 Happy Friday and welcome to day two of X-Prize Rainforest Summit. Yesterday was absolutely fantastic and has generated a lot of excitement. We have new teams that have registered, which is fantastic. We're really thrilled about that. Thank you again to all of our phenomenal speakers throughout the day yesterday. And again, I want to start today by thanking our sponsor organization, the Alana Foundation, who has made all of this possible. We have another great lineup of speakers and events today, including more of the world's leading experts and voices on all subject matters related to X-Prize Rainforest Competition. After our opening plenary coming up, we'll be hearing from X-Prize Rainforest Competition teams past and present, hearing about the benefits of competing. And this afternoon, we will also engage in panel discussions on Indigenous Peoples and local communities, governance, business, and NGOs. It's a full day, diving deeper into many of the topics that we touched on yesterday. And I'm very excited to get started with our first speaker. Jonathan Bailey is co-founder of Natural State, an organization that leverages technology to design, implement, and monitor large-scale natural restoration initiatives. Bailey was previously Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist at the National Geographic Society, where he oversaw grants, impact initiatives, National Geographic Labs, Explorer programs, and the international team. Bailey initiated partnerships together, raising over $95 million for groundbreaking collaborations across regions and sectors to conserve and monitor the natural world. He was also Vice Chair of the Society's Committee for Research and Exploration, previous to National Geographic Society. Jonathan also served as Director of Conservation Programs at the Zoological Society of London, where he built up and led a portfolio of projects on threatened species and their habitats in over 50 countries. Known for embracing technology, innovation, and collaboration, Bailey founded the Edge of Existence Program to conserve evolutionarily distinct and globally endangered species, co-developed a retail activism initiative with self-reduce and over 40 conservation NGOs to support sustainable fisheries and launched the first AI-driven camera traps for anti-poaching. So with that, Jonathan, it's great to see you again. We're really looking forward to hearing from you. I think you are the perfect person to set the stage for today and touching on all of these different topics. So thank you again for your time and greetings to you in Kenya. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. And it's great to be with so many people that are going to collectively transform our understanding of the natural world, in particular rainforests. In this opening session, I just wanted to cover really our understanding of biodiversity, where it's been in the beginning of my career, where it is now and really the opportunity for the future, particularly with the XPRIZE. So when I started my career, my first big opportunity was to go and work at IUCN. And the job was to essentially assess the conservation status of all known threatened species. And before that time, when you were to assess a species, it was basically up to the expert to say, well, I believe this species is threatened, or I believe that it's rare and that got listed as threatened or rare. But the work of Georgina Mace and a team that came together, they developed a quantitative criteria for assessing extinction risk. And so basically it was possible to go back to all those species and really objectively assess their conservation status. So we did all known threatened species that had ever been assessed. And then we did all known mammals. And so for the first time, we discovered that 25% of the world's mammals were threatened with extinction. And this was 1996. And so just, I mean, for some of you who are listening to this, it's kind of probably hard to believe that in 1996, we didn't even know the status of all mammals. It was sort of the first time. But then we have to realize that that's 1% or much less than 1% of the world's biodiversity. So we really knew nothing about the status of our planet. And so from there, we thought, okay, well, how do we go on and assess the conservation status of all the world's taxonomic groups, because this is such a puny part of the diversity of life. And we developed approach called the sampled approach, which allowed us to take relatively complete taxonomic groups and assess 1500 species from each and get a sense of their conservation status. And we did it for things like dragonflies and butterflies and mollusks and cephalopods. And we worked with Q and we did all plants. And what we found was that there was great variation between groups as there is in vertebrates, with often the more mobile species being less threatened. But overall, about 20% of the world's no one taxonomic groups were threatened with extinction. And that's pretty shocking, you know, if you walk through the forest, for example, that's one in five species that you see that would be threatened with extinction. And what we found is that not all systems were equal. So a rainforest, for example, would have a higher extinction rate than many other systems. But that's conservation status. And so there were probably about 1999, and we're just understanding the status of a broad range of taxonomic groups. But what about the trends? And so there we thought, well, let's just get the population time series data and look at trends of all these different species. But the reality is you can't do that for most taxonomic groups. We only have that data for vertebrates. So we started collecting the data for vertebrates and we worked with a guy named Jonathan Lowe who was working at the World Conservation Monitoring Center. And he came to Zeta Salon. We built out a group that was run by a guy named Ben Collin who was a complete genius in this space and pulled together all the world's population time series data sets. And in doing that, we discovered that there was a pretty significant decline of the world's vertebrates from 1970 to the present. And the most recent report, I believe, came out at about 68% decline since 1970. That's sort of my career. And that's a significant loss of the world's biodiversity. And the fact that we didn't know that before or even understand the trends is shocking in itself. But then when you look at things like the Red List or you look at the Living Planet Index, you realize those are not really real time or near real time. In fact, they're usually about five years out of date. And the reason for that is that if you're doing a conservation assessment, you have to bring together all the literature and you have to talk to the relevant experts. And so by time, you actually assess a species. It's already a little bit out of date. And then they often sit on the Red List for a number of years. And so if you're looking at the status of a species, it could be 10 years out of date. And then with the Living Planet Index with population time series, that's based on population time series in the literature. And so all of you who publish know that it takes quite a long time to get your work out. And so by the time it hits the index, again, you're not really real time. And so we became more and more concerned about this. And with a guy named Tim O'Brien and a number of others, we held a big symposium and we tried to explore the extent to which we could use camera traps to try and look at more real time monitoring. And we developed the Wildlife Picture Index at the time, which was looking at relative abundance using grids of camera traps and so on. And that methodology has been further refined and so on since that time. And we wanted to also take it a step further. So we developed some of the first kind of AI driven camera traps. It was called Instant Detect, the first one. There's this big chunky camera trap and didn't work very well. But it did, was able to detect the difference between an animal and a human and so on. And then we also developed other systems also to try and engage the public. And Instant Wild is an example of one where we had these camera traps that would take an image and that image would be immediately uploaded and a global community had an app that they could go through and they would help identify those species. So if everybody basically said, oh, that's a white-tailed mongoose, then it would be kind of in the white-tailed mongoose pile. But if there was great disagreement, then it went into a different pile and the experts could actually look at it. But it was a great way to help the global community sort data when AI wasn't really performing to the standard that it does today. But what that made us realize is there was great potential in technology revolutionizing the way that we understand the natural world. And at that time I met the individual who did the opening plenary yesterday, Lucas Joppa. And we with John Robinson worked on a book together called Protected Areas, Are They Safeguarding Biodiversity? And in that we did a big chapter on the rule of technology and how it's going to transform the field of conservation, not only in terms of understanding the status of what's in the protected area, but also in how we manage those protected areas. And at the time many of the kind of recommendations we were making and so on weren't really quite possible. But some of them were really delivered on and more than delivered on. For example, Earth Ranger is a system that was developed by Vulcan and implemented here where I'm sitting right now, which is in Lewa in Kenya. And now it's being implemented in protected areas across Africa. And that not only helps with understanding the threats to a protected area, but is increasingly looking at the biodiversity and how that biodiversity is changing through time. After I was at the Zoological Society of London, I had the opportunity to go to National Geographic. And there I was able to sort of pick up the game in terms of trying to explore this role of technology and monitoring. And there we developed a system called Earth Pulse, which was really trying to help us understand how the world's ecosystems were changing through time. So when we already had Global Forest Watch, which told us about forests and how they are shifting through time, but with the world's other ecosystems, it's been less clear. So working with WRI and Google and so on, we developed this technology which is getting better and better at basically using AI to see how the world is changing through time using satellite data. And this will be used by the UN to help measure some of the indicators for the post-2020 framework of the Convention on Biodiversity and so on. But then we also invested in our labs and in grants. We did an AI grant with Microsoft around biodiversity and AI to try and trigger work in that area. We give out citizen science grants. We give out conservation technology grants. And what was really clear to me is that there's so much potential in this area, but we're still relatively early on in terms of having them have that great impact in the conservation sector. One of the cool technology projects we had going on going, and again it was kind of in its embassy as well, was the a canopy drone. And it's a spatially aware drone that can fly through a forest. And the idea is it would take a 360 image and then you'd be able to use AI to look at the plants and animals and how they're changing through time. But that's again early stages and hopefully by the time the competition comes along, that drone will be flying around changing our understanding of forests. But what's clear now is that we're kind of past that early stage, that stage of promise. And we're in an era now where AI has evolved so rapidly even over the past year. And satellite data is getting better and better. You've got the scanning data, the thermal data and so on. You've got DNA in real time. You've got miniaturization of technology. Big data can now be analyzed much more easily. And there's a greater respect for traditional knowledge and understanding of its great contribution to understanding biodiversity and change through time. So all those variables combined kind of make this the perfect opportunity to have the XPRIZE 4 rain for us. And I think the structure that's been set up by bringing together diverse teams to problem solve in a whole range of different systems is an amazing way to basically crack this. But I think in addition to understanding what's in the forest, there's an opportunity to use that technology to essentially manage those forest systems. So by contributing to this prize, you're not only kind of illuminating or introducing the world to what really exists in these forests and how they're changing, but also how to understand where they are and how they're changing through time and what interventions might work and what interventions aren't working. And that leads to a third point of how the technology is really beneficial and that's around markets. And I'll spend a little bit of time just talking about the opportunity here. When we were at National Geographic, we launched a campaign, it's the 30 by 30 campaign, which is currently we're at about 15% of the terrestrial world is protected. And the idea is that we need to get to 30% by 2030 and ultimately closer to 50%. But the real question is, how do we achieve that? And there's government funding, there's philanthropic funding, and that's going to get us so far. But in my view, there's no way we're going to get to 30% unless we have private sector funding as well. And it's really interesting because over the last 18 months, there's been this massive surge of announcements. You've had announcements from organizations like Amazon or Apple or Microsoft or Unilever. Basically any organization that cares about its reputation has been making announcements about reducing carbon emissions or being even carbon neutral or carbon negative. And many of them have had nature based solutions as part of their kind of straplines and saying that they're they're interested not just in carbon, but in biodiversity and in development as well. So there's billions and billions and billions of dollars, which have the potential to go into nature conservation globally. And it's greatly needed, but we're not seeing it. We're not seeing it actually get there. And, you know, people can have many cynical reasons as to why that may be the case. But I think part of the simple explanation is that that we don't really have a way of measuring success or failure of a lot of these projects that the money's meant to go into. I was involved in a a red reducing deforestation project when I was at the Zoological Society of London. And it was really painful just to set up the project in terms of the bureaucracy and then and the monitoring. We spent 20 or 30 to 40 percent of our budget on just monitoring the area. It was laborious and it was time consuming. And it wasn't wasn't terribly accurate. And I know how tough work this really is because I'm actually doing it right now here at LAWA. We're we're designing a carbon project here, which integrates biodiversity and development. But to train AI models and so on, we're going and doing the diameter of breast height select the traditional measurements. And we're actually doing it the higher resolution than you would normally see you actually know, with great accuracy, the the carbon value of the forests. And so in there, we go and we take a measuring tape and we put it around a tree and do the diameter of breast height thing and measure everything around us amongst the the elephants rhinos and lions and so on. But the the reality is that if we don't improve the the monitoring systems, there's no way that companies are going to put the money in if they can't measure success or failure. And the amazing thing about a lot of these projects is they're only measuring success every five years. And who would put their money into anything that only really delivered on on a five year cycle, you know, told you whether you're successful or failure in that in that five year time period. Many might argue that, you know, the private sector is going to drive the carbon side and that will be done from space very shortly in an easy way. And you don't even have to do the ground truth thing. The biodiversity, there's no real kind of market incentive right now to sort of jump into that space. In addition, the development is less likely to be monitored as well. So I think the reality is is that biodiversity will just be forgotten in this opportunity if the technology isn't developed to easily to easily monitor it. And, you know, with this prize, there's that perfect opportunity to to develop that technology further to integrate it into these market systems so that companies can actually determine the success or failure of their of their investments. But in addition to that, it will really help in a way that allows us to understand the allows us to understand the impact that companies are having on on the rainforest systems as a whole. So traditionally, we haven't been able to assess the extent to which companies working in rainforest environments, the impact they've been having right now, with this technology you're developing, you could make it completely transparent, they could be held accountable. So massive, exciting developments in that in that space that I think many of you will be involved in. I just want to do make a comment on sort of the team structure. And so I know a lot of your teams are already in and you've had new registries just over this past day. But if I look at the technology projects I've been involved with over the years, it's absolutely critical that there's a diversity of representatives on the team and the more different they are from myself, the kind of more successful the project is often and you obviously need your ecologists, you need your biologists, you need your technologists and so on. But you also need your people who understand sort of the business world and local knowledge and particularly communication. And when I say communication, I know that storytelling isn't necessarily going to win you this XPrize award, but often the way you collect data or rather the data itself is like a tenth of the story. And the way you communicate that data is extremely important. And I feel there's an opportunity not only in developing this technology for the monitoring world, but also much of it is relevant to think about how we bring these worlds that nobody ever sees to the public so that they care more about it. Because you're not going to care about a system that you don't really understand and can't see. So how do we use these advances to not only just generate data, but to develop it and present it in a beautiful way that people feel connected to these systems. I would also say that in addition to having sort of a diverse team, you obviously want people that are kind of obsessed with biodiversity monitoring, which clearly I am, but you want sort of a value driven team that's doing it because they care about the conservation outcomes that will sort of keep the team together. But in the end, I think also that team has to be committed to not just being theoretical throughout the process and then trying to come through with something that's going to work at the end, but I would hit the field early and test your various approaches. And don't forget the importance of the local communities you're working with and the added value that they can bring to the projects. Because you'll probably learn more there from anywhere else. So I guess this is just an amazing point in history where we were moving from a place where we knew nothing really at the beginning of my career in terms of the status of the world's biodiversity to a point where we can just have great, great insight in a very short time. And you can, through this process, you're going to transform our view of the rainforest. You're going to transform the way that we manage these systems, but you also might help trigger the financing mechanisms that allow rainforests and protected areas globally to be sustained over the long term. So I congratulate all of you who are engaging in this process and I encourage anyone who's sort of listening, who's thinking about getting involved to throw a team together and actually make a massive difference. And I guess now that I just open it up to questions. Thank you so much, Jonathan, for all that you're doing in this space. Certainly a great way to touch on all the different aspects