The general program of NTT’s Global Research & Innovation Summit, Upgrade 2024, opened on April 11 with the inspirational “Upgrade Reality” short film and a welcome from NTT Research President and CEO Kazu Gomi. Three sessions followed, touching upon cardiovascular medicine, R&D investment strategies and innovation’s bumpy road. A Pixar Animation Studios veteran closed out the morning with a keynote on disruption.
NTT Research is nearly five years old, as Gomi noted, but its mission to take reality – i.e. “what is normal or standard” – to the next level has remained constant. Basic research is what makes achieving that ambitious goal possible. Supported by parent company NTT, which spends roughly $3 billion annually on R&D, NTT Research scientists have published more than 450 academic papers and achieved numerous distinctions in fields associated with its three labs. They have done so through an open-lab strategy that includes joint research agreements with 15 U.S. and international universities. “Upgrading reality cannot be achieved by NTT ourselves,” Gomi said. “We need good partners.”
The first general session illustrated the organization’s visionary and collaborative style. It opened with another short film simulating a future therapeutic technology being studied and developed by the Medical & Health Informatics (MEI) Lab. On the stage with MEI Lab Director Joe Alexander was Kenji Sunagawa, director of the Circulatory System Research Foundation and former director of the department of cardiovascular dynamics at the NCVC Research Institute in Japan, an active MEI Lab partner. Providing context for the MEI Lab’s Autonomous Closed-Loop Intervention System (ACIS), the subject of the film, was session moderator, Microsoft Research Chief Medical Scientist Junaid Bajwa.
Alongside aging populations and growing shortages of healthcare professionals, a “supply and demand mismatch for which innovation will be critical,” Bajwa noted that every healthcare system is currently expected to 1) improve population health at scale and pace; 2) and 3) improve the experience of care on both delivery and receiving sides; 4) reduce the per-capital cost of health care; and 5) improve health care equity. In terms of these widely embraced aims, Alexander said that ACIS touches them all. Derived from a broader quest for a Bio Digital Twin, this initiative involves interactions between cardiovascular twins and treatment strategies based on drug libraries. To date, the MEI Lab has built basic and enhanced models. In the near term, Alexander said he expects to demonstrate the performance of ACIS in an animal system.
What is R&D? What is basic research? And how do you toggle between the two? As to the first question, NTT CIO and Chief Digital Officer (CDO) Katsuhiko Kawazoe said there are two things that distinguish NTT R&D. First, R&D is an “extremely wide” area, encompassing 40 individual laboratories in Japan, in addition to the three at NTT Research, with a total number of researchers exceeding 2,300. Second, it encompasses a continuous spectrum, from fundamental to applied. Rejoining the stage, NTT Research President Gomi noted that he started as a researcher and then spent many years as an executive delivering technologies and services. “It’s cool to be back on the research side,” Gomi said. “There always needs to be good connections between the two.” Those links help when the time is right to assess the commercial potential of a new technology, but to achieve groundbreaking results at the scientific level, NTT Research has put a premium on intellectual capital. The “core fundamental idea” behind the three labs, Gomi said, was “to create the world’s best team in each area.”
Further insight into the sometimes bumpy road from research to innovation to product came from NTT Research Head of Partner Strategy Al Emondi, who spoke about “off-ramps” and the need for technology advocacy. Drawing from his experience as a program manager at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Emondi pointed to how his work on traumatic spinal injury led to ultrasound transducer-based technology that could also be used for automatically detecting a foreign body (e.g., a blood-soaked cotton ball, post-surgery), monitoring brain tumor regrowth and detecting and monitoring deep-vein thrombosis. These were examples of “off ramps,” derivative applications “that could be equally valuable, if not more than the original vision.” Along with exciting breakthroughs and potential applications, however, comes the need to “manage hype headlines and perceptions.” This requires a mix of skills that few scientists and engineers have by nature. “Part of you has to be science” he said. “The other part has to relate to the executive team and PR.”
The last talk of the morning came from Matthew Luhn, formerly of Pixar Animation Studios. Originally part of the Lucasfilm computer division, Pixar was spun off with funding from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1986. Luhn worked at Pixar, which Disney acquired in 2006, as an animator and storyteller for two decades. One relevant aspect of Luhn’s story is the disruptive impact of innovation. After working as a traditional animator on The Simpsons, a job he got at age 19, he joined Pixar to work on the first computer-generated film, Toy Story. Far from killing off artistic creativity, as many feared, it launched a hugely successful studio and revived the animation industry. “The technology did not kill that industry,” he said. “It disrupted it and created so many more jobs and opportunities.”
To watch these general sessions, please visit the Upgrade 2024 event website.
