Nic Palmarini: Preparing for the 2nd Billion

On this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Avivah Wittenberg-Cox talks with Nic Palmarini, the Director of the UK National Innovation Centre on Ageing. NICA is based in Newcastle and was launched with £40 million investment from the UK Government and Newcastle University. The Centre's mission is to “add intelligence to ageing and longevity”, allowing the private and public sectors to tackle the opportunities of the longevity economies while reducing inequalities, by developing and bringing to market innovative ideas, business models, services and products which enhance and improve all aspects of life for our ageing societies.  

Prior to heading up NICA, Nic was Head of AI for Healthy Ageing at IBM Research, and AI Ethics Lead and Research Manager at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, an academic-industry partnership for the responsible advancement of artificial intelligence. His specialty is connecting dots across disciplines to bridge academic and industrial research with real-world applications.

Trained in social studies and business communication, he also served as Director of the IBM Human Centric Solution Centre in Paris.  He holds a decade of experience in research on supporting older adults’ autonomy and independence, and leading teams in developing Human Activity Recognition techniques dedicated to older adults based on AI applied to IoT data.

Nic is also an author, teacher, applied research scientist and his main areas of research are loneliness as an accelerator of physical and cognitive diseases, ageism, ageing and economic factors, ethics and AI. The work done by his teams have twice been awarded the Computer Honours Award at the United Nations for Aging Initiative and received the Disability Matters – Market Place Award. He is the author of five books and member of several boards included the Scientific Advisory Committee at McMaster Institute for Research on Aging (MIRA), GIMI (Global Management Innovation Institute) and the Scientific Board of Political Sciences and International Relations at Universita’ Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan. Nic has been recently appointed as board member of the Humane Technology Lab.

Some Useful Links:

* National Innovation Centre on Ageing

* About Nic Palmarini (website)

* Article in Forbes by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, with Nic Palmarini and Lynne Corner: ‘Ten Steps to Longevity for the Second Billion – Are We Ready?’

* Nic’s TED Talk on Ageism

* IBM Europe Human Centric Innovation Center

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