Smart Talks with IBM: Project OWL

natural disasters, specifically hurricanes. It's a combination of hardware and software that leverages MESH network technologies and IBM platforms such as cloud computing, the Watson platform, and more. We'll hear from Brian Now, one of the co founders of Project OWL, as well as a Lisa Macklin of IBM to get a deeper understanding about the project, its origins and the long term goals, both for the Call for Code initiative

in general and Project OWL particularly. Now. I wanted to start the sentence that I'm speaking right now with the phrase the remarkable thing about this story is But it turns out I can't because there are too many remarkable things to pick just one. Here's a quick rundown. First, IBM has built a suite of technologies that are incredibly powerful. They range from cloud computing services, which give developers the

opportunity to take advantage of enormous processing power. You know, cloud computing is where you've got servers that are able to do processing on the back end, and through an Internet connection you can access that, so you don't have to have a supercomputer at your own disposal. You've got a virtual supercomputer in the form of these cloud computing networks. But they also have the famous Watson platform, which allows for an incredible range of AI applications that can tap

into all sorts of different processes. So you can think of this as a suite of refined extreme computing power. It kind of makes me tingle just to think about it now. Second, this story is about taking those tools and actually applying them to solve real world, hard problems.

It's not just that the tech enables cool applications. It's that like minded people who want to make a positive impact are finding one another and they're coming up with novel approaches to tackle these issues that affect millions of lives every day. Focuses on really big challenges. The theme for the first Call for Code in two thousand eighteen was natural disasters. The theme for this year is climate change,

so yeah, they go big. The third thing I find really remarkable about this story is that collaboration keeps popping up as an important component in the projects. Not only are individuals collaborating with their teammates, but also with subject matter experts and IBM professionals with deep knowledge and experience

in the technologies and the company's products. So so while we're looking at a competition framework, I mean it is a competition, the spirit of working together permeates the entire process. I sat down with Brian from Project Al and I asked him to walk me through his own background and how he found himself participating in the two thousand eighteen

Call for Code. A lot of times I think about how lucky I was to grow up at this particular time, UM, in this particular place, to have the resources I have and and the tools at my disposal. And what I mean by that is growing up like a few things

really inspired me to play around with digital technology. One was, you know, the accessibility of personal computers and UM the growing accessibility of the Internet, UM one of my proudest moments is I think the first real sophisticated thing I did with a computer when I was about eight years

old is illegally downloaded music with Napster. And despite the concerns um my mother had about that, I think it kind of opens your mind to this understanding that there's so many things you can do with digital technology, um that previously just weren't possible, uh in other industries or professions, careers, particularly things that are limited by the physical manifestations of the world around you. Of course, software is kind of you know, in a way I'd like to say, it's

like not real, right, it's just code. Um, and some other experiences too. I'll never forget. UM. What pushed me need to learn how to code originally was the first time I played, Uh, my favorite video game of all time was the first Halo. I mean, did you ever play that? Oh? I? Oh yeah, no, I'm I'm a big Halo Marathon fan. So yeah, um, first of all, amazing game, right, but I'll never forget when I played that, I thought to myself, this is the coolest thing I've

ever seen. I need to learn how to make things like that. Um. So I bought this book called three D Game Programming All in One and it, uh, it was like a thousand pages long and it's all about C plus plus video game development. So I thought to myself, Yeah,

how hard could that be? Little did I know? Um, but that was really an introduction and those kind of experiences that I mentioned from Napster, you know, playing video games thinking about how to build them, that was just kind of what I was doing through my teenage years and then even through college and well, I studied mechanical engineering. UM, I struggled to find an outlet for the work I

wanted to do. UM. You know, I distinctly remember applying in six months prior to my graduation and the six months after applying to almost a hundred jobs. And these weren't, you know, just random things that were within my area that I studied. I graduated with degreen mechanical engineering in four years, UM from the University of Rochester. And of all those applications, you know how many jobs I got?

