South by Southwest Festival goers, local leaders and Longhorns recently gathered at UT's Hook 'Em House at Antone's to hear from an esteemed panel about the opportunity for tech transformation in Austin, Texas and beyond, when the right groups come together to reimagine the possibilities.
The discussion was led by Mark Arnold, associate vice president of Discovery to Impact at The University of Texas and managing director of the UT Seed Fund. Discovery to Impact serves as the ecosystem that connects UT innovators - and their groundbreaking research - to the resources they need to get their ideas out of the lab and into the world to have lasting impact.
When Mark asked the panel what makes Texas, and Austin in particular, ripe with opportunity, panelists agreed that there is a spirit of optimism and a culture of innovation in Austin and in the state of Texas that is unparalleled As a renown visionary venture capitalist, panelist Jim Breyer, founder and CEO of Breyer Capital, added that a great University sits at the heart of where some of the best entrepreneurial opportunities lie. He explained that human capital is also more important than ever because of the pace of change and decision making that emerging technology brings. The key is to bring together University talent, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and industry in a way that can accelerate research commercialization to transform lives. Breyer shared that it's the seamless integration and sharing of ideas, testing and retesting hypotheses, that happens here in Austin, and keeps him bullish about the future.
Dr. Claudia Lucchinetti, dean of the Dell Medical School and senior vice president for medical affairs at the University of Texas, highlighted the medical complex the University is building with the concept of an immersive learning laboratory as an example. It is a place of convergence where the University, technology, the private sector and education can come together not to just react to what is happening in health care but to be part of shaping it. Dr. Lucchinetti illustrated the significance of building a purpose-built hospital at the time of great transformation in information technology and the opportunity that holds for Austin and beyond. She added that the University represents one of the most important trends in technology: bio convergence - the bringing together of AI, biotechnology, engineering and computing to spur health transformations. By bringing those component parts together, health care leaders are able to transform how we think about tailoring treatments, how we predict disease, avoid disease and promote a longer and healthier lifespan.
Benefits of public and private partnerships can also be seen in the growing semiconductor industry in Texas. As a co-founder and chief technology officer for the Texas Institute for Electronics (TIE), S.V. Sreenivasan discussed how TIE is playing a crucial role in semiconductor manufacturing and advanced electronics in Texas and the nation. With 84,000 square feet of state-of-the-art clean room space in Austin, TIE serves as a UT Austin-supported semiconductor consortium of state and local government, preeminent semiconductor and defense electronics companies, and national labs and nationally recognized academic institutions. Sreenivasan described how TIE is building a fabrication facility (FAB) that can allow people to do low-volume, early production of highly innovation systems but in a way that can be scaled up to commercialize it. The FAB ecosystem allows people to come together and build the most advanced prototypes and then deploy them in real applications, creating an ecosystem that allows people to innovate.
With rapid innovation, also comes addressing the future of artificial intelligence. Panelists discussed how UT is already embracing the use of AI to develop next-generation technologies faster, better, and economically across a range of fields whether that's AI-enabled drug discovery, semiconductor chip design or robotics. In looking to the future, it is exciting to imagine how AI coupled with medtech or humanoid robotics might change lives in the next five years- but one thing is certain: The innovation is happening in Texas and at The University of Texas at Austin.
