 Welcome to the AI For Good Global Summit 2018. I am delighted to be joined by Kevin Kajitani and Mr Akira Fukaburi. They are both ANA Avatar co-directors at ANA Holdings. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having us. So Kevin, we'll start with you. You both actually have a background in aeronautical engineering. So what's that to do with avatars? That's a question that we often get. If I may, I'd like to kind of talk about what an avatar is, first of all. We define an avatar as being a physical system that allows you to essentially teleport your consciousness, presence, and skills to anywhere in the world. So it's kind of a new form of transportation. It's not an avatar in a virtual space, but an avatar in a physical dimension. So the question we often get is, you know, why would an airline like ANA and an aerospace engineer like us pioneer a technology that allows people to travel without getting on an airplane? But we don't see avatars as being a competing technology. We see this as essentially an extension of the service that we've been providing all along, which is really connecting people and bridging the gaps of distance, time, and culture in the world. And when we kind of do the math, we realize that only about 6% of the world is traveling via airplanes. And as the only efficient providers of long distance connectivity, we believe that that's a huge market failure. And so we believe avatars will allow us to kind of break through that barrier and provide physical access to the remaining 94% of the world. And you are both founding partners of the X-Prize, and this very interesting project. What can you tell us, Akira, about the X-Prize for avatars? What's the project all about? Yeah, so X-Prize is a nonprofit organization based in the US, and they created global competition to drive innovation. So as an airline, it's really hard to create a really big disruption, like big innovation, because yeah, like many, like including us, all the airlines are struggling. So we knew that X-Prize is really professional for creating innovation using technology. So we kind of approached them, and we started really foundation partnership to work together to really create innovation. And then in 2016, X-Prize, they used to create their global competition, the X-Prize in house. They used to design in house, but in 2016, they opened up the design process to outside organization to design the next X-Prize. And Kevin and I, we competed in the very first X-Prize, prize design competition called Visioneers, and we competed against eight other global teams. So at that time, our theme was transportation, the big theme to create the prize. And at that time, our vision and vision is to really connect 7.5 billion people. But as Kevin mentioned, currently we only have 6% of the whole population actually traveling. So you need really a jump here. So our solution first was we came up with the idea of teleportation. Really. So we tried to create a teleportation prize, but we found out it will take for 100 years. It wasn't impossible, but still it will take a long period of time. So we kind of first back cast and come up with a telepresence, which we call avatar. So we teleport into a robot. Then we do communications or like we do tasks. And you can actually see and hear and touch. This is really important. So you have like 5G networks and you'll be able to log into the robot. And you can actually feel the heat and the softness and the harness as well. And by using this technology, you need a X-Prize. Because we do have the VR or AR technology, but those technologies are really developing independently. So there you need an X-Prize. So with X-Prize, we can converge these technologies into an avatar. So that's where we started. So now we launched the avatar X-Prize to create general purpose avatar, which anyone can log into that avatar and you can do multiple tasks. If you're a medical doctor, you can log in and you can do the surgery. If you're a teacher, you can teach children in different countries. And you can do that. You can travel to like 10 places in one hour. So Kevin, in order to deliver this vision, was AI the missing ingredient? It's one of the key ingredients. As Akira is mentioning, in order to create a general purpose avatar platform, it requires integrating multiple exponential technologies, one of which is artificial intelligence. And the ways in which we see AI playing a really important role in creating a general purpose avatar on multiple fold. For example, we see it as being a major ingredient in reducing the amount of data transfer that needs to happen because that's going to be a major bottleneck for latency issues, for example. Also, there are security and safety issues. And we believe that AI will help with kind of taking over in case of, you know, unexpected situations, if there's a loss of network connectivity, for example. And one other important relationship between avatars and AI that isn't often discussed is that essentially as people begin using these avatars to explore the world, to transfer their skills and experience the world, we begin to build this very rich, data rich database of human actions, communications, skills. And we'll be able to use that and feed those into the next generation of AI systems, which I believe will really accelerate our path to solving many of the, achieve many of the SDGs that we're trying to achieve through AI. So, Kera, to conclude with, why is it important for you and your organization to be here at the AI for Google Summit? Yes. So our really aim is to connect 7.5 billion people in new ways using avatars. So really the main goal is to tackle global agenda. Please imagine if you place one avatar in a remote village, that village will have access to every doctors or teachers or engineers. So we can use like 7.5 billion skills and resources to tackle global agenda. That's probably the first ever thing that we have, humanity have never experienced before. And to do that, we have to really work together with the UN and many organizations and many companies and many startups. That's the reason we came to attend this summit. And we really are looking forward to work together with a different kind of really organizations who have strong passion to make the world better place. Well, thank you very much to both of you. Thank you very much.