Inventor: James Meech, Sensors CDT, Nano DTC
Mentor: Steven Tunnicliffe-Wilson, Inca Printers
The inventor has been working on non-uniform random number generators since 2018 and is now looking for the best commercial market opportunity for his novel approach. He and a colleague were awarded the 2022-23 NanoFutures Leadership Award to stimulate and support the translation of cutting edge nanoscience research to higher technology readiness levels.
Working within the Sensors CDT, he has developed a programmable random number generator which can generate samples from any one-dimensional custom probability distribution, either an analytical function or using empirical datasets (for example using real sensor measurements).
A new platform technology of this type has a very wide range of possible uses, which include testing sensors, improving predictive maintenance solutions for a wide range of industrial and consumer products, and providing synthetic datasets to test machine learning models in several different applications. The challenge for the i-Team is to identify the best viable short-term market opportunities to allow the inventor to gain investment funding to take his idea forward, as well as identifying possible longer-term opportunities.
The inventor has a short-list of several markets for the technology, based on real-world problems that he has identified over the course of the past year. There may be others outside of his areas of expertise. The i-Team will be asked to work both on the inventor’s current focus markets, as well as any new ones they are able to identify, interviewing industry experts and recommending the next steps forward for this new technology.