 Hi everyone, my name is Peter Hulahan, technical lead of our X-Prize Rainforest. I'm also joined here by my fellow Rainforest Operations team members, John Griceberger and Allison Clower, who will be sharing different aspects about the competition before we get into our team pitch presentations today. So welcome. Just a few ground rules as always, please just make sure that you're muted throughout this to not interrupt. We're going to have the Q and A function open, so feel free to use that throughout. And then this is also being recorded so that it can be shared afterwards. In general, and as always, if you have any questions about the competition, feel free to reach out to us. The email address for our team is rainforestatxprize.org. And just for those new to Zoom, though, at this point in 2020, I bet that's very few people. The Q and A function is just down at the bottom of your screen if you hover over the bottom. So today, we're excited to host our second team pitch webinar. We'll share some updates to the competition first. You'll get to know a few of your fellow teams that are either interested in competing or already competing. And throughout all of these different events, one of our key objectives is to foster collaboration, both between individuals or institutions or organizations. Anybody who may be interested in competing, we hope to provide a platform for you to convene and come together and hopefully establish a really impactful team. Just a quick agenda before we get started, we're going to talk about why you should compete, how you can join the competition. Again, some updates to the prize. A little bit about our competitor agreement that teams have to sign when registering. And then we'll get into the team presentations, team pitch presentations, followed by an opportunity to live pitch. So we did this last time as well. At the conclusion of the prerecorded team pitch presentations and time permitting, we'll open the floor to individuals or teams who are interested to present their pitch or their requests for support to present live. So we're going to try to keep that just in two minutes. It's an opportunity to speak out. If you didn't have an opportunity to submit a prerecording and Allison just posted in the chat a link to sign up for this opportunity. And you can do that now or throughout, but please see the link to that Google document and we'll make sure that that is accessible to everybody. So if we can make sure that's a live link. And just make sure your Zoom is up to date and we will call on you at that time at the end of the pitch webinar. Next slide. And I'll turn it over to Allison for a few details on why and how to compete. Thanks, Peter. So I know some of these next slides might be a bit of a refresher for anyone who has joined one of our webinars before. So I'll try to go through them fairly quickly, but anybody who's new, this is definitely important information that we want to get out to you. So why compete? So XPRIZ has been around for over 25 years. We've been running competitions throughout that time. And these are some of the benefits we feel of competing in an XPRIZ competition. So there's the opportunity for technology verification, also specifically to this prize, access to internationally renowned testing grounds, creating and expanding industries. If anyone knows about our first XPRIZ, then sorry, XPRIZ, that really created the private space industry. We're also bringing experts and communities together. Throughout the competition, you'll have opportunities for media exposure, as well as fundraising opportunities, access to partner technologies. As we've mentioned previously, we have partnered up with Esri. They're one of our partners and they're offering, once you register, they're offering their full suite of tools and software to you free. We have also additional opportunities there as well. And then again, specific to the XPRIZ rainforest competition, the opportunity to join a global movement to revolutionize rainforest conservation. So team expertise. So you'll see throughout any XPRIZ competition, teams come in all different shapes and sizes from startups, universities, indigenous people and local communities, NGOs, companies of any size, high school students, college students, communities, families, anyone. This is actually a picture here from some junior high and high school students that competed in our Ocean Discovery XPRIZ and they won the NOAA bonus prize in that competition. And we're really excited that we have some students from the same high school competing in the XPRIZ rainforest, as well as one of our other competitions. So we really mean that you can come from anywhere. If you have a passion to compete, there's an opportunity for you to join this competition. Teams can also come from a variety of backgrounds from scientific to technical, like robotics, AI, biodiversity, remote sensing, any type of background. We really expect this to be an interdisciplinary competition of teams joining together from several different backgrounds. So this is a map here of our registered and our preregistered teams. So as you can see, we do have teams interested from all over the globe. Every continent is up in Antarctica. So if you're a team, a small team and individual, if you're interested in competing, but you don't have a full team, there are several teams that are looking for more expertise to join their team. And you can see that we have teams from all over. So there's most likely a team in close proximity to you. And this is just a breakdown of the map that you just saw. So you can see some of our top countries with several teams that are interested in competing, Brazil, Canada, India, the United States, but you can also see that there's several other countries with teams that are interested in competing as well. So just steps for finalizing team registration. First one is gonna be to create or join a team at pop.exprice.org. You're gonna wanna make sure you complete the registration form. And then of course, sign the competitor agreement and pay the registration fee, both which are due on March 15th of next year. And that's a $1,000 registration fee. Again, I know some of this is a refresher, so I'll hop through this quickly. But you can, to get registered, you can either go to rainforest.exprice.org, click on the started team, and it'll take you to the registration page. You can also go directly to pop.exprice.org to register. You'll see this pop up. If you've never gone on, you just wanna make sure you click register. You'll receive an email