good morning everybody
I hope you all recovered from the party
yesterday
it was a good party definitely one of
the better ones I've seen at conferences
so today I'm gonna talk
about some of the technology I've been
using to save elephants
now this sounds interesting but by no
means this is going to be an in-depth
technical talk
but don't worry I know how it feels to
be stuck in the wrong room I'm gonna
make this worth your while
I'm gonna share some of my life lessons
and I hope that you can use these
lessons on your own life and you know
for the years to come
all right
the journey starts last year
when I'm sitting in the back of a Toyota
Land Cruiser
and it's this big four by four and I'm
I'm there in the back and I'm crammed up
together with my team and all the gear
that we need and food for the upcoming
five days
foreign as we leave the populated areas
the roads become worse and worse now it
is huge potholes in the road
we hit one of those potholes and we fly
through the back of the truck I can
barely hold on to all my gear
one of the cans of beer bursts open
and after a few hours some of the
potatoes that we have with us starts to
rot
the smell is terrible it's like the
aftermath of a good college party maybe
some of you smelled it yesterday it's a
combination of the sweater five men beer
and rotten food
the sun sets and when you're near the
equator like the sun setting is like
turning off a light switch it goes
really fast
and the sky turns from Blue to Black
we drive along when suddenly the slide
the driver he Slams on the brakes
we see a group of elephants appear from
the forest in front of us and they cross
the road
now for me it's it's a magical thing to
see these animals in the wild
and it's almost as if they know that
we're there for them as if they are
greeting us
we continue our journey
and after 14 very long and uncomfortable
hours in the back of the truck we
finally arrive at our destination
[Music]
foreign
[Music]
is a relatively small country in central
Africa
and it's very important for the forest
elephants
in fact it is their last Safe Haven and
it houses 70 percent of the global
population of these animals
now I don't think that it will come as a
surprise to you if I say that these
elephants are in danger
boching is one of the reasons for this
it's where the elephants
get slaughtered
boaters have to cut off part of the face
of the elephant with an ax or chainsaw
to get the ivory to sell that illegally
it's horrible it's horrible
but there's actually one other big
threat to these elephants
something that don't not many people
know exists
and it's something that we witnessed
when we were visiting a small village
in Gabon
[Music]
Isola
you imagine lay down it's so loud
[Music]
elephants had broken into their
Plantation
and we're now eating the food that these
women need to survive and to provide for
their families
and just to clarify
these women just don't cannot just go to
the supermarket do this is their primary
source of food
and and these are deadly conflicts
because
if these elephants are in the plantation
and people try to go there sometimes the
elephants will charge and kill people
in retaliation
Farmers plant traps
I've seen like wooden boards with long
nails sticking through them and they
scatter them through the plantation
hoping that elephants step on them to
scare them away
or sometimes they throw Spears or use
other weapons sometimes killing these
elephants
and
now this sounds terrible and it is
terrible but from both perspective
perspectives this is only logical the
elephants are just hungry they're
looking for food
and
for us elephants might like like seem
like magical creatures but for them
they're just a pest eating their
livelihood
so these are are very big uh threats to
the elephants the human elephant
conflict even so it's like
um
just a bigger threat as poaching itself
and by now you might be wondering well
this is Tech conference so when are we
gonna get to the juicy stuff
don't worry I'm not a biologist I'm a
nerd just like you
and to explain a little bit on how I
ended up in Africa I have to ask you a
very important question
who here of you knows what a auto exec
dot bot file is hence please
we're getting old
but still nice to see some hands raised
so when I was about 12 years old my dad
bought a new computer
I still actually don't know why he did
buy it because he had no experience with
computers watch however but it was like
this amazing expensive machine it was a
Pentium computer with eight megabytes of
RAM and 265 megabytes of hard drive
space I remember thinking who on Earth
would need more space than this
but you know I had no experience with
computers as well
and I got this computer and it came
installed with os2 Warp
now this is you know some kind of
operating system and
I just wanted to do one thing and I
wanted to play Doom and kill monsters
but I was not able to run that game on
that operating system
so I tried to install MS DOS
it came on three floppy disks and for
the people that didn't raise their hand
just now a floppy disk is like a 3D
printed save icon
um so so I installed MS-DOS and I had no
clue what I was doing
um I tried to run the game again but it
still wouldn't load
I needed to to do some weird stuff in
that file how to exact dot bot file I
