 All right, well, welcome back to those of you who may have just joined us. Next up we have Paul Gardner-Steven talking about, well, his topic is from megalomania to prototype in four months, but they have read of the description that sort of reads from megalomania to more megalomania, but I'll let him explain about the serval project he's been working on. So thank you very much. Welcome, everybody. It's great to be here. And we'll just start with a little intro video to show some of what we've been up to. So just let me work the technology. Hello, computer. If they worked, we wouldn't have a job, would we? Anywhere at any time, that's the promise of a new mobile phone system that works in places where there's no reception. Australian researchers have developed the technology and say it could help save lives in a disaster. It's gone all out just to prove a point. Researchers from Flinders University have come to Silla's Outlook in the Arcarula wilderness in South Australia's far north. It's a breathtaking spot for many travellers who want to get away from the world and drop out of contact. Here at Arcarula, the nearest mobile phone coverage is probably 100 or 130 kilometres away. There are places that we're visiting today where, you know, we're in chasms and gorges where even a satellite phone, we actually have a lot of trouble. There's no problem for a system that doesn't need towers or satellites. Each phone is fitted with software that allows them to talk to each other. Hello Danny, can you hear me? It's an adaptation of wireless internet technology. But instead of transmitting data over radio waves, it transmits voice. Out here, conventional mobile phones are useless. But with this new system, it's easy to make a call. Hello Paul, how'd the test go? Hi Jason, yeah, the test had been 100% successful. So far, the system's range is limited to a few hundred metres that can be boosted with small transmitters. Researchers believe the system could eventually help in natural disasters or emergencies when communications go down. You could have a, you know, a Hercules or a similar aircraft overfly in the immediate hours after a disaster and drop perhaps a hundred or even a thousand of these units because again, they're very cheap and really provide a very effective telecommunications network. For now, they're happy they've been able to set up a connection where there was none. Jason Om, ABC News, Argarula. Okie dokie, let's jump back to the presentation. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment, but yeah. First, ads. I'll be talking about this project in two further talks. This afternoon I'll be talking about the actual technology that we're using because today I really want to, this morning I want to tell the story about how we went from not even having an idea to having an idea to kind of getting to this crazy place and convincing a university to pay several thousand dollars so I could charter a jet, fly to the outback and do a test with a media career that we could have done in the university car park. And the media as an alternative to conventional publication. And then the main talk they'll actually be doing is on Thursday where we'll actually be talking in more detail about kind of the big picture of its usability and then hopefully we'll have a big helium balloon outside somewhere at lunchtime and we'll actually demonstrate how the system could actually be used even here and now in Queensland and the other states with the flooding problem. So let's get underway. This is a very quick overview of what we've done and as I said this will be covered in more detail in the other presentations. We have mobile phones meshing, running Android and we actually can have phones connect to the 3G data network and to the mesh so that you can have mesh phones somewhere where there's no coverage maybe there should actually be some water here perhaps showing that it's got damp feet and we could actually re-establish communications in that dead area via a nearby cell which is actually still operating so clearly there's a whole pile of applications for this technology but really what I want to talk about is the process that we've gone through when I actually had this idea after the Haiti earthquake last year I was effectively an assistant min at Flinders University which meant that I had a day job which meant that I had one day a week if you like 20% time that I'd managed to get through the university to do research which was largely chewed up in paperwork and other things but I thought okay, it was a fantastic idea so how are we going to do it with no time, with no money and all of that kind of thing and my wife was pregnant and having bad morning sickness and it was not an ideal time to have no resources but I thought, no, this is an idea that can change the world and not just for disaster relief, you think of connecting the last 2 billion people if we can make meshing phones work so that these are already actually second hand phones off eBay but when they're third hand and we've finished with them or when you guys finish with your smartphones basically take them into a developing country and they are the phone network they can actually start enjoying the freedom of calls and of course it's all over VoIP so they actually have internet access potentially as well so I thought okay, how on earth am I going to fund all of this so I thought okay, I like my vintage computer collection I had a Commodore 65 prototype, one of about 50 in the world which I was very fortunate to get sold that for a surprising amount of money actually and also how many here in the university sector I presume reasonable number like as students and things as well who's ever tried to get a research grant out of a university or the government how much time and effort does it take compared to 6 minutes and getting a thousand dollars 6 days later if you're doing awesome work and have an awesome idea look up the Orgson Foundation and stick a grant in it