 Right afternoon folks. Ted Ralston and our fantastic staff and crew on our show where the drone leads at the Think Tech Studios downtown Honolulu today. Welcome on board Dr. Song Choi, assistant dean in Department of Engineering. Sounds good. And sounds good. Is it a different title these days? That's pretty close. No different title. Same song, Choi. Same title. Same school. All right, so that's pretty cool song. So anyway, you've been on this show half a dozen times. We've talked about technology and education and stem and drones and all those things. We have one of your proteges online, standing by in Las Vegas. Chuck DeVaney. Hey Chuck. There he is. Hey guys. Now you could have done a better job on these cosmetics, I suspect, but that's what we get. Hi Chuck. In fact, this is a really auspicious week, if I can suggest, because it was at the Paycom S&T conference about five years ago where I first met you. And you had the UH display there. UH had a big UAV display with Dave Hummer and some other guys with some Boeing sponsored products. I met Chuck shortly after that through the work he was doing, looking for drones for work in coastal geology and such. And then that led us to tie all together and that led to... We had a panel session. We had a panel session that had exactly what we tried. And then one thing led to the other and we're back here again, all three of us, at the same place this started five years later. That was about five years ago already. We should put a good shout out to Jay Fidel, who really is an energetic guy here making a lot of this happen. And Jay, if you're out there, join us on the paddle. Maybe he'll walk in. He owns a place, he ought to walk in. Anyway, so Chuck, you're kind of working your way back to Hawaii slowly but surely here, starting out in Hawaii, moving to DC, partway back, standing in Vegas for a while until certain things happen. And then he'll be moving out, moving along in other directions, I suspect. But Chuck, what's it like in terms of what you've been able to see for yourself at this point in time and the world of UAVs as you see it in Vegas? Well, I see a lot of opportunity here for a lot of reasons. There's a lot of activity here. We have the US test site that's happening here and I've reached out to those folks. We see a lot of movement in the FPV world. We see a lot of movement in the hobbyist community and we also see a lot of movement in the cinematography world. I also just north of here at the Air Force Base, they have a lot of their Department of Defense type UAS as well. So I am still kind of in the process of reaching out and forming those relationships with those people between here and Reno as well. That's great. And so Chuck's only been on the ground two weeks in Las Vegas and he's already got a complete inventory and a portfolio going on. Very good. What's out there, but what's interesting is what I mentioned, video and film and such. I mean, Las Vegas is entertainment. And the fact that UAS is a participant or could be a big participant in the entertainment business either in creating films or in creating light shows and all this sort of thing. It's a really interesting level of difference in entertainment. And Chuck, Las Vegas is where that's all happening. So maybe it is... Some of it. Yeah, definitely, Ted. So I'm working with a new company now called Quadrocopter. They've done very, very well in the cinematography world and we are going to be moving into the geospatial realm and data realm, which is going to be more of my responsibility. But they also do retail for DJI products and free fly products and Moby products. If you're a cinematographer buff or a cinematography type that is using UAS, you're probably definitely going to know of these guys. So I got to give... I got to plug them in because they're giving me a home. So... Oh, that's all right. Absolutely. Anybody on this show? We're totally open to promotion of anything. That's great. But don't get too far stuck in these things. We haven't even told you about it yet, but we have a proposal we're putting in pretty soon at UAS in about three weeks. And I think we need you on the team, Chuck, even though you're remote. So I'll tell you about that offline here. Okay. Is that the EBSCORE thing? It would be the EBSCORE thing. Yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah, let me know how we can support that. Yep. Okay, we'll do that. Well, we need an integration guy. We need to take care of sensor integration, payload integration, flight systems, and not so much at the beginning of the proposal, but more at the end when we introduce some different flight management and guidance techniques. So we're probably going to use an Instant Eye as the framework. We can get the academic version that has the ability to put in our own software and still retain the basic software as a failure case. So that's what we're talking about. And this is a kind of a neat opportunity. So... Totally. And actually it would be good, really great having Chuck as part of that, because you will have the insight and the perceptions from your new environment, which will inform us through Chuck's eyes on how that's all working. You know, I was out at Best Buy today because I had to look for something. And I was actually surprised that they had at least a dozen quad copters that were for sale from anywhere from a range of like $1,000 to as low as like, you know, $100 or so. And I also remember when I was all over Asia at the