CERN Alumni Second Collisions - Main stream

welcome back to second collisions the final day in this amazing online event we have an action-packed afternoon which includes talks from some highly impactful cern alumni here in the main auditorium we have networking sessions in restaurant 1 an entrepreneurship workshop in idea square but now it gives me great pleasure to introduce you to our moderator and second collisions organizing committee member connie potter nine o'clock last night watching double negative hey connie how are you doing i'm doing good thank you i was here last night till the very end watching double negative's fabulous talk oliver james gave a really really interesting talk and tonight i'm going to see one of their latest films june at the cinema oh they did that but did you know that they're actually recruiting cern alumni i heard him mention that what an opportunity it's incredible yeah who wouldn't want to work for double negative i still like working for cern though anyway who've we got coming up next so coming up now we have susie sheehy um she is uh one moment please right i met susie for the first time for a coffee a few days ago neither the 30-minute coffee nor the 20-minute talk she'll now give is enough to learn even a fraction of what she's achieved so far in her career a native australian she divides her time between her work on high power hadron accelerators at oxford university and her group focusing on medical applications for accelerators at melbourne university could you get further apart she's also founded the accelerate outreach program in the uk and incredibly has found the time to write a book the matter of everything due out early next year while reading through the comments on susie's royal institution talk on particle accelerators in amongst the marriage proposals i found one that said wow impressive very impressive i look forward to reading about what miss sheehy discovers and creates over the next decade and more as do i don't forget to put your questions in the chat over to you sheehy thank you connie and uh thank you for the the wonderful introduction um i hope everything is is working well here and i'll just wait for the slides to come up as well so in today's talk um i was asked to talk about both my career in accelerated physics and also science communication and a lot of my communication nowadays is around this idea of curiosity driven research and in preparing this talk today for use for cern alumni i thought well what can i what can i say to these people that they might not have thought about already um and actually just this morning i came across a wonderful article by the science writer ed young um and he was reflecting on and the article is called if you would like to read it how the pandemic changed how i think about science writing and in it he had this quote which i really loved and so i want to start with that and then and then build from there he says science is often caricatured as a purely empirical and objective pursuit but in reality a scientist interpretation of the world is influenced by the data she collects which are influenced by the experiments she designs which are influenced by the questions she thinks to ask which are influenced by her identity her values her predecessors and her imagination and i thought that was a really great place to start for the story i'm going to tell you today about how my science and my science communication have over the years empowered each other and how that is true throughout the history of my field not just for me personally so i want to start back in 1927 with this guy ernest rutherford a fellow antipodean he was from new zealand um and he came to the uk uh actually on the same fellowship that i had early in my career um and obviously rutherford had achieved a lot by 1927 he was already well established in the field of radioactivity but he was growing increasingly frustrated with the types of experiments that he was carrying out to try and understand the atom by this point they discovered that the atom had a tiny nucleus through the gold foil experiment in 1909 and he developed his atomic model in 1911 but he still didn't really understand what was inside the atom um and so in 1927 he was now the president of the royal society and he stood up in front of the great good of the scientific elite of britain and he said it's long been my ambition to have available for study a copious supply of atoms and electrons which have an individual energy far transcending that alpha and beta particles from radioactive bodies his problem was that natural radioactive substances like radium could only reach a certain energy in the radiation that they emitted or the alpha particles they emitted for his experiments and they headed out in every direction and they declined over time with the half-life right so doing controlled experiments with a high data rate was very very difficult in 1927 and involved many long hours sitting in a dark room with a microscope looking for tiny flashes on a scintillating screen that's literally how this science was done so ernest rutherford in this in this call was really asking for the first particle accelerator and he wasn't the only one actually who um was working on this uh and in fact it was his people cockroft and walton of course who built the first accelerator which i'll talk about in a second but they had competitors all over the world actually in the us there were people using giant tesla coils to try and uh build up a high voltage through which to put particles in order to give them energy there were even some researchers in germany who strung enormous cables across a big gorge and waited for the lightning to come through and they actually successfully managed to harness about 15 million volts for their experiments of course they didn't build an accelerator with it but just as they moved up to trying to harness 30 million volts one of the experimenters died in an accident on the mountain and that was the end of their adventurous type of particle accelerator made from lightning so obviously it was a little bit safer but not much safer to try and do this in the laboratory and that's what um john cockroft and ernest walton who was just a student at the time actually did they built this machine that you can see on the right hand side of the slide here which was the first working particle accelerator with which they split the atom in 1932. so this gave them not just new results not just new science but it gave them a new ability to investigate the fundamental matter of our universe through this technology now most of you have probably heard of that story of cockroft and walton and the first accelerator and you can see walton there sitting underneath the beam tube now just an extremely dangerous thing to do but they would actually sit underneath there and look for the flashes on a screen um from the the decays uh as a scintillating screen lit up and actually when they made the first experiments on end of april 1932 walton wasn't sure of what he was seeing and so he grabbed um rutherford and bundled this six foot four guy rutherford into this tiny box with his knees up around his ears and rather rutherford successfully confirmed that they really were saying alpha particles and that was their indication that they'd managed to split the atom all right if i can get this thing working let's go to the there we go so what you might not have heard of is is then another story about the invention of particle accelerators that happened around world war ii and in fact just before world war ii these two brothers russ and sigurd varian and some of you will recognize the name varian um were living in a socialist theosophist um community called halcyon on the californian coast and they along