Maria Hagardt

As a species, we have a remarkable history of scaling up and distributing new technologies among the world’s population. For centuries, books and letters were precious and limited to a small elite, today the printed word is ubiquitous and production costs are negligible. The most recent democratisation of technology took…

In this Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversation with Marius Brand, digital participants had the chance to discuss and ask questions. The interview series provided an intense personal atmosphere, in which high-level guests, speakers and panelists of the Falling Walls Science Summit 2021 focused on their individual research, career paths and experiences.…

Progress in autonomous vehicles and digital assistants shows that today’s machines can perform certain human tasks with remarkable accuracy. But they lack versatility and only work within limited domains for which large sets of training data are available. Transfer of knowledge, common sense, and an understanding of causality are open problems.…

Current technologies from silicon chips to computer memory to mobile phone displays are all derived from the fundamental quantum properties of materials. Creating novel materials and manipulating their electronic arrangements is the key to harnessing quantum properties at a macro-level for revolutionary technological advances. Suchitra Sebastian, an experimental condensed matter…

Ashwin Charles of Malaysia was awarded the second place for his new and low-cost method of breaking down the pollutants resulting from palm oil production by using solar power.

Abrar Alam is addressing the increasing demand for heart valve replacements by engineering bioprosthetic heart valves using stem cells. The goal is to create a longer-lasting valve with reduced immune response, offering a potentially improved option for patients in need of heart valve replacements.

This Winners Session features the Top 10 breakthroughs in the Engineering and Technology category. Several of the presented projects are developing eco-friendly materials and Clean Energy solutions, including safer, more energy-efficient batteries and a new method of cement production that reduces CO2 emissions, thereby ensuring that housing is both affordable…

“Critically Extant” is a project that explores just how little we know about the natural world by testing the limits of the data openly available to us. To achieve this, AI algorithms were trained on millions of open source images of nature and some ten thousand species. The resulting models…

The world today is facing the greatest threat to our continuous survival as humanity. Last year was Code Red for Humanity, as the IPCC called it. The UN juxtaposes the three greatest threats facing the Globe and calls them The Triple Planetary Crisis – Climate Change, Pollution and Biodiversity loss.…

Based on an in-depth longitudinal case study of one inter-organizational relationship between two multinational companies, we present the counterintuitve idea that policical struggles within organizations can be a powerful driver of collaborative dynamics between organizations. We develop a process model, highlighting the need for a political perspective on inter-organizational relationships…