You guys have seen the Terminator films, right? An artificial intelligence deploys robots around the
world to destroy the human race? Well, somebody saw that and decided to flip it on its head.
Artificial intelligence is right now being used to deploy robots around the world with the goal
of saving the planet; but they need your help to do it. I'm not joking. Stick around for this one!
Welcome back to The Pro Tech Show. Unless you've been living under a rock
you'll have seen something about the diabolical state of our oceans. Whether it's a turtle with a
plastic straw stuck up its nose, or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch where just one patch of
plastic pollution now covers an area of 1.6 million square kilometres by itself.
For perspective, that's three times the size of France or twice the size of Texas.
Obviously, this is catastrophic for marine life and the environment; but there's also a direct
threat to people. These plastics are breaking down into tiny particles called microplastics, and those
are so small they make their way into our food chain undetected. We don't know what the long-term
health effects of microplastic consumption are but we do know some of this stuff is toxic.
I'm not here to preach to you about the turtles. I'm not making this video for the turtles. I'm
not making this video for myself. I'm making it for my kids, and their kids. I don't want them growing
up eating, drinking, and breathing plastic; and there is something you can do about it right now.
YouTube creators around the world have joined forces to raise awareness for a campaign to remove
30 million pounds of plastic and trash from our oceans, rivers, and beaches. This campaign is called
#TeamSeas. I can't claim to have had any hand in organising it, but I was contacted to say "Hey! We
have a plan to clean up the oceans. Will you help by telling people about it?" The obvious question
was "How are you going to do that?", and when they said "Big robots!" I was in. Get Optimus Prime on the
job! I'm going to quickly tell you how you can help, then don't worry: we're going to talk about the
robots. For all the details go over to https://teamseas.org. I'll put all the relevant links in the video
description. Although this campaign is being arranged by a bunch of YouTubers there are actual
professionals handling the clean-up. It's not me and MrBeast on a lilo picking bottles out of the sea.
The deal is that for every dollar raised one pound of trash comes out of the ocean, so the obvious way
you can help is by donating some dollars to get rid of some plastic. I realise not everyone is in
a position to do that so the other thing you can do to help is push this video to as many people as
possible. Not only will that give more people the opportunity to contribute, but I will donate any
advertising revenue this video makes during the course of the campaign. The more people who see
it, the higher that number will be. Use that share button; and liking and commenting also gets YouTube
to push it to more people, so get click happy! Of course you'll want to know what your money's going to
be used for, and so do I. Every dollar will be split 50-50 between two not-for-profit organisations. The
first is Ocean Conservancy. They'll be using this to clean up beaches and haul junk out of the ocean.
Specifically, they'll be targeting "ghost gear" in the oceans. This is lost or abandoned fishing gear,
and is both particularly deadly to marine life and difficult to recover. The second organisation is
The Ocean Cleanup. They're going after the rivers. Why the rivers? They are also targeting the Great
Pacific Garbage Patch I mentioned earlier for clean-up, but your money will specifically go
towards cleaning up the world's rivers. Imagine you walk into your kitchen and you find a pipe has
burst and is spraying water everywhere. You need to mop up the water on the floor, but there's no point
doing that while the water is still spraying out. You need to stop the leak. When it comes to plastic:
rivers are the leak, carrying large quantities of new plastic from our towns and cities into
our oceans every day. We need to catch it before it reaches the ocean and becomes more difficult
to collect, otherwise no matter how much we clean up there will always be more. To do that The Ocean
Cleanup have designed and built Interceptors. These may look like high-tech ships but they're
more like autonomous, plastic-eating river bins. You plonk these things into a plastic-filled river, a
barrier system directs trash towards the mouth of the Interceptor using the natural water current,
and it drags it out of the river using a conveyor. The junk gets sorted into bins and when it's full
up it calls someone to come empty the bins. The clever thing about this is that apart from
someone changing the bins from time to time it's completely automated - meaning human operators are
not put at risk by handling river pollution, and compared to other solutions this requires minimal
looking after and is very scalable. The Interceptor generates its own electricity using solar panels
and this powers all of the onboard systems including plastic extraction and connectivity.