of X-Prize Rainforest and get our teams thinking. Today we really wanted them to be thinking about how to approach this more. And what do they need to include in both in terms of their team composition and their approaches to this? So certainly if people have questions in the audience for Jonathan, please feel free to add them in the Q&A function. One of the questions that I have for you is where do you really think technology and increased survey speeds, what would you be surprised about or excited to see that could really aid the work that you're doing? What kinds of technologies coming out of this do you hope to see? There's a few that have been really hard to crack over the years and for a long time people have been looking at acoustic data. And I think it's potentially really powerful because there's low cost acoustic systems and AI now exists to be able to basically help analyze that data. And you could have these little tiny devices that are giving you just amazing amounts of information. So I think in the acoustic sphere you're going to see massive transformation on the other area that I think is really exciting is the scanning technology. I think it's going to be a while before we can do a lot from just the satellite data. But I think the higher resolution scans using drones or fixed-wing aircrafts combined with AI is just going to be totally transformative. The early assessments of for example elephant data using AI is finding that you're actually getting many more elephants identified just using a model than the human eye which could transform some of the results we have from our biodiversity monitoring. So I think that's another area where there's going to be massive changes. And of course on the smaller camera trap size area the miniaturization of these devices and their multiple function between being able to take images and sound is happening right now and that's kind of a really exciting area as well. The an area I haven't been following as much is the kind of the real-time DNA work. But I think that that's such, you know, taking a drop of water and being able to obviously you have to know the species. It's hard to find new species when you don't have the DNA signature for them. But for those that you do it's an amazing way to to basically look at entire system and see what's there. So those are the sort of some of the key areas that I would say are going to be really really exciting and transformative. If we can get that canopy drone going which I talked about as well which is spatially aware flying through the forest. A bit of a pipe dream for somebody's thicker forest but I think the big challenge obviously with forest is getting through that canopy and I think we'll see some technology that's able to more easily get through the canopy and get thermal signatures and that type of thing which would be transformative in the forest system. Absolutely. I think that obstacle avoidance with drones is is getting there. It's still I was out the other day messing around a little bit but I think there there will certainly be advancements in that realm but also as a canopy biologist myself I think the ways in which we can further study that layer of the forest which harbors such a significant part of biodiversity and tropical rainforest will be really helpful. I see that I saw a little bit of insect diversity flying around you right there and I was thinking that scaling the technology from this competition also one of the exciting aspects is that if technology is developed for tropical rainforest can function in the demanding environments that they are we certainly hope that those will be scalable to other environments as well perhaps less harsh on technology in terms of moisture humidity heat things like that so yeah hopefully we can deploy some in your own backyard there more savanna and woodland ecosystems. For sure and I was I was making the comment like it's really important to get out of the lab at the end of the field as soon as possible with this technology because you know I think back to when we were developing the the instant detect camera traps which had kind of the first AI recognition systems and we had these cables that came out of them that went down to the to the battery and when we went to implement in the field it wasn't wasn't long before the termites had sort of worked through them and you know and we took months and months sort of designing this in the UK so yeah it's and I also think that it's it's important to try and base yourself in the location where you're going to actually use the technology and don't do like a parachute in test and I don't think you'll be successful that way you have to be in the location and adapting and and developing and I didn't really mention the invertebrate side but you know it is shocking we we still don't know the status of the world's sorry invertebrates you know and living planet index gives us a rough estimate of what's happening to some of the vertebrates but the the data that we do have shows these massive declines that if proven on a broader scale it's just unbelievably shocking and these are not just happening in areas where you have tons of pesticides being used they're happening in kind of rainforests that are that are untouched so I I'd love to see that you know one massive thing coming out of this is what's happening to our entire invertebrate world much of that invertebrate diversity obviously is found in the rainforest and that's such a missing key to the puzzle that we still don't you know have a good handle on yeah and I think there's a whole cascading effect beyond that of how ecosystems collapse beyond the loss of invertebrates and it sounds like you have quite a healthy invertebrate ecosystem in your backyard but that is such an indicator of of these communities and when those systems go silent it it has such a devastating effect down the line so yeah do you have any closing remarks or recommendations I think one thing that you can also speak to always is best practices and strategies for scaling novel technologies when people develop things for new purposes but then making sure that they're not just one off that they can actually you know scale beyond that and have broader global impact to transform the way that we approach conservation yeah I guess on just on the invertebrate side we have the locus passing through here now and that's completely transforming the local ecosystem it's I've never seen anything like it and it does make you realize though that you know we are looking at all these systems at a blip in time and this longer term constant monitoring through different seasons and through years this really is really important because fruiting events or you know locus or whatever can completely transform these systems we're working my biggest thing would be is you know when I think about any of these products we've developed to to really make sure if you're especially if you're a group of biologists ecologists is to get a business product design person involved early on that forces you to think about you know like not only your system for developing and designing the product but then what's the end use and then what sort of next steps in terms of packaging and and and taking it to a taking it to a bigger scale and make sure you go out and you you know you talk to people who have actually developed projects and and develop the technology and taken it to scale because there's all sorts of connections and and things that you're not even going to be thinking about absolutely so that that's that's like one of the community person or people and the business people and I would argue for your storyteller in there as well our you know critical teammates absolutely and we had some great sessions on that yesterday and more later today but Jonathan thank you so much I think you set the stage perfectly for what we have ahead especially the business aspects and and all of these different components to consider so I'll definitely be following more of your posts from the the locus in the backyard and chatting more about you know strategically figuring out different aspects of this along the way so thank you so much Jonathan and look forward to chatting more soon great thank you and good luck to everyone who's who's competing over that over over the lifestyle cycle of the project it's an amazing initiative all right take it you too all right well with that today we're going to dive into a lot of these topics that Jonathan just touched on and and more and and really engage with more of our ecosystem affiliated with this competition to start we really thought it would be great for teams interested in competing in X-Prize Rainforest to hear from some of our X-Prize competition teams past and present this is all part of our X-Prize alumni network and to speak to more of that I'm going to bring in one of my X-Prize colleagues Dan Sells our senior impact manager at X-Prize right welcome welcome to X-Prize Rainforest Summit thanks great to be here this is an incredible thing thanks Jonathan all of our speakers very very engaging stuff so I don't want to take up too much time as Peter said I'm a senior impact manager here at X-Prize which means I wear a couple different hats which I'll speak about today and one of them as Peter said I get to manage our X-Prize alumni network which is a really exciting and incredible opportunity I think we have we just launched this about a year ago and it's really you know we've been around now for for over 25 years as an organization we've run I believe it's up to 24 prizes across you know literally air lands the ocean so many different domains and there's so many incredible teams we've had the opportunity to work with how can we basically stay in touch as and as one of our alumni likes to say like how do we keep the party going even after a prize so we have a couple of alumni teams joining us today that'll that'll talk a little bit about what it means to to be an X-Prize but just for the folks that are that are listening in and thinking you know oh man should I do this prize should I not I've got so much going on you know is it you know okay sure maybe I have a chance to win the prize first but you know we would encourage you to think about it as more than that right I think signing up registering to compete as a team means that you know we we hope to make a commitment to you for life to to be there for you to help you scale during and after the prize to you know facilitate all kinds of amazing connections and resources and opportunities and just be your advocates for a long long time to come so we're really excited to do that I get to say I think I have the best job in the world sorry Peter but it's uh it's a it's a huge honor and an opportunity to work with our alumni so with that let me shut up and bring a couple of our alumni to the stage I think first up we are going to have Kafeer Damari and I apologize if I've totally butchered that but Kafeer was the co-founder of the Moonshot award-winning team SpaceIL from the Google Lunar X-Prize and he's going to share a little bit about what his journey was like and what it what it means to be a team of the next prize so Kafeer thanks so much for joining us today and the stage is yours my friend thank you so it's an honor to be here and we are going to talk now in the next few minutes about the story that we had with the X-Prize and about our little spacecraft and I will tell you that the story for us basically started with of course the Google Lunar X-Prize competition and for me it actually started when a friend of mine called Yeriv wrote on his Facebook wall that he want to open the Israeli team competing in the Google Lunar X-Prize and he asked who want to join and I answered in Hebrew if you're serious I'm in and this is basically how the story of SpaceIL and the story of Bereshit started and I like to joke about it you know three engineers sitting in a bar this is exactly what happened and we started in that meeting in the end of 2010 to design our spacecraft to design what are we actually going to do to make this to make this happen for those who don't know to win the Google Lunar X-Prize we had to build a spacecraft lend it on the moon move it 500 meters transmit images and videos back to earth and that's it and the prize was 20 million dollars and with a small catch it must be up to 10 percent governmental funding so we just started to design our spacecraft these were the initial designs that we had those two pages we designed a really small spacecraft in a size of a battle that will cost 8 million dollars and will launch it in two years and it will be really really small now what happened through the years and that is that we realize it's not possible and you know we started to do the to do the engineering and the smallest fuel tank we're able to find was bigger and heavier from the whole design and of course we didn't launch it in 2012 it took us much much more time just to get to a design that can actually work instead of a five kilo spacecraft we got a 585 kilo spacecraft basically a hundred times more from the initial design and I think that was one of the first challenges but we had sorry we had so many challenges through the years and you know planning this spacecraft is one of them but raising a hundred million dollar which was the final budget for the project also wasn't easy mainly because we didn't know it's also a hundred million dollar we believe it will be eight and then it became bigger and bigger and bigger but also even when we got to the point that we had a working spacecraft just navigating to the moon and capturing the moon and then the landing that we'll talk about it in a second a lot of challenges that happen through those years and also the the last challenge that we like to call it the very sheet effect and it's to make sure that this moment will also have a big impact all around the world but mainly also in our country and during the landing process after receiving this amazing picture and that you can see here and the picture and you can see also the x-prise logo and the button right in case you've missed it and after this picture there are actually a few malfunctions and eventually we reached the moon but we reached in speed that was one kilometer per second much higher than anything we expected so we hard landed instead of soft landing and these are the images that NASA took a few days after and you can see also from those pictures that we definitely made an impact on the moon and so that's one thing but I will say that although not everything worked as expected in the end and also during the process you know we we managed to become the first private organization in the world that reached the moon we've made Israel the seventh country in the world to do so and the fourth country to try to land and we also managed to inspire millions of kids and the the number is two million kids half of them in Israel half of them abroad mainly in the US that got inspired to go and study science and to go and follow their dreams and here I want to say a lot of thank you to the x-prise that beside just deciding to give us a moonshot award although the competition officially ended in 2018 and we reached the moon only in 2019 and we got the the award and the prize but I think that the the x-prise role here was really important besides just getting us to the point that we start we open sorry the the team I think that the what what the x-prise gave us it's gave us a focus you know now we're looking on a new mission that I will say a few words in a second but everything is open I think that the focus that came from the the x-prise and you know the competition that allowed us to actually see what's happening in other places that allow us to understand what do we need really need to go was crucial in order to actually allow us to get to the point and to to get to the moon and I will say a few last words first of all and this is you know one of the my my key points for you is it started with the three of us but I think that there is no challenge that can end with three engineers and I think that here we have to say a lot of thank you to all the engineers that were with us I think the only way to overcome big challenges and like the Google on our x-prise and any other competition is to create a winning team these are the engineers but we also had for some to do you can see their faces because they're working the Israeli aerospace industries but we also had volunteers and we had our donors and we had the supporters and we had everyone who joined in to allow us to get to the point that we have a working spacecraft and you know when we're talking about this mission we like to to remind ourselves but everyone that it's not just about engineering the only way to overcome big challenges is through creativity and resilience and teamwork and dreaming and passion and devotion and I think that those things are similar to any prize and also to the to the competition that you're going now to to try to compete in and and the thing that is written here twice is overcoming many obstacles because things will not work as expected but I'll jump to that in a second but I think that if you remember that you know it's not enough to have a mission and you need to have a vision I think what the x-prise also gave us is it allows us to realize that what we're really trying to do is to change the world change the way the world works and I think that's something that we learn through the process that we are not competing with anyone else but ourselves you know in the first few years we are thinking about what will happen if they will launch it and then we realize we will do our best work we'll do it as fast as we can and we're just competing with ourselves and to create the best result and with that I will say don't wait just you know push hard don't think about what do we need to happen just do whatever you can to move as to move forward as fast as you can as as further as you can and of course enjoy the process and you know it's going to be a long journey and I think that we've learned so many things about that this was actually our first startup and you know today we have the opportunity to also uh launch our new spacecraft the very sheet 2 that we just announced so this story even doesn't end with the with the very sheet one mission it actually goes now to to a new mission and we're hoping to get to the moon in another four years and now to have two successful landing and also an educational mission that will be international and hopefully there will be many kids that will be able to enjoy it all over the world so that's like summarizes the story of space a really really quickly and I want to wish all of you and a lot of success in in your new journey amazing thank you so much clear what an incredible story thanks so much for for making the time while you're busy trying to get back to the moon so best of luck with that mission and and so much what he said I think we hear over and over next prize right you know you can be just a group of students with a crazy idea and become a hugely successful team of engineers raising a hundred million dollars so thanks again for sharing that inspirational story and I think we're going to bring our next alumni team to the stage now so if I can welcome David Hertz to the stage now so David Hertz is the CEO of the grand prize winning team Sky Source from the Water Abundance X Prize David thank you so much for joining us today and looking forward to hear what your journey was like great thanks for being here it's a it's an honor to to be with all of you guys as you embark upon your your own X Prize journey I'm going to share my screen here and talk a little bit about about our journey it was quite amazing I'm an architect by profession so I just began to be fascinated by water and the Water Abundance X Prize which we competed in was a global challenge to address this water scarcity you know if you think about the scarcity model less than one percent of water on the planet is fresh but if you think about the abundance model there's six times more water in vapor form in the air than all the rivers so it's really an interesting mindset to extract 2,000 liters of water from air in 24 hours had to be done at two cents per liter and had to have a hundred percent renewable energy it was a two-year arc on the on the prize there were about a hundred teams from 27 countries and what was interesting for us is that we were actually not admitted to the second round of the prize and although we were disappointed you know we we thought well you know this is kind of amazing