 Hi, I'm Craig Whitlock. I'm a reporter with the Washington Post. I'll cover national security and have written a fair bit about drones and UAVs the past few years. I have the honor of serving as the moderator for the next panel on drones and disaster response. We've got three panelists. I'd like to introduce briefly, if they could come up please. First is Patrick Meyer. Patrick, as you've seen, wrote a terrific or was the primary author of the terrific chapter in the primer today, he's a well-known expert in humanitarian technology and innovation and the author this year of digital humanitarians, how big data is changing humanitarian response. Look forward to hearing some of his thoughts on some of the uses of drones for disaster response, particularly in Nepal and other places. Next panelist is Abby Weaver from the Red Cross. Oh, keep them in the chair, okay. Sorry, Ms. Anderson, Abby's with the Red Cross here, based here in Washington, has been doing a lot of research and testing of emerging technology solutions for the Red Cross and we look forward to hearing her thoughts about some of the promise and perils of in that arena going forward. And also have CJ Guinness, who's gonna be our third panelist. CJ, I had on your bio that you were the chief operating officer for a unity group, is that correct? And look forward to hearing, I know you understand from Konstantin, you all have been doing some work on cargo delivery and things like that, so look forward to hearing more on that. But first we'll be hearing a presentation from each of them, would you like me to sit back down and we'll let Patrick start off. Thanks very much. Thank you very much. Thanks for the kind introduction and thank you very much to New America and a media for including a chapter on humanitarian applications and the primers as well as dedicating a full panel today on the topic. It's a real pleasure to be in front of such an informed audience. You could all be giving talks here. It's been phenomenal conversations I've had on the side this morning and this afternoon. So my new book, Digital Humanitarians, explores some of the most promising emerging humanitarian technologies, including the current use of UAVs. Now the primer itself specifically focuses on the use of UAVs for data collection. And so what I'm going to be doing is keeping that particular focus in my presentation. I want to extend it to the payload delivery use cases or communication services, but I am actively exploring these and other use cases in the humanitarian context and we're gonna be hearing from my other fellow panelists on some of these other use cases as well. It's very slow here. So this is the very first high resolution aerial image of a major disaster taken all the way back in 1906 after the earthquake in San Francisco and it was done using a camera that weighed 49 pounds and was hosted up to about 2,000 feet with a combination of kites. So that was about 100 or so years ago and this is today in Haiti where the best pilots of the Caribbean have been using UAVs for disaster risk reduction and disaster response. In fact, these pilots here, I'm not sure the video is playing or not, should be playing, should not be playing, is not playing. I guess none of the videos are gonna work. That's a shame. These UAV pilots actually come from Cité Soleil, which was mentioned as sort of the red zone in Port-au-Prince. And what they've been doing is using UAVs in response to a number of hazards and in fact, Hurricane Sandy, which went right through Haiti on its way north to the East Coast and so on. And what they did within 24 hours, thanks to IOM, the International Organization for Migration, is to basically deploy these UAVs. This was done by a local team of Haitians and in collaboration with IOM and the government, La Protection Civile, were able to very rapidly do some initial disaster damage assessments and share that quite broadly. Aerial imagery was also used later on to put together these 3D point clouds for risk modeling and digital terrain models. This is of an area of valley called Rivière Grise, which is very prone to flooding, so doing this kind of risk modeling and analysis was also very key. And you can see here on the lower right, the coverage. Now this was two, three years ago, we can do this kind of 50 square kilometers in about three hours now, not six days. So the technology is certainly improving. Now moving to the Philippines, where a major high-end category five typhoon slammed into the Philippines in 2013. And again here we saw a number of UAVs used in response for different use cases from disaster damage assessment along the coastlines in Tacloban, which was one of the hardest hit areas to road clearance operations and also identifying displaced peoples. And what this allowed the Humanitarians to do is really accelerate their relief efforts and better target the provision of relief support and services as well as supplies. A couple of months after the typhoon, UAVs were also used in the recovery phase and with very strong local community engagement. So a group called MED-ER, a Swiss international humanitarian organization and partnership with drone adventurers used UAVs in Leyte and Tacloban to identify which families were falling behind in the reconstruction, providing them with extra support resources and also advocating on their behalf with regular government. And they also took the time to share imagery both in physical format and hard copy in digital form with local authorities like the mayor of Tacloban and local communities and what they did in this case, in the latter case, was go to a local banner shop and print out these very high resolution images on a rollable waterproof banner that would basically be a lot more durable in the field during future typhoons and rains and so on. However, during and in response to typhoon Haiyan, the vast majority of other UAV teams were not sharing any kind of aerial imagery with local authorities or local communities. The majority of them were not even plugged in to the formal international humanitarian efforts which meant that there was