 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. We are live folks. It's Thursday afternoon at 12.02 p.m., Ted Ralston here in our downtown Think Tech studio overlooking Honolulu. Sitting next to me is Josh Levy. Josh, welcome aboard. Thanks, Ted. I'm on a recent hire at UH and you are now the coordinator. And systems analyst. Coordinator and systems analyst of unmanned air systems at the Applied Research Lab at UH. Congratulations and welcome on board again. In fact, we had you on last time by Skype and this time we got you in the studio. This sounds like you might actually be running this show at some point in time, right? Slowly keeping up. Let's get closer and closer. Yeah. And standing by on our East Coast studio, we have Mr. David Kovar of Kovar & Associates. There you are. Okay. And the sun hasn't quite set yet in New Hampshire, which is, I believe, where you are. There's some reflection coming in the window. So the entire United States is basking sunlight right now, including 2,500 miles of the Pacific Ocean separating us and the continent. Anyway, David, thanks for putting the time in at the end of the day here and coming on with us. Our show where the drone leads, where we talk about subjects of importance to the public, to our legislators, to our educators, and to our potential users of drones on manned air systems, remotely piloted aircraft, whatever you may want to call them. And it's really nice, David, to have people like you to come on our show because we're kind of isolated out here in the Pacific, as you know. And we need to connect in with the larger intellectual mass that's going forward here in drones, and you represent a big part of that. And we just came across you recently. But tell us about your operation, your involvement in drones, and what your company does, if you will. Absolutely. And first of all, thank you very much for inviting me to be on the show. I very much appreciate it. And also, it's very helpful to have perspectives from the other side of essentially the country and even across the Pacific. One of the things that we sometimes forget is that we sit in our own little bubble and forget that there are problems that other people are facing that we can help solve. I have two separate hats. So first of all, I'm the Advocacy Director for the National Association of Search and Rescue. And my primary job in that particular role is to work with emergency management, search and rescue, and other emergency services providers to determine how best to integrate UAS and associated systems into emergency response. The other thing that I do, I work on cyber security issues relating to UAVs, particularly UAV forensics, protection of UAVs, and how to integrate UAV into corporate efforts, but also into emergency management efforts. And the two of those actually overlap a lot, because one of the things that public agencies are finding out is that, yeah, these UAVs are phenomenal tools, but they're gathering a lot of data, and that data needs to be protected for their own purposes, but also for public policy purposes. That's an incredible span that you've got under your control and under your observation. How many people do you have working for you, David, in this enterprise? We only are a four-person company. We're getting a lot done with a very small number of people. One of the reasons we can do that is because what we really focus on doing is collaborating with other people and trying to benefit the entire community. For example, in search and rescue, David Merrick out of the Florida State University is one of the really key innovators in terms of using UAS for search and rescue, to facilitating what they're doing is incredibly powerful. Robin Murphy out of Texas A&M has been doing a lot with robotics, search and rescue, and how to combine those two disciplines. So working with her and empowering what she's doing is really powerful. On the cyber security side, one of the things that we try to do is publish a lot of our material and really give the information to the community so they can make some further use of it. And so opportunities such as this to be on your podcast, I'm sorry, webcast, I apologize, really help us get the word out, not only about what we're doing but about what can be done and help people understand that they don't necessarily need to depend on paid consultants to accomplish their goals either in the cyber security sector or in the emergency management sector. That using available information and by networking with each other and by collaborating with each other, we can all really benefit the community much more than if we were trying to accomplish this on our own or with a larger company. That's a pretty good model for us here, I think, that we talked about four guys but your network expands across the country. We think ourselves pretty much in the same way. Josh, you've been working on this for a couple of years. Yeah, exactly. I mean, as you said, our Grand UES program is just the two of us right now but we have this huge web of people throughout University of Hawaii and other places throughout the islands and back in the mainland too that we go to for support advice and exchange information. So it's really important to have that good core base but then reach out to other people that have different expertise. That's exactly right and that includes different equipment, different operations and such. And in fact, as we told you in email, David, we had like 80 people together last week, a week ago yesterday, representing all aspects of public safety in ways that I never would have imagined. We had the security people, the intelligence people, we had the people from the attorney's office and the marshal's office and such and all of our police, law enforcement, search and rescue, ocean safety, all together asking the kind of questions that you have some of the answers to in terms of procedures and policies and methods for going forward in a positive way. At the same time, understanding what the downsides might be that we have to make sure we have inspection systems in place to protect against. So I was really struck by what you're talking about here is very timely for us to work together. We have the legislation session coming up, most of us do, starting in January for most of our states and I think this is going to be a really interesting year because drones or droneism has arisen to the point where it is knocking on the door big time and our legislative systems have to address that, adopt that and find ways to protect and also to promote. So the timing is really exceptional. I'm glad we have Josh on board now. We can have two guys working this job, not just