically trying to make use of the brands and influence of RMIT Distinguished Professors. At this point in time we have 18. I use them as a think tank to advise the University on future strategic directions, sort of a thought leader, and also as an advocator on behalf of the University. The Lectures are one of the important elements of that mission, but we will do more than just that. In the future we also will hold a public forum on issues, on strategies, on policies, which I think you are more than welcome to participate.

Speaker 1:       Today's talk is presented by Distinguished Professor Elena Ivanova. She joined RMIT in 2018. She's from Swinburne and one of the high flyers. Today's talk is about super-bugs. I think this is one of the highest numbers of participants, just because of interest. But I think it's more because of interest of topic and also, I guess, people want to know you more, about what you're going to do for us.

Speaker 1:       She's going to talk about her research and also her perspective. More than just her own research and perspective, about the future. What do we see for the future. Certainly, we all worry about super-bugs, so you know, that's why we're all very interested in what it is you have to say.

Speaker 1:       Please give a round of applause to welcome Professor Ivanova.

Speaker 2:       Thank you very much for the nice introduction.

Speaker 2:       I'm very honoured to talk to you today about our work and, as you see now, it's one of the major concerns worldwide, the epidemic of super-bugs. And they tell you that we are not losing the battle. There is a light at the end of the tunnel and we will see how we can do it.

Speaker 2:       As an introduction, I would like to talk about some problems imposed by antibiotic resistance, bacterial infections and emerging super-bugs. And then we can see how insect wings, natural bactericidal surfaces could be a potential solution to some of these problems. And I'll show you examples of novel mechanical ways, how we can kill bacteria without any need of antibiotics.

Speaker 2:       The rise of super-bugs. I'm sure you're all well-aware of increasing numbers of reports telling us really dramatic stories. Just a few of them are on the screen. In 2017 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that a woman in Nevada died from an infection resistant to all available antibiotics in the United States. In the same year, there was another report in China when super-bug Escherichia coli in this case was found resistant to last resort antibiotics carbapenems. That is an antibiotic of broad spectrum of beta-lactam plus. In fact, in Victoria 2016, a 56-year old man from rural Victoria with no history of hospital contact or international travel was reported to have died from Klebsiella pneumoniae and that particular strain was resistant to all antibiotics available in Australia.

Speaker 2:       Just to tell you that the background of this slide, what you see here, is an electron micrograph of Staphylococcus aureus or 'Golden Staph,' which is resistant to Methicillin and you can see how it is colonising, how it can colonise some blood cells. It's growing and colonising the cells.

Speaker 2:       Now, before we go on any further, I thought it will be useful to give you some terminology so that we all know what actually is a super-bug. A definition I found in The Royal Institution of Australia 2017, a 'super-bug' is usually defined as "a microorganism that is resistant to commonly used antibiotics" and of course 'antibiotic resistance', if you look at a major website, you'll find a definition of ‘antibiotic resistance’ which is "an ability of microorganisms and that could be bacteria, fungi or protozoans to grow despite exposure to antimicrobial substances designed to inhibit their growth."

Speaker 2:       You may ask me, how we now come to this point where the antimicrobial resistance is developed. There are several different ways. The major reason is selective pressure through drug use in medicine. Another serious reason is that uncontrollable use of antibiotics in many countries. Australia is not there, not in that list. Also, inappropriate prescriptions. But the major misuse is in agriculture. It's up to 70% of all antibiotics produced worldwide actually used mostly as a prophylactic against disease or as a growth promoter. And, of course, we do not forget about genetic transformation where the genes developed resistance to antibiotics could be easily transferred among different groups of bacteria.

Speaker 2:       Again, you may ask me, is it so difficult to kill bacteria still? It's so small. Well, look at these facts. Temperature: high temperature can destroy proteins, nucleic acids and damage membrane, yet we have bacteria called Pyrolobus fumarii, which can grow at temperatures up to 113 degrees. How about radiation? Can radiation kill bacteria? Yes, it can, but not all of them. There is a bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans, which can withstand ionizing radiation up to 20 kGy and also UV exposure. What about pressure? There are actually obligatory piezophilic species that can grow at 70 to 80 Mpa. What about reactive oxygen species? In fact, oxidative damage induces production of antioxidants and detoxifying enzymes by bacteria, so they can easily develop resistance to any reactive oxygen species.

Speaker 2:       Now, you can ask me again, why are they so smart? Why are the bugs so smart? And I'm always telling that don't forget that bacteria are the oldest life form on our planet. They have survived an evolution of 3.8 billion years and of course and they've developed versatile metabolic pathways. They can colonise each and every surface. They can survive everywhere, everywhere. Now look at this example. It was estimated that the total number of bacteria in 70 kg (so called ‘Reference Man’), could be 38 trillion. 38 trillion. It could be roughly up to 5 kgs we have in our body. And look at this scanning electron micrograph which I used as the background of this slide. What you see here is a community of bacteria which are found on the surface of our tongue. So, bacteria everywhere and looks like it's not that easy to kill them.

Speaker 2:       Now how do they survive? You may ask me again. A single bacterial cell will not be able to survive because it's very tiny, it's not protected, it’s very difficult for it to survive. What happens, bacteria survives in communities. And these communities are called biofilms. What you see here is just a single bacteria cell, they call it free-floating planktonic cells, settled on the surface. They aggregate, form micro-colonies and excrete extracellular polymeric material. That's how the biofilm is formed. The biofilm growing through that and producing a complex, three-dimensional structure. Something like that, what you see here. And cells they are protected by extracellular polymeric material against host immune cells and antibiotics. When the biofilm reaches a critical mass, the cells could release planktonic cells, could release again and colonise each and every other available surface. That's how the bacteria spread. Once, it forms a biofilm and release from the biofilm.

Speaker 2:       And this is also a reason why they can easily develop resistance to antibiotics because in the biofilm, they are protected from any antibacterial treatments. In fact, and they form infections. Implant-associated infections is number one cause of implant failure in patients. What is also dangerous is once the biofilm reaches the bloodstream, the bacteria can colonise more surfaces in our body. On this little picture, you see size of primary and secondary infections. And in a way that was our own motivation. We wanted to design surfaces which would be free from bacteria. We wanted to fabricate surfaces which could be used for bacterial implants. What you see here is a little movie made in our lab, maybe a good ten years ago now, showing how quickly Golden Staph can colonise the surface of titanium, which is commonly used in implantable materials for the hip replacement you will see here. And here is the real scanning electron micrograph of the biofilm form Staphylococcus pseudointermedius on the orthopaedic bone screw. That's what is happening.

Speaker 2:       Now, as I say, our motivation was to design these surfaces, but how did we rationalise our motivation. We were thinking that, because bacteria survived through colonisation on surfaces, why don't we look at the surface typography and see if we can modify the typography of the surface and stop bacteria from attaching. Once we stop bacteria from attaching on the surface, the biofilm will not be formed and we will be safe. So typography was our focus and the very first experiment we've done, but before we go there, I'll tell you currently what a traditional approach is, where people try to design antibacterial surfaces.

Speaker 2:       Of course, we are not the only one group trying to design antibacterial surfaces. Currently there are basically two major classes of antibacterial surfaces. Antibiofouling, which will be repelling bacterial cells from the surface, and bactericidal. In this type of surface, the bacteria in contact with the surface will be killed effectively. For that, we use a low molecular weight antibacterial compound including antibiotics, it could be antimicrobial peptides or even silver. Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks associated with these approaches. Toxicity, non-uniformity coatings, decrease in efficacy, environmental health concern and, of course, microbial resistance to antibacterial agents. So back to the start of our work, what was now many years ago, the attachment points or settling points theory was one of the main well accepted norms. What it says is that "the organisms smaller than the scale of the surface micro-texture will attach in larger numbers in micron scale shelters on the textured surface and will have greater adhesion strength because of the multiple attachment points on the surface". So, we said, all right, how about very small surface without many, no attachment point. Would it repel bacterial cells?

Speaker 2:       And the very first, very simple experiment was done by one of our PhD students. Just using the standard microscopic slide, which is actually quite smooth, with the average surface roughness in the range of 2 nanometres, and after the treatment with the buffered solution of hydrofluoric acid, these little peaks are gone and you see this surface even more smooth, with 1.3 nanometre roughness. What you can see here, is just a remarkable response of bacterial cells where you see that the film numbers on the nano-smooth surface, which is really not much change, is even increased. Also changed morphology, morphological transformations and extracellular polymeric substances. So, we re-confirmed this result using different surfaces, including titanium and also using different range of surface roughness, and the results were the same.

Speaker 2:       The main conclusion coming from this work is that the bacteria is far more susceptible to nanometre scale roughness than previously believed and nano-smooth surfaces do not represent a repelling environment for bacterial attachment. So that's why we had to move on and find any other surfaces which may be free from bacteria. And of course, we always look at nature. In nature, what you see in nature, there are lots of examples of bacteria-free surfaces and these are plants or insects, where you can find them free from bacteria. Now, the particular self-cleaning effect associated with these types of surfaces and it's mostly due to the superhydrophobicity of these surfaces, which in turn is a combination of surface chemistry and a particular amount of typography. So, these superhydrophobic surfaces, in a way, are not wet. And the water droplets just bounce on the surfaces and slide, roll off. And on the way of rolling off, it takes all contaminants away from the surface, so it's remaining clean.

Speaker 2:       What we've done next, in collaboration with our colleagues in a Laser Center at Hannover University, we were able to mimic the surface of lotus leaf on titanium and that's how it looks like on your left-hand side. You see an example of what that droplet's behaviour on the glass surface and on the superhydrophobic surface. Obviously, the water contact angle is 153 degrees. Now what happens when we immerse this surface in suspension with bacterial cells? And for that, we used two different types of cells: P. aeruginosa and S. aureus. You see, P. aeruginosa didn't really attach on this surface. However, S. aureus quite successfully colonised this type of the surface. We have to answer the question of why?

Speaker 2:       And it was the brilliant work of our PhD student, Dr Truong, now also a staff member of School of Science. We looked at what happened to surface when they immersed in water. What you see here is a little movie showing you how quickly air replaced by water. So, and that is really followed by the aggregation of S. aureas cells and their colonisation of the surface. Basically, air was one of the most important components in this surface and this surface lost air and it became favourable for attachment or S. aureus cells in particular. So that was quite a disappointing result. So, we looked at other examples of bacteria-free surfaces in nature and there are insects.

Speaker 2:       The next object for our work was actually cicadas. You all know that cicadas are the loudest insect in the world and there are numerous species in the range of 200 species are available in Australia. We used in our work one particular species called Psaltoda claripennis. If you look at the nanoscale, the wing of the cicada will be composed of a tiny, tiny nanopillars of just only 200 nanometres tall and 60 nanometres in diameter. It's a very, very fine pattern which forms in the epi cuticle of insects. What you see here is really the wettability map constructed by another PhD student, showing that the surface maintains high superhydrophobic features with the water conduct angle ranges from 163-173 degrees. What happened with the bacterial cells when we immersed the membrane of the insect wing in the suspension with bacterial cells? And as you can see, we didn't get the results which we expected. We saw that bacterial cells will not be able to attach on this surface. They will be repelled, similar to the water droplet. But what you see here, it was quite the opposite: bacterial cells happily attached on this surface but it looks like they are not so happy. So what you see here is a collage of scanning the electron micrographs, [inaudible 00:20:52] there's also [inaudible 00:20:54] and confocal imaging indicating that the cells are actually dead on the surface.

Speaker 2:       Another experiment is an atomic force experiment. What we showed is that the bactericidal efficiency of the killing process of the cell on the surface of the wing is remarkably fast in the range of 200 seconds, we detect a rupturing point and it was quite a nice match with the height of the nanopillars, which was 200 nanometres. Basically, one single cell could be ruptured in 200 seconds by, I'm talking about Pseudomonas aeruginosa cell, a particular type of the cell. The efficiency, the killing efficiency is also quite good. What you see here is that the number of viable cells remaining in suspension was decreased by 96% per square centimetre over 30 minutes. So that was quite, we were quite happy with the results.

Speaker 2:       Now the question then, again, was how did this happen? Was it a chemistry playing a role in this activity or not? In order to eliminate the fact or understand whether or not chemistry has any effect, we spattered gold on the surface of the wing. And it's a very thin layer of just 10 nanometres gold so that the pattern is not changed so we wanted to maintain the pattern, the same type of the pattern. And what you see here is that in fact, the bactericidal effect remained the same. A conclusion for this work was that the surface chemistry is not really important in the bactericidal effect on the cicada wing, but rather it is typography that is the dominant factor.

Speaker 2:       Another question is to ask, how is it happening? What is the killing process? What is involved in this killing process? The theoretical analysis was done in collaboration with a group of physicists in Spain in University of Rovira i Virgili. That was a PhD student Sergey Pogodin at that time. He modelled the membrane of bacterial cell as elastic layer because the thickness of the membrane in the range of 6, maximum 10 nanometres and the diameter is quite large compared to this one. And what really happens in this particular situation. The bacterial cell is suspended on the array of the nanopillars and the stress which is developed upon this suspension such as high that it breaks, but it breaks, rupturing in between the nanopillars. So in a way these pillars cannot pierce the cell. And this is a very common mistake with some of the people trying to understand what happened on the surface. It's all about dimension. So the large, like this 6 nanometre pillar, it cannot really pierce a really thin layer of the membrane. Rather it stretches and breaks in between the pillars.

Speaker 2:       Unfortunately, this particular type of the nanopattern is only active against Gram-negative bacterial cells. Gram- positive cells, and we tested quite a few of them, Gram-positive bacterial cells remain safe on this type of the nanopattern. The reason for that, we believe that, our hypothesis, we didn't prove it yet, in the different thickness of the Peptidoglycan layer, which adds full Gram-positive bacterial cells additionally GDT for the film, so it's much harder to rupture it. So that's our working hypothesis. Hopefully, we'll try to prove it.

Speaker 2:       Now, the next object in our work was dragonflies. Dragonflies are another numerous group of insects and if you look at the pattern of this insect, it's quite different, that is the pattern of the dragonfly. Maybe it's not that clear here but it's pretty much clear here. It’s very random array of different lengths, quite some different lengths of the nanopillars. Very difficult to describe it. But what is interesting here, this type of the nanopattern is very active. Basically, it ruptured all cell types including B. subtilis spores. This is quite a remarkable observation, though we wanted also to understand, if different types or different species of dragonflies have exactly the same pattern, but looks like they're not, and whether or not they're the same. Well, what is exactly the same, it may be visual similarity. If you look at the surfaces of the dragonfly wings they look quite similar. But yet, they are not identical. On this little movie, you see the behaviour of the water bouncing, taken by a high speed CD camera which takes 28,000 frames per second. So that's what you see here, that's how the water droplets films when it bounces off the surface of the dragonfly wing.

Speaker 2:       On this table, you see the comparison of the nanopillar height and density for this type of species. It's quite similar, quite similar. But when we used three different species of dragonfly and looked at the bactericidal activity, it appears to be different. So that's what you see on this slide that the one Diplacodes bipunctata is the most active one and the two others, which we used, are quite different. AFM topology analysis showed that in fact the curvature, the geometry of the pillars maybe the key when the slight variation in the nanopattern may severely affect the bactericidal performance of the nanopatterns.

Speaker 2:       Our next work on trying to understand using simplified forces which are involved in the killing bacterial cells. And this work was about the simplified model of the cell membrane which is really the Giant Unilamellar Vesicles or GUVs, which were constructed from DOPC and we used two other species, other different species of dragonfly.

Speaker 2:       So, on this image you see the Cryo-SEM image of the GUV which was done for the first time, for some reason, despite that this is a very common model of liposome contraction, from variable defined lipids. We couldn't see that before in Cryo-SEM analysis. So, what we'd done at that time was understanding whether or not these GUVs would be ruptured on the surfaces of both species of dragonfly. And, in fact, they both ruptured on this type of the surfaces.

Speaker 2:       What you see here is a confocal scanning of micrographs and cryo-scanning electron micrographs, showing different stages of rupturing, GUVs rupturing on the surfaces of the wing. And that allowed us to estimate that the minimum about of additional tension required to mechanically rupture the GUVs was in the range of 4.3-6.75 mN per metre, but that's all dependent on the relative size of the GUV. That was a pretty good match with the previously recorded data, I think using a micropipette asperation, so we were pretty happy with that, but that's not a direct estimation of the forces. It's still something to study further, so that's a load of work to be done.

Speaker 2:       Now natural bactericidal surfaces are very good and very interesting but the question is, can we fabricate this in synthetic analogue. And the answer is, yes, we can. What you see here is an example of first biomimetic analogue of natural bactericidal surface, or Black Silicon. In fact, it's quite easy, the fabrication of this type of surface is quite easy. It's a matter of optimization of the parameters. So, I'm not going into technical details of the fabrication, just only tell you that its basically plasma assisted reactive ion etching, a quite common technique. Once again, it’s a matter of recipe and optimization of the recipe and you can quite reliably and consistently get the same pattern of your choice.

Speaker 2:       Now on this slide, what you see is a similarity of the pattern which we found on the dragonfly wing and Black Silicon. Once again what you see here, it's quite similar, but it's not an identical pattern. And in a way, it's a good thing. Which means that the pattern which will be bactericidal may not be necessarily identical to the previously found or designed or fabricated. It could be different but of course the variation may be in a very narrow range of the nanofeatures. So that's what you see here, that's a dragonfly and this is a Black Silicon pattern. The table gives you an overview of the bactericidal surfaces which could be of different stability. Black Silicon is not super hydrophobic. The chemical composition could be different, the nanoprotusions or nanofeatures of this surface could be also different, bactericidal effectiveness could be also variable, depending on the pattern. However, what you see here that sometimes synthetic analogue of natural bactericidal surface may achieve a greater performance as a natural template of bactericidal surfaces. So, it’s all about optimization of the surface nanoscale parameters.

Speaker 2:       The mechanism in the context of the dragonfly is not really defined as yet. We believe this is our hypothesis. It's still stretching of the membrane when it's ruptured in between the nanopillars because even the Black Silicon nanopillars appear to be sharper. They're not reaching the dimensions below 10 nanometres. So basically, it's really from a very theoretical point of view, it's very difficult to pierce the cell. Still the membrane will be hard to pierce.

Speaker 2:       What is another remarkable thing about this type of the surfaces, in the way they are self-cleaning? But they are not self-cleaning as it was in the context of the water, when it's bouncing off the surface, but it is self-cleaning when you see that the cell debris actually removing from the surface all the time. The removal of the cell debris from the surface is not as quick as it's rupturing and it's highly dependent on the nanopattern. But in a range, it could be 20-30 minutes, which is required to remove the dead cells from the surface where the debris is probably floating around in the environment.

