RMIT Professorial Academy

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.