 Hello and good afternoon. Good evening or good morning depending on where you're joining us from. Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for short. Today we're pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2017 webinar series and exploration of the role of robotics in global development. My name is Rob Govir and I'm the managing news editor at E4C. I'll be the moderator for today's webinar. If you're following us on Twitter today, I'd also like to invite you to join the conversation with our hashtag E4C webinars. And I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a little bit more about today's webinar. Robotics and automation technologies have become vital to global development. They are improving the quality of life in underserved communities around the world. But as these technologies are becoming successful, they are also inciting a little bit of fear. We've seen a rise of alarmist opinions in the media and perceptions portrayed by Hollywood. It is important to know how to separate the fiction from the real impact on communities by providing an objective and unscued view. Today we've invited a leading voice in robotics for humanitarian work and global development, Dr. Raj Madhavan. Dr. Madhavan is the founder and CEO of Humanitarian Robotics Technologies and the distinguished visiting professor of robotics with Amatshi Labs at Amrita University in Kerala, India. He is also chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's Special Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology. Welcome Dr. Madhavan and thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to thank the E4C webinar series team. If anybody out there has questions about the series or would like to make a recommendation for future topics and speakers, I invite you to contact the team by using the email address here on the slide. It's webinars at engineering4change.org. Today's webinar is part of E4C's professional development offerings. Information on upcoming installments in the series as well as archived videos of past presentations can be found on the E4C's webinars page as well as our YouTube channel. Both of those URLs are listed here on the slide. Before we move on to our presenter, I'd like to tell you a little bit more about engineering4change. E4C is a knowledge organization and a global community of over 1 million engineers, designers, development practitioners, and social scientists. We're all working to leverage technology to solve challenges to the quality of life that people face in underserved communities. Those include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy, improved agriculture, and more. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to news, data on hundreds of essential technologies in our Solutions Library, resources for professional development, and opportunities such as jobs and fellowships. 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In the chat window, which is located at the bottom right of your screen, please type your location. If the chat window is not open, you can access it by clicking the chat icon in the top right corner of the screen. Go ahead and start typing in your locations. Great. I see we have people from Montreal, Quebec, Minneapolis, Providence, Rhode Island, people from Washington, DC, New Jersey, and I'm sure others. Thank you for joining us. During the webinar, you can use the Q&A window. It's located below the chat window. You can use that to type in your questions for the presenter. If you don't see the Q&A window, you can access it by clicking the Q&A icon in the top right corner. If you are listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any trouble, try hitting stop and then start. You may also want to try opening WebEx in a different browser. Following the webinar to request a certificate of completion showing one professional development hour, PDH, for this session, please follow the instructions on the top of the questions professional development page. You can see that page as URL here on this slide. Now, it's my pleasure to introduce our presenter, Dr. Raj Madhavan. Dr. Madhavan is the founder and CEO of Humanitarian Robotics Technologies. He has had all the appointments with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory as an R&D staff member based at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and as an assistant and associate research scientist and as a member of the Maryland Robotics Center with the University of Maryland College Park. He received a PhD in field robotics from the University of Sydney and an ME in systems engineering from the Australian National University. Over the last 20 years, he has contributed to topics in field robotics and systems and control theory. He has authored over 185 papers in archival journals, conferences, and magazines including three books and four journal special issues. Thank you, Dr. Madhavan. Thank you, Rob, for the introduction. Hello, everyone. As Rob said, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you are. I'm just about to share my slides, but thank you very much for being here today. As I share the slides, I'm just going to continue to talk here. So as it was mentioned, the title of today's webinar is Role of Robotics in Global Development, but I also kind of have a subtitle on humanitarian challenges in humanitarian technology, sustainability, and public policy. I will come back to that, but before that, I wanted to give you a quick overview on exactly what I would like to cover today. The topics today I'm going to talk about are squarely centered on humanitarian technologies, and I will discuss a little bit more on what I exactly mean by humanitarian. But I'm also going to talk about some of the