How many? Zero? Yikes. So it was kind of at that moment that I was like, well, you know what, if this isn't gonna work doing a traditional route, I might as well just do something I'm really passionate about. And that's when I kind of dug back into coding a little bit and really peeled back the curtain on

the hackathon environment. And now, I'm sure you're familiar with a hackathon or the mechanics of it, and probably most of your listeners, but for those who are in a hackathons kind of just like a coding competition, right and and companies from all over the world will will put on these competitions, from IBM certainly too Poor sher Mercedes Benz to UH, the US government, UM, the Red Cross,

all sorts of organizations. And typically what they'll do is they'll say something like, Hey, if we're a car company, we've got this new a p i UM for you to build on our on our on our vehicles, and what we want you developers to do is come up with amazing stuff, be creative, build out something incredible, pitch it to us, and the best ones you're gonna get paid. And for me, this was like the coolest thing in the world because it put together two things that I

absolutely loved that I really couldn't find anywhere else. And that's you know, I'm a huge sports fan Philadelphia Eagles for life. UM. I also played soccer my my whole life grown up, and I'm a big fan of the sport. And I love that like innate competitive spirit, you know, it's just get on a field and go and compete and try to win. But I also love going back to the Halo and Napster thing, like just that interest to just build stuff, you know, come up with ideas.

And a hackathon I think is so unique because it's able to put those two uh perspectives together, the you know, the interest to just go compete in an environment at the same time do that while building incredible creative technology. And so for a few years I was hopping around um going to hackathons and and I kind of got a groove in it, started winning a few, making a career out of it, and one thing led to the next, and then of course competed in the IBM Call for Code,

and here we are today. I asked a Lisa Macklin of IBM to give an elevator pitch to kind of explain what the Call for Code is all about a little bit about the background for for the Call for Code challenge. And one of the things that of course, UH it is really important is understanding what matters to developers. And an interesting insight on developers is that eight per

cent of them code as a hobby. They work on coding projects at night, in the morning, in over the weekends, in their spare time, and they are inherently problem solvers. And for most software developers, coding isn't just a profession, it's really a passion. And one of the things that we really see also with developers is uh tremendous use of open source technology, and I think an interesting insight there is that developers enjoy working together collaborating on projects

which open source helps them to do. So in thinking about how can we help developers with their UH, their love of side projects, of learning and developing new skills, combined with the desire which is a long held focus of of IBM S is using technology for good, creating innovation that matters, taking the technology that we have with artificial intelligence and blockchain and others and using those to

really help make the world a better place. And we know that the majority of developers are interested in the same thing. Most of them, as they're working on side projects are doing work that has societal benefit. So that's really what created the UH. The spark behind ying the

Call for Code Challenge. We wanted to see what twenty four million developers around the world would do if they were given access to the technology and also an understanding of some of these UH major world problems that they could help tackle. So with Call for Code, where IBM is a is the founding member of Call for Code, we launched it UH in tighten with the David Clark caused the Linux Foundation of working with the United Nations, and we wanted to focus on something that was really

really important each year. The Call for Code was is a five year program and we started with a focus on natural disasters. We knew that this is an area that was an increasing problem around the world and one that technology could could help, and so in launching Call for Code in we asked developers to create solutions for these problems, and we were really blown away by the

amount of engagement that we got. We had over a hundred thousand participants in that first year, creating some three thousand software applications, and over the last two years it's it's grown tremendously. We had nearly two hundred thousand participants in the Call for Code nineteen and UH. What I think is really amazing too is we had participation across

a hundred and sixty five countries. So we saw a tremendous amount of of interest and engagement in creating these sustainable solutions, leveraging open source and working not just developers, but typically teams that involved other experts. We had teams that were comprised of developers and UH first responders, medical professionals, students, groups coming together to work on an amazing range array of problems. And as Brian would explain to me, Call

for Code stands apart from other hackathon type events. The IBM Call for Code UH focused on originally, well still to this day, natural disasters, although they've kind of segmented and focused even a little more under that umbrella. I believe this year's competition is focusing on climate change. UH

certainly has implications to natural disasters UM. And so one of the things that I think was really interesting about the IBM Call for Code UM apart from all the other hackathons I've been to, and one of the things that kind of left me frustrated with the hackathon community was,