directly friend pop, and you'll click on that where it says confirm your account. That's where you're gonna go in and complete your registration page, which was set to you. And then I just wanted to show you guys a few things while you're on pop. So there's exciting resources in there. Once you're in there and click on my team, you'll come to this page here. So I just wanna highlight two areas. One is the activities page. That's where you'll find that exprice rainforest competitor agreement, where you can sign that document. That's also where you'll go in to pay the registration fee. The next tab is the resources tab. So as you guys can see, there's a lot of good information on here. We're also continuously updating this section here, but I just wanted to highlight a few sections. One is the competitor agreement. So you can go on here and view the full competitor agreement before if you're not ready to sign yet, you can view that over with your team. Also the informational webinar. So anytime we host a webinar, we're always gonna put the recording here on pop. So if you weren't able to join, you can always go back and view it there. And then the team pitch webinars. So this is our second team pitch webinar. We actually hosted one in September. So there's still teams from that team pitch webinar that are still looking to add additional members to your 13th. So make sure if you weren't able to join or haven't had a chance to view that, that you go check out our first team pitch webinar. And then of course, as soon as we are done with our webinar here today, we'll post this recording to that site as well. So we talked about pop. There's some new features, maybe since the last time we spoke, but this team pitch webinar is one way that we're trying to foster collaboration and help with teams matchmaking efforts. But there's also some opportunities on pop for that. If you're an individual, you can actually go on there. You can search for teams who have notified or posted that they are looking for certain skills. So if you have certain skills that you're looking to join a team, you can go on there. You can put in what skills you have and all the teams that are looking for an individual to join their team with that type of skill will pop up and you'll be able to go in there and ask to apply to their team if you're interested. Also, on the flip side, if you're a team and you're looking for certain individuals with the type of skills that you need to join your team, you can actually go and search for certain skills. And any individual who has listed that skill on their registration page will pop up and then you can ask them to join their team. And like I mentioned before, we're always adding additional information to the resources town. And a new feature that we added is the ability to message your teams and individuals. So like I mentioned earlier, if you're a team or an individual and you have a certain skill and you're looking to add to your team, you can actually, as an individual, you can message the team, let them know why you think you'd be a good fit to join their team. And then vice versa, as a team, you can actually go to an individual and you can message them and let them know why you think they would be a good fit and should join your team. One more item here is a slap. So this is a new tool. Some of you might be familiar with it. We use it here at XPRIZE to communicate. It's a messaging tool, just something else that we wanted to add that'll help foster collaboration amongst the teams. So this tool will allow you to communicate in an open forum type of concept. So after, at the conclusion of this webinar, all team leaders who are registered and pop will have access. So you'll receive an email from Slack within the next couple of days to join. So make sure if you're interested in this, that you do go on to pop and you register. Whether you have a team or not, make sure you go on there so that you have access to Slack to be able to communicate in this way. All right, so the competitor agreement, we won't go into super detail here, but just wanted to touch on a few highlights. This is the primary agreement between XPRIZE and the teams. It supersedes any past agreement. All teams must continuously meet these requirements throughout the life of the competition to be eligible to win the prize purse. The competitors agreement is available on pop right now in that resources section that we went over. It's also available on our main website for your reference. And then it has been updated to the activities page for those teams who have already paid in our register, ready to sign the competitor agreement. It is due on March 15th at the closing registration. And I just wanted to highlight here that we cannot review any teams qualifying submission without their signed competitors agreement. So you have to make sure you get that sign in order to submit your qualifying submission. All right, and I'm gonna go ahead and pass it over to John to go over a couple of prize updates. Thanks Allison. I'll start things off with a partner update, a strong ecosystem of supporters and partners is critical for this prize competition to be successful. We have a couple of official partners at this time and a couple others in the works. Esri is an essential partners of ours for this prize competition. They are their global market leader and geographic information systems. And they offer the most powerful mapping and spatial analytics technology out there. And we're happy to share that Esri has generously committed to offering every fully registered team in our competition free access to their suite of tools and resources for the duration of the competition. The governor's climate and forest tax force is another important partner and GCF's longstanding relationships with government officials, civil society and indigenous peoples and local communities will strengthen the competition by increasing visibility for team recruitment, facilitating engagement at the highest levels of government and by offering the opportunity for involvement to indigenous peoples and local communities within their network. The next updates pertain to our advisory board and judging panel. Some of you may know that we've recently finalized our advisory board and you may recognize a few people here. We're thrilled to have this distinguished group of advisors representing and supporting the competition. They come from a variety of different specialisms across the sectors of technology and conservation and they will contribute their wisdom, knowledge and guidance