Innovation

UniSC researchers confront how to build ‘the best’ human-AI teams

ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) and humans do not have an ‘ideal working relationship’ yet – that much is clear to three researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC) who are investigating this complex and urgent issue.

A team led by UniSC’s Centre for Human Factors and Sociotechnical Systems has been awarded $603,000 in Australian Research Council Discovery Project funding over three years, to develop a new model of teamwork for what are known as Human-Autonomy Teams (HATs).

Centre co-director, professor Paul Salmon is leading the project to investigate how to best design artificial intelligence, and organise teams so that humans and artificial intelligence can work together effectively across multiple industries.

“Often artificial intelligence is not designed in a way that allows humans to work with it very well, so it can be a problematic team member that increases the likelihood of teamwork failures,” Prof. Salmon said. 

“An autonomous vehicle collision is a good example of where you have very advanced AI, but often it’s not telling its human teammate what it can see and what action needs to be taken, which shows us that team situational awareness and communication are still lacking.”

Yet AI is being adopted globally in workplaces at a rapid rate – across healthcare, aviation, defence, transport, and disaster response – from driverless vehicles to robot-assisted surgery.

“There are huge potential benefits,” Prof. Salmon said. “But AI is complex and is often not designed to work in teams or with consideration for how humans are going to interact with it.

“A lot of research exists on the psychology of human teams, but now we need a basic understanding of what teamwork looks like when you have humans and AI working together.

“We plan to apply new systems analysis and computational modelling methods to develop, test and validate a new model of teamwork for humans and AI. This will clarify the processes and behaviours that support optimal functioning and performance.” 

Prof. Salmon is joined on the research team by UniSC associate professor Gemma Read and Dr Scott McLean, as well as global leaders in team leadership from universities in the United States.

UniSC vice-chancellor and president, Prof. Helen Bartlett said UniSC’s Centre for Human Factors and Sociotechnical Systems was an Australian leader in how humans work effectively with systems.

“This funding is testament to the expertise of our team from UniSC, which has partnered with world experts in team-building and human autonomy from Arizona State University and Rice University,” Prof. Bartlett said.

“This project builds on our commitment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which includes contributing to (the goals of) Decent Work and Economic Growth as well as Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure.

“We are delighted, that as a regional Australian university, we are at the forefront of new globally important research to build knowledge in these areas.”

www.usc.edu.au

 

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Neuren Pharmaceuticals triggers up Australian biotech investment

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

THE TREMENDOUS SUCCESS of Neuren Pharmaceuticals (ASX:NEU), the only biotech worldwide that specialises in neurodevelopmental disorders – and best-known for developing Daybue, a world-first treatment for Rett syndrome – is sending a signal to venture capital in Australia to start investing in biotech.

Daybue was launched in the United States in April by Neuren’s licensee, NASDAQ-listed Acadia Pharmaceuticals. The partnership with Acadia was recently expanded from North America to global, with Neuren receiving an upfront payment of US$100m. Neuren receives milestone payments and quarterly royalties on all commercial sales. 

Neuren is now focused on developing a second drug, NNZ-2591, for an additional four rare neurological disorders. Neuren is conducting Phase 2 trials of its second drug candidate, NNZ-2591, for each of Phelan-McDermid syndrome, Angelman syndrome, Pitt Hopkins syndrome and Prader-Willi syndrome.

Neuren granted ‘orphan drug’ status in US

Topline results for Phelan-McDermid are expected December this year.  Recognising the urgent unmet need, all programs have been granted ‘orphan drug’ designation in the US. Orphan drug designation provides incentives to encourage development of therapies for rare and serious diseases.

Generally, venture capital has been reluctant to invest in biotech companies in Australia as it has been seen as too risky.

Neuren Pharmaceuticals CEO Joh Pilcher said that could change with success stories like Neuren. 

“People are going to invest if they see examples of success and we’ve had a few of those now,” Mr Pilcher told Talking Business.

“That shows people what the end value can be and that incentivises them to invest.

“Technology is moving forward the whole time. You might argue there’s less risk than there used to be because we know so much more about biology.”

World first treatment for Rett syndrome

Mr Pilcher said the major challenge for his company was being the first in the world to develop a drug to treat Rett syndrome, a serious neurological disorder that emerges in early childhood.

It affects every aspect of life including walking, talking, breathing, sleeping, hand use and cognitive function. It mainly affects girls and there’s never been any treatment for it.

The drug itself doesn’t fix the mutation. It is not designed to treat one particular symptom. Instead, it focuses on trying to improve the connectivity between the brain cells.