needed to load my driver to my studio
room player in like the high memory or
something like that I don't remember
what it was but my neighbor he also had
a computer and he printed out his
version of that file and I was basically
just typing it over
and I remember typing go to that go to
this and I clearly remember the first
time that I saw the logic in a piece of
code I was like go to go to ah this is
like it's a logical thing
and for me there was a start and I never
stopped since
so fast forward to
when I was like 30 years old
uh by then I had written like a million
lines of code
and there came a moment where I started
to wonder I started to wonder
with how many of these lines of codes
they actually do some good in the world
and I started to realize that it's
probably not that many
it was actually through reading a brook
through reading a book that I had this
realization the book was called The Lean
Startup and every mistake that was
described in that book I was making it
and just make me so aware of the time
that I was wasting
um a little bit about books I definitely
was the guy that said who needs books
who reads books anyway because we have
the internet and everything is on the
internet but
um looking back I think you know every
profound learning I had whether it's on
social skills leadership skills
communication skills I actually got them
from books so books are actually read
books
foreign
all right
so I think what I went through is is a
common thing you know when you're
younger you're starting out with with
engineering then technology itself is
enough to keep you happy you know
learning new languages learning new
Frameworks
it's really cool
but at some point in time
I think you you hit a kind of ceiling
so technology itself is no longer enough
to keep you happy and you start looking
for other things
is that can can some people people
relate to this to this hands
yeah okay luckily I'm not the only one
my story makes sense
um
so I think this is a common thing
but I do want to challenge you a little
bit
on this because
I believe that technology is just a
means to an end it's it shouldn't be a
goal in itself does that make sense
so
my question is what problems are you
solving with technology
are you building
software for Putin's new rocket launcher
or for
an NGO that is working on sustainable
energy
now of course this is a bit exaggerated
but I do want to take a little bit of
time and think about you know what
problems are you solving with technology
and the more important question is do
you care about those problems
or are there any maybe other problems
that you would rather be working on
anyway
I was in a point in my life that I
wanted to make sure that I got the most
out of my lines of code
not just by writing code more
efficiently but I wanted to work on real
world world problems
basically and um
how do you go about this for me it was a
journey of a couple of years and and
just going out there just going to
meetups uh talking to people figuring
out what it is that I wanted to do it
was it wasn't liking that I had an aha
moment and it became clear to me that
this was the purpose in my life no it
had I had to go out there and find it
you know you have to solve these things
on your own
and now I'm working at a company called
q42 it's an agency in the Netherlands
and
within that company I run a small
Department with a small team called hack
the planet
and with hack the planet we can use our
technical skills to solve the bigger
problems of this world
and
the project that we do are
are going into all kinds of different
directions
this year we launched a online
interactive to educate kids about this
the dangers of online sexual abuse
but we also created a virtual reality
documentary
where we created peace between two
rivaling tribes in Uganda
but today I'm here for the elephants
so
how did we what we were what were we
doing in Africa at some point in time we
were talking to Rangers the people in
the fields protecting the elephants and
they were telling us that they use
camera traps I think I have a slide of
that
yes so these are skinny elephants as you
can see they're very hungry so that's
why they break into plantations
and this is a camera trap
uh Rangers use these a lot
they uh strap them to a tree and when
there is a movement in front of that
camera it takes a picture
and we were talking to these Rangers and
they told us well every half a year we
have to go to the camera trap
to collect the SD card and change the
batteries and then we can see well there
was a elephant here six weeks ago and
there was a poacher here eight weeks ago
and that is when we thought wait a
minute
what if we could create a camera that
could alert Rangers in real time of what
is happening in their Park
but how do you do that
um and I definitely didn't completely
want to reinvent the wheel I didn't want
to waste years and years to come up with
a new product or something like that so
we found smart pragmatic ways to use as
much existing stuff as we could find to
solve this problem
so we took that existing Bushnell camera
trap
and we opened it up and we added some of
our own hardware and we put a Wi-Fi SD
card in there Wi-Fi SD card is just an
SD card that creates a Wi-Fi hotspot
and then we created this thing
