London Invented in..

Today, this part of the capital is home to the third largest

technology start-up cluster in the world.

No wonder they call this place Silicon Roundabout.

Invented In London tells the story of the pioneers of tech.

We're solving some of the hardest computer science problems today.

From the creators at the cutting edge...

To regain that control and that ownership over my body

I'm trying to create a series of robots that are imitating

To the Victorian Countess who started it all.

Ada was known as the enchantress of numbers.

I meet the inventors and their inventions

Join me, Suzi Perry, as I uncover the past,

present and future inventors of tech right here in London.

I know you will all make really cool, weird, creative stuff.

At Goldsmiths university in south-east London,

its annual hack-athon Anvil Hack is getting underway.

This 24-hour invention marathon sees student hackers

from across the country going head-to-head to legally create

Anvil Hack is special because there are no limits.

Essentially, we give you three categories, audio,

visual and hardware and say, do whatever you like.

So the crazier, the weirder, the more out there it is, the better.

Regardless of how they come to this event, whatever their skill set is,

whatever their ability is, everyone here is going to learn

new things and build new things together.

Pandelis is a computer science student

from Birmingham university and a seasoned hacker.

The initial idea is we want to kind of take a ball and shove a computer

in it so we can detect the motion of the ball and how it's kind

of flying around in the air so, by playing around with this ball,

you can make cool sounds and maybe potentially cool music.

Ph.D student Amy Dickens has travelled

This is a device that has cameras and it can see

It recognises when I turn them upside down,

She hopes to modify an existing product.

The possibilities are endless for what you can control.

Anything you can control on a computer, it's like having

The issue I have when working with users with complex disabilities

is sometimes they have closed hands or movements that aren't typical,

so that means that the sensor doesn't necessarily even see them,

and that's what I'm trying work on today.

Now, it may be the case at other hack-athons that

hackers build really technically impressive projects.

Here, we're more interested in creativity.

I'm trying to create a series of robots that are imitating

the behaviours of my cat in different ways.

So, Leah is building a cushion type object to emulate a cat.

She has a cat called Ray and she knows that,

when she rubs it the wrong way, it will attack her.

Hopefully, once you touch a certain part of the conductive fabric band,

it will poke up just enough to hurt you.

I'm pretty much completely self-taught.

So, if Google doesn't have the answer, then

Once the competitors have decided on their inventions,

it's time to get hacking, and that is a race

My confidence level would be about a six or seven at the moment.

12 hours in, it will probably be a one.

We'll catch up with the competition at Goldsmiths a little bit

later on but, right now, I'm at the headquarters

of Deliveroo, one of the most successful brands to come out

of London's tech world, and this is the first time they've

Food delivery service Deliveroo is barely five years old but already

they are in 140 towns and cities worldwide, working with 20,000

Their tech team has developed software that solves the complex

So today we'll talk about the rider delivery

Co-founder and CEO Will Shu started Deliveroo in 2012,

but the seed of his idea dates back to a decade earlier

to when he was working as an investment banking

In New York, back then, this is 2001, we didn't

So we would actually call up restaurants,

give them our credit card numbers over the phone and then

Despite that lack of technology, it was actually a very good experience.

But then in 2004 I was transferred over here by my company.

I didn't understand why one of the greatest cities in the world

didn't have a decent food delivery network.

Will reached out to his childhood friend Greg Orlowski.

A computer programmer who would eventually

But, at that time, before smartphones and apps had caught on,

the only solution would have meant relying on fax machines.

You almost had to wait for the technology to catch up

Absolutely, but anyone could have had this idea.

Honestly, the idea isn't the most important thing,

because it's a pretty obvious thing to say, I want better food

from restaurants to be delivered to my house quickly.

The important part around that is the technology and the execution.

Our head of data science is from Netflix.

Guys like this really helped teach the rest of the team.

In 2016, Deliveroo saw orders increase by 650% globally.

The tech start-up has received almost half $1 billion in investment

to date and it's using data to expand its operation

exciting thing that we are working on now.

We've created a series of off premise kitchens,

whereby a restaurant will staff up chefs in our kitchens and,

in this way, the restaurant can focus specifically on delivery.

What this allows restaurants to do is go to areas that they otherwise

maybe would never dream of opening a restaurant, and they can reach

a lot more people, and we give restaurants that information.

