Stela Solar Leads A “World First in AI” | At the National AI Centre, CSIRO Australia

Andrea Macdonald, founder of ideaXme interviews Stela Solar, Director of National AI Centre, CSIRO Australia. They talk of “Australia’s world first” initiative to develop, roll out and manage AI and how Stela Solar leads it.

Biography Stela Solar

Director of the National AI Centre, CSIRO Australia

Stela Solar is the Director of the National Artificial Intelligence Centre, hosted by CSIRO’s Data61. In this role, Stela is focused on building value for Australian people, businesses and the country, through use of Artificial Intelligence. Over the past 15 years, Stela has cultivated expertise in capturing new revenue opportunities presented by emerging technologies and business model transformation. Stela is passionate about removing barriers to positive technology adoption and engagement. She leverages her broad experiences across business development, strategy, ecosystem development, marketing and product management to inform her insights surrounding cross-organizational factors affecting an organization’s ability to capture an advantage.

Global Director of AI Solutions and Sales Microsoft

Prior to CSIRO, Stela most recently held the position of Global Director of AI Solutions Sales and Strategy at Microsoft, and before that was with channel partners Ingram Micro, Express Data, and web security startup M86. Stela has recently returned to Australia from 7 years in the US technology industry. She has a Masters of Interaction Design and Electronic Arts from University of Sydney, and a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of NSW. Outside of work, Stela enjoys competitive sailing and plays cello and piano.

Stela Solar, Director, National AI Centre, CSIRO AUSTRALIA – ideaXme interview

Stela Solar, Director, National AI Centre, CSIRO Australia: [00:00:24] I’m Stela Solar. I lead Australia’s National Centre. I’ve been in this role for about a year and a half. Before that I was with Microsoft for ten years. Prior to that, I worked across various start-ups and distributors for about five years. But for me, my technology journey was a complete accident. My high school education and primary school education was really into music. And in fact, I was on track to become a film composer and was playing cello and piano. And this was the career of choice for me. And then through university, I was studying commerce and arts, and it was really about film, theatre, and philosophy. And on the commerce side it was economics and international business, and it was a bit of a negotiation. I did commerce for my parents and did arts for my love. And so, when I finished university, I needed to get a job and the first job that came my way was in technology. Nothing before that pointed suggested that I was going to be in a technology career, you know, arts, creative space, music, commerce, economics, and then suddenly first role in tech. I started off in inside sales and I learned very quickly just how creative technology was. It was that creativity that I never knew existed in technology, and I just learned on the job. I completed short courses, learnt in customer engagements, and that’s the history ever since currently at the National Centre, it’s hosted by CSIRO, which is Australia’s National Science Agency. And so, we have a mission to accelerate positive adoption of AI across Australia and that country level mission is unlike anything I’ve been working towards before. My previous roles, for instance at Microsoft, they spanned across Internet of Things on the sales strategy side, artificial intelligence on solution sales leadership kind of function was also in various product marketing and partnership roles, business development roles. And so there was always an objective about attaining numbers or outcomes. And now in this role, looking at this country level activation, it’s a next level of impact.

Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:02:47] Would you please define artificial intelligence and its applications?

Stela Solar, Director, National AI Centre, CSIRO Australia: [00:02:54] There is a lot of debate about what the definition is of artificial intelligence. In fact, the EU Joint Research Centre has I think a 150-page document collating various definitions of AI. The one that I really appreciate is about AI being a broad category of technologies and ultimately being a technology that you can train to do a specific thing and then it can do that thing incredibly well at scale. I appreciate that one because it’s more practical for businesses to really get a handle on how to leverage AI within their organization. You know, it talks about this ability for a technology to be trained to do a specific thing and then do it at a scale that otherwise may not be possible.

Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:03:45] Could you please talk of the challenges and opportunities of AI?