international duty free shops, they had quad copters everywhere. So, you know, definitely this has become a normal life and you can grab it any way you want. You know, that's really interesting. And then because that brings to mind the issue of Moore's law and the fact that these things, which were, you know, 20,000 bucks five years ago are now about 50 at the counter. And so they're dropping in price, increasing capability, actually increasing in reliability as well as you move forward here. But it also brings up the issue of the this proliferation and the fact that we're not educating people fast enough, I don't think in No, of course, that's a big issue because, you know, as with any technology, economics is going to drive how fast and quickly grows. If the price of one of these things costs less, you're going to have more people getting involved with playing with them and using them for whatever need that they have, you know, and here with the photography and all the tourism, it's obviously a plus that we have quad copters and they can take some very unique pictures when they're here. So what that brings up another point back to the issue, what we're going to do with Chuck, we'll give Chuck nine months or a year to be in Vegas. And we've got to harvest them and get them back here. And because that that whole issue of the entertainment industry and the tourism exactly as you mentioned, what is what you all about? It's about to look absolutely right. And we don't want to get behind that power curve. We want to be out in the front of that one, in terms of well thought through respectful programs. So we don't violate property rights and this sort of thing or not have permits and this sort of thing. But injecting this as an interactive aspect in tourism, we got to we got to get we got to get our arms around that. Oh, no, of course. I mean, you know, any technology is like a new flower that comes up, right? And the stem is the engineering and we're always the implementing and applying the knowledge is learned in the sciences and mathematics. We obviously have to be creative about what we do, right? And the more creative we are, the better we're going to be able to harness and utilize these technologies of the flower. And whether it be a yellow flower today or a red flower tomorrow, as long as like you said, we're ahead the curve. We are making those decisions instead of having them made for us because the technologies are driving us. I think we're okay. You know, and that brings up, sorry, another thing that we too many things coming up here once we can't track the conversations, which you can do is read the teleprompter and read the script. But you know, at the university, we deal with engineering a lot. We deal with coastal geology, we deal with folks in geography department and such. But we haven't I don't think we reached out to the hotel industry people at at UH. And there is some aspect of that. And or the end of business. Obviously, the business school and the travel industry management schools need to get involved sometime because a lot of these technologies are going to be in the forefront of what they do. And maybe these drones will be a way of optimizing some of their security aspects or safety aspects. And that'll just lead to a better experience when somebody's here. We can't we don't have control of the weather, but we can obviously control the other stuff that you know, and that and that leads to the thought that the tourists who come here are going to they've been other places as well. And other places aren't as regulated, perhaps in the domain of drones as we might be. So they might be expecting tourists might be expecting a higher level and a really professional level of a corporation injection inoculation of drones into our larger business scope, including tourism. So we got to get who can we talk to at UH to open that door and get them on the show here. Oh, well, I mean, we can always bring the deans of travel industry management as well as the business here. Okay. And I'm sure they would have their perspectives as to how the economy is driving more and more of these technologies into their industry sectors. Let's do that. And then we have we can feed that back to Chuck. Well, I think since Chuck is in Las Vegas, which is the city of hotels and entertainment, you guys, you might have a better perspective and see how the hotels there and the large resorts there have incorporate some of this technology. Well, the problem here, D Choi, is the airspace problem just, you know, to the south of the strip is the airport. So we're completely engulfed with Class B from, you know, 12,000 to the surface. So I can't imagine that there's probably a whole bunch going on or a whole bunch going on in the drone world here. I can imagine it could probably be used if the airspace wasn't quite a problem for some ISR for safety. Some of the ambulance, you know, first responder applications that that might exist. But you've also got a lot of people on the ground. You've got a lot of turbulent winds. You've got a lot of people that have been drinking a lot and parking a lot and up all night. And again, we're pretty much submerged in Class B. So if you were to use a DJI product, you would never even be able to arm it in Las Vegas. So you'd have to use something else. So I haven't seen a lot of it here yet. Plus there's a lot of tourist helicopters here, a lot of R-22s, a lot of R-44s, stuff like that. So I don't imagine that those