Name: Brainstorm AI London 2024: From Sports To The Workplace
Uploaded: 2024-04-16
Duration: 16 min 34 s
Description: Dr. Olivier Oullier, Co-founder, Inclusive Brains; Chairman, Institute for Artificial Intelligence by Biotech Dental Interviewer: Ellie Austin, FORTUNE

Dr. Olivier Oullier, Co-founder, Inclusive Brains; Chairman, Institute for Artificial Intelligence by Biotech Dental Interviewer: Ellie Austin, FORTUNE

Brainstorm AI London 2024: From Sports To The Workplace

Photography by Joe Maher/Fortune Brainstorm AI

Conferences

Hello again, everyone. Um I hope you are enjoying your lunch. So next up, we have our keynote conversation throughout history. Sports have served as a catalyst for both technological innovation and societal change. We touched on this in our sessions yesterday and the advent of A I is no different. Today's lunchtime speaker has left robotics and brain computer interfaces to enable a quadriplegic individual to drive a formula one car with his mind. It's incredible. You can look it up on youtube. And this summer our speaker will use similar technology to enable severely disabled individuals to carry the Olympic and Paralympic torches will discuss the potential of A I to enhance the lives of those with diverse physical and cognitive abilities and what this might mean for inclusion in the workplace and beyond. So please join me in welcoming Olivier O chairman of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence by Biotech Dental and CEO and co founder of Inclusive Brains. Thank you very much. Hi, Olivia, take a seat. Um Thank you so much for joining us. So you have many titles. You are a neuroscientist, you are an entrepreneur, you are an investor and as I mentioned, you run your own company Inclusive Brains, which you founded in 2022. We have a fantastic co-founder, Paul Barbas with your co-founder. Um Now, the goal of inclusive brains is to build a I's first neural foundation model. Can you tell me what that means? We want to create algorithms and models that enable machines to adapt to who we are and how we feel regardless of our needs, abilities and physicality. Machines should serve us A I is a fantastic assistive tool and we want to bring it to the masses. Paul and I, when we founded inclusive brains had one benchmark in mind is the remote control. The remote control was invented for people with disabilities, for them to interact with technology and then it conquered the world. Billions of people have changed the way they interact with technology. Thanks to the remote control, we want to be inspired by this story to bring A I that we first developed to help people with special abilities and needs and then leverage it for inclusion because true inclusion means serving and assisting everybody with no discrimination whatsoever. And so most A I systems are trained on language, but I know that you train your systems on a range of biological functions, whether it's the clench of a jaw, the clench of a hand or a heartbeat, a brainwave. Can you talk us through how you do that? Yes, it's incredible because look at us, we're interacting and words matter. But there is so much than words in the way we interact and the way we interact with technology. And there are people, people who can't use words. So we're training our models with brainwaves, facial expressions, voice stress what we call prosody, the intonation habits and lots of biological factors so that we can leverage generative A I to better understand and feel how we are and the technology to adapt to who we are, which I think this is the key we have to create interfaces that adapt, that can predict down the road. But first to adapt to who we are and what makes each of us unique. So to adapt to an individual's needs, cognitive or physical. Absolutely. Um I mentioned in the introduction, the project that you're doing this summer with the Olympics and the Paralympics. It's called Project Prometheus, I believe. Why is the Olympic parade, the torch parade, an important platform for you to showcase this work. The entire world is going to watch the Olympics. I'm old enough to have witnessed someone with a jet pack going out of a Coliseum in Los Angeles in 1984. And as a kid that's really sparkled, you know, my interest in technology and amazing things and I think we can inspire a lot of kids to see that the combination of A I with exoskeleton and neuroscience can help people have a con concrete, really concrete applications. I think this is why we want sport and its values to be associated with top technology that we want to bring to the masses. We're going to a demo in a second, the exoskeleton. Um But first of all, I want you to talk us through how this technology originated because I believe it came from a chance encounter you had when you were Stagg at Harvard. And we've got a photo to illustrate this. I believe I'm going to try not to be too emotional because the person you see is my friend, Mark Pollock. He is an explorer, a technologist. He has a superpower. He brings technology and inventors that don't talk to each other in order to turn their inventions into actionable solutions to help the world. What you see is Mark his team and I almost 10 years ago to this day in a basement in UCL A as Mark was using an exoskeleton in order to walk. Mark is paralyzed from the waist down and he cannot see and I was recording his brain waves in order to understand how his brain is processing movement following the accident that happened in his life. And this is really the very beginning 10 years ago of project proteus. The combination of exoskeleton and neuroscience. Let's try it out. I have to ask you a question and for your permission first, would you mind if I use neurotechnology to record your brain activity? Please go ahead and do you mind if we show your brainwaves to everyone in the room. Please go ahead. It has to be done with informed consent of people. That's very respectful. So this is a brain sensor, wireless brain sensor that is monitoring Ellie's electric activity of of her brain. Just sorry to mess with. No, go ahead your hair. I'm not precious about it. You're not perfect. This is more important. Exactly. So and uh let's have a look at Ellie's brainwaves. So the one thing that we need to show first is that we're doing this live. So would you mind moving your head because there are movement sensors. So this is in real time and this is how we train our algorithms. The technical term is multimodal, meaning that we're using different kinds of information to train generative A I brainwaves. We're also using facial expression. Very important. The interface is asking you whether you allow for the camera to process your facial expressions in real time. Yeah. Heartbeat, lots of things I could go on for hours as you can imagine. But this is just to show you that in real time, we can not only monitor what is happening but leverage artificial intelligence to measure in real time the level of stress attention, cognitive load. Hi right now, how are these? So how are these the markers, stress, cognitive load, attention and arousal, how are they linked kind of how do they sit against the baseline of what you would expect? Well, it all depends on the environment in which you are and how you were before. Well, we're human beings. We're a bit stressed even if we