at various points during the prize competition. For additional information, you can go to the XPrize Rainforest website to view our advisory board announcement and read their bios. Our judging panel has just been solidified as well. We're excited to work with this deeply experienced and talented group of experts working at the highest levels of academia, leading conservation organizations, prestigious research institutions and grant-making organizations. And these are the technical experts who will serve as impartial and independent evaluation team for all aspects of this prize. The judges will award the points and select the teams that will proceed to each subsequent round of the competition, including the winners of the grand prize as well as the winners of the bonus prize. We also wanted to share today that we are in process of formalizing an Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities Working Group. And we're collaborating with several organizations to expand our work in this area as well. This group is core to XPrize Rainforest and something we wanted to establish early to guide and steer key elements of this competition and to ensure it's run in an inclusive way. But also so that the technology developed is done in a way that is useful on a local level to ultimately further conservation efforts in an effective way. In terms of timeline, we're working towards finalizing the rules and regulations. This is a key document for teams that provides essential information and details that will govern the competition. And we're looking to release this in the next few weeks. March 15th of next year is an important date to mark down on your calendars as that is when registration closes for the competition. Closely following the close of registration, you will have the qualifying submission deadline. And for this competing teams will submit documentation which outlines their approach to the competition. The last thing I'll highlight on this slide is that in the second quarter of 2021, we will organize a virtual team summit. This event is an opportunity for competing teams to get to know one another, the XPrize Rainforest team as well as our judging panel. In terms of upcoming events, if you're attending the virtual AGU fall meeting next week, we will see you there. It's billed as the largest international earth and Spain's science meeting in the world. Also next year, our team is organizing a two-day virtual event in February to generate excitement around the prize and support team recruitment. It will feature a number of high-profile speakers and interactive sessions. I will be sending out additional details for that event in the coming weeks. So please stay tuned. Again, the rules and regulations will be released in the next few weeks. We'll also be hosting a webinar in the new year to provide an overview and answer any questions. The qualifying submission will become available for paid and registered teams in the new year as well. And teams will be required to submit their proposal in early May. I'll now throw it back to Alison to kick off our team pitches. Great, thanks, Sean. So just before we get to our team pitches, these will be the pre-reported videos that were sent in. I just want to remind everyone, if you are interested in pitching live today, whether you're an individual or a team, you just have an idea or you're looking to join a team, please make sure to sign up. That link is in the chat now. We'll go to those right after we do these pre-recorded pitches. And I just wanna thank all of the teams and individuals that sent in their recording for this today. So let's get started. My name is Erin Linebarger and I'm the primary point contact for this team. I'm here representing NAIA Systems, a small robotics software R&D firm based in Pittsburgh, although we have remote employees all over the U.S. I myself work for Rhode Island. NAIA has experienced developing autonomous capabilities for a wide array of military, public safety and industrial applications. For the qualifying submission phase, we will contribute one robotics expert, that being me, and one machine learning. For the later phases, we'd add one to two robotics experts. The NAIA team comprises experts in both off-road and aerial autonomous vehicles, as well as in computer vision and machine learning. We can develop the full autonomy stack in-house for navigation to perception to decision-making. As roboticists, our approach is currently focused on the robotics side of the challenge. We will combine aerial and ground vehicles, not necessarily the ones pictured here, so that we can survey any canopy layer. Off-road ground robotics is challenging to both the terrain and the structure, which complicates perception. However, NAIA has an existing baseline autonomy stack for exactly this purpose. The work that needs to be done this challenge is to develop specific perception and navigation algorithms, tuned for the unique needs of a biodiversity sampling mission. We will develop a computer vision and machine learning package for the Biodiversity Survey, and we will develop an exploration strategy for optimal biodiversity sampling. An exploration strategy is how a robot decides where to go next, and it depends on relevant exploration factors, which can be simple principles like minimizing energy extended or maximizing area coverage, or more complex factors like maximizing position accuracy. For this challenge, there will likely be specific exploration factors that depend on what data our rainforest researcher counterpart requires, and that will be a necessary part of our partnership conversation. This leads me to... We are seeking both investors and a rainforest researcher partner. We are open to working with any interest to rainforest researchers. We are particularly well-suited to partner with a group that needs to survey the ground layer. NAIA Systems has over 10 years' experience developing software for autonomous off-road and aerial vehicles. We do our own on-vehicle testing as well. Having worked with a diverse array of vehicles, we have new robotics industry partners, which will enable us to choose the ideal ground and aerial platforms to survey the rainforest without disturbing the ecosystem. Hi, my name is Erin Limebarger and I'm the primary point of contact for... Alison, you're on mute for the moment. Thanks, Peter. Sorry about that, guys. All right, thank you so much, Erin, with NAIA Systems. Next up, we're gonna move on and we're gonna go to Dr. Minerva's team. I am from the Center of Environmental Policy, Imperial