Some 3,000 of the world’s brightest minds, including technology trailblazers, Nobel Laureates, industry leaders, CEOs, ministers, scientists, artists and internationally renowned thinkers gathered on November 20-22 in Abu Dhabi for XPANSE, a new conference that seeks to set the horizons of exponential technologies, such as quantum, neuromorphic computing, next-gen materials, genomics, synthetic intelligence and more.
Speakers included Nobel Laureates Dr. Daniel Shechtman and Sir Roger Penrose as well as Dr. Hiroshi Ishii, Associate Director of MIT Media Lab, Dr. Mauritz Kop, Founding Director of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology, and Dr. Hoda Al Khzaimi, director and founder of the Center for Emerging Technology Accelerated Research (EMARATSEC), and associate vice provost for research translation and entrepreneurship at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), United Arab Emirates.
There were talks on purifying water by discovering new materials with Quantum + AI, building brains in a dish, non-invasive mind reading with AI, and computing with conscious fungi. One panel, moderated by The Innovator’s Editor-in-Chief, focused on how advancements in biosensing, multimodal AI and space experimentation will help usher in personalized medicine and preventative healthcare. (pictured here).
Startups pitched everything from harnessing Xenobots for industry to biocomputing, the next evolutionary leap for AI.
A session called The Ethereal Veil: Science Meets Art included an artist, Krista Kim, who talked about Heart Space, a biometric AI, generative art installation she showcased in an exhibition in Abu Dhabi. Kim uses AI to read people’s EKG [electrocardiogram, which shows a heart’s electrical activity] and extracts a unique algorithm, then use’ unique heart print information to create unique waveforms and color in an immersive artwork.
Heart Space is just one example of how exhibits and performances at the conference merged the worlds of science, tech and art. The common thing was understanding the human condition and pushing the boundaries of science and tech “until we can see everything,” says the conference’s organizer, Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker, a globally recognized Frontier Material expert, strategist, and condensed matter physicist, who currently serves as the Director General of the Advanced Material Future Preparedness Taskforce (AMPT) — an international think tank and association of over 30 country chapters, orchestrating the global use of Frontier Materials to solve humanity’s most immediate challenges.
The job of the men and women at the frontiers of science and tech is to advance what’s possible Cinker said in an interview in the run-up to the conference. “That is why we created Xpanse in Abu Dhabi. It’s a forum where we can explore the new horizons with the people who are pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. We are bringing them together with the decision makers to look at how we can work together to shape the future,” she said.
Read on to get some of the key takeaways from the conference:
Curating New Economies: The Power of Tech Convergence
Al Khzaimi, director and founder of the Center for Emerging Technology Accelerated Research (EMARATSEC), and associate vice provost for research translation and entrepreneurship at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), United Arab Emirates, talked about how innovation cycles must be reimagined to create resilient adaptable new economies. Since the 1700s there have been waves of innovation which have thrived on crisis and disruption. At the end of each crisis there have been breakthroughs that define the economy and help move the world away from a stagnation point, she says.
Today AI and quantum are top of mind but there are over 200 critical and emerging technologies shaping today’s technological landscape, she says, so there is the potential for a larger number of impactful breakthroughs in a much shorter timeframe.
Critical technologies, such as smart and new material science, semiconductors and new means of energy generation, are already foundational and essential to national security and economic competitiveness, says Al Khzaimi. Emerging technologies, such as AI, quantum computing and synthetic biology, are still at the developmental stage but have the potential to become critical as their applications expand and their strategic importance becomes more apparent.
She sees 25 clusters of potentially impactful breakthroughs that could radically change multiple sectors.
Moving into a post quantum world and post quantum crypto will require working with the next generation of randomness structures, such as neuromorphic computing, an approach to computing that mimics the way the human brain works. It entails designing hardware and software that simulate the neural and synaptic structures and functions of the brain to process information, while biological systems offer untapped economic value for creating secure and innovative solutions for Edge and quantum memory-based computing.
