 Hello. Welcome. Ahoy. I'm Joey Ito. I'm the director of the Media Lab, which is the place where you are today, if you didn't know. The Media Lab is a kind of peculiar place, if you haven't figured it out already. It's a lab at MIT that was started 30 years ago. And it was started as an experiment by the then president of MIT, Jerome Wiesner and Nicholas Negar Ponte and some other faculty members. And the program here is called Program in Media, Arts, and Sciences. But it was a code for the Department of None of the Above. And the role of the Media Lab really in our ecosystem is to try to explore those areas between and beyond the disciplines where traditional departments can't provide faculty slots or have students doing research. And other places where you just can't get funding to do research. So when we hire faculty, we ask if you could do your research in any other department, any other lab, don't apply to the Media Lab. And if anybody else in the world would fund what you want to do, you shouldn't start here at the Media Lab. And so the Media Lab's role is to try to fill in those places. And in particular with the open oceans initiatives, we have a number of initiatives. It's not just between the disciplines, but beyond the disciplines. And so we try to go where traditional academic research and science and just business are traditionally unable to go. And as oceans becomes more and more of an important topic these days, instead of just keeping, and this is whether we're talking about space or agriculture, one of our key things is also to take ideas from just the scholarship of academia and to try to bring it to indigenous communities to young people, to the real world. One of the key things in the founding of the Media Lab, this is the name of the way we think about learning is called constructionism. And it comes from Seymour Papert, who was one of the founding faculty members. And constructionism is the idea that learning in a textbook isn't nearly as effective as learning through doing. And learning through doing also involves learning through deploying. And one of the key phrases at the Media Lab in the early days was demo or die. And I modified it to deploy or die. And then when I was visiting with President Obama, he was saying deploy, die. Maybe you should work on that messaging. So we just changed it to deploy. And many of the actually students who didn't like the or die part was like, the president tells you and you get rid of it, even though we told you, what are we? And so deploy is one of our key things. And we learned that through deploying, through going into the real world, there's a tremendous amount of engagement and learning. And we have a group called the Lifelong Kindergarten Group. And they have this thing called the four P's, passion, peers, projects, play. So the idea is that if you have passion, you will learn to learn. And you will learn lifelong, not just in school. And working together is tremendously important. And working on projects is a really important way to learn. And it has to be done in a playful way. I don't know, is Ernst here? Is he here? Ernst, Ernst, so the only thing I was qualified to teach before I got to the media lab was school diving. And I lived in Dubai for a while and Ernst was my mentor. And we used to teach sometimes junior high school students. And Ernst would often tell me that the teachers would dump these students off and we'd be teaching them. And they'd always say, watch out for these two because they're the troublemakers. And there would be the ones who would be the most passionate about learning. And so Ernst would be there saying, well, we're gonna be in the ocean in a little while and we will be seeing these animals. And unless you learn gases and unless you learn Bois Law, unless you learn this, we're not gonna be able to go in there and do this thing. And so for those kids, the idea of just getting in the water and putting this contraption on and being able to swim and see all this wildlife was enough to learn all kinds of things that in this classroom, they were so bored that they would never learn. And so obviously, kids learn in a different way. But I do think that this idea of learning through doing, the idea that exploration is something that will drive us to learn. And nothing against kids who like textbooks, but there's already a lot of institutions for those people. So I think this is really for those people who don't fit in to that kind of traditional system. And I apologize if they're traditionals here. You are also welcome. But the other thing I think that we are doing here is that in addition to traditional scientific scholarship, I was at a conference recently that was called the Dufas. We'll meet some of the people from that conference. But there's a lot of knowledge that right now doesn't fit into traditional science. And as we start to learn more about natural systems, we're learning more and more about the fact that we know less and less and the complexity of the system. So there's this interdisciplinary piece, which is a lot of disciplines like to slice things in very organized ways. But when you look at climate, when you look at the environment, it is such a complex system. We've known about climate change for so long, but we haven't been able to intervene because it's not a simple system. And all of the things that we used to do, make more stuff, be more efficient, be more productive, those are all things that actually make climate worse. And so all of the tools that we currently have at our disposal to try to tackle the problem of climate change, we may be able to fiddle some of the rules and do carbon cap and trade and things like that, but we actually need to fundamentally change the values of our society. So there's a great, I love this story. So everybody knows Monopoly, right? So Monopoly is actually based on an older game from 1904 called the Landlord's Game. And the Landlord's Game was created by the Georgists who were the precursors to communism. And the Landlord's Game was designed to teach kids the perils of capitalism. The fact that rent and ownership of property would drive people to unhappiness. And it was trying to teach people how bad capitalism was. And Parker Brothers brought the game and they didn't change the rules actually very much. They just changed the goal. And they said, no, no, no, now you are the capitalist and you win when your friends are bankrupt. And I think the important lesson to that is that the rules are important. We can try to make all kinds of rules in order to get companies to behave in different ways, to protect our fisheries, to protect our environment. But if we don't change the goal, which is to have more stuff, to beat your competition and to extract resources from the environment and make yourself rich, that's sort of what companies are designed to do. And when we create an environment where that's the values of the institutions and as an individual, you measure yourself by whether you have more stuff than your friends, then you're going to create an environment that will continue to deplete our resources and also throw the system out of whack. And the way that we change it is we have to change the goals. How do you change the goals? You change the values. How do you change the values? You change what we believe is precious. And so to me, and this is another thing that I remember one of Ernst and my mutual friends who's a scuba instructor in Singapore, and he was working with a lot of Chinese scuba divers. And once they started to see the sharks, they couldn't eat shark fin anymore. And you don't get people to stop eating shark fin by wagging your finger at them from the UN. You get them to change their views on sharks by getting them to dive with sharks and then you get the kids to convince the parents. And so I think the other really important part about engaging young people, and this is true across the world, if you look at Generation Z, which is 2001 and later, they're pretty sober. They grew up with climate change. They know it's our fault, I'm a 52. They blame us, but they feel it's too bad, they didn't understand, they didn't know any better. But they're, again, there's a bunch of different ways, but in general, they have different values. They're sort of disgusted with the system, but they're sort of jumping into change. And I think it's really important to bring the kids into this conversation, take them diving with us, work on projects with them, and get them to talk to their parents and convince the parents, because I think the parents will talk to the kids, the kids will understand the science, and the kids, I think, will have different values. I can, like my generation, I can convince people logically that climate change is an issue and that maybe that's gonna, you know, their house in Malibu may wash away, but they don't really viscerally feel disgusted when they see waste. They don't feel disgusted when they see shark fin soup. But the kids can, and the kids will. So I think figuring out how to engage the kids in real projects, not just a bunch of textbooks is really important. And then lastly, I think that in order to advance science so that we can actually understand these complex systems, we can't do it using the same kind of science that we had in the past, this kind of linear approach and this slow, expensive, I know there are people here from the government in NOAA. Those big projects are extremely important as the bedrock of the research, but we need to push that out to everyone and involve everyone so that it's not just some sort of elite institutional thing. The other thing, and the last part I wanna talk about is we have completely overlooked the wisdom of the indigenous people. They, you know, there's a group here that works on trying to create a new kind of artificial intelligence, and they realize that we have these things like, we have a physics engine in our brain. So when you're growing up and you see a thing that looks like let's say a bag of potatoes and you kind of sense that it's about to fall over, what you have is you have a simulation in your head of what that bag of potatoes might do. And as a kid, you learn over time that intuitively you start to learn physics. It's not that when you're playing tennis, you're calculating the trajectory and you're doing a whole bunch of math. You're doing it because your brain has an intuitive understanding. When you talk to people who live in the Amazon or if you talk to people who live on the sea in Polynesia, they intuitively know where they are, what's going on, and there is a kind of physics engine-like thing that gives them a connection to nature. They can't explain it to us in the way that scientists like to be explained to, but they understand it much more deeply. And there's something that we can learn from them. And if you look at the history of exploration and anthropology, we sort of just dismiss that we can't explain as either noise or placebo in the case of medicine or just kind of just ignored it. And what we're realizing recently, and there was a great talk by Wade Davis at this last conference I was at about the fact that we completely misunderstood and didn't understand Polynesian wayfaring because it was impossible. How could a bunch of people with no instruments without a section navigate the open ocean? It's impossible. Well, it turns out it's not impossible. It's really hard. You have to have an intuitive understanding as well as a mental map of all of the stars, of all of the islands to be able to see the waves and that ability, that ancient knowledge had almost disappeared. And then we will be hearing from Ninoa, who is the president of the Polynesian Wayfaring Society next. And he to be is kind of the embodiment of that, which is essential for us to learn because Ninoa and his team have revived the art of Polynesian Wayfaring. And I guess I won't tell the whole story because then you won't have anything to say, but I urge you to connect with him because he is both able to do and teach people this amazing ancient art, but also he is willing to come to a place like MIT, which is sort of the opposite of that, and to talk to us and try to connect. And to me, that connection, that intuitive understanding of the natural systems as well as the sort of spirit of, I remember we were in a meeting with Ninoa and one of our dear friends is talking about this idea of natural capital. We just have to put all the fish and all the trees on the balance sheets so the companies understand the costs and that it's all calculated into the economy and so that these guys can't do bad things anymore and Ninoa at the end was like, natural capital, that sounds like an oxymoron to me. And so that voice, the idea that yes, we can try to fiddle with the economy in order to make it more conscious of the environment, that's really important, but I think even more important is we have to look at capitalism itself and say, is this the right way for us to be setting our goals, distributing resources, thinking about the future, or is there a better way to think about the future to inspire ourselves about what we wanna be, what is our purpose? Why are we here learning all these things? Is it to make more money and be more efficient or is it actually to be making the world more of a flourishing place? Is happiness more important? How do we measure happiness? And is happiness about having more stuff or living in a vibrant ecosystem with a diverse set of friends that are inspiring each other? And so to me, Ninoa is really a grand teacher of all of these things and so I'm very excited to introduce one of my heroes, Ninoa. Hello, my kakou. My name is Ninoa Thompson and I'm from the Hawaiian Islands and Joy, thank you for that amazing introduction. I mean, I didn't just come here. I came here with the belief that the challenge is before us. We have to connect. We have to build relationships. We can't solve the problems by ourselves. So, Katie, thank you for allowing me the privilege of being in this room and I say that because yesterday I was here and you guys are amazing. Every one of you in here that are gonna collectively make change on your own but when you add it all together, it's the movement we need. And so I've got a lot of slides and not much time. The assumption is nobody in this room knows anything about Polynesian voyaging so it's kind of a history lesson. So you gotta imagine though, imagine the Pacific. That 7,000 years ago, maybe the first craft was built in the South China Sea area. And then this technology moves south along the coastlines to the Melanesian area and then it went west, Austronesian speaking people, all the way to Madagascar. And then it went east, at least to the west coast of the Americas. Maybe the Caribbean or genetics. And so essentially this people of common ancestry and common language type would travel almost 14 time zones on the earth. And about 3,000 years ago, some genius in the Western Polynesian area in Tonga Fiji Samoa, we don't know, built the vehicle, the deep sea voyage in canoe, the capacity to go long. And in that 3,000 years ago, there was some other genius that figured out how to use nature to find your way, the navigational system. And then here, this is my home, this oil painting of the first canoe that would come about 2,000 years ago to Hawaii. And then, making long story short, that was one part of the genius of these people. How do they navigate, use nature, travel over 2,400 miles of open ocean, find the single most isolated higher island archipelago on the planet. And then be there for 1,400 years, they would go back and forth to the homeland called Kaikinui, really it's the Tahiti Marqueses area in the South Pacific. And then, so that was really the age of exploration. But in around that time in the 14th century, three things happened. One was there was probably overcrowding, that population outgrew the limits of the natural resources. There would be population crash, there would be the institution of what they call a Kapu system, a very, very strict, serious system of rules that you need to live by so that you can survive within the limits of an island. And then, at the same time on the 14th century, that's when voyaging stopped. So we don't know really why, but I think it's interrelated between the need to find sustainability on these small islands. And then, 1778, Captain Cook would come and he would do the first sense as you talk about the genius and the strength of these people. But what happened was that was the beginning of the long, same chronic native story, next 28 years, 75% of native Hawaiians would die, about 600,000. And list goes on and on, it's not about that story, but what the story talks about is loss of land, culture and all those issues which really is a pathway to extinction. 1926, public schools that outlaw Hawaiian language and cultural practices in our schools. 1924, my father, nearly pure Hawaiian, not be taught genealogy. Maybe he's a hundred generation, not genealogy, not language, not culture, because his loving parents felt it. If he tried to become who he was, he'd get hurt. That is the age of extinction. When everything's falling apart. Next slide. Next slide. Then another miracle. The story's not about me. I mean, Joy, thank you, but it isn't. This is an old story. 1958, this man, a surfer from Santa Barbara, was studying anthropology, would go to University of Hawaii. A woman professor, that you'd probably count him on one hand back then, would give him two books. Kantiki, and the other was Pacific Voyages by a guy by the name Andrew Sharp. So how do they believe that the Polygyms came from the Americas on Drift for Logs? Andrew Sharp believed, no, they had canoes. They came from the West, from Melanesia, but they didn't have the intelligence to navigate more than a hundred miles. Her name was Catherine Luomala. He gives them the two books. She says, read these books, they're wrong, change it. Takes a decade to make a phone call. To this man. Herb Kubai Nui, a painter, an artist, a historian, that could see. He was in Chicago, he's from Hawaii. The phone call went to Chicago, not to Hawaii, because if you talk about voyaging and building voyaging canoes, we were so ignorant in there because we weren't trained because of schools, we wouldn't know what you're talking about. But these two men came together, made a dream, and built the vehicle. Next slide. And they talked about the Pacific quickly. You need to go really fast. Polynesia, common people, common blood type, all that. Triangle, 10 million square miles, three times the size of the continental United States, and yet if you execute the landmass of Aotearoa, out of all the tiny islands in there, you can fit them all into one third of the state of New York. 600 times more water than that. This is an ocean, people. We're trying to figure out the ocean puzzle. How do they do it? Next slide. The vehicle, Hoku Lea. Hoku, star, Lea means gladness. It's a name that comes out of our creation chant. And we don't know anything. I might like to go on these stories. The first day of sailing was just a disaster. But this canoe was on the beach, and I was there. It was Hawaiian. It was powerful. It was elegant. It was beautiful. And it was challenging. Next slide. Who's in the navigator? No navigators in Polynesia, extinct. They're gone. Micronesia. There were six masters. He's the youngest. So long story, but leadership found him. Asked him to consider sailing a canoe that wasn't constructed on a crew that wasn't selected. Going a voyage six times longer than he ever has been on. And on a canoe eight times bigger, cross the equator under the southern stars he's never seen, and lose the north star. And he said, yes. You barely speak English. And his name is Pius Mao Piilug, youngest and greatest navigator ever. Next slide. That's his island, South of Wall. Sea level rising matters in Micronesia. This is our school, our island, where they kept the navigation alive for 3,000 years. He is the last. That's extinction. Next. This would be his challenge. Hawaii in the top, Tehiti in the bottom, Santa Waikiki Beach. Imagine you can see the east side of Hawaii, the west side of, I'm sorry, Tehiti, and the west side of Tehiti, 2,400 miles ago. That's less than one degree. And find it with the wave and the star and the seabird. Next slide. That's the imaginary sail planning he needed to do. Wins, world's two biggest winds systems, most consistent, collided in the equatorial area called the Doldrums. High evaporation rates, lift warm moist air aloft, cloudiest and rainiest place on earth. Hard to see the stars. Next slide. That's them. First voyage in 600 years. A lot of fear, a lot of challenge, but there was purpose. Next slide. Arrival. Papa Ete, I was there, not on the canoe, flowing down, had to climb the Monkey Pot Tree to see the canoe, true story. Had to ask children to get off the stern of the canoe in English because they were kind of sinking it. There was so much this innate connection of a culture that maintains their language and their orators. This canoe was theirs. And Mao Pi I looked in that crew in a single voyage would change everything. I know the power of the one, that this would change the books, it would change the movies, but it would change the heart and soul of Pacific people knowing that they're part of the largest nation on earth. That they are come from great navigators. Everything that we know now is what drove self-esteem and self-worth. And I think that depression that comes with the absence of that is the greatest chronic disease we have in this country that's never really recognized. Next slide. And then, the other miracle, he had come back for three decades to train us. Don't have time to go in there, but so it was not just the navigator, but it was the teacher that changes the world by teaching you something else that society denies. Next slide. Yeah, he would give our dreams back. He would show us the way. He would stay with us and do know there's a thousand other teachers too that helped us find our way. Next slide. Yeah, we would sail far. Next slide. I'm going fast. We would do all of Polynesia. And as far up to the West Coast, as far west as Japan, as far north as Alaska, and as far south as Aotearoa, New Zealand, for about 13 voyages, over about 35 years. Next slide. How am I doing on time? I'm gonna kick me out of here. Oh, okay. That's not much time I got left, yeah? Okay, best friend. Keiki Okuaena, Kuaena, he's from the dirt of Hawaii. He's Hawaii's second astronaut to space, fighter pilot. He's a lead pilot in the Thunderbirds, best in the world, Lieutenant Colonel Lacey Beach. Long, long story, but he was my mentor, my teacher, my inspiration about Katie. Exploration, why it's so important. Next slide. He loved Okulia. He just believed this is the essence of exploration. Next slide. But he was a shuttle pilot and he was a mission specialist. He flew. He's crazy. Next slide. Yeah, just by coincidence, we're coming up by coincidence, long story, but we're coming up from Rotonga from the Pacific Arts Festival. Just by coincidence, he's in Columbia in 1992. We're going four miles an hour. He's going six miles a second. And then he conjures up, gets these engineers to hook up communications to us in the canoe. Next slide. Because he believed in helping children want to learn and explore. So here he is in there in Columbia, SDS 52, talking to about 35,000 school kids from the canoe and from Columbia. Next slide. And he was kind of crazy guy. That is cockpit window, edge of the earth on the top. This is the island of Hawaii. If you want a place to test how to be sustainable, it's here. Lacey knew that. That's kind of a little red dot on the edge of the Mauna Kea, place called Keanaka Ko'i. That stone that you see floating in heavy, stone sharp, zero gravity. He smuggled on board, put it in the picture. Through the picture. Now I know I have a present for you. I'll bring it back from space. And it was about this way to solve the problems on the earth. Who solves it? In Lacey's mind, it's everybody. And he said this ads that came from Keanaka Ko'i, 12,500 foot elevation was the best stone next to the Greenstone in New Zealand because 35,000 years ago when there was a glacier on Mauna Kea eruption, super cool, the rock was very dense. But that is a tool to build voyaging canoes. Then he said you need to marry it and couple it with the power of technology, but what navigates technology? Good, kind, compassionate, human values. Bring them together, solve the problem. Next slide. Now, we would take one date, cross it off on our calendar books that drive our lives and say this day is a couple. This is the day nobody touches this day. Micho and Hilo rent a car illegally, drive up to the slopes of Mauna Loa, onto the black lava, absorbs all the light, bring the stars close, let's dream about how can we bring ancient wisdom, science and technology together. Change education. Change education. Change education. So there's amazing times that, except, next slide, when we talk about the island and you talk about what's happening, you talk about that there are so many issues and we can't figure it out. And then he was like the most optimistic person, Katie, I know, that would just physically get so upset about what we're doing to the island. He would talk about the only one we got and then he would talk about, you want to go to Alpha Centauri, the closest star system outside the solar system that would take you 200,000 years, with a shuttle, you've got to have enough power to stop it, turn around 200,000 in his back. And so he says, this is the only one we got. Why don't we take care of it? But when he talked about not having the solution, he physically get so upset, I would have to hold him on the lava rock and settle him down. Next slide. Yeah, he just said, you know, we're changing the earth. It's changing us. And he said, and we don't even know. How do you navigate to a place you don't know? Next slide. He loved his home. He believed that here is the place. Long story. It's a laboratory for figuring out every challenge of energy, food sovereignty, all the myriad of things we can. We can solve it here. Native Hawaiians already solved the food issue in the past. And this is a school. He said, Hawaii needs to become a laboratory of the school to learn how to live well in Ireland. Then you have the best gift for humanity. It's called peace verbatim from my friend. Next slide. Then we would lose him, Linful Melanoma, 1995. He should be here, not me. But I'm here for him. Next slide. He planted the seed of an idea, the power of the idea. He said, you can't protect what you don't understand. You won't if you don't care. And you can't do it by yourself. You need to build relationships. That's why I'm here. Take a look around the world. You need to learn about the earth to be able to be knowledgeable, to make good decisions. Go around the world, meet humanity, and find out if its culture is still kind and compassionate. His definition of the global culture is not about race. It's not about the boundaries of geography or nationalism. It's about values. And I've heard that over and over again yesterday. What are the values that we carry enough about taking care of the earth? And then he said, and then he just said, you can't do it by yourself. Meet people. And 1992, next slide. 