very little to no information sharing with humanitarian organizations. And frankly, most of these various UAV teams did not know about each other which presents not only a safety security issue but also just in terms of efficiency is not the right way to go about it. And when I Googled code of conduct, UAVs and disaster response while I was in Manila with the UN right after typhoon Haiyan, nothing came up. There was just, there was nothing on this. So I decided to launch the humanitarian UAV network or UAVators which seeks to promote the safe, coordinated and effective use of UAVs in a wide range of humanitarian settings. The advisory board of UAVators includes the United Nations, the World Bank, the Red Cross, the European Commission, 3D Robotics, DJI, Suns Fly and literally a dozen other experts in this area including a few who are here today, Kate Chapman, Timothy Royder, I think Tom Snitch was here also this morning. We've been actively promoting a code of conduct on the use of UAVs in humanitarian settings along with detailed best practices. And actually we just ran last week a three day policy forum on humanitarian UAVs that was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation where we bought 22 organizations together not only to revise the code of conduct but also to start developing new guidelines in four key areas namely data ethics so that the data management informed consent, data sharing and so on of aerial imagery. Number two is community engagement, social engagement and so on. Third was effective and principled partnerships between humanitarian organizations and UAV teams, UAV companies and operators. And the fourth was conflict sensitivity and the use of UAVs in conflict zones. So we had all the large humanitarian organizations, UN field-based organizations present. We had DPKO, a colonel from DPKO as well as a senior representative from the peacekeeping mission in the DRC that joined us and really contributed directly in developing some of these guidelines which I'm very excited to mention we've actually converged on which there was no guarantee. So we'll be doing a soft launch of these guidelines in coming weeks and this community, all of you here are gonna be integral in giving us feedback. This is really the first draft and it needs to be basically shopped around and get everybody else's input on this. The network also has this crowd-source crisis map. I'm not sure if the video is gonna work, it works. And disaster videos and pictures taken by UAVs from all around the world and the primary purpose of this crowd-source crisis map is to further promote the code of conduct especially to members of the public. So yes it could potentially raise situational, increase situational awareness but the primary motive behind this is to further expose best practices and the code of conduct. You'll find 50, 60 aerial videos and pictures of Kathmandu and Nepal post earthquake, for example. We've also offered the very first formal training on humanitarian UAV missions specifically geared towards established humanitarian organizations. So we had a number of UN agencies, we had the European Commission fact as well, take part in this three-day, 12-hour day intense hands-on humanitarian UAV training. We did this in partnership with the Aeronautics University of Vivas in Belgium. This was held just at the end of May. We'll be organizing a very similar three-day training, again specifically geared towards humanitarian organizations here in the US, most likely in Maryland this fall. And at the request of UAV companies, UAV operators will also be offering a dedicated course to those companies that are certainly experts in the technology but have little to no experience whatsoever in basically responding in international humanitarian disaster assistance, which has proven to be quite a problem in Nepal. And I might hint about this a bit more in the Q&A. Moving again forward and I'll get back into the operations and end with a case study, but UAV is a very strong local capacity building project. And just to give you one example, we've teamed up and partnered with Kathmandu Living Labs in Nepal. In fact, we did this last year, but we only just got funding now, ironically after the earthquake, to set up a local UAV Innovation Lab in Nepal with the expressed purpose of building local capacity within KLL and the University of Kathmandu so that you've got local expert UAV pilots who know how to operate, maintain, and also with the student connection and university connection, analyze the imagery. We're also including payload delivery and communication services in that innovation lab. Holding a first international humanitarian award to promote and really reward the appropriate use of this technology in humanitarian settings. I mentioned I wanted to go back to end with an operational example of UAVs in disaster situations. So this is basically in March 2015, a few months ago, the World Bank activated the humanitarian UAV network to basically launch a humanitarian UAV mission, asked me to basically identify appropriate UAV teams. We have a global roster of UAV pilots, more than 300 in several dozen countries. There were plenty from Australia and New Zealand. These were the two groups that we ended up contracting through the World Bank, and the mission was very, very specific, was to complement the bank's field-based surveys, disaster damage assessments on the ground, which a lot of every humanitarian organization does as a first response to a major disaster. But there are challenges with any kind of field-based assessments, and they are here, first of all, incredibly time consuming. It's very manual. It's really going door to door. Quality control is a nightmare. About 30% of the field-based surveys that were carried out in Vanuatu after Cyclone PAM were useless, and so it was really a means to try and triangulate and cross-reference. And then third, you've got limited perspective as you're going, the field-based surveyors are bound by the laws of gravity, and they don't take all the time they could to do this kind of assessment because they don't