Stela Solar, Director, National AI Centre, CSIRO Australia: [00:03:52] Mean, it’s such a huge area trying to explore the challenges and opportunities of AI. Ultimately for me, because I can tackle scale and complexity and volume so incredibly well. I see it as being able to uplift our impact as a society, as a humanity and uplift our industry impact all around the world. There are some tremendous benefits of being able to provide services to remote communities, for instance, who may not have access to services otherwise that could contribute to. You know whether that be through translation of materials or through creating AI models that are specialized at certain, let’s say, health tracking or health diagnostics that might be difficult to attain. But it’s this ability to scale all positive services for our communities that I think holds a true opportunity. There are also some risks that we’re navigating, and one example is underlying data biases. You know, through our history and all of our data comes from history by default. So, throughout history, we’ve had inequities, gaps in data, underrepresentation. And so, when we build models that rely on the underlying data, sometimes we can propagate latent biases that we may not even be aware of. So, I see elements such as diversity, being able to intercept how AI systems are designed so that we actually shape AI systems towards better outcomes, doing better as a society rather than replicating some of the biases of the past.

ChatGPT

Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:05:40] Sam Altman launched GPT4 in March this year, and whilst it wasn’t met with as much publicity as ChatGPT the first iteration, could you talk of the latest version and the question of alignment?

Stela Solar, Director, National AI Centre, CSIRO Australia: [00:06:09] So actually this entire area of chat bots has been a really pivotal moment to AI adoption and AI understanding around the world. Having been in the AI space for some time, I quite often get the question of terminators: Are terminators going to take over the world? And so finally with the chat bot technologies that have been released and there are now quite a number of vendors who have versions of them, it has enriched the conversation. You know, the community, broad community now engaging with generative technologies, whether they be language models or image generators, there is more access to get hands on with the technology to start ideating, real use cases, real benefits, and also very real challenges that we’re navigating. And so, for me, this entire arena of chat bots of Generative AI that has just exploded in usage over the last couple of months has been a critical pivot point for community to get more engaged in the shaping of AI towards responsible and meaningful outcomes.

Stela Solar’s Work at the National AI Centre, CSIRO Australia

Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:07:23] Could you talk of the nuts and bolts of what you have been doing in the last year at the National Centre, including the three think tanks and also the world first that you have launched?

Stela Solar, Director, National AI Centre, CSIRO Australia: [00:07:37] At the National Centre. We’ve been very busy over the past year, so we’ve been in operation since January last year and for us we started off with a national listening tour. So, we went all around the country. We visited 135 different organisations around Australia to really understand what the real experiences were and needs from Australia’s industry, from community and from the broader ecosystem. And that informed much of what we have designed today, including the establishment of the think tanks and the recent announcement of the responsible network. So, we have three core pillars to what we’re establishing. The first one is to help Australia’s business get started with AI. We find that a lot of larger organisations are already on their journey, but quite often the small and medium businesses are being left behind. In fact, larger businesses are twice as likely to be benefiting from AI than with small and medium businesses are. And about 60%, 65% of businesses in Australia in that SME category are asking just how to get started with AI. And so that is all about our first pillar. It’s to get started. It’s foundational knowledge and skills to enable businesses to take those early steps. The next pillar for us is get connected. And what we noticed during the listening tour is that the tremendous strength that Australia has in research for AI and AI technology development was by and large unknown by industry.

Responsible AI Network – “A World First”

Stela Solar, Director, National AI Centre, CSIRO Australia: [00:09:12] You know, industry didn’t know that we have world leading field robotics so that Australia is world leading in computer vision or that we have over 20 years of quantum AI work that is done. And so, we are bridging that gap through the launch of the ecosystem Discoverability Portal and then set of matchmaking and connection events that are going to be moving ahead. And then the third pillar for us is about uplifting practice. We know that right now AI holds a lot of opportunity if we navigate this opportunity responsibly. And many organisations around Australia and in fact around the world are asking how to do AI in a responsible way, in a robust, reliable, trustworthy way, but there is not really comprehensive guidance on how to do this. And so, we established the Responsible AI Network, which is a gateway for industry to gain expert advice and best practice on how to do AI well across their organisation. And there isn’t just one organisation that has all the answers towards this. So, we partnered with nine different organisations around Australia, including the Australian Industry Association, the Australian Information Industry Association as well, the Tech Council of Australia, our Committee for Economic Development, also Standards Australia and the Ethics Centre. Obviously, CSIRO’s Data 61 and the Gradient Institute. There’s quite an array of partnerships who have come together, so that we can fill in the various bodies of knowledge and expert guidance that are needed to ensure that AI is navigated responsibly across the organisation.

