 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Exascale Day, made possible by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at celebrating Exadata Day, 10, 18. It's, I think it's the second year of celebrating Exadata Day. And we're really excited to have our next guest and talk about kind of what this type of compute scale enables and really look a little bit further down the road at some big issues, big problems and big opportunities that this is gonna open up. And I'm really excited to get in this conversation with our next guest. He is Brian Pijanowski, the Professor of Landscape and Soundscape Ecology at Purdue University. Brian, great to meet you. Great to be here. So in getting ready for this conversation, I just watched your TED talk and I just loved one of the quotes. I actually wanted to quote you from it. It's basically saying you are exploring the world through sound. I just love to get a little deeper perspective on that because that's such a unique way to think about things and you really dig into it and explain why this is such an important way to enjoy the world, to absorb the world and think about the world. Yeah, that's right, Jeff. So the way I see it, sound is kind of like a universal variable. It exists all around us. And you can, you can't even find a place on earth where there's no sound, where it's completely silent. Sound is a signal of something that's happening and we can use that information in ways to allow us to understand the earth. Just thinking about all the different kinds of sounds that exist around us on a daily basis. I hear the birds, I hear the insects, but there's just a lot more than that. It's mammals. In some cases, a lot of reptiles. And then when you begin thinking outside the biological system, you begin to hear rain, wind, thunder. And then there's the sounds that we make, sounds of traffic, the sounds of church bells. All of this is information, some of it's symbolic, some of it's telling me something about change. As a new colleges, that's what I'm interested in. How is the earth changing? That's great. And then you guys set up at Purdue, the Purdue Center for Global Soundscapes. Tell us a little bit about the mission and some of the work that you guys do. Well, our mission is really to use sound as a lens to study the earth, but to capture it in ways that are meaningful. And to bring that back to the public, to tell them a story about how the earth kind of exists. There's an incredible awe of nature that we all experience when we go out and listen into the wild spaces of the earth. I've gone to the eastern steps of Mongolia, of climbed towers in the paleotropics of Borneo and listened at night and asked the question, how are these sounds different? And what is a grassland really supposed to sound like, without humans around? So we use that information and bring it back and analyze it as a means to understand how the earth is changing and really what the biological community is all about and how things like climate change are altering our spaces, our wild spaces. I'm also interested in the role that people play in producing sound and also using sound. So getting back to Mongolia, we have a new NSF funded project where we're going to be studying herders and the ways in which they use sonic practices. They use a lot of sounds as information sources about how the environment is changing but also how they relate back to place and to heritage. It's special sounds that resonate, that the sounds of a river, for example, are the resonance patterns that they tune their throat to that pay homage to their parents that were born at the side of that river. There's these special connections that people have with place through sound. And so that's another thing that we're trying to do. In really simple terms, I want to go out and what I call, it sounds rather simple, record the earth. What does that mean? I want to go to every major biome and conduct a research study there. I want to know what is a grassland sound like? What is a coral reef sound like? A kelp forest in the oceans, a desert? And to capture that as baseline and use that information for scientific purposes. You know, there's so much to unpack there, Brian. First off is just kind of the foundational role that sound plays in our lives that you outlined in great detail. And you talked about it's the first sense that's really activated as we get consciousness even before we're born, right? We hear the sounds of our mother's heartbeat and her voice and even the last sense that goes at the end a lot of times in this really intimate relationship. As you just said, that the sounds represent in terms of our history, we don't have to look any further than a favorite song that can instantly transport you, almost like a time machine to a particular place in time. Very, very cool. Now what's really interesting that what you're doing now is taking advantage of new technology and just kind of a new angle to capture sound in a way that we haven't done before. I think you've said, you know, you have sound listening devices oftentimes in a single location for a year. You're not only capturing sound, but right sound is changes in air pressures like you're getting changes in air pressure, you're getting vibration, which is kind of a whole different level of data. And then to be able to