sustainability issues and also technology and public policy issues. So the talk is a three-parter. So first I'm going to talk about some of the work I've been doing, which is more robotics work. Then I'm going to talk about a competition we have been running under the RAS site umbrella. Then I'm going to finish up with technology and public policy issues. So that's sort of an outline of my talk today. I have come to believe in the last three years or so that robotics and automation, in fact, have a very large role to play than people would admit or people would like to think in terms of elevating the quality of life for folks around the world, particularly in underserved and underdeveloped segments of the population. Now, underserved does not mean we are thinking about India or Africa, but that's what people immediately think. You could have a rich country, rich in terms of GDP, yet you can have segments of the population that can be classified as underserved. So I don't want you to start thinking when I say underserved and underdeveloped places in sub-Saharan Africa where I hate this term, calling it third world, but those type of places I don't want you to think. It could be anywhere. It could be a neighborhood in your big city. So the things I'm going to talk about are relevant to such type of communities also. Now, robotics, I believe, has a very large role to play, as I said before. And we actually are living in the middle of a robotics revolution, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, it's already here. We are already living in the midst of it. Think about the things you have in your house, for example, your thermostat, your dishwasher, your washing machine. All of these are examples of automation, and there is some intelligence in it. The level of intelligence varies, but we are already here, but there are things that are happening around us, from drones to self-driving cars to all other kinds of things you might have seen in movies or read in sci-fi type books or comics. People tend to have their own imagination. So I also want to do a thing today, which is to set some of the expectations right in terms of, as a roboticist, I come from the technical side of things. I also want to talk about that disconnect. A little bit more about me. Most of it was mentioned already, but I really want to emphasize the fact that I come from India. I did my undergrad in India, then I went to Australia for my grad studies. Then I worked in Europe for a year before I moved to the U.S., so I have kind of lived in four continents, and that actually has helped me to better understand and connect with a lot of the cultures, their sensitivities, and in terms of seeing things up close and personal, travel is always great, opens everybody's eyes, but in my case, it's very personal. I have in fact seen things that have had a profound effect on me. In terms of my research interest, the humanitarian robotics and automation technologies is something I'm very much interested in, and that's exactly my day job, if you will. But I've also held positions across academia, industry, and also government, so that also has given me somewhat of a rounded perspective, looking at these things. So to answer the somewhat of an existential question of who am I, I think of myself as a humanitarian technologist and a roboticist, somebody who uses technology for good to make a difference, make a change, a fundamental change in people's lives. That's what I see as my life's work from maybe two years ago. That's a path I've decided to go on. It's going somewhere, which I think is good. It's early stages, but I'm optimistic with the help of others and with the people I'm working with, I think we can make a big change in people's lives. I wanted to give you a quick dose of reality, if you will, in terms of robotics. The one on the right, a robot in every home. This was written by Bill Gates. Many of you, all of us know Bill Gates, a visionary, as you might call. He talked in 2007. So this article appeared in Scientific American. In 2007, he talked about a robot in every home. We really don't see that now. Maybe the closest thing we come to or we have come to is Rumba, which pretty much you can see YouTube videos with people putting their cats on it, to people doing all kinds of things with Rumba. Rumba is considered to be very friendly. So people have taken a liking to it, and it's been societally accepted, and I think that's a very important point, societal acceptance. Then in 2013, there was a question posed to Mr. Gates again, which was, what emerging technology do you think will cause another big stir, just like the computer did in the 90s? So then again, he put robots as the first one. In his answer, he had other things, speech interaction and pervasive screens, but he did put robots as the first one. So robots are seen, robotics in general is seen to hold a lot of promise, but we really haven't gotten to seeing robots part of our everyday lives. And that goes back again to this societal acceptance question, I think. Of course, there are gaps in research and development and cost and in terms of public perceptions, and I'll talk about that as we go on. But I put this slide in most of my talks these days, and I call it the Hollywood problem. Hollywood in fact has done a great service to robotics in it that it has made it quite sexy and cool in terms of having robotics as a good conversation starter, but also it has made life really difficult for people like me, where we are constantly finding ourselves in a position to have to set expectations right. And that's because a lot of the things, for example, take the Terminator. That's the things like chasing people to climbing stairs, and all of these things are really