Speaker 2:       Now you may ask how about eukaryotic cells, what happened in eukaryotic cells? If bacterial cells are effectively ruptured, what about big, large cells? As you can see here, that was our work some time ago where we used fibroblast-like cells, what you see here it's a movie of attachment and settling of COS-7 cell on the Black Silicon surface. And here you see a freeze fracture image where you see the cell and the nanopattern. So, the cell is safe on the nanoscale pattern. Well, if you think from the logical point of view, the nanopillars are too small and I'm always saying that, perhaps it's like a mosquito bite for us, that's what the nanopattern for eukaryotic cell. It’s a matter of different scales of the pattern, which may affect. So for eukaryotic cell bactericidal surfaces are safe. And in a way, it has a very significant, and it’s very important in the context of implantable biomaterials.

Speaker 2:       What you see here, it's another experiment. When we try here to infect the surfaces with infectious doses of pathogenic bacteria, and after that seed the surfaces with eukaryotic cells. As you see here within six hours, bacterial cells are effectively ruptured and eukaryotic cells you can see on the next slide are growing very nicely. So what you see here is the COS-7 cells on Black Silicon pre-infected with Pseudomonas aeruginosa and the same green surface pre-infected with S. aureus. And you see on Day 7, eukaryotic cells are growing nicely and reaching confluence stage and on the surfaces, which are flat or the ones which are used for implants, the infected surfaces keep going with the bacterial cells. I mean bacteria pathogen, bacteria happily growing on these surfaces and they, in fact, inhibit and contaminate eukaryotic cells. And eukaryotic cells do not survive on these surfaces.

Speaker 2:       Moving on, the effect of mechano-bactericidal surfaces, as we are trying to now develop this further to show you that it's quite versatile. So there are different ways which we can use or we can use a different type of nanopattern to kill bacterial cell by different way. This is another example when we can cut bacterial cell through using the nanostructured surface. And this surface could be a graphene-like surfaces. What you see here, that you can have a graphene surface with graphene flakes, which is very easy to obtain and we looked at different types of flakes fabricated from graphene and see how bacterial cells will respond on this. On the top you see graphite surfaces. And these two types of graphene surfaces, they are, in fact, highly bactericidal.

Speaker 2:       But until now, the nature of bactericidal activity of graphene flakes is not really resolved. Well there are two hypotheses. One hypothesis says that extraction of the bactericidal effect on graphene flakes. Extraction of the lipids from the membrane, that's what they say what happened when the cell interacts with graphene flakes. What we think it is and that is our work where we are trying to prove it, that actually it is a pore formed due to reorientation of lipid cells to graphene surface while they are interacting with the graphene flakes. What you see here, it's a little bit enlarged images confocal images showing the red cells, which I killed, looking swollen. And that's apparently because the cell, when its cut through, the environment external liquid comes inside and it appeared swollen.

Speaker 2:       Now the theoretical analysis done in collaboration with the same theoretical physicist group in University of Rovira i Virgili, that is Vladimir Baulin you see here, and they apply single chainmail field simulation to show that the pores are actually formed in the interaction. We believe this type of bactericidal activity, the bactericidal efficiency on graphene-like substrata or graphene-like material of this kind depends on the lateral size, shape and interactive angle of exposed sharp edges which are likely to puncture the bacterial cell membrane.

Speaker 2:       Another way we can kill bacterial cells using nanostructure surfaces is this. I'll show you how bacterial cells are torn apart on the nanostructure surfaces. What you see here is exceptionally high aspect ratio up to 3000 of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes. This work was done in collaboration with the group of Michael de Volder in Cambridge University. So what they've done, they grew carbon nanotubes from a catalyst layer and deposited on a silicon wafer using physical vapor deposition. We used two types of the pattern with the one microgram and 30 microgram vertically aligned carbon nanotubes. What you see here is that this type of the surface is also quite bactericidal. The highest bactericidal rates of 99.3% for P. aeruginosa and 84.9% for S. aureus were recorded on one microgram tall vertically aligned carbon nanotubes.

Speaker 2:       Now the question is, again, how this happened? Why? And this is quite interesting. In collaboration with the same group, what we found and they applied so-called engineer's beam theory, or linear theory of elasticity. This same theory was applied for engineering of the Eiffel Tower and this large wheel. It's exactly the same theory used for construction and we applied it to explain the high aspect ratio. So what you see here and what is explained is just stored and released energy. So basically the bending of very tall nanofeatures, when bending they store energy. And when they bend back, they release energy. And that's how it tears the cell apart. And it's quite logical to imagine that, of course, one microgram nanotubes are actually more rigid and store higher energy and that's why they are more effective.

Speaker 2:       And I think, I just would like to finish up with some aspects of the nanofabrication which is currently in this field and give you just one example of our recent work on the hydrothermal treatment of titanium. So basically there are different types of nanofabrication techniques which could be applied to produce nanopatterns. And the nanopatterns could be quite different. It still will be active but the range of the activity could be quite different, so that is a change. These are techniques you can use: laser irradiation, lithography, plasma etching, electrospinning, and even simple data of nanoimplant lithography template methods. It's all about the resolution, but with advances in nanofabrication where we can reach nanoscale resolutions, then the results will always be promising.

Speaker 2:       The hydrothermal treatment is one of the examples of nanofabrication using a very simple technique, but again, it's a matter of optimization. Optimization of parameters and time of the treatment where you can fabricate the surface of different patterns. So what you see here is the formation of asymmetrical nanosheets with sharp nanoedges and in a way, I would say the mechanism of bactericidal efficiency here could be similar to the sharp edge of graphene nanoflakes. It's in the same type of bactericidal effect as we believe it is. If you look at the bactericidal activity you see the P. aeruginosa could be up 100% cells killed and a quite large range of the treatment conditions, however S. aureus is much more difficult to kill, as all this. But it could be a high rate of killing could be achieved after six hours treatment of these surfaces.

Speaker 2:       And I would like to finish up again with this particular antibiotic resistance problem and show you if nanostructured surfaces, and we call them mechano-bactericidal surfaces, can kill antibiotic resistant strains. What you see here, I just wanted to emphasize that we used and there is a report from the Centers for Disease Control in the United States, 2013. And this year, in autumn they will break news in new edition of the same report. They identify the top 18 antibiotic resistance threats in the United States and Methicillin-resistant S. aureus is one of those threats regarded as a "Serious Threat". What I also found quite upsetting data that in the way there was epidemics that in our community, it's up to 5% of healthcare workers in the United States are carrying this Methicillin-resistant Staph aureus. And up to 2% of the population are actually carrying the same thing.

Speaker 2:       Now I probably wouldn't stop here except just to tell you that the antibiotic resistance and mechanisms are quite different, for different types of antibiotics in the case of Methicillin-resistant bacteria. What happens with this strain. First of all, the drug cuts the bonding, the close-linking that is again Peptidoglycan. So once the drug cuts this close link between the Peptidoglycan layer, the inner work is damaged and the cell is dead. What is happening in the Methicillin-resistant strain? It is actually building the bonding again and that's how it survives. That's how the resistance is developed. And now what we did in this work, we used Methicillin-resistant strain and Methicillin-susceptible strain (our regional standard strain) and we put this strain on the hydrotreated titanium surfaces and what you see here, they are dead. They are dead. It doesn't matter in the presence of antibiotics, I should say, the build up of the reconstruction of the bonding of the peptidoglycan layer triggers by the presence of antibiotics. That's why we run experiments in standard physiological conditions and in the presence of antibiotics. And you can see both types of the strains are successfully killed by the surface.

Speaker 2:       So, yes the conclusion we arrived to that highly bactericidal nanotopologies of insect wings represent the first reported example of purely physical antibacterial activity and opened a new era of biomedical antimicrobial nanotechnology. These mechano-bactericidal surfaces will be potentially useful when applied to implants reducing the risks for post-operative bacterial infection, and minimizing the demand for antibiotics, thereby helping to combat antibiotic resistance. Mechano-bactericidal can, of course, be exploited in various industrial and bionic applications.

Speaker 2:       Future directions. The target now is to fabricate the surface with dual-functionality so there will be repelled bacterial cells and the ones that will not be able to repel and settle on the surface will be killed by this surface. This is our next goal and hopefully we can achieve it with the help of a group of students.

Speaker 2:       And I think that was all from me. I would like to acknowledge many, many people without the excellent contribution of these people, this work wouldn't be finished, confirmed, performed. And of course, Professor Russell Crawford, Khanh, lots of people from Swinburne University of Technology and our colleagues all over the world, and this last slide with the students. Oh! with the students, and I was hoping that the movie would run, showing the work of the students on the left, but it looks like it's not. But thank you very much for your kind attention.

Speaker 1:       Thank you very much for a very interesting and entertaining talk. Any questions? We can have a few minutes for a few questions. Yes.

Speaker 2:       Did I go too long?

Speaker 1:       It's all right.

Questions and Answers

Speaker 3:       So beautiful and eye-opening. So one potential problem, one potential opportunity in terms of [inaudible 00:49:21] or targeting all the type of lipid-enveloped organisms. So Pox viruses, the largest viruses, around 500 nanometers and they're lipid-enveloped. So I was just wondering as you were talking if there might be some utility also in that area? And the problem, the eukaryotic cells at least you've shown you've tested in this presentation, they have very nice mechanisms for recycling their membrane, for keeping membrane stability. But red cells, we have a red cell expert sitting there at the front, do not have those same capacities. So how would you see first in the opportunity in the Pox viruses and perhaps the in vivo utility in terms of perhaps negatively affecting red cells?

Speaker 2:       That's a very good question. I'm impressed you know this, the possible effect on the red blood cells. You are absolutely right: red blood cells are very specific and they will not be safe on the pattern and we actually did this work and we showed that they are not safe. But again, what I want to emphasize all over again, it's a matter of the pattern. So, you can optimize the structure, the nanofeatures of the pattern and use the pattern which will be bactericidal to bacterial cells, say even the super high aspect ratio features which kills a bacterial cell by a different way. But by this way the eukaryotic cells will remain safe again, including red blood cells. We simply didn't test it. But that will be beautiful work, actually to compare different types of bactericidal patterns and see how they affect red blood cells. But I think that not all patterns will be similarly affecting red blood cells.

Speaker 2:       As for the viruses, it’s a matter of, again, the nanopattern and the fabrication. I remember when we just started working on this, the resolution of the nanopattern seven years ago, was so poor that we couldn't even dream about what we can do now. So, for the viruses you need a pattern with more fine features, nanofeatures to see. But I can't guarantee. So there needs to be some work done.

Speaker 1:       Thank you very much.

Speaker 4:       It's been such a fantastic presentation and beautiful work. I'm also wanting to follow on from Magdalena's question about how you think this technology might work inside the gastrointestinal tract to, you know, engineer the microbial population. So really targeting and dealing with that mucus and biofilm, and that sort of environment.

Speaker 2:       I don't have any answers on this question because no work was done. I don't know. There's no perfect solution, because that's the nature of science. As long as we go on our way, we find something else. So, so far, I don't know the answer. But I'm sure that we can handle in the future and find a solution.

Speaker 4:       And we can discuss together.

Speaker 1:       [inaudible 00:53:00]

Speaker 5:       Can you put the surfaces on the cactus?

Speaker 2:       Yes. It could be... like I said, maybe five, seven years ago, it was basically impossible to put this particular nanoscale resolution in the range of 10-100 nanometres on the plastic. Now it is possible. I can tell you that there is a company in Japan, they are very close to fabricating that type of a nanopattern in a large commercially up-scaling area. So yes, it is coming.

Speaker 1:       Any more questions? It's okay, we have another second, it's fine.

Speaker 6:       I went to a beautiful talk recently [inaudible 00:54:01] where she was describing on the smaller scale how polymers by their nature and flexibility could avoid the binding of proteins and how their movement and their typography was very, very important. As you were talking I was wondering, because you were saying there was the issue of attachment and then there is the issue of the clearance. And I was wondering when you were presenting your talk, all the surfaces you were showing us were rigid. And whether there were any plans of also exploring motility.

Speaker 2:       Yes. And it is work also about to be completed. Like I said before, it was very difficult to run a systematic study with changing only one parameter on the surface like the length of the nanofeatures. It was only possible to achieve using nanotypography which is very expensive and very, kind of, difficult to achieve. We still managed to have this particular type of the samples and about to finalise this work where indeed the bending could be a part of the effect. Yeah.

Speaker 1:       All right. I think we might just stop here. We’ve got refreshments next door. So you can continue to talk to Elena and mingle with each other. So thank you very much for coming and hopefully we'll see you next time in September for another one. So thank you very, very much.

Speaker 2:       Thank you. Thank you.    

Xinghuo Yu:My name is Xinghuo Yu, I'm the chair of RMIT Professorial Academy. I'm chairing this distinguished lecture as well. This is just the one, the Academy was established in 2019, consisting of 20 RMIT distinguished professors who are the prominent researchers, and academic in the university. The role of us is certainly there's three roles, we act like a think tank advising university on the strategies, we promote universities and also we represent universities, so today is the ... Lastly, we have two distinguished lectures and this is the first in 2018, so we're very glad to have distinguished professor Mike Xie, to give us a talk. So, this is going to be a very interesting, when Mike sent email to me say, “Hey, here's the talk I'm going to say.” And I looked at I say, “Can you make it as simple as possible? Because we have a very different, wide range of ... People have different knowledge.” So, he made it, so I think the title is great. Make something beautiful, we note when something is beautiful, is expensive as well, but he's also trying to make it efficient.

Xinghuo Yu:So, I just have a very quick introduction of Mike. Mike is Distinguished Professor in RMIT, he's very well known around the world. If you look at his CV, he received a number of very significant awards, for example, the 2017 Clunies Ross Innovation Award from Australia Academy of Technological Science and Engineering. He also was recipient of 2017 Michelle medal by Engineer Australian for his work in mechanical engineering, which surprising is ... I was surprised you're civil engineer, right? But now he got a mechanical engineer award.

Xinghuo Yu:And he's done many work more than, I think one of the things I found Mike is actually a great example, also translation from research to industry application, and vice versa, which he has done very well. So, I think without any delay, let's welcome Mike to deliver his lecture.

Mike Xie:Thank you Xinghou for your introduction, and thank you all for coming all the way to this lecture. It's a great honor to present the first distinguished lecture of RMIT University. I grew up in a small town in Jianzhu Tanzhou. This is what it looks like where I grew up. This is a grand canal connecting all the way from Beijing to Hangzhou. At that time, I wasn't appreciating how lucky I was to live in such a beautiful environment. My parents always ask us to study hard, to go to big cities, to look for opportunities, which I did. The first city I went was Shanghai. This is a photo of Shanghai, and you'll see this kind of buildings, Myers and Myers. And then, I went to London in Britain to study, come to Sydney. My first job was in University Sydney. On the left hand side you'll see ... Some of you may recognize this building. To me, it's the ugliest building in Sydney, this is the UTS building on Broadway when I walked home every night, I would see this building.

Mike Xie:And then, I came to Melbourne. I was living in Footscray, and I'd drive to work. I would see these two buildings in [race coast view 00:04:08] I think some of you know these buildings. So, these are the kind of buildings we see in big cities, and after 40, 50 years ... Nowadays when I go home, I really appreciate how lucky I was. And on the other side, when China become rich and we are doing something different so, because of the wealth generated and the exuberance or this rational exuberance, we are creating [monsters buildings 00:04:45] like this, and in the newspaper we were actually imposing how much steel we used to construct this world record stadium, and there's other buildings created. So, on the left is a CCTV Tower of China, on the right hand side it's the headquarter of People's Daily, and so, it resembles some human organs rather than [inaudible 00:05:19] the buildings.

Mike Xie:So, what I'm going to share with you today is how we can ... Because as engineers we always ask us questions like how we can create some beautiful structures, and also it's efficient. So, not only can we save the materials, we can also create something interesting and beautiful.

Mike Xie:And one of the contributions I made to this field, I'm an Engineer, but I have many friends in architecture. So, we come up with a very simple idea, say, if you want to design a better structure, you can actually start from any silly design, and look at what you have got currently and remove those unneeded parts. Those most inefficient parts you can gradually remove from your design, and then gradually you will end up with a structure, that structure is not only efficient, it looks very beautiful just like what you see in nature, I'll show you some examples soon. The advantages of our simple idea, it's so easy to understand. I'm sure when I show you examples you will see why we are getting this kind of shapes. And also it can be implemented very easily. When people read our papers they can spend a few hours then they can do exactly what we do on the computers.

Mike Xie:So, I'll show you the first example, say, if we want to design a structure for these given conditions, there's one point fixed, I apply gravity, I want to know what would be the best shape to satisfy these given conditions. If we don't know the answer, it can not matter, we can just start from this square shape, and then we can do a simple analysis of the structure. We would find the stress distribution of the structure, fix here apply gravity, and these purple areas, they have no stress. It indicates these corners, they're not useful from the structure point of view. If you remove these parts, it would not affect your structure performance. If they are not useful, why would you keep them.

Mike Xie:So, you can delete all these inefficient materials step by step, and you come up with something more efficient, and it's interesting, looks like apple. It can continue to evolve, and you get a small tiny cherry. It's just a coincidence, and when I published this work, a professor in Cambridge, he said, “Ah, I can do better.” Because I only use one material in my model, so he started to put a different material in the core and by changing the relative stiffness, he got a series of pairs and many other things.

Mike Xie:We are not just getting some beautiful pictures, but if we compare the two designs on the left, you can see different colors throughout the whole structure. On the right hand side, we see the same color on the surface. So, we got a design, which has uniform surface stress. Because this is the criteria we use, if you have low stress we delete it. And if you use different rules to satisfy different design objective, you will get different shapes. Because the idea is so simple, it has been utilized by many engineers, and architects, material scientists for many different applications. So, you can design a building by controlling the drift of a building, the top of the building or it can change the vibration frequency for buildings and the earthquake or wind We also did a project with Boeing several years ago for maximizing the buckling load of composite aircraft wing. And we are lucky to have another Boeing student in the audience. James is working with us, extending this work to the aircraft design.

Mike Xie:So, I'm going to show you some of the examples we have done. So, when you design a structure, it really depends on what material you use, you will get totally different shape. Some of you might have seen the stair cable bridges. These cables that are good for attention, the cables cannot sustain any compression. So, if your material is suitable for attention then, your final structure should be predominantly intention. I show you one example, you'll understand how it goes, because your final structure needs to be intentioned. You can start again from any silly design, and then every time, every step you remove the areas with the highest compressive stress, and you will end up with a material only intention.