you know, you go to these events. UM. Sometimes they're smaller, sometimes they're larger than the Call for Code is certainly a huge hackathon, um, but even you know, there are other in person events Call for codes at three month long, or at least it wasn't it might be longer shorter now three month long virtual things, so you can compete

from anywhere. But some of the hackathons I would go to, uh, like we would put three hundred developers in the basement of the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas for a weekend, and you'd like compete on different enterprise hackathons like PayPal would be their visa some other folks. Um. But what's so unique about Call for Code, and what I think really sets this apart is their commitment to actually see

the solutions through. And I think that's really important, particularly within the context of natural disasters, because so often that these hackathons you'll see great ideas or at least that first like nugget of an idea. You know, if great ideas are one percent inspiration and perspiration, and hackathon is

kind of like that one percent. The part of Call for Code that really impresses me and the reason I think it's the most important technology competition in the world today is the commitment to see the work through in the end to actually make an impact in the world, and I think that is fostered an exceptional community of developers. Like I said at the top of the episode, one of the interesting things about Call for Code is that

it brings together too seemingly opposing philosophies cooperation and competition. Well, Call for Code is structured as a competition. There's a deep culture of collaboration throughout the program. A Lissa of IBM explains, one of the things that really struck me early on is that, you know, the the open source movement is about collaboration and about achieving more faster by working together, and that also means that projects live on

in open source. So one of the things that really inspired me hearing from I participated in a number of of hackathons around the world. We do about six hundred of these every year, bringing developers and uh different parts of the world working with them together on their solutions.

And what I found incredibly motivating hearing from the developers is that they were excited that this wasn't a one and done, It wasn't you know, a twenty four hour hack where they come in, they create things, are great ideas, and then they move on. These are projects that can live on and be built out by developers around the world.

And that was also the thing in working with the United Nations that they really keyed in on, because there are so many software driven solutions that don't require lot of infrastructure, even things like you know, early warning systems for tsunamis as an example, if you have access to the weather data, if you have a smartphone, you can

get those alerts which save lives. And this is the type of thing that someone could create working on open source in one part of the world, and then it could be adapted for conditions in different parts of the world. Buy software developers virtually any place anywhere somebody has a you know, a laptop and a smartphone. And the U n was particularly interested in this because they saw the long term sustainability and in terms of how the developers

are working together. I think this is one of the things that really inspired me as well over the last two years, is seeing how these groups come together. And I think that Brian may have told you that the five members of the team that he's on with jacked oal from different parts of the United States and different parts of the world, and they met on a Slack

channel uh, and we saw a lot of that. UH. The The winner of of Call for Code nineteen is a team that at Barcelona based and there's a firefighter, a nurse and three developers. So it's different different groups collaborating together, meeting each other either in person or in hackathons or meeting virtually working on these open source projects, and they continue to collaborate over time. Brian confirmed what Alisa was saying describing how his team came together during

the first Call for Code. I had known a few of the co founders previously, we competed against each other at hackathons UM, but one of the founders of Project Owl, Magus Pereira, him and I had just met in the slack. I think digital technology and like meeting someone on a message board and Slack might seem like a little weird and different, right, you didn't run into this person in a room, you didn't meet at like a conference, UM, but it's really effective at putting people together who have

like minds, like skill sets, and like ambitions. And I remember Maggis had just posted some message about what he was interested in. We connected and had a call and I just still to this day distinctly remember his creativity, passion and interest in building unique solutions, and so even after one call, we we just kind of agreed, like, man, we gotta work together, Like how can we facilitate this because I think there's a lot you have to offer that you're interested in. And I feel the same way

about myself and the team we've already put together. So we I don't know if they still use Slack or how they do the collaborative piece, but the environment of all these developers showing up to just want to build something great while still inspiring people to have that competitive

nature um I think is a really fascinating experience. And IBM puts on call for code satellite events, so like many hackathons all over the world during the main overarching event, and this is another way to like plug in, try something quickly, see if you've got an idea for the bigger competition, and meet other technologists in the environment to

to really make this happen. This brings us up with what Project al would specifically focus on, which all revolved around hurricanes specifically with regards to what we did as we were going into call for code. Uh, we uniquely are.