“That’s what’s wrong in Rett syndrome,” Mr Pilcher said. “The connection between the brain cells – and  the signalling that’s happening between them – is not happening properly.

“That’s what our drug is trying to improve and you see impacts across a number of different things. 

“We’re getting stories coming out of the community. Things like improved communication, improved ability to use the hands for purposeful things, even improvements in walking.

“It’s a very exciting time after a long journey.”

Neuren has been developing the drug to treat Rett syndrome for the last 10 years and it has been a huge but vital challenge for the $1.5 billon biotech company.

Mr Pilcher been with the company right from the start and he said he and his team had learned so much. 

“We’ve had to show motivation and determination to get through,” he said. “In some of those periods, we weren’t in the great position we’re in now – not much cash, not great market support – we had to make sure we got through despite that.

“And the other thing is nobody had done anything in Rett syndrome before. We weren’t following what anyone else did. We had to create the path for ourselves.”

www.neurenpharma.com

www.leongettler.com

 

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business-35-interview-with-jon-pilcher-from-neuren-p

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Virtus Health and UNSW Founders join forces to foster women's health innovation

WOMEN’S HEALTH startup businessess can now apply to an Australian-first women’s health accelerator program. Virtus Health and UNSW Founders have partnered to launch a dedicated women’s health stream of the Health 10x Accelerator Program.

Virtus Health CEO Kate Munnings said the ongoing gap in women’s health innovation in Australia – and globally – was the driver behind the new partnership.

“Today, healthtech startups face numerous challenges on the pathway to commercialisation,” Ms Munnings said. “As one of the world’s leading Assisted Reproductive Service providers, Virtus Health wanted to play a bigger part in supporting women’s health startups to find the best innovation which can improve care for women and their families.” 

The Health 10x Accelerator Program focused on women’s health aims to equip startups with business expertise and resources needed to understand the health technology ecosystem, build their company and drive impact through commercialisation.

“Virtus Health is hoping to find startup innovations that are patient-centric and women-centric in design,” Ms Munnings said. “We are interested in finding deep technologies, AI, machine learning, precision medicine, anything that incorporates big data.”

Head of new ventures for Virtus Health, Associate Professor Vin Smith, explained the focus of the UNSW Founders partnership was to seek out innovations that “are truly going to deliver clinical benefit for patients”.

“That will make care safer, faster, a better experience, and reduce costs – the quadruple aim in healthcare,” Prof. Smith said.

Assistance added to funding

Virtus Health’s investment into the Health 10x program is more than financial. Women’s health startups will also receive in-kind commercialisation support.

“We’ll help the startups with access to our experts, business intelligence in the IVF sector, clinical trial capability and market access across the Virtus network,” Prof. Smith said.

“The best startup accelerator programs know how to commercialise, and UNSW Founders have built a strong track record in providing tailored commercialisation support to health startups over the last four years.

“Virtus brings to this partnership an ability to help startups test in a clinical environment,” Prof. Smith said.

Kate Munnings said, “At Virtus everything we do is evidence-based. Our goal is to bring the best-in-class reproductive health technologies to market, by aiming to use the highest level of evidence as our guiding principles.

“As one of the biggest clinical trial operators in the healthcare sector, we want to help startups deliver new clinical technologies to patients in the best possible way.”

Virtus breaks new ground with venture capital

Health 10x Accelerator Program is the first for Virtus Health’s new corporate venture capital arm – Virtus Ventures. 

“At Virtus Ventures, we bring the clinical, the commercial and the technology together – a very strategic and focused approach to the commercialisation process,” Prof. Smith said.

Virtus Ventures has already collaborated with UNSW-affiliated startup Drop Bio, an Australian biotechnology and digital health company.

This first collaboration aims to improve IVF success rates by researching personalised inflammatory biomarker analysis. 

“We are focused on quality not quantity – we set high standards and engage with quality companies and work closely with the companies to make sure they are successful. It’s a powerful way Virtus Health is aiming to make a difference in the lives of women and their families,” Prof. Smith said.

Virtus Health CEO Kate Munnings said the company’s focus on empowering women’s startups was mirrored in Virtus’s leadership team.

“I’m proud to lead a reproductive health organisation where women hold the leadership roles that most impact service delivery,” she said.

“The collaboration with UNSW also sees prominent female leaders in healthcare, at the forefront of increasing innovation and health outcomes for women.”

UNSW Founders senior manager for medtech, Dina Titkova said, “One half of the world’s population is women, yet only a fraction of health solutions have been developed with women in mind. 

“UNSW Founders are excited to partner with Virtus Health to change this, starting with accelerating the business growth of reproductive health startups and with future vision of improving women’s health along the lifecycle globally.”