because we really felt that we had some technology and some experience in this emergent world of atmosphere of water generation but we said well there's obviously some people that that have something that is perhaps better than ours the competition continued for about three months there was a an award a monetary award given and then we were invited back in when some of the finalists could not make the next challenge and that was a big decision because there wasn't really a level playing field we like to say you know we were the dark horse in the race but in fact we weren't even in the race so we kind of used this stealth advantage to come back from behind and enter the race well in progress clearly not a kind of equitable race because we were several months behind we didn't have time to really raise funding and after 37 years as an architect I'd finally owned a piece of property without a mortgage I mortgaged our property for 1.5 million dollars and used that money to build a a series of machines together and fortunately we won it was it was really laying it all on the line in a short period of time sometimes these sprints become even easier to do than a long haul and in some sense we kind of were given an opportunity to sprint I put together a a band of unlikely characters that were from Burning Man and kind of Stanford Berkeley kind of dropouts in Berkeley California we competed against somebody from Hawaii we made more water we made 2200 liters at 0.25 cents a liter and what it's given us is a wonderful opportunity to continue to speak and have an audience I mean having the your kind of reputation proceed you with the prestige of of an XPRIZE winner opens a lot of doors because you know this is a very objective process not really a subjective process and if you win an XPRIZE you know that you've gone through and really a global challenge that has a tremendous scrutiny and it gives access to wonderful things we participated in visioneering and have won some other awards subsequent to that including this best inventions of 2020 for our our we do but it's you know it's really not about the awards it's about how are we going to solve these global challenges especially of water and our devices we do has a steady state of self-reliance climate resilience and swarms for emergency response how we're going to address a shortage of water energy and food is is obviously critical as we face this this kind of threat multiplier and competition for resources shortly after the XPRIZE within a couple weeks we actually containerized the we do device brought it to the Oakland convention center and provided a micro grid for power for the convention and water we also were able to bring a small water pod to paramount studios for the visioneering conference last year that opened up as a water kiosk and we currently have a larger unit functioning in Malibu under a California energy commission grant where we're providing energy out of biomass on small scale sequestering atmospheric carbon making water refrigeration and and heat and through that process we're we're learning a lot about the machines we touch a lot of these sustainable development goals and you know it's really about impact and I think that's what the XPRIZE does that with these audacious but achievable challenges and we really look at the impact that that one we do would have over eight million five hundred thousand people providing water and energy and offsetting carbon as being one of the real benefits and I would just stop my share and just just say that you know it as Dan was saying it really is more than than just winning the prize it's it's it's the beginning once you once you win the prize it's really the beginning the inspiration of the prize is one thing the implementation is certainly the challenge and we've been working very closely with the XPRIZE on the implementation and and I would say that it feels really like a family you're part part of the family the continuum of the alumni the opportunity to participate with other alumnus that are all amazing in their fields and in areas of study and to to feel like we're giving tremendous impact is is really quite wonderful so I obviously everything that the the XPRIZE does all these challenges that we need in the world so badly are so critical it's a huge lift you have to have you know tremendous perseverance I I'd say I still have a little post-traumatic stress over the 72 hour continuous testing that was required lack of sleep I would say it's probably single hardly the you know most difficult thing that I've done from a kind of an emotional financial physical intellectual and and kind of mental process and that's wonderful you know that's what these challenges are all about is pushing yourselves and pushing the technology to make maximum impact so happy to to end it there and and if there's any questions or anything happy to discuss that at some point thank you amazing thank you so much thank you both for sharing your stories and experiences from space i l and sky source and in competing in previous XPRIZE competitions speaking of alumni teams we're actually now joined by two teams that are already registered for XPRIZE rainforests and who both happen to be involved and compete in previous XPRIZE competitions and so first of all we have Danny Kim from rainforest quest collaborative team of high schools led by the leaders of the ocean discovery NOAA bonus prize winners so Danny looking forward to hearing from you thank you very much just love hearing the other stories one of the great things about XPRIZE is its ability to inspire and to be honest although we're a previous winner we actually entered into the rainforest XPRIZE the ocean discovery XPRIZE is about four years ago and this is a picture of our team they actually stayed in the XPRIZE for the duration the three four years and long story show we actually won the bonus prize the million dollar NOAA bonus prize which actually made us the youngest team actually i think we're the only high school team ever to win an XPRIZE which is which is interesting because we entered the prize without any expectation of winning and what it did was it in the end it inspired the kids to really break that glass ceiling and know that nothing is impossible one of the things that the experience from the win has actually spurred on so much interest in the schools that that we interface with we've actually entered two additional XPRIZE as a result we just did a semi-final submission for the avatar XPRIZE and then we we actually did a entered into the rainforest XPRIZE I think we were the one of the first teams to enter the rainforest XPRIZE and what's interesting is as soon as we entered the XPRIZE the pandemic happened and you know because we were made up of high school kids all schools were closed so they couldn't meet and so one of of our experiences have been it was is adopting a technology platform that allowed us to not only do zoom meetings but we are using Microsoft teams to do all the communications so these kids in the pandemic while they're at home had a goal and a purpose to achieve and they've been actually interacting and meeting online discussing their times and we have a question that's asked by one of the participants and I get 200 replies within an hour so this has been a lifesaver just for the students to be involved in such a goal set oriented thing to keep them engaged at the level that's way beyond what the online school has provided for them and then when the schools just started opening up recently we had kids coming in and starting to implement a lot of the things that they have been designing and and envisioning over the last five six months collaborating for the first time and and actually dreaming again what's nice about the rainforest XPRIZE if you haven't signed up already is is this is one of our more most popular XPRIZE we've ever entered because of the diversity of skill sets that it requires the it's not just the engineering teams we usually get the robotics teams and then actually we had drone kits that are interested in drones signing up but now because of the need to do biodiversity and biorecognition and what that we have biology kits we have agriculture kits we actually have students that are in music music theory because a lot of the data analysis and gathering that they have interested and they wanted to be able to use that as well so that's one of the great things about XPRIZE as the other participants spoke about is not only is it a great way to inspire and get a goal and set in mind but it's it's a it's such a recognition for the kids and for the participants whether you win or not it's a great way to learn and inspire and set a goal towards learning so I would encourage those who are maybe on the fence you know join in because it's not about the win it's about the journey and and the kids that have participated in XPRIZE's even even the ones that with the prospect of not winning this Mr. Kim we would love to just continue no matter what happens and so again to them it's not just the competition it's about the process and I would really recommend that. Thank you so much it's a great testament to from both past and present and we're really looking forward to your team competing and working with you and seeing where your development goes in the time ahead. Next we have Professor Stuart Pym and Martin Brooke from Duke Blue Devils team from Duke University's Nichols School of the Environment. Stuart and Martin welcome to you. Thank you we're going to duet I'm doing the first couple of minutes and Martin's doing the second so I'm Stuart Pym I hold the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation at Duke University I'm a conservation biologist what I do is to look at how fast rainforest shrinking, how fast species are going extinct a thousand times faster than they should and lead a team of people that does a lot of rainforest restoration. What we can expect to get out of this rainforest price effort is to inspire people about how extraordinarily diverse and interesting rainforests are particularly the canopies the canopies are extra on really difficult places to reach. What we know about species in rainforests is that two-thirds of all known species are there and we have not a clue about how many species are really out there almost certainly most of them are unknown when we find them it's likely that those species will be described only by a barcode because we may never be able to put a proper name to them. So the challenge for us is you know if we can get there can we identify them I'm confident that with techniques like I naturalist which was conceived in my lab on the whole variety of other AI and technologies we can we can do some wonderful things to discover new species there. Do I fly drones into rainforests yes do I fly them into the canopy yes do I do that consistently hell no and that's Martin's job Martin's job over to you Martin you're on mute mate. There we go now I'm unmuted thanks Stuart. It's been great to see some of these other teams. Danny I tell people about your team all the time and the same thing with David and Kofir that those the exploits of your teams that's one of the ways I inspire students to stay get involved in the XPRIZE tell people what it's about what's going on and that winning is not the goal winning is not why I compete I mean Stuart keeps telling me we're gonna win but I I'm in it for a lot more reasons than winning the XPRIZE it's for this community it's for the the goal that it sets for us and the incredible stories we get to tell I'm really pleased that they've made storytelling one of the main requirements for actually winning this contest I think that's really important and so for me the key thing for forming a team was talking to Stuart when I first heard about the contest I was like man I know it's impossible all the contests are always impossible that's the point why would you have a contest if it wasn't impossible you know they're trying to set you something that's a real challenge I need to talk to someone who's who knows about biodiversity who knows about rainforest I'm actually a circuit designer and so I started going through lists of people Stuart was my like third contact to get to someone who actually knew what was going on in the rainforest so finding that other partner who knows the other side of things is really important and then you've got to get some support got to have people having high school students is a great resource we have Duke students that's a great resource having collaborators volunteers people who will stick with you through the contest very important so that's kind of my two cents is that you've got to find a collaborator and you've got to have people to support you back to you Peter thank you both so much we're thrilled to have your team competing and thanks again for hosting your conservation tech event earlier last earlier this year and thanks to all four of these teams who have shared with us today their experiences and XPRIZ competitions certainly one benefit of competing is staying connected to this entire network and what we're doing here with XPRIZ Rainforest is activating and mobilizing people from all over the world to share that share common interest passions and goals to work together towards a better future a reminder is that if you register for XPRIZ Rainforest by the end of today you receive 25% off of the registration fee so please check out our website rainforest.xprize.org also another housekeeping note I guess is that this afternoon's sessions are now open to everyone so if you're tuning in today you can attend those as well to make it more engaging and participatory it will actually be a Zoom meeting and so we'll be sharing that link and so after the lunch break midday we'll transfer over to that meeting rather than a webinar to be able to interface more with our audience next up we have more individuals sharing additional benefits of competing specifically additional partners and networks that teams competing will have access to so to introduce our first speaker and also provide a little bit more on that front I'll turn it back to our senior impact manager again sales thanks again for the the reintroduction Peter and as I said before senior impact manager here at XPRIZ and I talked a little bit about the hat I wear around supporting our alumni network another hat I wear is supporting actual live ongoing prizes so pre-alumni if you will the actual team competitors during the life of the prize and really excited to be working with with Peter and John and Allison and the team here that's around the Rainforest Prize to help teams scale during the actual competition so in this session that's all about the benefits of competing I want to just kind of flag a couple things you know we have you know a XPRIZ Rainforest funders round table that's going to help teams sort of think about their funding journey all the way from when they're registered and starting to compete two years after as they look for even more capital scale and we have a speaker coming up shortly we'll talk about that but first another really amazing impact partnership we have is with an organization called YPO I don't want to say too much about that as our next speaker is going to touch on that I think but just to say it's an amazing collaboration and sort of it's how we think about prizes right obviously you know Peter and his team are thinking about a lot of the technical challenges and the ecosystem challenges and all these dimensions of the competition and my job is to think about what are the resources you need to be a successful company right so it's not just about creating the tech but making sure you have the resources and the understanding to scale and be successful during and after the competition and like I said our partnership with YPO is a great way that we've been thinking about that so with that I'm going to bring up to the virtual stage Michael Tucci Michael Tucci is the president and CEO of Micro Technologies an advanced design and manufacturing company that specializes in precision hardware for leading OEMs of today he's also a driving force behind this YPO impact accelerator that's designed to help our express teams Michael also serves as the vice chair of the YPO impact council and previously chaired the sustainable business network of this member led org he lives in Costa Rica with his family and is passionate about the ocean adventures and martial arts Michael thank you so much for joining us today and all you do the stage is yours man appreciate it so let's see if I can share here I don't I don't think I'll get it in the right view but let's start with so I live here in Costa Rica and I think generally we do a pretty good job comparatively on how we treat our rainforests I spend a fair amount of time in them but perhaps not not the case all over the world so I've been living here for about eight years so I'm becoming more and more attuned to the importance of not just the rainforest a whole bunch of different rainforests I've learned so I am personally passionate about about helping you all succeed as we've done with other groups so what is the YPO X Prize Alliance will start with what is YPO YPO is a member led organization we are known as the largest group of CEOs on the planet we have some pretty cool stats we're about 27,000 members around the world we have 450 chapters around the world in over 130 countries if you put us together we are 22 million employees our combined revenue is nine trillion dollars I think that would make us the third largest economy in the world we have members that are petitioning to put a to give us observer status at the UN and some people trying to see if we can start our own currents just to give you an idea scale but at the at the end of the day it's people like me I'm a member I don't work for YPO I get paid for my own company but I am passionate about what we can do as a group and no nowhere more than an impact because with all these wonderful numbers if we can't actually help you create the change that you're passionate about I'm not really sure what they're doing so a subset of YPO is what they call networks and that's where we've been engaging mostly with Dan and the previous cohorts give you an idea again I won't bore you with all these numbers is about 50,000 of us because we have members and next generation teens and 20 something year olds engaged in a variety of networks there's three groups there's business networks and that could cover anything from manufacturing to plastics to real estate to construction and each one of those has thousands of CEOs in it then there's personal that could be ocean conservation which I'm involved in or water sports or conservation hunting could be you name it fine wines we like to drink a lot of good wine and then there's impact which is the third pillar which is where I currently sit on the chair on the council and there we focus on what how can we use this organization as a force for good we have people planet peace and prosperity that's what we used to call now we call sustainable business which is one of the focal groups that engages with with Dan and the team at X Prize that's about me we can pass that so what is the partnership not to bore you with all the details but it really started gaining some traction I think I was in China with with Peter Diamandis a few years ago and we were talking about X Prize and talking about YPO I said well what do you do with all these amazing companies all these amazing ideas that are generated through the X Prize engine and the answer was you know it's not really our charter which I wholeheartedly agree with so we said well you know we've got this YPO group we're pretty uniquely positioned to we're probably not the most innovative group certainly not as innovative as X Prize but we're really good at scaling things right we're really good at executing because we all run a somewhat successful business to be to be encountered into the group so fast forward to today we have what's called the YPO X Prize alliance or now we've called it the YPO impact accelerator on our side impact X and our our mission along with Dan and some great people on the X Prize side is to be your 10x accelerator what does that mean that means well we actually when we started this we wanted to positively impact a million people and given the early success we've had we've had to add a few zeros to it my partners I haven't seen this yet this is brand new but we will we will positively impact a billion people in this decade and we need your help to do it because you guys are the spark and