Our original team of five was spread out across the United States still is today, but we were at the time, Um, Charlie was in Houston, Magus in North Carolina, myself, Terra, Core and Nick in New York City, and very recently at the time, Charlie and Houston had gone through Hurricane Harvey, a massive hurricane caused a lot of economic damage in Houston, and Magus during the competition went through Hurricane Florence, so, you know, and kind of the outset, we felt, well,

it seems like hurricanes are probably a pretty good thing to try to approach here. These have been quite a problem, um, And not only are they a problem that hits close to home for us, because we've all been through them, you know, even still to this day. I'm here in New York City. I live on the L Train. Hurricane Sandy ripped through New York City in two thousand twelve, and uh, they're still shutting down the L Train to

repair it for like eight years later. So the team knew what type of natural disaster they wanted to focus on next. They thought about how technology could help people

affected by a hurricane. So in the absence of being able to stop these natural disasters, we really couldn't do that yet um, and we can't do that now, and maybe in the long run there might be something there, but in the absence of being able to stop them, we felt okay, Well, what we can do is enable people to prepare for and deal with them as effectively

as possible. And the first obvious problem is that when a hurricane rips through it destroys everything, most notably the infrastructure to provide organization, whereabouts and logistics in a community, and that, of course is partly where the name Owl came from. UM. So our focus was really that if we could find a way to quickly, easily and cheaply bring back communications in a place that either didn't have it or lost it, that could be a really advantageous

solution to these communities. And while the immediate devastation left behind after a hurricane is playing to see, Brian's team knew that they challenge lasts longer than a day or a week following a hurricane, and that communications plays a vital role in that timeframe. I think it's important to note that particularly for hurricanes, though I suspect this is

true for most other types of disasters. To UM, the the majority of the death toll and the economic devastation occurs not during the immediacy of you know, the wind and the rain and the thunder. It's it's the long tail after. When you don't have roads and physical infrastructure, you can't get to places. You can't get to love

the ones, You can't get to medical facilities. When you don't have communications, you can't effectively coordinate to put the right resources in the places they need to be UM, nor can you contact loved ones to see if they need help. UM. Elderly can't get medications they need food. Food is not adequately distributed to the places that need

it most based on who needs what UM. So when these infrastructures go down, particularly the communications piece, you lose the ability for society to function on the plane that we are currently accustomed to. So their solution was twofold, create small, durable and inexpensive network hardware that responders could rapidly deploy in a region, and a software platform that

enabled communications and other operations across that network. The idea seems simple and elegant, but as Brian and his team discovered, achieving that goal in the real world is a bit more complicated. To be clear, there were a whole host of challenges at the outset, and there are many many

more today that we still need to solve. Um. A phrase I like to use that never seems to connect with people, but I feel as appropriate is something maybe you've ever heard, the saying, uh, it's turtles all the way down. I think it came from like a joke in physics that, uh, some person said to a physics professor, you know, the Earth isn't in space, it's just sitting on the back of a turtle. And the professor says, oh, okay, okay, sure,

So what's that turtle sitting on? And the person responds like another turtle And there the professor goes, okay, and what's that turtle sitting on And the person goes, oh, it's turtles all the way down. My my point and the reason I think this is appropriate. Maybe I'm crazy, maybe this has no relationship, but the point is, as we are kind of peeling back the covers. I'm, by the way, I'm not an IoT guy. Sure, I'm a technologist,

like I can code. I know how to use Google right, um, which interestingly is like one of the core skill sets of programmer needs to be able to have how to learn new technologies and figure things out. Um. Nobody on our team was like a professional IoT developer. I mean even when we started developing, I would be writing code for the firmware, but I didn't actually know what language I was writing in. I just knew that it worked. Yeah, none of us had like a professional background to do

any of this. So if anybody's thinking like you need some you know, college degree or a career, No, none of that. And how this relates to my point of its turtles all the way down. As we were starting, we started like peeling back the covers on. Okay, well, what if we could get this little IoT device to connect to another device? That would be pretty cool. And uh, you know, we peel back the cover, play around with the radio technologies we used Laura nine fifteen mega hurts