We say, here is where we have super high demand.

Here are some missing cuisines in that neighbourhood.

And we say, OK, we think there's a huge opportunity there.

So the best way to understand technology is to test it yourself.

It's told me that I've got an order and I can accept it,

Before I started the business, I tried pretty much every style

of pizza you could have, whether it was American,

I went out to Napoli to watch how they do it and I think it's just

the love of the pizza over there is so apparent,

so it's something we really wanted to replicate.

We bake it in the oven which is about 500 degrees,

so it means it cooks in 60 to 90 seconds.

What I found actually, and I've done thousands of deliveries,

is that customers never want to talk to you because they are hungry.

So in the beginning I would say, hey, I'm Will from Deliveroo

and people would just shut the door in my face.

You don't really want to sit around and talk to someone.

How important would you say that your tech and coding team is to you?

Tying all this together is our logistics algorithm.

We are solving some of the hardest computer science problems today.

How do we make sure that the right driver goes to the right restaurant

minimising the wait for the customer, maximising

All of these things are incremental changes

powered by technology, so absolutely it's

Deliveroo are part of the rich history of invention

and evolution in tech and, when it comes to computers

and programming, it all began right here in London.

Ada Lovelace was the world's first ever computer programmer,

Her 1843 blueprint for a computerised future

She was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron

and Anne Millbank but, when Ada was just five weeks

Her mother's reaction was to reject the world of art and extol

the academic pursuits of science and mathematics, fields

But the real catalysts for her work were the designs of the inventor

I met Anne-Marie Imafidon, a figurehead today for girls in STEM

Ada was known as the enchantress of numbers.

She was a great mathematician who loved to play with numbers

and understand logic and discover new things, so she would write

letters about this, the way that mathematicians communicated

And Charles Babbage was one of the people that she struck

up a friendship with, who is known as the father

of computers, building the analytical engine.

She was the first person to write a programme for that computer.

Looking back, how important was that algorithm?

There's a big change there in building a machine

and in programming a machine, giving the machine a set

of instructions for it to do independently,

which was something that she figured out how to do and she was able

Following on from his theoretical difference engine,

a machine calculator, Charles Babbage's next designs

His steam driven analytical engine would be the world's first computer.

And it's here Lovelace's work is crucial.

She realised more than the originator

Babbage had designed the hardware but Ada Lovelace wanted

It seems that she knew she was onto because she said,

that brain of mine is something more than merely mortal,

Of course, it's something that now we still use today,

that translates into our apps and the websites that we use and

You talk about people being ahead of their time,

I think definitely both of them were almost living today.

Ada's layout for the world's first general-purpose

computer machine went as far as to envisage its potential

for musical composition and graphic design, ultimately the machine

However, before her untimely death at just 36, the same

age her father had died, Ada Lovelace's theories

Ada's layout for the world's first general-purpose

computer machine went as far as to envisage its potential

for musical composition and graphic design, ultimately the machine

However, before her untimely death at just 36, the same

age her father had died, Ada Lovelace's theories

and algorithms had foreshadowed the future of computing.

Is the spirit of Ada Lovelace very much alive today

I think it might have been quietened or maybe dampened a little bit over

I think we're still seeing women creating and solving big

We are seeing women come into the field who haven't had that

background and using maybe arts backgrounds and kind of putting that

We call that Steam, being the science, technology,

engineering, arts and maths all coming in together.

Ada Lovelace, the original computer programmer.

Back at Goldsmiths, the hack-athon is almost a third of the way

through and competitors are preparing for

I'm less confident than I was at the beginning of the hack.

With 16 hours to go, I still have a lot of work to do.

One of Anvil Hack's sponsors is Spotify

Along with other companies, they make elements of their product

available to be hacked by entrance of events like these.

Hugh Rawlinson is a developer advocate engineer.

It's really important for us to see what kinds of products

people want to build, what kind of interesting new ways

of interacting with music that people come up with.

Kind of made like a semi-phone pheromone, whereby, based

on the rotation of the phone, it kind of makes different noises.

Talent scouting is one part of it, for sure.

I mean, people who attend hack-athons when they are in

university usually are sort of the cream of the crop in terms

of they are computer science students, the really creative minds

I think one of the biggest challenges for people

building hardware that users are going to react with in

Sure, this is a hack-athon and whatever's going to be built

is probably going to be rough around the edges, but ultimately,

when it comes to 12pm tomorrow and people are showing

off their projects, it needs to work.

