 All right. Hello, everybody. We're on for another awesome artwork piece to showcase from the in-person sessions at Reclim Open. I'm here with Alex Carney, who is an alum from Skidmore and is currently at Swarthmore College. Dartmouth. I'm sorry. I was talking to some Rachel Winchester from Swarthmore yesterday, so I apologize for that Dartmouth right now. Fun fact to you, Dartmouth is a domain of one's own school for us too, so it's all in the Reclim community. But if you want to just introduce yourself a little bit and talk about what your art piece was at Reclim Open, it was super cool. So I'm really excited to hear more about it. Yeah, absolutely. So thanks for the introduction so far. My name is Alex, and last year I graduated from Skidmore College, which is a small liberal arts college in Upstate New York. I studied math and physics, and then I graduated from there and then went over to Dartmouth College, where I got a degree in engineering, and now I'm returning back to Dartmouth in the fall to start a PhD program in engineering sciences and quantum computing. So I, at the start of last year, I was still at Dartmouth. I was doing my engineering degree, and I was part of this student organization or like club. I don't really know how it really classifies, but it was this opportunity on campus called the Dolly Lab, so D-A-L-I Lab, and that's an acronym for Digital Applied Learning and Innovation Lab. And actually the Dolly Lab is an opportunity for students who are interested in software engineering and computer science to build actual projects for people in the community. So how it works is people in the general Dartmouth community, whether it be like professors at the school or people affiliated with the nearby medical center, or even just somebody who lives in the area and wants to build a company or start a product, they'll pitch their idea to the Dolly Lab. And their ideas are almost always like a mobile app or some sort of website, some sort of project that falls under the realm of digital art or digital products. So something that a computer science student or a graphic designer could work on and build. So what happened was for the first time in the history of Dolly, a doctor from the nearby medical center, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, came in and said, I want to build a physical product with Dolly, with students at Dartmouth. I want to build a new type of microscope that does all of its processing digitally and doesn't actually rely on any lenses or light refraction or optics, essentially. And the people at Dolly who review projects that are incoming were like, okay, what are we going to do with this? I think what actually happened was he kept on coming back after being either pushed off or denied, and eventually the people at Dolly were like, all right, let's bring it on and just see what happens. We have no idea what this is going to mean for the lab because it's a physical product. So I was lucky enough to get accepted into Dolly Lab right before this project launched. And so I was on the project for its first term along with another developer and two UI UX designers and a project manager. So there are five of us. And on day one, we meet with our sponsor, who is this super excited, super energetic pathologist from the nearby medical center. And he has a couple of sketches and an idea and a pitch that's all we're given. And the pitch is essentially this. He does external research or through the hospital on using AI algorithms to act as sort of like a co-pilot for pathologists who are diagnosing cancer and other dangerous diseases from a biopsy. So how it works is you'll get a slide. Basically how it works is when you go into the hospital, they'll take a piece of your skin that could potentially be cancerous or have some sort of problem. They'll take it out, they'll do a bunch of processing on it, freeze it, and then slice it up into these minuscule slices of cells. Those will be put onto a glass slide. And that is where you end up with what you would traditionally associate with a microscope, which is a glass slide with some tissue on it. Then those are given to the pathologist. The pathologist puts that under the microscope and looks at it. Our doctor was doing research with these, this different way of managing that pipeline by digitizing those slides. And what that means is that they would get that physical piece of tissue off of your body, but then they would put it into this advanced machine that would take a super high resolution image of that slide. And so now when you have that image, you can put the slide away, you can freeze it, you can move it away, and now you have this super high resolution image that you can use instead. And his research was using AI algorithms that use convolutional neural networks as sort of like image processing to look at those high resolution images and see if it can detect any anomalies or more importantly simulate the effect of different tests on those or on those tissues. And what I mean by test is that if a pathologist cannot just look at a diagnosis and make a decision, they'll send it off to a lab and apply different chemicals to it in order to see different reactions that the tissue has. So, you know, if this tissue reacts with this color to this chemical, then that means that that's a potential marker for this cancer. And that's why they're professionals is because they know all of those different things. So they were trying to build AI algorithms that could simulate the effect of these tests, which would have numerous incredible benefits if that was possible to put into an actual production workflow. So he comes in and says, I want to use these AI algorithms to help me diagnose the cases