here in the United States. Um, And when we solve one problem, we make little progress. We'd say, oh that's really cool. All right, what if we could do the next thing? And that's when we realize, wait, we need to like write a codec for this radio. Geez okay, Um, all right, well once we figured that out, all right, these Laura radios say they can communicate over like two kilometers. Great, Well wait a minute. When we went down to Puerto Rico, they're only working at two ds. What the hell is

going on? Oh? Heat and humidity are a big problem, and foliage and metals just like another huge problem for radio. So every problem we would find and then address, there would just be like five others underneath it that we had to to solve. And I feel another way to think about this technology challenges like it's a game of

whack a mole of like infinite size. Right, So you keep knocking down a couple of moles and a few more keep popping up and and what's impressive and I think shows your ability to execute, is how quickly you can move through the field. Um. And on the IoT side, you know it's hard. People say hardware is hard. It's true. Um. And also you have to consider in the long run, uh, the business case for hardware you're making and for project out. This was a discussion and a conversation we thought about

for a long time. UM, because we understood and still do to this day that ultimately, if we were ever to make a dent in a market. You know, I think we've got a great brand. I think we have incredible nomenclature and design. But at the end of the day, if Intel looked at any of our stuff, they could say, all right, let's put ten engineers on this and give them five million dollars and they'll have a better, faster, cheaper product than you, and we will put you out

of business tomorrow. Oh and we also have economies of scale for manufacturing. So you need to consider how can this integrate into a business model, because that's what it enables you to work on this for a very long period of time. Project OWL faces many challenges, both from technical and market standpoints. Not only must the team build a working system in which custom built hardware and software work together, they must also find a way to make

that a sustainable business. The hardware side of the project presented many challenges as the team worked to create a working mesh network infrastructure that was durable, deployable, and cost effective. But I wanted to know more about the software side and how Brian's team tapped into IBM, S Watson platform

and cloud computing capabilities. Yeah, so that there were kind of like two halves to our solution, uh and and they nicely fit under the hardware and the software, and both of them enabled unique capability that I think together

made one complete solution. UM. So the way we kind of looked at it was the software provided an incident management of sorts away to UM leverage data form analytics, do some intelligent things, and then the ducks, of course provided the way to acquire that data on the ground, particularly in locations that don't have any infrastructure. Electricity has gone, communications are gone. The software is UM. It's it's changed

a bit from the competition. You know, we pitched a lot of stuff that we found people just didn't care about. Our customers, clients, partners didn't care about but we thought it was really cool. UM. But when we originally pitched the solution, I think at the time they were like twelve IBM, Watson, a p I, s UM, and we had incorporated every single one of them in the solution. So these things, these things were like text to speech,

speech to text UM. There are some others like knowledge catalog, pattern recognitions, and I don't remember all of them by name at this point in time, but they could enable you to do certain things, whether it was speech to text being kind of giving it an intelligent feel um, and then some other things like Watson Discovery giving it more of an intelligent brain. Uh. And this these API s enabled you to act on data to do certain things that would be very hard to write code for yourself. UM.

You know, natural language understanding. So we had a conversational assistant you could just talk to for the OWL. UH. At the time, it was the I M S it's now the Data Management System the d M s UM.

And when someone would write in a message like hey, can I create an incident Hurricane Florence and it's in uh, North Carolina, we could run Natural Language Understanding and that would pull out things like the name, locations and tell us other interesting things this person said, versus of course, if you're just writing raw code to do that, you're never gonna be able to match the sophistication of a

cloud software tool like this. So IBM Watson was great in that it UM it provided all these cool A p I s you could play with. And I think one element that IBM did exceptionally well was they have these code patterns that you can just go online, pull down, play with um. You know, with if anyone listening has ever written code before, you know that one of the best ways to learn is to just find someone else's code and screw around with it or adapted to another

use case. And that's what IBM is. A great ecosystem of not only the services to build with, but kind of the tutorials and the information to like say, okay, this sounds cool, like can you just show me how to make something with it. As Brian mentioned, Project Al tapped into ibms Watson platform in several significant ways. Watson is a suite of services from IBM, and it leverages

artificial intelligence to an incredible extent. It's designed in such a way that developers can tap into these powerful processes without having to build everything themselves. So if a developer has an idea for a cool application that would lean heavily on something that's traditionally really hard to do, like natural language processing, you know, having a computer understand what we mean when we communicate the way we typically communicate, not as a machine would, but as a human would.