we're the fuel so what do we do how do we help you all right we do three main things we help with mentorship so we have again we're proven entrepreneurs you have to have a business of at least I don't I don't know what the threshold is like 18 million in sales or you know 100 employees or something so you have you know we've succeeded in some way in the in the real world and the subset that is engaged and we've had thousands of members express interest in helping here is we're passionate right we want to help these companies your ideas succeed we've seen that happen twice now we're in our third cohort what do we do in that phase I think the the most interesting we do is the thing we do is help you think bigger right I think that was kind of the earlier like why aren't we adding a couple of zeros to either your financial business models or your impact roadmap and and those would be two tangible things we would help you create or sharpen or scale up how do you get ready for money if you need money right we we have a very good group of seasoned investors in our midst as well and then most importantly I think an often overlooked is how do we get you building the right teams and right systems the second phase is how do we actually fund or support how do we get you direct help and that is done through an event we're holding the third one next week for the AI group and that's where we highlight four or five companies that are interested they've already gone through mentorship they're ready for our ecosystem we have an event it's sponsored by what our deal platform which is the largest platform in ypo it's got over 10 000 members deal flows hourly through that billions of dollars go through that so money's not a problem and we also have what's called the impact investing initiative or y3i which this accelerator is a fundamental component so that is gaining a lot of prominence with ypo so we can help both on financial and we can help on impact and what do we actually do we plug you into our deal ecosystem if you are ready for it and that's a double-edged sword right the the the good side is there's no shortage of resources that we can provide the downside is we're all pretty smart business people say you better be prepared uh and then the other side of that is you know we have we have partnerships all over the world big ones global ones the third thing is how do we help you scale right so i'm from new york um i have a saying one good idea and one token gets you on the subway all right so how do you actually use what how do we turn your idea into demonstrable very real very tangible metrics and for us it's about impact you it might be also about financial financial returns but for us we want that billion person impact that's our driving force that's why i do this for the big check of zero every day um because i'm really passionate about i think we have what will become the biggest engine in the world for positive change here we give you resources we give you access to all of us and again that's a pretty big pool to play in uh we have these focused networks so maybe you need manufacturing help maybe you need financial services maybe you need a contact in the zimbabwean government make whatever it is these are things we kind of wave our magic wand and happen uh and we are all again we're on a first name basis all over the world right so we can help figure out how to uh gain you that access and again these are things that are kind of easy for us um so uh where we went through three uh we're actually launching our third one next week our first cohort had a uh a very high bar of could you get the san diego for our first global event uh david or i saw on here was part of it so we had a very wide variety we had two groups of five that really gained traction and this learning upgrade which i think you'll hear more about in the future that's that's the group that decided to have us up our target i think when venote and his team were starting they were looking at impacting about a hundred thousand people and with the right mentor and the right axis they're now focusing on impacting a hundred million people and that's very very real the next one we did just to give you some flavor is about um uh we did uh one on actual moonshots with the with the lunar x prize just to help our team think our ecosystem think about thinking bigger and now we have the uh group coming up on ai those are the teams that will be showcased therein so i didn't want to take a lot of time today i just want to show you that this is what's available to you uh on our side of the fence we're really excited about this um we need more content we need um uh more of your ideas to help us feed our engine right we have a lot of CEOs that are really curious and and and and they want to help so um that's it i'll hang around for q&a and and we look forward to seeing how we can help you guys make a real difference amazing thank you so much michael and and you know thank you for joining us today and for ypo supporting us uh throughout this just quick quick anecdote i was a business school student before i came to x prize i remember there was like a a ypo luncheon or something and michael's point about well yeah you know you can join us but first you have to do whatever 20 million and revenue of 100 companies i was like oh man ypo is so so cool i'm never going to get to work with those guys and then to have an opportunity to be part of x prize and help connect our teams uh to to work with their just truly incredible network i think of anything michael somehow undersolded uh it's really great opportunity and like i said sorry peter still do have the best job in the world to get to connect folks with michael and this team so with that i will turn the stage back to peter to try and rebut my argument there and bring up to our virtual stage our next speaker so you're up peter thank you that's not even a competition everything's a competition expert apparently i'm still getting me sorry um next up i'm excited to introduce our next speaker who i've been working with on his amazon investor coalition a new initiative launched at un75 and he's also been an active member of our funder's roundtable um and just to give a little bit more background jenna wick camper is co-founder and president of nexus and the global governance philanthropy network as well as the founder of the healthy democracy coalition um and jenna has been active in in these spaces for quite some time working on a variety of different campaigns um including uh obama's in 2008 and and kind of all over since and amazon investor coalition has been a very exciting um group to be involved with and jenna we're looking forward to hearing more about all of your your work today thanks um uh hey so i'm that guy jonah wick camper that peter mentioned uh i'm going to lay out the economic argument for competing in expires rainforest and then i'm going to tell you a little bit about ways that me and the organizations i represent can help so first of all according to script finance uh the ecosystem services we uh get from you know forests and things like that give us about four trillion dollars a year in value and there's nine hundred and forty one billion dollars in annual turnover that is at risk due to dependency on commodities linked to deforestation uh the expires presents an opportunity for us to ensure that rainforests are worth more alive and standing than cut and burned uh 2019 paper by steven woodley of the international union of conservation scientists or conservation for nature uh put out a paper um showing making the financial argument that conserving 30 percent of terrestrial nature um provides economic benefits by a ratio of five to one costs to benefit so uh for every unit that we conserve that costs us one dollar we get five dollars in return in terms of economic benefit uh these numbers are i've posted them online at amazoninvestor.org slash compete uh a 1996 paper by david simpson made a very comprehensive approach to calculating the value of biodiversity uh per unit of acre land 25 percent of drugs used in western medicine today come from tropical forests there are 80 000 plants uh estimated to be in the amazon and only five percent of them that have been tested for their medicinal value uh the pharmaceutical industry reached about 1.25 trillion in revenue in 2019 growing at a rate of 5.8 percent that means that perhaps 256 billion in sales per year from your are coming from your tropical forest drugist by comparison the 2019 revenue of amazon.com was 232 billion a year i assure you that the valuation of amazon.com is way overvalued compared to amazon.forest uh the so uh get involved discover new opportunities and uh you can experience an extraordinary return on your investment but there are legal processes in place that you need to worry about the nagoya protocol was created back in 2010 under the convention on biological diversity and it has been ratified in 127 countries in the uu it requires that wealth created from biodiversity must be shared with local communities make sure that you're aware of that brazil has its genetic heritage management council that requires the same uh i'm going to give you some numbers on biomimetic entrepreneurship a swiss engineer named george de mistral was walking through the forest with his dog back in 1941 and he discovered these burdock seeds connected to his dog and him so he looked at him underneath a microscope and he ended up designing something uh the words were port are in french velvet crochet crochet means hook velcro uh you probably heard of that velcro usa posted a revenue of 357 million dollars in 2020 and has a thousand employees there's a new oil proof and waterproof coating called ultra ever dry that's monitored after the waxy hydrophobic slash oleophobic nanostructures that keep lotus flowers dry it hit the market in 2013 the company that invented it ultra tech was acquired four years later by vico for 862 million dollars in 2017 there's a caltech engine bio engineer named rod wonal sidique and he designed a new solar cell that is 90 percent uh more effective than other solar cells in the market by copying the wing structures of the rose butterfly which is popular in india their wings have microscopic holes that scatter light and uh that improved light and um absorbed from changes the game the us paid 1.3 trillion dollars in electric bills in 2018 if two percent uh was powered by solar and sidique's discovery was scaled across it he would be saving customers uh 12.3 billion dollars a year that means a 12.3 billion dollar economic opportunity just from analyzing butterfly wings the serrated edges of windmill turbines were inspired by whale flippers the dew bank uh bottle fills itself and it was modeled after the african nabid desert beater desert beetles ability to collect water from fog in the air lots and lots of opportunities come from biomimetic entrepreneurship and copycatting what are some emergent in industries acoustic monitoring if you want to issue new premium carbon credits or new premium forest carbon credits uh biodiversity monitoring is all the rage rainforest connection has a technology that allows you to do that and they can also detect chainsaw alerts what are other industries uh where your inventions could have big impact uh what about drones that navigate agroforestry and help pick fruits that's a giant emergent industry uh what about drones that photograph uh deforesters and help with the with their prosecution what about automated weeding what about supply chain tracing what about preventing the next pandemic which there's a lot of evidence that the current pandemic came uh as a result of um global warming uh modifying bat habitats in southern china uh we need your technologies we need your innovation to prevent the next pandemic a little bit about uh background and ways that the networks that i work with can help uh 20 years ago i co-founded a global association of youth organizations around the united nations or when our website went viral within a few years we're getting two million hits a day i got to meet young activists and change makers in almost every country of the world i also got to meet a lot of inheritors and people who are still teenagers and who had started and sold their businesses i realized the power of bringing them together as a group so i got the obama white house uh to host its first young philanthropy summit in 2010 and then i got the united nations to do the same in 2011 we created the brand nexus to surround it nexus is a global movement to bridge communities of wealth and impact that has close to six thousand members from 70 countries we have leadership in about 30 countries we have young people from probably close to 150 billionaire families involved probably more than that uh it's a platform uh that allows the millennial generation to come together talk about the problems of the world and how to solve them two years ago i reduced my role in nexus to develop new platforms for intergenerational philanthropic collaboration uh one to help um address polarization american politics to healthy democracy quotient and the other to help create new systems for management of the global commons uh so we have no system of world law and as a result carbon emissions go unchecked philanthropy has a special role to play in managing the managing our interconnectedness the absence of this system of world law means an absence of the system of global accountability philanthropy has a role to play so the global governance philanthropy network serves as a platform for funders of transnational issues such as oceans and climate and refugees to come together and explore governance solutions to global problems uh about a year ago uh as part of the global governance philanthropy network we decided to focus on the amazon uh in securing the ecological integrity of the amazon is essential for the future of planetary sustainability so in september we launched amazoninvestor.org the amazon rainforest investor coalition we have a four-part strategy to secure the ecological integrity of the system it's all about ensuring the rainforest is worth more alive and standing than cut and burned the four-part strategy is about first impact investing which also means uh figuring out the stumbling blocks that are preventing the arrival of more investment ready projects the second strategy is is about the rule of law we're conducting a survey we've identified 92 different grant makers and bilateral agencies that are putting money into the amazon we want to understand their investments and governance and rule of law strategies you can't have force-friendly economic development without a healthy rule of law the third strategy is about carbon innovation that means both carbon markets and ecosystem service payments some of your technologies might be able to help us develop new kinds of premium forest credits that all those off takers around the world like amazon.com or microsoft uh want to buy um the and then the fourth strategy is all about investor education after building nexus over the past decade we have very privileged relationships with banks and sovereign wealth funds and pension funds we want to be able to say to all of them collectively the amazon needs you and here's how to help and your technologies may be that gateway we're organizing a global summit may 24 through 28 you can see it on amazoninvestor.org the amazon can give us new antibiotics uh new new natural colorings new aromatic substances essential oils biodegradable polymers bio-insecticides your entrepreneurship can help us discover all of those things and create giant new uh opportunities to make the rainforest make amazon.forest worth more than amazon.com um there are two articles that i want to mention that are on that website uh how can we invest in the amazon rainforest there's a comprehensive review there um so many strategies suggested and finally on the subject of agroforestry uh did you know that agroforestry can learn a heck of a lot more than uh soy and cattle per acre how do we get there there's a strategy laid out your technologies we hope thank you so much jonah um thank you for all that you've been doing and convening people around uh future of rainforest and certainly i think that your your comments here uh kind of showcase the the power of convening people around these different uh initiatives and and also gathering the appropriate funding to ensure their success um and we do have a little bit of time if anybody has any questions um happy to take those and also jonah if you have any comments as well about um the funders roundtable that we started convening around x-prize rainforest and and just where you hope to see that go uh mr tucci talks about the deal flow network within ypo we're working on developing a deal flow network for the amazon as well uh i have met many new people new investors through the initial convening of the funders roundtable i've learned so much uh so much about being part of the x-prize ecosystem is learning uh if you have an idea and you want it to scale and you don't really think you're going to be able to uh succeed in the x-prize just get involved for the for the value of the network um you'll meet the most extraordinary people i already have that's a that's a great testament um and certainly we we are very conscious of the fact that it takes uh time and resources to compete in this competition the top 25 teams that make it to the semifinals um testing in two years will split a milestone prize of 250 000 and the top 10 teams that make it to the finals will split 2 million and so there are opportunities for those that actually make it to the point where they'll be testing their technologies in a tropical rainforest however we're also trying to work to find additional ways to provide more support to our teams at an earlier stage ultimately if we're able to do that at an earlier stage it it helps to ensure the success and the impact of of these solutions beyond the life of the prize and i think that as people have spoken to um we we'd like everybody to come up with exciting solutions did you have something to say on that journal uh apply today if you do apply today again another plug for that you receive 25 off that registration and there's milestone prizes uh coming up we'll certainly pay those back but um just in regards to funders roundtable um that is certainly a convening of people and organizations philanthropies donors investors that we've been working with uh with jonah on to um you know try to find additional support for our teams so we are we are working on that and and with others as well and that's a growing growing network so jonah thanks uh so much and also thanks for the additional opportunities outside this to communicate X prize rainforest at TEDx last year and even last last week at amazon investor coalition i appreciate it you bet my pleasure thank you next up we are joined by david gadston director of conservation solutions at esri um esri is a leading provider of global information systems that a name that many people here know and also a partner of x prize rainforest we're really appreciative of esri's support esri is providing access for our competing teams through their entire suite of tools so that's another incentive to get registered once you register we will connect you with esri you will have that access um and yeah i think also you may be talking about this today but uh esri will be producing story maps around or provide that that platform to communicate the process of teams competing so with that david thanks for joining us um and sharing perfect well thank you so much peter it's a pleasure to be here i'm just going to get my screen uh going and share uh how's that look on your end excellent perfect uh so thank you for the introduction peter and i'm you know i'm just listening through the the session here i'm you know first of all i'm wondering how a geographer snuck in um because you're all extremely well focused and qualified on both how to address wicked problems and how to build unique communities and financing around resolving them so i'm i'm honored to be here um i've been with esri for the past 18 years focusing on international organizations nonprofits both in the humanitarian and now conservation space and if you're uh unfamiliar esri is a rather unique organization we were founded in 1969 by jack and laura dangerman jack had studied landscape architecture and computing and spatial analysis at harvard and brought sort of the kernels of that emerging uh technology concept which was how do we take the real world and all of its