1992, he plants a seed. For 16 years, we would get together leadership every year annually in the voyaging community. We would talk about the power of the vision, the idea, the power of the idea. But then when we went to, let's talk about danger. Hurricane or a pirate or the mosquito or human violence or the rogue wave of South Africa. This whole long, long list about why it's so dangerous every time we vote no. We're not going to go. It's too dangerous. Except Lacey told us, you need to listen to the new language on the earth. Climate change. Being unsustainable. In the oceans, hypoxia, dead zones, acidifications, all this language you don't know and I know of. But you need to listen. Elizabeth 95, March, April 1st, 2008. We had a meeting with leadership in Hawaii. The question, listening to the language and changing our thoughts about what are we responsible, really responsible for, but what we really need to be is good parents. We need to take care of our children, protect them. So that meeting was not about whether we should go around the world or not. The question was, what's more dangerous, the pirate, hurricane, the rogue wave, or staying tied to the dock? Be knowledgeable and do nothing and tell your kids that you knew, but didn't act. So we voted four times. It was unanimous because we had to be, if we're not together on this, we're not going to make it. Next slide. But we would prepare Hokalaya. 18 months, 32,000 man hours of volunteer time. Young people. Next. We'd train the young. This is not my world. It's theirs. And so we've trained new captains, new navigators, in a way that they are an investment down the road. What if we change the schools tomorrow? In 20 years from P20, where would we be? If schools were about protecting the earth? Next slide. Built a second canoe called Hikianalia. It was launched on September 15, 2012. It's bigger than Hokalaya. It's our escrow boat. It's our medical platform. It's our safety platform. It's our documentation, education platform. She's powered by the wind and the sun. Two sails. We have 240 square feet of solar panel and six big lithium batteries and two electric engines. So we tried to go around the world with no carbon footprint. Didn't work. We did about half of it with this canoe. Next. Sail plan. Those are the dates. Summary, 37 months, 42,000 miles, 18 countries, 232 ports, and 222 crew members. Switch were all volunteers over that time period. It was a long trip. Extraordinary trip. Next slide. Yeah. 11 Pacific Island nations. But we had crew members from Japan. We had crew members from India. Crew members from many of the other countries in the world. Next slide. And we left. Head west until you come home. What's more dangerous? Staying tight to the dock. Yeah. It's way more dangerous. Next slide. 50% of the trip we navigated without instruments. We gave it to the young. Next slide. First protocol was Tahiti for permission from our elders. Next. We'd be in Samoa, and the Secretary General would join us for a sale in Ban Ki-moon. In that bottle, he had a personal note saying that he would commit the 127 countries in the United Nations to support focusing on the oceans. Back then, there was no focus on the oceans. It's unbelievable to even imagine that. And yet, so we committed to bringing the bottle back and collect support from the countries we see. So next slide. Aotearoa, New Zealand. Next. New Zealand, Manaya Kalani, the poorest of all the communities in New Zealand. Cluster 11 schools, 2,400 students. They all came down, chanted. Manaya Kalani is not Māori. It's Hawaiian. It's a star line in the sky. They borrowed that star line and said, let's study the heavens, let's study navigation, but let's teach it through technology. So it's bringing together the power of them being grounded and knowing who they are and where they come from, being proud and being involved in the rest of the world. These children are being taught to navigate, go anywhere in the world, but they know where home is. Next slide. Australia, next. Reef Guardian School, 300 of them. So Katie, optimism. It's here. 300 schools today, Reef Guardian Schools, 275,000 students, 776 teachers, I mean, 7,760 teachers. They are clear about what's important. What's the purpose of schools? Why do we send our children to school? Their purpose is clear. Protect the largest and oldest single ecological living system on the earth called the Great Barrier Reef. You go there, they've got your finger, a little kidney and a gun. They kind of hold your hand and take you to where they're replanting corals and in their labs and their algae and fish stocks and wounded seabirds and turtles. Wow, that's optimistic. Next slide. And then we go to the islands Pacific islands have 1% of the population there. Not even that. Nothing to do with climate change but suffering the most first. We know. Been there. Want to be optimistic, but we got to be real. Next slide. But we dove and understand if this is the top of the food chain, wow, that's a healthy place. Next slide. And then we would be there in Indonesia where you could walk on the floating rubbish. It's so bad. And yet, Hawaii and Indonesia because of the voyage is now trying to work on this issue of waste to power. So, I don't know. Plant seeds. We try. Next. Africa, problem. How do you get around it? There's no Panama Canal. There's a Suez, but you got to go out there. Yemen and Somalia, the Red Sea and it's the times when they have the refugees from Syria. It was like really a rough time up there. So, the human violence issue is one issue or you go around the south side of Africa and you end up in some of the most dangerous oceans in the world. We're three feet off the water. Rogue Wave, you die. We did the research. You die. There's no way out of it. And so, next. Started Mauritius, came around Madagascar. I would like to tell you these stories. We're out of time. Mozambique. Next slide. Yeah, it was a rough trip. Next slide. Yep, it was an awesome trip. It was the longest voyage. It took 61 days ago, 900 miles because we had to hide from cold fronts every three days. Next slide. Yeah, this picture is just about this Agulis current issue, Western Boundary Current and strong southeast winds, southwest winds, Rogue Wave. That's one issue. But on the other, Katie, about optimism. We came around Agulis Point at night and the National Geographic actually has, I mean, I'm sorry. NOAA actually has a photograph from space on a satellite of this gyre that was 1000 miles across that is clockwise rotating and it's all plankton. So bright and so brilliant. It shows up from space. And we went through that place and then the next day, we went up to Cape Town, just the super pods of whales. Unbelievable. There are these sanctuaries on the earth that where life is still intact and powerful. That is one of them. Next slide. Cape Town. Next slide. I wish I had time to tell the story, it's a don't. Yeah. Came to Hawaii in 2013, Archbishop Desentu to pray for the canoe. And if we made it in 2015, he'd be there. He couldn't walk that day. It's a long story. But when the children of Africa played music, he jumped up and danced with them in the streets. Next slide. And with our Hawaiian children. It was the most beautiful day. That day, I knew this voyage was worth the risk. Next slide. We chose the Everglades over Miami to take the first photograph when we come back into our country. Next slide. Went to the home of my friend. Where he trained. Next. Saw how many people came and talked to me about what an amazing man this was. Next. New York. Next. Gave the bottle back. 18 countries signed on to pledge collectively to protect the oceans. Next slide. Panama. Next slide. First time we would touch the Pacific again over two years. We're heading to a special first island in the Pacific. Next slide. The Galapagos. Humanity has 1% of the land, permission and 1% of the oceans. Nature has 99%. Next. It was just amazing being there. Next. And we navigate. Not me, I'm too old. Young people. Next. To Rapa Nui. Be the first time, the first island we would enter in back into our home called Polynesia. Next. Then we would come home to Hawaii. The news guys called me up and said, hey, you need to know there's two statistics. One doesn't really matter. By far this is the largest viewed event in Hawaiian history. Secondly, the statistics are that the vast majority of the viewership wasn't from Hawaii. We're getting there. Next. Well, I still got two minutes. Let me tell you a story. My teacher trained me. I never get it down until he did back in 1980, 6,000 miles. And luckily we bumped into islands and we found our way home. He sits down with me. The day he's gonna go home, he stayed with me for over two years. And we trained every day in the ocean, every day. It was a rule. He touched salt water every day. He goes, okay, Nainoa, you did okay. He bumped into these islands. Good job. And you did okay. Then he said, I give you everything. And the ocean show you everything, but it'll be 20 years before you see. If you want someone to know navigation in Hawaii, send your son, you're too old. He's right. I can't be him. That's why, this is not a statement of humility. I know, I'm in the education school in that grade, I'm in second grade compared to him who's a master. He said, my grandfather choose me when I was one. And he put me in tight pool to play, to hear the seabird, to touch the wind, smell your island, smell the oceans. And at an old age of five, he was voyaging already. His grandfather put him on the voyaging canoe. He said, yeah, Nainoa, when the wave make the canoe go up and down, I get sick. And so my grandfather tied my hands, throw me overboard, five years old, and dragged me behind the canoe. Try to do that in your public school system over here. But he spoke with great love with his grandfather. And the point was, he says, Nainoa, my grandfather throw me in the ocean so I can go in the wave. When I go in the wave, I become the wave. When I become the wave, then I'm navigator. The world needs navigators that know nature to protect it. And you gotta start young, a whole nother generation, but you gotta change schools. Next slide. We're gonna go a longer voyage. It's from the Arctic to the equator to the Antarctic. We're gonna start with really good friends. This is a star compass, a star aligns that we hold it, houses all the stars rising and setting. And we put it on the middle of the Pacific. We raise ourselves through Google Earth up to see when can we see Chile along with China and Antarctica and Alaska. You gotta go 40,000 not feet, miles up, one fifth of the distance of the moon to see the edges of the Pacific. It's big. And so we are gonna do a voyage with our friends from Alaska and go clockwise around the Pacific. It'll be 44,000 miles, 38 months, 47 countries and archipelagos. Just to do one thing, collect stories, educate the world, remove ignorance, build relationships. And so it's to protect the oceans because we believe that the oceans, if you look at the consequences, if you don't, the chemistry, the atmosphere, the biology of the earth and life on earth, what's gonna happen to culture and climate and ecology. So we're focusing on that, do what we can. Next slide. It's my last slide, I know I'm late, but Katie, you talked about the importance of exploration and you talked about speaking about the oceans and you talked about the importance of teaching the young. But you talked about the issue of optimism. I get scared, I got two twin nine year olds at home that I hate to leave my house. But I do that fundamentally for them, but there are days when I'm not optimistic. When you look at the raw data, if you look at the raw data and how we behaved yesterday, it's not gonna work. The arithmetic is not gonna work. Change is required. And it's those chronic days where I get so depressed, I can't even function. I don't believe I can be optimistic unless I know what depression is, that I can measure it against that. And it's when I look at, what makes things optimistic is because our whole world has changed. These conferences would not even exist 10 years ago. This room would be empty. We wouldn't even come together. 20 years ago, the ocean wasn't even an environmental factor. Nobody cared. We went to the, to sail to San Francisco to the global climate change in San Francisco with Governor Brown and others and they made the conference the first time we ever put the oceans on the agenda. And it's barely made it to the United Nations, but look at where it is now. That we're one, we're so much more knowledgeable now that we have the ability to make better choices. That what we're teaching to the many, that's the scales across the world is, there's very different, there's a whole nother language of renewal that's coming from extinction. That's optimistic. And the fact that this little blue island, just my humble perspective, is just infinitely, extraordinarily beautiful when you value life and you see it in its best. The other thing that makes it optimistic for me, and there's many, many things, activism, it's happening, is it enough? If you add up today, probably not, but don't add up today, add up tomorrow because it's growing exponentially. We went around the world to find out if humanity is still kind, because if it's not, it's over. And what we found is thousands of strangers everywhere. I don't know you folks, but in some ways I don't need to know you. On the worldwide voyage, we met strangers, making, doing, being, working, giving everything to the worst of the slums they live in, to the places that have the most degraded environments, to the places that have the most beautiful environments and watersheds and coral reefs and streams. I mean, look at the new maps, even on this East Coast of the United States. We were just so blown away coming up here in 2015 about what everybody's doing here. So what I see is a second renaissance for us. The first was cultural, bring back pride and dignity. The second is to take care of the earth. And what I've seen is around the world that makes it so optimistic that I can get up and function is when the growing community, this culture of thousands of strangers that I don't know that are doing things, every time some individual does some act of kindness and goodness and care and love for something in their place, they're doing it for all of us. I believe that humanity is on the greatest movement collectively ever, even though they're strangers, even though it's not organized, even though it's disorganizing, you should never try to institute kindness. But believe that every time someone does some act of kindness, they're not just doing it for themself, they're doing it for all of us. So he essentially says, be a part of the movement. It's the greatest voyage ever. And so to Katie, thank you. I'm not just honored to be, I need to be here. They have for my children. I think this room, even though you're strangers, are just the epitome and the microcosm of the movement. I heard it yesterday. Powerful ideas, courage, strength. Everybody doing their part. And when you add it up, it's the greatest voyage ever. So to all of you in this room, thank you for everything you do. We've got props, so just a minute. Good morning everybody, and welcome to the Create panel. My name is Alexis Hope. I'm a designer and researcher here at the Media Lab. My research group is called the Center for Civic Media, and we focus on technology for social change and social purpose. One of our main missions is to broaden participation in technology design, so to kind of open up the walls of this place. So I'm really thrilled to be here as part of this conversation we're all having about how to also broaden participation in scientific discovery and exploration. I think one powerful way to open up a conversation is with our hands and through making things and through the arts. So we have a panel of four amazing artists of all stripes who work across many different mediums, and we've all brought some fun things to share with us today. I'm gonna introduce everyone first, and then we'll get right into it. Hansi, sing to my left, is a knitter of undersea oddities. She makes hyper realistic and beautiful creatures. Very awesome. She's also a scientist. She researches Earth's climate systems, and she uses her art as a vehicle for pushing people towards action and conversation. We have Jeff Shelton, who's a filmmaker and documentarian. He serves as the primary documentarian for the band Okay Go, who you may be familiar with their fantastical and complex music videos. He also runs, he produces, directs and edits and shoots all of their educational content on Okay Go Sandbox, so that will involve taking a four second shot from one of the music videos and blowing it up into a four minute clip that explains the math and physics that went behind making that particular part of the video. So it's super cool. We have Whitney Cornforth, who is coming to us from here at MIT. Whitney studied naval engineering and marine engineering here at MIT. And while he was here, he discovered glass blowing, and then after graduating, decided to kind of switch gears and pursue his passion as a full-time glass borer, which anytime somebody switches gears in that way, it's super inspiring to me, and these are some of his pieces here, which we'll hear more about. He also teaches at the MIT Glass Lab here. And then we have Daniel Cohn, whose work is at the Crossroads of Art and Science, and he served as an artist in residence at the Broad Institute, which is a biomedical and genomic research institute around here, and his work currently centers on the ocean and is exploring the question of whether or not the ocean has memories. That's a very good question. So I think we're gonna start with Daniel, who has an additional prop that will be coming up here. Oh, I'm after him. Yeah, okay. Hi, everyone. So I'm gonna try and read and talk and draw at the same time, which is what we do. So we make meanings with stories, and I wanna tell you a story about our senses and what kind of questions artists bring to research, like, does the ocean have memory? One of the tools we use to measure the world is this. We stand on a ball of earth, massive enough to exert gravitation in a universe where gravitation exists. So this means I'm standing on the earth. Our view of the world is intensely connected to our biological history. We stand on our feet, but also in our minds. We're oriented towards the sun and think in enlightenment and dark ages. We stand on the earth and think in ups and downs. We walk on surfaces, see surfaces, and handle objects with our opposable thumbs, and we've built a world made of objects. This actually enabled the wonders of science, but also led us to see the world as largely inanimate, there for us to dispose of as we please. But we're beginning to understand that the world is one, and that we are part of it and it of us. And that this world is actually made up in a large part of ocean. And we're all here to talk about that water. Yet, is it enough to look in order to see? Most people know intellectually that the ocean lies below the surface. It's not surface, but actually volume. In fact, it's mostly in between. It's not normal for us. And this between quickly becomes very dark and pressurized, blinding our primary sense site and crushing our bodies. So in order to see the ocean, we may have to shift our point of view, not just shed light on it, but perhaps even leave light behind and find other ways to hear, touch, sense, smell. We may have to retune. Many of us think of water as without content, a place of erasure, a solvent to wash away our dirt, our sins. We have so few words for water, so little sense of it. But to a marine organism, water must be so rich with meaning, so full of structure, information, like pressure, chemical makeup, salinity, and all of these things are continuous, live flow, their experience. So I call it a project called the Ocean Memory Project, which seeks to leverage this kind of space of meaning by bringing people together from across many different disciplines and points of view. And we see memory as a dynamic and predictive process, the learning from past events to understand future outcomes, to predict them. We see memory as a core component of life, and ocean memory encourages us to think of the ocean as made up of living elements, both biotic and abiotic, in gene and geology, in stasis and flow, at the surface in the column and even below the crust. Stories are being made and told. So to finish my own story here, we need as a culture to walk back to the water's edge, to dive in and imagine and research what happens to our senses. How does one perceive in the dark? Can sound help you? What about chemoreception, magnetoreception, lateral lines? And how do these senses cohere into meaning? So I'd like to say it again, memory is a predictive process, the learning from past events to predict future outcomes. So we think we need to hear the memories of life in the ocean in the hope that it will help us move into our own uncertain future. So the group we're part of is currently 25 people and there are five of them in the room with us today, so I'd love them to stand up. Lisa D'Amore is a playwright, Julie Huber is a benthic microbiologist, Jonathan Berger is a composer, Rebecca Rutstein is an artist, and Tim Weaver is a bio-media artist. If Ocean Memory speaks to you in any way, please talk to them. Or you could visit us at oceanmemoryproject.org and you can contact us that way. And I look forward to the discussion afterwards. Thank you all. Wonderful, we're gonna go with Hansi next. Do you have signs? I do. I do. Okay, this is on. Awesome, thank you for having me. I feel really honored to be here. So I'm gonna talk a little bit today about sort of my own sort of approach to exploring the ocean through art. And so this is about knitting the ocean, which is kind of strange, but it works. So the ocean has this ability to us, to make us feel wonder. This is my son when he was five running about the Seattle Aquarium with his little digital camera, feeling this awe. In fact, we used to spend so much time at the Seattle Aquarium that we were also featured in their annual newsletter as in the family that never leaves the aquarium. Like, are they really octopuses? Did they just like transfigure or something? Like, what's going on? Why are they always here every time I turn around? So the aquarium has always been a big thing for us, and it's been a big part of my life and how I connect with the ocean. This is the Seattle Aquarium. But it was also a really good way to really in-depth look at ocean life. And so it was sort of that that inspired me to say, well, if I can look at it and it's so cool and it has all of these amazing shapes, then why can't I knit it? So I did, I did. So this was a period of time in my life. I had just had my first child and I sort of didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. This was sort of my pre-science life. And so I was like, I'm just gonna see what yarn and needles and some fiberfill can do. And it can do a lot of neat things. So I'm like really, I like anatomical accuracy. So I like my creatures to kind of like really look like what the actual creatures look like. But at the same time, like I like to be able to see the stitches. Like I don't want the stitches to just disappear. I want it to be really clear that like this is a cuttlefish, but this is not a cuttlefish, right? So I like to sort of emphasize the medium as well. And so I think it's kind of a really fun medium in which to sort of explore how shape and form give rise to these amazing life forms that we can capture in other media. So when I initially started this, I just sort of thought, oh, I'm just gonna follow a normal artist model, right? Which is like you make things and you show them in galleries and then people buy them from you and then maybe you get some acclaim or whatever. But even as I started showing things online and having art shows, people were always at me to like, please, can I have the pattern for this? Can I have the knitting pattern? Can you write me the directions? The essentially the knitting codes that I can now look at and remake what you've made with my own hands. And so actually that became the focus of Hansi Gurumi, which was the little arts company that I had, which was to make knitting patterns for people of ocean life so they could craft the ocean for themselves. So it was through that that I wrote this book and shared my patterns. So it's not easy to make an octopus, so here are some of the steps. And these are just the pictorial steps. There's lots of lines and numbers and things, right? It's kind of like computing code where you kind of wish you had a compiler, but really the compiler are the people that are knitting your patterns. So it's kind of hard to tell what will happen until they knit them, right? But you can see that with some ability to follow directions, yarn and needles and some persistence and patience, you too can knit an octopus. So yeah, that's exciting. Or a nautilus like this one. Or, and you can see over here, so these are some of Katie's works from my patterns. And so one really cool thing is, right? As soon as I started publishing these patterns, suddenly online there would be like, you know, hundreds of blogs that would show up with people knitting stuff like from my patterns. And yeah, right, an anglerfish, right? And not only that, but the anglerfish has a little light and I'm not sure how to turn it on, Katie. Oh, well then, that is, can you do it? I don't know. I'm not like, I'm not squeezing them right. Oh, oh, oh, at the same time. Oh, there it goes, okay. Very good. So, and that's the thing, right? Oh, and she even put a parasitic mail on it, which is pretty awesome. So the thing is about