So we take an old cell phone and we put it up in the trees.
And it listens to all the sounds of the forest
to pick up the sound of
anything that indicates there's some danger.
Would it be easier for us to do that, by focusing on the perimeter?
The Tembé people are an amazing example of a people
that's trying to preserve their forest.
They are well organized, they are well educated,
are not afraid to use different tools, new technologies.
They're looking for collaboration, they're not looking for help.
People on the ground in these places, they're the solution.
They're the ones who can actually really fight off deforestation.
But technology can play a really big part
in helping them do it more safely and more effectively.
And all you have to do is be kind of precise with this one here,
because the antenna is both fragile and sensitive.
You want to put the microphone on there.
Yeah, that's good.
Old cell phones are available to almost anybody all the time.
And so these aren't trash, these are actually
really, really powerful little computers.
They can connect to networks that are there, they can record the sound.
They can do all this great processing.
The hard parts of course have to do with
making it possible to power them,
and making sure they can actually pick up sounds from a great distance.
But these are things you can do with pretty standard electronics.
The Tembé themselves have, at most, 30 rangers,
30 warriors that are able to sort of patrol the area
and take responsibility for protecting it.
And yet we're talking about an area that's huge.
And that's where this ability for us to be able to listen
to parts of the forest, 24/7,
it really increases the efficiency and the safety of the entire operation for them.
And that's a really critical tool, given what they're up against.
No person could be able to detect a chainsaw at a kilometre away,
given how loud, and how noisy and how complex the sound really is.
So we're actually using an open source machine learning tool, TensorFlow,
that's able to detect a logging truck,
the sounds of a bird or animals or chainsaws in the forest.
It's amazing what they can actually find that we cannot even hear.
And it can send a real-time alert to the rangers, to the guards, to the chiefs,
so they can decide how to respond.
They want to go back where they grew up,
because that's where they have the most memories.
When you sit down, you have a moment
where you're not suffering from memory loss.