Virtus Health is the largest provider of fertility services in Australia. Clinics include Melbourne IVF, Queensland Fertility Group, IVFAustralia, TasIVF and The Fertility Centre.

UNSW Founders’ Health 10x program supports startups developing interventions, cures, and treatments that address the most pressing unmet medical needs, globally. Designed and delivered in partnership with The George’s Institute for Global Health (TGI), Health 10x is a national program providing Australian health entrepreneurs with the skills, network, facilities and capital to turn an idea into a global, scalable business. Since its launch in 2019, the program has helped more than 100 startups to help bring their ideas to life, and provided seed funding to 21 of them.

www.virtushealth.com.au

www.unswfounders.com

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Coviu has Australia’s telehealth covered

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

TELEHEALTH, the process of getting health care remotely, has taken off in Australia.

According to Coviu co-founder Silvia Pfeiffer, the practice is now well accepted among all age groups. Coviu – a spinout of CSIRO’s Data61 division – is today Australia’s leading video telehealth solution provider.

“The pandemic has given telehealth a kick in the behind,” Dr Pfeiffer, the CEO and co-founder of Coviu, told Talking Business.

“All the objections to telehealth before the pandemic fell away during the pandemic and both clinicians and patients embraced it.”

Dr Pfeiffer said telehealth was now not only used by general practitioners (GPs) but also in counselling and mental health services. 

Easy to use and accessible

Coviu’s video platform, similar to Zoom, allows clinicians to offer video consultations for their patients. That includes GPs, mental health practitioners, physical therapy practitioners, dieticians, nutritionists and medical specialists who provide a video service.

“Patients have got a real taste for it through the pandemic,” Dr Pfeiffer said.

“Think of a family, of a mother with three children and one child is sick and having to go to all kinds of efforts to get somebody to look after the children while she takes one of them to the doctor. How much easier is it to just do a video call with your GP?

“We have seen that over and over again. Patients have loved the simplicity with which they can go see a clinician online,” she said.

More importantly, Coviu has conducted research that revealed nearly half the number of Australians would switch doctors to one that offered video consultations.

The research into more than 1000 Australians found that 70 percent felt that all GPs should offer telehealth. This was across every age group.

The research also found 44 percent said they would switch GPs if they had a choice between a GP who offered telehealth and one who did not.

Patient age is no barrier

While younger Australians are less committed to their GPs, the result is similar across age groups.

Dr Pfeiffer said older Australians had really tuned into telehealth. 

“Even some as old as 99 to 100, they have embraced video telehealth because they find it so much easier than having to organise getting to a GP and asking a family member to take them,” she said.

Dr Pfeiffer said telehealth also offered opportunities in aged care and residential care.

“Right now, if you have people in aged care centres and they need to see their clinician, at the moment the GPs would have to travel out to them,” she said. “Often the GPs don’t have a lot of time, [so] they go through in a rush and they might not come often enough.

“If video telehealth can be introduced in an aged care [facility], they can just make an appointment when it’s needed without waiting for the next doctor’s regular visit to come to the centre.”

Dr Pfeiffer said it was “not really an issue” of whether older Australians would accept that, as many older Australians had already embraced telehealth, just as they had embraced video technology to stay in touch with their families.

“It’s more a personal preference problem,” she said. “Some people are very good with picking up technology and feeling comfortable talking on video and other people cannot deal with it. They absolutely have to go and see their clinicians face to face.”

www.coviu.com

www.leongettler.com 

 

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business19-interview-with-dr-silvia-pfeiffer-from-co

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SwarmFarm Robotics hands ‘integrated autonomy’ to innovative growers

SWARMFARM ROBOTICS has raised a $12 million in Series A funding to develop and grow the ‘integrated autonomy’ category in agriculture through its versatile SwarmBot platform.

The Australian-developed program with global ambitions will also drive forward SwarmFarm’s breakthrough operating system network, SwarmConnect, that enables developers to create an array of innovative applications for users of the autonomous platform.

“There is enormous demand for autonomy in agriculture, but today, most solutions unlock minimal potential,” SwarmFarm CEO Andrew Bate said. “The current equipment providers believe that farmers just want to be plucked from the cab or replaced by robotic arms.

“We believe that farmers want more. They want a technology ecosystem built to address the issues in their locality, a farm-centric system that leaves the lowest possible footprint on their fields, helping them do more with less. They want integrated autonomy, so that’s what we're building.”

Mr Bate and the team at SwarmFarm define integrated autonomy as a new approach to autonomy on-farm that unlocks the full potential of driverless technology by providing specialty robotics solutions with an open platform to develop on.