complexity and interdependency as was mentioned a moment ago and and try to manage that information in a computing environment and there it's actually quite complicated right the world is not round it's it's kind of a funny shape if you want to do accurate precision measurement you have to really get deep into building a mathematical mathematical framework to make that possible and then how do you abstract uh landscapes and roads and parcels and butterflies and temperature and and biodiversity right how do you how do you build a framework to do that and really that's what esri's been focused on for the last now 51 years um we serve a global community of GIS professionals and the impact of these geographic information systems are all around us they provide a foundation by which really many mission critical and fundamental systems in the world function um but our focus is simply building the tools and the technology to help equip others so we very much think of ourselves as a service organization uh at the same time our values and what motivates us is a deep concern for where the planet is headed many in the field of geography um you know dive deep into very complex issues and we're not only singularly looking to resolve something but trying to understand the context around it and the relationships around it and this computing environment by which geography is fundamental gives us that tool set to be able to to tackle wicked problems so our our focus is how do we serve and empower the global community um on a wide variety of topics and and I should also say commercial and and corporate uh you know endeavors around the world but specifically around conservation how do we help make sure these tools are available um how do we best architect them how do we create a sufficient openness so they can be pulled upon as needed to build into other solutions or to work towards the solutions that are needed uh to address the problems that we're facing so our conservation program goes back now 30 years it is a grant program if you are aware of any organization that needs access to technology cannot afford it we've been uh a long we have a long track record of making our tools available and also investing in communities so that organizations like the Society for Conservation GIS or various specialist groups that are related to conservation or environmental management and and form communities together we tend to lean in and and work with those entities as as equal partners and that's led us to have a significant footprint around the world um not only in conservation nonprofits but also national governments as you might imagine national park services natural resources agencies globally so building upon that footprint we form strategic partnerships um and you know Rainforest Sex Prize is a perfect example um of leaning in making our tools available and trying to help advance and move the ball forward I want to tell you a little bit about the technology and then I want to break it down uh in a manner that you can help see I hope the role for this platform and in your in your innovative work now ArcGIS has been developed over 51 years it is very comprehensive um and there are you know very uh there's a vast array of application industries uh levels of complexity huge data management systems lightweight apps it's just a complete spectrum and you're sitting there thinking likely okay this is a competition where I'm I'm responsible for developing an innovative solution like good for you Esri but I'm not going to win an X prize if I just use Esri commercial off the shelf tools and I don't really blame you for that sentiment what we're focused on however is providing these building blocks around geography so you can focus on innovation and not recreating the wheel so by unlocking and opening up ArcGIS you can simply harvest what's needed and we'll talk more about some of those opportunities there is also a tremendous amount of geospatial content that's available today and this is exciting I think for all of us I mean the the emergence of the geospatial industry over the past five decades has led to increasing availability of reference data um satellite imagery for the entire world that's constantly being collected elevation models where we've again federated together all of these uh you know focused high resolution elevation modeling projects into a global model by which we can drop a push pin anywhere in the world and tell you what's visible from that location or what's upstream or downstream from that location and that's no longer doing some computative analysis work on a desktop GIS package it's actually like a service a dial tone that's available to everyone so how do we build upon that right how do you leverage that to advise your work and then go further our platform is open and interoperable and this is critical critical for us based on the community that we serve both both across international organizations and national governments standards interoperability the exchange of information I really want to focus as well on open science so by bringing in leading scientific analytical tool gets seamlessly into arc GIS we're able to leverage whatever analytics package you're you're comfortable with but then visualize and contribute the output of those analyses into something potentially more contextually referenced and more significant from an additive way the the manner that most conservation organizations use our tools is simply devices in the field for collecting information managing where people are going tracking them getting them routed to places you know sketching and sort of data collection in the field it might be a very lightweight experience it may be sort of a detailed survey but increasingly we're seeing the evolution of sensor technology lead to continuous streams of information that's providing more of a real-time monitoring of what's going on in the natural environment so when we augment that with survey and putting tools and observers hands to collect information we have a significant opportunity for sensing and sort of gathering a terrific amount of information but then what right and I love the way that the again XPRIZE rainforest is structured so that it's not just about building a great sensor it's about what do you do with that information that is meaningful and in this case again we've got a massive tool set of spatial operators that you can pull in to your analyses and you know send and return sort of requests and get results from those analytical engines let's say that can then quickly get your response to being able to you know ingest large amounts of information conservation organizations increasingly are also real time so that monitoring through dashboards is again a new paradigm you know oftentimes conservation work was long long form survey observation writing pdf documents maps that were static we're very much living today towards a real-time monitoring capability where we're able to keep track of many different things that are moving in in real time those apps also give us the ability to tell stories so that we're taking photos videos texts contextual information that are not necessarily geographic and adding maps to them so a story map is a web application that we simply scroll through and that gives us the ability to better immerse people and where we are what we're doing why it's important and to give them the opportunity to interact with that with those GIS powered maps but in a way that's a very light user experience and not you know requiring a high bar of entry now I want to quickly highlight a released that we've just announced this is sort of a traditional view of ArcGIS we've got a robust software as a service offering we've got robust software we've got enterprise tools and a lot of content and information before it that's a very high level generalization but that's ArcGIS today what we're now releasing is a platform as a service offering for ArcGIS and I think for the X price teams this is this is significant because it allows you to choose your own open-source mapping library and then unlock a wide array of capabilities across the ArcGIS platform so the content that we have available providing you a basis to host and manage the data in a secure way in an interoperable way providing 2D and 3D mapping experiences visualization there's a lot here I'll very quickly sort of blaze through the kinds of opportunities that we have developers at ArcGIS.com is where you can dive in get a free account going if you're not already thinking of it you can you know do some research and the type of a mapping API if you're if you're leaning in that direction lots of resources for you available we're talking about unlocking all of that reference data that I mentioned providing a hosting capability visualization tools look up and search capabilities through geography routing content and then those analytics this ArcGIS platform offering can provide that baseline data set they can host those data sets for you in a manner that support transactions for updates whether those updates are coming in from a sensor environment whether they're coming in from surveys or you know a new tool that you're developing I should I should be clear here that we're not just talking about geometry and point signs and polygons but also raster files imagery potentially multispectral imagery so that we can obtain imagery and then process and return what's going on in that image from a land cover perspective or other identification thousands of spatial operators you know strong spatial science and spatial statistics embedded in the tools so rather than going deep in building your own analytics rather you can cherry pick and compile well vetted strategic you know scientifically based tools with your own and with the tools you're building to get those results and then visualize that in a compelling in a compelling way so there's a few examples here I plan to show I'm running a little bit short on time so I'm going to focus on just two of them very quickly here this is an example of a web application that was powered that is powered by the ArcGIS platform offering these are global earthquakes in the year of the years of year of 2019 really just a three-dimensional viewer but we're you know we're looking at a really significant data set here this isn't trivial and size any given earthquake that occurred that year we have an opportunity to sort of get a better understanding of what's happening I think the depth perception is pretty outstanding here but let's focus on biodiversity so first of all here's this the state of biodiversity mapping in the United States in 2008 this is based on many many local programs that monitor specific species rolling up into state heritage programs which natural heritage programs which are managing endangered species data and whatnot and here's the view of that same concept in 2020 so this work was conducted by nature serve they have spent many years building trusted relationships with those state natural heritage programs and what this program delivers is going from that local observation on specific species to incorporating all of the field activities that experts do in the field to monitor and measure taking those discrete observations of actual occurrences and then running through those spatial analysis tools to fill in the gaps so that gets us to a place where and obviously I'm skipping all of the science I'll also provide a link to this the story map in a moment for you but individual operations leading to being able to project into the gaps and fulfill those gaps to to have a better conception of the whole even though we've only seen parts of it is sort of a fundamental opportunity with spatial analysis and it's very common for users of our technology so my final concept is we will not be successful addressing the challenges we're facing in isolation you know whether we're a researcher or an advocate within an organization we need to get to a place where we're both innovating and we're equipping the authoritative leaders that are responsible for those topics we work with many federal governments we work with many international organizations and there's just not a there's fast track to building trust it takes time to build credibility it takes time to establish your relationships by which your contribution through the innovation can be sustained and so I really want to stress that by leveraging some of these technologies I'm talking about today you also have a pathway into these agencies which have been standardized on these enterprise geospatial tools for many many years so by publishing and contributing to the geospatial GIS content and offering you're able to potentially have your innovative solution you're developing seamlessly empower and accelerate a traditional reporting system in that authoritative government or lead agency sense so thank you so much it's a pleasure to have the opportunity to speak with you I do have a link here to a story map that we've developed for the enterprise teams that kind of summarizes some of what I've shown you today thank you so much great thank you David it looks like we have a number of questions for you we actually have a few minutes also to take them and so I'm just working on pulling those up really quickly and we do actually have some time if you did want to say a little bit about the story maps that could be a good good start you bet you bet I'm actually gonna go back to is it okay if I go back and yeah go for it absolutely just want to go back to the nature serve example here so again this this is a very nicely constructed story map just to give you an example it's not just maps right we're sort of drawn in what's happening with this you know with this crawfish I didn't know there were blue crawfish for example you know giving you that personal connection with someone in the field doing work and then seamlessly bringing in spatial data so in this case we're looking at a photograph of a jpeg of a map but in other cases these are interactive tools that then give the viewer the ability to actually go through and immerse themselves in the data themselves in the data itself now if you think of GIS traditionally there are countless web applications and and you know if you have to ever look up parcel data and you go to the county website you know you can get to sort of a a web app and it's clunky it's sort of you know lots of things to turn off on and off and not particularly user friendly the story map is a completely different paradigm right it sort of simplifies and removes a lot of that UI and just gives us the opportunity to interact in a very natural way so I told the story of the nature serve work a moment ago again I would encourage you all to look up nature serve and look up this specific project which is referred to as MOBI the map of biodiversity importance here's the steps that I described earlier you know first ingredient verified field data we've got sort of some some pop-ups that are that are kind of appearing to take us in a bit deeper we're looking at soils and in pH of soils forest cover wetlands classic GIS right we're pulling in all of this context and obviously the nature serve science team knows these are relevant but they're choosing from a massive catalog of earth observation data that is available to everyone today so going through the spatial stats to actually better qualify what's significant then gets us to a place that we can we can derive this type of biodiversity modeling which as I mentioned before is sort of filling the gaps between what we can observe other things that we know to be going on through other sensor approaches and what the relationships are between them so it's just a high level overview of the machine learning approach and some of the documentation on on how they conducted the analysis leading to the kind of a probability approach so I'm folk I'm telling you about nature serve but I'm just giving you an example of a story map and there are there are countless so we're happy to continue to make ourselves available to to advise with the teams pointing in the right direction for resources but obviously there's a lot to unpack here from relevant technology to back up your design work and your innovation work but also potentially a storytelling tool that you can use to summarize the work that you're doing as well awesome thanks David we're really excited about that and it was great seeing the whole tutorial recently it's going to be an awesome way for our teams to be able to view and share their experience at the competition one question from the audience is thank you for your presentation access to ArcGIS is a valuable addition how many seats are being provided to each of the teams so really let us know what you need and we'll and we'll find a way to support you so again conservation grant program running for 30 years we also have a very creative program focused on startups if you're if you're a commercial entity that's getting spun up so I can't quite say unlimited but I can definitely say hundreds of seats and then and then we'll work with you on sort of compute right if there's you know we want to make sure everyone has access to what they need if we're really throttling a lot of cloud compute then we might encourage you to work with one of our partners and bring some cloud resources to the table and we'll optimize sort of the overall cost of that but happy to work with you directly and and I'm sure there's a way we can get whatever you need into your hands I'm gonna paste the link to the story map I've mentioned into the chat here awesome do you want to repost that I think it just went to panelists so maybe panelists and attendees and then another question just building off of that is then which which version of ArcGIS professional or personal if professional basic or advanced maybe just a couple more details on that um professional and advanced whatever is needed yeah yeah so we grant full commercial licenses through the conservation program we also have a nonprofit program I was involved setting up a number of years ago really kind of tightened down four nonprofits and non-commercial use but through the conservation grant program we can be very flexible um we're so what you hear me saying is we're not capping the technology that's available to you um there could be instances where we have uh an extension technology that there's third-party royalties involved in which case I can't donate it outright but we'll work with you on all of those things this is a well-worn uh path for us and it's great to see some familiar names popping up here I'm excited to hear from Fabian and Corey and Shaw hopefully that will be the next session so just hang on and I think um I think they're all coming in David do you have any last remarks I just to the audience I can't express enough how great of an opportunity this is for our teams and again um just get registered and you will hook you up with Asri for those products and yeah just to Peter final comment I I think so much about sustainability and long-term application of these of these tools and obviously that's that's a pretty tall order when you're at the very cutting edge of innovation but I I think there's I think there's some ways to leapfrog ahead in that regard and I alluded to that in the talk but I I do think there are ways that you can assure that your contribution um from a content and technical and analytical standpoint are going to be easily accepted and and and standardized on by governments and authoritative entities that are out there and and that that's a topic I'd love to work with anyone on um we do have an incredible network because of the types of institutions that we're serving we'd be happy to help facilitate introductions etc so thank you so much for the opportunity thank you David we're really looking forward to it and um appreciate all the support from Asri um on that note we're going to transition into our next session I think we have all of our speakers on board uh and this session is going to be about innovating conservation technologies presentations and conversations on lessons learned in this space by number of friends national geographic colleagues who are committed both to advancing this field and also to increasing diversity equity and representation in this conservation tech space that has been very historically white male dominated and I appreciate the insight from who we have lined up here who are dedicated to supporting and mentoring the international community of teams interested in competing so far coming from over 53 countries to ensure that the future of this