Machines are not naturally good at that. You have to really work hard to make them understand well. Most developers can't do that on their own, but they could lean on a Watson a p I that's the application programming interface to handle that part of their service, so they can focus on whatever it is the app is supposed to do, and the natural language part can be handled

by the Watson platform. Now, I think most people who have heard about IBM Watson think back to the system's famous appearance on the television game show Jeopardy, and Watson acquitted itself pretty well on that show it won the competition. But it turns out it's much more than a trivia answering machine. In a way. You can think of Watson as access to an array of AI capabilities, and the Project Al team attempted to take advantage of every single

one of those. Interestingly, as Brian mentioned, they found out that in the real world people didn't necessarily use all the features Project Owl had included in their service, and this helps illustrate another big challenge facing any developer or engineer. What seems like a brilliant idea in the conference room or as was the case with Project Owl on the

Slack channel, may not translate in the real world. It's not that the idea itself is bad necessarily, but rather that it's less applicable than the designer's first thought, so some ideas might turn out to be best suited for other applications in the future. The development process at Project Owl continues. The original design led heavily on individual Mesh network devices the team called ducks because like a rubber duck, they were meant to be small and capable of floating.

The individual ducks linked together through a hub unit called a Mama duck, which can then send information over to a infrastructure component called a Papa duck that links the Mesh network to the Internet at large. But even without PAPA, the Mesh network itself can provide on site communications and logistics support within the region. The team's pitch one the two thousand eight teen Call for Code, and I asked

Brian what that actually meant on a practical level. Of course, there was a monetary prize and that kind of enabled us to, you know, not focus on other things. And there was also a lot of support from IBM, so a commitment from IBM r S to help us see the work through, and one of the biggest manifestations of that was the Corporate Service Corps deployment. So in March

last year, five handpicked ibm r s from around the world. UM, if I'm recalling correctly, they were from the United States, Canada, Israel, the United Kingdom. Yeah, that that's total. Two of them

were from the United States. UM. And this group was exceptional with a diverse skill set of talents and being able to like go to Puerto Rico with our very you know rough hackathon project and have five expert ibm r s there with skills in you know, from branding and communications to design, to engineering to back end to

front end software development. UM. This really kicked our solution into high gear, not just with the work they produced, but also I have vivid memories leading up to our our Puerto Rico one as we called it to pointment last March, our first official deployment to Puerto Rico. UM, I have memories of you know, hopping on our screen shares in the mornings and uh hearing the Corporate Serve Corporate Service Corps members saying to us like, hey, project OWL,

none of your stuff works right now. We were like, uh, yeah, you're right. Um, you know, because again like a hackathon is is about pitching an idea, and anyone who's been through hackathon understands that you don't have a fleshed out enterprise product. It's just not possible to do that given your time constraints and resource constraints. So if you can cobble together the idea, you can kind of work out

the kinks if people take an interest in it. And I think the commitment of IBM to provide that support, to provide experts, to provide UH the help in the field as you're deploying it is a huge benefit. Two, you're fledgling organization's ability to scale and grow, and so that for me was the in a way, was the most valuable part that we didn't really even consider at the time when we had won, but in hindsight it

was really exceptional. Project Owl continues to refine their technology and approach, taking the experiences they've encountered in the real world and using them to create a more focused approach to achieving their goal creating a nimble, robust, and effective communications platform using custom built hardware and software. Winning the competition wasn't the end of the line, but just the beginning.

Brian told me about the next steps for the project as it strives to achieve the goals of the co founders. So what's the next for Project Owl? We really after the competition where we had spent a lot of time focusing on engineering and design, you know, product development, coming up with the idea, executing on that. UM. To enable your organization to work on a challenge over a long period of time, you have to build a sustainable business model.