have the luxury. So the very key concrete focus was to basically carry out these aerial surveys of affected areas to identify fully damaged versus partially damaged houses. These are just a few pictures from the mission itself. The UAV assets that were at our disposal were primarily multi-rotors, quadcopters, as well as hexacopters. We had access to one fixed wing, but we were towards the end of the mission, so it was really multi-rotors that we made the most use of. We had a phenomenal and outstanding collaboration with the government of Vanuatu, enabling us to fly extended beyond line of sight, as well as phenomenal collaboration with air traffic control and the Australian Defense Force, which meant that we were able to operate not only in rural areas and disaster-affected areas in rural parts of Vanuatu and the outlying islands, but we were able to operate right in the capital in Portville because we had direct communication with air traffic control and we had set up standard operating procedures with the Australian Defense Force on how we would get flight permission. So this really very much proves that it is absolutely possible when appropriate mechanisms for coordination are in place to carry out humanitarian UAV emissions in non-segregated air spaces and complex air spaces. We did it for two weeks, not a single incident, and this is when you appreciate also working with professionals who know what they're doing. So these are just more pictures now. A couple more words on the data because ultimately in this case, that's what we're talking about. Aerial data is becoming a big data challenge and this was very clear in the response to Vanuatu because even though the World Bank had contracted us to collect this data, they were completely overwhelmed with other data and doing other data analytics tasks so they didn't have time right away to start analyzing the aerial imagery. So we collaborated and partnered instead with Humanitarian Open Street Map, Cristiano from OSM is here today who took the lead in doing this kind of analysis on the orthorectified nadir imagery which was very, very important to speed things up. But even more important are oblique images for the purposes of disaster damage assessments. They give you a lot more information. I'm out of time apparently so I'm gonna speed up. We sliced up the imagery and we crowdsourced it using a platform called MicroMappers which we've developed. It's a free and open source platform developed in partnership with the United Nations. We had hundreds of volunteers basically analyze about 6,000 high resolution aerial images in a matter of days. I will skip these are some of the initial results. We can go into the methods later. What we're also doing is developing platforms to analyze aerial video feeds, live feeds from disaster areas. This was an aerial video from Vanuatu but it took us a few days to analyze it. We didn't do it in real time. Now we're working with the University of Southampton to do real time using human computing and artificial intelligence and advanced computer vision techniques to do automated feature detection. But ultimately both these oblique images and the aerial videos present some major challenges in terms of geo-referencing. So we've got to actually forget 2D all together and move directly to 3D. This was a 3D point cloud of one of the villages that we surveyed in Vanuatu. It gives us a lot more to work with in terms of doing disaster damage assessment. And I'm out of time so I'm not going to speak to this but Nepal was a milestone as far as humanitarian UAV missions go. There's a lot more in my blog on iRevolutions.org where I've got a very long blog post on the early observations. I'll just say one thing that was an important precedent with Nepal. Namely that the United Nations publicly requested that all UAV teams in Nepal liaised directly with the humanitarian UAV network. So we were in fact at the end of the day liaising with 15 UAV teams over the course of four to five weeks after the earthquake, which really means it was the most coordinated UAV mission in response to a major disaster. But goodness knows some of the challenges. We need to really get our act together very quickly and that's what we're working on at the UAVators. But I'd love to talk to any of you who are interested in being part of the solution as well. I'm a lot more in my book on the humanitarian UAV side. Thank you. Thank you. So everyone, I'm Abby Weaver. I work for the Red Cross. I am based here in Washington and work for the American Red Cross. But I am gonna talk about what we're doing globally as my work extends beyond the borders here and in fact is mostly outside of the United States. This particular panel is really focused on disaster response, but I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge other areas of our mission and how we're applying UAV technology for the full disaster cycle. So we are also working on a number of different applications. Preparedness, recovery and development. Preparedness in particular, helping to identify risks before they become disasters and helping to mitigate them through our program decisions. And with recovery, we're also looking at health and community development and planning. The Red Cross approach to UAVs really started about two years ago with some fundamental research and has evolved into three work streams that I can briefly mention to you. I am really pleased at a message that I keep hearing throughout the day about community perception and community leadership. And normally we are one of the only organizations in conferences like this that are really championing this message. And I'm really pleased that we've tipped the scales and this has been a common theme here today. Because the first work stream is really about expanding community access management and ownership of this technology. International actors deploying UAVs is one model. But as we've heard from other people today, it is often not the most optimized, needs-based or sustainable approach. And so we have been working on a number of different initiatives to really