 Let's take a moment and enjoy this nice photo of a rhino in its natural environment. And actually if you look closely there's a second one hiding right here. Now this photo was taken about a year ago by a colleague of mine when in Africa doing a electronics development project which turns out to be a rhino tracker to save this magnificent animals. Just a quick fix here. So a bit of an introduction. My name is Luca Mustafa. I'm the CEO of Yarnas. We are a small company about 15 people based in Marburg in Slovenia where we develop hardware solutions. So we develop connected products for industrial and medical applications and a lot of the things we do are based on open source. So diving a bit into the history about 15 years back just straight out of high school I started working on wireless projects. So doing wireless mesh networks really getting access to the people in various places and open source was my learning ground. This is where I learned how to build things, where I learned about technology, electronics, software and all that. And that has been with me pretty much the whole my professional career working on firstly really what I like to call the religious open source phase where everything needs to be fully open sourced to the extreme. Now the more prognetical side of things where we can build all the components and the core technologies in the open which allows us to create cool projects and very helpful applications out in the field. So while we do a lot of these things as our core business at the same time we're very mindful of our environmental strategy and this is maybe an ask for all of you do you have one and if not why not have a thing what you can do as an individual as the company or as the organization you're in. For example what we're doing is we're producing more energy than we use on the company level we have solar power plant there and are constantly improving things. We ask oral clients can we build a better device for you or can we make this choice which will be more long lasting while it might cost slightly more and the same time we also subsidized the development of nature conservation projects and that's what I'm talking about today. So we work with a Dutch organization called smart parks sorry I see the logo is hidden in the corner up there so the smart parks organization is a Dutch nonprofit which specializes in taking the technology to the field so they are the ones that introduce the solutions and we work with them to protect wildlife with passion and technology where we develop the technology part. So the story I'm sharing today is an interesting story for which one unfortunately names and locations had to be changed to a large extent to protect some very guilty partners at this point. However we can have a look at this image and see what we see here the smart parks team obviously on top of a hill somewhere in Africa setting up a laura base station to create a network for all the different sensors to talk to but what else is on this photo there's about two rhinos hidden somewhere in the bush probably three to five lions a bunch of wild deer wild buck and many many other animals what we don't realize is there's also a small platoon of dedicated rangers these are normally guys in the field with literally their boots and a uniform maybe they share a rifle amongst five people and also there's one or two poachers somewhere hidden waiting to shoot an animal they can sell and the reality is poachers in these locations are just regular people they might be cousins from the rangers that are trying to protect the animals and they get a year's worth of salary by just you know shooting one animal and selling onwards what they get from that so in the local environment you know that's a very very interesting dynamic and we can't pretend that with technology we can change this but we can make it slightly better so with the smart parks for the past five years now we've been creating the open color ecosystem it's an ecosystem of hardware devices best practices and ways of deploying this in the field such that we can give a fighting chance to the people trying to protect the animals and the animals themselves diving quite a bit deeper into this we end up realizing that a lot of the animals in the field are worth more dead than alive just the worth of a rhino or well the rhino horn in the market you know sold to the finer consumer can reach hundreds of thousands of euros per gram it's worth more than pharmaceuticals then cocaine then gold and any other thing for a very pseudo like assumed benefits you know there's no proven benefits to having it however there's a whole ecosystem behind and with technology we cannot change the people the practices the governments the environments but we can empower we can enable the organizations the people on the ground trying to protect these animals to have at least a better fighting chance to do this by looking on a way more technical level the open color device architecture is a system based on a low power microcontroller running Zephyr Arthos why Zephyr Arthos well because it has all the necessary building blocks we need so as you know having my ears had on it why going the Zephyr out instead of you know free Arthos or any other things is it's one of the open projects which does not have only its core function which is an Arthos real-time operating system but on top of that there's a bunch of building blocks which are common features for example like a logging backhand a sensor backhand and a lot of very you know technically well-defined things but it turns out those are all the things we kept building before using Zephyr Arthos again and again and again in each and every project so as a company we had some shared libraries we passed pieces of code around which could be universal could be publicly available could be open and this is a really excellent example what Zephyr is doing very well so overall that enables us to have also a common architecture for a whole bunch of devices you've seen earlier and this means we roll out better and products essentially better and way faster out to the field than if we develop them the old school way so to speak but what's the impact we know the technology can help protect animals but they it's really about giving the chance to the people using it so here we see a smart park steam in Africa setting up a network so as you can imagine there's a bunch of this conveniently placed hills above a flat field here where we can put antennas and all the sensors can talk to it in practice in the rhino this actually looks like that we have a rhino horn and I have a rhino horn here