10057218A demand-led event engine to address lonelinessClosedGrant for R&DInnovate UKI'm Emma and I am one of the founders of More Human. At More Human we're building software to turn anyone into a successful organiser of high-quality well-attended events. I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at 29 and since have won awards for my work in awareness, have spoken at 5 TEDX conferences and have shared a stage with people like Theresa May and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. My YouTube content has a total of 1.5M views and I was recently awarded an honorary doctorate in inclusive design. Through my personal experience, I have increasingly understood the value of community and the importance of connection. With continued increasing social isolation and loneliness becoming more and more of an issue for the UK at an estimated annual cost of £8.4bn for older adults alone, empowering communities to address this by giving them the tools they need to create their own solutions is something I'm really passionate about. Organising social events and activities is hard work, the risk of failure is high and the tools available to support organisers are not fit for purpose. We are building a social event engine that helps anyone run events that build connection; the first ever platform to use demand data and machine learning models to intelligently and automatically generate events for an audience from scratch. The engine will create a virtuous cycle of creation and attendance, strengthening communities. Longer term, it will evolve to promote and pre-sell tickets for events BEFORE offering a human the opportunity to step in and run the event, enjoying the opportunity to be the host-with-the-most for a guaranteed turn-out. This will entirely eliminate the biggest barrier to organising something social; the fear that no-one will show up. Imagine a world where 20 people have already pre-paid to attend a crafting event next Thursday evening. When a host is asked to opt in, they just need to turn up.