put control into the communities and help build some capacity there. That work starts with some basic research around community perceptions. We've been spending a lot of time with communities around the world, mostly urban communities, but a range of different backgrounds and different levels of digital literacy to understand what are their attitudes, beliefs, questions and concerns about UAVs. And I'll give you some high level findings in just a second. And what we've been doing with that information is building a set of tools that will help industry improve the technology, improve the deployment strategies and overall be more needs-based or human centered in their work. We want to see a shift to more appropriate, accessible and affordable technologies. So the high level findings of this research really tell us that the humanitarian sector is very cautious about this technology or emerging technologies in general. And they often do it out of fear of exacerbating risk or vulnerability in these communities. But I think we're projecting a lot of that on these communities because when we actually talked with mothers and fathers and students and local business owners, they didn't share the same fears and concerns that the humanitarian community did. And what we found was a lot of optimism and enthusiasm and excitement about this technology and applications that we could have never dreamed up of that solve local problems and really address local priorities. And sometimes what the humanitarian community was thinking drones should be used for was mismatched with what the community thought they should be used for. We also really looked at where there were concerns because we didn't want to ignore that. What we saw were a lot of culturally driven and religiously driven fears. There's a, I wouldn't say common, I don't want to generalize this, but there was a theme about technology that's overhead, over your physical head is more threatening than those that you can see or which is below you. It's sort of a psychological thing. There was also a prejudice or a fear in communities that or post-conflict communities where drones had been weaponized. That's very natural and understandable. And what we found was that there was also fear and apprehension where there was a prevalence of access to popular media. We found a lot of concerns in communities where they had been exposed to entertainment or the ways that drones have been portrayed in media. So those who have access to film or television had a biased or skewed perception about what that technology could actually do. We had fascinating discussions in a slum in Nairobi about drones sort of taking over and who's your master. We had these whole dialogues and naturally the entertainment industry can exaggerate what these tools can do far more than what they are actually technologically capable of doing, but the community wasn't able to decipher that. They didn't have that technical expertise. Some other findings that we found were that we asked questions about does it matter the type of drone? Does it matter the sound? Does it matter the branding? Does it matter the size? And those things were really minor elements to their attitudes and perceptions. What was really important, regardless of all those decisions, is that they were notified and had a role in the decision-making about when those flights took place and where they took place and what that mission was all about. So we have been spending a lot of time with communities thinking about citizen committees and their role in decision-making and information dissemination, particularly honing in on the benefit. Right now the communities we spoke to don't feel connected to the benefit that humanitarians are deriving from UAVs. They feel like there's a flight that goes over the community and all the information is sort of sent to a database or a headquarters elsewhere and they don't ever see any of the results of that activity. And so trying to connect back that data to their issues, their priorities has been something that we've been really focusing on. And we've been building tools that will help industry and others facilitate these conversations, facilitate this research and then support the outcomes of that. We have been working directly with manufacturers of several different companies on this for a little over a year. The second work stream, so that was work stream number one. The second work stream where the Red Cross is really investing a lot of time in resources is related to the work that Patrick is leading and that is really defining and incentivizing good practices and shaping the systems and policies to support that. We've been weighing in a lot of regulations here in the United States, the Netherlands where these policy debates are moving forward and really trying to balance the rights of survivors with the aspirations of helpers. And as I said before, those are not always aligned. So trying to find the balance of advocating for our organizations and our peers but truly remembering why we're doing this and it is for the communities affected by disaster. We've been working in both over-regulated environments and under-regulated environments and there's freedoms in both of those. We've also been contributing to the Code of Conduct Development and the training. In particular, the Red Cross has a lot of expertise in international humanitarian law in conflict settings and protecting vulnerable communities, maintaining some neutrality and impartiality. And so one of our recommendations around the training is that international humanitarian law be a modular component of that training, especially for operators who might be working in border settings or flying across borders or even just with refugee or vulnerable marginalized communities. One other thing I will say, particularly around coordination, which falls into this bucket, is that this may be obvious but we all don't need to fly. And we have been spending a lot of time at the Red Cross really thinking through where do we need to fly? Where can we fly? And then where can we actually leverage the