So I was privileged to train in transplantation under two great surgical pioneers: Thomas Starzl, who performed the world's first successful liver transplant in 1967, and Sir Roy Calne, who performed the first liver transplant in the U.K.
in the following year.
I returned to Singapore and, in 1990, performed Asia's first successful cadaveric liver transplant procedure, but against all odds.
Now when I look back, the transplant was actually the easiest part.
Next, raising the money to fund the procedure.
But perhaps the most challenging part was to convince the regulators -- a matter which was debated in the parliament -- that a young female surgeon be allowed the opportunity to pioneer for her country.
But 20 years on, my patient, Surinder, is Asia's longest surviving cadaveric liver transplant to date.
(Applause) And perhaps more important, I am the proud godmother to her 14 year-old son.
(Applause) But not all patients on the transplant wait list are so fortunate.
The truth is, there are just simply not enough donor organs to go around.
As the demand for donor organs continues to rise, in large part due to the aging population, the supply has remained relatively constant.
In the United States alone, 100,000 men, women and children are on the waiting list for donor organs, and more than a dozen die each day because of a lack of donor organs.
The transplant community has actively campaigned in organ donation.
And the gift of life has been extended from brain-dead donors to living, related donors -- relatives who might donate an organ or a part of an organ, like a split liver graft, to a relative or loved one.
But as there was still a dire shortage of donor organs, the gift of life was then extended from living, related donors to now living, unrelated donors.
And this then has given rise to unprecedented and unexpected moral controversy.
How can one distinguish a donation that is voluntary and altruistic from one that is forced or coerced from, for example, a submissive spouse, an in-law, a servant, a slave, an employee?
Where and how can we draw the line?
In my part of the world, too many people live below the poverty line.
And in some areas, the commercial gifting of an organ in exchange for monetary reward has led to a flourishing trade in living, unrelated donors.
Shortly after I performed the first liver transplant, I received my next assignment, and that was to go to the prisons to harvest organs from executed prisoners.
I was also pregnant at the time.
Pregnancies are meant to be happy and fulfilling moments in any woman's life.
But my joyful period was marred by solemn and morbid thoughts -- thoughts of walking through the prison's high-security death row, as this was the only route to take me to the makeshift operating room.
And at each time, I would feel the chilling stares of condemned prisoners' eyes follow me.
And for two years, I struggled with the dilemma of waking up at 4:30 am on a Friday morning, driving to the prison, getting down, gloved and scrubbed, ready to receive the body of an executed prisoner, remove the organs and then transport these organs to the recipient hospital and then graft the gift of life to a recipient the same afternoon.
No doubt, I was informed, the consent had been obtained.
But, in my life, the one fulfilling skill that I had was now invoking feelings of conflict -- conflict ranging from extreme sorrow and doubt at dawn to celebratory joy at engrafting the gift of nathanstephens@example.com.
In my team, the lives of one or two of my colleagues were tainted by this experience.
Some of us may have been sublimated, but really none of us remained the same.
I was troubled that the retrieval of organs from executed prisoners was at least as morally controversial as the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos.
And in my mind, I realized as a surgical pioneer that the purpose of my position of influence was surely to speak up for those who have no influence.
It made me wonder if there could be a better way -- a way to circumvent death and yet deliver the gift of life that might exponentially impact millions of patients worldwide.
Now just about that time, the practice of surgery evolved from big to small, from wide open incisions to keyhole procedures, tiny incisions.
And in transplantation, concepts shifted from whole organs to cells.
In 1988, at the University of Minnesota, I participated in a small series of whole organ pancreas transplants.
I witnessed the technical difficulty.
And this inspired in my mind a shift from transplanting whole organs to perhaps transplanting cells.
I thought to myself, why not take the individual cells out of the pancreas -- the cells that secrete insulin to cure diabetes -- and transplant these cells? -- technically a much simpler procedure than having to grapple with the complexities of transplanting a whole organ.
And at that time, stem cell research had gained momentum, following the isolation of the world's first human embryonic stem cells in the 1990s.
The observation that stem cells, as master cells, could give rise to a whole variety of different cell types -- heart cells, liver cells, pancreatic islet cells -- captured the attention of the media and the imagination of the public.
I too was fascinated by this new and disruptive cell technology, and this inspired a shift in my mindset, from transplanting whole organs to transplanting cells.
And I focused my research on stem cells as a possible source for cell transplants.
Today we realize that there are many different types of stem cells.
Embryonic stem cells have occupied center stage, chiefly because of their pluripotency -- that is their ease in differentiating into a variety of different cell types.
But the moral controversy surrounding embryonic stem cells -- the fact that these cells are derived from five-day old human embryos -- has encouraged research into other types of stem cells.
Now to the ridicule of my colleagues, I inspired my lab to focus on what I thought was the most non-controversial source of stem cells, adipose tissue, or fat, yes fat -- nowadays available in abundant supply -- you and I, I think, would be very happy to get rid of anyway.
Fat-derived stem cells are adult stem cells.