not at the level of maturity that we would like to see, and certainly not at the level of maturity you would see in the movies. So there's a big disconnect in terms of a scientific engineering viewpoint versus the public perception that has been set because of Hollywood movies or even to an extent science fiction. So I wanted to take things you see with a grain of salt because what you see may not be really the reality, even though seeing is reality that really doesn't hold in this case. I'll now talk about, I mentioned humanitarian, so I'll talk about what humanitarian means to me at least. A straight up dictionary type of a definition is having concern or helping to improve the welfare and happiness of people. And turning it around a little bit, you can say that in fact it could mean pertaining to the saving of human lives or to the alleviation of suffering. So it's actually the same thing. If you reduce suffering, you minimize suffering, then you take people suffering away. You're going to make them happy. So for me, humanitarian, from a technical viewpoint, and I'll come to this again, if your technology, whatever that may be, if it can make or if it can alleviate suffering, and I think I would consider that humanitarian. It's also important here to distinguish between humanitarian aid, which is completely different. So that goes to things like delivering supplies for which technology could be used, but think about say a refugee camp. So if you give food to people, okay, the delivery of the food could be facilitated by technology, but the food itself is not the type of humanitarian thing I'm talking about here. So I'm purely talking about humanitarian development and deployment as opposed to humanitarian aid. And I think there is a distinction there. There's this thing called the quality of life index, which is put out by the economist. They judge the quality of life in terms of nine factors that are listed here. And they come up with the worldwide ranking of countries. Now this index is very subjective. It depends on who you ask, and it depends on how people respond to the questions. And then they come up with this ranking, which really doesn't tell much. So for example, Denmark usually ranks in the top three or even in the top five most of the time. And I do know a few Danish friends. And I can tell you they are not really happy as you would expect coming out of the ranking. They are grappling with the same problems that most of the, for example, the developing world is dealing with. Yes, standard of living is much more higher for them, but that doesn't really translate to happiness. Then there is this thing called the World Happiness Report, just put out by the UN. Again, this is more based on the GDP and some other factors listed here. On the left you can see these reports that come out every other year. There's one due in a few months. But last year they actually put out sort of an interim report. Fascinating read if you want to look at it. Again, this is very subjective. Then there is a Buddhist saying, to which I fully subscribe as a Buddhist. Happiness is that which can be born with these. Suffering is that which cannot be. For me, humanitarian then, from a technology perspective, if your technology alleviates suffering, then for me that's humanitarian. Then that brings us to the question, what is humanitarian robotics and automation? I talked about robotics and automation for the benefit of humanity, underserved under developed communities. If you can make that happen, then certainly that's humanitarian. But also there is this term quality of life. Now I'm talking about the third bullet. I'm skipping the second one, but there is quality of life and then there's standard of level. Now these are two different terms and they get used interchangeably. That is really not quite right in my opinion. For example, quality of life is something which you can think of, let's say, a place where there is no water or people have to walk miles to get water. Whereas standard of living, on the other hand, you can think about, let's say you drive a Toyota. It'd be nice to drive a BMW. That's standard of living improvement. Then you take the same example of driving and put it to this quality of life example I talked about where people are walking miles to just get the basic necessities met. It could be running water. It could be shelter. It could be schools. It could be healthcare. It could be electricity. It could be all of those things. But I'm really interested in seeing when I say humanitarian robotics and automation, these technologies making a fundamental difference in improving the quality of life as opposed to the standard of living. I will also venture by saying that most of the research you see in robotics these days, I would even say more than 90% of the research, is squarely aimed at the standard of living route because that's what sells. That's what makes money. Quality of life generally doesn't end in commercial products. So I'm not saying it's wrong or it is right, but that's how I think it is. Another difference in humanitarian robotics and automation is applied systems versus fundamental research. So we are putting things together, bringing together, tailoring existing techniques, existing technologies to solve a humanitarian task or a humanitarian impact. Then you're really looking at applied systems, not fundamental research. We're not looking at research patterns or publications. Sustainability is, again, a very important point where how do you install a robotics and automation solution? How do you ensure that it lives on after the experts leave? So it's very important to involve the communities right from the beginning. So you have to do not a top-down approach, but