Design student Leah's aim of creating a robot

to emulate her pet cat isn't quite going to plan.

It's like the second you want to show someone...

Fingers crossed when you come back in the morning it will work.

Tech dreams often start small, and turning those dreams

into a marketable reality can require big backing,

especially if the idea is as radical as artificial intelligence.

From Imperial College's development of the Google DeepMind platform

to UCL's predictive keyboard app SwiftKey, now owned by Microsoft.

Today, Old Street start-up Emotech are looking to join the bandwagon

with their personal assistant, Olly.

I'm excited to meet Olly, but you seem to have two of him.

So Olly will adapt personality and the life behaviour

from the owner, so you have two Ollys, one is from my personality,

the other is from one of our developers' personalities.

Can we talk to the Olly with your personality?

Sure, the one is always more exciting.

So, if I ask this Olly the same question, it

I feel charming, alarmingly charming.

Emotech co-founder Chelsea Chen believes Olly's USP,

in a marketplace that includes giants Amazon and Google,

is its ability to respond uniquely to each owner,

and in time it will even be able to communicate proactively.

Currently in London, it's sunny with some clouds,

One reason behind Olly is like as your assistant,

your friend, so even when you are down, Olly

When I cry, Olly will kind of comfort me.

Tries to give you a little bit of a surprise.

In Silicon roundabout's EC1V postcode, there are over 3000 tech

The competition for investment is fierce.

Now, with two rounds of investment, the company's current valuation

Yes, but I always say it's more than two years,

because everyone works over 12 hours per day.

So you are fitting two years into one year.

We believe how human being learning systems will be changed.

Now Olly learns from the owner and, when we have enough Ollys sold out,

So where do you see AI going in the future?

OK, let's go back to Goldsmiths and see how the hack-athon is going.

Morning has broken at Anvil Hack three.

For some of our hackers, it's been a long night.

I did sleep, for about three hours on the sofa in various

uncomfortable positions, because I was sharing it

And I'm not feeling so great about that.

Unfortunately, I completely slept over my alarm.

I just snoozed it about ten times and then went back to speak again.

Leah's hopes of building something that behaves like her pet cat

I wired this up wrong and managed to burn it out.

I'll get something in for the deadline.

Whether I'll be happy with it or not is a different question!

When you go around and talk to people, you really feel bad,

not like you are disturbing them, but they are really

Elsewhere, Pandelis and his team are in a more positive position,

We kept some audio elements but kind of turned it into more of a game,

and then it turned into a phone game and now it's a shouty phone game.

For Ph.D student Amy, who works with people

there was always rather less to shout about.

I don't think it will have the motion controller in there,

but what I have been able to do is learn what parts of the software

After meeting Chelsea Chen and Olly, I wanted to learn more

about how inventors today can fund their ambitions.

Anastasia Emmanuelle helps tech start-ups go to market.

Crowdfunding is just a way of raising money

from a large number of people, and typically small sums of money.

So instead of going to a bank or an investor and asking

for a loan, for a large cheque, you are asking the Internet, people

over the world to potentially help bring your idea to life.

That's the point with crowdfunding, that products coming to market

You would invest because you like the idea of it, wouldn't you?

Essentially, crowdfunding is democratising access

to capital because, instead of there being these handful

of gatekeepers who decide which ideas come to life or not,

there is the crowd who, if they like an idea,

It puts the power back into the hands of the people.

There is a huge benefit around marketing, in terms of crowdfunding

In the case of Olly, which will retail at between 600

and 800 US dollars, the crowdfunding campaign is planned for the next

To succeed, it will rely on a positive public perception.

Where do you think AI fits into the whole scheme of things?

AI has become a bit of a buzzword I think people outside the tech

world think that AI means that there's going to be robots

and supercomputers taking over the world, taking their jobs

It's very much just a technology that is in a lot

In Amazon Echo or Google Home or Olly, who you met.

AI isn't just something that you see in sci-fi movies.

It's really about this proactive and continual learning.

The DIY spirit of hack-athons lies right at the heart of tech.

