Expatriate picks NZ as place for prototypes

By SIMON COLLINS

New Zealand companies and universities are set for key roles in developing new technology to help aged or disabled people to use computers.

An expatriate New Zealander at California's Stanford University, Neil Scott, is leading the international "Archimedes Project", which is developing new ways in which computers can be used by people who may not be mobile, use their fingers or speak.

Through computers, the technology will allow disabled or infirm people to control household equipment such as lights, heaters and television. Mr Scott believes the applications are vast, with over-50-year-olds expected to number more than half the population in Japan in the next few years, and in Europe by 2020.

He is keen to bring some of the work to New Zealand, and is working with a group of companies associated with entrepreneurs Stephen Tindall and Keith Phillips, including Mark Thomas' Right Hemisphere, and with a Wellington technology company, Shift.

Auckland and Victoria Universities and Auckland University of Technology (AUT) are also involved.

"There is a huge opportunity for educational designers in this country to bring this technology into the vocabulary and skill set of the technologists that you are producing, and for companies to start exploiting the technology to make smarter devices," he said in Auckland this week..

"My hope is that, because New Zealand can move in a more agile way, they can get stuff done and claim ownership of those things, rather than the big corporations."

Mr Scott, a former dean of physics and electronics at Wellington Polytechnic, moved to California in 1986 and was named by Discover magazine in 1997 as one of the five top innovators in the US in computer hardware and electronics.

He took part in a SmartNet seminar on artificial intelligence at the AUT Technology Park yesterday afternoon..

He said he got involved in the field when a colleague in Wellington asked him to find a way for a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy to use a computer.

The girl could not control her arms, but could move her knees.

Mr Scott built a system that allowed her to control a computer through Morse code, using her left and right knees to make long and short code signs.

Within two weeks, she had learned Morse code, and spelled out her first words: "S-C-O-T-T I-S O-K."

"Her teachers said, 'That's the first thing she's ever said.' At that point, my life changed."

In California, he got a grant to develop a system which allows a disabled person to use any computer in the world, using an interface device which people carry around with them.

In 1992 an IBM grant enabled him to establish the Archimedes Project, based on the classic Greek scientist's statement: "Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth."

The project is working with Silicon Valley companies, and increasingly with others around the world, to develop systems which can understand instructions from people in any language through speaking or even simply looking in particular directions.

Mr Scott sees NZ companies and universities as ideal to develop prototypes of the new devices which may then be manufactured anywhere.

"One reason I'm not trying to do it in America is that US venture capitalists are only interested in spectacular returns - the next Sun Microsystems, and so on," he said.

"We are saying, there is more benefit to the country having hundreds of small companies employing 20 people each than in having one significant company which, at the drop of a hat, could go to Singapore."

Silicon Valley: Intelligent technology breakthroughs