UKTN | The Podcast

Jane Wakefield talks to Simon McIntosh-Smith about the role the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing is playing as the UK builds it own AI economy. The supercomputer is the UK’s fastest - and we discuss its size, why it is helping monitor a herd of dairy cows, and how the centre is dealing with the challenges of power-hungry AI.

Dr Anne Lane, chief executive officer of UCL Ventures, discusses why commercialising research at British universities remains a challenge despite significant will and the enormous impact of spending money on cutting-edge research. 
 UCL Ventures, formerly UCL Business, is the commercialisation arm of one of the world’s most prestigious universities.

Katie King, co-founder and chief executive of BioOrbit, discusses how her company is building pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities designed to operate in space and why that could fundamentally transform how the production of medicine works. 
BioOrbit is a British space tech company that aims to use the irreplicable conditions of outer space to improve the development of drugs that could massively shape how humans treat some of Earth’s most dangerous conditions.

Basecamp Research’s co-founder Glen Gowers discusses the firm’s ambitious plans to sequence a trillion genes. Gowers talks about how he lived his business idea by taking a portable lab onto an icecap, how he defied investor’s advice and employed field scientists and diplomats ahead of computer scientists, and how he hoped the firm will one day help solve the antibiotic resistance crisis in healthcare.

Chris Donnelly, co-founder of Searchable, discusses the wild ride of growing a business in a matter of months to a valuation of $85m. He shares his thoughts on the radical overhaul to search announced by Google and offers tips of what every brand, big or small, needs to know in the age of AI and we hear about the not often talked about dark side of starting a business and how it can be undermined by rivals.