College, London. I don't have a team, but I focus on artificial intelligence AI for tropical forest mapping. And essentially, that is what I'm interested in talking about today. I'm Dr. Minerva Singh and I'm an Imperial College Research Fellow. My expertise lies in tropical forests, conservation, artificial intelligence, and Earth observation. At present, the main aim of my research is to map the spatial and temporal evolution of forest fires in Amazonia. And yes, eventually I want to scale up and focus on different fire regimes and dynamics in other tropical biomes. My approach so far has been to use a combination of freely available spatial data and AI techniques, both machine learning and deep learning to map forest burns and their properties. For example, as you can see in this image, Amazon forest fires, I'm mapping the spatial distribution of fire intensity. So warmer colors mean greater fire intensity and that is what I want to map at a multi-decadal scale and not just for 2019 and for Amazonia and beyond. So the support I'm seeking is, well, support with implementing large scale deep learning models on dense time series data to study how the tropical forests have evolved over time and space, both in terms of deforestation and their fire dynamics, applying for research grants and funding with collaborators from academia and industry. I have worked with academic partners from different institutes and with industry partners and acted as a consultant. And I'm also looking to perform collaborative research and produce high-impact peer-reviewed publications. Now, the support that I can offer other teams includes Earth observation data analyses, geo-spatial analyses, including working with Google Earth Engine and other softwares like QGIS and R and so on. I can support with machine learning, implementation and artificial intelligence and tropical forest conservation. I really look forward to meeting like-minded academics and fellow professionals and actually producing interesting papers and results. Thank you, Dr. Singh. All right, and next up, we're gonna have team EarthShot Labs. My name's Troy Carter. I'm a co-founder at EarthShot Labs and we're developing the first global land use map for nature-based climate mitigation. We have assembled a really great team of open source contributors, about 200 people leading carbon, water, land valuation, forestry and other tools so that we can bring the level of solution to the scale of the problem. Climate is the biggest issue that we have right now, ecological restoration and specifically reforestation in degraded landscapes, including rainforests. I'm Troy, my partner's name is Patrick and we have a bunch of amazing project leads from around the world, people from five continents and all categories of diversity. So a little bit about our technology. So we are currently working on cutting-edge carbon sequestration potential maps, analysis of current stocks based on satellite imagery from Jedi, Landsat, Hansen, Hyde, so historical Landsats and ones that are currently being implemented and also estimates of rate of growth. We're using a combination of satellite imagery, ground truth data from historical records and also LIDAR to do basically have test cases to check our models. We're also developing tools for water restoration and implementing large-scale analyses of small projects, so reservoirs, swales, aquifer regeneration tools that are sort of conventional permaculture technologies that have never been implemented at large scale before. We're also working on land valuation, conservation forestry management tools and APIs so that anyone can contribute to these issues. What we need, we can always use more GAS, Google Earth Engine, software developers, domain experts in coil, in carbon, soil, biodiversity, hydrology, land valuation, forestry, et cetera. We have an amazing Slack channel that you can participate in with a pretty active community and you can join a project team or just contribute your expertise. We're always looking for additional funding, grants and impact investors will be raising a seed round for our public benefit corporation in the first quarter of 2021 and then we'll also be releasing a carbon-based conservation forestry fund and we'll be looking for LPs over the next year for that. Also, if you're another NGO or tree planting organization or an organization that wants to research how to use nature-based carbon solutions to offset your footprint, please send us a note. And we have a pretty great team of experts so we can offer a geospatial LIDAR, Google Earth Engine, GAS modeling. So if you're a tree planting organization or on the ground implementer doing reforestation efforts or water restoration and you want additional data from satellite imagery or LIDAR or any other way to prove to the world that you're doing something good, you can send us a note. We also, our team has pretty deep carbon finance and offset verification expertise through VCS and other verification agencies in the voluntary market and compliance-based markets. So that's also something we can offer this community. Thanks so much for listening and please reach out if you have any interest in EarthShot Labs. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Troy with EarthShot Labs. So it looks like we don't have any takers today for the live pitch opportunity. So just before we close this out, just a couple of reminders and just wanted to say thank you for everyone who joined us today as well as everyone who sent in their presentations for the team pitch recordings. So just a couple of reminders, you can find, you'll find this team pitch webinar shortly as well as our first team pitch webinar on pop. So if you go to pop.exprice.org, if you're already registered, check in the resources section. Also on our YouTube page, so we have our team pitch webinars as well as our first introduction webinar and additional videos there. So you can just go to the X-Prize YouTube page and check out Rainforest X-Prize there. Also just wanted to note that we are going to start doing office hours. So I know we've hosted webinars where we talk at you but we'd love to host some office hours starting next month in January. We'll host them once a month until the end of registration and then we'll continue to host it for registered teams up until the qualifying submission. So you'll receive more information on that. But if you're interested, if you have any questions, feel free to come to our office hours. And as always, you can email us at rainforest.exprice.org. All right, thanks everyone.