partnerships that we're building in this room and outside of this room to share data? Patrick sort of alluded to with Nepal, we made a conscious decision not to fly there because there was such a saturation of people flying and collecting information and what can happen in a disaster situation where the community is already fractured, already vulnerable, is that we can completely overwhelm them, add to their vulnerability, slow the recovery process when you have a million organizations coming to the government and coming to the community asking for the same permissions and same exemptions and it puts a lot of stress and strain on those communities. So in the United States, our immediate strategy is that we are gonna work with insurance companies and the public sector to leverage the data that they are collecting to make our assessments for our situational awareness and decision making. And that is just a much smarter decision than putting an additional vehicle up into the air. And it adds a new complexity to emergency management planning. We have to think about what our roles are in those plans. It's not just about who's bringing the shelter supplies and who's bringing the water. We have to think about who's flying and who's processing the data and who owns that data. It's a whole other chapter to a very long set of emergency plans. The third work stream is the exciting stuff which is around the actual demonstrations. Where are we flying? So we are doing a number of different experiments around the world to demonstrate different use cases. Just quickly I will say we have flown in Indonesia. One example there is that we wanted to mark progress from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to today. So as you know the landscape changed dramatically after that disaster and with the development and the recovery work that was done in those 13, 14 countries. So we were able to partner with several organizations to capture the imagery, to document that progress and see where there were gaps and opportunities for more investment. We are also working in Peru. Peru is like the most popular country. This example we are working with local community members to take trash, plastic bags and stitch them together to form balloons that will assess weather data and help with some of our climate mitigation and adaptation. In the Netherlands we are piloting another use case. There are a lot of fitness freaks there and a lot of marathons, a very healthy country. We are going to be monitoring some of the large sporting events to identify injuries sooner. Dispatch emergency responders to those locations and to transport critical first aid supplies directly to that incident. So we're mixing a lot of different applications there. One of the most exciting demonstrations that we're doing is in Ireland and this is where we're using a swarm of UAVs to help temporarily restore communications networks both Wi-Fi and mobile through a mesh network. And Ireland seems like a very strange place to do that because it's not very disaster prone but there are recurrent floods there and we want to address a really chronic issue. We also have a number of weather challenges that will give us some really good evidence that we can take to other communities. And the swarm itself, we're gonna be looking at how we have a suspended vehicle as well as vehicles that are posed on top of rooftops. So we're trying a couple different things there. So in conclusion, I am over time but I just wanna say, as Patrick said, there are many challenges that you all illustrated here today and that we'll talk more about in the Q&A but one of the greatest challenges to humanitarian UAV applications is really around mindset. We are learning a ton with all of these demonstrations but disasters are happening more frequently and we are not processing and adapting those lessons learned quick enough. In the Philippines, we learned a ton and we repeated those mistakes in Nepal and so what I would love to do is to see that learning speed up and that as we go into new disaster scenarios that we can rapidly apply those and actually have some progress. And then also that we don't go it alone. I think that right now we don't have enough incentives to work together and in partnership and we're duplicating a lot of efforts and the one area where strict government regulations really helps is that the governments are forcing us to collaborate because there are not a lot of exemptions to go around in a disaster. So that has been one area of benefit for us in this adventure or this journey to explore the humanitarian use of UAVs. Thank you. Hi, I know we're short on time. I think I have another tall friend here who had trouble using the mic. My name is CJ Guinness. I'm from New York. I'm part of a company called Unity Development Group. We develop infrastructure and new private equity in emerging markets where we see potential to transform lives as well as have good investments. It's giving you an example of one of our major projects. We're trying to build a railroad across East Africa. Why? Landlocked nations don't have market access. Very expensive to get things in and out. Keeps people in poverty. We want to see economic development happen. One of the things that has kept people in poverty for a very long time and that we're seeing change in Africa, for instance, is one example is the lack of infrastructure. Finally, we're catching onto the fact that infrastructure changes lives, whether it's ports or railroads or whatever. In this instance, drone infrastructure will change lives and it's a natural extension of the existing infrastructure that we're seeing developed. We're an institutional sponsor of a company called Redline, which is being launched currently spearheaded and chaired by a gentleman named Jonathan Ledgard out of the University of Lausanne. And Redline's mission is to pioneer effective cargo logistics for the off-grid world, including in disaster response situations. Our goal is to advance the technology of both the software and the hardware to a point where we can carry heavier payloads over