with many other people were interested in how to create radar how to create a system which could um uh guide or detect um enemy aircraft because of the the um and this went on into into wartime right so it was a very difficult challenge and they tried building a lab in their small community but they were having lots of difficulty doing that and so they hooked up with someone up the road at stanford named bill hanson and he's the one in the right-hand side on that middle picture there with the glasses and the fantastic eyebrows and bill was actually interested in developing particle accelerators and what he came up with was what he called the rumbatron which was a sort of cavity shaped device in which electromagnetic waves bounced around in such a way that they might be able to amplify and accelerate a particle and so at the start of world war ii while the british were working on devices called magnetrons which gave out radio frequency waves which were eventually taken up in the us for radar these people were working together on a different device called a klystron now it was a little behind the magnetron in terms of power output and that's why it wasn't used at first in world war ii and radar but they persisted developing it because it looked like it would be an extremely useful device and russ and sigurd varian actually went off and founded a company which some of you may have heard of and varian actually at first sold these devices for save the telecommunications industry and places like that and where they established this company was in a little known industrial backwater near stanford university which is now known as silicon valley now this is a really interesting interplay between the needs of war and industry and the needs of physicists for particle accelerators so they start up this company and meanwhile bill hansen starts up using this powering device the klystron to drive and develop new types of particle accelerators that were much smaller than the ones had gone before and you can see that him with his team with their first version of what's called a three gigahertz s-band linear accelerator and he working with a medical community and a local uh local doctors there actually developed these linear accelerators into devices which could be used to treat patients in radiotherapy now varian you might not know was actually the first ipo the first floated company in silicon valley and this activity around radar particle accelerators and high-tech vacuum tubes actually laid the foundation for the high-tech companies and manufacturing and expertise in the area from which silicon valley later later grew which was a really interesting background so i'm giving you this example as a way to show you that physics and particle physics in particular has never been isolated from society it's never been something that's just done in an ivory tower purely thinking about um the foundations of our universe the people who get in their hands on and actually build the experiments and this type of accelerator led to the stanford linear collider that eventually discovered quarks um doing this activity is part of our society and it interplays in many different directions with industry and obviously with medicine now i was researching these stories for the book that connie mentioned i've just written in the last couple of years when i became aware of um a sort of much larger story around this because it would be easy to think that having come up with radiotherapy and then letting industry including varian one of the major suppliers of radiotherapy linux um it'd be easy to think that the job of the physicist and the accelerator physicist or particle physicist it sort of finishes there in the story um and it came as a bit of a surprise to me that that our job hasn't finished now one thing you might not be aware of is that these accelerators not just the type that bill hansen um designed but all different types of accelerators that have been invented in many different creative ways throughout the decades are now used in so many places in our society so obviously medical applications is a major one which i'll touch on more but there's more and more accelerators also being used in industry um to make the chips inside our mobile phones um for advanced manufacturing for non-destructive testing and things like this so they're really really ubiquitous technology and one of the most commonly used ways that we use these small accelerators um is to generate x-ray beams for cancer treatment and about one in every uh about one in two patients where this treatment is available um are treated using radiotherapy among successfully treated cancer cases so it's absolutely a mainstay of cancer care worldwide and there are now many suppliers who will sell these there are two main market leaders um and they're extremely sophisticated technologies integrated with the imaging this small particle accelerator generates electrons turns them around hits them onto a metal target that generates the x-rays which are then shaped and everything is is designed around delivering the optimal dose where it needs to be in the patient measuring that delivering that and giving the patient a good quality outcome and i was aware of this but i guess something that i maybe wasn't aware of was the overall um rate of cancer deaths worldwide i had assumed because i live in a high income country well two high-income countries the uk and australia that overall the rate of cancer deaths worldwide was decreasing because we've gotten better at treating treating cancer and if you normalize for overall population growth this is true but if you look at the overall actual raw numbers the number of cancer deaths is going up over time because more people are living longer and healthier lives and so actually you're actually more likely perhaps now even to get cancer or die from cancer than than you were of other diseases before and so the cancer burden worldwide is actually decreasing sorry increasing not decreasing this came as a little bit of a surprise to me um but it means that these devices or these accelerators are of even more importance in the world as are the other ways we're learning to treat cancer say with charged particles which is something that i had worked on previously what i didn't know though was that by 2035 about 75 of these cancer deaths worldwide are going to be in low and middle-income countries not in high-income countries and actually if we look at the treatment facilities available based on the estimate of needing one of these radiotherapy units per 500 000 members of population a lot of the world is very well served already we don't have a shortage of these machines in say the uk australia or indeed in switzerland but there are parts of the world where there is no access to this treatment and a severe shortfall in fact we already know that there's we're missing about 5 000 of these machines keeping in mind there's only 12 and a half thousand of them in the world as it is so we need a huge ramp up in in these machines and then in about 2017 uh i was invited to a workshop at cern which was bringing together um people from the accelerator community both at cern and also a number of my uk colleagues and um let's just go back one and also an international cancer ngo called the international cancer expert core and a whole lot of stakeholders medical doctors oncologists medical physicists from lower middle income countries from many parts of sub-saharan africa and also nepal and a few other few other different places and we sat in the room together and i at first i didn't even want to go to this workshop because i had only worked on proton accelerators i hadn't worked on these small compact electron accelerators and i didn't know what i could contribute