it is a mini computer
it's actually a microcontroller
containing a Raspberry Pi for a compute
and the camera trap sends a message to
this microcontroller
it then turns on the Raspberry Pi
the Raspberry Pi downloads the images
from that camera trap that is uh
exposing them via the Wi-Fi hotspot
and then uses a machine learning
algorithm to automatically detect what
is on the photo is it elephant Rhino
another animal or maybe a human
and then the thing on top with the the
blue condensator it's a rock block which
is a satellite modem that we use to send
this information through space directly
to the phone of the Rangers
and in this way we created a hardware
setup that could create real-time alert
from the forest even in places where
there's no cell phone coverage
to alert Rangers of what is happening in
their park in real time
now this was only
part of the problem
because we also needed to
run a machine learning algorithm on that
Raspberry Pi
and me personally
I had very little experience with
machine learning
I've never done too much with it I think
even machine learning has like for me it
had like this magical thing it's like
this magical domain
but I needed to solve this problem
so I Googled and the first thing I
stumbled upon was fast AI I think in the
world machine learning you have like
two sides it's you have the tensorflow
side and the pi torch side and
fossilizing is a is a framework on top
of Pi torch that allows you to play with
machine learning and they actually have
an excellent course
so if you're interested in machine
learning I can highly recommend that
course it's called
uh it's called making neural Nets uncool
again
and it's it's an odd name but it's
really funny because this guy he really
tries to explain and remove the magic
unicorn sauce of machine learning and
drills it down to what it is it's just
math it's no magic everybody can do it
and with fossa I was actually pretty
quickly getting good results of training
a model on the data set that I had that
could recognize elephants humans and
others
so I played around with that for uh for
a couple of weeks and then I tried to
run that model on a Raspberry Pi
now after a lot of pip install headaches
and pulling my hair out to try and get
it up and running I finally did but it
was slow as hell it took like 20 seconds
to classify a single image and it was
crashing half of the time
so clearly this wasn't going to work for
me
and then I needed to go to tensorflow
tensorflow Lite is a live version of
tensorflow which makes sense which is
designed to run on Hardware on your
phone but also on a Raspberry Pi
and I basically went through the same
process I I took some samples on how do
you train an image classification
Network and the results are I got were
terrible
it was even like in the comments of the
samples of Google themselves well this
script produces terrible results but you
get the idea well I was like oh that's
not useful at all
so I wasted uh some time on that
until I found a service called Auto ml
and automl is basically a service of
Google where you upload your data set
you upload your CSV file that splits
your data into training and testing and
then you say train and it spits out a
model and that actually worked very well
now I must admit to you that it hurt my
ego a little bit that I was beaten by a
machine to train a machine learning
model which is kind of weird but you
know it solves my problem so it was all
uh all good and fine
and
doing this looking back at the past year
that I've been working on this
I must admit that a lot of the times I
had the feeling it basically felt like
that that that I was that little boy
again you know not knowing what I was
doing but knowing what the problem I was
trying to solve and it felt the posture
felt like that so a lot of the times I
felt way out of my depth I thought who
am I to be training a machine learning
model or you know getting it running on
a Raspberry Pi but
I came to realize that
this feeling of not knowing what you're
doing being way out of your depths you
you can call it imposter syndrome I
guess
you know it never goes away I'm now 40
years old and I've had that feeling when
I was 12 and I still do
and that's okay I think you should just
Embrace that feeling in fact even though
it feels really uncomfortable
I think it's a good place to be because
it means
that you're really pushing the
boundaries of what you are doing with
your own skill set does that make sense
I hope it does
all right so
um
I I got that uh up and running
and
um
now it was basically time to get it
working
so I want to make take you back to
Africa again
so while I was in Africa
it gave me a very humbling feeling
being in the middle of the rainforest
surrounded by
miles and miles of forest as far as the
eye can see with no humans there
it was it was very humbling and it made
me it made me kind of philosophical so
bear with me
I'm warning you
um
I think
I think I have been thinking about this
a lot lately I think almost all the
problems that we are facing the big
problems like the the economical social
ecological problems that the humanity is
facing today
is
because we are detached that's what I
felt you know I was sitting in the
rainforest and I became aware of how
different that is being in nature living