Going forward semiconductors will be made from graphene, rather than silicon, she predicted. To fully capitalize on emerging science and technology, researchers and tech pioneers should not be afraid to start from scratch to say ‘Why not?’, she says.
2025: The Year Of Quantum Computing
Speaker Kop, founding director of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum, spoke about how the United Nations has proclaimed 2025 the year of quantum technology (IYQ2025) and the EXPANSE conference is aiming to help set the agenda for the UN quantum year on topics such as the technology’s development, use cases, investment opportunities and a governance framework. “XPANSE Quantum will be a strategic avenue to present the voice and recommendations of the quantum ecosystem in preparation for IYQ2025, positioning key international stakeholders at the forefront of shaping the global industry’s agenda and opening doors to the Middle East regions,” he said in an interview with The Innovator. The objective is to harness quantum to benefit humanity but also to anticipate the risks and avoid some of the mistakes that were made with AI and the Internet. (For more on this topic see The Innovator’s Interview Of The Week with Kop)
New Materials
In an interview with The Innovator Nobel Laureate Schechtman, who won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of quasicrystals says that he sees battery technology being transformed by new solutions. Lithium, which is both rare and expensive, will be placed by other substances, such as sodium, he predicts, And, magnesium will be used as an alternative to aluminum in the aerospace industry.
Organoid intelligence: The New Frontier In Biocomputing
Dr. Thomas Hartung spoke about organoid intelligence, an emerging multidisciplinary field working to develop biological computing using 3D cultures of human brain cells (brain organoids) and brain-machine interface technologies. Last year, for the first time, a supercomputer exceeded the estimated computational capacity of one human brain – 1 ExaFlop. The human brain can, in fact, do the work of a supercomputer using the same amount of energy as a laptop, says Hartung, i biological computing could be faster, more efficient, and more powerful than silicon-based computing and AI, and only require a fraction of the energy.
Organoid intelligence requires scaling up current brain organoids into complex, durable 3D structures enriched with cells and genes associated with learning and connecting these to next-generation input and output devices and AI/machine learning systems. This new frontier in biocomputing could improve our understanding of brain development, learning, and memory, potentially helping to better understand and potentially find treatments for neurological disorders such as dementia and autism.
Mind’s Eye: Mind Reading With AI
Dr. Tanishq Abraham, Research Director of AI scale-up Stability AI talked about how his company is collaborating with Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Medical AI Research Center (MedARC), Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL University, 4University of Toronto, 5Hebrew University of Jerusalem on a project called MindEye, which uses a novel fMRI-to-image approach to retrieve and reconstruct viewed images from brain activity. Think of it as a non-invasive way to read the mind and reconstruct what it is seeing.
Flying Cars
Peter Thiel famously said in 2013: we wanted flying cars and we got 140 characters ( a reference to Twitter). Now Twitter is called X, users are fleeing the social media platform and buyers are signing up in droves for the first iteration of San Mateo, California-based Alef Aeronautic’s flying car. Designed to drive on the street, take off vertically when needed and fly overhead above traffic, Dr. Konstantin Kisly, Founder and Director of Engineering at Alef, told the EXPANSE audience that his company has secured over 3,200 pre-orders and is now entering agreements for mass production of its Model A vehicle.
TeleAbsence: A Story Of The Matterverse
MIT Media Lab’s Ishii had many in the audience in tears as he talked about how technology and the so-called matterverse, a metaverse where you can do anything that you would do in the real world but without the limitation of the physical realm, can help people connect to loved ones who have died. Building upon MIT’s Multimedia Lab’s Tangible Media Group’s TelePresence projects, TeleAbsence aims to create illusory communication channels with those no longer with us to soothe the pain of bereavement. The project is designed around objects, including old typewriters, telephones, bottles, brushes, and pianos that were once touched and marked by the hand of a loved one.
Through these tangible artifacts and abstract ambient media, TeleAbsence offers a sense of “ghostly telepresence” of lost loved ones. The project aims to address the issue of the vast, emotional distance caused by bereavement and the inability to receive a response from a loved one—the “presence of absence.”
To access more of The Innovator’s Key Takeaways click here.