quicker and not have such a large turnaround time if I have to send it off to a lab. But the only way to view these images, these super high resolution images of tissue is on a mouse and a keyboard and a monitor. So basically you load up the image onto your monitor, you click and drag your mouse around painstakingly moving around the image and these images are enormous. You know, each one is multiple gigabytes large. There are hundreds of thousands of pixels with a wide and height. And so you need to scroll in on your mouse to zoom in all the way and then you have to start dragging up and down. And he was just like, yes, it's not possible. So he showed us, he showed us some, some people that he had talked to in other departments, where other hospitals where their department actually paid the money to get all this software installed so that they could diagnose cases using the online mouse and keyboard and monitor. And the doctors didn't do it. They were like, no, we want to use our microscopes. That's what we're trained on. And that's what has been refined over hundreds of years to be the most ergonomic possible user interface for viewing cells using viewing glass slides with cells on it. And so our doctors said, you know, why try to pull everybody off to a new platform if we could just meet them halfway and build a digital microscope. And so that's what the smart microscope is. It is a user interface for interacting and viewing with these high resolution images of tissue that makes no compromises. You have the exact, well, almost the exact same interface as a normal microscope, but everything that you're looking at is completely digital. And that's really hard for people to understand the first time when they actually use this thing. They would pick up the slide and say, like, there's just a red square on here. There's no tissue on here. Where's the tissue? Like, where's the slide? Is there a QR code on here? So how it works is there's a computer inside of the microscope, and that computer stores as many of those high resolution images as you want, let's say 30 on there. You can load up one of those tissues to look at on your little ocular device by using our separate tablet application. So our tablet application is essentially, you can scroll through it and then you can tap on whatever image that you want to view. It will show up on your oculars. Yeah, so you can see me looking through the oculars right now. There's actually a tablet on the other side that you can't see, but on the tablet, you have all the image, all the thumbnails for your different cases. You'll scroll through, tap on one, and it will show up in front of your eyes. Then to move the image, it's exactly as you would move an image on a normal microscope. As you can see, my hands are on the stage, and when I move the slide around on the stage, the image moves in front of my eyes. And how it's doing that is there's a little red square on that slide. And people are like, what's the red square? Is that a cell? No, that's just essentially a tracking system where there's a camera normally where the light would beam down on the normal microscope. So right above where my hands are, there's a camera there. Whenever you move the red square around, we use a computer vision algorithm to track the location of that red square and use that data to move the image in front of your eye. And what that ends up, the final result of that is a haptic feedback where you move the slide with your finger and just moving it around that stage, and the image will move around in front of your eyes exactly in tandem. And then the second thing that we developed was it's a little hard to see from this angle, but underneath the stage, there's a little spinny thing. We call it a turnstile. The reason that we have that is because on a normal microscope, you can zoom in and out using different objective lenses. So essentially, you'll be moving your slide around and you can flick the carousel over and that will move you to different zoom levels. We figured we're actually able to do whatever we want when it comes to redefining our user interface because we no longer have those lenses. And so our team of designers did user research, did user studies, and we actually found out that it was potentially more ergonomic to have the turnstile be underneath the stage instead. Because since it's all digital, you can have whatever sort of control that you want, meaning we had an amazing balance of trying to copy what a microscope already does and coming up with new ways of interacting with these cells just based on our own design. So we had a wonderful team of designers. The lead designer, her name was Lauren Goyette, and they figured out that if we had the turnstile be below, it might be more ergonomic and it's just a new way of doing it. So how it works is when you flick that turnstile underneath the stage, there's a system of lasers in the base that will track the location of the new state and then zoom you in or out based on just some sort of internal processing. So it's a combination of engineering and design. And that's kind of what I've enjoyed the most about working on this project is that it's a beautiful design and our designers were not only working on the UI of the application itself, like the tablet, which is what they're kind of used to, I guess, because that's what normally Dolly the UI team would work on. They would work on the user interface of an application or a website. But we also had like a product designer. And this was the first time in Dolly that we had a person who was applying those same exact design concepts to a physical product and having it 3D printed. So we were looking at here is all completely 3D printed and then just pushed