in nature from how I grew up and I think
most of you grew up in a city detached
from nature
and I think we as humans think we are
better than nature and see it as a
resource to exploit for our own gain
but
that's just simply not true
we are nature and I think we can only
solve these big problems if we start
seeing nature
as our as our most precious resource
again and not shareholders profit or
anything like that
now I think
nature will be fine in the long run you
know we're not doing it we're not
solving these problems for nature if we
don't get our act together then she will
just shake us off like a wet dog after a
swim
we're doing this for ourselves for for
the future of of humanity I'm sorry I'm
warned I warned you this is I'll stop
here but I think this is why I like
working on these conservation projects
uh so much now
all right
we had a working system we had the
hardware working we had the machine
learning model working and now it was
time to test it out
so we jump back into the truck into that
4x4 and we drive to a forest near a
small village and this Village was
suffering from Human elephants conflicts
and we had been working towards this
moment for the past year so we jump out
of that car like a couple of excited
teenagers yes we're going to do this and
the Rangers like shhh
and he listens
and he smells
and he explains to us that going into
the forest is really dangerous because
this Forest is full of elephants
and if we go in there and we surprise
one
then it might charge us and kill us
and it will run through the forest like
there is no force and I will probably
stumble over the first twig I encounter
so he makes sure it's clear
we enter the forest
and he's looking for an active Elephant
Trail
he's looking at the ground at the trees
and it's it's like magic seeing these
guys work they see a pile of elephant
poop and they can exactly see how many
days ago this was
anyhow we find a good spot and we deploy
our cameras
we deploy the camera trap like a meter
of the ground so it can clearly see the
elephant
and we put a ladder against the tree and
the the mini computer we put that high
up in the tree
it's powered with a small solar panel
that recharges the batteries that is
running the Raspberry Pi
and we put it high up so that the
satellite modem can get a good clear
view of the sky of the sky to get the
message out
so we deployed the camera and we had
configured it to send a WhatsApp message
to the phone of my colleague when the
camera saw a movement an elephant or
maybe something else
that night
I'm lying in my bed and the worrying
starts it's it's bloody hot there I
cannot sleep I hear the mosquitoes
zooming around my head luckily I'm in a
net
but I think oh man is this gonna work
I it feels it feels it doesn't feel very
good if your code is running somewhere
and you cannot see it you don't know if
it's if it's working you don't know if
there's bugs in there so I was worrying
that
you know we were there for nothing
and I think about a home a conversation
that I had with my oldest daughter Julia
she is then she was 12 years old
and just a day before I left for Africa
she asked me so Dad what are you gonna
do in Africa for three weeks and I'm
saying I'm gonna deploy eight camera
traps and she's like do you need that
much that much time for that
and I tried to explain to her you know
what we're trying to achieve there but
she's clearly not impressed
teenagers right
but the worst thing is is that I start
to believe in myself
so while I'm lying there I'm like oh man
what is this not gonna work at all
and then suddenly my thoughts are
interrupted
by some strange sounds
through the thin wooden wall beside me
I hear a phone going off
it is that phone of my colleague
receiving notifications
and the next morning
he confirms
the camera trap we deployed the day
before had reported to have seen
multiple images of elephants
but since we use that satellite modem we
cannot actually see the image itself
so what we do is we only sense the
metadata of the classification so we
only sent that an elephant has been seen
and what the accuracy of the model is so
we want to go back there to double check
if it's correct
we go back to the first camera
we open it up pop out SD cards I put it
in my laptop and I go through the images
blank
a monkey not an elephant blank I'm like
[ __ ]
this is not working I take a closer look
at the images
and I see this weird branch in view
and this weird branch
suspiciously looks like the trunk of an
elephant
so that was a it was a good learning
there that
um no matter what you do these factors
can still bite you in the air so we
reposition the camera
uh to move away from that branch and
hope that'll work
we go to the next camera that we
deployed
and this is what we see
yeah
eye of the elephant
wow
could it be that it's actually the
elephants that are inside the fence now
holy crap not only did our system work
but we actually got the same group of
elephants on camera that had broken into
the plantation of these women you saw
before and they were now having an
all-you-can-eat buffet
in that Plantation
so this proved that our system worked
and it could provide valuable
information to Rangers to keep elephants
and people safe because if Rangers know
when elephants are approaching a village