but i thought okay well i'm interested to learn about this because this is a type of accelerator that i talk about in my science communication but i don't know an awful lot about it so i went purely in that instance to try and learn and speak to people and learn about this wider context of the research that i did in particle accelerators and what happens over time when you put these interesting different communities and different uh nations together is this process which i now describe as becoming t-shaped researchers now the classic scientist is an eye-shaped researcher they have one deep specialization usually and what um is happening more and more over time hopefully my clicker will uh reveal this there we go um is it over time when interdisciplinary collaborations spend time together it's a bit of a journey that you have to go on so at first um researchers from different disciplines will oscillate between asserting their own field and or hanging back and and sort of listening to someone from the other field and you have to slowly gather um the skills both the listening skills but also the actual um technical skills and language in order to actually work together productively to solve a problem on an interdisciplinary scale and this is the process that we went through and so i found myself not just sitting there listening but actually as a science communicator as well as a scientist i found that my most valuable contribution in the moment at that conference was being able to put in plain language why you know the frequency of the accelerator was important to the overall size why one thing had to work the way it did and not not another way so i was able in a way to bridge the two communities because i had some background in medical related technology but all of us over time had to go through this process and you'll notice that the vertical axis on this process of becoming a t-shaped researcher is all about communication right and so it turned out that one of my most valuable skill sets that i'd been doing to the side of my research became front center and absolutely essential to the work that i was about to embark on with this collaboration and i sat there and we heard you know we listened and we heard these stories of these machines and the problem was not just the lack of the machines but when they're installed they break more often um and this was a picture of uganda's one and only radiotherapy unit at one point in time and i don't think i need to explain from the gaffer tape around it what the problem is here robustness is the problem um but nobody actually had any data on how the machines were breaking and so one of the very first projects that i did with one of my students as part of this he went over to nigerian botswana for three weeks and we actually gathered the first data set to try and break down these machines in the intricate complexity and understand at a statistical level what was actually happening and what was going wrong because this data did not exist it was extremely difficult to to get hold of and we found that at least six of the subsystems fail twice as often as in the low and middle income countries compared to high-income countries and there were some sub-systems like the vacuum subsystem that never had a failure in 10 years in the uk hospitals we looked at but failed quite frequently in low and middle income countries and so over time it was really asking the right questions and having the right conversations that led us to do that work and then led the group or the collaboration as a whole to form a new initiative called stella which is smart technologies to extend lives with linear accelerators um and so we've now formed this international collaboration in order to try and address this problem of the shortfall of radiotherapy machines and their robustness in these environments to try and contribute what we can to this extremely complex interdisciplinary challenge of delivering cancer care throughout the world in an equitable way not just in the countries um that can afford it so that's been an absolutely wonderful journey to have gone on and this program now sits alongside a lot of my other more technical detailed research in particle accelerators but it's one that um absolutely i think chimes with this idea of bringing our science and our communication and our values together that ed young so nicely put in in his piece this morning and so just to finish i thought um i'll read it another tiny couple of sentences from this this piece which i really recommend you read um and it it comes as a reflection on the pandemic and how um how a lot of scientists have now realized that their work is actually not actually can't be separated out from the rest of society and suddenly have realized how important communication politics framing all of this stuff is in the world and he says the pandemic clarified that science is inseparable from the rest of society and that connection works both ways science touches on everything and everything touches on science thank you so much for your attention and if you're in the uk you can already pre-order the book that tells these stories and many more uh and how particle physics experiments have changed our world um but please keep an eye out for it it will be in about 11 different languages from next year so very much looking forward to that and i'd love to take some questions if you have them well thanks a lot susie for that very interesting presentation i feel like we've just covered the tip of the iceberg of your work if only we had more time and there are already quite a few questions coming up so here we go um i see your book is entitled the matter of everything you must have had many ideas for your first book what made you choose this one yeah that's a that's a really great question um i guess i i really wanted to capture this interplay between society and particle physics because particle physics in particular is such a curiosity driven field and most people think it's so esoteric right they don't think there's any practical applications but to those of us working in the field we know that these stories we know that we know the influence it's had on society but i felt that nobody had really tried to tell that story the other aspect is that as an experimental physicist i felt that all the books out there about physics were really written by theorists and i thought well hang on this isn't you know theory is wonderful and it's awe-inspiring and the books these books are amazing but it doesn't tell anybody how you actually do this how you actually walk into a lab build an experiment and interact with the world on a scale that is too small for us to see or touch or even know that it's there and that's really what i do and so uh over time it became clear that that was the story i needed to tell this sort of large sweep through these 12 selected experiments um and how they've come to influence our world but over long time scales time scales much longer than most uh politicians or even business people are used to working with um and i think now one of the interesting things that's happening is when i proposed this book we didn't have a global pandemic we didn't see these things that ed young is pointing out about how integral science is to our society and the long-termest approach we need to take to that and i think this book really tells the story of that in physics at this very fundamental level and so i think that's part of the reason why i'm so excited about it and why i'm getting a lot of um interest from people about how this works really in the real world so it just it became a story i had to tell when you say that that people um aren't really physicists aren't really telling the story of how the process of creating an experiment