space looks very different and people have you know the right tools and experience and expertise equipped to develop scalable impactful solutions so today we're going to talk about lessons learned from engineering design and development for application in the field to AI applied to biodiversity data and satellite imagery in order to derive new insights to the story that we not only can but must tell during using data so that we can together have a larger voice and further amplify our impact setting the stage I'm actually going to give a brief intro to all four of these guys up front and then let them run with it um and beginning with Fabian Laurier who's volunteering to support X Prize rainforest as an ambassador and just in general a huge lover of rainforests he he ran National Geographic Labs as VP which Jonathan Bailey this morning spoke about and he also worked in the White House for four years on climate change and conservation issues and you'll be hearing from him first we will then hear from Sha Selby a technical consultant on X Prize rainforest who was a previous judge on the ocean discovery X Prize and actually informed me about X Prize in this job while we were on an expedition just over a year ago in the Congo deploying an open software Wi-Fi network in the rainforest canopy for Kemmering scientists in the Baku community to monitor their forest Sha's a founder of Conservify and they just launched a great new product called Field Kit so check that out he's also National Geographic Explorer and Fellow and has a background in rocket science with the Boeing third we will have Corey Dysklauski National Geographic Fellow Explorer and entrepreneur Corey was the recipient of the 2020 Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the year award for his past and current accomplishments and innovations to advanced conservation anti-coaching security and exploration from Antarctica to Everest to the Titanic leveraging his experience in deep AI and sensors Corey has developed and deployed technologies for exploration and conservation missions all over the world he's the founder and CEO of Synthetic the leading synthetic data company and closing it out we have Dr. Dan Hammer managing partner at Earthrise Media a creative agency for the environment he is also a climate fellow and senior advisor at X and the winner of the inaugural Pritzker Environmental Genius Award he received his PhD in environmental economics from UC Berkeley and has received numerous accolades throughout his career he also previously served as well as a senior policy advisor in the Obama White House and a presidential innovation fellow at NASA who's a chief data scientist at World Resources Institute where he founded Global Forest Watch and also has been a National Geographic Fellow so we have a phenomenal group of individuals here and with that I'm going to hand the stage over to them starting with Fabian hey thanks a lot Peter can you guys all see my screen yes awesome well thank you very much Peter for for having us today I mean those guys are some of the best people that I know I've been so lucky to I've worked with them continue to work with them in and around conservation so this is such a thrill to to be here today and and provide some insights in terms of your conservation and how do we can take this field forward so we've heard that over the past a couple days but I think it's it's worth repeating biodiversity loss and habitat loss is is really accelerating over the past hundred plus years we degraded 50 percent of the earth ecosystems 70 percent of wildlife population lost in the past 50 years only if we continue business as usual by you know mid-century we're talking about 90 percent of habitats for all animals being lost due to to human impacts and this is this is what's what's coming right massive massive implication for biodiversity something that you know we as human have never experienced so it's it's a big unknown but I think there's hope again I mentioned 50 percent today of the planet has been impacted that means that there's another 50 percent that if we manage it and conserve it properly we'll be able to maintain the level of biodiversity that's needed in order to sustain the life as we know it and that's the reason why government around the world this year will assemble and hopefully agree to protecting 30 percent of the planet by 2030 on the way to hopefully protect 50 percent by by 2050 so this is the global biodiversity framework as part of the the CBD in addition to the public sector getting you know it's act together the financial sector has sort of you know woken up to to sort of the alarm and recognize that natural capital is extremely important we're talking about you know estimates of upload close to 50 trillion dollars of value in terms of ecosystem and ecosystem services and I think that's for that reason that the financial sector over the past couple years has seen an unprecedented flow of capital towards sustainable and ESG assets so ESG being environment social government assets which are essentially you know ways to invest so 17 trillion today in terms of the market cap for those ESG investments this is a third of the entire volume of equities in the United States a third biodiversity and climate change are at the very top of of sort of the priority the problem as we all know right is that in order to unlock this this massive amount of capital and fully capitalizing on the opportunity to align nature with market so that conservation doesn't have to be always subsidized by you know ever doing philanthropic money we need to come up with better metrics that are consistent and that are powered by data generated in in in nero plan and that's where you know all of you guys and gals are coming there is a huge opportunity in terms of harnessing the latest advances in tech innovation starting with the remote sensing we've seen an explosion lately of remote sensing satellites in the commercial space and that provides us only a clear picture of the planet but it also allows us to potentially have through broadband access globally and anybody who has done conservation in the field knows that you know broadband access is a huge step limiting factor of course you know all the way down to the ground there's been huge advances as well in iot and so edge sensor edge compute so if you pair some of those advances which come with you know increasingly powerful uh microchip that you can deploy on the edge that are coupled with potential 5g network uh then then you have you know a recipe for for for a really transformative set of tools here and in addition to the broadband some of those devices are having one more powerful battery that and those devices are consuming less and less power so all of those factors together really allow us to think about a sort of a a fully integrated sort of you know mud to space uh uh monitoring and observing system for biodiversity that would generate those data that i'm talking about and you know with the advances in computing which allows you to do massive compute you know out of your cell phone you can then derive the type of matrix uh that that are needed for for not only of course you know managerial strategies and and of natural uh habitats but then also to my point earlier to help guide and measure effectiveness of some of those impact investment or ees investments a lot of the data that you know can be generated others you know machine learning etc can be uh you know effectively ground truth and validated by deploying millions of people using uh apps like iNaturalist which you know is the largest citizen science app in the world with the largest sort of user base it generates more biodiversity data than anything that exists it's the largest contributor to the gbif database um so that's yet another tool that allows you to engage communities and students uh get them to participate actively in something that that is actually meaningful again you know collecting biodiversity data so we can make better decisions and then last but not least uh open innovation from incentive prizes and challenges is what we are all here uh this is sort of you know sort of like the the the cherry on the cake here there's so much that can be done when you can activate uh people who have traditionally never thought about biodiversity but have amazing skills that can be transferred to help us move the needle um and so with that i'm going to pass it to to xiao who has been doing that in the field uh a lot longer than than i have and has uh ends on advice and experience in terms of how do we uh how do we make this this work over to you xiao thank you fabian um hey everyone um so my name is xiao so i'll be uh peter did a great intro to me this actually this picture behind me was taken when peter and how we're in the field just before the pandemic hit but i'm going to share with you some insights so i've been working in the conservation technology space for the last almost 15 years now and i've made every mistake imaginable in that and so maybe some of the insights that i have here can help um some of the project team so let me share my screen real quick um yeah so you know my background is uh i'm an engineer by training and um and uh and i've actually had a fair amount of experience with the x prize um i i was a judge for the rainforest or for the ocean discovery x prize and um can you see my screen is that all right okay perfect i was a judge for the rainforest or for the ocean discovery x prize and now i'm an advisor for the rainforest x prize so um i started a non-profit um technology development lab that's called uh conserva five that's um based in los angeles um on the indigenous territories of the tangla and chumash uh people and we develop open source technologies to help with uh wildlife conservation environmental issues so that means you know when we when we work with communities all over the world that that acquire a tool we try and create an source version of that tool and provide it to them so that they could use as a basis of building upon and and learning um so we you know we have projects in five continents right now and and our biggest project with which peter mentioned is around environmental sensing and how we can make that easier and more modular and more effective and that's a project that's now you know on 20s across 26 different countries and and we just recently launched it so it's a lot of really exciting work in the space and i think as you guys think about the things that you can do with the rainforest x prize it's really important to to kind of think through the impact that you can have broadly across across all different environments so when i say conservation technology i mean a very specific thing i'm talking about how do you create technologies with these conservation solutions as the core user and so that might be a little bit different to how you would deal with things um if you were trying to adapt to technology that's being used in the shipping sector or you know in self-driving cars and other sorts of areas trying to bring it into this space you have to think about things in a different sort of way if you want these these solutions to be sustainable and scalable within the environmental context and so that's kind of what the slides i'll talk about over the next couple of charts um is is discussing um the first and most important thing that i'll mention is that you always want to make sure that you're you're building the right thing um and this this means you're building something that um understands the needs of the people who are on the ground that are trying to to get a better idea of where biodiversity is today um the communities that live within these really really critical ecosystems um and then there's a there's a process there's kind of it's it's much like what you've kind of heard in terms of human-centered design and a lot of the other work out there um around how do you design something that's actually going to solve that need and not necessarily bringing in a solution that's not quite um uh situated in the right sort of way to to be um to be useful so the first thing that you have to do and this this is really important is is really understand what you're solving for and this this involves talking to people within the community getting an understanding of the science that's um involved there and and getting a a deep idea of what it is that you're actually trying to solve for before you even start with any sort of technology or prototyping um the important thing to do is to understand where the gaps are so where the opportunity spaces are that your your technologies that you're focusing on can can fill the need and the rainforest enterprise does a really good job at kind of outlining what some of those gaps may be so the gaps in understanding biodiversity and doing those sorts of assessments um but it's really important as you start to design your solution to think through what that looks like um in a bigger uh in a bigger way there's always constraints associated with developing any sort of technology you know everybody who's here thinking about doing this competition realizes that you're putting technology in a place that's not suited for technology you know you have to deal with rainfall and humidity and dense forests and and insects and you know things that eat the technology that you're gonna you're gonna be deploying out there so it's there's a lot of constraints to really pay attention to um the other thing I'd add is is be sure to think wild about your solutions I mean the tech we have today and the way that we're going about solving these sorts of issues today we're not doing a good job at it and that's why we see biodiversity falling and why we see species going into extinctions we really have to get better and more wild about the ideas that we have to try and solve these sorts of solutions the one of the most important things I can say and I know Jonathan mentioned this in his talk earlier is be sure that you're very kind of careful and deliberate about the testing and the pilot piloting that you need to do um this is something that needs to start earlier than you expected to start and it needs to happen more than you kind of have it planned to do it and then be sure to have a really good way at kind of tracking and measuring your progress so I'm going to very quickly go through some of these common pitfalls but these are things that either you know most of them I've made this mistake in my career but it's also things that I've seen other people make these sort of mistakes so it's really important to kind of think through them as you're going through it the first one is something I just talked about it's not testing enough you need to be testing the the instinct you can put something out there and start getting testing data out you need to do that you're the the nature of conservation technologies you always need to put these tools out into the field um as soon as possible and that means that like testing needs to start basically on day one the second thing I'll say is it's really important not to um not to think about the solution before you fully understand the problem and so you know I did a lot of work on on drones for conservation over the last couple years and that was something where I saw a lot of people um coming into this this idea thinking they needed a drone for the solution when maybe they didn't actually need a drone the drone might be the perfect tool for the job but it's really important to kind of go through the process ahead of the time and talk to the right people to understand what you need to build unintended consequences is a big thing to be thinking about so as you're creating these sorts of solutions think about other ways that people can use those solutions for harm or even not deliberately for harm but could impact the data that you're collecting so a perfect example is you know people were using these these um GPS trackers on these birds that use cellular data and then when the birds would travel to different regions people would take the SD or the SIM cards out of it and use it for phones and the researchers were hit with a bunch of um a bunch of cellular charges and so you just got to kind of think through how that works in the greater world um other uses for the technology you create is an important thing you know this the the traditional example is malaria nets and all these giveaways for malaria nets that you've seen all over the world and and then some of the communities realize that they actually just need fishing equipment so they end up using malaria nets for fishing equipment so this is something that we've seen before but like as you're developing technology think about like what are other things people can use this sort of thing for um one really important thing when it comes to technology development is always realizing that it's really it's really exciting to go immediately to that really sexy solution whatever kind of seems the most shiniest and technologically advanced but there's also pieces of that solution that need to be very simple and solve some very simple problems and and in my own personal expertise there's a huge amount of opportunity for entrepreneurship and solution creation in those lower lower areas um forgetting the user i mentioned this before this is the most important part of it and think a lot about the communities that you're going to be operating in and who's actually going to be using that technology and how you can create something that actually works for them make sure that the data that you're collecting is actually solving the biodiversity problem and not just collecting data for the for the data collecting data sake um be sure to realize that if you want to change to a different sort of solution that um that that's a very kind of well thought and and um uh a mature decision to do so so you know Topher White is a good friend of mine they were doing a lot of work around hardware and they realized that the main issue that they were that they really needed to solve was in the software world and so they ended up kind of moving into that software world because found that that's the most value and that's a hard thing to do if you've like sold your kind of idea on just hardware so just think about that and that's the same thing for funders sometimes funders want to fund you know exciting new ideas like if you think like hey I need to really reimagine how things are are going to be visualized and shared in that sort of way or this software is soup is definitely needed to be able to solve this problem then focus on that sort of thing um and make sure you scope your project effectively so that you're not kind of going beyond what you actually need to do um I just have a couple more of these one is life cycle costs think through not only what it costs to build your technology and get out in the field but what happens to operate your technology how much does it cost to operate your technology because that will be you know uh life or death in terms of if it's viable in certain communities also think about what happens after that technology is done like how do you dispose of that technology if it were to fail in the field does it fail in a way that doesn't damage the data that you're collecting or damage the environment that you're working within all these things are really important to think about and and in much of the same vein of the funder stuff that I saw the public also has a bias on the sorts of things that you're building so think a lot about that as you're as you're going through it and make sure that you start things early because these timelines are always too short so it's always important to kind of focus on that so that's very quick summary of some pitfalls that I found if you have any questions or anything I'm always happy to answer anything but I think I'm going to pass it next on to Cory who's going to talk more about specific technologies. All right hi everybody Cory Jaskolsky thanks for the inter-operator I'll jump right in with some slides here right can everyone see my screen cool all right so what I'm going to talk a little bit about here is I think that in the X-Prize Rainforest competition as well as in conservation in general one of the massive force multipliers that you can think about applying to your projects is AI however the biggest challenge with AI is really that the AI successes that you hear about today AI being able to drive a car better than humans or you know Facebook's awesome at getting the bounding boxer on your friend's face but those are trained on in the in the case of Facebook