Creating my Startup
In 2019 I’d been in the workplace for 13 years. I’d faced and was continuing to face many challenges and obstacles but always persevering to break through and do my part in making our industry a better and safer place for women and ethnic minorities in my own small way.
Technology had really taken off throughout the course of those 13 years, social media had exploded, smartphones became the rage and AI (a once academic subject when I had studied it) was now highly commercialised. I started to become disenchanted with how commercialised AI was mostly being used to target individuals over social media and search engines to sell them stuff. I felt disappointed, I got into AI and technology to make a difference and do good in the world. To see it being used to sell ‘stuff’ to consumers via social media and search engines, was saddening.
At the time, I had recently finished a postgraduate course in Astronomy, where I’d met many interesting people, including a consultant Oncologist. He had a real interest in my AI background and was wowed by the projects I’d done at university (including the Curiosity rover one) and when I shared my thoughts on how I currently felt about AI he suggested we team up to solve a real world challenge he was facing in Oncology. We went to his hospital where he showed me the current process of lung cancer diagnosis and where the massive wait times are in the workflow and how we could use AI to make improvements, catch cancer early on and save lives. We worked out how long patients had to wait to be seen and treated and the cost implications for an underfunded NHS system and from there, Astronomical AI was born with our goal to use ‘AI for Scientific Advancement and Social Change’ and to ensure we have a company ethos of championing diversity, equality and fairness.