this, is that like, I know some people love that, right? So I never had this idea of like, oh, why can't I put a light in it, right? I mean, this is the kind of thing that people just come up with. You give them directions for something and they just go wild. So that's pretty awesome. And so I think that really in terms of my knitting, like that is the way that it has really like, you know, helped bring art into people's homes and bring the ocean into people's homes. It's through their own experience crafting the ocean and their own take on it. So this is a Nautilus in my living room. It's this sort of beautiful spring day in Seattle. The windows open there. It's kind of late afternoon and it's kind of getting a little dark. The shadows are longer. And there's a Nautilus hovering over the dining room table. And the big question that this brings up is like, how can we bring the ocean so deeply into our lives, into our metaphorical living rooms? And, you know, one way is through art. I think art is really powerful here. So I actually work as a scientist. I usually talk to scientists. I, you know, present at big conferences and things. And so I, but I don't think science is really the way to do this. Like, I think really like art has a big part to play in how people really feel and get close to, you know, the ocean and what it means to them. So, yeah, I just want to end with that question. How do we, how do we bring the ocean into our lives in a central way? Thank you. Jeff's up next. Hey everybody. My name is Jeff Shelton. I'm a filmmaker. I make films related to everything from documentaries, feature films, promos, music videos. But today I'm going to talk mostly about the work that I do with the Rock Band OK Go. I didn't have the privilege of being here yesterday, unfortunately, but I was told that they came up in relation to 2-Bit Circus and the work that they did with their music video using Cause Effect Machines or Rube Goldberg machines. So I started working with OK Go in 2012. I was hired to record their process, recording their album. And we all became very close friends because the studio was in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York. You had to cook, sleep, and make music all in one enclosed place. So it was basically sink or swim to use an ocean joke or pun. That's all I got. So as you see here, if you are familiar with OK Go, they are known very much for making these insane, elaborate music videos. Pictured here is a music video that they did on a parabolic flight. The music video, if you watch, it appears to be happening entirely in microgravity. If you pay close attention or watch some of the videos that I made to show the process, you'll see that there is actually up and down in different sections of the music video. So as a result of working with them, we did a music video all around optical illusions. And we did this music video upside down and inside out. And through working with them, we kind of got into a pattern of making a whole bunch of supplementary behind-the-scenes videos that explain a lot of the processes that go into making their music videos. So of course, their music videos being as elaborate as they are, something like working in microgravity, something like using Rue Goldberg machines. And as she explained, we have a music video that they did that was shot in about a little over four seconds, but it was shot with high-speed cameras. So it folds out into four minutes. These music videos have been used in classrooms. Maybe there's people in here that have used them. Teachers were coming up to the band a lot and saying, I'm using your music videos in classrooms. How can we build on this? And so fortunately, a professor at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota has an organization called the Playful Learning Lab. Her name is Dr. Emery Thomas. And she spoke with Damian, who is kind of the lead of the band, lead singer. And they came up with the idea of creating OK Go Sandbox. So OK Go Sandbox right now is a platform online. It's free for everybody. It's geared mostly toward teachers. And it's for teachers to use the music videos as entry points into teaching. So they use music videos to teach everything from how frame rates work in cameras, what is the physics of falling objects, how do you make flip books, creating your own cause-effect machine, but using the arts in a way to incorporate that learning process. So next slide, or I'll just do that. Cool. So this is a little still from the one-moment music video, which is all shot with high-speed cameras. And just to give you a little sense of what OK Go Sandbox is, I have a video here. This will have sound, I'll just say no. Or maybe not. We can skip it if it's not working. OK Go Sandbox is a website where teachers can engage with the content of OK Go's music videos and use them in their classrooms for challenges and to start discussions about things like art and math and science. Right now, we know that there are teachers out there who are using our art to actually do something really good in the world. And that's such a rare and wonderful thing that we just want to help it. We want to do anything we can to be part of that process. It's an honor to have teachers continue on with the videos and the artwork that we make. I think the real-life application of science is what our kids need to see. Far too often, they see what happens within four walls and don't see the relevance of the science, technology, engineering, mathematics in the real world. This is a project done with teachers. Teachers have been part of it at every step. I can't go out and produce these amazing videos, but I, as a teacher, know what to do with them when you give them to me. We're trying to provide tools for teachers so they can bring some joy and some wonder into the classroom. I've never had lessons so engaging before, you know, all the way through. It broadens the spectrum of people who would otherwise be less interested in science. I don't have kids that aren't into it. To take math and science off the page and into the world in a way that kids can see that it's fun and it's creative and it's worth engaging in. I think by having this sort of content that comes from the place that students really care about and turn that into fun educational activities that the teachers find useful, then for us that's a perfect win. These things we've made, like they, the world is actually using them for good. Let's keep that going. So what does that have to do with the ocean? Nothing directly, but basically, I think the reason I was invited here is because what we're doing is specializing in teaching complex things in math and science, making them entertaining and engaging for young people as well as adults. So hopefully we'll continue to do that and we'll do our best to try and eventually get the band to do a music video in the ocean. Good morning. I need to start with an apology. I don't have beautiful slides and videos. That's mostly because I wanted to share with you some of my newest work, which I've literally just been completing this week. So this morning I set up some glass outside while people were eating breakfast. Those pieces will be up throughout the day. There's a couple pieces out there. All of my work is very ocean influenced. It's all blown glass. There's a couple pieces out there that are reminiscent of kelp moving in the sea currents. There's a couple pieces that have a shell-like design and shape. And then a few others that are just more inspired by the colors of the ocean. And they do a little bit to try to capture some of the movement. As a little bit as why I ended up here today, as my mom loves to tell people, I spent my childhood messing about in boats on the coast of Maine. I spent my summers on Deer Isle in Penobscot Bay. And in addition to tons of rowing and sailing, I spent countless hours exploring tide pools and usually sandy and damp and kind of disgusting. Looking for sea creatures and climbing over barnacle-covered rocks. And all that time spent doing those activities and listening to the birds and the waves and looking out at the colors of the light on the water was extremely formative to me. So it was kind of no wonder I ended up here at MIT studying ocean engineering. What was really shocking though was discovering glassblowing while I was here. Something about the heat and the fire and the intensity and the power of working with molten glass just totally hooked me. So when I finished my master's degree in naval architecture and marine engineering, I decided to become a full-time glassblower. And then so for about the last nearly 20 years now, I've spent that time in Boston working at shops and working here at MIT teaching glassblowing and helping other artists make their glasswork. Throughout all that time, I've been making my own work and working on my own skill set and my own sort of glass vocabulary, if you will. At the time I made that decision to become a glassblower, it seemed fairly insane. I'd never been particularly artistic and I just spent all this time in engineering school. But now looking back on it, I recognized that there were some very strong connections to working with glass and all that time I spent looking out at the water over the years. To me, glass has a million similarities to the ocean. They both have this amazing ability to be both transparent and opaque and they do such amazing things with the light, constantly bending it and filtering it, refracting it, reflecting it. It's just so mind-boggling to me. Recently I had a glass mentor who was watching me shape a piece and he commented, the piece wasn't ocean-related at all, but he commented as the shape was developing that the ocean is in everything that you make. I didn't really think about it too much at the time, but reflecting back on it later, I realized just how true that actually is for me. And it sort of started to define a direction that I've been taking my work a little bit more ever since. For me, the ocean is just an endless source of ideas and inspiration from the colors to the patterns and textures. People don't often think of texture in glass, but for me, I think that's something that's incredibly important. It's not just something to be looked at, it's something to be experienced and touched and felt. I've got a couple pieces here that I've just finished that are obviously very reminiscent of seashells, but they're largely about the texture, not just the patterns and the designs, but it's the textures within that are so interesting to me. So I'm always looking at the ocean and getting ideas, whether it's from the plants and animals and their structures and forms, like I said, the colors or even just the water itself and the way it moves and trying to capture some of that movement. I could never, as I've tried to sort of make work that's from the ocean, I can't try to replicate it and do justice to what nature does, but I constantly borrow ideas and try to use glass in ways that captures some of that feeling that the ocean evokes. In addition to being an engineer turned artist, I am also the father of 27 year olds. And I see in my kids, when they get the opportunity to mess around in the water and explore the water, I just see them totally come alive. There's clearly this instinctual connection that we all have with the ocean and it just satisfies us in a way that nothing else can. With the work I make, I feel like adults often see the influence of the ocean in it. But when the kids see that, I feel like that's when my work is really successful and I've somehow been able to tie into that connection that we have, that fundamental connection we have with the water. So I try to make objects that people like to look at, like to look at and wonder about and to see and experience and like I said, to touch and feel the textures. But that all starts with myself and I need my work to satisfy that for me. And the work that does that the best is the work that has that connection with the water. So thanks very much for your time. These pieces will be back outside with the rest of the work for the rest of the day if you guys wanna look at stuff a little more carefully. And please, like I said, feel free to touch them. They're not off limits. Enjoy. Great, I just have one question for you all before I'll turn it over to the rest of the room. It seems like you're all sort of forging very new models for being artists, kind of different from this model Hansi was talking about where you just put something in a gallery and then hope to sell it and that's it. But it struck me that you all have sort of very participatory approaches where you're incorporating teaching and building communities around your work. So I'm just curious about how does that public engagement change or deepen your practice or make you think differently? And any one of you can take that one. What I do is an incredibly hands-on experience and I think what connected with me so strongly was that hands-on experience and the power. I mean I work in front of a 2000 degree furnace all the time. So it's hard for that to not be engaging and it just, it draws people in and it opens the door to those conversations and getting people to work together and invest in one another. So I think it sort of just naturally fosters community. So it's an easy one to just ride those coattails. Maybe with the work specifically that we're doing with OK Go in terms of the community it's been great to be a part of a community. I mean on their music videos it's not just the film crew and the band making a music video. There's engineers, there's mathematicians sometimes. There's Russian cosmonaut trainers. So you already, every time you go on to the set you're already in a new community and now with the work that we're doing with OK Go Sandbox when I do these original videos for the website we are always bringing on a teacher. Sometimes we're bringing in different professionals related to whatever that lesson is. So in the sense of building media projects it's just a great experience to always have a community around creating whatever that end product is. And then of course the interaction with the people here or anybody else that views it and wants to talk to me about what they're doing and how it relates so it's great. Sure. Yeah the knitting community is just very big and decentralized which is kind of cool because it's all over the world. So yeah, initially when I first started like putting work out there and then having people be like, well where's the pattern? I was like a little bit like, you know. I don't know, I was not used to this model of like everyone making their own work from sort of your directions. But yeah, but now I think it's amazing because I think that's what has really just helped kind of sort of propagate this. And if we have this question of like, well how do you get someone in the Midwest interested in the ocean? Let me tell you, like they love octopuses. I don't know why they love octopuses. I don't know if they eat them. I mean, yeah, I don't know. But they love octopuses. So I think, yeah, there's that way in which when you create a community you can bring together lots of different type of people that maybe only have one thing in common. So. Sure, I'll jump into that too. So my world kind of opened up when I met a geneticist and we started talking about art and science and I realized that my frustration with the art world and when you meet someone who's in your domain you end up talking about, you know, your gallery, your paints, you know, if you're a scientist maybe your reagents or, but if you meet someone with whom you don't have that common set of concerns then you talk about the metastructures that join you so you start talking about the world and why the world is the way it is and you start to realize that actually it's the same world that you and they live in and so it really brought me to a real pleasure of encounter and surprise and then thinking about it really realizing that we're in a particular period in history where we're starting to see the world as multiple and connected and whereas in the Newtonian space we thought that the world existed and then we just observed it. Now we're thinking more and more that the world is made up of all of the observations that we can make and so all of the points of view are relevant and so when you work, when you meet people and hear their point of view it actually enriches the whole world and yours as well and so there's something fundamentally different from just working by yourself. It's like it's a place where you're making, you're walking the road together and the road becomes what you can do so it's very nourishing. Do we have time for, no time for audience questions? I'm sorry you guys, thank you all that was fascinating and everyone make sure to check out the glass pieces and then talk to these folks over the break and at lunch. Thank you guys. All right, we're onto a lightning talk session so any day two lightning talkers please head over in this direction and we'll kick it off with Lee Marsh, could Louis, Margot, Alexis, Arya, Sheena, Zuleka, Harpreet, Sebastian, Anastasia, Andrew, Ernst, Katelyn and Mara please come over here and we'll get lightning talk started. PSI've made a Hansi creature for about every friend's baby I know for the last 10 years. Right, hi everybody. So quickly I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about some of my research that I've been undertaking. Many of you will know that most discoveries in ocean exploration are totally unplanned. They result from observing the ocean in a new way or like not using a hypothesis to test with a planned outcome and that's exactly what happened here so this area here on the map is the Clarion-Clifton zone in the Pacific Ocean which is an area that's designated for sea floor mining of polymetallic nodules. Now because this area is so vast and so deep the only way you can survey this area is by using AUVs and that's what this piece of equipment is in the middle. So to look at the sea floor we can use acoustic sonars like side scan sonar and what that does it looks at the texture of the sea floor whether it's hard or soft and whether there's any holes or any objects on the sea floor. As you can see we usually fly at 15 meters altitude and what that gives us is a relatively uniform sea floor we can't really see anything of real interest there but when we use our camera surveys we fly the AUV at three meters off the sea floor and that allows us to look at the nodules itself look at the animals that are on the nodules and we can start getting a baseline assessment of what animals are actually there. But one day what if someone says well why do we always put our sonar on at 15 meters why don't we turn it on when it's at three meters maybe we'll see something different and everybody on the ship's like well we never usually do that why would we do it today but we did so we put the sonar on while we were flying three meters off the sea floor and because of the low incidence angle of the side scan sonar on the sea floor we actually started to reveal these holes in the sea floor which form tracks. Now I counted all these tracks over 20 kilometers squared of the areas we surveyed within a couple of the license areas. There were over 3,500 of them and they formed these curvy linear features that kind of looked like tracks like footprints almost and they were up to a depth of four and a half thousand meters which is incredible. And they resembled other marks that have been seen on the sea floor in the Mediterranean which have been attributed to beaked whales so like this. No one's actually directly observed them but looking at the morphology and the structure of them that's our best estimate of what kind of large vertebrate can be causing these marks on the sea floor. Now to put this all into context the deepest known whale is a cuvier's beaked whale and it's tagged to dive down to 2,993 meters. We were observing these over four and a half thousand meters which is incredible. So we're not entirely sure which species of deep diving whale could be causing these marks on the sea floor although this observation is pretty cool. For me it's really cool as well because I think it's thrown a bit of a spanner in the works for the mining industry within the Clarion-Clifton zone. So yeah, keep exploring because we'll never know what we'll find. Thank you. Good morning everyone. I'm geologist, volcanologist with the Chilean Geological Survey now in charge of a new program of marine geology and geophysics. So you know Chile has a long coastline more than 8,000 kilometers and about a half of the national territory is under seawater. As part of a recent national policy of the oceans, marine protected areas were expanded and now about 40% of the exclusive economic zone is under some kind of production. This is a big, big area. It's more than California and Texas states together. So, but these protected areas are mostly volcanic in origin but the knowledge, the basic knowledge about them is still poor. So our recent findings in some of this place, this is the O'Higgins' Gulliot in Juan Fernandez to Rich opens avenues for ocean explorations and public engagement with the oceans. Chile as a country which economies based on the natural resource, mostly the mining commodities, the link with the earth sciences seems to be more evident and our strategy is bottom up. So from the sea floor, the best knowledge of the sea floor to the surface. Of course, we have small budgets for that. So small budget for science or technology or outreach. But we think that there are many things to do and the good news is that most of them probably require more creativity than money. So I'm happy to be here and learn about your amazing experiences and interesting stories about her. So thank you very much. Good morning, I'm Margot Philippi. I'm a Fluid Dynamist. And today I want to present to you trajectories of traditional fishermen who sail from Australian co-adoles to the Timorese Islands. So this data set I collected when our team did field work in Scott Reef and Adoles sister, Mosho Western Australia. And I was able to go on the cruise. Thank you to Joe Ito. So thank you for that and thank you to the MIT Media Lab for having us here today. So the goal of our work was to look at small-scale sea surface dispersion and we released drifters. They were made of a PVC pipe that contained a GPS tracker and attached to a conic sea anchor that is submerged for drag and stabilization. So we deployed these drifters and shortly after several of them got picked up by these Indonesian and Timorese fishermen. So at first I was quite upset because, well, that was some of my PhD work. But I quickly realized that A, at least as drifters would be reused and repurposed. So that was good. And B, things as simple as a PVC pipe, a plastic sea anchor and GPS trackers were actually of huge values for these fishermen. They live on this traditional sailboat for month and month at a time, about 12 men per boat. And thanks to the GPS trackers they stole, I was able to track them for up to 11 months. The whole office actually tracked them for 11 months, so all my landmates really stoked about that. So they sailed from Scott Reef, which is on the southwestern part, up to the Indonesian island of Timor and East Timor. East Timor is a country where half the population is illiterate and half the population live on a dollar a day. So this is a prime example of how coral reef is a beautiful ecosystem, but there is a habitat that provides food for millions and millions of people around the planet. And these people survive on the fish that they can find in aturals like Scott Reef. Well, Scott Reef, when I was there two years ago, over 90% of the coral was dead because of rising temperatures and subsequent bleaching. And sadly, this is a trend that we see globally. But back to the theme of a bright and optimistic future, let's this be motivation to keep working together to find solutions to protect these ecosystems, but also ensure we have sustainable fisheries for people around the world. Thank you. I am Alexis Weineck and I'm a PhD student at Temple University. A lot of the work in our lab focuses on how humans are impacting the deep sea. And I was going to stand up here and kind of give you some results from experiments that we ran, but after all this conversation about ocean optimism and the stereotypical scientist coming to the table with the doom and gloom, I realized that that was generally me and I didn't want to share those stories with you right now. So I'm gonna focus on a new project we have called Deep Search, which is off the southeast coast of the US and the purpose of it is to go out and explore and understand a lot of these ecosystems that are out there. And that's where this video is from. This is a cruise back in August where we had a chance to go out and survey muscle beds and cold water coral mounds and canyon habitats. And what we found was incredibly high diversity and abundance in all of these habitats, many of which were outside of what our predicted habitat models had showed us. So these were in areas that we had not even thought we were gonna find these types of organisms. And this leads us to the idea of exploration before exploitation. So the southeast US coast is under potential, is under extreme interest for potential oil and gas exploration. And so it's incredibly important for us to get out there and explore before we actually end up exploiting what we didn't even know was there. So thank you. And if you wanna talk about experiments, just find me after. Hi everyone, my name's Aria. I'm a doctoral student here at MIT in urban studies and planning and a guest student at the Marine Policy Center at Woods Hole. And in my fields, while I'm studying the ongoing UN negotiations that are seeking to develop a legal framework for how we manage our uses of the high seas. And in my field planning, fundamentally we're concerned with how to translate knowledge into action. Borrowing from Aristotle, we can talk about three kinds of knowledge. Epistem, which is knowledge of what things are. Technique, which is knowledge of how to do things and phronesis, which is knowledge of what should be done. And often this last one, phronesis is the trickiest because it relies not only on the first two, but also on people's politics, their values, their desires. And often these are intention or even in conflict with each other. So planning theory would suggest that negotiation can help us resolve these tensions and come to shared agreements. But for negotiations to work, people need some kind of shared language which to communicate about existing conditions and about possible futures. Thus far marine plants have been communicated primarily through two-dimensional, planometric images. And I would argue that this two-dimensional thinking is inadequate in any environment, but it's just an especially obvious lacuna or a gap in visual storytelling in oceanic spaces. As I'm sure many of you know, the Gaia hypothesis says that the earth system is a sort of body and that its systems work holistically to regulate its health. This metaphor is controversial, so I bring it here with a grain or even a sea of salt. But I use it or offer it next to this series of MRIs, which happen to be of this body, to illustrate the disciplines other than planning have much more developed visually or much more developed ways of visualizing complex systems than the ones that are currently being used in marine spatial planning. And representations like these allow us to conceive of volumes more fully to better comprehend three-dimensional and even four-dimensional relationships and to intervene in these systems more precisely. So one strain of questions that I'm asking are how do current approaches to mapping within marine spatial planning expand or constrain decision-making processes? Can we adapt tools from other fields to develop a common visual language for marine planning? And how can different representations help marine planners make better use of scientific knowledge and research facilitate collaboration more effectively and end up with better policy outcomes? Thank you. I planned a talk and I was going to go into the marine spatial planning, spatial blue economy, the blue bonds, the Aldabra Cleanup Project and Necton, all of which are amazing projects happening in the spatials right now. But instead, I'm going to talk about little Brianna, an exercise that we did yesterday. So little Brianna, that's not a name that's common in the spatials, is from a small island nation, often not even featured on a map. She fell in love with a picture of a fish. It was a strange fish. In fact, to a five-year-old, it was a very strange fish because it lacked a tail. Her mommy and daddy told her that it was a sunfish. She's all grown up now, all sort of, and she studied marine ecosystems, and you guessed it, fish. But she often feels helpless because her small island nation is at the mercy of decisions being made by bigger ones. These decisions affect global climate change, sea level rise, overfishing, pollution. The list goes on. Today, she's here at a forum, listening to all the amazing stories of how people care about the ocean and how they get other people to care too. She's an optimist, and therefore, it's hopeful that with networks and collaboration, we can make the ocean a better place. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I am Zalaga Filander, and I'm an offshore scientist with the National Department of Environmental Affairs. I'm also a part-time PhD student with Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, and my project there entails assigning names to coral faces, evaluating the health and protection status of these ecosystems in South Africa, and the idea is really to develop some sort of conservation or management plan that can assist us in identifying our next 5%. But today, I'm really going to talk about the work that I've been doing within the department for the past four years and how it not only advanced DVC research in the country, but also assisted us in increasing our protection status from 0.4 to 5%. The process really started over a decade ago before my time, and basically, a group of scientists came together under the leadership of Dr. Kerry Sink, a mentor and co-supervisor of mine, and the idea here was really to identify areas of high conservation interest with the best available data at the time. But what became apparent throughout our negotiations was that it was difficult for us to strengthen the protection case when we, ourselves as scientists, had not seen or ever seen some of these ecosystems. So for the past four to five years, we came together as DVC researchers in the country, and we decided to revisit these areas and collect quite valuable data in refining not just the boundaries, but also ensuring that the areas meet the objectives. So like I've already mentioned, this provided the first visuals, and alongside other data sets, this assisted us with actually refining our national habitat classification map, which is our basis for planning and management. The process itself really enhanced not just relationships within scientists, but also across different stakeholders, and although there were a lot of disagreements, but it was the first time where we had different stakeholders sitting at a table and discussing what to do with our ocean space, which I think was quite an awesome thing to be part of. One of the challenges was really trying to convince people that we actually need to protect an area that is relatively unknown, more so because 80% of South African population live below the bread line, and so how do we tell people that they need to protect for the next generation when today is sort of unbearable for them? So the department decided to invest a lot in a roadshow where they communicated the importance of NPAs, and although these NPAs, while the recently approved NPAs are offshore, there are some areas that are actually expansions. So the lesson learned, I guess we've been hearing this a lot, the importance really of communicating our science beyond the scientific community, and I just wanna echo that, and one of the results or outputs or outcomes from the entire process was having this interactive map that sort of like walks you through the different NPAs, the objectives of the different platforms used and the contributing projects. Yeah, okay, thank you. Hello everyone, my name is Herpreet. I'm an assistant professor at Parsons School of Design. Also used to be a student here at the Media Lab. I do interaction design, but beyond digital traditional tools that we usually use, I design new hybrid bioelectronic plants, and these allow me to do new interactions with devices that are not digital. Plants have electronic signals inside them, and we usually look at these signals by change of light, change of gravity, change of environmental conditions, but we designed interfaces where you click on a plant and instead of listening to signals, you send signals to a plant, and when you click on a leaf, the plant leaves start closing like a display. There are plants that now can act as antennas, plants with electronic wires inside them. A new plant that I'm designing actually derives it inspiration from the oceans, the Australian beaches. The pigment is called chlorophyll F that absorbs beyond the visible light spectrum as we know, and this plant allows me to do sensing and create a plant that can sense the water quality and the pollution and our lights. The oceans are like a new design space. There are displays phytoplanktons. There are sensors, aquatic plant life, how we use them, and how do we utilize that design space is something that I look in my current practice. That's all I have to say, but if you are interested in the experiments, please come talk to me. Thank you so much. Hi, everyone. My name is Sebastian, and I'm part of the Sculpting Evolution Group here at the Media Lab, and we're a group that studies evolved systems, and my colleague and I, Ashton, we're hoping to engage in a collaborative brainstorming session, partly with relation to what we're proposing. So we come from different backgrounds. My background is primarily in environmental contamination, and I have a special interest in the structures, the physical structures, both built and natural, that create habitats for our ocean communities. She is also a biologist and has an interest in microbiology and population dynamics. So we started thinking and started talking about the different relationships that drive evolution in oceans. Here are examples of Vibro species, which, as you can see through this rather complex map, have various kinds of relationships between different members, and a lot of these relationships are mediated in part by a need for the use of iron, which is often one of the limiting resources in ocean environments. At the same time, as humans have, as people have talked about today, have deteriorated a lot of the naturally occurring reef structures, there have been movements to create artificial reefs. In many instances, these look like building materials that no longer have use or decommissioned vessels, many of which are rich sources of iron. So we're interested in understanding how these new artificial reef environments interact with the current population environment, sorry, the current population dynamics in the oceans and engage in work that revolves around this practice. Thank you. That means I get four minutes, though. So I'm a deep sea ecologist and I study human impacts on that last great wilderness, but I'm also a science communicator and I recognize the inherent contradiction of working in places that almost no one in the world will ever see, but still trying to help people fall in love with that abyss. I'm also a toy maker and my toys are underwater robots and ocean sensors. My toys are platforms like the OpenROV, an underwater robot that allows anyone to become an ocean explorer. And over the last few years, I've held ROV building workshops in places like Papua New Guinea and Saipan where we were actually invited to use one of the voyaging canoes as a research vessel for our students. And we donate the ROVs so that the students don't just gain the skills necessary to explore the ocean, but they also get the tools, the hardware to take ownership over their research. And it was through my work with OpenROV that I was inspired to advance my own open source development project, the OpenCTD. The OpenCTD is a low-cost sensor system for measuring the basic parameters of ocean health. That you can build it from accessible parts. And something really magical happens when people build their own ocean sensors and take measurements and take ownership over the science that happens in their own backyard. They trust the data. When people understand how data is produced and how that data comes to exist, they trust it. So I wanna kind of end with a vision. There's this hydrothermal vent in Papua New Guinea called Solwara One. And it's only a few kilometers from shore. And in the very near future, Solwara One is going to be mined. And I want someone who lives there, someone who cares about their local waters to have the capacity to paddle out to a hydrothermal vent, to deploy an ROV, to take water quality measurements and to understand what's happening in their own oceans, 1600 meters below, without big research grants, without the support of major universities with just that drive of curiosity. And we're not quite there yet, but every year these tools, they get a little bit better and they go a little bit deeper and they get a little bit cheaper. So with a little bit of luck and a lot of creativity will get there. Thank you. Hi, my name is Ernst. I'm from South Africa, but I live in Costa Rica. I grew up on the east coast of Africa, southeast coast of Africa in a place called Port Edward. And one of my math classes was looking out the window when I was about 10 years old and I saw a whale came right in front of the school and she was giving birth to a baby whale. These dolphins came and made a massive circle around it. My teacher was very frustrated because I wasn't paying attention to any of the math problems over there, but she then came over to me and she says, you know what, Ernst? Nature's everywhere, we learn from nature. And she says, you know what? Everything that you're going to learn in this classroom, you'll probably forget for the rest of your life, okay? Everything that you learn outside the classroom, you'll remember for the rest of your life. Fast forward, in Dubai, I was teaching a bunch of kids scuba diving and we're sitting around and I say, where do you guys like to hang out? They say indoors, because that's where the electrical outlets are. There's also the, you know, the internets and everything like that. And I realized we live in a day and age where kids are disconnected from nature, which kind of also gives way to a much bigger problem over there. We came up with a program that uses place-based education that takes scientists and people like yourselves that are mentors and get them in a position where they can actually mentor kids. Now, place-based education means you learn. Hands on, okay? You're not inside the classroom. The common denominator over years that all of these things are based around five different marine ecosystems. And what we do is we teach kids through citizen science how to collect data and we upload it onto a GIS database, creating very comprehensive spatial analysis of what's happening. So what we're hoping to do next week as we have a meeting with Patti, the largest dive organization in the world that certify 25 million divers. Every year they certify million dive certifications and we're hoping to make this mainstream to create a STEM education program that will be available in schools worldwide as a way as an extracurricular activity or an opportunity for kids just to learn. And that's what it's all about. We believe that passion is gonna be the long-distance fuel that will change our planet and it's delivered through people like yourself. So go out and make your passion and connect the young people with it. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. My name is Caitlin Noyes and I am the director of Ocean Academy at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences. So I thought I'd just take a second just to take you to Bermuda, just a second. 600 nautical miles off the east coast of the United States. What you can see is as you come over that volcanic platform just how much reef track is there. 600 square kilometers of coral reefs. One of the reasons that BIOS, the institute that I work for is stationed there is access to the deep ocean as well as the subtropical habitats. One of my jobs within Ocean Academy is to create programs that connect Bermudian students to the ocean and to the research that we do there. And we try to do this through a three-pronged attack. The first is immerse. Get students in masks and snorkels and wetsuits sometimes and get them out exploring their marine environment and taking measurements about the ocean. Our second prong of attack is to promote innovation. I'm conscious of always trying to find different literacy access points for students there. And we do this through an underwater robotics competition that we host annually. Students have to build and create and market their robots to do different scientific tasks related to the research that we do at BIOS. And the third one varied near and dear to my heart is mentorship. I feel that supporting students that are interested in STEM careers by using our faculty at BIOS that we can continue to promote their development in these fields. I truly believe that by pushing innovation within the Bermuda community and continuing to connect students to the ocean, we can continue to improve ocean literacy and develop lifelong learning and connection to the ocean. Thank you very much. Hi, I'm Mara, I'm a graduate student in the MIT Woods Hole Joint Program in Oceanography. I study ocean currents and ocean microbes and I really love doing that and I love talking about that. So feel free to come talk to me about that anytime. But what I wanted to bring to all hands on deck is an organization that I find really inspiring called Science for the People. And so in my field, oceanography, climate science, we often talk about people who don't trust science, don't believe science from their perspective of climate denial. And that's true, it's real, it's a problem but there are also other reasons that people don't trust science, don't feel that they can have access to science and don't feel that science is something that believes them in their stories. So examples of that include science built the atomic bomb. Science conducted the Tuskegee Civilis experiment. Science brought us biological determinism. And I think it's the role of scientists to organize themselves politically, to address these harms that science has done to society but also to work with movements that are working for social justice today and to envision a world that's more just and the role that science plays in a more just world. And so that's what Science for the People does. So on the right, or on your left, the harms that science has done, we work to fight against those. But we also work to build a more just future today by using science. So we've sent a brigade to Puerto Rico to build ties with community activists in Puerto Rico, to do ongoing science with Puerto Ricans recovering from Hurricane Maria. We work with movements for reproductive justice to forefront people suffering from the harms done both by science and politics that prevent their access to reproductive justice. We've also in Boston organized tech workers to pressure their employers like Microsoft to cut their ties with ICE. So bringing these perspective of political organizing that come from outside of academia, outside of science and technology, to the science and technology realm to build a better and more just science. As I mentioned, we do this through political organizing. We do this through education. We have teachers. We do this through organizing workers. And we do this by protecting STEM intellectuals who do stand up from attacks that come to them when they stand up and speak out politically. Yes, so this is an invitation to join us. Okay, good morning everybody. Thank you for joining us for the panel on explore, empowering, what is it? Empowering a global community of ocean explorers. So before I introduce you to our phenomenal panel here, I'm gonna set the scene a bit for you. So my name is Diva Amon and I'm a deep sea biologist from Trinidad Tobago, but I'm currently based at the Natural History Museum in London. And we all know that the ocean is critical to life. It's the largest ecosystem on our planet. It takes up about 99% of all habitable space on Earth, but only about 15% of it has been mapped using modern methods and only about 5% of it has been imaged by human eyes or seen by human eyes. We tend to think of exploration as this Indiana Jones type activity, but in reality, we are all explorers. To explore is to travel in or through an unfamiliar country or area in order to learn about or familiarize oneself with it. Straight from Wikipedia everybody, FYI. It's something that is powered by curiosity and that is something that is innate to all of us. We have it almost from birth and we continue this process throughout our lives. But when it comes to ocean exploration, that global community shrinks drastically. And when you think about deep ocean exploration, it shrinks even further. We have all the necessary skills, so how do we broaden that participation past the incredibly elite privileged model of sticking a handful of experts on a ship in the middle of the ocean? Let me get this right. If seven billion people depend on ocean resources, then all seven billion should have the opportunity to engage in ocean exploration, ocean issues, and ocean discovery, right? So, here to answer that question, no pressure. The question of democratizing our oceans, we have this incredible panel. First up, we have Alan Leonati, Dr. Alan Leonati. He's currently the director of NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration and Research. And this is the only federal program that is dedicated to systematic, telepresence-based exploration of the world's oceans. He is also a meteorologist and oceanographer. Next up, we have Antonella Wilby. She's a PhD student and National Science Foundation graduate research fellow at the Contextual Robotics Institute at the University of California, San Diego. She's also a National Geographic Explorer. And incredibly, she develops autonomous underwater vehicles or autonomous robots to explore extreme environments, such as those we find in the ocean. Next, we have Dr. Alan Adams. He leads the Future Oceans Lab here at MIT, where his team develops not only low-cost, low-power tools for ocean exploration, but also high-end custom cameras to document the world's changing oceans. And finally, we have Elizabeth Tyson. She's a fellow with National Geographic Society in their Citizen Explorer Labs. Her goal there is refining strategic programming around participatory scientific research and innovation. So each of these people represents a different facet of exploration, but all work towards empowering that global community of explorers. So, Alan, do you want to take it away? Thank you. So as Diva said, I'm Alan Linaari, and I am, although you said currently, the director of NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, I don't know what's coming next for me, or if you know something, I don't. But I'm happy to be here today, either way. And really, this is about empowerment, so I'm gonna try to keep this brief and the main message I want to take away is in our office, while we do at-sea research and exploration, we also like to instigate it as well in many different facets. So we conduct our work in several ways. One, we, of course, have a ship and a deep-diving ROV system. We enter into strategic partnerships and we conduct a very vigorous contracts and grants program, so we fund work as well in the community as a whole. In all cases, we're striving to have data that are collected and that's shared and made accessible to everybody as fast as humanly possible so that everybody can get the benefit of this information. Now, we're also, as I had noted yesterday, the instigator in a national program on ocean exploration, which then convenes on an annual basis forums such as these. We look for calls for proposals, either through our office that we fund directly or we instigate other federal agencies to fund things that are relevant to what we're interested in. And we also conduct regional workshops with members of the ocean community to understand what people want when people are going to sea, what kind of data and information they want us to collect and deliver for them to be able to use. Through this process, we often partner with people to do technology development. Some of that takes place on our ship, some of that takes place through grants programs, some of that takes place on partner vessels. We are constantly looking to find people who are working in the technology space and mate them with people who are working in the at sea space and figure out how to test those things together in a leveraged way. We also, of course, have data management. We collect a lot of data, a lot of video data this. The middle panel here shows you just the body of work that we conducted with just our ship from the years 2014 to 2017. If you don't understand what that looks like, that is a huge swath of the Pacific Ocean where for three years running, we visited all of the US managed marine protected areas, sanctuaries and monuments and systematically collected data and information so that those communities of resource managers can understand what they need to manage. Before we went there, in many cases, they had no idea what was in these deep sea zones that they had to manage. We also very actively support education and training. We have a fellowship program where people can come out and learn how to do systematic survey techniques and mapping on board our ship. We provide lesson plans and conduct teacher professional development training so that teachers across at least the US and broader can use those lesson plans within their classrooms to encourage not only better knowledge of the ocean space, but a community of practitioners someday that may join us either as technologists, as oceanographers, as scientists in general, as communicators, as artists, or as teachers themselves. We, of course, also have some strategic partnerships in the process. We work with the octagons. We've been working with them on some of their activities and some of the materials that they're developing. And, of course, we're working with a community of explorers, not just in our own spaces and on our own ship, but we're working with faculty members who are actually using our activities and their classes to help develop dives for what we actually do at sea. So they're working with their students to understand what we should be doing and that is directly influencing what we do at sea. So the future for NOAA, from my perspective, is that we're looking for continuous input. Forums like this are one manner of that. Partnerships that we're entering into is another manner of that. We're also looking for a more active national program. This isn't just about NOAA and NOAA's program, it's about a national program. It's about getting the broad community together to explore this relatively unexplored place. We, of course, are also trying to look for new partnerships. Maybe they're partnerships directly with us. Maybe they're partnerships that are gonna happen with some of you together with others of you here that we're not gonna be involved with. That's all a win in my book if we're looking at exploring and understanding the ocean. And of course, we're always looking for better access to ocean data. And when I say access, access isn't sufficient. The data is there, but it also needs to be usable and usable by a broad community of people. So the things that we look at doing is trying to empower people to work in those spaces so that everybody else can work in those spaces as well. So I appreciate your time and I'll yield a little bit of my time to the rest of the panel and hopefully to your questions. Hello everyone. I'm really excited to be here today. It's been an incredible experience thus far, learning from all of you on the transformative ways that we're working to change the future of ocean exploration. So my name is Antonella. I'm a PhD student at the UC San Diego Contextual Robotics Institute and a National Geographic Explorer. And today I'm gonna talk about how we can use robots to push the limits of our current understanding of ocean exploration. So my PhD work is on developing a swarm of underwater robots to map ocean environments like coral reefs. I'm collaborating with a project at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography called the Hundred Island Challenge. And the goal of this challenge is to create ultra high resolution, large scale maps of coral reefs at 100 different islands all across the world as one tool for understanding reef resilience in the face of ongoing problems like pollution, ocean acidification and climate change. So right now we have teams of divers, surveying coral reefs with a large stereo camera system. They collect two-dimensional imagery and post-process it into 3D models like these. And what this gives us is a snapshot which is usually a 10 meter by 10 meter 3D model which it takes about an hour of diving to create this. And that gives us ultra high resolution imagery on that particular portion of the reef. And these are incredibly detailed up to a millimeter resolution but it's still just a snapshot. Now imagine if we can get this type of data but across a really large area, we won't need a way to both automate the data collection and the annotation process so that we can not only fill in the gaps here but also annotate this data at scale. And to do this I'm working on developing robots with this goal of scaling up our ability to create these high resolution maps of coral environments. Now in case anyone is worried, the goal here is not to replace humans in the field with robots. I wanna go into the field and dive so I don't wanna do that. But the goal is to augment our human capacity to do science in the field. Robots are really good at swimming back and forth and collecting data in an automated way. And ideally what we'll do with this project is free up the humans to do more interesting experiments in the field rather than just swimming back and forth with a camera. This is still a pretty significant technical challenge. And let's use it. I'm not going to go into a huge amount of technical detail but the main portion of this work is on vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping. And that's an algorithm that a robot can use to take a camera or a pair of stereo cameras and localize itself within an environment and create concurrently build a map of this previously unknown environment and use that to navigate and make decisions. And this is really challenging underwater for a lot of reasons but in particular one of the assumptions that we make is that we can find static landmarks to localize. So if you see in this video here all these green dots are landmarks that the algorithm is tracking from frame to frame with the assumption that they're static. Now if they're not static this totally fails and the robot basically it's lost. So one of the things we're working on is making these algorithms far more robust to the particular environments that we deal with underwater that we don't have to deal with in terrestrial robotics. One of the other things we're working on is building these algorithms around low cost vehicles in order to not only make this technology more accessible to researchers working in the marine space which is typically incredibly expensive but also make it more accessible to ecologists working in remote areas or who don't have the support of a really large research vessel. So we wanna be able to deploy these robots with a couple of people working on a small boat or in a really remote area. And some of you might notice this platform is a highly customized blue ROV2 but we're currently working on building a new low cost vehicle that's more geared towards autonomy rather than the remote operation. And the other goal of this system is that we eventually wanna scale this up. We wanna have not just one robot we wanna have multiple robots a whole swarm working together so that we can really scale up the data that we're able to create from say tens of square meters to eventually square kilometers. And once we're able to do that we have a problem of scale. We actually already do. So right now the core ecologists that we work with are annotating these point clouds by going and hand painting them in visualization software. This takes an incredible amount of time and with the data that we're able to create with scuba divers, this is already intractable. So one of the things we're looking towards for the future is annotating this data using machine learning in real time so that when the robot gets out of the water we're handing scientists data that they can already use to do interesting things and draw conclusions instead of just a pretty model. Let's see. So I'm gonna conclude by trying to contextualize some of this work in the greater space of ocean exploration as we look towards the future. So earlier this year over the summer I was fortunate to be on EB Nautilus as an ROV pilot. And this was my first time working with a system of this scale. I don't know how many thousands of hours that this system has been underwater making discoveries. And so that got me thinking about the ways that we could potentially bring the newer advancements in robotic technology from new sensors, algorithms, high level autonomy, machine learning and merge it with these proven systems that are already in the ocean making these discoveries every day. This could take the form of an automated classification system running on the data, the video stream coming up from a deep CROV. It could be higher level autonomy algorithms and decision making and adaptive sampling on an AUV. Or it could be vehicles that we haven't even imagined yet. So my personal vision is that one day we'll have millions of robots of all shapes and sizes working alongside humans to explore the ocean. And I'm so excited to see what we're going to learn. Thank you. Hi, I'm going to cheat and use technology for a crutch. So I really love this photo. It was taken with a Nikon in a big bulky underwater housing by a first year MIT undergrad who had never before used a camera that wasn't also a phone, right? So this image tells a conservation story about competition on a coral reef. It also tells a technology story about the gulf between bulky, expensive underwater tools and the supercomputers that we carry around in our pockets. That disconnect between the tech that's in your pocket and the tech that's available on the reef has very serious implications, not least of which is cost. So for example, a CTD, the Workhorse Sensor of Ocean Exploration, if you want to go out and just buy a nice one, it's $15,000. You go out and you buy a camera that'll go 6,000 meters and it's $50,000 and that thing doesn't take a photo as good as my iPhone. You wanna buy an acoustic modem, communications underwater and a modem, even the inexpensive one costs $8,000. And if you're an oil rig or the Navy, peanuts. But if you're not an oil rig or the Navy, that's a problem. In our world, what that cost does is it makes lots of the core domains of ocean exploration unobtainable and out of reach to lots of people, whether that's conservationists or researchers or fishing communities or me, right? And I really want to be able to go out and explore. So the fact that everything's too expensive is profoundly frustrating to me. The cost also makes exploring the vast bulk of the ocean, the volume, incredibly difficult. Look, if your sensors cost tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can look at a patch on the bottom or a patch on the top, but you can't study the volume. In order to understand the bulk of the ocean where most of life lives, we need to radically decrease the cost of the tools we use to explore and sense. So the mission of my lab here at MIT is to create low cost, low power, high value sensors and cameras for ocean exploration. That means sensors and cameras that can tackle key bottlenecks that are a barrier to the data flow out of the ocean. So our approach starts with sort of two key ideas. First, commodity electronics and manufacturing at scale can just dramatically bring down the cost of things. If you build one, it costs you the cost of a postdoc for two years. If you build 10,000, it costs you the cost of a postdoc for two years. So when you think about building things at scale, it's a very different calculus and the cost and the price point comes down dramatically. Can come down dramatically, doesn't always. Second, you don't need four decibel places for most of the things we care about. You go out and you buy a $32,000 sea cat and the reason it's that expensive, well, there are many reasons, but among others is that it's breathtakingly accurate and reliable over extremely long time series. For a lot of our purposes, we need the first two, not the last two significant additions. And when you don't have to fight against those kinds of tolerances, you can make economies in your design, in your manufacturing that dramatically change the price point. They change what's possible, going to scale and taking the first two significant digits. So let me flesh that out in a couple of examples. So suppose you've got a camera deployed on a reef, it's 30 meters down at, whoa, I'm going slow. So it's 30 meters down and you wanna change a setting. You can't run wires to it because you're in a protected area. You can't use wireless because it's salt water and that's opaque to radio and wifi. So we've basically got two options. You can shout at it and hope it hears you or you can send your grad student down and they sometimes like it but eventually gets really boring. To dive, bring it back up, change the setting, dive back down. This is particularly difficult if you're grad students in Cambridge and the center is in Fiji. So on the other hand, if you go out and so I'm serious about the shouting, in principle shouting or more precisely using acoustic waves in the water to communicate data, right, a modem. In principle shouting is way more effective. It's way easier. You don't have to send anyone down. But on the other hand, if you go out and you try to buy an acoustic modem right now, the really nice ones like who is a micro modem. It's brilliant, wonderful piece of equipment, 6,000 bucks. Cost me less to fly a student to Fiji and send them down for a dive, right. So meanwhile you need two, right, one on top and one on bottom. So that's crazy. And look, to be sure that micro modem, that $8,000 modem, it's amazing. If you hit it with a hammer, it doesn't break. It can communicate for miles and miles and miles and it can send 50,000 bits per second. But I want a TV remote underwater. If it goes 50 meters fine, if it's 50 bits a second, fine. It does what I need, first two decimal places. So we built one. This is Nathan, he's the grad student who took point on this and that's his first hydrophone. That was great fun. Our initial goal was a 50 meter range and 50 bits per second and as low cost and low power as we could possibly get away with. Our first prototype that worked on the lab and in the water hit those specs and the total bill of parts was $36. So we're now working on a second version and there's a second version of the graduate student, Charlene, who's also amazing. And we're working with manufacturing partners who are gonna work with us in designing for manufacturing at scale to put them in the market so you can buy them for a lot less. And our hope is that that will dramatically change what's possible when you can communicate with your device without having to worry about how much it costs. Just as a side note, we're also making all of the designs and all of the code and everything available purely on open source. Second project, so I'm running out of time so I'll run through this. This is Nathan at the lab bench the first time it worked. It was awesome. Second project, cave mapping, it's hard, it's expensive. If you use a diver, they run lines and use dead reckoning and that's what you get after two weeks of six people or after a week of six people. It's not the best mapping system in the world. If you were gonna do this in this room, you'd use LiDAR. Unfortunately, LiDAR system underwater costs a quarter of a million dollars. Why does it? It's a post-doc, right? So the price points are just very different. Also the people who buy them are oil and military. So instead, we're using chips that are only available in the past couple of years. They're totally awesome, they're low power and we have to develop all the electronics ourselves and there are real hurdles in that which is great fun. This is Project Prometheus which was funded by Here Be Dragons. And the goal, okay, we're gonna be an order of magnitude and a half less accurate than LiDAR but at two decimal places fewer dollars too, right? And that matters. It means things are possible that you wouldn't have thought possible before and scale is possible. We took a prototype to a test site. I mean, everyone has to have a test site. There's Jake, the post-doc who's taking point on it with the first prototype at the test site. That was quite an adventure. So to close, we really need massively deployable open source tools for ocean exploration. The bottlenecks are not the availability of the technology. The bottlenecks are bringing commercial at scale already commoditized technology into the ocean. In particular, communication, biofailing, navigation, optical sensing, 3D mapping. And one that really doesn't get enough love is data storage and distribution. You know, you have a ship, it's bringing in data. You have AUVs, they're bringing out data. You've got little tiny deployable sensors that are gonna have an SD card. That's bringing back data. You've got fish archival tags, that's bringing back data. They're all coming over different channels at different times with different formats and someone has to put them in one database and that's a nightmare and making that better deeply needs to be done, right? So people are working on this, but it needs to be loved. And there's a beautiful story behind this, but I'll leave it at that. Thanks. Well, I'm gonna cheat and sit, so. First off, I'd like to thank Katie and the organizers of this conference for bringing together a diverse and amazing group of people. There's a lot of careful thought behind this and I really, really appreciate it. So I was invited here to talk about citizen science and the legal and administrative barriers influencing the practice of the phenomenon. Green? Mm-hmm. Sure. So I don't know if any of you read the week, it's like a meta summary of news. There's this one small column that's like boring, but important and it reviews like Supreme Court rulings and stuff like that. That's kind of what this is about a little bit. It's boring, but it's important. So I'll start with definitions of the practice. Ironically, I actually wrote this up wrong. It's a form of mass collaboration to advance scientific research, not science research, but that's okay. I prefer loose definitions of the practice because I believe that transdisciplinarity requires this. I also believe furthermore intersectionality requires this and these are two very important words for this decade. So why is citizen science occurring? These guys are a pretty easy answer. It existed before science became professionalized, but these have enabled mass communication. But more critically, why is it important? There's three kind of areas that you can summarize on why citizen science is important. I'm probably preaching to the choir right now, but addresses societal needs, so collaborative natural resource management, highlighting air quality concerns. Number two, hands-on STEM education that advances science research. Enough said, pretty awesome. Two birds with one stone. And three, advancing scientific research at scales and costs that were previously unimaginable, especially for this group with Ocean and the scale that we're talking about. Citizen science, I see, is the only answer to get out there and explore. So I don't have time to go into some of these projects, but I'd just like to draw your attention to the photo in the left-hand corner. So Ella was talking about the comedy of your work. I think this is also the absurdity of the work. I asked the community manager of iNaturalist to give me a weird observation, and he pointed me towards this, which is an Alaskan fisherman reported this, and it's a ling cod that ate a yellow-eyed rockfish that was in the process of eating an octopus. Like, that's just absurd, and we wouldn't be able to see that if it wasn't for iNaturalist existing for this platform. So now that that's out of the way, boring, but important. So I'm gonna talk briefly about my work as a program associated in science and tech innovation program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C. Our goal was to and is maximize the risks and maximize the benefits and reduce the risks of citizen science. I love this group. Go into the volcano. Yes. Four researchers, volunteers, and project managers. What we were doing was we were defining the legal and administrative gray areas that academics and government practitioners encountered when they were going up to use citizen science, these major gray areas that create barriers. A lot of these reports actually helped in, along with Army of Citizen Science Volunteers in D.C., helped with creating and passing the Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing Act in 2016, which further defined and codified some of these legal and administrative gray areas so government employees can use citizen science more. I'm gonna go really briefly through each report, but I just wanna note that all of these are free and available online that you can download and just come grab me and I can point you to where the resource is. One of the first reports written by Teri Saskassa and Hei-Wang Chung was on intellectual property rights of researchers and volunteers who participate in projects. They created a typology for understanding what types of issues might arise when you're doing citizen science. Four broad categories for consideration, the type and consent of data, IP issues surrounding the choice of platform or IT structure, establishing terms and conditions for contributions at the beginning of writing your grant and lastly, copyrights and dissemination issues. She also touches on researchers who are interested in patenting their work but also using volunteers and at the end, it concludes with an IP checklist that you can give to your volunteers so they're aware of the discussion that's going on. Another report that we worked on that I directed the research for was with collaboration with the Environmental Law Institute. It was written by James McElphish, John Pendergrass and Talia Fox and the goal of this report was kind of to review US laws that invite the public into discourse about making decisions about our environment. So it defined the roles and identified who makes resource decisions at the local, state, tribal and federal level and then it identifies when and at what governance scale citizen science projects might be able to interact with these public decision makers and it outlines the legal and administrative constraints that public decision makers face and how you might be able to creatively work with them on those constraints, such as court timing and procedure rules and like when you can and can't admit data into a court proceeding. So the last report, this is your Bible if you're a government employee really and you want to do citizen science I really recommend you check it out. It is on the legal issues affecting federal agencies written by Robert Gelman and he does a deep dive into the precedent and the history of specific federal laws like the paperwork reduction act. I never thought I'd know so much about it but I do that prevent or slow down leveraging citizen science practice. So a lot to unpack again free and available for download. I think I have one minute talk about or something that I am very, very excited about. So I wanna wrap up by sharing a really exciting global initiative led by the Wilson Center the State Department Earth Day Network and in partnership with National Geographic I'm the liaison for this initiative. It's called Earth Challenge 2020 and our goal is 1 billion data points by 1 million citizen scientists on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in 2020. So this initiative is being co-designed as an attempt to address a lot of well-known issues in citizen science. Silo data collection, a lack of global coordination. What you described as I just heard is undifferentiated heavy lifting. It means you got all this awesome data and then like 80% of the work is collating and making it available and digestible to the public not to scientists and polyceem makers although we think that's important but to the public as well. So all of these challenges in the citizen science ecosystem we took them and then we designed this awesome project. It's going to be, it has an invigorating and exciting timeline. We currently, we've got a year and some change to work with and we just put out the public call for research questions. So we're asking the public what are you interested in and we're gonna build the database and the low cost tools to explore this. We're also gonna have software development kits and APIs for the database so anyone can get in there and muck around with the data. We'll be hosting satellite hackathons and core hackathons to kind of refine a lot of the technology that you talked about out there is really awesome and could be a potential for this. So we need your help. Come speak to me after this. Submit a research question at Earth Challenge. Amplify and spread your word via your networks. We really need ocean people. We've gotten seven continents but not a lot of ocean questions so get on board and you could host a satellite hackathon. So thank you for the minute and a half that you gave me that it probably went over but... Okay, join me in thanking all of our amazing panel members. And so we have just about seven minutes of questions. That is probably not gonna end well for you but... Hi, my name is Anna Madlina and I study robotics as a graduate student in Stockholm right now so I'm also really passionate about ocean, you're basically my hero. And I've done some work in the past year about how to, yeah, try to find out how we can use technology to make the normal society more connected with the oceans which is what we all here for obviously but recently as I was telling my professors why I'm missing this week of school because I'm going to a conference at MIT about ocean they were like, oh, greet this professor and I said, no it's actually at the MIT Media Lab and it's about how to connect people through art and culture with the ocean and they said, oh, why? So that's not so normal so I'm really curious to ask you do you feel that outside of this room of very specific interested people there's actually a will in the robotics engineering community to make these resources very available and understood for society and yeah, if that is actually something that you think is being yeah, communicated more outside of the normal engineering box, as you might say. Yeah, so I think there is there's certainly a movement to open source a lot of the technology and that's been very common in the robotics field and it's less common in the marine field and so I think open sourcing I'll talk about the technology first open sourcing the technology itself can help make it more accessible so that people can do these sorts of things and then in terms of bringing in other people like artists a lot of the places we're going a lot of the things we're getting back are new and no one has seen them before and sometimes they've been seen before but they're being seen in different ways a lot of the things we do at Qualcomm Institute which Dominique mentioned yesterday is visualization so when we're going out it's kind of emerging of not only robotics and scientific data but getting data that sort of can also be used to bring in the public like I personally think the coral reef models are really cool I've been lucky enough to dive on a coral reef but a lot of people haven't and so if you can use what you're getting with technology and bridge that gap to art and like public communication and use some of these incredible things that we're able to get through technology these visualizations and this data I think that's a really cool way to bring people in so I hope that answers your question Anybody else wanna contribute before I move on? Yeah, could I just add one? It's been amazing to me how how common the following scenario happens you're working on a project you get an email from someone saying I'm an engineer at this fancy company and I do the stuff and I love it and I think it's great but I wanna do it for the ocean so can I give you spare time advice? Can we just like help? And it's amazing how in informal ways the bulk of people who are serious professional roboticist engineers of various different stripes want to give their expertise maybe the canonical channels don't lend themselves to that gift but informal routes really do and so if you go around there's this emerging market of emerging circle of companies targeting citizen science in the ocean and if every single one of them is backed by a list of ridiculously skilled engineers in academia, in industry who give their time so I don't know if I'd say it's super well supported within academia proper but academics support it and so making that fit together better is certainly something we should be working on but there's a huge will to do it you'll find people to play with Thanks, any other questions? Oh God. Thank you very much my name is Jack Whitaker I'm from UMass Boston I was kind of curious a lot of you are working with data someone with one billion pieces of data Almost Yes, so do you have any recommendations for thinking about the right mindset to have when approaching large data sets? Are there sci-fi books or movies that have stuck out to you because Google just released this thing called like searchable data sets and now you can just search like the weather in Wisconsin for like the last whatever how many years how do we start to approach data sets in productive ways and not have them overwhelmed Thank you. Thanks. So I was just at the UN World Data Forum and there's lots of talk about this there and someone briefly brought up an academic I've never heard of but he got the point across which was we're entering into the fourth paradigm the third paradigm was big data don't ask me what the first and second paradigm were but what's critical now is how you ask questions of the data so yes, data is important to get quality, all those things but the really we're in the age of targeted important creative questions don't know if that helps and if I might add I mean I think big