in fact, a bottom-up approach where you really talk to communities, understand their needs and involve them right from the design process, and that's the only way to ensure sustainability. Of course, it has to be economically viable. It should make sense. It should be cost-effective. And that's very important in terms of sustaining a solution. Now, there is this thing called frugal science, and this again goes to sustainability. And the reason I put this up is a few years ago, 2014, India launched this satellite, or put this space orbiter, the Mars orbiter, for a cost of $74 million. Now, you can see in the graphic that there are other efforts that are substantially higher, but what is also interesting is the fact that India put it in the very first try for a very low cost. And just to compare the numbers, the blockbuster gravity a few years ago actually cost $100 million to make. So when I say cost-effective solution, cheap does not mean inferior. It just means you do a good job, you be creative with the funds you have to get the task accomplished. So I wanted to make that clear. There's also this UN Sustainable Development Goals many of you might be aware of. There are 17 goals that was formulated in 2015, kicked off last year. So it's a 15-year program in which they are looking at how we can make a fundamental difference in people's lives, both developing and developed economies. I believe robotics can make a difference in many of the goals here, for example, number nine, industry innovation infrastructure, I think is an important one. I think robotics has a role to play there. I won't dwell too much into this, but I just wanted to put this up. This is something I'm interested in also. There are several domains robotics can make a huge difference in, and I'm today going to talk about only two of them. I'm very much interested in education also. There are some things I'm doing, but I'm not going to talk about that. So the first one I'm going to talk about is disaster-related applications. What's referred to as USAR, USAR stands for Urban Search and Rescue. Here you can think of a situation, say for example, an earthquake has happened and buildings have collapsed, pancake, and there are people stuck in between rubble piles. Now how do you really safely bring them out? So then you can use robots here, not to pull them out of the rubble, but in fact to pinpoint the location of the victims. That way then the first responders can really go there much quickly and get them out and hear times of the essence. So pinpointing the location, getting them to go to that location quickly, robots can make a huge difference. And this is something I have worked on in the past, but this is kind of where I really got started in terms of thinking about how robotics can alleviate suffering. And that morphed into going into the drone or unmanned aerial vehicle domain. So I have always been a mobile robotics, ground robotics person, but with moving to the aerial vehicles domain I literally elevated myself in a manner of speaking. The drones domain is huge. In fact, the graphic on the right side where you see drones, market overview, it's a market survey that was put out which estimates by 2020 the drone market is supposed to be a $20 billion range that's billion with a B. So that's huge and we are not that far away. We are only three or four years away. The survey came out a couple of years ago, but still the drone business is booming. Two types of drones are usually used are UAVs. One are fixed wings. Let's see what you see on the left top picture. Other ones are the multi-rotor types. The more ubiquitous one is the quad rotor because you have four rotors. Each of them have advantages and disadvantages. The one on the top can be used for longer flights, but they cannot hover, for example, if you want to look at some structure or some object in a disaster situation. The one in the bottom, the multi-rotor or multi-copters can really do that, but the battery lasts only 20 to 30 minutes. So you need to really strike a balance between the two depending on the domain you are working in and depending on the type of application it is intended for. So my work is done in collaboration with some of the folks in the southern part of Brazil called Rio Grande do Sul with the university there. This area, the Rio Grande do Sul actually, in fact, also has this lagoon which periodically over floods and in addition to damage to natural resources and population displacement, seems like these are becoming more common all over the world. Call it climate change, call it global warming, whatever suits your taste, but it's undeniable that these type of calamities and disasters are occurring at very alarming regularity and we have to be able to deal with that. So we may not be able to prevent these using robotics, but what we can really do is we might be able to deal with the aftermath of it in terms of our response, in terms of how we can respond better so that lives are saved and then it also helps in terms of the recovery efforts and the reconstruction efforts which come after a disaster happened. So this is only showing floods here, so this same thing holds for things like hurricanes. It could hold for earthquakes. It could hold for landslides, any of those things. So what we do, our goal is to move away from the dependency on satellite images. So in a disaster like this, typically the dependency is on using satellite images and there are several disadvantages with using satellite images. If you don't have a dedicated satellite, you may not be able to get the images that you need whenever you need it. So you cannot have them on demand. Also the other disadvantage, I've listed a few things here under practical issues, but