together with screws and it's in a full assembly. So sorry, I was just gonna say that's super cool. On this side, I grabbed this photo from your submission. Ben Harwood at Skidmore sent me this photo from the Instagram. So I just thought that was a really cool visual to kind of show show what we're looking at. But then I want this is what we had a reclaim reclaim open on the ground and Brian Alexander breathing fire and brimstone as the smart microscope is paving the way for the future analysis and artificial intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm super interested if you want to talk more about that 3D printing aspect of the of the microscope that that's really cool. Yeah. So essentially how it was working was we were really I think we really lucked out with the team that we had for this project. And I think maybe the Dolly hiring squad kind of figured like, oh, we've got a physical product coming in. Let's try to hire people who are not only, you know, not only of the skills that we're looking for normally, which is, you know, computer science web development and UI UX like app development, but also maybe some people in the engineering department. And it just happened to work out that I applied and I had digital electronics knowledge. And that other lead designer that was talking about Boya applied. And she was interested in product design and had taken product design courses. And so what that means is that she was using SOLIDWORKS, which is a 3D like computer aided design tool that almost every engineer knows. And how SOLIDWORKS usually works is you would design some sort of machine part out of metal to be milled out in a machine shop. But now with the rise of 3D printing, instead, you can directly export a SOLIDWORKS file, which is just some sort of computer aided design file or rendering that you build in software, you can directly export that to a file that can be read by a 3D printer and just print it right there. So Dartmouth has a makerspace and conveniently it was adjacent to the Dolly lab. So we would just go back and forth between, well, actually, I guess we wouldn't really go back and forth. I stayed in the lab and did my coding on my computer and Lauren was and her design team was in the makerspace planning things out on SOLIDWORKS with these huge engineering like blueprints and then sending it over to these massive 3D printers that would print everything piece by piece. And then she came up with the ways of like using screws to assemble everything together. So there's an assembly step as well. That's not just a single, there's probably like five or six that are all put into a final assembly. So Alex, one of the things I'm wondering is so you got this person, they came in, they gave you the pitch, you both or the team went back, they built this pretty remarkable instance. And I love the way you talk about the ergonomic ability turnstile to switch. How did the sponsor or the person who came to you asking you to build it when you gave them the prototype or the actual smart microscope? What was their reaction? Like, were they like your geniuses all hail? You know, the team, how did that go? Also really quick, does my mic sound different now? It does. Okay. And it's, I assume it's better. It's better. Okay. So unfortunately, I guess the system defaulted to using my webcam as my mic rather than my actual mic on my headset. That's all right. But anyway, you sound great both ways. Okay. But anyway, so yeah, what was his reaction to this? I mean, this guy is so excited and so high energy that I think that has been one of my favorite parts of working on this project. I mean, you show him literally anything and the guy will just start like bouncing with glee. And that's not even an understatement. And so it really made it, I mean, it made it a real treat to work on this project because he knew what was a big contribution. He kind of understood the magnitude of what we were doing and he understood when we were presenting what we did during the week during our weekly sponsor updates, he could pick up on exactly what was a major contribution, what took a lot of time, and what was a big thing to drive the project forward, which is sometimes rare because those contributions would be like some computer science thing like, oh, I was able to use this package with this package to make this thing work that normally a sponsor who's not really as integrated into technology and software would say, okay, why didn't that take five minutes? You know, it's kind of the there's kind of a running joke in the software world where sponsors and program managers have these crazy requirements and have no idea what it takes to build things. And it makes it difficult to work with because like, you know, maybe a project manager will say, oh, that should only take five minutes, right? I mean, that doesn't sound that hard. Or like a sponsor will say, I want this, this, this and this and this and this without knowing what's really possible when it comes to software. But although our doctor was not a software engineer or did not really have a software engineering background, somehow he knew enough about the field and as a whole where he was able to know exactly when we were making big contributions, even if it didn't sound like something or when maybe we needed to pick up the slack a little bit. And maybe we were falling behind. And so I know that the the super high energy and excitement was maybe a little bit of a deterrent to other people on the team because we were full time students doing this. This is just a project, we were getting paid. This is a paid position what the Dolly lab offers. But you're taking a full load of courses, you're trying to pursue your degree, trying to have