Got some time and $200/month? Solve a real world problem.  Cornelius will take people through the steps from thinking of a problem to using AI to solve it. Which AI or all of them? What prompts? How to check results? Antibiotic resistance? AlphaFold + molecular docking + LLM literature synthesis means a small team can now do preliminary candidate screening that previously required a pharma R&D budget. Rare disease diagnosis? LLMs trained on medical literature can do differential diagnosis screening that no single doctor has the breadth to do. Wildfire prediction (very BC-relevant)? Satellite imagery + climate models + LLMs synthesizing fuel load data. Microplastics in the food chain? The computational screening for biodegradable polymer alternatives — finding what replaces the plastic — is wide open.

What’s a world problem you want solved? 

Cornelius van Heerden is the founder of CAGE Chemical Inc., a startup developing food-grade, formaldehyde-free finishing chemistry for textiles and cellulose. A self-taught inventor with a computer science background, he pairs computational modelling with bench chemistry to replace toxic industrial reagents with safe, food-derived alternatives, and holds multiple patent-pending innovations. Alongside CAGE, he leads technical pre-sales for Enterprise Business Intelligence in Canada at Google, has run his own company in South Africa for 15 years, and writes on AI and semantic modelling.