Mike Xie:So, this is a very simple example, so, I fix two points and I apply the gravity, and I want to find a shape which would be suitable for a stay cable or some membrane structures. So, every time I remove the areas with highest compressive stress, then I will get a catenary shape. So, when you hold a metal chain, that shape is a catenary and you would only have tension throughout whole structure. Not only have I got a shape for the structure, it also indicates where you need more materials so, on the two sides, because it's supporting half of the weight of the structure, you have more materials here then at the bottom, here the forces are very small so, the relative size is also small.

Mike Xie:If you see around us, most of our structures are made of concrete, the concrete is good for compression. So, if you want to design a structure for bricks, masonry stones, and you want your structure to be in compression, and again you can start from any design and then, every time you remove the areas with the highest tension stress so remove all the areas in tension, you will left with a structure, which will be in compression. And when I was doing this work about 10 or 12 years ago, I was very lucky that I have a colleague, Professor Mark Burry, some of us know him. He's a very well known architect, he's a Chief Executive Architect for this famous building in Barcelona. So, at that time Mark was working on this Passion Façade, and these columns on this Facade.

Mike Xie:There were very few joints left behind by the original architect Gaudi. Gaudi started designing this structure about a hundred years ago. At that time he was using this physical models with chains and weights. If you look at this structure, every point on the chain is in tension, and what Gaudi did, he put this model upside down then everywhere would be in compression. Because he was building this church using stone, which is similar to concrete. It needs to be in compression to be efficient. So, if you turn this model upside down, you will get a shape, which would be suitable for a masonry structure or stone structure. And if you go inside this church, you will see a lot of interesting models. This is one of the models inside, and these chains were being tensioned and there's a mirror underneath, I took a photo from the mirror. And this would be the structure, Gaudi would use to build these structures. You can compare the two, you can see the architectural elements, they are very similar. And if you walk around Barcelona, you will see many of Gaudi's creations similar to this shape.

Mike Xie:Once we got our method, we can actually replicate what Gaudi did a hundred years ago very quickly, because when he created this models, it needs six or nine months in order to get a model working, and also he could only consider gravity. But, with our method you can put all the forces in, and to see, which areas are in tension you remove them. You will leave behind a structure, which will be suitable for the stone material. So, this will be what we get for the Passion Facade, which is very similar to what Gaudi's original joints, and what Mark Burry finally created using parametric studies.

Mike Xie:And it also depends on what forces you use. So, if we build this church in Shanghai, you would get a totally different shape, because in Barcelona the earth quake loading is small, but in Shanghai, Tokyo, the issue is, you have to have very high resistance to the lateral load. And we actually try that, if you put down very strong lateral ... The earth quake load, you would have additional bracings in order to resist forces in the horizontal direction. These are a series of studies I did with Mark Burry. So, if we want to create three columns on a slope, and starting from this by deleting the areas, which has highest tensile stress, within a few seconds, we can get a shape like this. If you go to Barcelona next time, have a close look at these columns on Passion Facade. And these columns have exact the shape as what we can get from our simple rule of Evolutionary Structure [inaudible 00:16:12]

Mike Xie:All we did is we start from any design like this, there's no bias. It only says there's three columns. If I remove areas in tension, you will get a shape, a beautiful shape, and just like we would see at the real church in Barcelona. In a 3D version, say, if we want to build a two columns on a flat surface, so you start from this, every time we remove the areas with the highest tensile stress, you get some strange looking column like this. And people can see that Gaudi as a genius, he actually got this design about a hundred years ago using his physical models. But if we go back to the basic mechanics and apply the simple rules of removing the tensile materials, we would get exactly the same shape as Gaudi did for his famous church in Barcelona.

Mike Xie:And later on we improved our method, in previously we can only remove the inefficient parts from the current design. We can actually do the reverse, say like the apple example, he can plant a seed and let the see to grow into apple so he can ... In structure terms, you can strengthen the most critical part in your structure by adding material to where it is most needed. Or we can do both ways, so you can start from any design then, while you are removing the most inefficient material, you can add those material to where it is critical. So we caught it Bi-Directional Evolutionary Structure Optimization method. So, it would be much faster and it's more efficient. So, I show you one simple example, say I want to design a bridge type of structure. So, I have a deck with uniformly distributed force, four points fixed at the corners, and I leave a gap in the middle so that vehicles can go through. All the rest will be decided by the computer where to put the material. And your initial design can be also very simple.

Mike Xie:So I have applied four columns, and this can also be a bridge, but no one will pay you consulting phase for designing something like this. It can break very easily, there's a stress concentration, but it doesn't matter, we can start from this initial design, and let the computer to decide where to add the material, and where to delete. So you are fine. Some of the earlier material added is removed later on. So, we are not doing some local modifications of a design. That's what people do in consulting office. They have a design and then do some assessments, “Oh, this part needs to be strengthened a little bit.” So, they do a simple change. We actually change a structure concept from this to that. It's not a simple local modification. The structural concepts of the two designs are completely different. We got an arch bridge with additional members like the tree branches we have repeated seeing in Gaudi's designs so that the whole structure has very uniform stress distribution and uniform structure performance.

Mike Xie:We have done many other examples, say this one is to design [kitchen 00:20:03] in a hotel, say you have four columns, you have very few column, you want to transfer the loads from a few columns to upper levels, and our process would enable you to find the best load transfer system, again, it's looks like what we see in nature, those tree branches. We can also do the dynamic optimization, say if we have vibration frequency through our process, we can find a design with a highest frequency, or you can increase the first three or five frequencies of the structure. We can have multiple constraints, for this building, we can minimize a deflection at the top of the building and also control the frequency.

Mike Xie:So, by redistributing this uniform shear walls, we get a bracing and the structure performance will be increased significantly not for both static and dynamic criteria. We have also tried to apply our technique to periodical structures. So, I show you one simple example, you will understand. So, this is a bridge say a few hundred meters long, but it's made of identical units. So, if we apply our rule by first say, divide the structure into a certain number of units. And when you change your one unit, you change the corresponding locations at all units, you will get a periodical optimal design. This example would be easier to understand say, this wheel has eight identical modules. When we apply our method, say, if want to do need any material here or the corresponding location, what have the material removed and you apply all the loads you were experiencing when you're driving the car.

Mike Xie:In our case, when you're accelerating or turning or breaking all the forces on the wheel will be different. You need to consider all the major load cases in order to decide which part needs to be removed or remain. Depending on how many cells you want, for a wheel you can get to do defend designs. And this was done by one of my PhD student. He got this pretty pictures, and then, I asked him whether these are correct or not. He walked around Melbourne street and took two photos and he found this. So, this is what he got using our simple Bi-Directional Evolution Structure of Optimization. These are Cadillac, BMW 17, They're almost identical.

Mike Xie:So, again, this is not a coincidence. This is because our design objectives, and BMW and Cadillac's, their objective are the same. We wanted design the lightest possible wheels, which has certain structure performance. So, they have spent maybe 40 or 50 years to improve their designs. But using our technique, we can develop the next generation of motor vehicles very quickly. Around the world these days, the electric vehicles is very popular, but the loading on the wheels are quite different because of the heavy batteries, the loading on these wheels will be completely different from what you see on BMW or Cadillac. But when we design a new wheel, we can apply this new conditions, and get a very close to the optimum design very quickly. And I started doing this work when I was in the Aeronautical Department in the University Sydney. And because weight reduction is of critical importance for aircraft, and that's why we have been working with Boeing and also Comac in China, tried to apply this technology to aircraft. We had several collaborative project with these companies.

Mike Xie:But strangely, I expected the people who become very excited about our technique was a group of architects. And so about 15 years ago, famous architects around the world started using our technique. I think it's mainly because of the organic shape we were able to create. It look so beautiful, it looks like what you see in nature. So, they started to make buildings, so this was the first building designed using extended Evolutionary Structure Optimization, which was based on my work. This was built in 2004 near Nagoya. There many other buildings, I give you a few.

Mike Xie:And some of you may heard that the Pritzker Architecture Prize, this is the highest price in architecture. It was award last week to a guy called Arata Isozaki. He actually was one of the first architect using our technique to design buildings. This one was in Qatar. It's actually very similar to the bridge example I showed you. If you're using our software, you fix this two points, put uniformly distribute load on the top, within a cup of tea, you will see this beautiful image on your screen. It's as simple as that. It's not just a beautiful picture, it has been built. This was a photo taken in 2012. I once passed Qatar airport, so I took a taxi and went to take this photo, so I took this one. So it has been built.

Mike Xie:And in China, Shanghai, there's another famous building, Himalayas Center, these strange shapes. Next time when you see it, it's not strange anymore. It's based on our simple rule of deleting inefficient material, and to get a different design. So, these are all based on the extended evolutionary structure optimization [master 00:27:01] I originally redeveloped. I have some other architecture friends who had been using my technique to build these different structures. This one has been done in Shanghai as well. I also tried to ... She mentioned that I was good at translating research into real project, but I tried and I failed terribly in Australia. I give you one failed example, it's a lesson I learned to move to the next step.

Mike Xie:So about 12 years ago, the VicRoads was doing a revamp of the Monash Freeway. There are several foot bridges, which they were calling for proposals. And I was very excited because we thought we could use our technique to design a better foot bridge for Malvern. I think we did a week ... We did a very good job. So, we were given the information, how wide the Monash Freeway was, 45 meters, and the boundary conditions. Depending on where you build a bridge, so if you're building against two solid rock, you would have this, if you are supporting here with a simple support, a roller, it will be a different structure.

Mike Xie:So, we did a series of studies. This is what we proposed to VicRoads. This is near Malvern station. So, next time you could have this bridge there in 2007, we presented it to VicRoads because this is really too dramatic, people haven't seen this kind of thing. This is before Isozaki built his structures in Qatar and Shanghai. So, VicRoads said, “Oh, look, it's impossible to build a bridge like this.” It's actually the [tech 00:29:06] is here so, if you walk through this bridge, it will be a really interesting visual experience. So, they said, “No way, this can't be built.” So, in their great wisdom, they built this. This is the Malvern station footbridge. So, they chose the safer way to construct this.

Mike Xie:I was very disappointed because actually it's not possible to build. I built one in the lab. It's building 10 in the old civil lab. The circle has six identical pieces. So, I made a reusable mode, this is timber mode, this foam will become the house. So, I put the steering reinforcement where the connections, putting the concrete six identical pieces I put on the boats, I can construct this very easily one to four scale section of that bridge. So, I wasn't successful to convince VicRoads. But in this check, retrospect, I can understand because this is something too ahead of the market, the market wasn't ready 10 years ago. But if I do this again now, I think I have a much better chance to convince people in their authority to take a risk and do something different in Malvern.

Mike Xie:I tried my hands in China as well. So, this is a proposal in [foreign language 00:30:49]. Again, this beautiful design is from a very simple rule of removing inefficient materials, redundant material from the structure. The byproduct of that simple process is this beautiful design. So, this is the proposal, we are still trying to get a build in China. And not that, we actually did a serious work. Last year I worked with a famous architecture firm in Shanghai called [Atilya Aqui 00:31:20] mixing. So, we proposed a series of foot bridges in Huangpu River, it's a famous river in Shanghai. We can also apply our technique to small scale structures. And so, this is a hot area of meta materials. So, by applying our technique we can, we can improve the material properties of this repeated periodical microstructures. In this case we have been maximize the back modules. So, under any pressure, this structure would have the least amount of volume change.

Mike Xie:The next one is a micro structure which can resist the shear stress. If you put on shear stress on this material because the material has been arranged on the diagonal direction, it can have very high shear resistance. Or we can design a micro microstructure with specified stiffness in different directions, like a bone, when you want to create a replacement for a piece of bone, you want that material to be having similar material properly like the bone being replaced. And normally you would have different stiffness in different directions. We can get exactly the same stiffness ratios by designing the microstructure. So, this is a functional grade it can have changes along the length and have a gradual change in the material property. And this is one of the material we have designed.

Mike Xie:So, normally, normal material when you have compression it will expand laterally. So, in our case, when you compress it, it actually shrink literally, so it does the opposite. So, this is [inaudible 00:33:37] material. And there've been a lot of papers written, but we were very early to be able to produce something which we can show to the people how it behaves. Another one, this is metal version of the [inaudible 00:33:59] material. So, the shapes are a little bit different from the rubber one. You can see a rugby ball shapes, so a horizontal one, a vertical one, this is a 3D, it's not just 2D, it's a Q. So, when you compress it, it will move in laterally. This kind of material has a lot of application in defense industry. We have some contract with the DSG, used to be caught DSTO trying to incorporate this kind of material to resist the strapping of penetration to armored vehicles.

Mike Xie:We have developed another material which behaves different from normal situation. So, normal material, when you put it on compression, it will shrink. So, in this case, I put my material in a freezer bag, and put a tube to suck the air out, which is the same as putting uniform pressure and the material. If I do that, if I suck the air out put the pressure, it actually expands on the pressure. And this is purely because we have designed our microstructure so it will have maximum deflection or deformation in a certain direction. So, I can change the shape of those cavities to make it grow in two directions. We have designed these kind of materials as well. So, you can make it grow in one or two direction. It's not possible to grow in three directions under uniform pressure. We can also make different holes, so that under any pressure, the length of the material will not change or the cross section area will not change. So, by simply changing the shape of the cavity through our optimization algorithms. So, this material has applications in biomedical field. We had to contract with [Wun 00:36:13] management CRC. It's because our special material like this.

Mike Xie:I'm going to talk about something. So, the connections in civil structures, they are very complicated and normally you need to say this are cast, these are weld. And one of the project we have been working with Arab is try to use 3D pending technology to realize these complex connections. So, traditionally we would design the columns and beams and in our project we would like to use standard steel columns, steel beams, but we designed every connection because you can find these forces in every member easily, and then, using this forces as input, you can design the connection. So your initial design could be a solid balL, and then let the computer decide, which area needs to be removed to make it lighter. So, this is one of the examples. So, I fix here, put a [banner 00:37:35] moment here, another banner moment there, then I can get rid of all the unnecessary material to produce the most efficient connection for this given loading condition. We have done many different notes. In this case, I fixed one point, put a shear force here, put a shear force, after you removed being efficient material, you got this beautiful connection. So, if we come to a future building, we are going to construct, when you come to a room, the connections are not like this boring squares. Every connection is a piece of artwork just like this.

Mike Xie:And these are some of the 3D printed metal notes. I have some at the back, when we finish, we can have a look. So, at RMIT, we are very proud of the facility we have at the AMP, Advanced Manufacturing Printing, we can print many off our notes. So, this was done at AMP, this was done somewhere else. But, there's one critical thing about the metal printing, although you can say, oh, it can be done, but there's two ... When I brought this note back to Mike, my friends who are doing the real project in the field, they asked me tWo questions, A; How much does it cost? B; Can you certify your note? The first question, I did some calculation, I give him the prize. It's about a thousand or more times of the normal price they were to use in the construction industry. The second one is the possible defect in this metal printed parts. So, eventually I stopped doing the direct metal printing started to do the casting, because you can print the same model using wax very cheaply, and you can print very large wax models.

Mike Xie:So, in Huangzhou University of Science Technology, they can print those wax models 1.2 meters big. Or if it's three meters you can print two pieces and stick to wax model together. Then with the wax model, you can create a shell outside the wax model, and that Shell can be used to cast metal. So, the next one is the shell. So, this is a ceramic shell you can get after you dipping your wax model into the ceramic slurry and let it dry. You do that several time, you get this very solid shell, and you can pull the molten steel into this.

Mike Xie:So, this is a very good image, it was taken in Malvern three years ago. It looks like a medieval 300 years old picture. The process of casting has been there for hundreds of years, but people are still doing this. But this is a perfect combination of traditional casting technology with modern techniques here. So, here we actually used the lightest topology optimization technique to create the shape. We used a 3D printing to print the wax. And so the advanced manufacturing technology is here, but the last step is casting, and this, we have several examples on display at the back. So, when you see this note, this one was cast. And also two questions I was asked, one the price, this would cost a small fraction of the direct metal printing node. The other thing is because the last step is done through traditional casting technology. It can be used tomorrow because there's standards people have been using casting for real projects for many, many years.

Mike Xie:So, I have 10 more minutes. I will go quickly about some of other [fans 00:42:08] we have been doing. So, the topology optimization technique can be used for many things. We actually made some jewelries, but I deleted that picture. I show you some of the furniture's we have made. This is a stool we made so by applying the load, then we can get this structure, we can 3D print. If you come to my office, you can see some of the tables, my student made for me.

Mike Xie:So, this is jamming and one of the student there. He made this table for me using our technique, using our software to remove the inefficient materials. I want to show you the slight difference. Initially I want to make a table using 3D printing. So, we generate this shape, I send it to print, the bill came back, this leg costs me 700 Australian dollars. So, if I want to have a table with four legs, it's almost $3,000. It's too much, or it didn't get the budget, Xing didn't give me any additional support for that. So, I changed the strategy, so instead of doing the full 3D printing, this is a 2D laser cutting so, it's made of four plates. So, it's a 2D plate, you do laser cutting and it can be flat packed. It takes very small volume and the whole thing cost about $100, that one will be $3,000. And we bought a table top, the glass $99. So, this is $200 table, it looks very nice.

Speaker 3:[inaudible 00:44:00]

Mike Xie:Sorry.

Speaker 3:[inaudible 00:44:03]

Mike Xie:The table top is from Ikea, but that advanced technologies underneath the glass, we want the glass so that we can see what's there. And the other issue is this four plates, we need to have the glue to glue them together, which is actually very tedious because you need to have two people hold it and wait for a lot of time. So, we improved it. So this one has three plates, we use a tough tower system. So the three plate, you can just slot into each other, they can assemble them. So, he can put it in a suitcase because it's so small volume, and when you get there, you can assemble it.

Mike Xie:We also tried our method to [June. 00:44:57] So, this is the initial design and you apply the load when you fly, you're turning the force is on the four propellers are quite different, so you feel when taking off. So, some of the loads in one propeller will be much higher than the rest. So, I think we consider maybe around 15 load cases and removed the inefficient parts, we can get a very light weight and organic June, just like this. It flew perfectly, we tried this in our campus. It's also at the back. We didn't bring the battery, otherwise we could fly in the room here, I could show you.

Mike Xie:I actually tried very hard to put some of my technology into real structures, I'm making some progress. So, this is one of the project we have design. So, in this one we designed 48 tree top column, just like what Gaudi did in Barcelona. We are having this to 200 meter buildings to be completed in the next few months with 48 trees just like this. And the wanting, why? It's me. I was so proud to inspect my team's work when this mock up, this one to one model was built about 18 months ago.