one, so that's half the size of your operation. By the way, we have one on the table here. We always make sure we have one of our little friends on the table so we don't lose sight of what we're talking about here. And but this also brings up the point that we do focus a lot. Media focuses so much on the vehicle itself and it doesn't really focus much at all on the other sides of it. On the talk about the, and look at work you do, Josh, for example, let David know about that because this whole area of how the utility is right there needs to be brought forth over and over again so people can understand what's going on. Talk about what you do. Right. Well, so I mean actually going back to what David was mentioning before in terms of, you know, so okay, so once you have the vehicle up in the air, that's a whole bunch of other rules and regulations, but once you're actually taking those photos and collecting that data, you know, all the important stuff is, you know, who gets to see that data, how you're processing that data, how you're storing that data. And that has this whole, you know, whole separate, you know, a bunch of problems in terms of the capacity to actually do those things, the rules and regulations as to who can actually, who is legally allowed to see this type of information, especially if it's being used in the emergency systems and that kind of stuff. So, you know, as David was saying, that's the biggest issue that we have right now that people are slowly starting to get excited about and getting stuff developed on. You know, and that needs to a point. I wonder if we could take our experience last week, David, where we I think have a pretty good idea of what the user mass needs in terms of enabling function to go forward. And we have an understanding of the technical sides and you have an understanding of the cyber aspects and of some of the operational aspects that would be the enabling steps forward. We could put together some kind of a checklist. This is, if you want to start down this path, here's where you need to start thinking. And here's where you need to start preparing the way. And at the end of the day, you go buy something like this. The wrong thing to do is go buy something like this and then try to figure out what to do with it. Have you been through that kind of a thinking process? I've seen a lot of different programs, emergency management and corporate, that went off and bought a drone and they said, okay, we're going to build our program up. We're going to start with this. And via one mechanism or another, they ran a foul of a policymaker or administrator or something like that. And that set their whole program back because now either the administrators that oversaw their program or the public perceive that somebody was trying to accomplish this backdoor deal using UAVs. And the public's already concerned about the inappropriate use of UAVs in certain cases. And so one of the things that we tend to really encourage emergency management organizations is to really be upfront about what you're trying to accomplish with your drone programs. But the other thing that they should be upfront with is what they're trying to accomplish for themselves. But think about their use cases. Don't go get a drone and then try to match it to, okay, we can go do this thing with it. Lay out with all your constituents and all the partner agencies you might work with and all the people in your agency, lay out all the problems that the drone might solve and then break those down into different problem sets. And figure out based on those problem sets, then what sorts of drones to go up and look at. Do you want fixed wing? Do you want rotorcraft? What sensor packages do you want to use and all those other sorts of things that come as part of the purchase problem? As you said, don't purchase first and then try to fit into the program. So that would be a kind of an interesting product we could maybe generate together using our experience last week with our public safety people as a frame of reference. Your knowledge and thoughts in particular of the search and rescue activities, and I'm really interested in that. I wonder if you can tell us more about how you've integrated with the search and rescue people in terms of made avenues and penetrated into that area. Absolutely. And thank you very much. I've got 15 years of search and rescue experience which really helped me understand a little bit more about the problem. But what I've been doing for the last couple of years is talking to various search and rescue organizations around the country about the problems they're trying to solve and the approaches they're taking to doing it. We've spent time educating them on policy and regulation. And then we've also done that use case scenario that I was talking about and say, okay, for example, you're a mountain rescue organization and you want to go use this to go look at somebody who's on a cliff face. Is this an appropriate tool? So a motor craft can sit there hovering against a cliff face and spark there. And now you've got the ability to see what that subject is doing, but do you have an ability to communicate with them? Do you want to be able to communicate with them? To think through that. But a lot of the search and rescue organizations don't really know where the subject is. And so that's the search aspect of it. But do these actually make good search tools? People have a perception that they should, but the one you have in front of you and many other motor crafts such as that, they've got about a 25 minute flight time. And if you're trying to search for a subject in say 100 square miles or even 10 square miles, 25 minutes of flight time out and back really won't get the job done. So I get them thinking about that. And then they start saying, okay, so it may not be useful for our original use case, but there are other things we could do with it. For example, in New Hampshire, we have a lot of swamps, which surprised me when I moved back here. I can never remember this many swamps. But if a subject goes into a swamp, it's a fairly small area. And you can fly over that entire area using a 25 minutes of flight time and get a good sense of what is in that particular area, which leads to the next use case and next problem. You've flown that UAV, and your view through that camera on there is usually just a mobile device, either a phone or a tablet. If you're trying to see a subject from 100 feet up in the air on a small device such as that, it's a very difficult task. And so what other ways, using that camera platform or other sensors, can you locate the subject? And some of those answers are things like looking at