Each year, 167 billion disposable nappies are made, used and thrown away. Such is their impact, that in countries such as Vanuatu, disposable nappies make up 30% all of their waste. Rather than letting them accumulate in landfill and our oceans, what if a soiled nappy could be fully compostable? What if the poo could become a source of fuel? What if nappies could become a source of income, rather than a household expense? Eco-nappy entrepreneurs Jason and Kim Graham-Nye are working to make that a reality.
When Vicki Chen describes her area of expertise as ‘membranes’, it might not mean much to the average person. But membranes, which can be all manner of thin, permeable barriers, could offer solutions to two key challenges that the world will need to overcome with increasing urgency: excess CO2 and dirty water.
A professor in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland, Shazia Sadiq runs a world-class team within the university’s Data Science research group that is working to improve data quality standards and come up with ways that they can be integrated across areas such as transportation, social media and learning analytics.
Dr Alan Taylor – former professional rugby league player, bench scientist, investment banker and game-changing life science entrepreneur – is not only helping to drive developments in cancer diagnosis and treatment and imagining a galaxy in which patients can benefit from precision therapies, but also making sure that Australian scientific breakthroughs get the attention they deserve.
We want to find that nerdy, transgender kid, who’s sitting in their room, creating amazing technology, but who may not be confident or think anyone might invest in them at all. We want to go to Indigenous community, the disabled community, the women’s community, the refugee community. We want to support women and minorities who would normally fall out of the funnel somewhere,” says Wallace. “I want to change what an AI entrepreneur looks like.”
Professor Hala Zreiqat is hoping that, one day in the not too distant future, it will be possible to print parts of the jaw; until now, it has been an almost impossible part of the body to rebuild. And all of this will be done within two days, she says.
Dr Sue Keay never expected to end up in robotics. It was a 2014 conversation with her sister, Andra Keay, a Silicon Valley-based robotics entrepreneur, that made her realise robotics was a way to have a greater impact on society. “I saw the potential and I was hooked,” Keay told The Brilliant.
Since then, Keay has created Australia’s first robotics roadmap, brought The Grace Hopper Celebration, the world’s largest gathering of women technologists, to Australia, and is the inaugural CEO of the Queensland AI hub.
Robots and AI have long been a staple of dystopian fiction, either as merciless overlords, or as downtrodden slaves. Sometimes, they just take all the jobs. Professor Simon Lucey says that far from Artificial Intelligence (AI) being a futuristic nightmare, it has the potential to put Australia at the centre of a global revolution involving plenty of new jobs and benefits.Lucey isn’t simply speculating about a possible future – he’s creating it. In October 2020, he joined the Australian Institute of Machine Learning (AIML) at the University of Adelaide, where he is going to help drive Australia’s role as a world leader in machine learning and AI.