they can inform the villagers or they
can try and scare away the elephants
when we were in the plantation we were
walking there we saw these big oil drums
with wooden sticks on them we asked the
Rangers what are these for and they say
well if we hear elephants sometimes we
start banging on a drum to try and chase
them away
now
at the end of our trip to Gabon
we were invited by the minister Lee
White
and
um
it was it was a very weird setting it
this we we entered this room and there's
the minister
and the head of anti-poaching
and the minister
he he really knows what he's talking
about he's been working his whole life
in the area of conservation
and
he is in charge of protecting the Flora
and Fauna of the entire country of Gabon
and we sit there and it's a very weird
atmosphere the head of anti-poaching is
a huge guy in military art form and he's
he's kind of scary
there's a big elephant skull in the
corner of the room
and we sit there and we explain to him
what we have done we explain the
technology that we developed and how it
can help Rangers to keep elephants and
and and humans safe
now we cannot really read these guys
they have like steel faces and we don't
know whether they are impressed with
what we're doing or not
and at the end of the meeting
The ministership Sounds dramatic to say
it's a matter of life and death for the
echo guards but
fewer of our Echo guards will die
and more poachers will be caught if we
can deploy this technology
now even though I think that this will
still not convince my daughter Julia
because this is not on tick tock
um any doubt I have was now gone
they basically told us that with this
technology we could be saving the lives
of people
and I could never have imagined that my
programming skills would bring me into
the African rainforest
and the funny thing is that
what I do is is basically the same I'm
still writing codes most of the time
I'm still a nerd but why I'm doing it it
has changed
and I don't think we are done yet there
are still so many challenges out there
and and the good thing is that when
you're out there You See Spot New
Opportunities so when the Rangers start
talking about the the steel oil drum
that they use we had an other idea and
we are now developing an elephant
repeller or elephant scarecrow or how
you want to say it it's basically a
system of a loudspeaker and a in a
flashing light that we can deploy
and it works together with the camera
traps so if the camera trap sees a
elephant it will send a Laura message
to that system that is strategically
deployed around the village and it's if
an elephant walk by then suddenly he
hears sounds and and noises and and sees
flashes of light coming from that
direction
and with this system we basically hope
to automate that oil drum and steer
elephants away from villages
um
and I think this illustrates how how you
can see spot more opportunities when
you're there in the world
and before before I wanna
um leave you uh with this session
I wanna
end with maybe a frustration that I have
and I hope there will be plenty time
plenty of time after the talk to
challenge me on this frustration or ask
questions about the system
but and I hope I don't offend anybody
with this but the frustration that I
have
and I've been guilty of this myself is
that so many of the brightest and most
talented Engineers are wasting their
time building useless things
building a chatbot that everybody hates
or
at building a system for making people
buy more stuff online that they don't
really need
and this is this is what frustrates me
because there are so many good causes
out there that could desperately need
our help
and these organizations usually don't
know what is possible with technology
and they cannot see the opportunities
especially not the way that we are used
to working with technology in in big
organizations so these are organizations
like green pieces or WWF that are
working on re-greening projects or
foundations that are trying to tackle
humanitarian crisis or protect
endangered species
and this kind of projects we need for
our own future basically
now I'm not saying that
you should all become a Greenpeace
activist and chain yourself to a tree
no
um not at all but I do think that we
have a moral obligation
to make a conscious choice on what we
are working on
and I think most of us of you
can make a choice what we what you work
on you have that choice even though it
sometimes means not going for the
biggest paycheck
and of course everybody decides
um for themselves what they're working
on I'm just saying that what I found
what I learned in in the past few years
is that it is possible to code your way
to a better world
so my question to you is basically what
do you really care about
what problems would you really like to
be solving
and why not why not go for that
because if you make the right decision
then
what I've learned is that it's so much
more satisfying doing your job
and you will be able to do some good in
the process
thank you very much
[Applause]
I don't know if it's uh any questions
you go
so so the question
so the question is do poachers see the
cameras and Destroy them
yes this happens
um to be honest it's just part of the
game and not only boaters also elephants
uh destroy them it's actually that
uh elephants have a very good scent and