just to be very clear it is a 3d printed plastic rhino horn it's not a real thing it's not worth anything files are online you can print it yourself just to be very clear about that not to make a mistake so rhino horns you know start from about the size which would be the upper one and they grow much larger up to about the size so how to build a solution which fits in here well firstly a fun fact rhino horn is actually nose hair so it's nose hair with some glue kind of growing out that way and turns out to be a very hard and interesting substance you can actually drill a hole into it and put something in there that does not hurt the rhino they don't feel it but also because the rhino horn is growing in about two years this grows out so it's not permanently installed falls out and we repeat the process so every two years you have a chance to install a new tracker when the battery life is expanded you repeat the process and you know where the rhino is now given all the different sizes we start from very small which would fit in here pretty much in the size of a horn to the medium and the large size obviously photos aren't to scale where the large size would be this which is you know fits in a palm quite nicely what this gives us is the understanding of where the rhino is and hard to put things at scale but for example a rhino can roam an area which is a few days worth of walk large and the few people on the ground also need to walk a few days in a direction to cover that land and actually be present and when we talk about scarcity you know even looking at things on the map we'll see you know also a made up map not real situation there aren't rhinos here we can see that yeah there is a super large area so the person with the boots on the ground there needs to be roughly in the right area if they want to protect the animal and given that you have about 100 times too few people in place you really need to make sure they are at the right place so what do we do with the technology we track the animals so we where we know where they are we track the people so we know where they are we track vehicles helicopters all those things so we know where they are and the management of these areas they can decide you know you go there you go there we'll we'll all be in the right position but also we can see where animals hang about you can see the watering holes you can see how they walk around and if we look closely and go back to our story we can see a very very interesting point up on this map you will see this point here any guesses what happened here something like that yeah if we look at the GPS track we see that the rhino suddenly learned how to go straight so either the rhino learned how to fly at a constant speed in the constant direction was driving a car or actually it was not a rhino anymore and I need to warn you the next slide is really graphic so if you feel a bit sensitive about it no shame in looking away this is what happens the rhino is shot the horn is taken away usually with a chainsaw or a hacksaw or some really brute force method and if the rhino is lucky it's not alive anymore at that point but that's not for certain and while technology does not prevent this it makes it a lot harder a lot riskier and it gives a bit better chance for the animals to survive so the story goes because horns are tracked you find them in very interesting states when poachers try to get them in various metal cases or you know with other methods because they fear they fear that they're being tracked because horns transmit their location some poachers are caught data is used as evidence oh you know it's not I found this at the side of a road I don't know where it's from it has GPS track hey like you carried it from there to there so it's used in legal proceedings to crack down on this and make it harder and make it really a lot more difficult and a lot riskier so the practical outcome here is we have more coordinated efforts we have hard data to take legal action against people doing such actions but also this is a really practical use of a large number of open source components we all helped to build at some point to make a system like this work if we unpack it we see all the way down to you know Laura gateways some base stations running Linux to the whole communication stacks operating systems and even the designs of these trackers we all make that available so people can iterate and as the well I don't like to call industry but the nature conservation is a really really small field of mostly nonprofits and a few companies trying to support them being one of the most innovative fields out there because it's so much starving for new technology so as let's say a high tech company where we develop such tracking solutions for various industries we see that our rate of innovation in introduction of new technologies is the fastest is nature conservation it's the first place where for example Laura was introduced to track things out in the field it's very early on all the machine learning and other aspects is they're so desperate trying to find solutions with super limited resources and us as let's say technologies and developers you know often think that technology saves the problem solves all the issues it doesn't really but it improves the chances of people who are out in the field and to be really well connected we need to understand what they're doing so a bit about the future what's happening all these devices are getting smarter for example we have the capabilities particularly with time me ml and all the components that each device like really small real low powered years on a single battery can detect events you know can tell a difference between me having it a pocket and walking between the animal walking or something else happening we're in the development as the larger ecosystem of smaller trackers to fit on other animals even down to pangolins and very small four-legged in their devices and the constant drive is to make things better faster more power optimized and if we think bigger you know this reads almost like a children's story we take back some lessons is that we really need to understand the fields where we're introducing the technology and like you mentioned in some verticals open source is really hard for them to understand some feel threatened by it some don't understand it but then again we're likely they're outnumbered in what they're doing anyway and they're afraid of the change so we can take what we were all building and find the best ways to apply it but also to tell the world about it so thank you very much feel free to reach out if you have questions