you know billions of human faces and in the case of self-driving cars on many tens of thousands of hours of human annotated labeled dash cam footage so really not something that exists in a lot of conservation applications so what we think of in AI is that there's this massive massive unmet AI need that's basically due to data sparsity below the surface and what I hope in this conversation to do is to inspire you that there's still ways to compellingly use AI through a technique called generative data in the fields of conservation and these other sort of unmet needs even in the case of one image in a lot of cases we can create an AI that's fairly performant so I think in terms of scale and in terms of the rainforest XPRIZE where there's going to be a substantial value on processing data quickly I think considering AI and your projects would would be would be a great move but so what do we do with this data sparsity problem but synthetic we actually grow data so we grow data in two different ways one is 3d modeling so the elephant on the left and the AK-47 on the right are we're built by our team of 3d modelers that can create a creature or a weapon or an object or an insect and then render data from that hundreds of thousands or millions of frames in order to train an AI on an object that we don't even have maybe any real pictures of the other data that you're seeing here though is another sort of generative data that cancer data on the left and the chest XPRIZE and the ships from satellite data and the elephants from drones those are all completely synthetic data that are imagined by an AI in a similar fashion to if you're familiar with the NVIDIA's website this person does not exist if you're not go to it and hit refresh a couple times a new person pops up that looks completely real you can't tell it's not a real person but it's synthetic data and that person has never been born and doesn't exist on earth and in a similar fashion you can grow any sort of data conservation data medical data satellite data here's an example of an implementation that we did with our synthetic data pipeline is we built this conservation intelligence portal in collaboration with National Geographic but effectively what this does is it we decided that we weren't going to fight the connectivity challenge and try to make camera systems that communicated over laura or something something complex right out of the gate we were going to count on the fact that global connectivity is increasing and there's off-the-shelf camera traps that run on 3g and 4g that you could distribute into an area or you could use there's some other camera traps out these days that all relay back to a center point that you can then wi-fi up or satellite up as well so what we decided to do is build a system that was cloud processing on the on the cloud as it gets these images from from these connected camera traps but what our system does is it basically builds a time domain map of what it's seen from a series of cameras deployed in the field so this in this example these are deployed in florida part of the panther project in florida and what you can see is we can detect when animals are seen when people are seen when vehicles are seen and when weapons are seen as well we have a weapons detector portion of our ai that can alert rangers not just if there's people in a park when they aren't supposed to be but if they're armed and what they're armed with as it changes you know the the danger of their response so um but as an example um we're zooming in at 9 a.m. here where we see the people walking the ai can pick up uh you see it does a pretty good job at putting a bounding box around each person it believes the trailer is a vehicle because the wheels there and then reports the probability back what we can do with this though is um take this a step further and not just look at people in vehicles or animals but actually break it down species by species so our tool that we're building out um automatically collects each image of a species and if it hasn't seen that image before it knows that it's in a different category and automatically buckets for us in a new bucket so that we can start to uh teach the ai to recognize species even if the ai has never seen it before and that's kind of our solution to the fact that there's so many animals that you might see in camera traps so many different environments and so on and so forth so our novel piece of this through generative ai is to allow the ai to effectively know when it finds something new and then learn from that um but here's a good example of some of the animal detects this is in florida still but you can see um on the bottom there we can detect it as an animal but then further break it down into a species or in this case a meta species as deer and then we could break it down further into male or female and so on and so forth so um whether you use synthetic data or 3d rendered data or whether you find enough images of objects or animals in the rainforest i would uh you know suggest that you take a good strong look at ai as a tool that might allow you to really um you know process through a bunch of data very very quickly with ai you could put 100 camera traps out even if you had to go get the memory cards back or fly a drone over and upload them off of um off of wi-fi or something like that or long distance rf if you were able to uh you know deploy a large number of sensors can image sensors but then also rip through them automatically um as time goes on uh you'd be able to collect a large amount of data and have it down to species level so wanted to show you a good example of what we do when there really is no data and we have to go ahead and create the data so we have a project going on right now with national geographic um in the Sumatran rhino sanctuary in indonesia where we're building an ai system to try to find the Sumatran rhinos that are not in the sanctuary but are out still in the wilds there's only about 70 Sumatran rhinos left in the world so if we don't get them into this large sanctuary area it's unlikely that they'll continue to breed and this species will probably die off so finding these last few rhinos in this tremendously large area in indonesia has been pretty impractical the the tracks that they leave look like tapir so finding them and they're pretty reclusive um so trying to find them uh you know is like looking for a needle in the haystack so um i don't know if you guys are going to play the video on that side x-priser yep there we go and you can turn the volume off if you will cool so here what we did here to solve this problem is we actually have a 3d scan of harapan the Sumatran rhino and the Sumatran rhinos sanctuary i captured this with national geographic by building an array of 24 cameras that all fired at once and built the 3d model of the uh of the rhino you know millisecond as it walked in front of it we can take that 3d model and our 3d team which worked on dead pool and walking dead and where the wild things are and some netgeotv shows reanimated it by adding bones to it in a similar way that you do for visual effects for movies but it's a full 3d animal that we can now rotate and pan around and look at from every angle so we then went ahead and modeled the indonesian rainforest environment so um we built up uh you know a couple regions uh full of the representational foliage and the water and mud wallows that the rhinos like to hang out in and from there we could reinsert our digital rhino back in the environment have a move around through the environment interact through the environment and by doing this we could now take millions of synthetic camera trap images day images i are night images all sorts of different angles with the different occlusions and change the you know the appearance of the rhino and that allows us to create a robust data set for a creature that there is not a robust data set and finally make an ai that can distinguish automatically in the camera between tapir and and rhinos and our plan with that is we'll be satelliteing data back whenever we have a high probability of a rhino we'll compress the heck out of that image and send that image back for human verification um i will pack back to my slides here here all right oops all right um so uh can you still see my slides i'm uncertain if we can hear if it switched um i don't think we can see your slides right now all right stand by stand by fixing okay cool uh can you see them now now we're yeah all right good deal so uh the other thing that we can do um do a lot of it may be applicable to some of your applications in the rainforest is you can think about imaging from above um what i'm going to show here is an example using synthetic data but regardless of synthetic data or not you know imaging about from a drone at the top of the tree canopy and looking at bird species with ai might be an interesting application to get a fairly good species count um early in the game and with limited processing um what we did here though is we augmented a data set of elephants taken from drone and low altitude airplane and we wanted considerably more elephants in order to build a train an ai that could recognize elephants uh even in complex situations so um half of these elephants are actually synthetic and the ones in bounding boxes are synthetic imagined elephants so these elephants were never born they don't exist there's no these aren't real images of them their shadows aren't real the trees around them aren't real every pixel in those red bounding box images are completely imagined and compare those to the actual elephants you can see that the ai even learns to grow shadows and other complex features so i guess the takeaway there before using the results of this is that don't be discouraged by the fact that in your application whatever it is in the rainforest or conservation you probably don't have enough data whether it's by low shot learning techniques that you can find on github for ai these days or whether it's by generating synthetic data um on your own or with a with a group that does that um there's a lot of uh mileage that you can get out of ai these days and by going ahead and getting that extra data you can really increase the accuracy so as an example we worked with the non-profit save the elephants to process some data that they did from aircraft and what you can see is um even in these uh you know incredibly distant elephants so you're looking at a digital image that's about 40 megapixels in resolution at the full screen slide but you can see even the elephants off here in the distance as we zoom in they're really blurry they're just a few you know maybe dozen pixels across but you can the ai actually manages to pick up every elephant in the situation it's because we trained it with so much synthetic data that the our ai is probably seen more elephants than exist on earth because we can continuously just create synthetic elephants from different angles and the terrain around them and my favorite picture is um even the human annotators working for save the elephants missed this one but you really just got an elephant butt beneath the trees and that's that's the only elephant in this entire scene that the uh and the human annotators missed it and went back and located it after the ai found it so I guess yeah the takeaway is is um you know really think of ai as a force multiplier that can massively expand your campaign to look for species or to work on conservation problems even outside of this challenge whether it's looking for animals with snare wounds whether it's looking for species that um there's not enough ai data to really identify in all these cases you know give ai a shot even if you don't think there's enough data there's a lot of tools out there that will probably surprise you and will probably enhance your project quite a bit thanks and over to Dan great thanks Corey um so I um I mean Shah's presentation was sort of so comprehensive and insightful that I'm sort of like well do I even really need to to go we even sort of look the same as a white dude with beard but I'm going to charge on because I like to hear myself talk um I am uh Dan Hammer and I'm a managing partner at a creative agency that built product for environmental organizations and we work in all sorts of environments we've built a marketplace for carbon removal from regenerative agriculture and a platform to measure plastic waste from satellite imagery um but most notably for this audience and for this prize I had co-founded and helped to build the first few versions of global forest swatch which is a um a site to monitor uh identify and monitor uh forest cover loss from satellite imagery and uh basically everything that I've I've done after thereafter here has been uh founded on this one principle that we had sort of this insight that we had gotten from looking at the user logs early on this has turned into a big much bigger project than than I think any of us ever expected when we started to work on it in like 2008 and this is some of the user logs from 2015 through 2018 about two years worth or three years worth and this the line indicates about the the number of unique users that came to the site every day and it hovers around 1500 to 2000 users but that time series is punctuated by these massive spikes in usership that can go up now to 50 000 people in a single day and we were looking at these these logs and we were trying to figure out like why why there were these spikes and then how to lift the whole baseline up to the level of those spikes to increase the amount of people that were using uh data about how the earth's surface was changing especially if something is important as as forest cover loss throughout the whole globe it turns out these spikes correspond to when a journalist used the data in a service of reporting on an environmental or humanitarian event that is before on this website these are pixels that light up on a screen you know red or pink pixels in this particular case that indicate forest cover loss but there's all sorts of types of forest cover loss that mean very different things to to humans and so what was required in order to get this out into the world in a way that people actually engaged with was that additional context around around that data and so forever after we've been just trying to figure out ways in which to tighten the loop between the data that we can observe be it from satellite imagery or from from other sensors we tend to work with satellite imagery because it's this globally comprehensive comparable and compelling source of information there's all sorts of data that needs to be contextualized in order to show why forest cover loss in one area means something very different if it's in you know protected indigenous area so for the last four years we've been among other things we've been working with investigative journalists to bring satellite imagery into into the narratives and here are a couple that we had provided the data for or the visualizations for and it's working you know one a notable example was working to identify the the foot building footprints as they changed in the northern china for these Uighur detention centers where Uighurs are the minority muslim group and and we could show that you know the chinese government said uh we're not building these anymore and we looked at the satellite imagery and we're like yes you are i can see you doing it and we measured it and published it and this was that data was was was measured and identified by two guys sitting in a coffee shop in berkeley to be able to refute the claims of the chinese government and it's not because we're particularly good at computers it was that uh this this data source is really compelling if if uh in context and we were helped we were that bridge to context and it can be done for thousands and thousands of these applications actually one that just published today which is really cool here so check it out was around um sand mining and the effect of sand mining on the like broad landscape changes they're just digging up the whole the whole earth for sand mining um but same thing where we sort of continue to do this work um and it's not just about investigative journalists this type of storytelling and it's easy as a data i my background is a data scientist it's easy to gloss over storytelling it's easy to think well i'm going to finish the algorithm i'm going to finish the data set and then i'm going to go present it in the work to the world but there are all these intermediate stages and products that are really uh valuable and important um to do and i'm going to show you an example of that which is sort of methods environmental data story that i think is really valuable in order to communicate the work uh and to to iterate on that production design um where the those lessons can back propagate into the design of the algorithms which is uh something that was new to me uh but the the idea here is that these this type of design and data science combined is really important for a whole vast array of environmental uh contexts from farming to you know environmental sustainability governance metrics there's all sorts of ways in which uh the design and data science is is that final piece that's really important in order to turn this into a digital product as opposed to honestly a vanity project that sits in some dusty corner of the internet forever after um so i'm going to show you um an example of what a method story looks like for a project that we're working on right now this is not having to do with the with with the rainforest but what we are building is a way in which which sort of amounts to global plastics watch which is to identify and monitor uh aggregations of waste from satellite imagery it's very similar but unlike what we had done before which was to package this up into a website uh when when we were done with some sort of global run what we're doing is we're explaining these methods to to everyone else so that we can identify ways in which to make our algorithm better more efficient uh and faster um without having to sort of present the whole finished product uh and just say world take this this is what we've done take it and run with it but rather have these types of conversations rather than stories as andy revkins said yesterday uh which is you can do in an operational way through these environmental data stories so i'm going to sort of show you what looks uh it's just sort of a tour through the issue i'll send this out as a link if you guys want to see it i'm going to just skip through it because the content here isn't nearly as important as the form in which we presented so this is sort of early results and methods uh usually when you see these sorts of reports about environmental reports it's uh describing some event that has already taken place it's something that's a a big deal and newsworthy but what we're suggesting is that this is sort of a visual report on a methods paper that you might see in a you know optimistically the nature magazine or science magazine for example uh but that this is a really important way in which to express results so you can get feedback and actually design the algorithms in the best way possible for the people who would actually use them later so what you're seeing here is just a quick description of what training data is and what and how and how we separate areas with plastic aggregations versus those that don't and now we're going to sort of like go into a quick presentation of like what remote sensing is and how that interacts with deep learning in a way that most the people that we are going to the people who make decisions about plastic waste also can sort of engage in so here you can see all the band or the bands that we use for these plastic to identify these plastic waste sites from satellite imagery and now we're sort of talking about what classification means to people who don't study machine learning or data science you know how we'd identify plastics from no plastics from the in these web in these uh in this application we sort of show what the impact is and then how we verify that impact part of this storytelling is not just that this is magic but that there are real people making real interpretations with these data so you can actually see in Bali where we tested this out you can see it from um from uh street view and then also being able to describe that once you can identify these plastic sites you can monitor them because the footprint changes all the time these are all things that from the outside we didn't know when we started and we need to test