and i think back to to the old days when we did live festivals two years ago that seemed so long ago and our science pavilions at music festivals one of the most popular items on the program is a build your own cloud chamber and and that just you know is basically a fish tank with some dry ice and some wonderful volunteers but it is an actual little experiment and and i've had people leave that that uh workshop in tears because they've been moved by the whole process and what they've seen and and it's it's it's amazing yeah um another question along the same lines on outreach um which is interesting because i've been in a debate on this topic as well um there are those that say all physicists should be obliged to do some outreach what do you think of that i think there are different types of scientists right so just as i would say there are some eye-shaped scientists and some t-shaped scientists where you have a deep specialization and a breadth to what you do there are different types of scientists in terms of um there are the politician scientists there are the deep theoretical scientists who who uh you know struggle to even explain to their colleagues exactly what it is they're doing and then there are the sort of communicator scientists i think i would put myself in that category obviously you're doing science but your skill set lends itself to uh certain other activities right so i i would not force people to do public engagement in fact there are studies that have shown that poor public engagement is worse than none in terms of the impact that it makes and we do need to think about how people feel when they engage with science and that takes time and energy and skill and a desire to do communication and public engagement well um so no i'm not a fan of forcing people to to do public engagement of course a lot of people maybe think they can't communicate what they're doing because it's too complex and i would challenge those people to try and think about distilling down their ideas or presenting it in a way that people can engage with we do as a community i think have a um a mandate to communicate what we're doing to the public who pay for it but i think that's kind of a very you know narrow way to look at science communication when you consider it as a part of culture and a part of society there is a demand there from people to know the kinds of things that inspire us as well about um the nature of the universe and how the world works and people should be able to access that regardless of their mathematical background in my opinion so so there's yeah there's many roles that people can play and there's also you know presenting like i do for example or writing uh are only two examples of the ways you can communicate science even having a good conversation over a dinner table with people who are interested in what you do counts it has an impact yeah yeah yeah i'm really hoping that we'll have the opportunity to welcome you at one of our science pavilions with the book once it's out that would be absolutely amazing um so a different question here addressing the lack of cancer treatment machines in certain poor countries now you mentioned the stella project that you're collaborating on um in perhaps more layman's terms in in everyday um actions is there anything being done to address it can we support particular charities for example this this person's asking thank you that's a wonderful question yes if you'd like to support the project i recommend you look up the international cancer expert corps icec um they're an international ngo and if you want to work with them or talk to them or contribute to them that will go directly into trying to solve this challenge could you say that again susie i see ec just so that we get that one right see international cancer expert core i see okay got that one um so which type of accelerators has the best future in the radiotherapy domain antiprotons oh that's interesting is in which which type of machine i think is it's kind of the question again it depends if you're looking on the short term or the long term i mean in in the short term these existing types of uh radiofrequency accelerators well they may be slowly moving to higher frequencies and getting a little bit more compact in the shorter term those are extremely effective um in the longer term of course we may get a breakthrough that gives us a completely different paradigm of cancer treatment or a completely different paradigm of accelerating particles like say plasma acceleration or laser weight field acceleration so in the long term uh i hope cancer treatment will look different in 20 years from how it looks now i hope it will be a lot easier that the technology will be a lot smaller um maybe we'll find a way that doesn't even require uh particle accelerators or radiation i don't know but at the moment certainly at the moment and over the last um five to seven decades radiotherapy and radiation has been an absolutely integral part of cancer treatment and the solution to the cancer burden worldwide so i would say for a while this is still going to play a role but i couldn't tell you exactly which type of technology is going to dominate in the future because i think there's many there's many options on the table i hope that sort of answers the question i hope um i guess so i mean but listening to you also these machines are still extremely expensive of course so the um the ones we have uh uh are relatively inexpensive now because they've been industrialized but to buy one of these radiotherapy machines still cost a couple of million of whichever currency or a couple of million swiss francs couple of million pounds right which leads us on we've only got 30 seconds left i'm gonna have to just pick um what are the next steps for the data collected from africa yes so i've actually already expanded the study to a study across indonesia as well and the paper on that one is about to come out um and then we're looking to expand that into a more automated system of data collection and that's something that we're talking to vendors and data scientists about so if you're interested in that please do drop me a line if that's something you can help with susie thank you so much for your time again for giving up your sunday afternoon it's a pleasure listening to you and i can't wait till we meet again in person all the best thanks so much connie thank you very much susie for your fascinating talk now for our next talk on the topic of entrepreneurship i'm delighted to introduce our moderator for this session dr rebecca gonzalez suarez rebecca graduated from the university of cantabria in 2010 with a thesis on higgs boson searches at the cms experiment in 2018 she moved to uppsala university in sweden joining the atlas collaboration she now teaches modern physics to undergrad students and with more than 10 years of public engagement experience she was elected outreach coordinator of the atlas collaboration in 2020 and within this role she has been in charge of the atlas wide education communication and outreach program since march 2021. rebecca the floor is yours thank you very very much for the introduction so i'm hearing this to be your moderator for the next talk and the next speaker's name is thomas luca thomas is the ceo and co-founder of creal a lausanne based startup that develops and commercializes light field display technology for vilturn and augmented reality thomas became an entrepreneur after 15 years doing research and more than 50 scientific publications he has a phd in science engineering and has done control system engineering for the pixel detector and atlas and also things like materials research at epfl via entrepreneurship he could use his technical knowledge to solve one of the key roadblocks for the