fun, you know, so for a lot of people, it was a little bit of extra stress to have somebody so invested in this. And it's like, well, I'm not that invested in this. And so we actually had some some pretty high turnover rate with students coming in and off of the project. But for the people who stuck along the whole time, I think it really was his excitement that that kept us so engaged with the project. Because you could you could literally see that this is we're doing something that matters. And I'm still working with him now over the summer, because we are going to we're going into our first round of clinical validation study. So he is preparing a set of cases that are going to be used by doctors on three different mediums. So the microscope, the smart microscope, a traditional microscope, and the mouse and keyboard. And he's going to put it into an actual paper and go from there. And what that means that this was not just an idea from him, like this is something that he has put money, time, a lot of energy into the passion project that he thinks, and now the rest of us think can really, really take off. And so having a passionate sponsor is is just who believes in the project just kind of trickles down to the whole team. It's funny too, because that passion seems to have found its way into your presence in general at Reclaim Open. I have commented on before I will again, I mean, you were a great presence. You brought not only like amazing fair art fair project, which we're looking at, but also a great talk on Reclaim Cloud, and how you use that in the students. So what was and even I think you ran into by coincidence, certainly not by design, a histologist, who probably saw your project and what you were doing and was like, you know, this is another way. It was an interesting coincidence just to kind of remind us that there are people in this space who have immediate interest and possible need of what you're creating. So what was Reclaim Open like for you and like the energy for the work you're doing? Like, how did that work, you know, for you? Yeah, so coming to Reclaim Open, first off, actually, I think the story of being invited to it is also funny. So I'll start there. So basically, there was my, so I graduated from Skidmore two years ago at this point, and I had this senior project that I had built as a web application for the physics department to use to aid their research. And I kind of built it. I deployed it on Reclaim Cloud. Some of my professors were using it, but the project kind of not really died down, but I kind of, you know, forgot about it, especially once I started working on the microscope. I had a friend at Skidmore who was a year younger than me. His name was Sten, and he's like just as passionate and excited about like everything as I am. And what happened was he, without me knowing at all, him and Ben like sent in that my senior project to Reclaim Open like as a here's something that we could present as Skidmore. I had no idea. I had no idea. And then I went and visited Sten for his birthday, and he was like, Hey, do you want to go to a conference? And I'm like, what the heck are you talking about? And he was like, Yeah, I took your senior project and me and Ben, we submitted it to this conference and it got accepted. You can go present it. And I'm like, I was just here. I was dumbfounded. I thought he was joking with me, but Sten's the kind of person who was just so excited about everything that he'll do that. And then he threw in, Oh, and by the way, as soon as I graduated from college, leaving and going back to Europe to live, so you're going to just go with Ben. I'm not even to go there. And I was like, Okay, that is okay. We have a word for that in American, right? Like it's getting thrown under the bus, right? Yeah, it's getting thrown under the bus. But like, if the bus is an awesome opportunity that I would have never known about in the first place. So I guess it's like a good getting thrown under the bus. I don't even know. You didn't make a new catch. You didn't make a new idiom just for that. And so I was like, Yeah, let's let's do this. I mean, when in my life is something like this just going to be presented to me without me even knowing that it was presented to me. And so Ben and I started preparing and we came to reclaim open. Well, actually, before that, I was like, Okay, if I'm going to do this, I might as well also talk about what I was doing a year before, and what I'm doing currently, and what I'd like to get more help with when it comes to using cloud computing on the microscope. And I guess I can talk about that a little bit later on kind of the future of the project and how cloud can continue to have it go into its next step. So I come to reclaim open. And I don't really know what I was expecting. I had never really been, I had never been to a conference before. And I thought, I mean, I had all these ideas in my mind. I thought it was going to be like a kind of like a massive convention with like people like different companies with like stands everywhere to just like walk around from the different stands and just like introduce yourself. I don't know. I mean, maybe some conferences are like that. But reclaim open turned out to be more of like a community meetup of a lot of people who had connections to each other through all these sorts of ways. I mean, Ben knew a lot of people from like Twitter just and never had met them. And it was it was more of this is of a community meetup where everybody has similar values and things to share. And it was a really, really wholesome environment to learn. Now, me coming in as a complete outsider, not really knowing anything about the web before like, you know, 2019, I guess, and not knowing