Adam Johnston interviewed Robert Newport for the MedTech Innovation podcast presented by Australian Academy of Technological Sciences & Engineering (ATSE) and Industry Mentoring Network in STEM (IMNIS)

Description

Thanks to: Sarah Crowe (AATSE) for recording/production and Ngozi Chidi-Egboka (UNSW) for post-production editing.
Interview draft text INTRO
Good afternoon and welcome to this session in the for the MedTech Innovation podcast presented by Australian Academy of Technological Sciences & Engineering (ATSE) and Industry Mentoring Network in STEM (IMNIS), where we Focus on MedTEch Innovators, as part of the PodCast series “Succeeding in STEM”. To endure, being innovative is the first half, commercialisation and entrepreneurship is the key second component.

Today we’ll soon be hearing from Robert Newport, someone who has succeeded at both innovation and commercialisation. I’m Adam Johnston a PhD Student in Law at Macquarie University and I’m also part of the Catalyst program at the Academy of Technological sciences and Engineering

Robert has important messages for all those considering a career in STEM, regardless of whether you are school age, entering university or at a more advanced point in your career. One of the most important messages you will hear is ‘hold on to your vision or dream’. Over time it will adapt and change and, as Robert rightly says, there will be a need for you to exercise nuance and pragmatism along the way. Ultimately, if you listen on, you will meet a man who should be called a visionary, predicting in the 1990s that the internet would be a place where we lived more and more of our lives, just as we live in other parts of our environment. While that view was not embraced at the time, Robert’s expertise in designing, analysing, and modelling systems from cities to the human eye, using powerful computations is something truly amazing. But this is not a presentation simply for computer geeks. Other life choices may have seen Robert become a fine artist, however in many ways science, technology and mathematics have become the tools of this fine artisan.

As we gather from around Australia, I’d first like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands from which we meet. I’m joining you today from Garigal
land. I pay respect to elders past and present, and to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who join us online today. As we share and discuss our own knowledge and practices, we acknowledge the deep knowledge forever embedded in custodianship of Country.

Now I’d like to introduce Robert Newport, PhD Scholar at Macquarie University and founder of Macquarie University Incubator Start-up EyePathDx.com which is an integrated medical-grade eye tracking device and (SaaS backend) platform that helps doctors, researchers, marketing strategists, designers, teachers, and anybody else analyse how people look at things. The website explains Rob Newport created EyePathDx.com to make both eye tracking and its analysis easier and more insightful. Sight is something precious to me, because many of my contemporaries with cerebral palsy lack it due to humidicrib’s being over saturated with oxygen.

Robert, thank you for agreeing to be part of the MedTech podcast. Before we come to your development of EyePathDX.com can I ask:

Robert, you started your tertiary education in urban planning, before a master’s in software engineering. That’s a big jump. What were the turning points and who or what was the inspiration?
•A brief 2-3 mins insight of your journey from high school to university and then your career into MedTech start-ups (points that can be included are high school subjects, ATAR, motivations to take up your career path, overcoming any challenges to where you are today etc)
You’ve developed software for a variety of organisations from Disney to our Defence Department, as well as being a lecturer, consultant and patent holder. What’s been the most interesting thing to work on?
•Your impetus to MedTech innovation
How did this inspire your ‘technical creativity’? Looking back, what would you want to have told your high school self?
Reflecting on your experience, as someone who has finished high school, how would you say your high school subjects set you up to achieve this?
What advice do you have for high school students and to older students?

•MedTech journey
-During your career your CV records you as the co-founder or senior engineer of numerous organisations and developing many applications. How important have collaborations been in your work?
Can you describe a time when you found yourself looking for a collaborator with specific skills? How did you navigate skills needed for your MedTech that you didn’t have?
   • Is there a patient story you can share where your tech has changed their life? Or other significant impact?

How will the eye scanning technology of EyePathDx change the outcomes for patients?

What links do you see between eye scanning technology and computational neuro-surgery given the brain’s role in ensuring we see one consistent image?

   • What advice do you have for someone who is exploring MedTech and research commercialisation? What has establishing EyePathDx.com taught you about medtech commercialisation?

-And now, to wrap up, something completely random: Is there another thing you would have become if you weren’t a scientist?

CLOSING
Thank you for joining us and sharing your journey with us Robert.

More information about the Focus on MedTEch Innovators podcast is available on the ATSE LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. To apply to join IMNIS, look for the IMNIS website, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, where you can find out more about Succeeding in STEM. My thanks again to Robert Newport, and producer Sarah Crowe from the Academy. This has been Adam Johnston for the MedTech Innovation Podcast series. [Ends]


ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND

Robert Newport is currently a research scholar at the Computational NeuroSurgery Lab, Department of Clinical Medicine, Macquarie University. He completed his Master of Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master of Research from the Department of Computing at Macquarie University, in collaboration with the Australian Government Department of Defence Science and Technology. He is currently doing his PhD in medical image processing and Artificial Intelligence under the supervision of A/Prof. Antonio Di Ieva.

The topic of his research is in search of relevant things: A novel approach for image analysis. I aim to investigate how experts’ cognitive processes may be transferred to computers for the automatic recognition of visual features. By merging computer and brain sciences, my project will characterise the way the brains of experts understand what is seen, in order to translate such a process in a new computer vision tool. This should provide significant benefits, such as automatic detection in diagnostic imaging, mainly in neuroradiology, among other applications. For the first time, the combination of how a computer analyses an image and how an expert interprets it will be used as a common language to enable machines to process visual information in a manner that mimics the way human brains do.

Develop mobile code in Swift, C, and Objective-C in Xcode; and Android Java, Kotlin, JNI C, and Renderscript in Android Studio. Machine learning using algorithms in Matlab and Python. Mobile expertise encompasses licenses to develop on Apple iPhone and Google Android.

Variety of project management methods used in the industry to ensure quality deliverables produced on time and within our designated estimate. Depending on the software requirements, a combination of Scrum, Waterfall, Spiral, or XP will be used to project manage. Deliverables for project management include Daily or Weekly conference meetings, Microsoft Project schedules, man-month estimations, and real time status reports. (LinkedIn Rob Newport - PhD Research Scholar - Macquarie University | LinkedIn)

Period	6 Sept 2022
Held at	Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE), Australia, Victoria