data, any data is important but quite frankly if it's not accessible or usable it's not important at all so one key is making it accessible the other one is making it nimble and light and agile and usable to as many different user communities as possible that's not a trivial problem but that is a key, right because you can look I love the state of Wisconsin I grew up in the state of Wisconsin I love the weather in Wisconsin but if I go to that website and I can't use that data and information it's useless to me if I'm wanting to ask these curious questions All right, one last question oh, this is never gonna happen Yeah, it will Woo, yeah Excellent, so it's connecting the dots over here because this is very interesting Alan, you guys are making these accessible and affordable ocean exploration tools and how are you guys planning then with Elizabeth getting into the hands because I'm grassroots on the floor guy getting things going I'd like to get my hands on those tools as they are planned for rolling that out Yeah, totally so we're in early days so just a little background I grew up as a theoretical physicist and did string three for 20 years and then had my coming to Jesus moment and here I am so we've been ramping up just over the past few years getting these projects going and so the projects that as we put projects out we're putting them repositories on GitHub instructions on Instructable and a website for each project that will be coming for the lab and the goal will be to be and God we should be using Open Explorer as we go out in the field which we haven't been doing but the goal is definitely to do that and to partner with as many people as we can look, let me just talk about the modem as an example it's not like people haven't built low cost low power modems before it's been done 100 times the point of doing that is not to do it the point is to never have it done again that development effort should never be done again it's a waste of time so we will have failed if it doesn't go out and get used both in the citizen science community because there are schematics in an Instructable it'll be a failure if it doesn't get manufactured so it's viable so this is something we're struggling with a lot and it's a key thing we're thinking about let's talk afterwards Any final comments? If not, please join me in thanking our amazing Explorer panel again we're done everyone, how are you doing? It's a pleasure to be with you today my name is Danielle Wood and we're going to invite some amazing panelists please join me thank you, hello thank you so much hi there wonderful before I introduce our panelists if you don't mind I'm going to start by reading a brief quote from a poem because I find that poetry helps us connect better as we start and our theme now is connection this is written by George Moses Horton I'll just read the first stanza he says I feel myself in need of the inspiring strains of ancient lore my heart to lift my empty mind to feed and all the world to explore now clearly he's an explorer but he was also born a slave and lives and was able to write and as a poet it's obviously he was able to think beyond his circumstance to explore we're here for discussions with some who are going to think about with us how we help people connect even when their circumstances may make it seem like it's difficult he'll just hand me that clicker that would be amazing this one, thank you so much I'm going to start by just highlighting a few points about my background since I have a new organization here and I'll introduce our other panelists so we can have the slides I'll go next to the first slide so I lead a research team here at the Media Lab called Space Enabled and our work, it really lines closely with open oceans in the sense that just as oceans ask us how can we bring together everyone to be an explorer and a steward of the ocean our work also says we want to ensure everyone has access to technology from space as part of their local and national development activity so we see this as advancing justice in Earth's complex systems using designs enabled by space and for us we measure our success along with many of the people around the world by asking are we helping use technology from space as part of the global effort towards sustainable development goals how many of you in some ways use the sustainable development goals as an inspiration or as part of your daily work it's amazing that the more I ask this question the more I see the hands go up which is very exciting we are coming at least to have common languages to describe where we're trying to head by 2030 and hopefully beyond so in our work we see that there are six technologies from space that already help us use technology as part of the long term effort toward development this includes satellites to observe the environment satellites for positioning and communication systems which are often particularly useful when you're on the ocean but also when you go to sea or you go to space we create special technology to help the humans survive so that technology is often useful both as a technology transfer and because in space we also take away the impact of gravity and think about how that influences us and that knowledge is very useful and finally both in space and in the ocean we'd ask how are countries around the world investing in basic research as part of their development process so a lot of my work is interacting with organizations at the international level but also national and local to ask how they are pursuing these activities and we bring a team of people who are artists and designers social scientists modelers and complex systems thinkers as well as satellite engineers and data scientists and all of us are asking how our skills together cannot make technology such a space or other related skills more effective I just want to give one example as I show my team here there's 10 amazing graduate students and we're forming a team now and learning to work together across these boundaries and I want to highlight some work we were doing recently in Benin and did welcome a guest if I can have Genevieve stand up this is Genevieve Yanme so just give her a hand she's one of our research collaborators thank you so much for the close and the conference for allowing her to be here as we're working together to think about the health of coastal communities and particularly we're asking how invasive plants are affecting her native area as well as asking what's happening in mangrove areas this is a view of the ocean looking at the Atlantic coast from Benin and I want to highlight another scientist as well her name is Dr. Lola Patiembo she teaches me about the importance of mangroves as this place where the ocean and the land come together and with her I've been able to travel around through Benin and see both the beauty but also the cost because it is an area where deforestation is a major concern and so we are asking what kind of options as people become both explorers but also stewards and of course people who need to figure out how to meet daily needs in this environment how can fishing and access to firewood or some kind of fuel also be sustainable even as people are working toward their daily needs so that's an opportunity that kind of links to some of the people who are here on the panel so I'd like to jump into introducing them as well so just here next to me which is exciting is an old friend and somebody that we've known for a while here at the Media Lab we should introduce you freshly to make sure people know your latest work so I'm happy to introduce Marguerita Mora who many of you may have known as the managing director of the Conservation Stewards Program for Conservation International but today we're introducing you when you roll in the Otero and there you're focusing on building partnerships with indigenous peoples and local communities so we look forward to hearing about that when you present thanks for being here I also want to talk thank you so much to Tierney Tyson for being here as well and Tierney is a National Geographic Explorer as well as a Biologist and Filmmaker and Research Associate at the California Academy of Science so we look forward to your discussion next go to Mark Pierce thank you for being here I think we'll hear a lot about volunteerism from you especially in your role as City Year of Boston's senior management of student engagement and on the far side we have Madeline Foote and she is Associate Director at National Geographic focused on science and exploration and building this community of open explore so a few minutes for each person to discuss and we're asking the question how do we connect people to the ocean but also to each other and so I look forward to each of you taking about six minutes to discuss that and we'll start on this side with Margarita thank you thank you good morning everyone I have a confession I come from the mountains I was born and raised surrounded by the Andes in Ecuador and it is so wonderful to be here surrounded by people that love the ocean most of what remains of nature is in the hands of indigenous peoples these are the areas with the highest diversity of plants and animals the largest carbon stocks areas that are important for us for freshwater cycles and for food security actually these are also the areas that have the highest cultural value to humanity where 95% of all languages are spoken people living in these areas deserve the same opportunities as us however we have to be very very mindful that it is not for us to decide but it is for them to accomplish their vision on how determine their culture and maintain their culture and their territories in the future last century and actually in some places nowadays protected areas were established by pushing people out of their lands by fencing them in many cases there was a lot of miscommunication and manipulation of the people and it caused changing the lives and the ways of being of people this created a lot of resentment and for a good reason actually and it has not been good for the people living in those areas it has not been good for us and it has not been good for the entire planet our future and actually the future of some of the planet's healthiest ecosystems is in the hands of indigenous peoples and they need to defend those territories in order for all of us to thrive how can that happen? If you start thinking a bit about the planet you realize that indigenous peoples have their own knowledge systems that have been tested over hundreds of years in some places thousands of years they have place anchor technologies and that has led them to be what we call the guardians and to accomplish guardianship of those lands which is having the rights accepting the responsibility and having the capacity to sustain vital ecosystems within collective territories this is not an easy task however if you look at the entire world you will find out that more than 25% of the land is managed by indigenous peoples of what is actually registered right there is much more that is not registered and of the waters we actually don't know but if we go to the Pacific islands you will find 17 indigenous island nations that manage 10% of the planet's surface and actually more than 60% of all the tuna catch as Nainoa mentioned this morning they are voyagers, they descend from voyagers they have known how to get from island A to island B by knowing their stars, by knowing the water currents by knowing the waves, by knowing the animals and they are still committed nowadays to maintaining that ocean examples include the Cook Islands and the Yermarae Moana Initiative if we go to the other side of the world to the northern Amazonia region which is one of the most remote regions in the Amazon basin you will have find more than 300 indigenous groups managing an area that is six times the state of California they have been there despite of being wiped out by colonization they know they are forests they know they are animals they know they are water cycles they know the rivers and if you leave them alone they can actually thrive in those areas indigenous peoples are actually facing a lot of pressures and what they need and what they want it is recognition, it is support and it is partnership and what means to be a partner, right? When you start thinking about it it means not imposing our knowledge systems not imposing our ways of learning not imposing what our ways of thinking it ends up meaning being able to listen listen attentively to what these people that have been living in those places have to share with us and it also means acknowledging that it doesn't matter how long you spend in a place you might not ever came to understand it so profoundly as the people that have been born there I have a four year old son he is beautiful and he makes me smile every single day and constantly I am thinking whether he is going to be able to experience and learn from people that see the world in a very different way because that is magic and it makes me ask one question to myself on a regular basis which is what kind of ancestor will I be? What kind of ancestor will we collectively be? And this is not a new question this is a question that indigenous peoples have been asking themselves for generations for hundreds of years for thousands of years in many places and this leads me also to think that if we have the capacity to start thinking about well-being not in terms of what we take but thinking about what we can leave behind maybe we will be able to manage the identity crisis that we have as a society and face some of the most pressing environmental challenges of this century thank you very much I think I'll call on Mark next Thank you so much Thank you Gonna stand I think as well so I didn't bring any slides it's a little less fun I brought just a still but I'm just gonna set this here this still describes a lot so my name is Mark Pierce here from City Year Boston City Year, first I have to describe a little bit of what City Year is City Year is an organization we are funded largely in part by AmeriCorps we're derived from AmeriCorps so we are thinking a lot about every day how we can put volunteers into classrooms in urban public schools and create additional opportunities and give additional I heard it described yesterday as an additional set of eyes additional set of ears and then an additional heart in that classroom so we're in 29 Boston public schools this year constantly expanding last year we were in 23 to give a little bit of a scope of that we're in about I'm gonna misquote it so check City Year.org later and you'll get the real number I think we're in about 28 cities as of this year in the United States and then also interestingly enough we have some across the Atlantic we have a few sites in the UK and a site in South Africa as well but it actually all started here in Boston 30 years ago 30 years and two months ago 1988 so what we do and what we're doing this year especially we put AmeriCorps members young volunteers we usually say around the ages of 17 to 24 some of them are just out of high school and some of them are coming right out of college post undergrad they're looking for something to do something to engage with before they enter the workforce in a different capacity we put those young volunteers into classrooms alongside teachers they don't serve as the primary teacher in the classroom they're alongside the teacher who has been with those kids for years and years we're in we work in third through 10th grade across 29 different schools in Boston what these AmeriCorps members do so we have these very flashy red jackets as well if you don't know the branding of City Year it can be pretty explosive sometimes so here's an example of one of our AmeriCorps members just a shot a moment of working with a student in a classroom we see these, these are happening actually in many cases right now we have almost 300 AmeriCorps members in classrooms right now as we speak or as I speak I should say their goal is to just be that additional set of eyes, ears and heart in the classroom to be there for a student and to create opportunities and to be able to differentiate instruction in ways that they, that students don't always get when you have one teacher in front of 30 students just by having one additional adult in that classroom or reducing that ratio in the educational realm that adult to student ratio is very important because it creates more meaningful experiences for students my role at City Year Boston I did a service year as well I was a bit of a trader I did it in Chicago but Chicago is a great city as well my role at City Year Boston for the past three years I've been really helping organize and promote our after school programs some are before school programs so we call it extended day internally but I'll just call it after school here because it's probably what most people know about it our goal with our after school programs is to extend the school day so our AmeriCorps members are there before the beginning of the first class and they're there through the end of the school day after doing after school programs it's very rigorous year that's why it's a sprint they're volunteering for a year we call it a sprint they're there they are engaging with the students all day they're buy them in the classroom and then at the end of the school day they're taking a break for 10 seconds to catch their breath and then they're out there putting on a program what we can do in those what we have the privilege of doing in those after school programs is delivering curriculum packages delivering instruction delivering opportunities really to the students that they don't get in their everyday classroom experience with math and ELA being huge focuses for our US education system that's obviously a huge priority for increasing likeliness of graduating from high school and that's important that's one of our mission one of our goals what we can do with our after school programs is give them that extra stuff that extra fun engagement opportunity and I heard a lot of kind of passion and philosophy around the idea that we need to support young people and give them opportunities to explore and I think that's what everyone here is really trying to figure out how to capture in their own way and what one thing we have the opportunity to do this year we've committed to working with the our heroes over here at MIT who are developing the Lego program the Lego Robotics program we've committed to bringing that program to a couple of our schools at least a couple we're figuring it out still as we speak but how we can get that opportunity into our classrooms where students who live just in many cases a mile or less from the ocean but don't necessarily get to explore it how we can give them the opportunity to do that both in the classroom at the end of the school day with maybe an aquarium building some Legos I mean I think about how awesome that would have been when I was young building some Legos and being told hey you're gonna be able to take these over to the ocean and explore the ocean floor possibly with some camera maybe collect some data and getting into those new opportunities is really invigorating and inspiring to me so when the question was asked and the partnership came to our door essentially it was very easy to say yes absolutely we want to bring this program to some of our students and our Boston public schools and that's what we're looking forward to do and that's it for me, thank you Thank you so much Mark I want to invite Tia and me to go next if you don't mind just to highlight, I appreciate the notes you gave me at the beginning of the fresh ways you'll help us define connections I look forward to you sharing Oh, yes Well, so first a big thank you to Katie for gathering this amazingly diverse group of people and it's exciting to be here at my dad's alma mater actually first time speaking here I think most of us would love we love looking at scenes like this incidentally this was just taken from one of Sven Lindblad's ships just a couple days ago before in the Channel Islands and we love looking at images like this but I think most of us look at more at images like this and we sit in traffic for many of the hours of the day now we are officially an urban species metrosapiens as some anthropologists have come to call us and we, you know, more of us live in cities than don't and we spend 90% of our time indoors clicking away at our computers and perhaps this is having some influence on our mental health and our rising mental health issues so now I think intuitively we all know that being outside is good for us but recently there's been a slew of evidence-based research that is giving hard science behind why it feels so good to be a tree-hugger there's hard science behind that there's, you know, everything from boosting your microbiome to bolstering your immune system to cognitively restoring you to I'm bringing back your, you know helping your creativity to reducing ADD in schools and it's good for the planet people understanding this natural these natural benefits there's just a slew of information out there now that's supporting this and yet we are careening into being a fully urban species so the research I'm gonna share with you today are a series of research projects that I've been working on that are working to boost our knowledge of and accessibility to nature's benefits and one of these is working with severely nature-deprived populations specifically with incarcerated populations and this is a project with my wonderful colleague Nalini Nadkarni where we've been placing nature imagery into solitary confinement prisons to lower stress and violence and we've had, you know, tremendous success with this we had after a year of deployment 26% reduction in discipline referrals and I just talked to the prisons a couple days ago and they're like we don't have just one of these rooms now we have nine and so great news from that one prison we're working in and then we've had prisons and jails around the country wanting to adopt these blue rooms is what they call them so exciting, exciting stuff there did the time, am I out of time? Oh, oh, huh and so now we're putting what? Oh, okay because my timer said zero so we're now testing soundscapes both songbird and waves and wind and we're testing those to be to put in prisons as well so that research got me more interested in how do we actually process nature imagery and why does it have these benefits? Advertisers know how important imagery is when we read a website we know through eye tracking studies that we use this F pattern of reading a website and we know that when we look, we're drawn to faces and when we look at faces we'll just look at the face and we won't look at the text next to it but we can change the direction of the face and what the face is looking at that will direct our attention more to the text these are things that advertisers know of course we also know that we have a left gaze bias that we tend to look more at the left our left field of a person's right side and we look there for emotional information so all this information that marketers have we need this as conservation biologists and so I've partnered now after a blue mind conference where I met Nick Savet at Stanford I'm now involved in a neuroscience project with Nick at Stanford where we've taken 900 of National Geographic's top Instagram images National Geographic has the largest Instagram account in the world and we are looking at how the brain responds to the nature imagery as we run people through an fMRI scanner and we also, so we see what's going on in their brains when they like the image and also when we ask them to protect that so we can see correlative brain pattern brain activity patterns predictive brain activity patterns that overlap is where we can have behavioral change and where we can optimize our messaging platforms and we're also so what we're also doing with these images is trying to get into the nitty gritty of the components of the imagery whether it has ocean in it or greenery or fractal dimensionality or spatial frequency all those things that you can use to categorize and quantify visual imagery and we tag those we've hand tagged those with RAs at Stanford lots of them we've also partnered with the University of Chicago to get algorithmic tags and in doing this we've been able to then map this with some amazing complex visualization mapping software that's all available on GitHub complements of vibrant data my friend Eric Berlow started that and oh I'm running out of time but we can see that mapping these images they cluster into different fields and we can start to see what parts of those images are most powerful, optimize those and then have that enter into our messaging for environmental campaigning I think that as we careen into being a fully urban species we need to be able to navigate the not only navigate our way into this fast moving future but also figure out how to navigate the dark waters of our cerebral seas that reside inside our bony skull caps and we need to be able to wave find without leaving the blue and the green and our humanity and our sanity behind so thank you Next we welcome Madeline to share about Ocean Explorer, the community, thank you so much Yes, we do have the largest Instagram following of any brand I'm really glad you mentioned that because it's a point of pride it's one of those vanity things, it's great So I work for National Geographic and one of the things that I think a lot about is how we engage people in conservation science and exploration topics and it's been, I only have two slides because every time I do one of these and I listen to all these amazing speakers I end up rewriting my talk like three or four times and I'm like, I should include that or I should mention this So I only had two but I really wanted to go back to the transmedia workshop that we did yesterday when we talked about, you know, Wade, swim and dive into topics a lot of science journalism and science communication does a really good job of the Wade and the swim but how do we create an accessible way for the public to dive deep into topics that they care about? Someone who's mesmerized by a video of a swimming feathered star or, you know, filled with wonder when they see a playful seal or in awe of, you know, the amazing and weird and beautiful things that we find in the deep ocean how do we take those viral moments whether they be funny or profound and get someone to engage more deeply in some of the more complicated, nuanced and sophisticated science conservation