the other disadvantage is, in addition to not being able to get the images, but even the images that you get are not of sufficient resolution. So we cannot really plan things on an image that does not give you sufficient level of detail. So what we do, our goal is then to combine the best of both worlds. So the drones fly for a shorter time, but then we can get up close and personal and we can capture images that we need. And then if you can fuse the high resolution on-demand UAV images with the low resolution, not so current satellite images, then you can put together a visual representation that is much more powerful than one of them on their own. So that's what we have done, and we are also in fact investigating merging this with social data. And when I say social data, these are things like Twitter feeds, Facebook data, data that people would text, send in terms of disaster, if we can capture and then we can merge them with these type of visual representations, then you can enable the responders and make their jobs much more easier to respond to such disasters and in disaster situations. So what you're seeing here on the right is a false color image, but it is an image that has been obtained by fusing aerial imagery obtained by UAVs, drones, infused them with flat-lit images. So of course the one you're seeing on the right side is not doing a disaster, it's in a much more calm state. But you can see the level of detail you can get from these. You can see the buildings, you can see the roads. So what happens in a disaster situation is you will not know where the roads are. Probably some of the lower buildings are submerged underwater or collapsed, but then having information about them from the satellite imagery, you know, okay, there is a school here and now this is how the school looks. Perhaps you need to look for survivors there and that's how the response to a disaster situation could potentially work. The other thing you can do is in terms of floods, so I'm going to talk about the picture on the left. What that shows it is what you can think of as the trajectories of rivers, if you will. So if there is a river that periodically over floods, if there is a river that bursts when there's heavy rain, and if there's history and if you can tell, okay, this is a potentially dangerous river or it could be the track of a dam too, what you can then do is you can perhaps predict where these rivers would flow if there were a surge or if there is a leak. And then you can potentially plot the trajectories and then you can inform people downstream. That way they can A, B be prepared and they could be used at the level of city planning so you may not want to build houses or any dwellings along the way of this potential trajectory, but also at the same time, in fact, if there are houses then you can say, okay, you are in the path of these deluge of water so you can better plan your recovery so you can move people to higher ground and you can respond much, much, much more effectively. I'm looking at the time, so I'm going to rush a little bit here, but I think I will finish on time and then we can take some questions. I have been active within the IEEE Robotics Automation Society. Many of you might know IEEE as it is called the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers is the largest professional society in the world, close to 400,000. It might be even 400, I think the number is 430,000 now, but it's definitely the largest professional society in the world and it's divided into many societies, divided by technical areas. Robotics Automation Society is one of them. We are the fifth largest society and we have about 14,000 members spread across 110 countries. So within this society, I started with the help of like-minded individuals, what we call a special interest group on humanitarian technology and this resides at a higher level as site, but then what we formed is RAS site, so it's a society-specific site and obviously because we are the Robotics and Automation Society, all of the work we do has distinct robotics and automation flavor. In fact, we were the first society within IEEE to have a site and you can read the vision and motivation or the focus on the mission. Not much different from what I have been talking, but the key point to remember is you're looking at emerging and existing technologies to make a fundamental difference in people's lives, elevating their quality of life. We do this in several ways and I want to share a couple of those today. The way we have been doing that is by acting first of all as a bridge, as a facilitator to bring people whose skills can benefit humanity, but also people who are willing to contribute to such efforts by providing a platform for them to share their knowledge, but also at the same time using their brain power, if you will, in connecting with folks and connecting with communities where there's a distinct need for that brain. I personally see that as a biggest contribution that RAS site has been providing. Some of the challenges, the problems we have been tackling are explicitly framed so that it's not a purely technical solution, but in fact it covers environmental structure, cultural and socioeconomic aspects also. And then we bring that to bear in terms of providing a little bit of funding, providing or organizing challenges and competitions and establishing collaborations with networks of academia, industry and governments. And this has been going quite well. One of the ways we have been doing that is through this landmine clearance competition. Now you can read about the why. That's a very easy sell. The important thing I do want to point out, in addition to saving lives, people talk about being able to save humans when their