are. You and I are quite used to, to be, uh, to be on stage and it changes a lot and the fact that it's jumping if you have to remember, one thing is the fact that how we stress how we are, our personality cannot be captured by a bunch of questions. Once in a lifetime that determines who you are in your organization, it changes from a minute to another, it changes from a day to another, from a person to another. And this is how we can create interfaces that are tailored to our uniqueness. So when you have this information, what do you do with that? We can use it in order to prevent accidents in order to improve how people learn in order to inform what the outcome of a decision making process can be. But it has to be done respecting all the regulations when it comes to data, to privacy and now regulation of artificial intelligence. And we can do things these days in terms of monitoring in real time that we couldn't do in the past generative A I is amazing for that. But once again, we have to go beyond large language models because there is so much that language can capture. We are a lot more than words. Fortunately. So would you like to try the exoskeleton. I'd love to. Now, you've made it very clear to me beforehand that this is not a robotic arm. It's an exos why is that distinction so important? So first, it's designed to help people. So there are two modes we can use it. One is passive help. There are people who can still move but are losing step by step, the ability to use their muscle, they are losing power. So the device is going to assist you when you move. Can you share with our audience? What's your experience is? Yeah, so I'm only very slightly moving my arm, but it feels like there's a superpower behind my joint that is doing all the hard work. So this is also a brain scan that we launched at a fortune event back in 2019 in Guangzhou, China. It's brain sensing earbuds and we can leverage them to do what people would call mind control. In that case, it's control that is done with clenching because the technology can adapt to what you can do. Some people like Ellie can focus and can do real mind control. One of our participants in the Olympic torch relay, she has a cognitive disability and she cannot focus enough. So we have to tailor the interface to measure her facial expressions and also the fact that she's clenching in order to be doing what we're going to do now, which is me by clenching providing you more assistance Oh, wow. Yeah, that's way stronger. And so this could be installed at someone's workstation, for example, if they needed help at work, it could be in their home, all different use cases. Absolutely. And this is the goal is to provide assistance to everyone. I'm going to free you. I appreciate that. Thank you very much. Yeah, my headpiece and so Olivier, how accessible is this technology right now? Both in terms of cost and availability. Let's go. Let's sit down ready. Yeah, it's a few €100 for the brain sensors, a few 1000 for the exoskeleton. And what we do with our technology is we're hardware agnostic. We're developing the A I that can basically be used in any connected device or environment that has sensors because we're training the model with all this information, the brain waves, the facial muscles, heartbeats, generative A I will be able down the road to recreate the signals and we will need less and less wearables. The goal with that is really to have machines to adapt to us and how we feel. There are moments where I'm too distracted for some task, especially if I'm working on a brain surgery. Ken, we a Ken, I'm not a brain surgeon. You do not want me to operate on your brain, but we did work with surgeons, orthopedic surgeons. Absolutely in Abu Dhabi that are specialized in the needs of your favorite football players and we monitored in real time how their brains interact. So two surgeons, it was a world premiere to understand the difference of how they process information when they are performing routine check, routine operations and when they are dealing with the unknown. And what did those results tell you? And how is that going to change the world of surgery? If we throw it ahead, we can optimize the whole day of work. Surgeons like most caregivers, they have operations after operations after and they are just like every one of us at some point, you know, you're mentally tired, it's harder to focus. So we can better time care delivery in order to minimize errors and accidents. Another example is what we're doing in dentistry. A lot of us are afraid of dentists so we can monitor in real time the level of stress of a patient with the ear buds in order to make sure that we wait until the patient calm down in order to perform whatever intervention we have to do and little details like that can change everything in care delivery, but also on a construction site or for knowledge workers. So it really is about enhancing people's experience regardless of their cognitive or physical abilities. This can be integrated into so many different factors of life. That's your ultimate goal for this technology. Yes. As long as we do it in a responsible, fair, ethical and legal way, this is why people have to be informed people what we did is I did not record your data. Your data is is not stored. We can have aggregated data about a group of people without having information about the individual that is anonymized so that we can learn that a group of people works better at certain times of the day or can perform better. The idea is really to leverage this technology for good in order to improve safety, whether we're talking about physical or mental health. In order to improve decision making, avoiding accidents, there are so many operations and accidents today that are happening just because we do not have a good relation with technology, whomever buys a computer, whichever workstation you have in your office, we have to adapt to the work environment. We have to make the effort. It doesn't make sense. It would be just like giving clothes to go on a construction site to someone who is 1.7 m. You would give clothes of someone who is 2 m, the helmet is too big, the shoes are too big. You don't do that when it comes to physical safety, we have to do it about psychological safety as well. We customize this is like haute couture, but recognition and physicality. And on that note, I wouldn't normally comment on your fashion, but you've told me that you're wearing very significant trainers. Can you talk me through these? Yes, because we're talking a lot about high technology A I exoskeleton but low tech can help a lot. This is a partnership between a famous brand, sportswear and cafes. Another brand that employ only people with cognitive disability and these shoes and explain to people who can't see what's going on in your shoes. So my shoes one is yellow, the other one is black and this low tech can help people who have some cognitive disability. Remember which side is which it's just as simple as that. It's about designing environments that are inclusive work environments, everyday life environments. As long as we leverage A I or low tech for good Olivier. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you for bringing your technology and good luck this summer at the Olympics and Paralympics. Thank you very much.