collect that for a whole year and then, you know, start to try to figure out a baseline, which is pretty simple to understand, but you're talking about this chorus. I love your phrase a chorus because that sound is made up of a bunch of individual inputs and now trying to kind of go under the covers to figure out what is that baseline actually composed of? And you talk about a bunch of really interesting particular animals and species that combine to create this course that now you know is a baseline. How did you use to do that before? I think it's funny, one of your research papers, you reach out to the great bird followers and bird listeners because as you said, that's the easiest way or the most prolific way for people to identify birds. So please help us in a crowdsourced way try to identify all the pieces that make this beautiful chorus that is the soundscape for a particular area. Right. Yeah, that's right. You know, it really does take a team of scientists and engineers and even folks in the social sciences and the humanities to really begin to put all of these pieces together. You know, experts in many fields are extremely valuable. That you know, they've got great ears because that's the tools that they use to go out and identify birds or insects or amphibians. What we don't have are generalists that go out and can tell you what everything sounds like. And I'll tell you that will probably never ever happen. That's just way too much. We have millions of species that exist on this planet. And we just don't have a specific catalog of what everything sounds like. It's just not possible or doable. So I need to go out and discover and bring those discoveries back that help us to understand nature and understand how the earth is changing. I can't wait for us to eventually develop that catalog. So we're trying to develop techniques and tools and approaches that allow us to develop this electronic catalog. Like you're saying, this chorus. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a species specific chorus. It'd be a chorus of all these different kinds of sounds that we think relate back to this kind of animal or that kind of animal based upon the animal's instrument produces the sound. Now again, keep it to the exascale theme, right? You're collecting a lot of data and you mentioned in one of the pieces I dug up. That your longest study in a single location is 17 years. You've got over 4 million recordings. And I think you said over 230 years if you wanted to listen to them all back to back. I mean, this is a huge, a big data problem in terms of the massive amount of data that you have and need to run through an analysis. Yeah, that's right. We're collecting 48,000 data points per second. So that's 48 kilohertz. And then so you multiply everything and then you have a sense of how many data points you actually have to put them all together. When you're listening to a sound file over 10 minutes, you have hundreds of sounds that exist in them. Oftentimes you just don't know what they are, but you can more or less put some kind of measure on all of them and then begin to summarize them over space and time and trying to understand it from a perspective of really science. Right, right. And then I just love to get your take on, as you progress down this kind of identification road, we're all very familiar with copyright infringement hits on YouTube or social media or whatever when it picks up on some sound and the technology is actually really sophisticated to pick up some of those sound signatures. But to your point, it's a lot easier to compare against the known and to search for that known then when you've got this kind of undefined chorus that said, we do know that there can be great analysis done that we've seen AI and ML applied, especially in the surveillance side on the video with video that it can actually do a lot of computation and a lot of extracting signal from the noise if you were, as you look down the road on the compute side for the algorithms that you guys are trying to build with the human input of people that know what you're listening to. What kind of opportunities do you see? And where are we on that journey where you can get more leverage out of some of these technology tools? Well, I think what we're doing right now is developing the methodological needs kind of describe what it is we need to move into that new space which is gonna require these computational that computational infrastructure. So for example, we have a study right now where we're trying to identify certain kinds of mosquitoes a vector born mosquitoes and our estimates are that we need about maybe 900 to 1200 specific recordings per species to be able to put it into something like a convolutional neural network to be able to extract out the information and look at the patterns and data to be able to say indeed, this is the species that we're interested in. So what we're gonna need in the future here is really a lot of information that allow us to kind of train these neural networks and help us identify what's in the sound files. As you can imagine the computational infrastructure needed to do that for data storage and CPU GPU is gonna be truly amazing, right? So I wanna get your take on another topic. And again, the basis of your research is really all about around the biodiversity