Mike Xie:This is one of our current job. So, this is Observation Tower overlooking a famous lake in China. And this was designed by architect and the owner wasn't quite satisfied, he said, "Oh, we want to create a landmark building for this structure. Can you find someone who can do better?" So, people refer to us, they know we like doing some crazy things. So, we started redesign this Observation Tower. So, this is about 150 meters or 200 meters? About 200 meters. So, there's two lifts going up, there is artificial wetland here. And so, first we need to set up all the loads. So, you have the gravity on the tower, you have the forces on each floor, and the lifts and the artificial wetland winds from four directions. Once we put all the forces in, we can start to evolve, to generate different designs. So, again, by deleting those inefficient materials we can come up with a total different design. So, this is one of the proposals. We can actually control the member sizes to make a sticker. So, this is one design, in another one, it's a similar process, but with thicker members. So, these are some of our proposals so I just go quickly. We are hoping to get this built in the next few years.

Mike Xie:And there's one thing we realized through our work is we need to have much closer collaborative relationship with the architect. Because traditionally in China, in Australia, in many countries, the architect would produce a design, and then they give it to the structural engineer to say, 'Look, you design the thing to make sure it doesn't fall." But the structural engineer wouldn't be able to make much changes to the shapes or forms of the design. But if you're able ... I'm mainly a structure engineer, but if we are able to get involved in the project very early, so before they decided that the design, you need to start to talk with the architect in order to co-design that project, then that would make a big difference.

Mike Xie:In this case, we actually have been talking to the architects very constantly, like when we produced this design, the architects said, "No." Because this is Observation Tower, I can't a solid wall here. You need to have transparency, you need to able to see through. We can achieve that by simply putting a thicker walls at the bottom. If you use a thicker plates, you can get additional holes in these phases. So it's only a matter of proper dialogue rather than just one way flow. It's a two way dialogue in order to come up with a design, satisfying both the architecture intention and a structure performance.

Mike Xie:One of our current researches, when we deal with a mathematicians and when we do optimization, they always say, "Is your solution the absolute best or the unique solution?" That's what the mathematicians want to ask. But these days, actually I want to do exactly the opposite. I don't want a single solution, I want many solutions. That's because I've been working with architects, they hate to give a solution, I've got the best solution if that's a case, what's their job? They want choice, they want input. So, what we want to do is to create many solutions, all the solutions that look dramatically different, but in terms of structure performance, they're very close. So, this is something, and we have made some good progress. So, this Qatar Convention Center, if we only consider the structure performance, we will get something like this. But because this is the existing design, we can't build this in Melbourne or Shanghai. It's has been there, people have been winning awards.

Mike Xie:But the situation is quite common. You have to support uniformly distributed load. For given boundary and loading conditions, we want to create a different looking design. This is what we have achieved because this is a existing solution. Any material which has already appeared in the previous designs, I would penalize it. So, by doing that I get it quite different results. So, this is the additional trust and the structure performance of this is actually very close to that. Another, example say, I have uniformly distributed load on this tech, and if I only consider structure performance, you get two arches, if I penalize the material which has already appeared in this design, I get the second design where the two arches are coming together.

Mike Xie:If I penalize both existing design, I get another one. The third one, the two arches become one and the three looks quite different, but in terms structure performance they're within 3% if you consider their stiffness. So although they look different, from structural engineering point of view, they are very similar. So, that's why we call it diverse and competitive designs. And I'll go very quickly, we have developed some software called Amoeba. It's been running on the Cloud. It can create all these structures very quickly. So, this is how we can design the stool, and this is a 2D version of a chair and there are some of other things. So, I'm very lucky to have so many talented students, and probably 15 of them are here so they have contributed to the work, and we are making some new progress in our team. So, thank you very much.

Xinghuo Yu:[inaudible 00:53:49] So all different kind of discipline areas and they create some of the fascinating structures. So, now we just open for some questions, any questions and comments? There.

Speaker 4:Does your method always converge to a solution that's stationary or do you just have to decide on an arbitrary stopping point?

Mike Xie:We actually have to get them to converge. So, we look at the objective function. If the objective function do not change much for 10 steps, we stop. So, we have a criteria to decide when to stop. It's always we have a very flat line to make sure it converges.

Speaker 4:Thank you.

Xinghuo Yu:Thank you. Any more questions? Yes. Can we have the ... Sorry, can we have the speak [inaudible 00:55:00]

Speaker 5:Okay. Thank you. In designer category or structure, if the minimal size constraint and specify the volume fraction, can we get solution which matches [seratical 00:55:19] solution very well?

Mike Xie:To prove our algorithm is working, we have actually compared a lot of benchmark examples to show that our simple rules can produce those analytical designs. We have done that in both static and dynamic examples.

Xinghuo Yu:Alright. Okay. Can we pass on that to speaker.

Speaker 6:Thank you for the example. I'm just wondering [inaudible 00:55:57] Well, your design is dependent on electro materials that are used, and if you can use a combination of different materials and how many materials you can incorporate into one design, if it's a constraint or?

Mike Xie:It heavily depends on the material you use, like what I showed, whether it should be suitable with tension or compression. You can have multiple materials, because our technique is a simple post processing [inaudible 00:56:25] It's actually whatever you can analyze using finite element software, we can process the output and make changes. So, your problem could be nonlinear, material could large deformation, as long as you have considered this in your analysis, you can do modifications to get a new design and put it back for the analysis to assess its performance.

Speaker 6:But, if I can add to this, the practicality of things like their boundaries between materials, they would be susceptible to deformation or stress, how this is accounted for?

Mike Xie:We haven't considered these details as I keep it mind.

Speaker 6:Thank you.

Xinghuo Yu:Okay. Thank you very much. Yes, there's some other questions from there.

Speaker 7:Thanks Mike. Just a quick question. When you analyze the structure and then you change the shape, do you restart from initial condition or how does it work or do you just keep going the analysis, especially if it's nonlinear. Do you start from scratch when you change the shape?

Mike Xie:We actually continue. Yeah, if it's nonlinear it's far more complicated, you really need to go back again to do it. We haven't done many nonlinear examples, but we did some nonlinear materials. Both are possible, but the result will be different because it's past dependent then. We can do both ways to see what difference we will get.

Speaker 7:Thank you.

Xinghuo Yu:Okay. Oh, well there's another one questions.

Speaker 8:Thank you. It's a very interesting presentation. My question is regarding construction prefabrication, because that's getting more and more popular in the construction industry. Have you considered to inform the lean manufacturing stage for that, ratio design and the optimal solution for the structure, whether that can be considered also to inform the lean manufacturing stage?

Mike Xie:One of the things we can contribute is the aspect I mentioned about the periodical structures, because the prefabrication, you have many identical components, and we can make this identical component. If we can save a small amount for that component because it's producing set such a large number we can achieve a lot of savings. So, we have thinking about along this line.

Speaker 8:Maybe bathroom poles so it's kind of things.

Mike Xie:Could be.

Xinghuo Yu:Okay. Thank you. Yes, there's another question.

Speaker 9:I've a non engineering question. So, because obviously, so you've got the architect that is using the software to produce a very unique looking design, but the design uniqueness is actually sort of inherent to the actual software. So, the software in itself is geared towards this very specific design aesthetic. Does it mean that as a design professional, there is a possibility of coming across IP problems by using the software from multiple design firms because you will inevitably get, although you say they look different, they may not look sufficiently different from plagiarism point of view.

Mike Xie:I guess, it's self regulating, if they are aware that some similar firm being built, they wouldn't produce something similar [crosstalk 01:00:55] That's why the diverse solution becomes so important. We can actually have some random process every time you write because we have put some random modifications to the same material properties, every time you get totally different random design, but we make sure that the structure performance is not sacrificed, although you get random shapes, but every design has very high structure performance.

Speaker 9:But, I'm thinking more from the actual aesthetic point of view. Is there a way to modify, so let's say as an architect, you can have a very specific, We call it design, thumbprint, so design some print?

Mike Xie:Yeah.

Speaker 9:So, it's literally like a thumbprint that recognizes you as a designer because the Japanese designer seems to be using that very natural shape and it's become his signature look. So, is there a way to modify the algorithms so you can have your own, the algorithm takes your signature look into or it will develop some sort of a signature look.

Mike Xie:You can actually specify some regions, some examples, you can say, in your design you can actually put RMIT in the design and that RMIT is always remaining there, and you can say this area has to be a hole or that area has to be solid. And all these things, the designers or architect can control on the screen. So, it's not just a black box, we want to avoid a black box to, we want to empower the architects to use our tools.

Xinghuo Yu:Given the time, we might just stop here so you can still talk to Mike after we have some refresh after those. So please join me to thank Mike for the fascinating talk. All right.

Xing:This is the second and the last distinguished lecturer in RMIT we have sort of organized. I am [inaudible 00:00:11]. I am the chair of RMIT [inaudible 00:00:14] Academy. So, this is one of the mission we have, is to promote excellence of research, and also stimulate the discussions, talk about issues of international importance, and of course, create an environment for us to talk together and work together.

Xing:So today it is my pleasure to have distinguished professor [inaudible 00:00:36] to give the distinction lectures on livable, sustainable cities, which is very interesting to me as well. I have seen that quite a few from science engineers, and certainly that [inaudible 00:00:54]. I don't want to introduce Billie too much, but you all know that Billie is the director of the ECP-Urban Futures, this is one of the key issues that Urban Futures addresses. Billie is an outstanding researcher, I don't want to raise the [inaudible 00:01:18] as a very quantitative person, I think the number.

Xing:Check your numbers you have 260 publications, 11,156 citations, [inaudible 00:01:28] 52, and you're right in the highly cited researcher in the top 1% in the world. So really congratulations, we are very fortunate to have you. Without any delay, please join me to welcome Billy to give her lecture.

Billie:Google results, because the Google Scholar ones are even better.

Xing:This is better, this is web of science.

Billie:So thanks so much for coming, I know how busy it is at this time of year to fit in another lecture, but it's really nice to see you here, and thanks so much to Xing for the very nice introduction.

Billie:What I'm going to talk about is my own research, obviously the enabling capability platform director at RMIT my job is to enable the capability of the university to solve conflicts and problems.

Billie:There's no question in my mind that creating healthy, livable, sustainable cities is an obvious and apparent problem and it requires all hands on deck. It's not going to happen without all of the people who work in the building [inaudible 00:02:38] working together, us using the best technology to monitor the city, there's so many things that need to be done to create better cities.

Billie:I want to give you the why, what, and how, not that I've got all the answers, but to demonstrate why this is such a multi-disciplinary problem. Now I'm sure all of you would be sleeping under a mushroom if you didn't know that Melbourne was the most livable city there ever was, until we got our crown stolen by Vienna. And the question that [inaudible 00:03:11] is is this measure of livability fit for purpose, what does it tell us about Melbourne truly?

Billie:It's interesting when we unpack the index itself, there's 30 measures, 26 of them are politics. So about 6 are about the products of crime, it doesn't measure it, it rings up the night still, and Melbourne is safe. Any comment they make, no mate, that's okay. Any conflicts it's asks about culture and environment. I love this one about culture and environment: humidity, temperature rating. Is it discomfort of climate to travelers? And that's because this particular index is for executives when they're trying to decide what learning should thy give an executive when they're relocating to a city, they use the intelligence, a common intelligence unit to decide what they're learning will be.

Billie:So if you're going to some countries, Africa, some African countries, you get a 20% learning, and when you come to Melbourne or any Australian city, no learning. So if you're an expat going somewhere else its going to give you a bit of learning. It asks about education, and that's of interest to some sorts of people. Available private education, quality of private education. So truly if were thinking about livability of Melbourne is this index fit for purpose?

Billie:Now in the health sector we've been thinking about the way we design cities and the impact on health. In the last 15 years, quite seriously. There always was a relationship between the way we design cities and health, you know during industrialization the concern was about air quality, crowding, all the things that came with rapidly industrializing the city. It was really to do with infectious disease, but in the 21st century the issues are more to do with chronic disease.

Billie:I'd like to put this image up, this was cover, we were on the cover of Lancet. Now in our field it's not like publishing in Nature, or Science, which for those in the scientific fields are really aspiring to, but when you get published in Lancet you feel like you've really made it. And we got the cover. This is not us in the picture, but the image behind this is of New York, we went to launch of our special series of lancet on urban design transport and health.

Billie:So I want to present it to you because I want you to see why we think in health the way we design cities is so important in the 21st century relating to chronic disease. So I had the first paper on how to balance [inaudible 00:05:40] in the paper there was a number of people from across the world. So it was a multidisciplinary, multi-country endeavor. And what our job was was to lay the foundation for this particular series, and look at what does the evidence tell us about how city planning can affect population health and to outline what the challenges were.

Billie:Well the obvious thing that's happening in cities for the first time in human history, since 2008, 50% of people are living in cities, used to be 10% of people in the 1900s, and now it's 50%. In 2050 it's estimated it's going to be 66%, so we've got both rapidly growing populations by 2050 we estimates are we'll be 9.5 billion on the globe. But we've also got urbanization, and something that puts a lot of pressure on cities, clearly, because that's where everyone is flocking to, and the question is are we going to accommodate those rapidly growing populations, and do it in a way that protects the health and well-being.

Billie:And this is not just a global problem of course, because in Melbourne, by 2050 it's estimated that we're going to be 8 million, and we already see the discussions going on about the pressures of the city, the traffic congestion, the inequality that's being caused both out of suburban, inner-areas, so there's lot of issues that cities have [inaudible 00:07:02] to deal with.

Billie:But from a health perspective in addition to those big picture sustainability managing population growth issues, there's a whole range of other issues in the 21st century that cities need to deal with. The levels of chronic disease, now in a global perspective that's really important because what's happened of course, as countries become more wealthy, they've also got the diseases of wealth.

Billie:Used to be that in lower-income countries they dealt with infectious disease, but now they're living with chronic disease, and often they're dealing with infectious disease with chronic disease at the same time. But the chronic diseases are very expensive, and it's putting a lot of pressure on the health systems throughout the globe.

Billie:Rising levels of chronic disease is a big issue for health systems across the globe. Rising levels of depression, and it could be that we're measuring it better, it could be that people have always been depressed, but there is growing concerns about the rising levels of depression. Road traffic injuries, this is the 8th leading cause of death and disability globally. And it's becoming a bigger issue of course, through wealth, through countries getting more and more vehicles.

Billie:Air pollution, this is the biggest environmental hazard for health that we have. WHO has come out now and said this is a growing issue, I've got a couple of slides on that later. As our cities become more urbanizing, rising levels of noise, noise is a huge issue in Europe, and as we've got more people moving into the inner-city that will become a bigger issue. People are feeling socially isolated, and that has a big impact on people's mental health.

Billie:And when cities grow, people become more fearful, and constrain [inaudible 00:08:52], they're worried about going out today, they're constrained both by physical behavior, so being physically active, and also their social behavior. And that has a big impact on both their physical and mental health. And this rising level of inequities.

Billie:The haves and have nots, so we have cities now where we have growing levels of inequity. And we see it in a special way in Australia with our out of suburban areas not having nearly as much amenity as we have in the inner city. But income inequity is a major issue, and we ignore that at our peril is the way I put it. We cannot ignore inequity because when we have inequity we have such a disruption, so even if we're taking a selfish view rather than a more social view, rising levels of health and inequity are a major issue.

Billie:Now this has been recognized globally, the United Nations set development goals, really puts the role of city planning front and center of it's major goals. It has of course got 11, which is around cities and human settlements, so that's where we all live, but actually if you look across the whole document you can see that city planning, and health, are picked up across 9 goals, and 24 targets. So it's very much embedded in if we're going to achieve a more sustainable plan, cities have got to be a part of this.

Billie:Now, the other part of this is that in 2016, and [inaudible 00:10:22] was here, he was at [inaudible 00:10:24] of a team of people from IT. This is where the new urban agenda was launched, and this is clear recognition that if we are going to have a more sustainable future cities have got to be part of this, because that's where all the people are flocking to and we have to have cities as a city planner is clearly recognized, and what I like about this is, you might know about the urban futures planbook and their building platform, is they've actually put these words into it and it sounds awfully complicated, but what they say if we want to have a sustainable future, we have to reconsider the way cities are planned, designed, financed, developed, governed, and managed.

Billie:Now if that's not a multidisciplinary problem, I'm not sure what is. It means that everyone needs to help do that because were not going to be able to help get the cities that we need for 21st century unless were addressing this from a multidisciplinary perseverative. But it's not just the UN its also the OACD talks about pedestrian safety, urban space, and health, and I love this one. This a little quote from this, this is in 2012, because, it's sort of, it made the point that transport ministers and health ministers need to be involved in putting in the technical administrative, and regulatory framework that will promote the simple act of walking.

Billie:Because we've designed walking, active modes, out of the transportation system. We've really been designing cities for the car. And on that school, just to emphasize the point, it also put out this report in 2017 talking about the rising cost of air pollution. Thus far in the 21st century, so this is looking only at what's happened in the 21st century, 2017, the 21st century burden of air pollution in 41 countries was 3.2 million deaths and around 5.1 trillion dollars in 2015. So between 2000 and 2015 it's cost 5.1 trillion dollars because of air pollution.

Billie:And most of the air pollution is coming from transport, because transport is the largest contributor to air pollution in cities. So we're not talking about something that's trivial, so depending on what you're interested in, if you're interested in a social view, a health view, it looks pretty bad. If you're interested in an economic view, you see its costing us a lot of money, and if you're interested in environmental issues, we've got a big problem on our hands where we can see people actually dying from the fact that were driving our vehicles at the rate we are in cities.

Billie:So these are big issues, of course, the big discussion that goes on, it's been in the NYT at the moment, is about well, worry about population growth lets curb migration. Big issue. Can we do that? Can we curb migration, is that the solution? Is that to suggest that only some people, I saw this cartoon in the paper the other day, some of you are causing congestion, this is a Scott Morrison, so this is a ridiculous idea that we curb migration as a way of solving our population growth issues.

Billie:It's true that we have a lot of growth through immigration, but actually when we look at the details of that, two things emerge. One is that we only have 2.5% of our immigration is through humanitarian immigration, and I can't imagine that in the future we're not going to need to have more migration to deal with humanitarian problems that were dealing with globally. Social disruption from climate change and war, all sorts of problems we see across the globe, can't imagine that Australia is going to be able to avoid that in the future.

Billie:But in addition to that we have an aging population, in Australia, taking a selfish view, this is looking at a high growth scenario of what the average age of the population will be. So this is looking at Tasmania. With a high-growth scenario, so that's upper ring, so that's having a lot of migration. Even then were seeing that we're getting up to the average age, median age, being almost 50 by 2030. So big issue we've got an aging population, and this is the thing if we go for a low growth strategy, so we curb our immigration and have low growth, and this is the upper level here, this is really if we go through the low growth by 2030, 2031, this is wat the ages are going to be. Here we're getting up to almost 50 in the low growth strategy, 2031, in 2061 we have got a major issue we don't have immigration because we have an aging population.