longer distances at high repetition. Second of all, we want to develop drone ports, drone infrastructure to receive and send off cargo. Third of all, we want to integrate with existing logistics systems around the world. Logistics is a massive problem and it's one of the most important solutions. If you look at the Red Cross, it's effectively a logistics organization. If you look at my friend Scott over here in Ironman from the Army, the Army is effectively a logistics organization. And if you want to help people in poverty or if we want to help change things in disaster situations, we need good logistics. And we believe at Redline that drone logistics are the key to doing that. If you look at natural disasters or some of the disasters that have been referenced, what we're seeing is disintegrity. The system is breaking down. Typical logistics are breaking down. Road infrastructure, bridge infrastructure, port infrastructure is breaking down. And sometimes it's very difficult to get response to the people who need it. And so I believe that drone effective cargo logistics using UAV will be a response. In the very short term, as you know, currently we're only able to carry very small payloads. But that's gonna change. And one of our aspirations is to radically increase the payload size that we can deliver for a low enough cost where there's a product market fit, both for disaster scenarios and for emerging markets. But even now with small payloads, you can carry small high value payloads. In the case of off-grid communities today, we can carry medical necessities. So in the case of the Red Cross, we can carry both medicine and blood transfusions to medical clinics, to people who need it. We can also carry economic necessities, solar panels, computing equipment, mobile equipment and things that can change lives. Much further down the road, we see the development of effective markets like we see with Amazon and Google in the United States. Amazon and Google, Tim back here, these guys are focusing on last mile logistics for the developed world. We're focused on middle mile logistics for the world that is not yet developed. But we think we see in the very near future in the next five to 10 years, the development of an Amazon like market in the emerging market and frontier market world where people through their mobile devices will be able to order the products which they can afford and which they need and they'll be able to receive them through drone logistics. And we hope the same will be true for disaster response that whatever the immediate solutions are, whether it's medical aid, food aid or other products for building materials, they will be able to ship those and get them to the people who need them in an effective manner. My encouragement today to you in this audience, there's a number of foundations and this area is such an important area for foundations. It's an industry which is emerging. It's an entire market that's emerging. It's a solution that's developing and foundations and nonprofit capital have a huge role to play just as the government has played in the development of the internet which my friends got mentioned earlier to take on risky investments at this time prior to them meriting private capital. And so there are some things where the technology is not yet developed. There's some aspects where the infrastructure and the logistics is not yet developed. Obviously the regulations are something that we've talked about today which really merit foundation capital because they don't yet merit private sector capital. The areas that merit private sector capital are receiving a lot of investment and they'll continue to do so. But I wanna encourage you at foundations and people who are more philanthropically minded, infrastructure is an incredible place to invest where you'll change lives. Thank you. Great, so I'll try and knit some of this together but one thing I've heard from each of you is the promise but also the challenge of using this technology in disaster zones or in unimproved areas. And one thing there really has been a real revolution in aviation in terms of the affordability and capabilities that drones provide. At the same time that affordability for humanitarian organizations that makes it possible for them to fly aviation assets that in the past only national governments or the military would be able to. That same capability can now be purchased and operated by just regular folks. And so when you come to a disaster zone and we saw this in Nepal, you've already made some mention of this. I can very much foresee the next disaster zone. Not only will there be a number of humanitarian groups coming in with their own drone assets, pilots but it'll be very simple for people who live there, people who are from that country to have their own as well and that's gonna be, I can only imagine this happening in the United States where Hurricane Sandy went up and down the East Coast a few years ago. Imagine if that happened now, how many people civilians would be out there flying their own. And trying to bring some order out of that is gonna be real challenging. I'd like to hear from you all, not only suggestions or ideas on how to bring some order and coordination among humanitarian organizations but just in general with governments, with militaries and with civilians. Anybody care to start off with that? Sure. How much time do we have? Yeah. So disaster tourists have always been an issue in humanitarian settings. This is nothing new. Now of course they're coming up and showing up with quadcopters they bought last week which certainly is a problem. But I wouldn't say they were the major issue in Nepal. I mean a number of individuals did get in touch with the humanitarian European network. Now we've got a sense of how much experience they had and if they really did not have that much experience we would say thank you very much, please stay on standby. And for the most part they were excited to stay on standby, right? The biggest issue, one of the biggest issues that we faced was more private sector companies who are again experts at