This isn't a pipe dream. Three interceptors already in operation, with more being built.
We need more. Fortunately we can be quite clever about how we deploy them. There are at least one
hundred thousand rivers in the world, but 80% of the plastic that's making its way into
the oceans from rivers comes from just 1% of these rivers. Those are the ones being targeted.
Waste extraction performance varies based on local conditions, but one fully operational Interceptor
can extract 50,000 kilograms of plastic per day. If conditions were perfect and the river
really nasty, it could theoretically extract as much as 100,000 kilograms. That's one Interceptor,
in one river, in one day! The more plastic-filled rivers we can clean, the less plastic makes into
the oceans and into our food. Obviously we save a bunch of marine life, too; which is good.
It's not that I don't care about the turtles... I just care about my kids more. These Interceptors
may be a clever bit of engineering but their intelligence is limited to sorting trash into
bins, systems, waste, and weather monitoring, and calling some to come empty them. Big robots?
Sure. Clever? OK. But artificial intelligence? No. That's where Microsoft Azure comes in.
In order to clean up this plastic effectively it is necessary to understand the flow of plastic
through our river systems. Cameras mounted on ships, beside rivers, and on drones can take plenty of
pictures; but rivers have a lot of things floating in them and identifying which dots in an image
arr plastic and which are natural materials is tedious work from a drone shot. Microsoft offered
to help by applying cloud computing to solve the problem much faster than a team of people could.
They figured out how to process images in Azure using machine learning to automatically sort
the plastic from the ducks and help The Ocean Cleanup figure out how to best tackle the problem.
Not ones to give up on the buzzwords, Microsoft have extended this using IoT and Edge Computing
to bring the smarts closer to the problem, on the drones and river cameras.
Now plastics can be automatically identified in real-time from live video feeds instead of doing
it later from uploaded images. A similar process is being built to analyse ocean plastic and build
predictive models to help clean up the plastic already in the oceans. This channel is about
technology, not waste plastic recycling. Big robotic river cleaners are cool and all and I'll put some
specs u[ here for interest, but I'd be remiss if I didn't try and explore the A.I. technology a little
given how many of my viewers are IT professionals and might need to use the same cloud components
themselves at some point. Saving the planet and inspiring techies at the same time? Why not?
Information on the A.I. side of things is more difficult to come by, but here's what I find out.
Geek mode: on! It's largely using serverless cloud architecture which you may remember
me talking about in a previous video, which I'll link in the description. Three Azure
Functions provide APIs for image uploading, image processing, and burst processing. Data is
placed in Azure Storage Accounts and processed data is recorded in Azure SQL and PostgreSQL databases.
Azure Machine Learning is used to train and deploy the image recognition models.
The Azure Kubernetes Service hosts data processing and computation for agricultural and economic
models, with microservices coupled together using the Azure Service Bus; while GPU-optimised Virtual
Machines handle number-crunching for plastic debris detection models. Python scripts are used
to feed sensor data to the Azure IoT hub, with edge-based A.I. processing located close to the
cameras using NVIDIA Jetson. The data is surfaced through PowerBI. OK. Geek mode off again. All
that is really to say this isn't a fly-by-night enterprise. Serious thought has gone into it from
serious people, and whilst designs are constantly evolving based on experiential data as these
systems enter production they are committed to making this work. I get a lot of emails
asking me to advertise stuff in this channel and most go straight in the bin. This was one email I
was very happy to make a video about because it's important. So when someone comes along with a plan
to clean up the thousand worst polluting rivers in five years and remove 90% of floating
ocean plastic by 2040, and they've actually got systems in the field doing this... that's something
I'm happy to support. If you'd like to support it too then go over to https://teamseas.org. Check the
description for links and remember to push this video to as many people as you can. Thanks for
listening to this little diversion and if you're new here say hi in the comments, and why not check
out some of my normal content while you're here? I'll "sea" you later... sorry, I couldn't help it!