Billie:If we don't have a population growth and we're not having immigration were going to have an aging population and many fewer people who are employed who can keep the economy going. So again if we take a view, a selfish view, immigration is a really big part of what we need to have in our cities, the question is how do we manage that growth. Which is the major issue, because we need to increase the number, maintain the number of skilled workers, and also the number of working age populations.

Billie:The other issue of course is we could manage our growth rather than manage our migration manage our congestion. And I like this image, this is an image of the busy city, so some people talk to us about what we should be doing with our vehicles is moving over to electric vehicles or, autonomous vehicles, and I like this image that appeared on twitter the other day, because this is what it looks like when we've got cars, this is what it looks like when we've got electric cars, this is what it could look like if we have autonomous cars, this is what it's going to look like when we have uber.

Billie:So depending on the decisions we make in terms of our policy, and government diversity, we're going to end up with all these scenarios regardless of the technology it's really up to us as citizens and researchers to look at what's going to the be the best way of governing this to actually use the technology to truly manage the city, but it's going to require governance. Its going to require, what are going to be the rules for the autonomous vehicles coming, what will be the rules that we use, what will be the governance that we put in place to deliver a good outcome for cities. Cause I'm pretty sure that the car manufacturers have probably got one thing in mind when they're thinking about autonomous vehicles, that all of us hopefully have our own car, because that's the business model. I can't imagine that we're not going to need to manage this.

Billie:So again putting our minds to this to come up with the best possible solutions for our cities, so we need to think about this in terms of again, it's multidisciplinary, a technical solution, a policy solution, and social solutions all of these need to be in mind to produce the best results for our cities.

Billie:Of course, I think this picture of Jack and Jill, I think this is a Tesla image, I have to think whats going to happen to these guys if this is what the future is, them having an autonomous vehicle, what's going to the be health impact of that. We're already dealing with chronic disease, this cars going to come up to your door, get in your car, sit down, lie down, not even concentrate on driving, just lay back, goodness knows what's going to happen to health impacts in the long term if we don't think carefully about what were going to do with autonomous vehicles.

Billie:The chronic disease impacts the medical impacts, I think it will be enormous and hopefully we'll learn about that in some of our research in the next little while. Now, none of these ideas are particularly new actually, in 2011 there was a high [inaudible 00:18:47] in the UN about how were going to manage, I mention this big issue about rising levels of chronic disease, and they have a [inaudible 00:18:58] on the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases. And what they said, which I think was really important, is that unless we can manage chronic disease, we're going to undermine the social and economic growth of our economies because the costs of actually fixing people up when they're preventable diseases is so great, and what were seeing in the developing countries, now seeing that infectious disease and chronic disease are actually gripping our hospitals.

Billie:I like this report because when I'm talking to my policy maker colleagues, because what it said is the house sector can't deal with this, the health sector is not going to be able to deal with these problems because all the other sectors outside of the health sector that create the conditions for good or poor health. So for example, in the health sector, what we do, is we are talking about what to do, eat a healthy diet, be physically active, don't smoke. Or we patch people up when they're sick, so if they don't follow that advice, we put them in the hospital, and we help them get well. Or we look after that when they're sick.

Billie:It's really all the other sectors that create the opportunities/the conditions for global health. And that's what this is saying, it's said that if were going to solve this problem we need to have engagement from all sectors of society, and to generate an effective response, and it needs to be multidisciplinary and multi-sector. So you may not think this in your own jobs, own future, own research, that decisions you make will have a health impact, but they may well, they're likely to.

Billie:And its a new way of thinking that it's all the other sectors that actually create the conditions on whether people live healthy, or unhealthy, lives. And this is important because we've got growing levels of inequity, and in this report that came out by the WHO, it suggests that the importance of social determinants of health, we need to be putting health and health equity at the hearts of our city governments, we need to be thinking about what will be the unintended health impact of the decisions we make.

Billie:Autonomous vehicles being one, I'm very keen that we start to think right now, not just of the technical solution, but what would be the social solution to this. It's not saying just don't have it, it's saying lets do it in a way that will produce an outcome we'll be proud of. On our watch were either going to create cites that promote good health and well-being, and good mental health, or not. So really it's about trying to think of these things up front and try to manage that. We won't always get it right, but we should be thinking of these before we just put the technology out there.

Billie:The WHO has said to close the gap to reduce inequity, we need to be thinking about placing health and health equity at the heart of all our city planning decisions. And this was reinforced in their Shanghai Declaration, talking about sustainable development goals, they've said for decades now, they've been talking about cities as a critical center for health, and they affirmed this, but they said, and I think its a really good quote, that health should be one of the most effective markers of any cities successful sustainable development, should be the health and well being of the people who live in those cities, and if we can't get that right, we're not really doing effective sustainable development.

Billie:Now, I've framed this around the paper that we did for the Lancet series, now Lancet was interesting because just one of the solutions about those cities is to really foster the alternative to driving, walking slightly to public transport use, and that's what we focused our paper on. But what was interesting about the Lancet which is very conservative if you'd like, it's a medical journal, and tends to be you know, gotta do everything right, they said we want you to go outside of bounds, we want you to not just write a completely academic, of course it's an academic paper, but they said we want you to push the boundaries, give us a sense of not just what the problem is, but how we're going to fix it.

Billie:Which really pushed us to think through bringing our research together, bringing together these multidisciplinary teams to think of it, and what we said was we need to have 8 integrated planning and transport dimensions, and I want to talk you through those. First of all, we're built on the work of the transportation planners, and overplanners, radioing in [inaudible 00:23:43] of era, and they've come up with the notion of [inaudible 00:23:45]IDs about how we should design cities to promote health and well being. Now we separated those out, and came up with the 8Ds we'd like to improve on, whatever everyone else has done, but we think it made sense what we proposed.

Billie:What we said is that if we want to build better cities, and to be honest in the health sector what we've tended to do is to focus on the local urban design, we said yeah, you need to do the local urban design, think about the design of the street networks, the levels of density that would optimize health, how close transit is, the diversity of housing, and how desireable it is, is it attractive? Do people feel fearful because of crime? Is it got [inaudible 00:24:27] and camping, can people walk and feel safe?

Billie:But in addition to that we needed to be thinking about [inaudible 00:24:32] planning. How are we going to get to drive, what's the quality of the transportation system, the public transportation system, that will get people to employment. Where is the employment, is it all in the center of the city, or is it spread throughout the city, so the distribution of employment. What's the demand management, I alluded to this a little with the comments to autonomous vehicles, but how are we going to diminish the demand, is it just free do people just do what they like, or is there congestion charging, or is there high cost parking that discourages people? Is there low cost public transport, that means people are more attracted to public transport.

Billie:These are all sort of demand management strategies, and again that requires the agro-scientist to be involved in those sorts of decision making. What we felt was this is a package of activities that need to go on, not just one, but a combination of things you need to create a better city, but we're not going to get that unless we can actually do things up front.

Billie:So we needed to have upstream activities, and we needed to be thinking about all the urban systems that create city, and align integrated planning across all of this. Transport, health services, where infrastructure is going to go, where the employment is going to go, [inaudible 00:25:48] planning. If you're in engineering you probably don't talk to the planners, the engineers and planners don't talk together. I saw, we had someone visiting from Finland, she's got one of the first programs where they're bringing land use and transport planning together. Oh heaven, that's really great, we should be doing that at RMIT, something for us to think about.

Billie:So, all these systems need to be integrated if we're going to have a good outcome, because together they produce the intimations that create the city. Which affect our transportation mode choices, identity outcomes, what we have access to in terms of employment, food, services, demand for different modes of transport, but in particular, a transportation mode of choice, whether we walk, cycle, use public transport, whether we drive.

Billie:Now, why are these important from a health point of view. We argue that these 8 exposures, 8 risk exposures to health, the amount of traffic there is, air quality, noise, social isolation, the crime that people experience, and then behavioral factors, whether people are inactive in their mode of choice, do they drive, do they sit, or whether they have access to healthy food. These are all behavioral risk factors, these are the social risk factors, and these are the environmental ones.

Billie:Now they're important because they affect our health. So for example, traffic, the obvious one affects traffic incidents and road trauma, which can have a detrimental impact on health. But traffics also important because of the impact on air quality. And air quality affects green house gas emissions, particular climate change, and it also has a number of health impacts that are caused by air quality: respiratory disease, heat stress, infectious disease, mental illness, all of these are impacted by the quality of the air.

Billie:But traffic is also important because of noise. Noise can impact social isolation impact on mental ill health. And then if people feel personally unsafe they can strain their behavior and that affects their social isolation. And together with all chronic disease factors, that impacts on our chronic disease, and ultimately our overweight, and overall well being.

Billie:So it's a system I've implied, it's a linear system, it's not a linear system, but we've presented it that way. But we're trying to make the point that the decisions we make around the cities, the integration of our policies, impact on health and well being of people down the track. And unless we want to do something about our chronic disease, our health and well being, we need to be doing things upstream to protect the conditions of good health.

Billie:Now what we've argued is if were going to achieve that we need integrated governments across a city. So in the past we haven't done this particularly well, we need integrated governance around transport and land use, employment, housing, all sort of social infrastructure, public safety. We need all these policies to be working together, which is why what's great with the ACP, we're trying to get multidisciplinary teams to solve these complex problems. We won't solve them unless different disciplines are working together.

Billie:Now, we've argued, [inaudible 00:29:16] is that the reason we need these 8 integrated systems is because that's what's required to create a livable city, and we've defined a livable city, and it's an inclusive definition, not like the [inaudible 00:29:30], we've said that a livable city is one that's safe, and socially cohesive and inclusive, it has to be environmentally sustainable. We can't continue just to build our cities the way they are, they're not environmentally sustainable. Of course we need to have affordable housing, but there's no point just providing that affordable housing on the fringe of cities if it's not linked by public transport or cycling infrastructure to all the things you need for daily life, access to employment, access to shops and services, access to public owned space, recreational opportunities. These are all the things we need for daily living.

Billie:So, just putting out affordable housing on the fringe of our cities is not actually solving our problems, it's putting more roads, it's enhancing inequity, it's meaning that people are living there without all the things they need for daily living. The question is how do we change that. So to encourage active transport and achieve the new urban agenda, what we've argued is that we need 8 integrated urban policies because they're needed to create the 8 urban transport planning intimations, and they are important because they affect 8 city related risk exposures.

Billie:Now, we didn't actually come up with the 8, it just sort of worked out that way, that was beautifully done, we were very clever in coming up with that. It just worked out that way. But that's going to require integrated governments. Now, the simple part of what I'm going to talk about is how you work with this, in our research we came up with the notion that what gets measured will get done, and we needed to be measuring.

Billie:So, we've been measuring walk ability, we've been using walk ability, geographic measuring systems to create measures of a built in environment for decades, but we've never really given it back to anyone, we've never given it to our policy maker colleagues, we've never made It public, we've just kept it on our computers, but now what were doing is starting to visualize this and give it out.

Billie:So this is our map of Melbourne. And you can see inner Melbourne, of course is very livable very nice and walkabout, but any yellow out to red that's where you start to get people driving, and anything that is yellow to red people only drive, there is no other choices. So what we planned is that we needed to be collecting information on the legislation of polices, the government investment in different types of transport, all the interventions and then all the outcomes to be able to monitor that.

Billie:Now, we've been doing some of that work here in Melbourne and I wanted to share that with you. This is the [inaudible 00:32:15] many of them in the audience now who've contributed to the research, and we've had funding from a number of different resources, from a central resource excellence, which is finishing this Thursday, to the Australian election partnership center, and the clean air and landscape, they've all contributed funding to fund the research that I'm going to present.

Billie:We've done lots of testing out of all the different measures, so everything I'm presenting here [inaudible 00:32:38] to work for our CRE, we've got a lot of papers behind us, so we haven't thought of this yesterday. This has been a long series of work. We want to test out, public health tends to be very evidence based, we want to test out the indicators. Do these policy relevant indicators of the building [inaudible 00:32:59] do they promote health? So we've been testing those out.

Billie:And we've used those in a report we've done nationally, the creating livable cities report, which was published in 2017. This work was led by Jonathon Arandelle. We had funding from multiple sources, and partnership with RN, and researchers from a number of different universities. We did a couple of different things in this, we reviewed in the policy. If we want to change cities, we have to understand the policy and environment in which we're working, so what we did first, we reviewed all the evidence around policies in the 4 states: [inaudible 00:33:37], Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland.

Billie:And we wanted to create indicators of the main intention of policy and to assist the level of policy implementation, to give us a sense of do we have the policy frameworks in place to deliver better cities, and to whom are those policies being delivered. So that was the first part. We also created a set of national health related indicators. So the health related indicators were the ones Hannah had worked on. So we looked at which indicators, that were policy relevant, but might not be in every state, policies that were being delivered in that state, but which indicators would promote health.

Billie:So if you had a policy for this, we'd test it out and see if promoted health. The ones we tested out were the ones that we found were most likely to promote health, and we wanted to map and look at the spacial distribution, and make some recommendations. So we only focused on a set number of domain sustainability: we looked at public open space, transport, walk ability, housing affordability, employment, food environment, and alcohol environment. The alcohol environment really came from our partner, one of the partners was a [inaudible 00:34:53] partnership center particularly interested in people's access to alcohol.

Billie:The others are more interested in the urban planning type of indicators. And it's interesting because it's quite hard to do a study like this because it's a national study and getting the data together was a major challenge. So just to give you a sense of the sorts of things were looking at, for example, in Victoria, the Victorian transport policy is that 95% should live within 400 meters of a bus stop, 800 meters of a train stop, or 600 meters from a tram stop, and what we have here is the map showing that level of access. So this is all the residential areas where they are achieving this, so the darker the color the more likely you have this level of access, and in the outer suburban areas you see much lower, lighter colors and that's because they have less access to public transport.

Billie:And then we looked at what suburbs are actually achieving the policy, the policy was that 95% of houses should be in this level of access to public transport. And this is only where you really get everyone in the area. It's only in the inner city really that we find that most people have this level of access, so there's this gap between the policy, and who's actually within it. So there's inequities in terms of delivery of the policy.

Billie:We also found looking across the country, differing levels of policy ambition. So this is a really interesting one from Perth. Perth's policy is much more modest, it's policy is that 60% of dwellings, not like Melbourne 95%, should be within 400 meters of a bus stop, and public transport stop, and it looks pretty good, because this is the level of access. So this is the number of suburbs that actually meet that policy, 60% of dwellings meet that. So that looks kind of good right.

Billie:Look at Sydney, Sydney's policy is that 100% of dwellings should be within 400 meters of a bus stop, or 800 meters of a train stop, but there should be a service every 30 minutes. Much better policy, not very well [inaudible 00:37:06], 2% of suburbs have that access. So very interesting because what we argued in the report is actually it's better to have a better policy, and not be delivering, than the modest one, Perth's just sitting on its laurels thinking oh we're pretty good.

Billie:What we then did is we compared a common metric, which is our health related indicator, which is how many people live within 400 meters of a bus stop, which a service every 30 minutes. So we can compare apples to apples. And this is Perth, so here it looked really fabulous. This is the only suburbs where you've got most people at that level of access out of the inner city. Sydney has got many more areas where there's that level of access, nothing out in the west, but certainly close to the city, not doing too bad, in fact it's about 35-30%.

Billie:So, interesting differences comparing apples and apples was important. We did this across all the cities, so you see, it's actually only Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, all have around 35% of people have that level of access. And in other places, Brisbane very poor, 12% of people meet that level of access, Perth not doing well, none of the other cities.

Billie:So quite interesting differences when you compare cities on a common metric. We also compared them on things like walkability, and you find the same, similar patterns, so inner city you're doing pretty well, same as in Perth, Brisbane, not too bad, all that in the fringe very bad of course, and all cities are the same. Sydney, not doing so well either. So what we're finding is that the policies are good at being delivered in the inner cities, but again this idea of inequity. And so if you're thinking about inequity in terms of the outer suburban areas, people can't walk anywhere, no public transport, it's quite an inequitable station.

Billie:We wanted to try and unpack that, why is that the case, and part of the reason is our policies, again we're doing policy analysis, is that the densities are so low. As our policies we actually build our cities at very low density, our policies for most Australian cities is on the fringe of cities, building at 15 units per head, which is very low. And even when we look at where is that policy which is very modest being delivered, you find it's really only in the inner cities that that's even being delivered. The places where it's walkable, the places where there's public transport, that's where we're getting, achieving, that low density 15 [inaudible 00:39:38].

Billie:We've got big problem with our policy ambition. When we looked at this, done by Lucy Gunn, and Claire Valaunch, Clair looked at what sort of levels of density do we need to encourage walking slightly and public transport use and to reduce driving, and we find that people are 2.5x more likely to walk 5.6x more likely to cycle, 3x more likely to use public transit, .5 are likely to drive, if we get up to 20-29 [inaudible 00:40:10].

Billie:So, density is really critical, and yet we're still building at such low densities on the fringe. I've emphasized in our livability index, a livable city has got to be a sustainable city, and we're certainly not doing well in that regard. This is the ecological footprint, this is work done by Pierre Newton. Looking at the ecological footprint along the bottom, and along the other axis, we're looking at the livability index, so this the [inaudible 00:40:39] intelligence unit. This is Melbourne and Sydney, so we're highly, highly livable. Really up, high score for livability, but really high ecological footprint.

Billie:And I've mentioned that we've just been knocked off by Vienna, it's got 1/2 the ecological footprint because of the way the city is designed, because of the public transport system, it fosters more cycling, and so a lot of the European cities, including London, Paris, I'm not sure in terms of ecological footprint than what we enjoy here in Australia.

Billie:So a big issue, so we have a way to go. There's many things that make a city livable, but we're not going to achieve the outcomes that we really desire because we have a long way to go. And we've recommended a number of things, we said that we need to have more evidence informed policy, that all the time creating more evidence we could be doing much better policy making if we used the evidence to form our policies.

Billie:We suggested that there needed to, we encouraged the idea of ambitious policy, I mentioned about Sydney it's public transit policy is very ambitious it's not being delivered, but we think go for ambition, and make short-term, and long-term targets to achieve it. Don't go for the Perth approach, 60% too low, I mean really that's not going to create an equitable city having such modest policies. Better to have ambitious policy, short and long term targets.

Billie:We've suggested that we really [inaudible 00:42:13] useful. Because then it tells us are the policies being delivered, and to whom are they being delivered to. We've suggested that the national cities performance framework be expanded to include broader indicators. A lot of our indicators have been picked up by the national performance framework for cities.