data post-processing. So land the aircraft, feed it into some sort of analytical system, or feed it into what they call a mechanical Turk, and let people look at the imagery after the fact in greater detail, and then that will potentially help you either find the subject, find clues leading to the subject, or give you some sense of confidence that the subject's not in that area. So it's really a lot about going through those thought exercises, tabletop exercises, and then going off with an example UAV and starting to try out some of those scenarios and see what works and what does not work. So what's interesting there is what she's talked about is the time commitment to sit ahead of time in the quiet and go through tabletops, go through thought experiments, and then maybe do even experiments themselves. In fact, we had one last week which we'll tell you about we can take a break here for a minute. We'll tell you about that and we get back. It taught us something even in the middle of this demonstration we did for our law enforcement people. We'll get right back from our first break. She said, What are you doing? Research says reading from birth accelerates our baby's brain development. Push! Read aloud 15 minutes, every child, every parent, every day. Hello, I'm Helen Dora Hayden, the host of Voice of the Veteran. Seen here live every Thursday afternoon at 1 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. As a fellow veteran and veterans advocate with over 23 years experience serving veterans, active duty, and family members, I hope to educate everyone on benefits and accessibility services by inviting professionals in the field to appear on the show. In addition, I hope to plan on inviting guest veterans to talk about their concerns and possibly offer solutions. As we navigate and work together through issues, we can all benefit. Please join me every Thursday at 1 p.m. for the Voice of the Veteran. Aloha! This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. It is still Thursday afternoon, folks, right after lunch. Ted Rolston here in our Think Tech studios downtown Honolulu. Josh Levy joining me. Josh, welcome aboard. Now welcome aboard to UH as well. Once again, I might add. And welcome on our show for the first time Mr. David Kovar in somewhere in New Hampshire hasn't revealed exactly where in New Hampshire that is, but all we know that's something pretty far away from here. And David of Kovar and Associates, a long participant in Search and Rescue and a major advocate for getting unmanned air systems into public safety starting with Search and Rescue. Welcome on board again, David, and thanks for joining our show. Thank you very much for the opportunity. You know, I think we'd like to have you on time to time, especially in the six months coming as they all get ready for our legislative sessions and such as I was saying. But let me tell you what we did last week. We had this experiment. We had these 80 people together and we just did a simple demonstration. We had to shoot around the exercise, shoot around the roof of the stadium, got to go find them. And so it takes, get some drones up. Everyone hadn't been called yet, so drone one goes and then we had more than one. So, okay, we'll have a drone two go. So we had two, one doing perimeter patrol and one doing in-close inspection. As it turns out, because the wind had blown the target off the roof, we substituted the target with a sandbag and the guy trying to find the target couldn't find it because it didn't look like what it was supposed to be. Which is actually a learning experience itself. But right there, our public safety people began to realize, hey, maybe two of these working in partnership, one on remote, one up close. Maybe there's something there. We hadn't thought about that. Now how do we control and coordinate two? How do we get the information from two and fuse it into a common operating picture? These exercises are worth their weight in gold. And it further struck me that we did this in a high-level athletic facility, the university's baseball stadium. And if you take nine guys on a bus who have really good skills at all the positions and drop them off and call them a team, they're not a team, until they've practiced a hundred times. We have to practice drone-ism a hundred times. We have to inject faults. We have to have the rain come. We have to have something fall out of sequence. We have to have a technical issue. We have to do this over and over again in the sense of what David was talking about from the table top exercises to real exercises in order to see how these things all play together. And that's what I'm thinking of, that we can take as one of our action items from last week or our takeaways, take forward and work it out with David as to how he might think about that. So what kind of exercises have you been able to run with your search and rescue teams, David, to help push this forward? There was an opportunity that Virginia Department of Emergency Management put together last year, a conference they ran. They spent one day essentially having lectures and things like that. The second day was a series of scenarios that we set up in advance. For example, the search and rescue scenario was a very large field, dream running through it, freeze and things like that with nine different targets in that field. Some were human-sized objects, some were clues leading to a subject and things like that. And we gave various responders, fire departments and other operators, the opportunity to fly through this exercise with no knowledge other than they were supposed to search this field for signs of either the subjects or subjects themselves. And every single one of the participants, the fire department operators, the vendors, et cetera, all came away from that exercise, learning a lot from their personal experience, not from theory, not from somebody else telling them how difficult this was, but from their own experience of how long it takes to find that many targets, how difficult it is to find a target on a very small screen and how important their logistical supply chain is in terms of making sure they've got the appropriate equipment to conduct exercises for a very long period of time. We also did other scenarios where we set up a mapping exercise. So if you want to have overhead component for search and rescue, active shooter, fire team, things like that, what different components do you need? What tools do you need? How are you going to conduct those operations? So we really set up a lot of examples that were appropriate for the different types of responders and we made sure that there were subject matter experts to guide the