And adult stem cells are found in you and me -- in our blood, in our bone marrow, in our fat, our skin and other organs.
And as it turns out, fat is one of the best sources of adult stem cells.
But adult stem cells are not embryonic stem cells.
And here is the limitation: adult stem cells are mature cells, and, like mature human beings, these cells are more restricted in their thought and more restricted in their behavior and are unable to give rise to the wide variety of specialized cell types, as embryonic stem cells [can].
But in 2007, two remarkable individuals, Shinya Yamanaka of Japan and Jamie Thomson of the United States, made an astounding discovery.
They discovered that adult cells, taken from you and me, could be reprogrammed back into embryonic-like cells, which they termed IPS cells, or induced pluripotent stem cells.
And so guess what, scientists around the world and in the labs are racing to convert aging adult cells -- aging adult cells from you and me -- they are racing to reprogram these cells back into more useful IPS cells.
And in our lab, we are focused on taking fat and reprogramming mounds of fat into fountains of youthful cells -- cells that we may use to then form other, more specialized, cells, which one day may be used as cell transplants.
If this research is successful, it may then reduce the need to research and sacrifice human embryos.
Indeed, there is a lot of hype, but also hope that the promise of stem cells will one day provide cures for a whole range of conditions.
Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, spinal cord injury, muscular dystrophy, retinal eye diseases -- are any of these conditions relevant, personally, to you?
In May 2006, something horrible happened to me.
I was about to start a robotic operation, but stepping out of the elevator into the bright and glaring lights of the operating room, I realized that my left visual field was fast collapsing into darkness.
Earlier that week, I had taken a rather hard knock during late spring skiing -- yes, I fell.
And I started to see floaters and stars, which I casually dismissed as too much high-altitude sun exposure.
What happened to me might have been catastrophic, if not for the fact that I was in reach of good surgical access.
And I had my vision restored, but not before a prolonged period of convalescence -- three months -- in a head down position.
This experience taught me to empathize more with my patients, and especially those with retinal diseases.
37 million people worldwide are blind, and 127 million more suffer from impaired vision.
Stem cell-derived retinal transplants, now in a research phase, may one day restore vision, or part vision, to millions of patients with retinal diseases worldwide.
Indeed, we live in both challenging as well as exciting times.
As the world population ages, scientists are racing to discover new ways to enhance the power of the body to heal itself through stem cells.
It is a fact that when our organs or tissues are injured, our bone marrow releases stem cells into our circulation.
And these stem cells then float in the bloodstream and hone in to damaged organs to release growth factors to repair the damaged tissue.
Stem cells may be used as building blocks to repair damaged scaffolds within our body, or to provide new liver cells to repair damaged liver.
As we speak, there are 117 or so clinical trials researching the use of stem cells for liver diseases.
What lies ahead?
Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide.
1.1 million Americans suffer heart attacks yearly.
4.8 million suffer cardiac failure.
Stem cells may be used to deliver growth factors to repair damaged heart muscle or be differentiated into heart muscle cells to restore heart function.
There are 170 clinical trials investigating the role of stem cells in heart disease.
While still in a research phase, stem cells may one day herald a quantum leap in the field of cardiology.
Stem cells provide hope for new beginnings -- small, incremental steps, cells rather than organs, repair rather than replacement.
Stem cell therapies may one day reduce the need for donor organs.
Powerful new technologies always present enigmas.
As we speak, the world's first human embryonic stem cell trial for spinal cord injury is currently underway following the USFDA approval.
And in the U.K., neural stem cells to treat stroke are being investigated in a phase one trial.
The research success that we celebrate today has been made possible by the curiosity and contribution and commitment of individual scientists and medical pioneers.
Each one has his story.
My story has been about my journey from organs to cells -- a journey through controversy, inspired by hope -- hope that, as we age, you and I may one day celebrate longevity with an improved quality of life.
Thank you.
Many of us here use technology in our day-to-day.
And some of us rely on technology to do our jobs.
For a while, I thought of machines and the technologies that drive them as perfect tools that could make my work more efficient and more productive.
But with the rise of automation across so many different industries, it led me to wonder: If machines are starting to be able to do the work traditionally done by humans, what will become of the human hand?
How does our desire for perfection, precision and automation affect our ability to be creative?
In my work as an artist and researcher, I explore AI and robotics to develop new processes for human creativity.
For the past few years, I've made work alongside machines, data and emerging technologies.
It's part of a lifelong fascination about the dynamics of individuals and systems and all the messiness that that entails.
It's how I'm exploring questions about where AI ends and we begin and where I'm developing processes that investigate potential sensory mixes of the future.
I think it's where philosophy and technology intersect.
Doing this work has taught me a few things.
It's taught me how embracing imperfection can actually teach us something about ourselves.
It's taught me that exploring art can actually help shape the technology that shapes us.
And it's taught me that combining AI and robotics with traditional forms of creativity -- visual arts in my case -- can help us think a little bit more deeply about what is human and what is the machine.
And it's led me to the realization that collaboration is the key to creating the space for both as we move forward.
It all started with a simple experiment with machines, called "Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1."