if they smell something that has been
touched by humans they sometimes just
completely destroy the cameras or even
push down the entire tree
so um yes we tried to hide the cameras
as as much as we can and like I said the
mini computer is very high up in the
tree so poachers usually don't see that
but it's part of the game yes
good question how do we get funding it's
actually one of the most challenging
things on working in this space so like
I mentioned uh hack the planet is part
of q42 which is a agency of 100 people
and we do commercial projects
um and uh q42 basically donates 10 to 15
of the annual profit into the projects
that we are doing so um
that is one way we get funding but to be
honest Hardware development is very
expensive
actually what I found is Hardware
working with Hardware is very hard
especially in these times when Raspberry
Pi seems to be more extinct than
elephants
but what we do for these kind of
projects uh is try to get funds from
like WWF or apply for other funds which
I'm not a fund I'm I'm not really fond
of writing these applications but we
need to
more questions
have I offended anybody
no
yeah oh that's a good one they all put
like a red paper in the in the in the
thing I will count them yes
well yeah it's it's for me also it's
kind of a different way it's it's not
giving a talk on a technical subject but
it's more you know on life so sorry if
that was not your expectation but
last questions anyone I'll see a hand
there
good question I've thought about that as
well
um
you know I think the honest answer is
yes
because if there's like this alarm going
off and poachers know that what kind of
system it is then
they might know where to go but I I
don't think it should it's a real
problem usually it's it's
um there there are different kinds of
problems that these elephants are facing
like I said it's poaching and human
elephant conflict and usually where
there are human elephant conflicts
there's not a lot of poaching going on
boaters are usually active on in more
remote areas of the park
so uh I don't think it's going to be a
problem the same goes basically for the
old oil drum so if you know the oil drum
is going off then oh there must be a
elephant somewhere
um but I don't think it's going to be a
problem because usually these two
problem areas are separated
yeah so the question is what about
maintenance of the hardware
um and so far yeah so
um I actually write wrote a lot of unit
tests for this which is not something I
always do to be honest uh so that's one
way of of you know keeping it keeping it
up and running uh recently we got the
cameras back to do a software update
so it basically means you know getting
them from the field shipping them back
to us and then we ship them back to
Africa uh we do we have trained the
Rangers so
um it's one thing to create this
technology but
it has to be simple enough for the
Rangers themselves to work with
otherwise you know it's useless so we
train the Rangers on how to install the
cameras how to install the smart Bridges
or the uh the mini computers
and they have actually they have been
there for six months the cameras and
they have actually repositioned the
cameras many times so the the yeah that
works but yeah maintenance of Hardware
is hard and we're you know it's very
small scale it's like we recently uh
shipped another 15 cameras
um but it's small scale so it's not we
don't have like a support department or
anything like that
any more questions
all right oh one more
yeah
um I did I actually
I think I I have a branch somewhere that
basically has this functionality
but it's it's really difficult it's the
same goes for Laura I don't know if
there are any any Laura Specialists
Specialists here but like Laura and the
satellite modem that we're using are
designed to only send very tiny amounts
of data so for instance the satellite
modem that we're using only allows you
to send
um 340 bytes
and this is not a lot of data so being
smart with bits and bytes I'm able to
send like 55 image classification
results by only sending the metadata but
if we were to send an image I've seen
you know if you if you take an image and
you make it really tiny like 100 by 100
pixels and compress it really really uh
down then you still have like like 1500
kilobytes that you need and you like
four or five satellite messages to get
that out and sometimes it takes like 10
minutes to get it out and you have to
stitch it back together on the back end
so we basically long story short we
decided not to go down this route
technically it's possible but it's yeah
I don't think it's a good idea
that's it any last questions
ah
the elephants are hanging around yeah
um
so we we implemented some kind of
a debounce logic so if the camera takes
a picture and it takes another one and
takes another one then we wait and
collect the data and then we ship it and
then we send it and then for like five
or ten minutes we don't send any other
events so this is a way to basically
mitigate the system triggering all the
time
and what we have seen so far is that uh
usually you get like the elephant walks
past and it takes like a couple of
images and then it moves away I've never
seen an elephant you know
chilling in front of our camera trap for
our land
all right
thank you