Britain's garden shed and bedroom inventors really do play

Frank Swain is having a new set of hearing aids fitted on a Harley

street, but all is not quite as it seems. This is a gateway to an

alternate world. How did this idea, round? I had been going deaf since

my mid-20s, probably from too many loud concerts and bad genetics.

Hearing aids give you an exact replica of the environment, which

got me interested in the idea of what other cells could I change. If

I listen to an interpretation of the world the rest of my life, I want to

play a role in that and change the sound I can hear. Collaborating with

the artist Daniel Jones, Frank has hacked his hearing aids so they now

detect Wi-Fi networks wherever he goes and translate them into sound.

We use a smartphone to gather information. Daniel has written

information on the phone to turn it into a continuous stream music. That

is sent to my hearing aid to stream. As I walk around, the phone is in my

pocket and I hear the Wi-Fi. The project aims to give the user an

additional sense or in augmented reality. As well as sound, the data

gathered is made into animations that map out the Wi-Fi fields that

Frank hears. Walking around, you hear two separate layers, one

sounding like a Geiger counter, the density of networks around you, and

the other one translating the names of individual networks. This project

kind of performed a series of experimentation and research, but

the outcome is very much a kind of aesthetic process, immersing you in

this kind of uncanny architecture. I'm trying to imagine, listening to

it when you are walking along, what does it bring to you that you didn't

have before? I think it is being connected to the world, experiencing

something directly that you know is there, that you use everyday, but

isn't quite tangible. It is simultaneously a very alien sort of

landscape, but also something inherently familiar about it. When

you heard it properly for the first time and you walked out, wasn't

there a part of you that thought, the air is thick with so much stuff

that we don't see? Absolutely, we were surprised how much the device

could detect. How would you describe this? Is this tech or an art

installation? I think of it as sitting at the borderline between

art and science. A lot of technologists are moving into the

world of art, understanding that the technology they make as expressive

powers, and a lot more artists are coming to the technological world,

picking up programming almost vibrant collage. Both art and

science are concerned with enquiry, about the world around us, showing

ourselves things we might be unaware of. Some audiologists would

configure hearing aid sometimes and that would be bad. And now we are

seeing that the user can change settings and programme them and

change the way they work. For me, we gaining that control and ownership

of my body is really exciting. At Goldsmiths, Anvil Hack three has

entered its closing stages. The final hour. Start getting your

presentations ready. The last hour is the most tense bit, but that is

the thrill. It gets the adrenaline flowing. That is why people come. As

the hackers get ready for final presentations, finishing touches are

being made to the inventions. First up is Pandelis's team. We've

designed a game with the intention of being loud and fun and

visualising things. We've created a phone number people can call and it

puts everybody into a conference call and, as people shout, the bird

will flap based on how loud people shout.

SHOUTING. Next is Amy, whose aim of modifying

a device to work for users with complexed disabilities has eluded

her, but she has mastered a new function for the system. I also have

a pitched one, to shift the pitch wait up for any user. I came to try

and pick apart those bleak gestures, but implementing web audio myself

for the first time was good, because I have only ever used visual

interfaces before. Having it written in code was a great feeling. One

person who will not be presenting is master 's student leader. I don't

know what happened but flames started erupting from where the

relays are. I don't know what went wrong. Five minutes ago, I was on

top of the world, it was finally working, and I was like, I've got

something to present. And then, I don't know... I keep thinking, if it

was a software project, it would be impossible to set on fire! I've

already got a collection of things I'd blown up this year. I'm aiming

to make them into a necklace. I'm going to wear them at Pride. This

will be a nice centrepiece. Wood after 24 long hours, time to

announce the winners. And that prize goes to screaming bird or shouting

bird, but that shouting at your phone thing. Pandelis and his team

have done it. Their audio driven game has won them the price. I might

try my hand at making some more games, because that was quite a bit

of fun. It's been an emotional roller-coaster, as they usually are.

You come to learn something and you've got something to take away. I

kind of want to go to the pub and forget about it! From Charles

Babbage and Lovelace to hack-athons and artificial intelligence. For

centuries London has led the way in artificial intelligence and

technology and it is showing no sign of slowing down. Artists and

creatives using technology. The number one city of AI in the world.

We are pioneers in this service. 40,000 tech companies in this area.

We want to make this a global success story. You can find out more

about inventions across the UK if you go to the website.

Hello, I'm Sarah Campbell, with your 90-second update.

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