limbs are cut off, people step on landmines. It's a huge problem, yes. But the other important problem is these mines are buried in perfectly good agricultural lands. So by removing these mines, you're not only saving lives in terms of people not getting blown up, but also you are providing ways for people to be able to sustain themselves. It provides a sustenance factor too by allowing them to cultivate crops in these good agricultural lands. There are solutions to this problem, and you can throw money at this. So for example, one of the solutions is a $100,000 truck. It drives over the mines. It blows them up. Now, yes, the mines are cleared, but then the land is no good because all the explosives, everything goes into the soil, and then it's not good for many, many years and you can literally forget about being able to cultivate any crops in these fields. There are several cheaper solutions. One of them involves using rats, but they are effective. It is not cheap exactly. It costs about $3,000 to train a rat. Then of course, rats are considered indispensable, I mean, considered indispensable compared to humans. So if a rat gets blown up, and I'm sorry if there are animal lovers in the audience, but in the hierarchy of things, human life is considered to be more important than an animal life. So rats are considered to be dispensable. You may or may not agree with that, but there are solutions that are also happening that are cheaper. So what we want to do is we want to bring together in a competition format. We want to involve students to be able to contribute to this problem, and where we are going with this is a very cost-effective solution. You can think of it as a black box that can mount on to a mobile platform, and we have essentially separated the two problems of mind detection and extrication into two different problems. So unless you really can detect and classify a mind and say with good accuracy and reliability that there is a mind in this grid of a map, there is no point in trying to go and extricate that mind because along the way you might get blown up. So extrication is actually the easier part. The physical removal of the mind is the easier part, but detecting with certain level of confidence is the hardest part, and that's what we are focusing through this competition by providing a platform for students to contribute to this. It's all done in an open source way. I'll show a video now that will make things much clearer and make my job easier in terms of saving time. So let me run this video. It doesn't look like you can see the video. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back again to full screen and skip the video, but not to worry, it looks like it might work. But anyway, we'll skip this, but I do have slides so you haven't lost much. So the way we do this is in three phases. So we do a simulation phase, a testing phase, and then there's the finals. So what happens in the simulation phase is you have a faithful reproduction of the environment and the robot. Teams are able to develop code, then they can test it. And in this phase, we pretty much allow all the teams that are initially interested. So one year, we started with 14, and by the end of the simulation phase, we eliminated four of them, so then we ended up with 10 of them. And now these 10 teams now move on to the so-called testing phase. And in the testing phase, we have a robot. It's a standard platform. Everybody works on the same robot. You send us the code, we run the code, and then we will send you the data files, a video, and what happened during the execution of your code. So the nice thing about doing this is it is a very low entry barrier. That way, folks don't have to buy the robot, instrumented the sensors, put it together. They can pretty much work in the comfort of their own cubicle in their own country, and they can develop code, and yet they can contribute to this landline clearance problem. That's probably the greatest strength of this competition in that you provide a means, you provide a platform for people to get involved without even having to travel. So we started in 2014, which was a very somewhat of a simple environment. We had 14 teams from eight countries, four went to the finals, and then again next year we made it a little bit more complicated. Then we had 15 teams from 10 countries, five finalists. Now the important thing I would like to point out, if you see on the HRATC-15, Team 2, the runner-up is Orion, and it'll go back to the last one. You don't have it, so actually you can see it on the picture on the right, it says Team Orion. So Orion won the first year. They decided to compete the following year, but then a newcomer, National University of Singapore, beat them. Now the interesting thing is they actually had the code available from the previous year. So essentially they took Orion's code, and to an extent they modified it, added their own intelligence to it, and they were able to beat Orion essentially at their own game in a manner of speaking. So this is exactly what we want. We don't want people to waste time reinventing the wheel. We want people to build on what already exists, and this is another strength of the competition where people are able to build on what the previous teams have built. Now then we ran it last year. We had 19 from five countries with four finalists, and then we had another team from India win it. We are doing it again this year. I'm going to skip this over interest of time. We are doing this again this year. We have just finished our simulation phase. We are starting March 1st, which is tomorrow. We are actually going into our testing phase. So this is a competition that actually runs for almost six months, with typically