the technology and but zero experience in humanitarian response. And unfortunately I think they are assumption that the fact that they were experts in the technology kind of I think made them assume that they were going to be experts in disaster response as well. And that didn't go down very well. And a number of them got arrested. About 16 UAVs were confiscated and rightly so. A number of UAV companies decided that the fact that there was no regulations gave them a carte blanche to basically do everything they want. A rather poor judgment if you ask me. And there was only so much we could do in terms of promoting the code of conduct. The good news now is despite all the fiasco and the circus of the response to Nepal, a number of humanitarian organizations realize the gap that exists in coordinating that and have asked us to start filling that gap and proposing standard operating procedures and so on. So we'll get there but coordination regardless of UAVs is a single biggest challenge in disaster response and has been for decades. So this is not going to be solved overnight but the good news is that we're taking the first few steps and even though the evidence end with this, even though the evidence base for the added value of UAVs in humanitarian settings is still necessarily thin, it's a new emerging technologies, the fact that we were able to spend three days last week with leading humanitarian organizations and UAV experts to create and develop those guidelines now to inform the safe coordinated and effective use of UAVs I think is to be applauded. I think the humanitarian community is not missing the boat on the humanitarian UAV side as they did with the mobile technology revolution 10 years ago. Well Abby, the Red Cross is a lead player in these scenarios. Since from your discussion that it's been cautious about trying to lay down the rules or take an active role in operating its own to what degree has it been thinking about this internally about who is going to coordinate this, who's going to be in some ways sort of crying out for a lead agency when the government can't step in. Yeah, I would say we've been pretty progressive. I mean, I think that we see an opportunity, we just wanna be smart and efficient about it. I think just because it's new doesn't mean it is better, faster or cheaper. And it doesn't mean that it brings value to the communities that we're trying to help. So we've been really trying to hone in on what do the communities need and what are their priorities. But in terms of coordination, I will just liken this to the bar to help is lower than ever. And that is not just with drones. We see with digital volunteerism and others, there's lots of ways for people to get involved in a disaster response. And some of it is helpful and some of it is less helpful. And it just takes persistence and constant education with the general public. I mean, I think back to hurricanes from the 80s when we were bombarded with landfills worth of clothing that people donated from their homes because they wanna help. And over the last few decades, we've been able to transform and transfer or channel that compassion into more meaningful ways to help in a disaster. And it's a process. I think people want to do what they can do and money's always a barrier. So they look in their closets or they look in their hobbies or they look in their expertise to help. And what we need to do is just find a menu of opportunities for people to help. And I think as Patrick was saying that some of it lies in preparedness is that engaging these hobbyists and engaging the activists and engaging the disaster tourists before disasters happen, engaging them as coordinated volunteers. We have a professional volunteer network where they can get trained in advance. They can plug into our system. They can learn about codes of conduct and principles. And then when the disaster helps, they can apply those skills in a really helpful way. And so in terms of coordination, I think it's plugging into institutions that have this expertise. And our job is to go out there and find those people and bring them into our organization before the disaster happens. One more question then I'll open it up to the floor. But for CJ, you were really talking about delivery of cargo and payloads. And up till now, I think we've been talking mostly about drones as flying cameras and sensors, but there's certainly in the longer term, seems like there's enormous potential for delivery of needed goods in conflict zones or in disaster areas. Can you comment a little bit on what you see as that long-term potential? How far out are we from on a consistent basis being able to use or deploy drones to deliver medicine, food, other really urgently needed items in a disaster zone that up till now we've had to do with either manned flight or on the ground? That's a great question. The answer is nobody knows. Right now, people are conducting flights to deliver medicine and other high-value small packages in places like Africa. But it's not happening at scale. It's not happening with integration with existing logistics. I think in the next three years, we will see payload capacity rise above 100 pounds. And I think we'll see distances lengthen as well. What needs to happen is that we need to develop infrastructure. So we need to develop physical drone ports and drone ports that are located in places where there's market demand. Possibly we need mobile drone ports that can go into disaster response situations where they've been wiped out. We really need all of our logistics providers who are out there who are already interested in the subject to look at the off-grid world because the logistics that are being developed now that Tim's working on for San Diego are very different from what's required in Africa, both from a technical and physical standpoint from a price point standpoint. But I think in a very short amount of time, I think in three years, our goal is that in three years we will develop the technology to carry payloads of 100 pounds over distances of at least 120 kilometers. Our goal is that we will