National Science Week Presentation

Presentation to Year 10 from Mr Dan Bowen, Technology Strategist, Microsoft.

During Science Week, Year 10 had a presentation by Microsoft’s technology strategist, Mr  Bowen. The presentation gave snapshots of what working with new technology will look like in the future. He mainly focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it could be used as a tool to complement and transform a wide range of technologies. He noted that public fear of AI is understandable, especially with Sci-Fi movies always portraying AI as the villain, and he stressed the need for regulations and compliance. His examples of using it for good began with the combination of AI and facial recognition for the preservation of the world’s rarest species and then introduced Microsoft’s latest project, ‘AI for Earth’. This project plans to combine the world’s largest environmental data set with AI-like technologies, using the latest data storage (i.e. the cloud), to allow scientists to answer global issues. He got us to imagine a world where AI told us how to save the planet and gave hints about our potential role in its success. It made us feel that the technology that we are growing up with will be the tool our generation utilises. He then re-grabbed our attention with how AI is making gaming better, and naturally, the audience sat up straight. With a bit of a pitch for Microsoft’s Xbox engine being better than Sony’s PlayStation hardware (over the long term), he then leant in the possibilities of quantum computing. A limitation of quantum computers is that they function under extremely low temperatures, and so will likely never be as accessible as our current ones. However, Microsoft’s partnership with Sydney University could potentially give the public access to this technology, via the cloud. As the presentation closed, questions from the crowd mostly centred on quantum computing. I personally want to thank Mr Bowen for giving up his time to give us students some new and encouraging ideas about what work we might pursue beyond school. No doubt that with subject selections coming up, more Year 10 students will be thinking about science.  

James Thompson
Year 10