Billie:We've suggested there need to be better data standards, in particularly across our country, it's only a small country we could have consistent data standards that allow us to do these sorts of studies better and frequently, and we've suggested that these sort of cycles, creating these indicators, we should be checking in the same way we do the census, we should have an environmental census to see what policies are being delivered, who's getting them.

Billie:We've suggested that there needs to be better governors, methodological governors, that aligns local governments, state government, federal government, to be able to achieve the cities that we need in the 21st century. You can see these are really, they are multidisciplinary, no one really knows how to achieve these, and that's where the social scientists, the political scientists really need to be involved in this as well.

Billie:Just want to check with Xing about the time, how am I going?

Xing:5 minutes.

Billie:We have been thinking about this in terms of the sustainable development goals. Could city planning metrics help achieve the goals, and it's arguable, that really depends, and I'm just going to acknowledge, put a paper under here at the moment, Jonathon, [inaudible 00:43:49], and Melanie Lowe, what we were looking at, and I mentioned this is the framework we've got for our cities, and then what we have, I mentioned we need an integrated government because that's going to produce this intimations that will impact health.

Billie:And what I did was, we've gone through and done, we took the sustainable development goals, what's happened is that the UN has now approved a global indicator framework, with the idea to help achieve the goals, and what we did was map them against our framework, and what we found was, there's a lot of indicators, air pollution, personal safety, mental illness, these sorts of things. But not so much focused on the upstream, so how are we going to improve air pollution if we don't have any investments, and can't support, don't have any policies around air quality.

Billie:So, our concern is that what we're doing when we're setting up these frameworks is the indicators themselves won't do it unless we're asking the right indicators in there, and the indicators are a bit too downstream to achieve, there are some that are upstream, and there's a couple that have a focus on how much money is being spent, but there is no comparison for example on how much we're spending on transportation in different countries, and whether there's a transportation policy, or an air quality policy.

Billie:If you want to get better air quality, you need to have policies in place to achieve it. So we have some doubts, you might ask does this research, it's really applied research it's designed to have impact, and I just ant to talk you through and show you where some of our research has gone.

Billie:Our definition of livability is being adopted, and I'm pleased someone from the health department is here, Denise, it was adopted int eh health and well being plan 2015-2019, so that's quite important because local government looks to the state government health and well being plan to get clues about where it should be working at the local government to promote health. It's required to do this as well, plans, and this is where it gets clues about where to focus, so we're really pleased about that.

Billie:And its great because all of our livability indicators have been picked up in Cardinia, they just got a prize for the work that they're doing, its been picked up in the interface councils on urban fringe, its being picked up by Molland, where they talk about livable communities and refer to our work. The M[inaudible 00:46:20] Peninsula livability index have picked up our indicators into their framework, and there's also livability work being done here in the city of Melbourne.

Billie:In terms of the national level, federal level, our indicator they've picked a new indicator for transport, by the [inaudible 00:46:40], and in an actual performance [inaudible 00:46:44] for cities, and they even mention us as a source of it is from the creating livable cities report. They've also picked up our public owned space indicator, and they will next year put in our walkability indicator.

Billie:So design research that's tied to the policies that we're trying to influence, means that it's relevant to them and they're going to pick it up which is really a big thrill. We've been putting out our scorecards for cities, and this has created a lot of discussion, I've just been up in Brisbane last week for our final meeting about Center for Research Excellence, and Treasury because they're very interested in the work we've been doing. We've got a scorecard for Brisbane that've we've just put out.

Billie:So again, tying to their interests, the government's interests, it's much more likely to get picked up. So where are we going to next? We're working at the global level, we're just about to start doing global indicators with 20 cities across the globe. Hannah is doing work in Bangkok, [inaudible 00:47:43], she's got her own program work now, but she's doing work in Bangkok, looking at indicators, working with the city of Bangkok.

Billie:But we're working with a group of researchers in 20 cities where we're going to try to create indicators using geo-spacial data, to be able, and publish it in Lancet, as proof of concept is it possible to use data and to create a global network of data.

Billie:We're focusing on child development through attitude. So most of our work has been done with adults, but Karen [inaudible 00:48:15] she's been looking at child development and livability and what it's like for families in communities. But we're also doing work with [inaudible 00:48:23], not that that's that old in Brisbane.

Billie:Lucy Gaines is looking at thresholds, in terms of walking, but we're also looking at thresholds for green space. How much green space do we need to optimize our health, what's the size, what's the quality, that sort of area. Lucy Gaines is also looking at economics, we're trying to work out the economic evaluation, to be able to work out what makes it worthwhile from an economic perspective. We've certainly got some nice data on that.

Billie:Clair Valaunch is looking at using planning support tools to help planners to make better decision making when they're building their cities, and moving into [inaudible 00:49:10] less modeling. We're going to model the city which is really exciting, this is work led by Jonathon Arendale, and Claire Valaunch, and then we're also going to be testing out, this is Lucy, looking at the health impact in the cities that we make around autonomous vehicles.

Billie:There's been a model that's being developed by infrastructure Victoria, looking at different ways we could go with autonomous vehicles, we're going to look at the health impact of that, and then we can do the economic evaluation of the decisions that we make. And I think this is really critical, we need to be thinking upfront about our decisions before we just go off and do it and think oopsie, we've got a big expense here, and a big impact on the community.

Billie:The other area that we're not doing but Paul [inaudible 00:49:57] might, foreign PhD students, but we're thinking about the [inaudible 00:50:00]. We have policy and we don't implement it fully, the question is why. You know where is the leanage curve, so here's the policy principle, here's what ends up on the ground, but at each stage of the review process goes to local government, it goes back to the developers, it is reviewed by government, why doesn't it get delivered. This is what we call the leaking of the block pipe. We want to work out why this is a [inaudible 00:50:29] curve, and that's a really interesting question for us.

Billie:We're creating an urban observatory for our data, we want to give this back to the community so they can actually make a difference, and use the data. So if you [inaudible 00:50:40] on a computer, urban observatory in the making. We'll be opening next year, this is what it looks like. You'll be able to zoom in and go look at areas, and we'll give people metrics if an area is not looking very good they can go in and work out why.

Billie:Local government likes this because they can go in and work out in their area what they need to do to improve it. And of course, through the urban futures and capability platform we've been doing some work, we want to bring together evidence, and give it to governments, so we want to make a difference, and it's been terrific, we've been doing some policy briefs in time for the election, we've put it up on livability, active, transport, natural based solutions for sustainability surveys. [inaudible 00:51:26] but a whole bunch on transport that were done by the transport network, and we've done another on water, which is done by Julia in engineering.

Billie:And then there's another one on autonomous vehicles and new mobility, why it has to do that tying in engineering. So it's really, urban futures, we want to give out timely advice to government, which [inaudible 00:51:46] through policy has been leading this work, but this is the sort of thing we want to do. We want to have an impact.

Billie:So I'm going to stop there. [inaudible 00:51:57] so this is the why.

Billie:The why. Land use and transport policies have a major impact on [inaudible 00:52:03] and health. And there's lots of benefit from prioritizing livability, all these kinds of public transport, and really thinking carefully what's going to happen with autonomous vehicles, or electric vehicles.

Billie:No one solution is going to solve this, [inaudible 00:52:23], really needs to have teams of people working on them to solve them. And we've recommended a number of 8 integrative interventions and we need to be thinking about, ensure that we have a healthy and sustainable future, it does require integrative planning, across all the urban systems. And we think the [inaudible 00:52:43] indicators will help us sharpen our attention to see what are we delivering, who are delivering it to, and are we producing the sort of cities that will be healthy and sustainable into the future.

Billie:So thank you.

Xing:Thank you very much. We have a few minutes so now we open for questions if anybody has any.

Xing:I might just start. I look at what you are trying to do, lots of things, in Australia, and is that the cultural context for the whole thing. If you go to a different country, different culture, different religion, the regulatory framework is different. [inaudible 00:53:36] approach with [inaudible 00:53:37].

Billie:Well the research has been done like this. I mentioned that we're doing these indicators in other cities now. And it's been a big global study, 20 countries across the world have been collecting data, and we find that the same things are predicted. So the sorts of things that were in our model, are predictive, so the density, the access to transit, all those things, but the delivery of it might be different. So in some countries, for example, China or India, they've got plenty of density, but it's not safe to walk in India.

Billie:It's not a safe walking infrastructure, it's not safe at all for people to walk because of the amount of traffic, and there's not separation, so the principles are similar the delivery is different, so they need to be localized. So that's why you need to have a lot of interest in this in both India and China, and our Lancet paper, someone just translated it into Chinese, which we're very happy about, but there's a lot of interest in it. It just needs to be localized. The principles are the same, but the delivery will be different, and obviously the densities are very different.

Billie:So it's not a big issue to worry about density, it's about maybe some of the other things that need to be considered. And the other thing of course is the durability of the heat. I've just been up to Brisbane, and it's very hot there, and so you need to think about tree camping, and greening, to actually make it, and keep the heat affects down. So there's all these other things that need to be taken into account.

Billie:But we've sort of captured that I suppose in our concept of desirability, which is a bit of a catch all. So I think it requires contextualizing, but human behavior is the same, it just needs to be, the environments are different, they need to be contextualized.

Xing:Alright, any other questions, Margaret.

Margaret:I have a question about where does electricity play into all of this, and if we're talking about autonomous cars, and some of them being electric, then their pollution and their noise is much less, but there are other things that need to be taken into account. And in the public transport are buses considered, or is it just purely trains, and trams?

Billie:Buses are part of it yeah.

Margaret:Cause they're private, so when you talk about the distance of people to public transport, is that considering the bus routes that take them into the train lines that take them into...

Billie:Yeah. They've got terrible access to buses as well. That 400 meters out to a public transport, and those every 30 minutes. So their access is really poor around the fringe. But to make your point I think that's a really good one. That concerns me. I'd really like us to model moving to autonomous, or, it depends how they're going to be powered.

Margaret:Well I'm thinking electricity on buses that have solar panels on their roof or something that take the...

Billie:That would be great, but I worry that all these vehicles are going to use pop up [inaudible 00:57:06] car stations.

Margaret:Yeah.

Billie:That's not going to produce a good result.

Margaret:But solar panels.

Billie:Solar panels, yeah. Transitioning as quickly as possible to renewables, and when I think about the autonomous vehicle it could be a really great, if there were shared vehicles, and you know we have fewer vehicles, and we talk about that, there's lot of places in the world that live in a values free way of thinking about autonomous vehicles.

Billie:And are value streamlining so that everyone will just be able to do what they want, if we are going to get down to it, a bit of a nightmare, there will be drones, there will be autonomous vehicles. It could actually be bad, and we I think on our walks this is going to happen. And we have to ask ourselves the question, what is going to produce the best result for society, and we've got to bring together multidisciplinary teams to try and work out not only what's the best use of technology in a sustainable way, but the right energy, but also what's going to produce the best result for society that produces a good future.

Billie:And I think that's the beauty of what we're trying to do with ECPs is that we're coming at it not just within one system, or one discipline, but trying to bring a team together to produce...bringing in social science, bringing the political scientists, the people working with community, the people who talk to the community. Find out how to produce the best result, and that's where we've got a real opportunity.

Billie:I think we've got a responsibility to be honest, I've just written a book chapter for London School of Economics, and I think they're about to get away with it, but I did say in the end, that anyone who builds a city, should have to sign a hippocratic oath, first do no harm, and that's our responsibility. Yeah, just because we can doesn't mean we should, and if we are going to, what do we actually think about it upfront. We're smart enough we know the problems that have happened to the environment by us just being cavalier with technology.

Billie:Let's just now think about it and do it in a way that's going to produce the best result that optimizes the health impact or the world [inaudible 00:59:26], individuals and the environment, and minimalizes any harm.

Xing:Just one last.

Speaker 4:I'm interested in your [inaudible 00:59:38] drawing. Is that because culture, as you mentioned, or is it because of democracy, where blending is then changed in another 3 years time, and keeps on going on?

Speaker 4:So the example, I'm going to give is in Singapore, the first time I went there I was just a teenager, Melbourne has got the city look, and there's nothing at all in Singapore there's no transportation. And I just visited I think 5 years ago, and saw this public transport is fantastic over there. And I saw this headline in the NYT and it says within 2030 everybody will be living 5 minutes from a train station.

Speaker 4:We don't know how to do it, we don't have the budget, but we're going to do it.

Billie:It's easy to do things in Singapore because of the political system, there's no question about that. But it is an interesting point, I believe in [inaudible 01:00:56], it's interesting we did an evaluation on the state of policy in West Australia, and they have a policy it was only 47% implemented.

Billie:And we could actually look across all the different policies and see what was implemented and what wasn't. But the policy didn't work. The policy was fine, every chance of increase in the policy, the odds of people walking increase by 53%, sense of community improved by 22%, mental health by 11%, and being a victim of crime did increase by 40%. So the leaders were right, it was the implementation that was the problem, and that's why we're curious about the leaking pipe.

Billie:Is it when the different jurisdictions do their policies in different ways, but in West Australia, the state government, its responsibility was to review all of the plans. Now did they say, oh that's okay we're going to let that go, the lineage curve of that state, where they let things go that weren't right.

Billie:Or was it when it went back to local government that had to implement it? Was it them saying, oh we'll let that go. Or was it when the developer took it, and then just didn't develop what they were meant to deliver. So that's why it's interesting, but you're right in some jurisdictions we could have many more opportunities. That's the sort of conversations we need to have as a community. We do [inaudible 01:02:25] but also I think we need a relationship with the university as well.

Billie:The university has a responsibility to be thinking about this thing, and being [inaudible 01:02:35] and leaders, and saying, I really think, that in our university, what has to be seen is [inaudible 01:02:40] that we're not just putting things out there, but putting things that we're really important in that multidisciplinary view and we produce products, and policies, or technology that has really been thought through.

Billie:That is going to produce a good outcome. And we will get it wrong sometimes, I'm not saying that well be perfect, but it would be really nice if we were thinking about it. I think that's what the promise from the [inaudible 01:03:02] is about, is that it does provide people with those opportunities to look at things in a different way.

Billie:The other thing is we're putting in a big [inaudible 01:03:13] urban futures CRC, and what's great about that is the program I'm doing is about citizen centric solutions, actually asking the community, that's my area that I'm strong in.

Billie:But community engagement, how do we get the community engaged? The community is often wiser than we think, so I think we could be involved in the community and co-design the product, and actually gain their social license to put out products that both industry and government will have more confidence in. It's time to stop.

Xing:Just one last quick question.

Speaker 5:[inaudible 01:03:59]

Billie:It's very transparent. There's two types of indicators, one around policy and that was [inaudible 01:04:21] with the city, so Perth's policies, and that was the other thing every city has to give policies in Australia.

Billie:It's hard to imagine why they would do that, but we different policies in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. So we measure and reflected back to them what was being delivered, for every residential parcel in every capital city by the end of the year, we'll have them for the 21 cities that in the national performance framework. So the indicators are at the parcel level, so we can look at your home and say what do you have access to in terms of these things.

Billie:We haven't weighted them, and that's a very good point. We have created an index, but we didn't weight them. We sort of weighed them in a way because we uncapped some of the indicators, so we put in all the different types of destinations, which means it's weighted just because you've got more indicators in there. But that, if you're into those sorts of things, we would love to talk to you, we would love to try and do that.

Billie:So if you're a mathematician, come to our class, we'd love to work with you, that is something we'd love to be able to do. I think there's so much more work we could be doing with these sorts of things. The sky's the limit and without urban observatory were going to make it university wide, it's going to be for the community, but we're also creating a search platform so that people can come and work on those data sets. So if that's your thing that measurement. We'd love to talk to you.

Xing:Please join me to thank Billie for the excellent talk. All best for the new year.

Xing:Thank you.

Xinghuo Yu:My name is Xinghuo Yu. I'm the chair of RMIT Professorial Academy, which was just recently established by the Vice-Chancellor basically to give university an opportunity to have this kind of think tank to advise on university policies, to look at the features, and also to be ambassador to promote university.

Xinghuo Yu:Today is the one occasion, one the thing we do is really to celebrate some of the achievement of outstanding researchers, and also this lecture is another way is promote particular strong areas, and in particular is the impact for directions.

Xinghuo Yu:It give me a great pleasure today is to introduce distinguished Professor Min Gu, who is going to deliver the first inaugural RMIT Distinction Lecture. This is a great honor, but I don't want to read Min Gu's very long CV. Certainly he's one of the top researcher in the country or in the world as well in photonics.

Xinghuo Yu:He has many honors. As you know, that he is the fellow member of the Australian Academy of Science and Australian Academy with Technological Engineering and Science and also for member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

Xinghuo Yu:Today he's going to talk about Bio/Nanophotonics: Ready for Life and Work. I think this is going to be very easy to understand. I know there's concern about this, so sophisticated. Even all distinguished professor found it a bit hard, but I think Min is going to explain it very plain term, and particularly this is Friday, just to make sure that we do something entertaining. Without any delay, please join me to welcome Prof. Gu.

Prof. Min Gu:Thank you. Can you hear me? Okay. Thank you very much for coming to this inaugural lecture for RMIT Professorial Academy. I was very honored to be invited to give a first talk when Xing came to my office and say, "Well, you should give the first talk." I said, "Someone else should do it." I thank you very much for I'm pleased to come here to talk about very difficult topic, nanophotonics, and I'm trying to make it as simple as possible.

Prof. Min Gu:Now, whilst I was prepare this talk, I trying to minimize the mathematics. I know people hate mathematics, but eventually I found I have to include one mathematical formula. I'll hope you all enjoy that mathematical formula and why this is important for Ready for Life and Work. You will see mathematics. If you coming to say, "I don't want to see mathematics," close your eyes for this.

Prof. Min Gu:Let me first start that I would like to acknowledge the people of the Kulin Nations on whose unceded lands we are meeting today. I will respect if you acknowledge their elders' past and present for this particular occasion.

Prof. Min Gu:On this occasion, I also want to acknowledge that the support I have from my research group. It is this group, and they make me possible today I'm still speak whilst I'm still doing the ... and commit a lot of time in the administration roles in my RMIT. Thank you very much to those people in the audience and I really appreciate over the last three years the support.

Prof. Min Gu:I came to RMIT beginning at 2016. Thanks, RMIT, for the support. I had the lab opening at the end of 2016. You can see the photos. [Karin 00:04:05], you're there, and the Vice-Chancellor there. We had a lab open at the end of 2016, but we created a world-class facility in order to make this complicated nanophotonic device.

Prof. Min Gu:Having been in RMIT, it is important to aware that the Ready of Life is the strategy. Last year, we create a second laboratory, which is called the Photonics Technology Translation Facility. What I'll talk about today, most of the work has come from the second lab, but it's very important to have the first lab in order to produce the excellence. Then we can translate into the impact of what we talk about.