exploration narratives that don't span the 39 seconds of the Facebook video but actually often span years and are filled with failure and successes and changes in direction really the scientific process how it really works out. One of the things that I have encountered a lot in thinking about this is, you know in science journalism we often cover discoveries and successes but no one walks into a forest or into a tidal pool and picks up an animal and is like, new species but it appears that way from sometimes how we write about these things usually it was years of returning to that field site lots of work, lots of mistakes maybe they weren't even looking for it in the first place and there's amazing stories on that path that the public very rarely hears from the pages or from the Instagram places like National Geographic so how can we provide that? We ended up helping build a community called Open Explorer which we envisioned as a community for science conservation and exploration and really is like a digital field journal where people can follow scientists and their work and their teams or their labs or their projects over the course of weeks, months even years of research being done and we continue to build digital tools on this platform to try to connect people directly to scientists but also to try to get people not just observing but actually potentially participating more and more in science and conservation one of the things that we observe about how people dive into new things is they observe initially and then often what they do is they imitate and off imitation they end up iterating and that's only after that that we get into iteration or into innovation but it's really hard for them to get to innovation or really engaging if they can actually see how these processes evolve and besides just making science more transparent and engaging people in this process we also wanted to create a community where we could actually like literally empower people like it's great to be like oh great stories that's very important but one of the things that I've always really wanted to do is like actually get people tools and actually get them exploring the ocean and if you want people to do something you have to make it easy and that's actually really hard to do in design and in community building and stuff but we have partnered with a ROV company named OpenROV which has actually gotten a couple mentions from the stage and with funding from Rolex from the Moore Foundation for the Avatar Alliance OceanX and the Schmitt Marine Technology Partners through Open Explorer we're actually gonna be giving away a thousand underwater ROVs to scientists, to students, to NGOs, to local communities, to indigenous groups, people who have questions and want to see what's below the surface but either don't have access for like logistical and infrastructure reasons or even if they do have access it's limited by the amount of time they can spend underwater by a brief field season. Our goal in doing this was really to get people excited about exploring and then documenting what they were doing, how were they modifying their ROVs, what are they finding and actually expand the community of people who can do ocean exploration in a really like literal, profound, immediate way and I'm really excited about it which is why I wanted to talk about it today and so I actually have like three things that I wanted to like come out of this talk. One is I would love for you to consider this an invitation to contribute or participate in Open Explorer. We have a ton of people here who I'm gonna embarrass and call out who are already involved including Katie and Diva and Andrew Soller and Carlos who talked about the Manta rays yesterday documented how they were doing that project on our platform. It's become a really vibrant place where people are documenting how they're building tools, protocols and how they're working with local groups to do innovation in ocean exploration. The second thing is that I'm fairly new to this space. I've only been working at National Geographic for about 18 months and we launched Open Explorer in April and we launched the sea initiative less than three weeks ago. So my network is primarily through the National Geographic realm and that means it is predominantly Western English speaking and is not super diverse but there's amazing people here doing work with local groups all over the world and if you have people whose work or research or communities would benefit from tools like these I would love to talk to you. And then lastly, what's the third thing? Yeah, no, I think I'll just end it there and say that I really wanna get tools to more people and I wanna then get their stories out to the National Geographic audience on Instagram, across our magazine, across our online presence and if that is something that sounds like something you would like to do I would really like to talk to you. Thank you so much. Thank you all for sharing so passionately. I wanna go to questions very soon but before I do I really like how you ended your piece with a call to action and invitation. I wanna allow all the other panelists to take just about 30 seconds each and answer two ideas. One is basically what do you feel so urgent about your work right now and what do you want people in the audience to do in response to this urgency? What action can they take or can they encourage other people to take based on the urgent issues you see now? So I'll start with you Marieta. Yeah, for me it is urgent for more and more people to understand and recognize the role of indigenous peoples in actually protecting all of us and I urge you to read some amazing books about it so that you can get to be so passionate about it as I am. One of the amazing books is The Way Finders by Wade Davis. It is a really good introduction that can open a lot of ideas for action. That's great. So read The Way Finders, thank you. Go ahead, Tia. Oh and he also has a series of lectures online if you don't wanna read it. Nobody seems to read these things. All of a sudden there are options for everyone. If you wanna be more visually oriented. I would just say it is so important to culture a love of the natural world as youngsters and if you have access to kids, get your kids outside. Get them comfortable being outside. The thing I worry about most is as we put more and more walls between ourselves and the natural world, especially when we're youngsters, we're not gonna have that deep bond that we need in order to protect our natural resources as adults and that bond has to be made repeatedly and it has to be made deeply and it has to be made when we're young. So get your kids outside and keep them outside even when it's raining. All right, please. Sure. I think one of the most urgent things about that keeps me just kind of focused on why I do what I do is the idea that there's not always enough opportunity to make a connection that's genuine through the curriculum that's being given in the United States at this point. I can't speak for other countries but there's just such a limited scope as we focus in on what is really important to get students to graduation of high school and that doesn't necessarily include all the time the arts and the sciences and different in those more explorative capacities. So I think what's urgent is giving students those empirical experiences to enjoy something and to be engaged in something and for some spark of inspiration to occur when they realize how accessible the outside world is and also you get to play with Legos in this program. That's amazing. Nowadays building is through Minecraft and through Fortnite and that's tough and I would love to see students make connections building with their hands again. Like I once did. Madeline, you get one more chance to give us a call to action. Oh, I think the call to action to me for me. Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry. You were trying to pass it. You can. No. You really feel like you need one. No, I should. I was sitting back here saying forward is community. Yeah, I guess I'm like a meta level. I really care that I think sometimes we think that if we lower the barriers to science and exploration it means we're lowering the bar and I think Alan like hit on the head with we need more tools that people can use that don't need the fourth and fifth decimal places on them. What we're doing is trying to bring the first of those tools out there. I would love, it's been up three weeks. We've gotten hundreds of applications for these from all over the world. So many interesting organizations. But I'm already like ready to do the next one. Like what's the next tool that we can make available to our community, be it terrestrial or ocean based. And my other call to action would be if you guys have ideas for tools or what we should be addressing next and how to empower ocean exploration or terrestrial exploration. Please come talk to me because I'm like ready for the next thing already. Thank you. I think it's a fun. I get to stand up and I'm going to ask for help. If it's really far away I'm going to ask for multiple throws. All right, I see someone in the back. You want to ask a question? So please do. I'm going to ask for team throwing. Can I get someone to help me get it all the way to the back row? All right, green shirt. Can you help me out? There you go. Keep going fast until it's in the back. Keep raising your hand. She's going back to her. Keep going one more time. And good team. Thank you. Thank you very much. So first of all, thanks a lot. That was a really interesting session. But I have a question. I'm constantly exhausted and somewhat depressed by how indigenous people are treated by our own. So by those of us that travel, whether it's conservation, whether it's the adventurers, whether it's the academics. And I just wanted to know, because I'm constantly hitting a brick wall on how to communicate on this topic, how to the concept of treating people as equals. How do you deal with this? How are you getting the message out to people that we're doing this wrong? Yeah, that is a really good question and a challenging answer, right? Because it all depends who are you talking with. There is a very heavy bias to science. And what people sometimes don't understand that might be part of the traditions on the way of knowledge of indigenous people is seen as like, ah, that is really something not useful, right? What is interesting nowadays is that more and more people are recognizing that the fate of our planet and ourselves is in the hands of indigenous peoples worldwide. If you look at how nature is doing and you compare protected areas with indigenous territories, indigenous territories are way better managed than protected areas, right? So there are numbers for the people that need numbers to show that this is a path that we need to follow. Because otherwise, we are not going to move in the way that we want to move in order to address the social and environmental challenges that we are facing. Thank you, that was very, very clear. If we have another hand, if so, can we get a team toss all the way to the lady here in the red sweater? All right, team. We'll have to coordinate the team a bit more. One more throw, I think we'll get it there. Thank you so much. And maybe if I can ask, it is also a message of hope. It is also a message of hope because despite all of the challenges that indigenous peoples have faced, they are still there. And they will be there. Thank you, Margarita. Please go ahead. Hi, thank you all. I was wondering what advice you might have for how we can encourage minority students here in the US or, I mean abroad, wherever, to find their own personal kind of connection to and stake in science that not only uses their own identity, but leverages that and celebrates it. It might be a good one for City Year to speak of. Yeah, I think incredibly challenging. I think the best thing we can do is create opportunities to explore something new, right? Which is another just example of how we're seeing kind of the genesis of City Year and MIT working together, creating this experience to make a unique opportunity, to allow a student to engage in something that's outside of their technology and outside of their block, their neighborhood, right? I don't know if I could possibly be even qualified to answer the question at a broad, but I think it's really about creating those experiences. And one of the things that we are aiming to do in City Year is put another person there to ask those questions of students. So I think mentorship plays a huge role in it, and that's something that we find really important in our work and in our service is giving opportunities for students to have a mentor to talk to, just to receive questions from and to be asked what is it that you're interested in or what is it that I could get you interested in to see that there's different possibilities that can create that spark to really create this empirical experience that says that you can do something different from what you're experiencing now, and I think that that's important. And then, I think, from open exploring, there's a piece of this as well, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think people really connect with stories on a really fundamental level, and we talk about that natural border being a portal to other worlds. And in order to, if we can get someone to walk through that door, we can get them to walk out of another door as like a slightly different person. That's the power of storytelling. And especially when we talk about science and academia, there is a real anxiety people have about talking about failure and about fear and about the emotional and the personal aspects of their work, and that's actually something that I really actively encourage, that we create an inclusive community that celebrates failure as well as victories. And those stories are more relatable and more emotionally potent, and ultimately I think more representative of what it's like to be a human and to be a scientist. And I think that's gonna be really important in making scientific career seem accessible to people who are not seeing the daily struggles of academics who will all volunteer, that they are struggling with their work and there's failure and they have to make changes in shift direction. And so I think the way people talk about themselves and present themselves is gonna be an important way to make science more accessible to people who don't have access to it. Thank you all so much. We've come to the end of our time. I'll just highlight one angle to your answer is also asking how we make the policies that make systems for education and opportunities for career advancement more available to everyone, which is something we're still working on in space and oceans. Thank you all so much for your discussion and we really appreciate your work and connection. So I'm the last thing that is between you and lunch. So I'll keep it brief. I wanted to introduce a project and here's the clicker that was started just over six months ago. So and really one of the first reasons that I came here to the Media Lab was to bring the lab and National Geographic closer together because as Joey was talking about deploy or die, deploy. There are a whole lot of people at National Geographic who are deploying all the time but don't always necessarily have technologies they need to explore any number of different types of extreme environments. So we held an event here in this room called Here Be Dragons and we brought something like 15 National Geographic Explorers and other ocean explorers of all different kinds to really talk about the gaps that exist in exploration and storytelling and technology. And the end goal of the event was for people to form teams and to come up with project ideas that then would move forward afterward. And so we ended up with 13 proposals for these rapid field deployments and the goals of all of them were to better understand the ocean and to connect people to it in some way. They also had to be uniquely suited to the combination of both the National Geographic and MIT communities. And we used a number of criteria to select them including that they had to be innovative, impactful, compelling and achievable. So outside during lunch you'll see demos from the eight projects that were selected in February. So there's still some of them vary in sort of beta prototyping mode. A lot of them still in progress. But we're very excited that we've made progress in such a very short period of time. And they range, I'm not gonna go into detail on all of them, but they range from using machine learning to automatically track and classify underwater imagery to working with neurodivergent youth here in Boston to bring them into the inner title zone to creating immersive experiences to make you feel like you're a microbe on a slide. One of them we don't have here today is the Connected Coral Project by Emily Salvador who moderated the Imagine panel yesterday. Sorry, Immersed Panel. Because that one is on display at the MIT Museum right now. So you'll all have a chance to see it tonight during the reception this evening. We also have Dominique Rizzolo and Antonella Wilby, excuse me, have a table out there to talk more about their Hundred Islands project. So please definitely take a look at their table. And yes, please have conversations. Everybody is super excited to share their work with you and to give feedback on what we could do next with all of these projects. One final note is that we are not coming back here before breaking up into workshops. So please keep an eye on the time. Workshops will start at 1.30 and just after lunch, disperse to wherever you need to be. Again, it's on the back of your name tag. And telepresence, rather than going to the fifth floor, we're gonna start in the lecture hall which is just across the little hallway here. So if you are in either telepresence section, please start there and then you'll move down to the fifth floor after the live connection with the ship. So that's all for me. Thank you so much and enjoy lunch. We're gonna do our workshop report backs right now and then wrap it up. So I'd like to invite John up to the stage for the Ocean in Transformation. Thank you, Cathy. Ocean in Transformation is a project that we are developing as a long-term research project together with the TBA 21 Academy, Tissemba Namitza Art Academy, which is represented here by Marcus Reimann. I'm John Palmedino from Territorial Agency, which is a group of architects working on the ocean. And we are trying to understand how cohabitation and conviviality can be rethought in the age of the Anthropocene. What we did today were two sessions, each one more or less with 70, 80 participants, looking at two complex data sets, one in the Pacific and one in the Atlantic, overlaying multiple open access data sets on the ocean in order to create this rather complex image of the ocean in transformation that range from, say, the Caribbean all the way to the Philippines or from the Caribbean all the way to the Arctic following the Gulf Stream. Each one of the sessions had groups looking at these images and some of the participants mistook Nova Hezbollah in the Arctic for the Florida coast. Others knew exactly what was going on in the meanders of the fjords of Norway and they could recognize it immediately. So it was a moment of disorientation at the beginning, but that disorientation was for us very important because it allowed us to engage with the key element of the workshop, which was to start thinking the ocean as a set of interrelations, as a set of entities that are completely self-organized and relating to other entities that are equally set for organized without ever having an overview. And so that initial misconception by members of the workshop allowed us to enter that. We had two very different sessions. The first one was probably more energetic. It was a larger group. Out of 10 groups, we had 10 different stories. The second session was quieter but engaging in a completely different dynamic and we had many more overlaps across the stories that were told. The method that we followed was in four steps. We asked the participants to identify an entity that could be sustained in space and time, either in short periods or in very long periods in spaces of time. So we went from identifying little species, inhabiting the reef all the way to identifying the ligno or the Gulf Stream transforming its dynamics. And then we asked, once we started identifying the entities, to look at how they are affecting their immediate surroundings. So we started seeing the entities operating as a transformative agency. We started looking at the agencies of these entities in the ocean being distributed. That was the first step. The second step was to look at it backwards. We started looking at how the immediate surroundings of those entities that we identified were affected, the entity that we looked at. And we started finding couplings and both positive and negative feedbacks. And then came the most difficult part and that was to tell the story of cycles, of entities that were now circular relations in respect to what they are affecting. So a cycle affecting other cycles. And this was probably the most difficult part in terms of storytelling around data sets, where data set became really engaging. And we had people talking about nuclear tests or the relationship between whales and deep sea mining. We had people talking about moratorium on the exploration in the deep sea. Other people talking about the relationship between the long history of slave trade and exploitation of labor at sea and contemporary forms of engagement with international trade and the sea routes that are changing because of the global warming. So the number of stores that we are bringing home today with us are multiplied. We thought that we had too much on the table and we go back with far more. And this is exactly where the project for us is interesting because we start thinking that the ocean is the location of contemporary forms of knowledge production that allows us to think the Anthropocene in a completely different way. When we are on land, we still think that we are disconnected. We still think that we are stable, that the land beneath our feet is only to be owned. When we start thinking the disconnection in the ocean, we start thinking the Anthropocene in a far more interesting way. And the question that we are really bringing up back home with us is a number of conditions through which the groups at the table somehow facilitated a description of the ocean in a way that was non-human. It was a mixture between human and non-human agencies that allowed then maybe for possible future diplomatic encounters and hopefully a climate peace to be in the future. So thank you very much for everyone who participated in the workshop. We really appreciated your time and particularly your phenomenal intelligence. And thank you, Cathy, Dan, Jenny, and all the people here at MIT lab and at NOAA for allowing us to be here and do this experiment with you. Thank you very much. We're gonna tag team this one. So telepresence across scales, we had two very different sets of conversations and Brian and I have spent a little bit of time trying to figure out what we can tease out of both of them that's actionable. And one of the things we did is because it's about telepresence, we had remote participation from the Okeanos Explorer and the Nautilus and we very much appreciate you if you're watching this video at some point. Thank you and all of the participants, thanks very much for your thoughtful and in many cases heartfelt and energetic contributions to the discussion. So one of the things that we were really pushing the participants to think about is that circumstances are changing and so we were not just looking for incremental improvements over current practice but rather we were saying, if you go to the Consumer Electronics Show and you see there are three different brands of consumer undersea drones for sale there and you realize that there are millions of people every day who sit around and watch other people play video games. There is clearly a whole lot of untapped potential in the telepresence space and in the space of watching and creating additional value with regard to the huge volumes of videos that are already being generated and streamed and stored. And I think part of that was building the critical mass of number of vehicles out there like right now where you've got Nautilus, Okeanos and Falcor diving maybe six months or eight months total out of the year but once we start having all these consumer electronic drones posting information in the cloud you can hit this critical mass of enough people interested in it where people might be watching for their subsection but you can draw from all these different sources and one or two people may be watching all the time when something cool happens it'll snowball and the influencers are pulled together and people will start creating their own content based on this raw input and from an outreach and engagement standpoint you get this massive amount of data coming out to the community that is kind of being self-curated and will allow a much larger group of people to interface with the data from all around the world. Now in conjunction with that there were a couple of dimensions that people seemed to agree needed a lot more work and these included how do you create a sense of community among the people who are doing that and second how do you do loop closing? This is no longer just broadcast but in fact if lots of people are looking at your stuff how can you benefit from all of the care that they've put into watching the stuff you didn't have time to watch and look up information about and so thinking about how you create an incentive for that content not just being used for a bunch of middle schoolers to get excited about the ocean but actually for you to think about what is your next cruise going to do based upon what these people found to value in your previous one. And as part of that in looking at it not from just the engagement outreach side but looking at it from the scientific side with this probably precipitous drop in bandwidth and equipment cost that's coming between the drones, the access, the bandwidth, getting that information out there making sure that information is collected and uploaded in such a way that it's scientifically useful as well so it can go out and capture the hearts and minds of people but as well the higher end users, the scientists and