guys are going to probably want to share too much of the airspace with guys, you know, pedaling their offerings using UAS. But a Waikiki might be a different animal altogether. You've got safety concerns. You've got people in the water. You can drop a life preserver to them. You can have a surveillance ISR component. You name it. And then of course the advertising and marketing as well. You know, to take that pretty picture for the brochure. And you don't have quite the airspace concerns, because I think we're still class G right in that area. But you got to stay 200 feet from everybody. You know, and the other side of the tourism aspect, beyond the just the physical plant protection and such, you're speaking of Chuck, is the actual tourist entertainment aspect, the involvement, the participatory. So as you speak, Las Vegas itself is within the five of McCarran Airport. But certainly outside of that, there is plenty of class G. And absolutely plenty of it. Plenty of there's a lot of Moas you got to be aware of as well. Push or active only when they're active, but active when they're active, which you got to pay attention to that. And you know, make sure you you know, you dot your eyes and cross your T's when you're when you're dealing with that. But there is there's I've actually already joined the Las Vegas Soaring Club. So I've been out there and I've met those guys and and seen a lot of talent, talented pilots out there as well. There's a lot of beautiful countryside that can be, you know, filmed and and I don't know what whatever you do with with the with that an advertisement for, you know, Red Rock Canyon, so on and so forth. But yeah, once you get outside of the what we're going to do is take our first break here and then come right back and talk about how we're going to take this tourism thing one step further. So the agreement you and I made to get the business and hotel industry deans together and talk about this. No, of course, I think that's a good idea. Aloha, everybody. My name is Mark Schlove. I'd like you to join me for my program Law Across the Sea on thinktechhawaii.com. Aloha. Aloha. My name is Justine Espiritu. This is my co-host Matthew Johnson. Every Thursday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech, we host the Hawaii Food and Farmers series. We like to bring in folks from the whole realm of the local food supply and agriculture, anyone working on these issues, any organization or individual that has plans or projects. What kind of people have we head on? We've had farmers, we've had chefs, we've had people from government, larger institutions, everyone who's working to help make Hawaii's local food system that much better. So you can see us every Thursday and join the conversation on Twitter and we hope to see you there. Ted Rawson and our team here on the Think Tech Studio table where the drone lead show, Dr. Song Choi. How you doing, Ted? Last time we talked to you, which is 15 minutes ago, you were assistant dean of engineering at UH. I'll stay that way. Still there, okay. Have you checked if the, have you called up the telephone information to see if that's still true? I'll go check. We have Chuck DeVady, a product of UH, standing by in Las Vegas. We're just talking really excited stuff about drones entering our economic streams here, which happened to be entertainment in both Las Vegas and tourism and entertainment in Hawaii. So, you know, one idea that did come up was replacing fireworks. Yeah, absolutely. With a swarm of drones that could do different type of patterns. I thought that was a really interesting idea, almost similar to the water light shows at Las Vegas in front of Bellagio. Sounds like an engineering challenge. I think it is. It's an engineering controls challenge. Absolutely, it's that. And in our case, it would have a weather tolerance aspect. That's right. It would have an orientation so that the imagery or whatever the graphics are can be projected at the ground. Right. And that also leads to search and rescue in some way. Oh, of course. So, once again, we have a need to get these other deans together and go work this thing out. Of course. You know, talking about this entertainment aspect, it really does lead to, like what you said, a search and rescue type stuff because swarming control and swarming of vehicles is obviously something we need to look at because you look at the animals, the way they migrate, the insects, the way they travel, and they look for things. It's all in some sort of a swarming pattern. And if we can have the right control aspects in having them feedback to one another or to, let's say, a mother or a king drone, then you have all the data that you need to do whatever you want. And you know what? What do we pay for those animals? The Buck 29D Triton maybe? They come with all that capability. That's right. And the sensors. And their fault tolerance built in. And a reasonably long life cycle. And fairly easy maintenance. Feed them some hay and they do their thing. That's it. I mean, the only shortcoming we have with any of these technological developments is what we run into. And that has to do with power, right? So whoever can come up with the endless power source is going to be like the cancer treatment for cancer, right? So it's the holy grail. And we're always looking for that. And you know maybe with Hawaii being one of the leaders in renewable energies and how we're trying to separate ourselves from much of the carbon-based fuels, maybe