having a natural experience in virtual and augmented reality so thomas will have a 20-minute talk and it will be follow of course by a 10-minute q a so please put your questions in the chat and we will try to ask him as many as possible so thank you very much and thomas what is yours thank you rebecca hello everyone good afternoon well first of all i should maybe say it's a big honor for me to be invited to speak as someone who should have something interesting to say about the life after cern and also what's the role of the cern experience in building a startup on augmented reality and what's the potential impact on the society in general and the title was actually this one from the atlas experiment to improving the augmented reality and i guess everybody may put a question what does it have to do together well directly not much i had to completely change the field but 180 degrees and the title could be easily from atlas experiment to something completely different but it doesn't mean that the experience doesn't have impact on it in fact this is a huge impact so the underlying message i would like to say is that in fact being at sun was a great start to possibly any future because you get value in uh kind of in in different forms so you improve your skill you prove your skill you get a network you get a credibility and you get also confidence because once you see that what was possible to build with a group of people you can just say that okay i saw building probably the most sophisticated device ever built by people and that's the value on its own so but maybe to put it uh from my perspective just to understand who i was i am a 100 percent techie guy who was fascinated by science and technology since ever i read possibly all the popular science books like susie was promoting in the last talk and i studied science engineering which is let's say the practical part of the research in a small provincial university in the czech republic and technical university of liberates and i saw my future in the research i still think this is the most important human activity and civilization depends on it and but i saw it also from the perspective that research career means some kind of a sacrifice of material comfort for the sake of doing what you really like and then you can imagine that one day i was sitting in the office and you hear a distant voice of your colleague how he's speaking about the atlas pixel group in the prague and that they need that new people for for the experiment so i immediately grabbed his hand contacted the head of the group and in couple of months indeed after i finished my my stage in uh in japan i was here and for me it was like uh you know over exceeding the dreams to early so i will show you a few nostalgic photos because no one has ever seen them i took them and keep them for myself so this is a photo from the center of the atlas detector this is from kind of another day when you could when the toroidal magnet was being installed and i was one of the few people which was quite regularly entering the detector and you know creeping to the center to test the installations and debug the installations uh often every day so this is how you get inside and here you can see the actual hell hole where uh the atlas pixel or inner detector is installed around the interaction point so at that time in this time the detector was still outside on the surface and i secondly also contributed to the detector control system software so i built several control panels and also did a the supervision tool which is taking care of the clients and servers of the data detector control system and so i was there during the two i think hottest years in 2007 2008 because both these euros were already delayed and i touched vast range of hardware and software proved that you know to myself that my skills are certainly sufficient for something so amazing and very importantly i experienced organization of some complex project which is extremely important for you know building a startup several years later so when when the detector was basically finished i moved to epfl in lausanne to work yet again on completely different projects this time in material science and again vast range of projects but probably the most fascinating one was a building around 20 nanometer transistor in ceramic material so amazing engineering and scientific adventure but kind of industry-wise or business-wise it's quite useful you can use less you cannot beat the silicone today and then the break point came i had to continue in the academic career and apply for tenure track or professorship and in fact i didn't i didn't apply at all because i saw that what it i saw what it means it means to stop doing basically the hands-on work actually on the devices on the experiments and this is something i was not willing to sacrifice and at the same time you kind of realize that come on each time in each project you just were doing completely new stuff there was no original guidance you just have to build a device which has never existed before and you just realize that all these skills are made by people like you and me and you need certain budget so i wanted to continue in building let's say the real things which are useful to people i should maybe summarize it more here that uh you know you see in academic career you know that often you work on the fundamental science which brings few fluids but usually after very long incompletion period far in the future and often the contribution to it is very the chance that you contribute to it is very small so fortunately science is often done for the fun of doing the science uh but i saw my skills more appropriate for really applying the knowledge which was already acquired in the past uh in the science so the applied science and building i would say many more many small fruits sooner and there is enormous amount of knowledge and technology knowledge which still was not applied in the favor of you know society or people's daily life and this was my space and in fact i was exploring a lot of potential projects already during during the research career which was again out of the field which i was doing so there was actually no other way to pursue what i want to do apart from doing it independently and uh here typically you can see how people try to make a let's say independent project or business and often start from doing something really complex because you just know how to do that and this is i saw many times in the research as well so this appears to be very often very bad idea to start it's in fact not really innovation often so what's much better is to solve problem that actually matters and often the solution requires you know available skill available technology you know five percent of what you can do and this is what can bring much more benefit to the society and i typically don't show uh say this slide or don't speak about what is in this slide but here i think i can afford it it's let's say representative way i i look at the world uh to judge whether you know something is innovative and makes sense to do uh and may have a value in the business or general in general for for the society so it's not just how i see it that's the fact that the world is a thermodynamic system and our role in it as a living creature is to funnel the energy to our benefit to survival and reproduction and secondary to comfort and security and what can we do better is to find more energy sources which we do all the time or convert the energy more efficiently by making tools and engines as amplifiers of our own muscles or levers as our own muscles and if you look at what's the most important tool which we have is the most bizarre of the tools it's our ability to communicate in very sophisticated way it's bizarre because