Prof. Min Gu:Now, let me first start to say, what is the photonics? In fact, the photonics is the science of light. We have light in the room, and that's the photonics. That's very easy. Now, how important the photonics. Two or three weeks ago, there was a Prime Minister Award. If you look at the award, the most important award, the Prime Minister Award Prize for Innovation.

Prof. Min Gu:This year, this prize awarded to these four gentlemen. If you look that what they have done for this country, switching light for fast and more reliable internet. It's very important to realize, when we talk about the light, immediately is related to the life we are living, and it's also the concept immediately coming to the mind the internet.

Prof. Min Gu:These four gentlemen, what they have done is, if we think about what we learned in high school, Newton's Prism. If we want to resolve the sunlight into multiple color, seven colors, so we learned in high school, but what they say is they can resolve into 100 colors. Color is very important.

Prof. Min Gu:What that means, they can actually send these multiple colors through this optic fiber. That's where link everywhere from the city, Melbourne, from the internet, from the data center, to the homes. It is important, notice this fiber is now enabling our everyday life, but it's also we should actually acknowledge that the person who invented the fiber is actually receive the Nobel Prize in 2010 as the physics. They can see how mathematics and physics important. He passed away, unfortunately, last year.

Prof. Min Gu:That is light, internet, fast, reliable. That's the way how this important for these four gentlemen. In fact, one of the people, Steven, actually helped RMIT to evaluate some of RMIT's technology in these areas as entrepreneur.

Prof. Min Gu:Now, I just touch base that color is important. More color, more information, more movie, more data you can do, and faster. Now, there is a limit. That's why we have a bandwidth, broadband network. Bandwidth means how many colors you can do.

Prof. Min Gu:Apparently you can say, "Why don't we increase the color? Thousands of color?" Unfortunately, we do not have this capacity. There is a limit. How many colors we can send through the fiber, limited by the material, limited by the capability how many we can produce the color.

Prof. Min Gu:There is one things over the last few years. These things. This is actually invented about four, five years ago. You can see it's twisting. Twisting, it means a very important, another equivalent color. You can think about color, but it's not called color. It is actually call the angular momentum. It is angular momentum that increase the additional capacity.

Prof. Min Gu:This would be another revolution in telecommunication, but the issue is, how can we put this twisting, which is called the optic angular momentum, into the fiber? Now what RMIT's contribution 2016 is we know the group from Boston, they can put this twisting, which is angular momentum, into the fibers. That means that we now extend the bandwidth, but the question here is, can you use that twisting to carry the information?

Prof. Min Gu:What we did is say, "Well, yes, we can actually now coding the information into this kind of twisting light through the fiber." That's important to prove that concept. It's very fundamental science concept, but the next question is, can we detect it? Can we see it?

Prof. Min Gu:Now if you can transmit we cannot see, then, this useless. This is why recently over the last few days there's another round of media RMIT released that we have detector, we play the detector. How small the detector? Like a human hair. We can actually reduce traditionally to detect this kind of light from the tabletop, dining table, to now the human hair size. That is very important, another step as we are now we achieve this year.

Prof. Min Gu:Now where this go? What this eventually give to the Life and the Work, what this go? This is the future. Li-Fi. If you haven't heard that, this emerging technology is coming. What that means is that everything you see here, the light in this room, eventually becomes the Wi-Fi.

Prof. Min Gu:To do that, we need significantly extended bandwidth. Color is not enough. We need a different means. Anything related to physically you can actually design to this information, they are important. Angular momentum is emerging as very important. In fact, this project is being fund by the ARC Discovery Grant this year, start from this year.

Prof. Min Gu:I'm not talking this. I'm going to stop here, change to more general: the impact of the light. Now I talk about this impact and introduce that the light is very important related to internet, but in fact, if you look at the light, they're all related to more broader topic. They're related to telecommunications, solar energy, sensing, autonomous car, AR/VR, brain science, big data.

Prof. Min Gu:I will talk about in the next rest of the talk to cover these three topics we are working in RMIT. At the end of these three topic, I will point to the why this is important to brain science and how this artificial intelligence coming into the picture for all this journey we are doing.

Prof. Min Gu:Big data. I don't need to emphasize how important. It's not because engineering science. It is now very important to any aspect in social science, in the humanity, and in any other research area, but if I start asking where the data is, how much the data, and I do want to go to that, as I said. Let's look at the chart.

Prof. Min Gu:This is basically we are saying, every second year, we double it. This looks not difficult, but if you start calculating this every second year doubled, it's a huge number this what we are facing. This is the way the problems. What is more problem is, every country contribute to this, and I was trying contribute roughly 4.5% of the data.

Prof. Min Gu:For any developed economy, roughly similar to order of magnitude of 4% or 5% to the global data, but the problem is that we produce so much data, only 70%, the 70% of data cannot be stored. We don't have a space. We talk about cloud, the way as a cloud. Cloud is physically is a house you have to store somewhere in the device. Only 70% of the data can be currently stored.

Prof. Min Gu:Also, among the stored data, there is another issues. 70% of data stored, you not use it. It's called the cold data. You don't use it. For some reason, maybe two years, three year, maybe 10 years, they are useful. They have to keep it here. That's where the current problem I was talk about what's the problem.

Prof. Min Gu:We have cloud. Cloud is a house inside a house lots and lots and lots of device. Then they take the energy away. How much energy? 3%, 4% of the national and electricity use. It's huge. When you think about the data center, it cost 3% or 4%. That's a huge energy consumption. I'll come back to this.

Prof. Min Gu:There's also environment. These are huge data centers like football stadium. Lots of material, lots of infrastructure you have to committed to that. This is not environment-friendly and there's a lot of cables material you have to also to consume.

Prof. Min Gu:One of the problem is the longevity, because the current device that you go to data center, they will tell you every two to three years or every three to five years, depending on what media they use, you have to change that. You can see, if you change the recording media how much energy you needed to consume, you do this complete again. Think about that. Every three to five years, this is our problem.

Prof. Min Gu:The energy consumption is a problem. How do we compare this energy consumption? This is the data as talk about say, if you believe now every second year data is double that. Now this is the oil, petroleum. If you turn all the annual yield of oil into the electricity, then you will see that this is the electricity needed to store all the data.

Prof. Min Gu:There will be very soon, in 10 years' time, there will be a problem that you don't have enough petroleum if you turn all the petroleum into electricity. This is really the problem. That's all the big data center they are facing, that whilst we are promote digital economy, big data, there is the pressing issues, how do we make this sustainable?

Prof. Min Gu:This, as I said, if you take analogy 2011 or if you store all string data, that means that consuming the whole national electricity consumption. That's the type of the issues we are facing. How do we solve the problem?

Prof. Min Gu:I go back to the optics now. Let me go back to the equation I want to show you. First of all, if you go to Jena, you see the memoriam in the downtown city park. See how important to remember this gentleman's called Ernst Abbe. If you look that Abbe, what they put under monument.

Prof. Min Gu:This is interesting to see that equation. That is the discover. Very simple. What that means, it means that if you go send a light through the lens, the lens, we all use the lens. It's piece of lens. What that lens for, to see small detail. How small the detail you can see? That is the formula tells you what is the smallest feature you can see through the lens.

Prof. Min Gu:Now I just rewrite this formula slightly different. This is the modern way to write. This is engraved on the memoriam. This is important. Now if he didn't pass away before the first Nobel Prize award, and he would be the first person win the Nobel Prize. You see how important, why this is important, because this is lay the foundation the microscope. The microscope are now we are still using after hundred years, still this is enabling because of that simple formula.

Prof. Min Gu:Another German scientist, Maria Goeppert. In her PhD, she discovered that so-called two-photon citation. Now forget about it. Just remember the name. What that means? If you combine with the microscope with this kind of discovery, and you will see that these are difference.

Prof. Min Gu:If you take Maria's discovery seeing through the microscope, you will see a tiny dot, but if you don't, then you see a blurred thing. Now this is important. How important? Very simple. I'll you example. Opera House. We build Opera House seven years, using seven years.

Prof. Min Gu:This, we build up a mini opera house, 30 minutes. That is the foundation of nanotechnology. Nanofabrication now. 3D fabrication can go to the nanoscale. It is because of that discovery. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1963. How small this, the Australian kangaroo? We actually fabricated this. The background of this is the human hair.

Prof. Min Gu:Another thing so I want to introduce with optics. Let's now go to the optic disk to touch the topic. The optic disk is invented after almost 100 years of Ernst Abbe by this American entrepreneur. What he says, "Okay, that's good, so let's think about this formula."

Prof. Min Gu:What that means, it gives you smallest the feature you can see. What happen if I use this smallest feature? Burn a mark on the disk. That is the CD burner. That's the concept from very simple turn the imaging, see through to the burning. We burn the mark. That's where using this formula.

Prof. Min Gu:That means we can see, we can burn a very, very small dot on the disk. That's where the first concept, the first-generation CD, based on this concept. The industry, you can see, if you remember 20 years, 30 years ago, CD was really the place lots of things in every aspect.

Prof. Min Gu:Then we went to this Blu-ray. Now what is the Blu-ray? Basically make the, see whether we can work around that formula make it a little bit smaller. You can actually think about that make this more clever not using one layer, you can do this multiple layer.

Prof. Min Gu:The capacity, smallest feature. Remember, this is smallest feature you can put it in, and that means roughly 300 gigabyte. That will be our maximum. That was the reason DVD now not being popular, because the good things become better things under the current situation.

Prof. Min Gu:2005, at that time, we proposed a concept. Thanks to ARC after accept that concept, we got the ARC Discovery Grant, and we call this five-dimension data storage. Whether you can see that we actually break that ceiling, so the bottleneck issues, 300 gigabytes, we now can do terabytes, 10 times more than information you can put it in.

Prof. Min Gu:Now this marked beginning of the nanophotonics. Very important, the nanophotonics. What we do in this case is using this tiny nanoparticles, now it's very popular, this kind of nanoparticle is the metal particle. We use gold because gold is just available at that time. You can use other material.

Prof. Min Gu:They are not sphere. They elongate. Why they elongate? Because if I have a sphere turn around in the space, you will not see you turned. You don't identify the difference, but if I have lost, if I turn around, you will see you turn around. That means the equivalent of the color.

Prof. Min Gu:It's exactly the same thing as want to see multiple difference, then I can put the information into that. We use this different orientation, you can detect and we can actually achieve the optic data storage. This is over the years quickly snatched up, along that journey, first concept published in 2009. In fact, the work started 2005.

Prof. Min Gu:Over the years, we proved that this kind of a storage is secure and could be ultra-secure because you have amount of information. Then, we also, 2017, we can reduce. Remember, energy consumption is the issues. We reduce the consumption per bit, each bit, and to a very small value.

Prof. Min Gu:Now if you couldn't imagine how small this value is, this is equivalent to the brain consume energy. We want to eventually go to that region, because our body is actually the best efficient can use the energy. We do not consume too much energy in the brain.

Prof. Min Gu:Another things we achieve the last year is we can now store the information up to 650 years. 650 years. Think about that. Someone will argue, why I need? I will show you why we need these things, and for the long data storage, but I also list here a couple of things. This is for this Ready for Life and Work.

Prof. Min Gu:First things, we submit the patent in 2013. Two years later, we submit another patent. This year, we also submit the patent on this one. I'll talk about this while we needed these three patents. Go back to this formula. Now remember that this is the Ernst Abbe engraved on the monument.

Prof. Min Gu:This is this gentleman and he was awarded Nobel Prize 2015 for Chemistry. Not for Physics, for Chemistry. Now if you look at that, what is it he discover? He discover this formula. How close these two formula? The only additional things here is little. What that means? Why this got a Nobel Prize?

Prof. Min Gu:Now remember, these are still the smallest of feature that becomes better things. Better is in the biology, you cannot see inside the cell because you have to go into the cell, have a look at what cancer or cancer. You also want to see nanoparticles, small, very small. You can't do it using optical microscope.

Prof. Min Gu:What this gentleman says is, well, how about I do these things? When you see small things, using eraser to erase this fluorescence along the age of that small spot, very simple thinking. He invented this idea when he was a post-doc.

Prof. Min Gu:Now if you look at this picture carefully, had you recognized that's Australian? Phillip Island. He was in my lab when I was at Victoria University in 1997 and he was a post-doc. He created this idea. Now did everybody think he's crazy. How can you do that, achieve this kind of an action? He did.

Prof. Min Gu:Now of course if I simply say, because that formula, he got a Nobel Prize. No impact to Karin. There we have the impact. Formula. That's impact. For 15 years, everybody criticized. He actually worked with industry. Leica, the big microscope company developed this instrument. This will cost a half-million. If you buy a microscope for this one, it will be half a million.

Prof. Min Gu:Everywhere in biology that you go to, Melbourne University, any biologic lab, they will buy this microscope. It's called a STED microscope. It's how important the concept and turning into the product, and also how long the journey, 15 years, that he actually get this.

Prof. Min Gu:I'll come back to this formula now. He invented this. Also, because of that formula, smallest feature you can do, this becomes now the bottleneck issue of the Blu-ray. We think in same way. Along the 2010, we will say, "Well, why don't we do this thing?" We erase it. You record, we erased along the age, and we do it continual. Then we also turn that formula into slightly complicated formula, but we achieve that using this geometry, the method that we call "spin." He goes there and we call spin.

Prof. Min Gu:What that means? Of course in the laboratory, you have to do very complicated. These are the system we can achieve now, 33 nanometer. In fact, the smallest the feature is 9 nanometer. Now for those people who working in the nanotechnology, you know smallest the feature, the electro-microscope where you can see, you can give is along the 7 or 10 nanometer. This is optic method, gives you the smallest feature, 9 nanometer. This is actually achieved in a much cheaper format.

Prof. Min Gu:That is actually the times we realize this can change the data storage industry, we call the new era is coming, so which means using this 33 nanometer, we can actually better the capacity up to 340 terabytes, so thousand times high than the bottleneck issues in the Blu-ray, and this much better than the traditional in terms energy consumption, in terms environmental protection.

Prof. Min Gu:This is over the years we work on this journey. Now if you put this into this comparison, hard disk, fresh memory of the disk. The hard disk eventually reach the ceiling because the nanotechnology and because all this industry can do, so there's a ceiling going towards ...

Prof. Min Gu:You can actually do possible in few years' time the nanotechnology, nanofabrication becomes better, but still you can see there is a ceiling we can achieve for this hard disk industry. Then, optics, because of that formula, stops somewhere here. Now, with this technology, spin technology, we can assess to the nanoscale and we are actually going on this another disruptive change.

Prof. Min Gu:Long data storage. Remember that the 650 years, that is very important, the milestone we achieve at RMIT. Why we needed that? There are a number of area really need a long data storage. Brain research. Brain research, you record the conscious or the thinking, you need a long data storage. You need a high-capacity data storage and long time.

Prof. Min Gu:The other one is the telescope we are developing, Australians also part of the project, square kilometer array telescope. Large amount of data that is only meaningful if the 100 years long this kind of data. Then, there's a gravitation wave and an even longer time scale for this meaningful result.

Prof. Min Gu:In fact, recently, as I said, there's a more related to the other area, geology, biology, astronomy, history, they all need long data. You need it to data meaningful over the few generations. This is actually the reality how we want to do from their own words.

Prof. Min Gu:[Inaudible 00:28:17]. Large amount of data consume energy. We need to consume much less, so our ambitions through the ARC project, the Discovery one, the first one I got when I came to RMIT, we want to go into femtojoule. If you look at 2017, we achieve picojoule. We want another three order magnitude the reduction of the consumption. We were using nanotechnology. I'll come back to this one.

Prof. Min Gu:Next one, longer. Longer and higher capacity. That's the demand from industry. We are actually working on combination, the spin technology and the nanotechnology. Then faster. If you have a vast amount of information, we want fast. How do we do that? We want to have, again, the high capacity, and we need artificial intelligence. That's the way.

Prof. Min Gu:Let me give some flavor what we are now achieve along this direction. The first one, student. One of the student, Simon, I hope he's in the audience. He came from Italy. We just launched the patent. What we use is using very low-cost material. It's called the [inaudible 00:29:29] nanoparticle. These are the crystal.

Prof. Min Gu:We collaborate with Singapore National University and we achieve what he did and say, well, using this nano-crystal, we can now moving into the region where the consumption of energy can be reduced another three order magnitude, and also, nanotechnology. This is the patent we just submitted. He just show some success result there, and hopefully another six months he will conclude this piece of the work.

Prof. Min Gu:Then, artificial intelligence. We will do it, but I don't believe ... I won't do it. I do not have time to do these things, but we have to work on this complicated artificial neural network. This is the concept of how do you make things faster.

Prof. Min Gu:This is the calculation method. How do you calculate this multiple, the focus port, and through this artificial neural network things? That's too complicated. I can't do it. What I can do is we facilitate a workshop with the Computer Science people, computer scientists in the School of Science.

Prof. Min Gu:This is one of the workshop we facilitate. You see Sheldon Lee, [inaudible 00:30:41], they all are very enthusiastic. Very important we are now have a paper on my desk to submit through this workshop, and it will be submitted to a very important journal through this collaboration.

Prof. Min Gu:We are actually trying to, through this conceptual development to the device, which is on the 13 floor, the translation lab, and turning into we call a box. Of course, industry needed to be onboard, and hopefully this can be go into this one.

Prof. Min Gu:Now, that's what we can see what's the future happening. With this Blu-ray technology, the people are producing now the optical media and data center for the reason that low energy consumption, but the size for this amount of information, 100 petabyte space capacity, we need roughly 300-meter-square space, but if we do our own, then we only need a one meter to achieve equivalent things.

Prof. Min Gu:This is the huge impact, of course, and the most important with this optic technology. Then you can see that the energy consumption can be much, much lower. I think we did the calculation few years ago, if we do the solar cell power of the building that is electricity we can generate, a solar panel can be used to power all this optic disk. This will be now beyond the force field. You can use energy outside earth to do the big data.

Prof. Min Gu:I won't be able to deliver this. The industry collaboration, as we can see, very important. The first things, as I said, around 2013, when we have the technology, this spin technology, this company is a spinoff company from Facebook staff member. They actually called me when I was in Singapore. They said, "Well, have you thought about this spin technology for application?" I said, "Well, it's fun. We published a paper." "Nice."

Prof. Min Gu:They actually came to [inaudible 00:32:52] to the patent for optic data storage. They just send the [inaudible 00:32:58] to the patent. Of course they wanted the patent licensed to OAI. A year later, the technology was bought by Sony. Sony acquired OAI.