our ability to figure out whether or not they're valuable and then we've run this for the algorithms that we had produced for Java and Bali um already uh with the sort of idea to be able to take this to the world the thing that we learned already from being able to publish this out to the stakeholders uh this story and we've heard a lot I've heard a lot about storytelling the power of storytelling yesterday but it's not just for the finished products for these intermediate products here what we've already learned is that we don't need to identify with high precision exactly where these sites are yet what we need to do is we need to limit the search space for human intervention for human labeling of this data if we had our if we had designer algorithms to be like highly precise we would have wasted a ton of cycles uh on um we would have wasted a ton of cycles on on basically creating tech that was irrelevant and yes I'm pretty good at creating tech that is irrelevant but it'd be much better to make sure that this will land and the way in which we can we can have this land is not just by throwing it out in sort of an intermediate prose paper but but doing this visual storytelling to bring people along in the methods so that they can help design it for the most efficient most effective route so if I just sum up you know I don't really like preaching but preaching and I might be preaching a choir here but I'm going to preach anyway which is that if I just sum it up into one sort of compact takeaway I would say early on bring on a designer a graphic designer a product designer a uiux designer something to be able to communicate these data products that you're producing before you're done get it out into the world and tell that story about how you did it so that you can adjust on the back end early on so that is me I'll turn it back over to someone else awesome thanks Dan and Corey Fabian and Shah I think now there's time for Q&A so if anybody in the audience has questions I've been sent a couple and just to kick it off several of you made really compelling cases for the use of AI if you haven't used AI before how would you recommend I get started are there particular resources you would recommend or how would you approach that Corey you want to start with that one yeah I'll jump on that one if you haven't used AI at all before and are trying to process image data I would look to one of the big cloud service providers like Amazon Microsoft or Google and each of them have a AI tool that doesn't require any a priori AI knowledge we're on Microsoft Azure with our tool set so I would recommend Azure's custom vision is the name of the tool set you can effectively upload images it prompts you to draw bounding boxes around the things you want to find and then it trains it and then you can now send other images to it via a simple web URL in order to do AI prediction and that sets a really great way to get started if you're more of a developer type there's tons of great tutorials on there on PyTorch and TensorFlow the two leading AI frameworks but yeah they're starting with one of the cloud providers is a really easy low low input way to go and they all give you free a couple hundred bucks for the free cloud minutes if you sign up too awesome you know I just want to jump in really quick I did want to make another just point for the rest of today before before we get too far into this this afternoon check out the agenda online and it's a reminder that afternoon session is a zoom meeting not this webinar so after this session we'll be switching over to a zoom meeting so grab that link in the chat so that you have that to switch over and that will be more engaging and participatory so back to questions you mentioned working with open source projects what are challenges and opportunities for companies and teams to have to look to attract funding to scale their open source projects and maybe also extend that question to the importance of just open source some takers yeah I mean I can start with that I think I found open source to be like a really compelling method of scale and getting people to kind of help on a project that wouldn't necessarily help in the past and so you know we do a lot of work with the hardware community and they really appreciate the open source side of things but like if you look there's there's a lot of there's a lot of opportunities for you to contribute to projects or even leverage projects on on your own and I think especially once you start looking into things like machine learning and edge sort of stuff there's a huge amount of resources nowadays through like edge impulse and a lot of the other organizations that have recently started out where they're putting out courses and other sorts of like materials because they're really trying to push this sort of this sort of stuff forward so I you know I would I would do a good kind of review of what's out there and if you're looking at at using a certain kind of technology then look at evaluate the field and see what's available both like on a proprietary standpoint and understand what those lifecycle costs are associated with that and what you gain or lose out of using those proprietary systems and then also look at what like the the open source equivalents are of those in some situations it's going to make sense to go with like maybe the more established proprietary type of solutions and in others it's going to make sense to go with the open open source solutions. We in the work that I do always move towards the open source side of things because part of the mission of the organizations that I've started is to help to expand knowledge and that includes in like developing and then open sourcing that sort of information but but I do understand that like to actually get the data that you need to get sometimes like the open source tools aren't necessarily going to fulfill the need and you have to you have to leverage the other ones so really think about your solution in in a more system and kind of holistic sort of way when you're when you're trying to design exactly what you need. Awesome. I think I have a question here for Fabian and Dan and possibly other guys as well but given your background in the government and the new administration in the U.S. what do you see the new administration doing to support rainforest conservation if if for U.S. citizens what should we be advocating for and possibly there's a tech angle to incorporate into that question as well in terms of how can teams be thinking about developing their solutions to influence policy? Well I will just start by saying that you know it's a whole brand new era from the political standpoint and the policy standpoint here in the U.S. today we officially rejoined the previous agreement which you know as we all know of course limiting greenhouse gases emission does involve promoting a nature based nature based solution to carbon capture so anything from agroforestry to restoration and conservation projects and along the same line the President Biden administration has pledged to join and agree to protecting 30% of the United States by 2030 so this framework that I talked about the first 2020 global biodiversity framework when it comes to leveraging technology to help influence policies again you know and then then you know as done that so we can talk more about it but there's been billions of dollars invested in observing systems particularly of this publicly available remote sensing satellite uh uh constellations that are out there and so you know learning by example how to tap into this huge investment from the public sector pair that with AR cloud compute and and and come up with not just data but the stories to dense point right so packaging all those insight that you can derive from publicly available data in a way that is accessible to policymakers so that there is not only an intellectual understanding of the issue by an emotional reaction to it that's why it's it's it's a real win-win yeah it's not data that's going to change hearts and minds unfortunately if it was then everyone would believe in global warming right so it really is the storytelling so whether the story maps that David Gatzen was talking about or the the compelling stories that Dan was using mapping and visuals to create I mean to me the science has to you know it has to stand on the foundation of science of course but it's the storytelling that's going to get politicians involved and get you know the general public and other practitioners to care I think so if you're if that's um you know a goal which I think is a great one for your ex prize rainforest efforts I think lay heavily on the storytelling and take Dan's advice and get a graphic designer and some uh UX designers for your website and the like and make it make it a compelling story because that'll live past the project and on on my account I I know very little about uh US policy as it relates to the Amazon deforestation but I I do know that you can't change what you can't measure and we know woefully little about the way in which the earth is changing right now and big decisions are being made blindly like like weirdly blindly and it doesn't have to be that way so across the board more information about environmental justice or carbon accounting there's just uh it's just shocking to me how little we know about um sort of the the the way things are changing especially as they relate to policy changes we have modeled estimates rather than directly measured estimates which won't respond to behavior change on the ground we just won't know if they're being effective so uh I brought your question which I don't know the answer to to a question that I do know the answer to um but I know I'm talking so that was great sorry um Peter I just I want to add to what what Dan is saying because I think this is such an important thing that I've realized when it comes to conservation um and even a lot of the science that's happening out there like the amount of people have this when I talk I always hear people make this comment but people have this assumption that we're sitting on a wealth of data when it comes to these sorts of systems and what's happening in the systems what exists currently in the system how the systems are changing over time and this could be beyond brain force you know fisheries the oceans all sorts of stuff and and the truth is we're not we are not sitting on a wealth of data about this and these policy decisions are made based off of very very small very specific datasets and um and part of what's so exciting to me about the rainforest XPRIZE is like maybe we could start making decisions as as as governments as communities that live within the the rainforest based off of off of datasets that are actually representative of what we're seeing there and I think that's really the the exciting thing about um about this this challenge yeah all excellent points um kind of building off of that a few more questions uh actually two came in that were very similar you've all introduced topics you know well and what tech could be applied what other technologies what other current or emerging technologies do you feel are most relevant to this or could be leveraged I would look into EDNA pretty heavily I think I mean the opportunity to take fairly small soil samples for example and and discover what species are there on the microscopic insect side or have been there on the you know the trace from from urin and the like I think that's a compelling tool that I would look into and there are now a few companies out that are making small portable EDNA devices that are you know fit in the palm of your hand and connect to a laptop or connect to a robot if you're so inspired I would imagine but I would yeah I'd look hard at EDNA um but don't you know not an area that I know a lot about Fabian no I was just gonna say I mean the EDNA I mean it's a wonderful tool the limitation is going to be uh sort of the the baseline data right I mean it's one thing if you if you don't if you don't know what type of species are you in your ecosystem to begin with EDNA is kind of like useless right because you don't know you have no reference to to base whatever observation you have to but that's something that hopefully will will evolve and and could potentially transform the field we didn't really talk a little about about that depending that Cori has done some amazing amazing work around that which is sort of the acoustic sensing particularly for the rainforest it's such a wonderful proxy to a bird of the city health particularly when you have restoration projects where you begin with almost you know nothing and and in words the invertebrates coming back as you implement you know restoration strategies so that's something that I'm particularly excited about yeah you know I would add I think EDNA acoustic new camera technologies are all very interesting areas of development currently I also would would maybe stress that for the teams that are competing in this it'd be interesting to think about how you build autonomous systems that aren't directly impacting the measurements that you're sort of taking so if you're thinking about drones how do you build a drone that doesn't scare everything away that you're actually trying to to observe I think that's an area that like there's a lot of work to be done and might be interesting to see how that works out through this any recommendations best practices for scaling new technologies well you heard Jonathan Bay this morning just you know similarly to bring a designer bring someone who understand business because hardware I know people like Shari know all too well building hardware is really really hard and you gotta have a very very sweet business plan right up from thinking about scaling whatever technology is not something that you think after you're done with your prototyping and you find out that your technology is actually potentially working same as the story thing it has to be you know pre-baked into into your entire approach and I'd add to that like where you can use cloud architecture do I mean the scaling on the cloud mean to add more compute resources for example is can happen automatically or at the click of a button scaling hardware means you know sourcing components manufacturer testing all that sort of stuff so um I get excited about conservation projects that are leveraging cloud resources and satellite data and that sort of stuff that it's easy to easy to keep scaling yeah the other I'll build a little bit on Fabian's thought too just beyond even bringing in like the business sort of thing I think in being successful in developing these sorts of solutions this is a mistake I've made a lot is very quickly identify what you don't know and find the people to help you that actually know that sort of thing so a lot of times a lot a lot of kind of effort and time is wasted on on trying to focus on something or learn something before you sort of develop it there's a lot of people in the world who would be very excited about participating in a rainforest price and using the expertise that they have and in code or product design or hardware design and all these sorts of things to be part of your team so like don't try and do it all yourself find those people bring them into the team and build it like with a with a with a group of people and you could do some really remarkable things so business is important all the different tech pieces are important but really think about how you can bring in the right people to build what you want fast so you can get the testing as quickly as possible I think that's really important I think that's a perfect segue into indigenous knowledge and local communities and how teams can work to co-design technologies and I'd love to hear some just thoughts comments suggestions recommendations for you know there are 50 million people living around the world in tropical rainforests who harbor immense vast quantities of knowledge about these ecosystems and you know what are what are some we talked about this a lot yesterday but in a tech standpoint just co-designing methods and and recommendations if no one else was to talk I'm happy to say it so so the the projects that we take on when we take them on we make sure that we're partnering with with an organization or a community that's like well within the area that we're working and so a lot of the times that ends up being indigenous communities or organizations that are working working within indigenous communities and so when we're looking at designing a solution those conversations are happening at the very beginning and we're making sure that like the things that we're making are not going to be you know built from hardware that you can only find in California and you know the written in a very sophisticated kind of English languages so that the users have to be someone that comes over from there you know into these sorts of areas and so that stuff has to be critical to every single part of what you're sort of what you're building and when we do open source we think okay we're building something that's open source we're not just going to pretend it's open source let's let's like talk to you know the universities in the region or industry in the region and figure out how we can get people there that are actually building on our stuff and take take our stuff over so one way that I like to think about things and this might not work for everybody is every project that we take on I expect to be out of the project in five years or less so like how do we build systems that work for those communities help gather those sorts of data and they they enable the sort of environment that like community members can have a hundred percent of the ownership of that project in five years and that changes a lot about how you design these sources systems and so that's one thing to kind of think about that might not be the end goal of some of these rainforest enterprise teams but it's really important to make sure that indigenous communities are not just kind of brought in in the last like four weeks of the project that they're actually like a core part of the the component in the team moving forward and I know that the X I know that X prize is going to kind of help facilitate that relationship because one thing you don't want to do is just like it's it's in some situations it's very difficult to get in contact with these sorts of communities and so facilitation of that is an important thing as well. Very well said I'm happy to wrap things up I think on that note and we are we after this break we will be starting right back up with an IPLC session and indigenous peoples and local communities session with four phenomenal panelists and so I'd just like to thank the four individuals here just who have done amazing work are great friends and just thank you so much for sharing and really look forward to collaborating in the time to come and figuring out how you guys can further support teams competing. Thanks Peter good luck to everybody in the competition can't wait to see what you come out with. Yeah definitely good luck. Thanks see you guys. All right so with that we're going to transition a little bit all together and we're going to move over in half an hour we're going to pick back up with a zoom meeting and so if you check out in the chat or on our summit landing page you can see the entire agenda for what is to come also in the chat if you've already registered for this afternoon you already have the link now that it's totally open if you are in this webinar right now and haven't yet attended you can click on the link that is in the chat and we will stay on for a couple minutes to ensure that people have access to that link and we will reconvene over in that in that other meeting so thank you all for attending thank you for our speakers thus far this morning we're really looking forward to this afternoon we have an amazing lineup of panelists and you'll be able to interact and engage after they give their presentations a little bit about their work so thank you all so much again if you register by the end of today we've had a number of teams do this you receive a 25% off discount registration is open until March 15th but if you get in today you get that discount so please check out our website rainforest.exprise.org and after a short break we will be back and see you over in that zoom meeting so again check the link in the in the chat and if you have any questions or get lost please send an email to rainforest.exprise.org so thank you all very much and we'll pick back up at 11 30 a.m pacific time see you soon