I call the machine "D.O.U.G." for short.
Before I built D.O.U.G, I didn't know anything about building robots.
I took some open-source robotic arm designs, I hacked together a system where the robot would match my gestures and follow [them] in real time.
The premise was simple: I would lead, and it would follow.
I would draw a line, and it would mimic my line.
So back in 2015, there we were, drawing for the first time, in front of a small audience in New York City.
The process was pretty sparse -- no lights, no sounds, nothing to hide behind.
Just my palms sweating and the robot's new servos heating up.
(Laughs) Clearly, we were not built for this.
But something interesting happened, something I didn't anticipate.
See, D.O.U.G., in its primitive form, wasn't tracking my line perfectly.
While in the simulation that happened onscreen it was pixel-perfect, in physical reality, it was a different story.
It would slip and slide and punctuate and falter, and I would be forced to respond.
There was nothing pristine about it.
And yet, somehow, the mistakes made the work more interesting.
The machine was interpreting my line but not perfectly.
And I was forced to respond.
We were adapting to each other in real time.
And seeing this taught me a few things.
It showed me that our mistakes actually made the work more interesting.
And I realized that, you know, through the imperfection of the machine, our imperfections became what was beautiful about the interaction.
And I was excited, because it led me to the realization that maybe part of the beauty of human and machine systems is their shared inherent fallibility.
For the second generation of D.O.U.G., I knew I wanted to explore this idea.
But instead of an accident produced by pushing a robotic arm to its limits, I wanted to design a system that would respond to my drawings in ways that I didn't expect.
So, I used a visual algorithm to extract visual information from decades of my digital and analog drawings.
I trained a neural net on these drawings in order to generate recurring patterns in the work that were then fed through custom software back into the machine.
I painstakingly collected as many of my drawings as I could find -- finished works, unfinished experiments and random sketches -- and tagged them for the AI system.
And since I'm an artist, I've been making work for over 20 years.
Collecting that many drawings took months, it was a whole thing.
And here's the thing about training AI systems: it's actually a lot of hard work.
A lot of work goes on behind the scenes.
But in doing the work, I realized a little bit more about how the architecture of an AI is constructed.
And I realized it's not just made of models and classifiers for the neural network.
But it's a fundamentally malleable and shapable system, one in which the human hand is always present.
It's far from the omnipotent AI we've been told to believe in.
So I collected these drawings for the neural net.
And we realized something that wasn't previously possible.
My robot D.O.U.G. became a real-time interactive reflection of the work I'd done through the course of my life.
The data was personal, but the results were powerful.
And I got really excited, because I started thinking maybe machines don't need to be just tools, but they can function as nonhuman collaborators.
And even more than that, I thought maybe the future of human creativity isn't in what it makes but how it comes together to explore new ways of making.
So if D.O.U.G._1 was the muscle, and D.O.U.G._2 was the brain, then I like to think of D.O.U.G._3 as the family.
I knew I wanted to explore this idea of human-nonhuman nathanstephens@example.com.
So over the past few months, I worked with my team to develop 20 custom robots that could work with me as a collective.
They would work as a group, and together, we would collaborate with all of New York City.
I was really inspired by Stanford researcher Fei-Fei Li, who said, "if we want to teach machines how to think, we need to first teach them how to see."
It made me think of the past decade of my life in New York, and how I'd been all watched over by these surveillance cameras around the city.
And I thought it would be really interesting if I could use them to teach my robots to see.
So with this project, I thought about the gaze of the machine, and I began to think about vision as multidimensional, as views from somewhere.
We collected video from publicly available camera feeds on the internet of people walking on the sidewalks, cars and taxis on the road, all kinds of urban movement.
We trained a vision algorithm on those feeds based on a technique called "optical flow," to analyze the collective density, direction, dwell and velocity states of urban movement.
Our system extracted those states from the feeds as positional data and became pads for my robotic units to draw on.
Instead of a collaboration of one-to-one, we made a collaboration of many-to-many.
By combining the vision of human and machine in the city, we reimagined what a landscape painting could be.
Throughout all of my experiments with D.O.U.G., no two performances have ever been the same.
And through collaboration, we create something that neither of us could have done alone: we explore the boundaries of our creativity, human and nonhuman working in parallel.
I think this is just the beginning.
This year, I've launched Scilicet, my new lab exploring human and interhuman collaboration.
We're really interested in the feedback loop between individual, artificial and ecological systems.
We're connecting human and machine output to biometrics and other kinds of environmental data.
We're inviting anyone who's interested in the future of work, systems and interhuman collaboration to explore with us.
We know it's not just technologists that have to do this work and that we all have a role to play.
We believe that by teaching machines how to do the work traditionally done by humans, we can explore and evolve our criteria of what's made possible by the human hand.
And part of that journey is embracing the imperfections and recognizing the fallibility of both human and machine, in order to expand the potential of both.
Today, I'm still in pursuit of finding the beauty in human and nonhuman creativity.
In the future, I have no idea what that will look like, but I'm pretty curious to find out.
Thank you.
(Applause)