Stela Solar, Director, National AI Centre, CSIRO Australia: [00:11:05] In fact, there are six core pillars that we’re focused on as part of the responsible AI network. The first one is obviously leadership. We are finding that AI is only as good as we lead it and it’s because ultimately is a tool, a technology that we’re using to achieve the outcomes that we want to achieve. So, leadership is that pivotal, foundational one. Governance is another one. Law and standards as well, especially with a wave of standards that is about to come from the ISO organisation. And we also then focus on technology and principles as well. So, we’re breaking down responsibly AI into those six core pillars and the way that we maintain the pulse of what industry needs, what community needs and ensure that we’re responding in an agile way is through the establishment of our three think tanks. So, the three think tanks have 57 members that represent industry, academia, government, and community organisations, and we meet every month to talk about what is needed, where are the gaps and actually scope the next projects and programs that we invest in. And there are three of those think tanks we have one for Responsible AI, another one for Diversity and Inclusion in AI and a third one for AI at Scale.

Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:12:32] You have mentioned that this is a world first to build such an ecosystem. You sit within AI and the context of AI is of course global. I was just interested to hear the extent to which you’re reaching out globally to involve other entities, other countries, other organizations in your world first.

Stela Solar, Director, National AI Centre, CSIRO Australia: [00:13:02] So the responsible network is a world first because it’s taking an all of ecosystem approach. We have seen other countries form responsible partnerships within the country, but this is a very different way of approaching. It’s bringing together various subject matter experts to create a fabric of sorts across Australia to uplift practice. We started off with an announcement in Australia of our partners, but we are already talking internationally with partners so that we can collaborate. Our core intention here is to bring along industry on this AI journey. It’s to uplift the practice. We know that AI is a huge opportunity for industry. No one wants to get it wrong, but at the same time businesses are finding that there are gaps in guidance on how to do well. So, we are looking for partners around the world to help us fill this gap on industry guidance and then proactively land it in across the industry ecosystem.

Establishing a Set of Global AI Standards

Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:14:06] Is your plan ultimately to establish a set of standards, rules – to be a leader in that respect?

Stela Solar, Director, National AI Centre, CSIRO Australia: [00:14:17] Actually, there are so many organizations already either creating guidance or frameworks and, you know, mentioning standards. There is already a huge wave of standards out and another huge wave that’s coming from ISO when it comes to AI. What we’re trying to do is to simplify this experience and also commission net new areas of development that will help businesses fill the gaps of how to do responsibly. There are many organizations who are publishing frameworks and guidance, but no business is going to be going hunting around for all of those different frameworks and how they all fit in. So, we see our role partially as curation, as centralization and simplification and then commissioning for guidance frameworks and best practices to fill the gaps. And there are definitely gaps that we’re finding.

A Global Charter for AI?

Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:15:11] Do you think there is any chance of an agreed global charter for AI?

Stela Solar, Director, National AI Centre, CSIRO Australia: [00:15:18] It is a big question I don’t have the answer to. I was fascinated to see the open letter that was that was recently published. And, you know, I don’t know how practical or reasonable the suggestion of a pause is, but what it really does, spotlight is the need to go deeper into responsible AI, the need to reflect as a society around the world in terms of how we want to shape AI, what we want to use it for, what kind of guidance, best practices, frameworks we want to put in place. So, it’s put that into spotlight, I think, in a way that we have not seen before, and it was probably generated by the Generative AI wave. You know, this engaged such a high volume of people that this question is an imperative question for our time. What do we want to see from AI? How do we want to shape AI and how do we see it as part of our lives? So, we welcome everyone to follow us on our LinkedIn channel. We just launched this a couple of weeks ago and we’ll be amplifying some of the latest announcements and projects that we have, as well as some of Australia’s ecosystem. You’re also welcome to reach out to us through our website. It’s www.https://www.csiro.au/naic.

Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:16:40] Stela Solar, thank you very much for your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you.

Stela Solar, Director, National AI Centre, CSIRO Australia: [00:16:46] My pleasure. Thanks for the chat.

Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:16:50]

Watch the interview with Stela Solar

If you liked this interview, be sure to check out our interview with Nitendra Rajput, SVP and Head – AI Garage at Mastercard

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