two months for simulation, two months for testing, and then we go on to the finals. If you're interested, you can find more. Just do a search, or you can see the website there. You can find out. Maybe you can compete next year. We also fund small projects. Some of them are shown here. The ones in bold are the ones that are starting this year. That means the ones that are not bolder are the projects that have finished last year. The project call actually just ended yesterday. If you're interested, we can still talk about it if you have an idea, but it has to be robotics and automation and should definitely have a humanitarian flavor. Just a little bit more information here. The projects are not your typical research projects. In addition to having a humanitarian angle and using robotics and automation technologies, we are very much interested in pairing a community with perhaps a nonprofit organization that may be working alongside and trying to understand the needs of the community. Our funding is deliberately kept low. They're typically the range of $2,500 to $5,000. The reason is that, A, we are not a funding agency. B, we don't want to give funding to develop research technologies. There are science agencies. There are research agencies for that. Our strength is trying to pair, trying to bring these parties together so that everybody feels some accountability, some ownership of this problem. On that way, it goes towards sustainability also at the end of it when the experts leave then the community because they identified the problem, they have ownership and the solution continues to live on. For this year, we would like to fund 8 to 10 projects along all regions of IEEE. We usually don't have much participation from South America and also from region 8, which tends to be Middle East and Africa. If there are folks who are listening in, if you do have ideas, even though the deadline has passed, I will be open to speaking with you offline. If you have a good idea and more importantly, a solution to a problem that is relevant to your community, we can still talk. We also have a UN voluntary commitment and this squarely goes towards disaster risk reduction. There are some things happening here. I'll share the slides you can read at your own leisure. Quickly, I want to conclude now. I think we have only about six minutes and I'm going to rush here. I mentioned before at the top of my talk that we are living in the midst of a robotics revolution and this is a quote from Joseph Chamberlain who actually is the father of Neville Chamberlain who used to be the prime minister of the UK during World War II. That's a different story altogether but the code really rings true even today. It fully captures the excitement behind new technologies but also it captures the fear and the anxiety that comes with such new technologies. Now, I want to give three examples. Robots and jobs. This is definitely something you have heard of. People always talk about robots coming in and swooping in and taking all the jobs away. There are arguments on both sides of this conversation. Of course, folks say that robots are great. They're increasing the productivity and thus they're good for a country. But then on the other side there are also these alarmist views. If you see the picture in the middle, it portrays a view where we are going to be living in a society ruled by robots and humans will be reduced to being slaves of such a robot society. That's far-fetched, definitely, I think. But you also have to remember that we are at the early stages of it. Maybe there are valued arguments here but what is happening is that this alarmist hyped-up view is what is more prevalent in the media. There are several publications but it's very important and as I said in the beginning to take everything with a grain of salt and try not to get carried away because in my mind what doesn't really get talked about is the fact that yes, robots will take jobs away but they will create a different kind of a job. They'll create more jobs than they take away and this is not the kind of discussion or the view that's represented generally in the media and then that leads to a lot of confusion and fear so that's really not good. The other one is self-driving cars. Pretty much every auto manufacturer has their own version of an autonomous or a self-driving car. Of course the well-known one is the Google one. They have been driving or testing these for a long time and recently Tesla's autonomous car actually got into an accident with the first ever self-driving car of fatality. Of course people then start saying, okay, this is not good but then really have to take a closer look at why it happened. It's not because of the fault of the self-driving algorithms but rather it was a sensor fault. The argument goes that it was blinded by sunlight and it was not really visible. A truck pulled in front of it and this car rammed into it and that's killing the occupant. So there are ways to go. I mean this is not a very demonstrated improvement technology and with it it brings a lot of other interesting questions and ethical questions. So if a self-driving car is driving and if there are a bunch of pedestrians who step in front of it, should the car swerve to avoid in order to save the occupants of the vehicle or should it say, okay, there's only one person in this car so I can sacrifice one to save many. So that's an ethical question, right? It depends on who you ask. If you ask the person in the car, obviously that person is going to say, no, no, my life is more important. I want to be saved. Whereas if you look at the common good, many people being saved then somebody who is totally removed from this context then say, okay, many people should be