crisis, right? That's kind of the thing that started it and now you're using sound as a way to measure baseline and talk about loss of species, reduced abundancies and rampant expansion of invasive species part of your core. But I'd love to get your take on cities and how do you think cities fit in the future? Clearly it's an efficient way to get a lot of people together. This is a huge migration of people to cities. But one of your themes in your TED Talk is reconnecting with nature because we're in cities but there's this paradox, right? Because you don't want people living in nature can be a little bit disruptive. So it's better to kind of get them all in the tip of a peninsula in San Francisco or but then do they lose that connection that's so important? I just love to get your take on cities and the impacts that they have on your core research. Yeah, I mean, it truly is a paradox as you just described it. We're living in a concrete jungle surrounded by not a lot of nature really honestly, occasional birds, bird species that tend to be fairly limited, selected for the environments. So many people just don't get out into the wild. But visiting national parks certainly is one of those kinds of experience that people oftentimes have. But I'll just say that it's getting out there and truly listening and feeling this emotional feeling, psychological feeling that wraps around you this solitude, it's just you in nature and there's just no one around. And that's when it really truly sinks in that you're a part of this place, this marvelous place called Earth. And so there are very few people that have had that experience. And so as I've gone to some of these places, I say to myself, I need to bring this back. I need to tell this story, tell the story of the awe of nature because it truly is an amazing place even if you just close your eyes and listen. And the dawn course in the morning, every place tells me so much about that place. It tells me about all the animals that exist there. The nighttime tells me so much too. As a scientist that spent most of his career kind of going out and working during the day, there's so much happening at night. Matter of fact, there's more sounds at night than there were during the day. So there is a need for us to experience nature and we don't do that. And we're not aware of these crises that are happening all over the planet. I do go to places and I listen and I can tell you, I'm listening for things that I think should be there. You can listen, you can hear the gaps, the gaps in that course. And you think what should be there and then why isn't it there? And that's where I really wanna be able to dig deep into my sound files and start to explore that more fully. That's great. I mean, I just love the whole concept of and you identified it in the moment you were in the tent that Thunderstorm came by. It's really just kind of changing your lens really. It's really twisting your lens, changing your focus because that sound is there, right? It's been there all along. Just do you tune it in or do you tune it out? Do you pay attention? Do you not pay attention as in an active process or a passive process at night? I love that perspective. I wanna shift gears a little bit because another big environmental thing and you mentioned it quite frequently is feeding the world's growing population and feeding it in an efficient way. And anytime you see kind of factory farming applied to a lot of things, you wonder, is it sustainable? And then all the issues that come from kind of single output production, whether that's pigs or coffee or whatever in this susceptibility to disease and this and that. So I wonder if you could share your thoughts on, based on your research, what needs to change to successfully and without too much disruption, feed this ever increasing population? Yeah, I mean, that's one of the grand challenges. I mean, society is facing so many at the moment. In the next 20 years or so, 30 years, we're gonna add another two billion people to the planet. How do we feed all of them? How do we feed them? Well, and equitably across the globe, I don't know how to do that, but I'll tell you that our crops and the ecosystem that supports the food production needs the animals and the trees and the microbes for the ecosystem to function. We have many of our crops that are pollinated by birds and insects and other animals. Seeds need to be dispersed. And so we need the rest of life to exist and thrive for us to thrive too. It's not an ideal, it's not them or us. It has to be all of us together on this planet working together. We have to find solutions. And again, it's me going out to some of these places and bringing it back and saying, you have to listen. You have to listen to these places. They're truly a marvelous. So I know most of your listening devices are in remote areas and not necessarily in urban areas. So I'm curious, do you have any in urban areas? And if so, how has that signature changed since COVID? I just got asked, because we went to this light switch moment in the middle of March activity, human activity, slowed down in a way that no one could have forecast ever on a single event globally, which is just fascinating. And you think of the amount of airplanes that were not flying and trains that were not moving and people not moving. Did you have