will take 6 minutes and you might get a phone call from Boston 6 days later and if you can actually get the Boston they'll even give you a big check with a thousand dollars written on it so it's just good all around so decided okay, we're going to do this got a thousand dollars to actually buy the first few handsets and then basically I was working 80 hour weeks for 4 months with a research student I don't regret what we've achieved out of it but it was not a fun time fortunately as students hopefully you can actually have the luxury of working full time on these things to some degree but this is the reality of what's going on so we got close to having a working prototype of being able to do mesh calling we thought okay, how do we do this as I say there, do we publish respectively in a peer-reviewed journal and go the normal course of academia and maybe in 15 years time someone might read it and we might get a couple of citations and oh that's wonderful and good or do we want to change the world which meant dealing with that thing which is generally not well respected in universities but the most part which is to publish in the media and you've seen the two minute clip that came out of that and I've actually had a little bit of previous experience with publishing in the media as well and the simple line is actually that it works it depends on the outlet the ABC is probably better than some of the other stations for this kind of thing in terms of perceived credibility what was really interesting is that TV actually isn't the best if you want to get attention of the people who make decisions in a country go on the Radio National AM program and you'll get calls from the Defence Signals Directorate and all sorts of really interesting things because kind of think about what Spooks might care about what we're doing so I've got some academic publications as well but none of those have actually had any tangible good for what I've tried to do in research the media on the other hand has been great New Inventors is also a fantastic one to get on when I was filming with them with this project they were saying just kind of casually like 1.3 million people a week watch the New Inventors I suspect there are probably not many researchers in the world who actually end up with 1.3 million people reading their papers let alone actually paying attention for seven minutes while you get to actually say what you really care about the project rather than just explaining the weird things that the peer reviewer actually wanted you to explain so I'm encouraging you to think more broadly than the traditional approach to publication oh yes in universities academically the media oh no no no no terrible but the university's marketing departments media, oh very nice indeed when we did that trip to Arcarola at that point the university had contributed zero dollars to the research they had however contributed three thousand dollars to chartering a jet plane to fly to the outback and then another six hundred dollars came out of another bucket and a whole pile of things suddenly became easy because we were doing a marketing exercise marketing purse strings are much looser and the success criteria are beautifully vague this isn't to say that you go out to scam the media because you don't because it's actually it's a win-win situation for it to work but a successful media event is one that happens it's like saying that a successful publication is one that gets published rather than actually read cited and being in a decent journal and you could just sit there and print it out and then you're at home and glue it together and put it in the library and that would be deemed success in comparison that's how easy media is although there are some challenges in terms of thinking about how you actually get the media to engage cultural reference is actually a really good thing as well as obviously relevance so the previous work that I did was actually shoe phone no one had made a real working shoe phone before exactly and if I could get the jolly thing to you have to pair the shoes because there's a blue between the shoes because one's got the headset and the other's got the phone so my pair of shoes are refusing to pair at the moment so someone can have a go at that after but that whole Maxwell smart like immediately people know what a shoe phone is and so we put that out we put a university press release out about making a shoe phone and credibility we thought okay what possible academic well benefiting use can a shoe phone have because it was extensively very little although I did discover it is actually easier in many cases to wear a shoe phone than to be like digging through your pockets to get a phone out still remember there was one day that we had a completely unrelated media event at the university that I was kind of helping out in a technical role but I also had I think about half a dozen radio interviews to do on the shoe phone so I was literally wearing these things and well it's going about my day and it was actually it's really quick and easy to just you know they're non-laced you just slip it off you know unclip the thing pull the thing down and like Maxwell smart you know you're talking in no time at all and there's even one point where there was noise around and so I was like I was cowered in a corner by a door so I had to talk to someone on my shoe it was very fun certainly compared to writing drill journal papers it was immensely fun so yeah cultural reference if you can find a way to get it in there will help you enormously it's also why what we've done with the phones we've called the several bat phone because my strategy there is other people will think Batman and you know the phone under the cheese serving lid or perhaps someone will sue us because we're infringing a trademark and we'll happily change the name in that case and put another media release out saying that we've had to change our name because someone's being nasty to us about the