saved. So this leads into this murky domain of ethics and legality and liability. So this is an evolving field. There have been documents that are being put out. Again, they are not complete rule books. They are more of suggestions, if you will. And of course the drone domain is right with issues, close calls of drones flying closer to aircrafts near misses every year, every day in fact. And this is a widely considered problem Federal Aviation Administration in the U.S. is looking at this. They have documents on guidelines and how people should do, what drones should be flown, how high they can be flown without line of sight, how close to airports, who can fly them, whether you're a hobbyist or you're a commercial entity. All these things have to be taken into account. So all of this we have been looking at from this Future Directions project, which started last year for one year and a series of workshops were conducted to get not just a technical perspective, but again I keep going back to the socio-economic cultural perspective. And in that vein we organized one in North America, one in Europe and one in Asia. And these were fascinating discussions. What is happening now is all of this is now finding its way from an incubation project. It has now become what is called as an initiative, which is a longer duration. It's actually going to be maybe perhaps a three-year initiative. We have our first kickoff workshop coming up next month. And we are calling symbiotic autonomous systems. So symbiosis then here means man and machine working together. What type of issues that it lead to, certainly ethical, legal, societal implications, but also in terms of autonomy itself, what do these things mean? So we are first having the kickoff workshop to talk about within IEEE. Then we are going to open this up for the larger community, government, industry, and other agencies and organizations that are interested. I've kind of really rushed. And so I'm going to stop there, but this is my last slide and I promise. Coming from India and maybe even if you don't come from India, Gandhi's words as a nonviolent proponent have a lot of value these days, especially with the tumult we are seeing across several parts of the globe. And this statement or this saying really speaks to me, which says, be the change you want to see in the world. One of the things we don't think, and I certainly felt this way when I started wanting to do something useful is that I'm one person, what am I going to be able to do? And I think that's the wrong view. What you need to think is, okay, one person can do it, then others will see it, and then one person will become a movement. So I think you really need to believe in yourself. I'm not blowing my own horn here. I'm not saying I've accomplished a lot, but I'm just saying when you start, then you will find like-minded individuals and folks and organizations that will join you in the quest. And then it sort of snowballs and it becomes a much larger thing than a single person. So I would strongly encourage everyone to start thinking about whatever it is you have, start with yourself. It starts as an inner revolution first before it becomes an outer revolution. And in that vein, I mentioned I'm a Buddhist, so I'm biased here. I put the picture of the Dalai Lama here, but he says, if you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with the mosquito. Now I wanted to end my talk on a somewhat of a funny or a jocular way, but there's a lot of truth in that statement. And this goes back to what I was talking about. Change starts with that individual level as opposed to wanting to make it as a mass start. And I think that speaks a lot. So I know I already rushed it. I can talk for two hours on these topics, but unfortunately I have to stop here. So thank you for listening. Some of my contact details are here. You're welcome to contact me offline if you have questions or if you want to start a larger conversation, I'm open. So I think I will end there. And I think, yeah, so... Great. Great. Thank you, Dr. Madawana. It was very interesting. We only have a couple of minutes left, but I'd still like to open it up to questions. If anybody listening to this presentation has a question, please go ahead and use the Q&A window and type it in there. And I see that we have one already from Peter Haas. Dr. Madawana, how do you state the coming open source release of DARPA's fast, lightweight, autonomy challenge code base will impact humanitarian UAV use? On the flip side, how will it accentuate humanitarian crises and conflict? Well, I mean, both have advantages and disadvantages. I'm going to make a wild guess here. I do know what you're talking about, but I don't really know all the particulars. But when you are talking about open source, then a lot of it just because of the definition of open source. So open source doesn't mean free, right? Open source just means it's free to share. But open source generally tends to facilitate development much, much faster than code based, as you were saying, somewhat of a closed competition. So there are, of course, there are disadvantages in open source because open source, because it's not done with a commercial angle. Maybe you don't get all the benefits that you would support maintenance and things of that nature that can be thrown behind a commercial entity. Sorry, Dr. Madhavan, I'm going to have to cut you off there. We can't go over the hour or a lot of it. I do want to say that any further questions, Peter or anyone else on this call, you can direct them to Dr. Madhavan at the email provided or send them to webinars at engineeringforchange.org and we can relate them to Dr. Madhavan. Thank you so much for joining us, everyone, and have a good day.