responders through those exercises so that they had a positive outcome and they had a very positive learning experience. And one of the things that Virginia was trying to do and we encourage other people to do is do something similar to what you did. Bring all those people together, have a conference section, have a lecture section, but also take that opportunity to get people together and practice together exercise together and learn from each other. Do the after-action reports in person at the end of the day so people can have a clear understanding from each other what worked and what did not work and then take that experience home to their home agencies and exercise that at home. I think that's a really great example that you've stood up there and I think we've had the lecture section now last week. We had the very preliminary demo section. I think we're ready for some serious field exercises, probably not in the stadium, probably in some more outback area. We got to put that together, Josh, and figure how we're going to take that as the next step. In fact, do two of them between now and the beginning of the legislative session. Yep, absolutely. Have educators involved, have the community response people involved and do this for free. That's the other part. The other part, getting paid for this stuff, David, you're apparently getting paid for your success and making this a business which is we can't forget that. This has to have business at its basis because that's what makes things work. So tell us about your business besides just the work of promoting search and rescue. Yeah, so one thing to bear in mind is that 95% of search and rescue, 95% of search and rescue in the United States is conducted by volunteers. So that is just pure. We are in this for the public good. On the private side, what does allow me the flexibility to contribute in search and rescue is cybersecurity and UAS forensics and counter UAS solutions and looking at all those technical problems of if you find a UAV on somebody's front lawn, how did it get there? Or if a UAV was used by a malicious actor, how do we go about determining who that malicious actor might have been, how they used it, where else they used it? So those are a lot of the technical challenges but what's really most interesting to me is the policy challenges around all of that. Counter UAS being one of the primary examples, there's a lot of concerns that drones are being used maliciously and the fact of the matter is that a very, very large percentage of the operators out there are absolutely above board, legal, they mean well. There's a couple operators that just are not unaware of the regulatory requirements and so they kind of reflect that in the rest of the community when they do something foolish but there are malicious actors out there who are dropping contraband into prisons for example or who are using UAVs to surveil oil refoundings. So we really need to have technical solutions for addressing these things but we need to have legislative support for doing these as well and right now there are a lot of challenges for deploying what they call counter UAS or counter UAS solutions. Those are mostly that it's illegal to shoot at an aircraft. If you try to hack into the command and control circuit of that aircraft to take control of it you've now taken control of somebody else's property and you've now hacked into somebody else's computer so you're violating several state and federal regulations. So we as a community need to again think about what are the problems we're trying to solve in this area, get together, think about the technical solutions and then work with the legislators to figure out how best to implement this without causing a lot of fear uncertainty and doubt. Do this database, go off and gather the data about the problem, about the possible solutions and then go forward with the community and come up with the best possible solution for all of us. You know in the short time we have left this half hour goes by really fast. We'd like to invite you to converse further with us maybe offline. We've got some major athletic event coming up at the end of towards the end of this year. It's an international scope event and it has a very important need to understand what UAS might be involved. There's going to be legitimate UAS involved with the program and there's going to be those who are outside the fringe and we're going to need to do some technical work in terms of the detection and tracking aspect and I think you may be able to help us think through that very well. Secondly on the commercial side even the commercial side we have had one case here in Hawaii already Josh you might know about it too. There was a reef ship grounding on a reef and part of the protocol when you remove a ship from the reef is you got to take a look at what the damage on a reef is and then go pay someone to restore it somehow. There was a commercial operator doing drone work observing the ship being taken off the reef. There was another guy observing what was going on recording the same imagery with his exact same drone right next to the guy who had the permit and we know what he was doing he was attempting to get in there and hustle and then undercut the guy who had legitimate contract. So we're going to see this a lot I think in business we're going to see even in the world of education as innocent as that might be. If you're a researcher who's got good reputation for drawing grants because you do UAS work someone might copy you. Someone might copy you Josh you might see a second UAS out there flying in exactly the same pattern you are recording the same information going up to the same grant. So wherever we are we're going to have this need for good technical solutions to give law enforcement and administrative people a knowledge of what's going on and David I think you might be on the cusp of helping us pull that forward. Thank you very much. We do enjoy being out on the cutting edge particularly because it gives us the opportunity to talk with other people who are interested in helping solve these real challenges they're facing all of us and getting solutions in place before they become serious problems. Okay and we'll do that as much as we can through this show get you on times in the future and others that you might suggest want to add to our total picture here. But at this point we are at the end of our 30 minutes we thank you so much for coming on from New Hampshire David and the sun's probably about ready to set there we're going to go have lunch on this end and we'll see you again David Kovar of Kovar & Associates in New Hampshire and we'll see you next Thursday folks.