it is abstract it's not a physical thing and if you if you think about it a little bit you will realize that without ability to communicate we would be quite unremarkable creature right imagine yourself just alone so here our communication tools which culminated today with the smartphone which is absolutely amazing device you can just connect to anybody on the other side of the planet or it in some way it thinks for you it gives you access to our shared memory and so on so and the last part of it is well look at the history and you will see the projection where it goes in certain moment you can be sure that the smartphone is actually not the last communication device we have it would be the same like the thing that the telegraph or boot printing was the last communication device so there will be devices after smartphone and what is it well the first thing which comes up in mind is to of course communicate directly with the brain and the best way to do it in fact is through the eyes ah sorry it's here because if you have the glasses which project images into your eyes it's basically delivering the digital data to the highest bandwidth input to our brain the eyes like 85 of all information from outside to our brain comes through the eyes and at the same time it can mix with the real information from the real world so the connection to our shared mind which is all the internet and all the super computers can be much more seamless but in fact billion dollar companies are working on augmented reality devices so where is the problem to solve and for me the problem came already very long time ago like in 2014 when the virtual reality was coming as a big promise of entirely new experience is a new tool which can help us to design and train and so on but what came instead was very big disappointment the experience was unpleasant was annoying and i realized later that i'm more sensitive than other people do it and i knew why it's why there is the problem why it is unpleasant because the eyes cannot behave normally they cannot change focus because the image which you see is a flat and this is the moment i realized that this would be much more much bigger problem for augmented reality because you see also reference objects such as your own hands so what we would like to see in augmented reality is something like this the vibrant and crisp digital images in your own hands but what you get instead today is a blurred potato and this is not a problem of too lower display resolution or to bad optics this is a problem of fundamentally wrong way of displaying 3d imagery and you may experience it on your own eyes if you try a small experiment together with me so if you close one eye and look at this text over your hand like i do right now you will notice that you can't focus at both of them at the same time so you can read either the text or see your hand and this is a massive problem for augmented reality because practically all display systems and all devices you can buy just magnify flat image in front of you so two of them provide the illusion of depth due to our stereoscopic vision but each one i sees a flat image in fixed focal distance which is not natural for our vision so what we need to do is an image which is like genuine representation of how light exists in the real world something like a hologram but it's quite difficult right so when i realized there is this problem i was looking at who is solving the problem not so much like that i would like to do a business out of it but more like okay when is it coming who is solving the problem and i didn't find any practical solution it was either too complex or delivering too poor image and i was investing more and more time and effort to exploring it until one moment which i remember until today the full day of testing and simulation when i realized at 3 am uh that yes this is the idea this is the heureka moment i have the system which should work simply and well started building prototype quit the job and applied for a patent first patent and at this moment i thought i am 99 done well the reality is that i will just incorporate a company and start selling basically the know-how to producers well i was wrong the reality is that i was maybe in one formula of the journey you need to get money to build a team to improve the technology no one will just take it and finish it for you you have to do all by yourself it's enormous amount of presentation convincing people that this makes sense people may not have the same opinion on it as you and so on and most importantly what you don't realize at the beginning that when you make a startup it's almost like building a new culture without knowing this is the task because if you don't have a team which shares certain common values have the same vision and behave and functions as one family you will probably fail and so there was this very new very social aspect of of you know doing things and startup is about it i would say from 90 percent i've often hear this you know presentations on what is the startup and the pathetic phrases on the culture and dna inside well you realize it's really true that it is like that so now we are 20 people in the facilities with around 250 square meters we have beautiful holography labs we became number four in the most prestigious ranking of swiss startups this year we raised 16 million dollars so far and we are indeed selling the technology already and what is it about so we are called creal or c real because we make the natural display of augmented reality so here i would like to show you our promo visualization video from already 2017 which shows how augmented reality should look like but it doesn't and what light field enables so just pay attention to that changing focus you need to focus closer far and see the associated blur collect correctly and only later the media started writing that lightfield is the holy grail of augmented reality one of the most transformative display technologies since the invention of tv and we sneaked in into media as the closest thing to the real light field so and this is what we have today it's a headset it's not end user product but in many ways it's a fully functioning augmented reality headset with all the tracking hand tracking spatial tracking and so on and this is what you see through it so this is entirely authentic footage taken by a camera that is sitting behind the glass there is no post processing this is what you see and pay attention to that changing focus so now the background is blurred the hand is sharp and the closer planets are in focus including the panel when you focus far you see the correct change of sharpness and blur this is exactly what you cannot buy in any product on the market today and we do it without any need for eye tracking or any feedback from from the viewer the depth the focus that is already baked in in the projected light here are just some still photos showing that you can read the text in your hand which is normally not possible if you do it with you know the other products on the market and here you see the change of focus that's the value which our startup is selling and i didn't mention it we have currently uh team which are of restaurants from augmented reality projects at intel round the smallest smart glasses so far and magiklib which actually left the teams and joined us and together we are building or squeezing the projection technology to this form factor of classes and because it is quite difficult business wise to do product for market which doesn't exist yet we just realized that a subsection subset of what we are doing is already applicable for different use cases like in a vision care and virtual reality so we have built of virtual reality headset as well and this is again entirely unique device because