a lot. It meant that the first couple, the first day and a half was like, really overwhelming, because I was like, what the heck is WordPress? Like, I've heard of WordPress. I've made my website with Domains of One Own. But like, why are these people talking for so long about like WordPress and blogging and all these arguments about these different platforms that I didn't even know existed. And then I very, very quickly realized, wait, these people have the same exact passion that I do for the things that I'm interested in, and they have a lot to share, and I have a lot to learn here. And so I started, well, I was always going to the sessions, but I started really, really appreciating what everybody was doing in their own sphere of the internet. And I realized that it affects a lot of people in ways that I would have never expected, because I've kind of had such this, such a bubble that I was in of just, you know, other students, and being like, oh yeah, let's build our own applications or whatever, without realizing that in the educational space, there's a whole entire world out there that I had no idea of. So this was an amazing opportunity for me to get a glimpse into, you know, just, it's not just my generation that has enjoyed and has contributed and has had the internet be a massive part of our existence and our identity. And that has been a thing for decades now. And it was a little bit, almost like a culture shock, but I was really, really glad to learn so much and see so many passionate people and talk to so many passionate people and hear about so many cool projects and listen to the amazing keynote speakers. And yeah, I mean, it was an incredible opportunity and I having an amazing time. And I'm glad that my presentation was at the very end, but I'm glad that I was able to get acclimated to the culture and meet everybody beforehand because that meant I could be totally, totally comfortable during my presentation and be like, yeah, I mean, I can just, I can be just as passionate to everybody else because I'm just mimicking what I've already seen so far. So all that passion and all that excitement that I had in my, in my presentation at the end, that was just mimicking everything that I had seen before. So. And you nailed it. I mean, absolutely. Like you, you sold the cloud better than we did. It was, it was pretty impressive. So we have a couple of minutes here left. What is your vision of the cloud in the future and what are some final words we can get from the ever insightful Alex Carney? Yeah, so the cloud offers infrastructure as a service. That's one of the very many things that it does. And what that means is that you can have these computing devices that don't have much power at all on their own, but can be hooked up into a network that handles the computing for them. And now with the massive increase in AI and what I'm currently studying in, in school, quantum computing, you can have these decentralized computing centers for, you know, map hundreds of graphics cards, crunching, you know, AI so that you can make your chat GPT write you a funny story or a quantum computer that's in some basement that is, you know, veiled to be the coldest place in the universe doing your computations. And you can access that from any device through the cloud. And I'm working with, you know, the smart microscope, it's a Raspberry Pi. It doesn't have the capability of running AI algorithms on its own. But that's what the cloud is for. Having a network up there and being able to sell this infrastructure, have all these microscopes connect through the cloud. And so there's a variety of things that the cloud brings. But I think really offloading the infrastructure as computing needs become more and more and more demanding. You can have smaller and smaller computers like Internet of Things in your home that connects to a cloud database. You can just kind of reduce the amount of physical computing that you need in the moment, but have decentralized everything that you need. So, yeah, I think the infrastructure is really the biggest thing. So that's basically how the smart microscope is going to be working, right? You have very affordable, reproducible Raspberry Pi running the code that you developed. And then you're offloading a lot of the hard GPU CPU number crunching, etc. to the cloud, which is then just taking that work and reproducing it for the user. Does that make sense? Is that fair? Yeah, exactly. It's awesome. You marry innovation, 3D printing with the cloud on top of just an amazing learning experience at the Dolly Levitt Dartmouth, which is commendable. And you talked extensively about it at Reclaim Open, and we loved you for it. I mean, that was great stuff. So, again, I just want to personally thank you for coming, but beyond that, for being such a kind of a bullion, fun, really open and amazing presence. I mean, in some ways, I said it at the conference that I'll say again, you kind of, for me, personified the joy and the possibilities of dreaming of Open. So, again, thank you for coming. It was great, Alex. Yeah. And once again, thank you so much for having me. I never could have, like, I totally could have never imagined what sort of experience I would have had, but I had an amazing time and I learned so much. Right. All right. Amazing. Yes. Are we going to wrap it, Meredith? Yeah. So, we've got some awesome more repremiers of all the sessions at Reclaim Open starting this coming Friday. So, after this premiere is Friday throughout the month, we've got the rest of the sessions coming up and some awesome keynotes throughout the month as well. So, stay tuned. And thank you again, Alex, for coming on to talk about the smart microscope and your experience at Reclaim Open.