So we've spent a lot of time and energy. Uh. You know, if I was engineering software in the beginning, I'm spending a lot of time engineering the company now. So that's who how does project outfit in the market, and who do we service? You know, I had mentioned earlier our incident management system. We had all these capabilities in it, a whole bunch of different things that could do. And we realized that the people we wanted to go and support, we're only really asking for one or two

of those things. So like them, we can just get rid of them, um. And And that's a realization that took a long time to come to, through a lot of conversations and a lot of trial and error. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about working

with the team is certainly still on technology. I mean, we're all nerds here and this is what we love to do, but a lot of times thinking about how we can put Project Out in a position to succeed over the long term, because if we do that, then that enables us to think about some of this other

crazy technology. When Brian and I first talked way back at IBM think two thousand nineteen, the Project OUT team was mainly working with the basic duck units and they were meant to be spread over a region on the ground mostly. But things have evolved a bit since then and the team has come up with some more variations on this basic technology design that they hope to develop further. We have a whole variety of ducks, um, many more

so that when I last met you. We have detector ducks, we have disco ducks, we have cluster flocks, we have duck ducks, we have space ducks, and there are many others um. You can actually go to our open source firmware uh cluster Duck Protocol dot org and there at lists a bunch of the different duck variants. You can

check out some of the other ones we made. But space ducks was a project I did in collaboration with UM some engineers at cal Poly to put a duck on a very large helium balloon and send it up to a hundred thousand feet to acquire sensor readings and try to transmit and see if it would break. And so these are kind of, you know, that early seedlings

of ideas. Not only sure, we got great photos from that, but I've been thinking to myself too, and the rest of it's here, I should say, project out been thinking, Um, you know, putting this community cations stuff on the ground is great, but what if a hurricane comes through. I mean, it kind of just destroys everything, So we're gonna lose a lot of stuff. Well, okay, where could you put communications things where they would stay there and even if

a hurricane rips through, they would still stay there. Well, interesting space might work. Oh and by the way, you know what environment radio frequencies work really well in a vacuum. So the more we were thinking about, the more we were considering, hey, it might be worth our time to just start throwing some space ducks out into space and see what catches UM, because there might be a real

long term opportunity here. Brian and his team continue to develop Project Out to move beyond a testing phase and into fully fledged deployments and implementations. Meanwhile, the Call for Code is underway. I asked Brian if you had any words of advice for competitors in this year's Call for Code, I would encourage any developer working on solutions in the upcoming competition to think about how you can distill a

concept down to like it's fundamental atomic parts. Because if you can do that and you find the right atomic components, you know, like a proton, neutron, an electron, what you find is, oh wow, actually people can make a whole

pyra periodic table of elements with these things. Right. So I think from Project That's perspective, we're very fortunate we we certainly didn't know this at the time, but the original duck Link we've now developed into a whole host of variants for different use cases, but still leveraging that

same fundamental core. And I think this similarly goes for the software side in the cloud, that our data management system is really slim down and simplified to the core components, you know, getting data in, seeing what it is, having dots appear on a map and then a p ing that data out if you need to put it in external systems. So those core components are are like that

fundamental atomic nucleus that you know. We're still just in the early days of this, but we think UM can inspire a lot of folks to solve problems around the world in unique ways. I want to thank Brian and Alisa for joining me on this episode of Smart Talks. And this is just the first in this series. You'll hear more conversations with people using technology to make a positive impact in the world very soon. Episodes will publish here on tech stuff and also over on Stuff to

blow your mind. You'll learn about how some really smart people are changing things for the better in incredible ways. So make sure you catch every episode. You know, I talk a lot about tech on this show, and sometimes it's easy to get lost in how tech works and you lose sight of why it's important. Compa Editions like Call for Code and companies like Project Al remind us that these powerful tools can bring about incredible change and

help those who need it most. Now I have no doubt I'll be talking more about Project Al in the future, describing how it helped communities see two vital functions despite natural disasters, and I can't wait to see what the participants in Call for Code come up with as a tackle climate change. Make sure you check out the other episodes in the Smart Talk series as they publish over the next few weeks, and if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, feel free to reach

out to me on Twitter or Facebook. The handle for both of those is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Eight