it combines the high resolution light field image in the center so you can see the changing focus now on the pressure bottle and later again back on the dashboard again feature which you don't see in any product on the market it's practically retinal resolution image and the periphery is lower resolution but that's because our eyes have lower resolution there as well so again here you can see the change of focus from the dashboard to the camera outside this is again the effect which is happening now in the camera but when you have it on your head it is happening in your eye only so again here you can see the resolution that you can read the text which is again not the case of most of the products on the market and the change of focus and last but not least because this is still very difficult uh business and market we realized that the light field because it can form the light as if it was coming from the real world we can also transform the light which means that we can simulate the function of lenses entirely digitally and this is enormous value for vision care because if you are doing any vision test you are still looking through devices which look like 100 years old machines and we can do that entirely digitally so that's where we are today and i think i'm almost out of my time and i don't have any conclusion slide so thank you very much for your attention thank you very much that was this was very interesting actually so it was it was really great okay well so yeah you are perfectly in time and we have now 10 minutes for questions so there are already some questions happening i wanted to start with one question actually from myself that is uh you say that you already are selling this uh this technology right without giving us any kind of trade secrets or anything what kind of customers do you have yeah those are typically producers of devices so if you have it in vision care these are producers of vision devices so if you do go to your of optician or or optometrist you can just read the names on their machines in virtual realities these are the companies often when the with the healthcare because that need there is the biggest you can benefit you know the training saves you a lot of money and time in the health care you cannot cut always a human body uh they are getting pixie but i didn't know that and the last one is of course the the usual suspects in consumer electronics business because they are working on the augmented reality devices with the vision that it will be our everyday tool in everything from cooking to neurosurgery and we want to be part of it cool oh this is super interesting okay so then now i'm i'm gonna go to the questions of the audience right so the first one is like if you could tell us exactly how long this transitions transition pro process was since the moment that you decided to just go out of the field and start this thing until you were like settled well i didn't have any really sharp transition point but you inclined more and more to the you know decision that i will do but i showed certain timeline there was like in 2014 i i realized that there will be moment i will have to do what my professors are doing if i stay in the academic area and i was totally scared about that just writing and reading and promising and defending miranda and this is what totally scared me and i started them working on very practical realization of couple of ideas i had a whole list of ideas very wide range really from like advertisement to just the technology and i think in 2016 because i saw that the prototype actually works really well that was the moment of decision it works actually way better than i was expecting and the reason is in fact that we think how how good the eyes are when you really do the test you will realize how terrible sensor that i is it's the brain which creates the illusion of you know that high resolution image around us and in fact you need very little to project to the eye to make the sensation you just have to do it right okay i'm not answering anymore your question so it was the moment when well i think i think that's a great answer also it's it's kind of nice to also like explain how this is not necessarily like a today tomorrow change black and white there is some kind of a process that is a little bit more organic that one will think when you are always in the in the same field so that's very nice and actually following up a little bit on that since you started the company until you started like expanding and getting the you said that you have 20 people in the team right so do you see this uh growing even more or do you think you have achieved a size that is already like uh let's say the final one how do you see the future yeah well i should say there is a big dilemma because 20 people is perfect size for a startup it's still a tribe the band but we are not really catching up with with the opportunities and we are planning to now double that again we were actually doubling the team initially every six months pandemic slowed it down but not much cool i think that's that's really nice why am i taking notes while i tend to do these things all right cool uh so another question could be like if you have any advice for somebody that is thinking like oh i may jump out of the field try to realize this idea what do you think what you would have told yourself decided to start moving towards this direction that could be a good advice yes uh where the first thing is don't be afraid there is a big hunger for people which are willing to try really so there is no problem to start i think the first place you you will go which is involved in supporting startups they will grab your hand push you here and there give a training or introduce you to investors that's that is a really big hunger because you know it has enormous value it's it's a huge positive sum of that there's a big risk involved of course but the few successful projects written everything back super generously it is in fact like 20 return which no other thing gives you in average if you have enough money and so i would just just do it but the other part of this question the the advice would be really solve a problem it doesn't have to be complicated it should be unique of course you just see the problem which other people don't see later you will realize that 100 people are working on it anyway but at least at the beginning you should really think about unique thing and you know look look at some very successful uh projects in the past i really like the light bulb everybody associates light bulb but in fact he didn't invent light bulb he just made it practical and make all the infrastructure around register in some way was also not original by bell labs and the same as all the search engines and social networks are not first ones as well so just sometimes you have to do it better and sometimes you have to do completely different things which people don't know yet they will good well i think that's nice advice all right i think we are we're gonna close it with this last one and this one is it comes from me again so my question is like from your time at cern what is the thing that you remember with like the most fondness most fondness okay yeah what do you remember with more nostalgia you know what is the like your favorite time etc yeah okay there is there is the professional part of it which is you you go to the bit and you see the detector and you do wow you know even when you are there with the time that's so impressive simply that's so insanely impressive that i recommend it to everybody and of course there is a really amazing group of people uh with which i was working and living in the office it was a little a little bit you know like living in the desert or on different planet because you have really