“While many companies are making driverless tractors and developing niche robotics solutions in agriculture today, we believe that there is a third category of autonomy that combines the robot and the application within a development framework that will allow farmers to customize their equipment for their needs and allow developers to bring their innovations to life much more rapidly,” Mr Bate said.

“It's the best of both worlds. For the farmer, we provide customized autonomy in a box. For the developer, we provide a streamlined path to the grower with a tight feedback loop.”

The company’s Series A funding round was led by Emmertech, an AgTech fund from Conexus Venture Capital based in Canada. The funding also sees new investment from Tribe Global Ventures and Access Capital.

Also joining the round are SwarmFarm's existing investors, including Tenacious Ventures, and GrainInnovate, the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) venture capital fund managed by Artesian.

“We are thrilled to be joining Andrew, Jocie, and the whole SwarmFarm team as they pioneer the future of autonomous agriculture,” Emmertech managing director Sean O'Connor said.

“The key trait that drove our eagerness to lead this round was the farmer-centric approach this team is built around and the truly exceptional results their robots have achieved. We met with several farmers who were putting upwards of 3000 hours a year on their SwarmBot, often leaving them out in the fields for over 24 hours at a time.

“We believe there’s a future where SwarmBots can be found on farms across North America and worldwide.”

SwarmFarm announced last year that SwarmBots had successfully been deployed to farmers who covered over 1.3 million commercial acres, operated for 64,000 hours, and reduced pesticide inputs by an estimated 780 tons (700 tonnes).

“We are proud to support the team at SwarmFarm as they unlock the potential of integrated autonomy in agriculture,” GRDC head of business development, Fernando Felquer said.

“What makes SwarmFarm so attractive to us is that the founders are Australian grain growers developing autonomous solutions from the ground up with Australian farming systems in mind, and the technology has global application.”

Born on the Bate family farm in rural Queensland, Mr Bate said SwarmFarm exists to solve a complex problem set many farmers are facing around the world today: “how to grow better crops and the optimal amount of food on their land without putting down excessive amounts of chemicals or acquiring larger and larger equipment”. 

“We hit a point where we just said enough is enough,” Mr Bate said. “We saw our input costs increasing, our equipment costs rising as we bought larger equipment, our dependence on pesticides rising, and our yields declining despite it all.

“There was a day when we sat down and realised that this wasn’t an equation that needed incremental change; we needed an entirely new farming system – and SwarmFarm was the solution.”

The SwarmFarm team saw a future where developers could create specialised tools that could be attached to swarms of small, nimble, autonomous robot platforms that create new farming practices through facilitating collaboration between farmers and technologists – laying the groundwork for the SwarmConnect product.

“We envision a future where the most promising minds in technology are encouraged to turn toward solving the challenges faced by modern agriculture,” Mr Bate said.

“We also believe in a future where there is no longer such a severe distinction between farmers and technologists, but rather a new breed of farmer-technologists. This funding helps us to move toward that future by meeting more of the global demand for our product and facilitating the growth of our SwarmConnect network of developers.”

Today, SwarmFarm serves customers across Australia and works with some of the most innovative farm equipment developers, including WEED-IT, Bilberry, Weedseeker, Hayes Spraying, Rasmussen Brothers Engineering, Goldacres, and Croplands.

“It is critical that we put tools into our farmers’ hands that help them do more with less. This is key to a climate resilient, profitable future for agriculture,” Tenacious Ventures co-founder and managing partner, Sarah Nolet said.

“With their background in farming, the team at SwarmFarm has been able to see around some of the corners on the road to autonomy and anticipate the needs of the growers they serve. We look forward to continuing to work with them as they unlock more productivity and sustainability in agriculture through their unique approach to integrated autonomy.”

SwarmFarm’s unique approach to autonomy resonates with its customers, resulting in consistent and continued growth. Mr Bate said the team would hire for roles in their Queensland and New South Wales offices to support this growth.

“The future of agriculture is happening now, but there is no way that one company can really invent everything needed to revolutionise agriculture,” Mr Bate said. “We need the smartest minds from around the world working on this.

“We need an army of developers solving agriculture’s problems one app at a time. So come join us as a partner and help deliver the revolution that agriculture needs.”

SwarmFarm Robotics was founded in 2015 near Emerald, Queensland to pioneer the development and use of intelligent robotics in Australian agriculture through integrated autonomy. Mr Bate said this entirely new approach to autonomy on-farm provided “more than another driverless system or a niche robotics solution”.

“Integrated autonomy puts the farmer’s needs first and creates a technology ecosystem around them to help save time, resources and energy while optimizing for profitable and sustainable growth,” he said.

More information about SwarmFarm can be downloaded here.

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