the serious citizen scientists can still use that data in such a way that is scientifically relevant. Right, so there was another set of discussions regarding how much context is appropriate in order to give people a proper sense of what it is they're actually looking at and the discussion of the previous workshop brought in that notion a little bit that do you just want to show video? Do you have other pieces of curated information that allow people to get a better sense of what it is that they're working with? Anything else to add? I have to check my notes. Too many people talking too often. I can't keep track of that. I was trying to reread our great note taker Susan Haynes' notes before I came up here and I didn't have time to even finish them all. It was quite a lively crew in there. Great. I think that was pretty much it. I think that was it as well. So thank you all. And if you'd like to talk to us about what do we do about it, I think we're both going to be trying to do something about it and looking for other people to join in with us. Absolutely. Thank you all. Thank you. Hello, everyone. I'm going to keep this short and sweet. So I'm Clarice Sullivan and I participated in the workshop on designing a pop-up discovery lab this afternoon and during the workshop when they asked what our thoughts were, our definitions of a pop-up discovery lab, a few words and concepts came to mind. A lot of people said that it should be something that is low cost, something that can easily be replicable. And especially accessible to more people, especially those that are in areas that are hard to reach. Like in our country, most of our aquariums and museums are mainly found in the city. It's harder to build a museum in the provinces. So having a pop-up lab for sure would be something that is easily to carry to an area would be great. It is also a sort of tangible media that can mainly teach children and even adults different scientific concepts using hands-on activities as well. And during the workshop, they also talked about having a framework or a structure that teachers, researchers and scientists can use so that they can design their own pop-up discovery lab. And the main bullet points of that is you need to identify a question that you're trying to ask. What is your area of interest? What do you want to teach these children or the adults? Who is your audience? Will it be children? Will it be middle schoolers? Will it be high schoolers? And what are the constraints and physical and financial considerations that you will need to address if you are gonna build a discovery lab that you will be taking to different places? It's, you can't essentially log around an Illumina sequencer to, I don't know, a remote island easily, so maybe you could try an Anapor sequencer or you could try bringing, if you wanna talk about microbes, maybe a very small compound microscope inside of like the big other microscopes. And then the other, I know. And then when they also asked us to do some hands-on creation of our own labs, a couple of ideas that they had was to build a remotely operated mini-tank that essentially rides along the bottom of the reef or of the vent thick area to explore the splash zone because you don't wanna send in little children or other students into a break zone and there's like a wave that's about to just like essentially wipe them out. Other ideas that they had was having a float cam in the middle of the water column. Somebody mentioned an augmented reality tool and also a motion camera for the water. And all of these ideas that they had mainly focused on citizen science and essentially making science accessible to all. So thank you. Hi, I'm Neil. So in this workshop we talked about how do you design crowdsourcing or crowd computing system. We started with the science of crowd computing. We talked about strengths and limitations of artificial intelligence algorithms. We looked at like how data is growing and what kind of techniques that will help us to get labeled data so that we can train AI algorithms in a better way. When doing crowd computing, we don't realize the risks associated with it. Lot of time we engage with the crowd like, oh, they're gonna label the data. But can we make crowd as a partner? Can we build the platform for them to succeed? Why should they contribute? So we discussed those topics. We briefly talk about previous platforms that are successful. We looked at the success stories and failures and we concluded with ethical discussions like what it means to kind of involve the crowd. But not to misuse them in the scientific exploration process. In the end, we had two different projects. We asked people to engage into and people then break into two groups. And both of those groups discussed more problems which often arise in these kind of ecosystems. So one of the problems Ben will talk and other Jeremy, Rebecca and Max will talk about. So the problem that I was talking about and generally was dealing with the vast amounts of video and imagery data that exists in across scales in ocean exploration. So in the theme of crowdsourcing and crowd computing, it was interesting that the two sessions kind of broke across different, in the first session, there was a lot of talk around engagement and talking about the logistical challenges in getting people involved and determining what the right questions to ask people are and what the level of expertise and error you might want to get people engaged in that. And in the second session, it was a lot more around a common theme that we're hearing of how do you solve the underlying challenge of accessibility and there is no place for you to go and upload everyone's underwater data on the internet so that it can be accessible to everyone in one of these platforms. So it kind of highlighted the technical and the logistical challenges around building some of these systems. So I introduced some case studies of use of actually like satellite imagery and satellite data for ocean exploration. And people discussed those case studies in a couple of different ways. First, how you can engage like a wider audience using that data because it is undeniable that data such as sea surface temperature or even just like imagery is much harder to wait to for a wider audience than personal video of an encounter with an octopus on the sea floor. So in terms of using or leveraging like crowd computing for science, people talked about perhaps using ground truth in situ like verification of data collected for all these satellites. You can contact like local communities to actually go out and study and collect samples of their coastal ecosystems to verify the data they're getting from these satellites. Another aspect we talked about were ethical considerations. So as one example, you can track fishing data from fishing ships all around the world and you could theoretically source out so people can identify illegal fishing activity, but that might enable a whole fleet of kind of like vigilante people who are going out and trying to prosecute illegal fishing activity. And that might be what we want. It might be not what we want. So it was an interesting discussion. I think people had different thoughts on that topic. You want to share other thoughts? So Jeremy, Max and I all working on the same project, largely focusing on how we can use the satellite data that's already available to solve different problems around the oceans. So one of the big things that I took away from this is while a lot of this data from like NASA and NOAA and other international organizations is technically available online. It's not necessarily usable. So while NASA and NOAA have all these great data sets, how can we make those more usable for people who are interested in trying to solve ocean problems to try to use that data in a better way? And I think all that I would add is it gave me a sense of truly the magnitude of the problem, just how much data is out there and how much is used for a specific purpose and then the challenge at like accessing that data for other purposes and bringing that from wherever it was stored into use for another purpose. So before we conclude, there's one thing which kind of like came out in both of the workshops that most of the time we are so fascinated with having access to big data, but we often forget like what kind of problem that we are trying to solve. So it's very important to kind of like spend at least few months figuring out what's the research question or exploration question that as a stakeholder we want to solve and how to kind of like decompose that problem so that citizen science community can understand it. So I think focus needs to shift from a lot of data to like what are the challenging problems out there and how to break them down so that people from high school to senior citizens can participate and solve them collectively. Okay, so I'm Randy Rogin, I'm from Boston University and it was a pleasure to run this workshop with many other people, all of whom were still in the room and about 80 of you who came. So we covered a lot of ground and I know it's late so I'll try to briefly sum up here. My Deepsea My Backyard was a project that was born from the Dragon's Workshop that happened here in the MIT Media Lab in February. And what it's really about is democratizing the oceans. It's really about broadening ocean access and making anybody an explorer and an explorer on your terms where you get to explore your own backyard for the purposes that you want for the reasons that you would like on your time scale and on, you know, at your convenience. In order to operationalize that, we had the pleasure of putting out two pilot experiments that were still going on, two pilot programs, using Nat Geo drop cams, the open ROV Trident and a custom made reel cam that Bren and Phillips wherever you are in this room built is part of our team. We are in the midway through those projects and we've actually been both to Trinidad and Tobago and to Kiribis to bring this technology, teach people how to use it, train them on the finer points of troubleshooting things when they go wrong or how to tweak things and how to access the data, try to figure out what they might be looking at and then have left the tech in country for everyone to be able to explore again on their own terms. This is part of building a distributed model of exploration where anybody can contribute. And so at our workshop, what we did is we tried to take that example and open it up to everybody to try to figure out how everyone in the room, regardless of where you're from or where you work or where you think you might want to work or even in a virtual space, might be able to embrace my deep sea, my backyard to be able to bring exploration to anyone. And a huge thank you to Noah and Katie and MIT Media Labs for hosting a workshop that was able to take something that was developed in a pilot project and really turn it into something that we could have a really important visioning conversation about for everyone. So our workshop was broken into three pieces. We talked about technology, culture and capacity and the next generation. And from the tech point of view, we really came to a few conclusions both as a team and as a workshop that it has to be easy to use in this kind of model and it has to be low maintenance and logistically simple. And one of the other things that came out of both sessions of our workshop was the desire for increased capacity of this technology, things like adding sound or adding extra sensors or even the ability to potentially stream live to some extent or stream quickly afterwards so that more and more people could access what people were seeing. It's the kind of idea where you're excited about it and so your parents are gonna be excited about it and your neighbors are gonna be excited about it and whatever community you have, you would like to be able to have the ability to engage even with small tech. From a culture perspective, there was a lot of conversation about how this works in landlocked parts of the United States or other parts of the world. And the workshops came to a couple of general thoughts and conclusions, for example, using lakes or rivers as proxies for ocean exploration, just any way to engage and taking a watershed approach through that. So understanding how all of these freshwater ecosystems relate to the ocean because of course everything does and really just exciting and igniting this culture of exploration with whatever body of water you have. One of the other really important cultural pieces that came out was the importance of having a key person as a project champion without the one person who's going to take this, embrace it, be passionate about it and run with it. It would never have the traction that it needs and it was really exciting to see 80 people in the room over two workshops, each one of which could have been that one person and who knew a lot more. So I think those people exist and are out there. We also talked about culture in terms of even the coastal parts of the United States, but there's so much urbanization. So what does exploration in an urban context look like versus a rural one? And how can we use some of those concentrations of geography and space and people and what opportunities that opens up to have exploration and engage a larger body. And we also talked about engaging community leaders both in a traditional sense or not and what that might mean in different parts of the country or the world. From a capacity perspective, there was a lot of talk about increasing capacity from an educational standpoint, engaging students, engaging citizen scientists, engaging recreational fishers, but there were some also really creative ideas that came out of these workshops. For example, one of the best things about My Deep Sea, My Backyard is that you can take low cost, small, easily accessible tech and deploy it off of any boat, even a kayak. But at that point, the explorer is limited to one or two people or if you have a small ship, maybe three or four or a larger ship or boat ship. But if you really want to reach a lot of people and you still have small tech, how can you augment that? And one of the creative ideas that came out of our workshop was maybe having a drone fly overhead so that you can have a shore based audience while you're actually putting something in the water. And about creating physical spaces for students where this becomes a gathering point. And I think there was just a lot of really creative and energetic ideas that came from the concept of capacity and culture by using this technology. In the end, My Deep Sea, My Backyard really is about inspiring and contributing to a community based program for ocean exploration wherever your community is. And I think that we had a lot of excitement in the room about what's possible, the tech that exists, the tech that's yet to be, and all of the explorers who are out there. So thank you. Pick up the clicker and I've also got knitted toys to play with. It's really great, so. Okay, so yesterday I was the last speaker before the reception and today I'm the second to last speaker so things are moving up for me. Which is great. And my talk is shorter so that's even better for you. What the, I think we can all agree we've had a great time here and it's been a very impressive event in every possible way. As someone who's been involved with the Ocean Exploitation Forum since the first one in 2013 where I collaborated very closely with Jerry Schuble, it's really gratifying for me to see them evolve and change and take advantage of the venues, invite more diversity in all different ways you want to define that. Discipline, diversity, age, gender, everything. We've really, I think, come a long way from the first one, however important that was. So really appreciate Katie and the team here working with us and Carly Weiner and others to pull this one off. So the question, I think we're all energized, we've also all been to workshops where we can't really remember what we said or did in about two weeks. Okay, so what do we do about that? So what we've done, and I like to explain a little bit about our process which is a bit of an experiment for us, is a couple of things. First of all, all this material, the transcripts, the video. We hope the presenters will allow the presentations to be archived and used. We'll be collated and shipped off to a group called Human Design in Boulder. So Human Design is a very important part of the XPRIZE workshops and some of you may have talked to John or Reid who just had a dash off to get their flight back to Boulder but they're a design agency, a messaging agency, a marketing company and they're very passionate personally about the ocean. So they're going to help us structure this report to be a bit different than maybe we shouldn't call it a report, maybe we should call it something else but a document, a book that will help to capture the spirit and the great ideas that we've come up with here. So we're pretty excited about that because quite frankly, those of us involved in production of these before have other jobs and they take a while so the document that you I hope picked up on the table back there was from October, 2017 and it was printed last week so that you could have it here. We'd like to do better than that next time, okay? So that's one thing. The second thing is we had rapid tours in each of the workshops. So rapid tours, if you're here, please stand up. Okay, these are mostly NOAA people, also Allison Fundes and some others, Carly. I want to give a big round of applause for these people who worked very hard. Okay, so if you forgot what you did in two weeks, they remembered because they took notes so we'll also use those but we need more help and in the spirit of creating community and promoting community and not forgetting what we did here in two weeks after Thanksgiving, you're going to get a survey on Tuesday, Katie, right? Okay, so in addition to resources page on the website we'll have things like the X Prize presentation and Jodica's paper and perhaps the other presentations and other material. We're going to rely on you to take the survey quickly within a week, I think a week's reasonable, otherwise you'll forget, right? And it's going to have three simple questions because ultimately we need to capture your ideas and your energy and your perspective. I don't want to sit here with Katie and kind of try and put together what happened here and then produce something that may not be very interesting in a few months. You can help prevent that from happening so this is why you have to take the survey. So who knew? That's a question about what was unexpected or what was interesting about this event and it doesn't have to be, I mean, plenty of stuff in the presentations or the workshops, no question but in the spirit of community we also all had sidebars. I might have had more sidebars than actual workshop experience but never mind. What happened in those sidebars that was unexpected or new to you, changed your thinking or opened up a new vista. Okay, so we're giving you these questions now it's kind of cheating, so you're not getting this cold but we want you to be thinking about these so that you can quickly answer and respond because we want to capture this stuff. So the second thing is, and I'm famous on my team for this question, also provided to my undergraduate professor who would write on my papers so what at the end of them, so big deal. You learn something, what are you going to do but why is this significant, why does it matter? Why does it matter to you but also why does it matter to the community and why does it matter in terms of how we engage with public and ocean issues? So that's ultimately, we can all have a good time if you're really warm and fuzzy about our experiences here but if you don't start to translate it into the so what question, all we've done is have a great time, not insignificant, certainly but it doesn't have the impact I think we all want to have. And then the final thing is the let's go question is two parts, one is what are we going to do about that, okay? We all have skills and talents, we all have passion. I'm a little bit famous for also saying this perhaps regrettably but great, you're passionate, what can you do, okay? Passion isn't enough, it's necessary but not sufficient. So what everyone in this room has a skill or something they know how to do that can make this equation different in six months a year, five years. Okay, so what is that? It could be data science, you could be a media person, you could make films, you could be developing the low cost innovative technologies that we've talked a lot about which are fascinating to me. There are lots of skill sets in this room that need to be applied to these problems that we've identified or these opportunities that we have identified. So what can you do and how can you contribute? Are the questions of let's go? So I would like us all to think about this in a year and realize that we were different, our work is different, the world is different in some tiny way, probably not gonna change the entire world but maybe a corner of it because we were here and because we were energized by each other and by this ocean exploration community. Okay, so we're providing other resources for you as well. The all hands on deck hashtag will be active so you'll be here, you'll monitor that, you'll be seeing things on social media, inviting you to build and add to the community. As I mentioned, the resources page will be available and will definitely be in touch. So thank you very much. It was a pleasure getting to know many of you. I've got some more time with the reception and with that I'm going to turn it over to Katie after she's got her kids going away there. I'll carry the water. We can have lots of water after. Somebody wanted to help me. Have some water and then come up. All right, sorry. Moving on. First I would like to thank our organizing committee for all hands on deck, David and Adrienne from the No Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Carly from the Schmidt Ocean Institute and our Media Lab team that really were the core team that put all of this together. Also our amazing speakers, especially those who said, I don't do anything in the ocean so I don't know why you're inviting me. Thank you for trusting me and being here and I really thought it brought a huge new different dimension to what we're doing here. Also all of our workshop leads, our rapporteurs and all of our demos, they put a ton of work into all of these projects for the last six to nine months and I couldn't be more excited about everything that happened here. And thanks to all of you for being here. So please keep yourselves. Because we can book caterers, we can book an awesome production team but the energy, the magic, everything that happened here is really because you all were here and made it possible. So I've dedicated, oh and really made it possible with all of our sponsors of course, particularly the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and everyone else who is able to contribute and help us financially to make it possible for our ocean discovery fellows to be here, for us to eat amazing food and really for all of this to happen. So I've spent my entire career, about half my life now, to ocean exploration. And I'm still amazed by the new perspectives that come to light by events like this, by serendipitous encounters. I've like, and all the conversations that I've been hearing. Wanna sit with me? There we go. Naenoa this morning said that the movement is the ultimate voyage and that movement is starting here today right here in this room and I'm gonna get all weepy again. And I think there are incredible number of reasons to be optimistic, I truly do. So what we've started here really feels like something new and I'm not just saying that so many people have come out to me and said the exact same thing. And as Alan, Leonardo, said in his remarks yesterday, and has been the theme throughout both of these days is that this gathering is about opening the ocean to everyone, new ideas, new approaches, ancient voices, new voices, all joining into conversation together. The planet doesn't have time, we don't have time to keep doing things the way we have been. We need to accelerate how we're learning about the ocean and how we're communicating and engaging the entire planet in the conversation. And to do that, we really need to do things differently. In our lightning talk today, Lee Marsh said, well, we've never turned on that instrument at that depth so why would we do it now? But we did and they discovered something new. So we need to keep doing the unexpected, keep pushing ourselves to do things that break the cycles of how we've always done things. We've seen some awesome examples of how to do things differently from Lego and comedy and knitting and volunteerism. And by bringing all of these ideas together collectively, I think we truly can make a difference. No one organization, no one person can navigate the solution to the challenges that face us alone. It's really the connections that we made here today and beyond that will help us get there. The MIT Media Lab is about convening these groups in crazy ways and really harnessing their power and deploying results and I'm sorry Reese isn't here but I am stoked that we had the opportunity to host the National Ocean Exploration Forum this year and to explore these ideas over the last two days. I hope that the connections made here can help us find this new path forward to a discovered open ocean. Thanks guys. Thanks everybody. So we have our final reception at the MIT Museum. The address is up here. If you'd like to take a picture of it or read it down and take a walk, it's about a 10 minute walk or we also have a shuttles. I think we're actually running a little bit early so we won't wait until 6.15 whenever shuttles get packed up. Please jump in them. Head over again the connected coral exhibit will be there on the first floor. That's Emily Salvador's work and I hope you're all able to check it out and enjoy the new Harishoff exhibit which is a big naval architecture exhibit that just opened a couple weeks ago at the museum which should be stunning. So really looking forward to it and enjoying the last evening with you all and tomorrow at the IMAX Theater at the New England Aquarium. Please join us. All sorts of really fun events that are open and free to the public. So please join us and tell your friends. Thanks guys. Oh, wait, Beth has a question or something.