cool worked with the group of but don't socialize much much outside so but yeah all amazing so i i think that's actually quite nice and i can't relate to that 100 so thank you very much thomas it was really nice to have you i think your presentation was very interesting and uh well thank you very much really for for uh telling us about about your career and your company so thank you for voting all of our talks over the course of the weekend have been exceptional and we are truly honored to welcome our next speaker but to introduce him i am delighted to introduce you all to charlotte varkal sen director for international relations before coming to cern in 2016 charlotte has a variety of posts at the united nations including associate speech writer to chief of the political affairs and partnership sections and she was a key focal point for relations between cern and the un nation's office at geneva charlotte is also a very strong supporter of the cern alumni network which has been established in the international relations sector many thanks charlotte it's truly a privilege and also quite intimidating i have to say to introduce our next speaker professor having shopper who served as a director general here at cern from 1981 to 1988 coming to cern from a very distinguished academic career in germany and well beyond including as chair of the board of directors at daisy as director general of cern he was instrumental in ensuring the construction of the large electron positron collider lep which is the predecessor to the large hadron collider now and we are very much continuing his work now today here at cern professor shopper is an outstanding particle physicist he's an agile and a very able leader of large infrastructures and of course a consummate diplomat he's truly inspirational in all of these fields professor chopra is a visionary his ability to bring people together around science and also to persuade politicians to think beyond narrow definitions of national interest has led to the development of sesame the synchrotron light for experimental science and application in the middle east a unique regional science facility and he's now applying these very fantastic talents uh in in southeastern europe bringing together scientists and politicians to develop the south east european international institute for sustainable technologies which will be a hadron cancer therapy and biomedical research the center with protons and heavy ions and this holds great scientific potential for the region we're very fortunate to have professor shopper with us today to share his insights of close to eight decades in particle physics at a global level thank you so much professor shopper for being with us i have no doubt that your talk today will inspire us as your career has done over the years and will generate many questions so the floor or maybe i should say the screen is yours i hand over to you professor shopper well thank you very much charlotte for your two nice words but certainly i was very glad to be invited to talk today to the third alumni which is a great pleasure for me now i'm supposed to talk about science without borders and science diplomacy which nowadays is put together usually under the general expression science diplomacy why it's important well it's clearly that peace building is considered as a very important task of our society now of course it's clear that science benefits from international cooperation but that is not a point the point is that science should radiate back into politics ah there's some changes by the screen only if and let me say brackets this works only that science works into politics if the science itself is excellent otherwise i think it will not work how can can that work well first of all we can try to transfer some of our ethical standards from science like objectivity tolerance with respect to race religion gender and so on into politics and certainly and secondly the collaboration between scientific scientists and politicians on concrete projects can create a lot of trust of mutual trust of course this to build up that takes some time and so we have to be patient i still have to promise my screen well the best example how this works is of course cert and that requires that we go back to the foundation of cern which indeed was due to two initiatives first there was an initiative by the uh by physicists who realized that they can be competitive with american colleagues only if they put together their resources but secondly there was another initiative which was created by mr de rosh who brought together in a meeting at lausanne in the 1950s short after the war the politicians from france italy and england together with german politicians where they discussed what could would do to get together the countries which had been fighting during the war for peaceful cooperation and they thought well why not use anxiety scientists are comparatively reasonable people why not using science as a tool for this and these two initiatives came together under the conference of unesco in florence in 1950 whereas a immigrant idiot an eminent scientist physicist nobel prize trail drafted a a declaration which was later submitted to unesco and was accepted and in that way what i would call the sand spirit was born which means having organization which has two tasks promote science and technology but at the same time bringing countries together now after 30 years when served had his 30th anniversary i invited this is the rabbi to give a talk at cern and he just talked he said well i would like to remind the physicist etc not to care only about particle physics but to be aware that they are the guy guardians of the flame of european unity and that this european unity should help to preserve peace in the world and for a long time cern was the only organization which took care of these two topics which i mentioned well i you could ask now in what concrete ways did you really help it could give you a long list now but it would take too long if you are interested some of the points maybe we could come back to it later in the during the discussions so we have promised mosquitoes again well let me come to spring offs of serb well one which was just mentioned by shalotte is cesare an international organization according to third in the middle east what caesar stands for the algorithm it doesn't matter if forget it nobody knows anymore what church stands for but when caesar was founded i insisted that it should which has submitted both in the arab world in the western world and so in the end caesar was chosen which is a symbol for door opener according to the storytellers of thousands and one night it is an offspring of sun as i mentioned and it is the first internationalization which was founded in a muslim country the first ideas came up in a meeting uh in workshops which were organized by physicists working at cern one of them was rubidius italian the other one was elisa rabinoichi by the way who had just been elected as uh council of the third council they started discussed how to organize workshops which would bring together israelis and palestinians during one of these workshops the idea came up why not create an organization like cern in the middle east i had retired as a director general sir so in the end they asked me said look we have time now why don't you take care of that and i said okay but i said it would work only if we follow the foundation of cern which means under the umbrella of unesco so i wrote a letter to the then director general of unesco which was federic mayor he picked it up immediately with great enthusiasm he invited all the governments in the mediterranean area in the veda area to a beating in par

2021-10-08 09:28

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