project and we'll get more free media so if you think these things through in the convoluted way that you know that all publicity is good publicity there's a whole pile of really interesting things that you can do the other lovely thing is that the media won't do what journal peer reviewers do you know you put something together that you know actually has dealt with all of the risks and all the issues involved in a piece of work and then the you know the peer review comes in says oh you really you should run that on a you know an atom smasher in the CERN Institute to really prove that you know your program works reliably or whatever it is and you go where am I going to get 15 billion dollars to put an atom smasher in with the media they don't care you actually get to set the story so it's just I cannot speak too highly of using the media to your advantage I've even been on a current affairs show without actually being chased down corridors by cameras which is something that I'm strangely proud of and not at the same time so for serval the way that we looked at this we thought okay let's demonstrate the key thing calling from one mobile phone to another mobile phone with no supporting infrastructure and you know as I said we could have done this in the car park at the back of the university in fact I do on a regular basis to show other people but I thought okay to get the media to buy in a little bit of hyperbowl is actually quite good and look you know when you watch that video there's no question that you know we've kind of you know sneakily put SIM cards in the phones or done anything like that because you know you know he's in the outback he's wearing khaki it must be real so you know you can use that kind of theatre to great effect the funny thing is I haven't actually published a single paper on this project this is the closest that I've actually come to date to actually having a publication on it a completely unlisted unreferred whatever journal paper sorry conference paper but it doesn't matter once it was out on TV and once it was on AM radio no one doubts that we've done it no one can claim the academic space around this project from us because we can actually show on the public record that you know on July the 12th 2010 we were in the outback we had a film crew on a PC10 PC12 airplane that we charted and did all this fun stuff and there's not many other ways you get to charter an airplane and research work either unless you work in the right fields and so easily and on university money it was really good so we set this thing up and then talk to and get to know your university media relations people they are your allies because anything that they see has the potential to raise the university's profile in the public eye and get it out there they will tend to be very supportive so they can do the press releases and things that you can then use to send out to all your favorite high tech blogs and things I can't remember all the blogs that we got the shoe phone and the circle stuff out onto but we got some pretty high profile ones partly because we had the press release and then in due course if you play your cards right you can get a crazy title out of a university as well so I am Dr. Paul Gardner-Steven research fellow in rural remote and humanitarian telecommunications which it's great whenever I say that I feel like King Julian off of Madagascar where he is being introduced by the other limo with this blah blah blah blah blah at the end with this enormously long title but that title lends credibility in a way that nothing much else can again I have no publications in this area but the university has bestowed upon me a crown that means that I can talk to the federal government the state government NGOs that work in disaster relief and all sorts of things and the fact that I am at a university and that it is known and I had this wonderful title opens doors and the reality of course is that we have actually done very little work I mean winding back I mean to the shoe phone I made this as a prop for a church camp because I had like a get smart theme and I was on the organizing committee and they pointed at me and said you, you're an engineer we want props we want a shoe phone, we want a phone booth and people to disappear at the bottom of and we want a kind of silence and I had to sit there and go like no I'm not an engineer people call me an engineer officially I am an engineer because I teach engineering students now but the reality is I am a computer scientist or more to the point of mad scientist but they said okay fine I can do techy stuff so two weekends of mucking about a family friend who was a cobbler and we made a pair of shoes is a shoe phone that was all the work that was really involved and a couple of hours of sitting down thinking you could use these things for remote medical monitoring you could work out if someone falls over wearing one of these so that's what we wrote into this press release that was the full extent of the work that was we literally did nothing else it was like a hundred bucks for all of the bits and pieces to cash converters to the pawn shop to get second hand bluetooth and find a phone that could actually tolerate being walked on and it went around the world if you search for shoe phone those computers out there you should find me fairly readily there if you do the image search in google for shoe phone you'll find a crazy picture of me wearing probably the same khaki shirt and holding the phone next to my head and we ended up running a piece on it it was a very wacky time realshoefone.com you can have a look at all sorts of fun pictures there as well but you know sometimes the media doesn't come off and you shouldn't be disappointed with that either so I thought I'd arrange what was a fantastic stunt I wore these shoes from the time I stepped onto a plane in Adelaide airport until I got off the plane in San Francisco post 9-11 I'm wearing shoes that have got electronic and wires