we're on the right track. How about our reduction in carbon base for entertainment and tourism? There you go. And a higher value entertainment in the process. There you go. In fact, Chuck in Vegas could type in the parameters of the show and run the entertainment show. That's right. And we could run the Las Vegas entertainment show. Of course. That would be interesting. Chuck, are you writing this stuff all down? This is your assignment list. All down and it all makes perfect sense to me. Of course. Remote control is the way to go, right? Yeah, remote control. Do everything from your own home. That's right. And the notion of swarming and who's in charge of the swarm and how decisions are made. That is a fascinating discussion that maybe some of our botany people would have some knowledge of. I agree. I agree. That would be, you know, if you think about it, the biggest form of flattery is emulation, right? So when we try to emulate how robots are getting closer and closer to human anatomy and human biology, human motions, and we're also looking at how robots can become closer to animal motions, there has to be something said. There must be some sort of perfection in that biological happening that we're constantly trying to emulate these. And maybe swarming is one of those things where birds and insects do it instinctively and we just have to figure out how that's done and try to see if we can get our programmers to work that out. So there's a state change there of some kind that we have to get into that different state. I don't know what that is. It's a transformation. It's not an axis transformation. It's not a common filter. It's something gigantically bigger than that. It's almost a complete modification of how things are done, I think. We're used to a base of rules and then when I think when you hit a certain state we instinctively go into another set of rules. And some of that we don't really know how it's done because I think we do it instinctively and we're trying to figure out how those connections take place and the whole concept of artificial intelligence rises from that. Maybe we'll come up with some solutions. Now this is really getting where we have to get to. How do we, because this defines the future of Hawaii's intellectual domain, which then sets salaries and that sets how much the government can tax us. So that the carrying cost for Hawaii gets better if we can start getting some of this functionality being extracted and defined and developed here. Of course, I mean, you know, with Chuck over at Las Vegas, I think one of the things that we need to take a look at is we see a lot of these drones or unmanned aerial vehicles and pretty much remote control. Maybe we need to figure out a way to have a little slap-on or modification add-on that makes it autonomous. And that would be a really interesting way to see how close we are to how things can operate on. We always talk about auto-drive cars and stuff like that. We have Tesla's and all the Google cars and all that. And we keep thinking it's far away, but if you look at the technology that we have, if we create the right structure, all those vehicles can be running on their own. It's the humans that are unpredictable because we go out there and we have a tendency of dodging left and we should always be dodging right. And that leads back to the issue of what is our basic GNP of Hawaii and that we don't have resources. We have sunshine. That's our resource and 365 days a year of it. We have warm water. Boeing, for example, started in Seattle because there was a high-end lumber company up there called Boeing that made when I had Citrus Bruce and that's what airplanes used to were made of. So that's how Boeing started where the resource was. Douglas started in Southern California where the resource was sunshine. You could work on airplanes outside all year long. So how do we take this really interesting issue of the compelling need to generate a viable tourist industry that isn't just getting a bus and go take a tour, but is something higher than that and is enhanced or is somehow made possible by the or is increased in capability somehow by drones and in participative as well as expressive. That would lead to an incredible state change in mathematics and in computation and we get away from these one-on-one to one-on- many engagements. That's right. I can't even think what that discipline is called that does that. Well you know like all disciplines now we've been calling some of them. I'll talk about engineering. We have mechanical engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering. I mean these disciplines have been around for decades, centuries. We ought to think about maybe the next 50 years from now those electrical engineers will not be electrical engineers. Those mechanical engineers will not be quite mechanical engineers. They're going to be something else. So I think we need to enhance and embrace those changes and see where we're going to be leading. When I was working a lot more with underwater vehicles, part of the entertainment thing we were looking at was going into regions that normally you would not be able to go with these vehicles. Maybe it's the same thing with these aerial vehicles. We're going to go to these vast oceans where we normally can't get to but we now have access to visualizing some of the beauty that's after. Who knows? Maybe a new sport can be brought together or an entertainment factor of some sort. So we got to