Prof. Min Gu:About that time, we launched the second patent which is the long data storage idea, and this eventually, there's another company from China, they licensed before I left, actually, [inaudible 00:33:21] this license to another company in China.

Prof. Min Gu:Very interesting, when we publish the result, the 650 years, early this year, Microsoft actually approached us from Microsoft Cambridge and they want to know what we do with 650 years. Now, this is very important. I mentioned it. Sometimes we thought that this is the pathway. We do, but in fact, when I went there, everything I telling you, this possible or not possible.

Prof. Min Gu:Maybe this is not the industry want to go to the pathway. Why is that? When we go to the cloud, so the data center, they manage multiple data center around the world, and they not consider individual disk performance. If you improve individual disk performance, that not necessarily the best of pathway for the cloud storage.

Prof. Min Gu:In fact, they are working on this, a similar competing technology from University of Southampton in UK. They work on this concept, optic cloud. Because ND, I can't go to the detail, but this is actually the future and we've been invited to present a pitch to this concept, how do we eventually all the technology we develop can be used on cloud. This is the way optic data storage.

Prof. Min Gu:I want to quickly change the gear to another technology which is very important, again, invented by Dennis Gabor. Dennis Gabor invented this so-called holography. For that, he actually got a Nobel Prize in 1971. He was born in Hungary, eventually later living in UK, I think Cambridge or Oxford.

Prof. Min Gu:Now, this is his invention. Now I don't want to go into this detail, what that holography means, but I think that you have the experience that if you go to some of the museum, and they have nice this hologram, a 3D picture. It can be through 3D, but what is ultimately this technology can be impact is from this movie.

Prof. Min Gu:Have you see this movie? You saw this, 3D movie, the first 3D movie, Avatar. That's the movie. This actually show that the future, the 3D display, it should be like that. Important I want to emphasize, this person watch this 3D side view, not in the way we watch normally. This is important. The signal you will receive, your side. You're not face it. This, how to achieve, holography can do that.

Prof. Min Gu:Now, at this stage, this is the device. It's called a spatial light modulate, SLM. This is actually a piece of device currently used for generate this kind of a hologram. If you start to do a little bit analysis why this doesn't work, and if you look that SLM versus if you look at this viewing angle, I emphasize this viewing angle is important, if you want to do 3D, you have to be able to see, this is the screen and you can see somewhere here. The viewing angle becomes very important.

Prof. Min Gu:SLM can only give a few degrees. A few degrees. That's why we want to now design all these things we have to face it. You cannot achieve really 3D. In order to break this ceiling, then you needed to think about what's the problem? The problem is that we have to now moving from this region to the region more than 90 degrees.

Prof. Min Gu:You can see that the size predicted that it's very challenging, but this is actually we achieve a few years ago. We can use this laser printing in graphing. This is a graphing material. It's very popular, but we use the laser to produce this hologram, simply speaking.

Prof. Min Gu:What this advantage in this technology is we actually put multiple color. If you can put three color, it means that all these true color imaging you can achieve that. We achieved 52 degree. This is 52 degree, 52 degree in this technology. Now, going beyond that, I'll tell you why this is difficult. Let's first have a look at one of the movie which, at that time when we published result, it was list on the Time Magazine in the front page.

Prof. Min Gu:This is actually the movie. You can see, this test object three-dimension, you can see from minus-26 degree to positive-26 degree, around this, so 52 degree, you can see this. This is the first time. I guarantee that this is the real 3D, the imaging. You can see the wide angle.

Prof. Min Gu:The one step, the one step to reach that level. That is because the technology. Again, go back to why we cannot do that, because Ernst Abbe said, "The smallest the feature, there's a limit." You can't do more than that. You can't go more than this.

Prof. Min Gu:We will continue on. Last year, and this is another paper we published. The one step, we do step by step. We actually can produce a hologram and in very, very thin sheets. There is housing 1,000 hair size. It's very, very thin. That means you can extend this into the more broad application. One is this vision. This is really a number of industry now want us to demonstrate that with this kind of watching, and then you can actually achieve is a 3D display.

Prof. Min Gu:To do that, the first things, we needed to increase the viewing angle. The viewing angle, as I said, with the spin now, we should be able to achieve 90 degree. Now I do have the result, but I didn't have time to include. In fact, last week, one of the post-doctor achieved that this smallest feature would really go beyond other limit. This is doable. We want to also do flexible, and I'll show you the flexibility in a minute.

Prof. Min Gu:The next thing, so must be dynamic. If we don't do dynamic things, you can't see the movie, all these thing. For that, we launched the patent this year to make sure that the idea, before we can talk, the idea is being patented. Very soon, we will be able to now solve this problem. As I said, we want to go to the smallest feature and go to our mobile unit.

Prof. Min Gu:Just as one demonstration, you can see, this is the flexible material and we can actually produce a hologram into this material. Of course, at this stage it's still not high-quality, but it demonstrated that this 3D holographic imaging can be build up into this flexible structure, and this is the pathway is there.

Prof. Min Gu:Last topic. Super capacity. Karin. This is Karin's favorite topic. What I will only emphasize what the contribution, what we have contributed to this field. Now, what is a super capacity? There's a academic definition of "super" and there's also very easy to understand the "super." "Super," it means that quick charge, and you can have charge this capacity very quickly. You don't need to wait for hours to get the charging. That's super.

Prof. Min Gu:You can actually reuse, charge and recharge and recharge much more times than the current battery, and again, this is super. There is the possibility you can actually make this into flexible, and that means that all the stretchable device, flexible device we dreamed, this can be powered by this kind of a device. They are environmentally friendly, so it's much less damage to the community, to the environment.

Prof. Min Gu:There are the scientific definitions, "super," and this is probably from more layman point of view. I go back to the scientific comparison, do this easy one first. This is a very simple comparison. Notice, kind of also have similar slides on that.

Prof. Min Gu:Super capacity versus lithium-ion battery. This is the one we use in mobile phone similarly, so all this in mobile phone. We experience the problem, the safety issue, there's a chemical problem issues, all kind of issue, but this let's compares very important.

Prof. Min Gu:As I said, the charge cycle much better than the traditional one, and there's also the fast, fast charging. This is the very fast charging and lifetime longer, but there is one problem. The problem is energy density. Why is this so good? Why not we use it? Because we cannot put too much energy into this one. There is a problem. This is where you can see this currently the very low energy density if you want to do have a lift, you have to use many, many of these things in order to achieve the practical application.

Prof. Min Gu:Go to young people. We have [Litty 00:42:54]. Litty is in the audience? Not? This is another PhD student. She just finished the PhD last year. Now, this is her idea, independently proposed. It's not my idea. I just endorsed the idea. This is a good idea.

Prof. Min Gu:We were working these issues, how do we put the more electricity into this super capacity? Now what she come back the idea, say, "Why don't we learn from this tree?" Tree, the particular tree is called a fern tree. If you look at the tree, it's American fern tree, and under the microscope, then you see this very nice pattern.

Prof. Min Gu:This side under the ... close to the macro-nanoscale. They're the interesting things what she discovered. This pattern mathematically, let's go to the math, mathematically, it's equivalent to this fractal structure. Hubbard is very famous mathematician. He actually predict a lot of things. They're the pattern Hubbard fractal. They are equivalent, mathematically exact, the same.

Prof. Min Gu:Why we need this equivalence proof? Because now, this pattern, I can ask the laser to follow the trajectory. The laser can follow this pattern to produce electron which can store the energy. Now more than that, this pattern, actually the fractal is a cell for reproduce.

Prof. Min Gu:When you go to smaller, produce this same pattern, when you go to smaller codes in the pattern. We can actually really control at a nanoscale the size. This can be also done on the substrate. This actually fabricate a structure, and this on the substrate, flexible substrate.

Prof. Min Gu:She done very more since integrated this device on the solar cell panel. This on the top, there's a solar panel, and under that, there's super capacity. It's actually one girl you can actually make using this technology to finish this using layer-by-layer fabrication to achieve that.

Prof. Min Gu:That's Litty's PhD. She also actually done that increase the size moving to the slightly larger than the research size. This is another product that she produced in her PhD. At that time, the energy density is higher, it's higher than the published result, but it's not high than what we want to go. Litty's result received mainly inquiry from the industry even from Defense. For that, we'll launch the patent in March this year. Litty was awarded this RMIT Impact Award for HDR Student.

Prof. Min Gu:From there onwards, now on this journey, so first of all, using spin, we want to increase to this number. This will be equivalent to lithium-ion battery. Then we want to size the increase with this ceiling funding, and then we are actually also integrated with the solar cell for the panel for the design harbor. This is Litty. Just yesterday, she told me she can actually achieve this fractal pattern on the fabricates. This is the conductive fabrics and this can be done.

Prof. Min Gu:This is the movie, I quickly show that, so that we can generate electricity from solar panel and then charge the super capacity. This is charging and this is super capacity. These, the fan, you will see that after minutes charging, so after charging ... Come on.

Prof. Min Gu:After the charging to the one volts and we turn off the solar cell, so disconnected this part and store the energy here, and then turn on the loading, the fan is there, so the electricity. We will scale up using this device to achieve this work with ...

Prof. Min Gu:Now, I want to wrap up my talk and just touch this topic. We all talk about artificial intelligence. Now, maybe the next few slides, my view will be very provocative. It's my personal view. This is where the direction to go. We all talk about artificial intelligence. I call this is the Phase 1. Based on this very simple older technology, still older, computer separated memory and calculation, but still like that, we still work on this architecture.

Prof. Min Gu:The only thing is this person, Turing, is very famous. He said we can do, using computer, do some testing. The human task make this so-called artificial intelligence. We can beat the game in the chess and this is the goal, our goal.

Prof. Min Gu:Everything we develop, this is all based on one's principle. It will not actually revolution. What is the revolution? It will be these things. The computer were based on the neural network. The chip will do the neural doing the job.

Prof. Min Gu:What that means, the neural will eventually collect a signal, do the calculation, pass on the signal, all and go within one cell. We have a millions, millions of the cell, and then it will make a decision. This is called the neuromorphic computing.

Prof. Min Gu:Now if the neuromorphic computing can be developed, this is really artificial intelligent, the computer. Now, by putting this biological model into the engineering model, and what that means is that we need as a device, you can calculate the waiting, the waiting from [inaudible 00:49:17]. We have to have a waiting like this one. Then we do this decision and then pass on, and on and on again. They produce this synapsis type of function and do this calculation. These are the two major functions, and it must be combined together.

Prof. Min Gu:This is over the few years, last few years, a very hot topic around the world. Again you can see this from Alan Turing and the same guys propose this artificial intelligence, the concept, the Turing test, he also proposed this concept so-called this neuromorphic computing. Then, this is the first person to use traditional computer to achieve this concept. It's huge, but you will not go into it because energy consumption issues, it's a huge energy consumption.

Prof. Min Gu:This is where the integrator circuit come into the picture, and that's where the magnet is smaller. Recently, now you can see photonics, RMIT, Princeton last year simultaneous published a paper going to neuromorphic photonic chip. Why that already emphasize photon carry much less energy, consume much less energy.

Prof. Min Gu:If you look at their result, what they are missing? They do this based on this calculation, and that's were achieve. The blue color means this based on the basically equivalent to [inaudible 00:50:43] communication type of a device, but they're missing this part. They do not have a synapsis.

Prof. Min Gu:While they do the synapsis calculation and the probability calculation, they still use traditional computer. It's not really neuromorphic things. What we recently proposed that the RMIT, the concept that we haven't going to the patent. If any in the audience, don't worry, I didn't disclose too much here.

Prof. Min Gu:We have a concept and I can see with joule here, by one of the early [inaudible 00:51:16] research, and through this device, we should be able to now produce this function. If we produce this function, connect it with this, and then, this will be really complete, the photonics or photonics neuromorphic computing with speed of light.

Prof. Min Gu:Now, I'm not trying to say, well, this is the only my view, it's happening in RMIT, in Princeton, in Stanford. In fact, the recent paper published University of California, they actually also moving onto this direction. It's publishing science, actually. It will happen, or optic computing with the speed of light with this kind of concept.

Prof. Min Gu:Just to finish up, this neuromorphic computing, if you use in traditional way, the first one, the energy consumption per signal pathway is somewhere here. Then using this electronic one, you'll reduce two to three order magnitude.

Prof. Min Gu:The real neuron is sitting here. There's six order magnitude that we have to find for, and then the photonics can come into this picture. Again, spin becomes very important in this case. The size, the energy consumption, that is the way we are targeting in this region.

Prof. Min Gu:Just want to summarize that I actually trying to say mathematics, science, they are very important, and this is the way we do lots of fundamental work, but in the meantime, we very well aware that the impacted is in each of the area. I didn't have time today talk about the house area. We do a little bit of work actually in this area, but I want to emphasize last, the one that all the work now point us into this, the real neuromorphical artificial intelligence, one I want to ... the group is eventually to move in this area.

Prof. Min Gu:Of course, industry is very important to take this all the result. These are all the industry, after RMIT, there's a number of industry coming to approach us, and specifically for the three technology, the optical data storage, the holographic, and the graphing super capacity.

Prof. Min Gu:I'll stop here. Thank you very much for the attention.

Xinghuo Yu:Thank you very much, Min, for the excellent talk. Now we have time for a few questions. Anybody have any questions, comments? Yes. I'm not sure if this one is working or not, but you can try. Otherwise, just shout. I think it's working.

Speaker 3:Thank you, Min. That was a fantastic talk. Fascinating. One of our question is, I'm particularly interested in the AI structure you mentioned. If you use the photonic technology, is the computer or the neuron will be binary or is it going to be like a decimal or even different type of representation maybe, analog?

Prof. Min Gu:Yes. It could be combination. It could be digital, it could be analog, and could be the combination, either digital or analog. In fact, you probably realize that another branch towards this neuromorphic computing is memories. If you look at the design in memory computing, and there are two ways still, but personally I believe that the digital probably is more advantage in terms of the signal and coding, and from our point of view.

Speaker 3:When you form the structure, can the structure be changed later on?

Prof. Min Gu:Oh, you have to design according to the ... Probably it's difficult. I think it will be related to here. Different approach probably need a different architecture.

Speaker 3:Thank you.

Xinghuo Yu:Thank you very much. Any other comments, questions?

Speaker 4:Thank you for the fantastic talk. Just a quick question. Can you comment on what you pointed out just now about neuromorphic computing? There's another quantum computing. Can you comment on any connections or any opportunities to different ideas or different concepts?

Prof. Min Gu:The quantum computing is actually still based on the current architecture thinking. You just increase the more states. If you do the job zero-one, the current computing, the quantum computing say, "Well, I can do zero-many, many states." It's not from zero-one. You can have a one. Quantum is a probability, so it actually could be unlimited, the states. Then, so that you can do the calculation much faster. That is from that angle.

Prof. Min Gu:Now, one of the problems I see, the energy consumption. Because you're still going on the traditional technology, silicon technology, all the technology, and you have to do the hardware to achieve this kind of things, the energy consumption possibly will be one of the problem.

Prof. Min Gu:Going to neuromorphic computing, because I have limited time, one of the important things, so this will combine into one unit. The calculation memory will be in one unit, and that will be the way to reduce the consumption. Now I also need to emphasize that, ultimately, we will not go through, I believe this eventually scientists who are not going to this way. This is still the concept [inaudible 00:57:17] this separately, but the way that one of the ... In fact, I was involved one of center of excellence UI this year.

Prof. Min Gu:Then finally, it must be related to the [inaudible 00:57:28] device. You have to follow the neural growth and then making sure that that will be the more sustainable approach, but this is a long way, probably another 50 years to go into that direction.

Xinghuo Yu:All right. Thank you very much. There's one or two more, then we ... I know I just remember you are standing between Min and the refreshment.

Speaker 5:I just have one question on this connection to computer science, machine learning, because on machine learning, you have this machine learning more like neural network, and you can do training. That means the connection waves can be adjust. If you can do this in, I don't know, in neuromorphic computing, is it possible to make them adjustable so that you can do them for this sort of learning or training?

Prof. Min Gu:Yes. Thank you. This is the way I found a few months ago when I was in Microsoft. Then I start see happening on the plane. There's 15 hours on the plane. Then you can start a speculation, think about all of these things.

Prof. Min Gu:This diagram, the dot is very important. This actually dynamically, we believe that very similar to the current memory disk, it's a photonic memory disk, so we can training this into the way to remember, and then do this machine learning thing. The learning function will be here.

Prof. Min Gu:I can talk to you which we collaborated, I want to show you in fact a very similar. This one, it means you can actually change status according to the output. We can achieve that loop, which is the learnings you need.

Xinghuo Yu:Thank you very much. Just the one last one. Anybody has ... ?

Speaker 5:Maybe I'll take the blame.

Xinghuo Yu:Oh, you'll take the blame.

Speaker 5:Sorry for holding you for the refreshment. Actually just a follow on Sheldon's question. In the recent years, in one of the bottleneck or one of the direction in AI or machine learning is the learning model is actually try to combine with memories.

Prof. Min Gu:Yes.

Speaker 5:I'm asking whether this structure can actually be a natural solution so that learn model also come with a memory.

Prof. Min Gu:Yes. The answer is yes, but there are two approach that currently in the future computer design. One is called in-memory computing. They follow the way the memory and the calculation combine together. This is the different approach. This come from the neuromorphic point of view, but they all achieve the same things.

Prof. Min Gu:In the end, these dots becomes the memory. On the chip, whatever happened, so this can remember, even you turn off the power, the state will be still remember, and then this becomes the memory which cannot do right now. Like we sleeping, we still have memory. This can be done. That's the way we want to achieve with the machine. This will be the on-chip memory simultaneously. These are the calculation.

Speaker 5:Yeah, but this is probably not exactly what I have in mind. When we talk about machine learning model has memory, they memorize variables before they're doing the decision?

Prof. Min Gu:Yeah. Our [inaudible 01:01:23] simply won't, but if you actually think about this array like the computer chip, and this can be proven.

Speaker 5:Ah.

Prof. Min Gu:I just simplify the ... I don't want to discuss all this. I have a much more complicated we have the calculation, and also each of the function can be train.

Xinghuo Yu:All right. You can continue discussion during the refreshment. Firstly, I would really like to thank Min for this very-

Prof. Min Gu:Endeavor.

Xinghuo Yu:... entertaining talk. I'm very enlightened, actually. Very nice on this Friday. I understand-

Prof. Min Gu:I saw the one mathematical formula.

Xinghuo Yu:I'm not sure, Min, I understood and all, but [inaudible 01:02:05]. Please join me to thank Min again for the excellent-

Prof. Min Gu:Well, thank you very much.

Xinghuo Yu:Thank you.