that could feasibly look like a bomb if you put it through a scanner it shows it's got lithium polymer energy storage in there and this is like only a year after that guy had been busted for having allegedly a bomb in his shoes but a little bit of careful planning I didn't go through any US security screening I purposely chose to go from Australia into the US and I thought surely the media somewhere will care, no they didn't maybe with a bit more effort or the right contacts and the right luck that would have worked better but you can do funky things if you look at the realshoefone.com she has a picture of me in a 747 holding the shoe phone to my head needless to say in flight mode in flight mode but getting back and I'm conscious that we're running out of time as well the real challenge of what we did was teeny tiny little bit of code lots of integration if you work at a university and you're kind of in software half of you guys probably have a number of these skills anyway try and get yourself some work experience with the local system in team and learn how to tame computers because once you can tame computers to do what you want you can do anything and indeed this project the programming part was less than three weeks but it was four months of grinding away with a student to help me to try and get everything working I mean, asterisk into a mobile phone Android has a really weird linker environment it's compiling stuff, what you do is assistive me SIPDroid, the SIP client for the phone was never designed to connect to a SIP server on the phone we tried it and we're like great this should all work fine, here's the work done for us and then SIPDroid says to me you don't have a data connection like I'll just loop back but it couldn't see a SIM card so it didn't want to do anything so being able to nut your way through these little challenges is really helpful in research and I think I've probably done most of that part already actually and that's probably all you want to say up front but if anyone has any questions about running a research program in a university in an atypical way probably the other thing I should actually say is that all of this media coverage so we got on the new inventors and that was very good the university then invited me to a they had a pitch day to basically say oh look how good we are at research and gave 20 researchers 3 minutes to pitch their research so I participated in that I then button-hold the right people in the university and 4 days later I had a 3 year research fellowship from the university none of this waiting 18 months with ARC and vagaries so you can actually get the things that you want out of a research career through this path as well questions so for the media stunt part of your several demonstration how certain were you that it was going to work at what point when I was on the plane in the morning flying up I was pretty certain it was going to work 48 hours prior to that we hadn't actually got it working yet that was one of the anecdotes I did actually forget to mention we had it all planned out there's a pilot in our department and he was going to fly us up in a little 4-seater Cessna it was going to take like 3-4 hours to get up to Arcarolla do some filming during the day with a little handy cam overnight job come back the next day and give the footage to the media and kind of work with it that way a few things happened the weather turned on us we only had one day in which to do it we thought the Cessna cannot get there and back in one day of visual flight rules in July 10 hours of daylight so that was when I had to buy one four and a half grand to charter a jet and this is what I'm saying marketing has much much much better economic parameters than research funding so we found a jet and we were sitting down there taking off and there was a distinct moment of dread in the plane thinking I've organised this plane full of 10 people and film crews and all that kind of thing but very exhilarating and very fun PC-12s take off in a really really short distance it's an interesting experience presenters want to swap around their laptops while we take more questions Paul I'd like to congratulate you on your out of the box thinking on getting your message out I'm not in the academic world now I am retired but I knew all about your project I've seen it on TV I've read it in the paper congratulations any other questions for Paul great we've got one down the front here why did you choose to go the academic path and not necessarily look for funding through a company we're doing that too I didn't mention it like I'm based at Flinders University but I also have several project Inc and I also have several project Petrage Limited and basically the university is for academic funding the Inc is for not-for-profit funding Petrage Limited is for commercial funding we are making the largest surface cross section for funding to land on that we can possibly arrange which that sorry was the university funding the first set of funding or did you have those the university provided the fellowship but it's been at our own cost to set up those companies and pursue various things we did actually get a very fortunately I spoke to the university and said this is going to change the world this is a potential to be a flagship project for the university and we actually got the IP Maya sorted out in a very interesting gentlemanly way I don't know how much of the IP but the university has made clear that I am authorised to use all of the IP to engage in these various ways to the global good because getting universities to quantify how little they own of something for it to be as little as you think they own is something that takes years so yeah you have to be shrewd because universities are afraid of losing so you need to offer them something much bigger than what they're afraid of losing right are there any further questions for Paul right well if that's everyone thank you Paul for your very entertaining talk