any data? Have you been able to collect data or see data as the impact of that? Not only directly in wherever the sensors are, but kind of a second order impact because of the lack of pollution and the other kind of human activity that just went down. I mean, certainly with a lot of memes on social media of all the animals coming back into the city. But I'm just curious if you have any data or any observations? Yeah, we're part of actually a global study. There's a couple of hundred of us that are contributing our data to what we call the Simon Cities Project. It's being coordinated out of Europe right now. So we placed our sensors out in different areas, actually around the West Lafayette area here in Indiana, near road crossings and that sort of thing, to be able to kind of capture that information. We have had in this area here now the 17 year study. So we do have studies that get into areas that tend to be fairly urban. So we do have a lot of information. I'll tell you, I don't need my sensors to tell me something that I already know and you suspect is true. Our cities were quiet and much quieter during the COVID situation. And it's continued to kind of get a little bit louder as we've kind of released some of the policies that put us into our homes. And so, yes, there is a major change. Now, there have been a couple of studies that just come out that are pretty interesting. One, which was in San Francisco, looking at the White Crown Sparrow and they looked at historical data that went back something like 20 years. And they found that the birds in the cities were singing much softer, 30% softer. Yeah, and they would lower their frequency. So the way sound works is that if you lower your frequencies, that sound can travel farther. And so the males can now hear themselves twice as far just due to the fact that our cities are quieter. So it does have an impact on animals. Truly it does. There was some studies back in 2001 during September, the 9-11 crisis as well, where people were going out and kind of looking at data, acoustic data and discovering that things were much quieter. I'd be very interested to look at some of the data we have in our oceans. To what extent are oceans quieter? Our oceans sadly are the loudest part of this planet. It's really noisy. Sound travels five times farther. Generally the noise is lower frequencies and we have lots of ships that are all over the planet in our oceans. So I'd really be interested in those kinds of studies as well. To what extent is it impacting and helping our friends in the oceans? Right, right. Well, I was just gonna ask you that question because I think a lot of people clearly understand sound in the air that surrounds us but you talk a lot about sound in ocean and sound is an indicator of ocean health and again, this concept of a chorus. Now I think everybody's probably familiar with the sounds of the humpback whale, right? It got very popular and we've all seen and heard that but you're doing a lot of research as you said in oceans and in water. And I wonder if you can again kind of provide a little bit more color around that because I don't think people, maybe we're just not that tuned into it, think of the ocean or water as a rich sound environment especially to the degree as you're talking about where you can actually start to really understand what's going on. Yeah, I mean, some of us think that sound in the oceans is probably more important to animals than on land on the trust real side. Sound helps animals to navigate through complex waterways and find food resources. You can only use sight so far under water especially when it gets to be kind of dark once you get down to certain levels. So there, many of us think that sound is probably going to be an important component to measuring the status of health in our oceans. That's great. Well, Brian, I really enjoyed this conversation. I really enjoyed your TED Talk and now I've got a bunch of research papers I wanna dig into a little bit more as well. It's a fascinating topic but I think the most important thing that you talked about extensively in your TED Talk and I just taken a minute to take a step back from the individual perspective, appreciate what's around us here, that information and I think there's a real direct correlation to the power of Exascale, to the power of hearing this data, processing this data, putting intelligence on that data, understanding that data in a good way, in a positive way, in an enlightful way, a spiritual way even that we couldn't do before we just weren't paying attention. I'm like, lift your nose out of your phone, please. It's all around you, it's been here the whole time. Yeah, Jeff, I really encourage your viewers to come and just go out and listen. As we say, go out and listen and join the mission. I love it. And you can get started by going to the Center for Global Soundscapes and you have a beautiful landscape. I had it going earlier this morning while I was digging through some of the research. Brian, thank you very much and I really enjoyed the conversation and the best to you and your team and your continued success. All right, thank you. All right, thank you. All right, he's Brian. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE for Continuing Coverage of Exascale Day. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.