get with our once again with our funny beans and see if they go along with us or are they trapped? So I think we need to contact the travel industry management, the business school. We might also have to start looking into some contacts in other states like California. Like Las Vegas. Las Vegas or California where entertainment industry is a little bit more developed where maybe we can tap on USC and say hey let's access your entertainment departments and see what we can do in terms of creating new entertainment. But these are in the worlds of not quite artificial intelligence but hybrid intelligence and this sort of thing and hybrid reality and augmented reality those are the kind of terms you speak about. Yeah I mean think about what virtual reality has done and computer graphics has done to the film industry. Even if we look back five years ago the computer graphics in films look like computer graphics. You look at computer graphics now and you look at some of these video games. I can't tell if those are computer graphics or real people. They look the same until you sit there and you go I don't think you could move like that. That's interesting because 35 years ago there was an advertisement on television for a particular brand of audio tape and it said can you tell the difference. That was audio right that was limited now we have the same thing in video you can't tell the reality. You cannot tell. I mean you look at some of the TVs these ultra high definition TVs and you go wow that's cleared and looking out the window. So these changes that we see technologically the engineering implementation of all our science and math and arts and the creativity that we generate is going beyond I think some of what our imagination was and now we're just we're trying to play catch up as to see where we can go. We have to play catch up with our imagination and find that new state that's exactly the way into it. That's exactly what it is. And that's the setup for a meeting I was just told about on Wednesday Bert Lum was telling me about unconference this year and I have to run a session at the unconference on that very issue and I'm inviting you. It's on a Saturday I think it's on April 1st or something like that. That's why. You sure? April 1st? Yeah. How about that? What a logical place to put it right? Yeah. And I was going to ask John Rand and Peter Quigley to if we can they're probably not even watching but we'll try to get him on that as well. I just saw him a couple days ago. Because we've got to figure out what how this all fits into the Hawaii economy. Oh of course. Of course. And we have to generate the educational system that gets the workforce development and then we also have to get the the production of software and such. We're not going to produce hardware. We know that. Maybe nano hardware or something. But we're not going to be producing conventional hardware here. Well I mean we have to always remember you know we're always told let's develop workforce. But if we develop workforce we have. Like Chuck we developed him and guess what he did. That's right. He skipped off to DC two years ago and now he's. Well that's because that's because the other part of what I want to say. We have to develop the work along with the workforce. Okay. You can't have one with the other. So you know if you don't if you don't want people to leave you have to have that work here that expectation that for the workforce that you develop and you know what whether it's through entertainment or tourism. We have to do something. And what's interesting is this big basic technology here which Chuck had a lot to do with introducing me to by the way has is one of those vectors into that new change into that new that new world that new view. Yeah. I mean I mean people should realize that one of the biggest industry here is the military. And next week we have Pacific Command Science and Technology. We started this show. All right. And everybody whoever has a time should drop by and take a look and see what type of technology is being brought here and see how something like a drone which a long time ago may even thought of it as a toy can fit into actual work space. Very interesting question. It won't take very long but we're talking right now about using this thing which is actually a Marine Corps standard product along with a sensor sets and a payload set such as this one which Chuck I don't know if you can see it there or not. But acting as a strobe beacon to take care of a man overboard situation on a submarine. And we'll be developing that theory in the next couple of days here. But that's what we have to get to here. And the Paycom S&T conference is at the Hilton. Is at Hilton next week. And people are the public's invited to come in and join the on especially on the exhibit side exhibit side. OK. So with that we'll we got ourselves entertained here pretty well. And we were talking about entertainment. We're talking about drones. We're talking about workforce development and work not just workforce development. We're talking about getting our expatriates like Chuck back. That's the main reason why I mean if we are developing people like Chuck who has all the capability and the knowledge it makes no sense for us to let them go all the way to DC and only be 40 percent of the way back to Hawaii. OK. You know we need to have him back. Chuck are you feeling guilty? You ought to be. I'm feeling pretty guilty right now. All right. Thanks. I'm feeling you.