have developed drone port infrastructure that works to receive and send drones carrying payloads at a high rate of repetition where obviously UAV have a meaningful, competitive advantage over manned aircraft. Third of all, I wanna have integrated with existing logistics companies in terms of a system where we can receive packages that are sent from anywhere in the world through existing cargo infrastructure in emerging markets like we're serving in Africa. And our hope is to develop a regulatory model. In Africa, generally, you have a virgin regulatory environment when it comes to UAV. And you have a huge human need. And so there's a good opportunity there to develop very simple regulations like we have in Switzerland, where UAV logistics are actually feasible. Now we've seen things shut down in a place like Kenya in reaction to tourism, which is very understandable. But our hope is that within three years we will have a scalable model. There's huge market demand up there. And our hope is that in three years we'll have a big model that we can then blow out. So I think in the next five to 10 years, we will see a meaningful cargo logistics UAV industry develop not only in the United States if regulations end up prohibiting it, but also permitting it, but also in emerging markets. We have a couple of minutes for questions. People could stand up, identify themselves and ask a nice pithy question, please. We'll start with this gentleman then the gentleman in the back, please. Hi, I'm Robert and I'm with Practical Action. A question that I have about this is, a lot of times we talk about humanitarian response, but there's also this equal partner with that that's a kind of disastrous reduction working on building back better, things like that. I was wondering if you could- Building back. Building back better. Basically you can, if you invest beforehand, you'll save more money than what you would ever put out for an actual disaster. So I was wondering if there's been any work that's been done that uses drones for that kind of work. And if you know of anything that's like that and what's been done in that space. Yeah, I can just give a couple examples. In South Africa, there has been some work looking at urban settlements and particularly looking at flood drainage and making some, seeing where there's blockages and seeing where that can be cleared so that we can actually mitigate the disaster in advance. There's also in those same communities, looking at where pathways and these really dense labyrinths where roads or pathways are blocked so that ambulances and evacuations can take place efficiently in an emergency. That's just one example that I can share with you that I hope to see the sort of preparedness and risk reduction use cases increase. So I mentioned there's Haiti. I mentioned that program with IOM. World Bank in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania flew a number of fixed-wing UAVs in March for disaster risk reduction regarding the massive flooding that happens in Dar es Salaam. There's a project in Jakarta that's also focused on disaster risk reduction and the Pacific with the World Bank. It's a resilience UAV program for looking at climate change and disaster preparedness and so on. So there's quite a bit. Sir? I'm Peter Humphrey. I'm a former diplomat and current intel analyst. I'm wondering if there's any sort of identification of friend or foe chip, a little lightweight transponder or beacon that could be put on these drones. I'm imagining a situation in which you have six or seven drones from six or seven agencies flying over Kathmandu and a forward air controller can't see any of it. And the Fairfax Rescue Team comes in and they would love to have an overview of a collapsing building. And there's already six birds in the air but there's no forward air controller and he can't see the drones because there's no IFF chip. Is there any sort of development in all of those lines in the technology? That's a great question. I think also maybe there's, one of them crashes or gets lost there may not be a identification number on there too. Anybody have any thoughts on that? Patrick what did you find in Nepal? So this was also a conversation that happened last week at the forum. So I think we're definitely headed towards that and technology is certainly part of the solution in terms of coordination. But if you simply have already teams sharing with you their flight plans, where they're flying, when they're flying and so on, you already have clarity. You already have some situational awareness. There was also a suggestion by a large humanitarian, a UN humanitarian organization last week that yes indeed if you're going to fly in an disaster area you basically added a dedicated transponder to your UAV and yes we were talking about also markings, signs and so on under UAVs as well. I just don't want to start with the technology. I want to start with developing the actual processes and workflows around the coordination and then we see what kind of technologies, smartphone, transponders, sensors we can use to improve the use of those processes. And who would those flight plans be shared with? In the case of Nepal, those 15 UAV teams that were liaising with us, not all of them I should mention shared their flight plans. But that was the whole idea is that they were sharing imagery, flight plans and then we were getting humanitarian organizations asking for specific areas in terms of the imagery that they needed and we basically served as a liaison role between humanitarian organizations and UAV teams for the information. And what about that information with civil aviation authorities or military? What about sir? Well, I mean if you're flying, you've asked or tasked. Yeah, so that's what I mentioned in Vanuatu. So those standard operating procedures, you- Right, it's only got worked well there. What about in Nepal? Nepal, no. Didn't work, okay. No. Okay, time for one last question. Any others? Okay, hearing none, I'll declare this a successful wrap up. Thanks very much everyone for your time. Thank you. I learned a lot. Thank you.