Transcriber: Ayako Ezaki Reviewer: Denise RQ
(Japanese) Hello.
Knowledge is the foundation for a just society,
and if the citizens are not actively pursuing this knowledge,
then justice cannot happen.
I believe that we're in a situation
where more than ever, we need to have this knowledge
because there are so many difficulties in this area;
and especially, about environment,
because if we want to have environmental justice,
knowledge is really a condition.
Environmental justice can sound like a very abstract or grand idea,
but I'd like to use two simple examples
and show tangible, simple ways that anybody can contribute
to this knowledge and environmental justice.
The first example I'll be taking is about oil spill, or oil pollution.
In 2010, the BP oil spill happened in the Gulf of Mexico.
I was responsible for a team at MIT in Boston,
and we were trying to develop a technology to clean up the BP oil spill.
But that was really a terrible and enormous environmental catastrophe.
If you look at the scale of it,
it'd be just like if half of the coasts of Japan would be covered with oil;
that was the scale of the accident.
The technologies we were developing at MIT were extremely cool,
but they were going to be really expensive
and it would take a lot of time to develop them.
So, I left my dream job, and I moved to the Gulf of Mexico,
where I lived for two years to work with the local communities.
And this is what we did.
We didn't have much money, so we started with what was around us.
We cut plastic bottles and we'd put a simple 100-dollar camera in them,
and then we'd inflate those party balloons,
and attach the camera under the balloons;
or would fly it with kites,
we'd attach the camera to the kites and take pictures from the sky.
Sometimes, we'd walk on a beach or get on a boat,
and we'd take literally hundreds,
or often times, thousands of pictures in one session.
Eventually, we'd stitch them
into many small maps and more small maps,
and eventually, we'd make those very large maps.
Those maps had the resolution
a hundred times the average of satellite imagery,
but they cost much less, as you can imagine,
maybe not that much less than Professor Yamada's.
What's really special about them
is that we could make those maps whenever we wanted,
and they were made by the residents.
That was really important for the people so they can reclaim environmental justice.
BP oil spill was recognized as an environmental crime,
BP was recognized as guilty of neglect.
What's special about this
is that it is the victims of the environmental catastrophe
that had to collect themselves the evidence
to reclaim environmental justice,
they had to be extremely creative and resourceful
to reclaim environmental justice.
And I think it's a very similar situation here in Tohoku.
It was a very fun activity as well.
Beyond the community aspect, I kept being more interested
in how I could actually clean up the oil spill.
Making the image map was a very useful thing,
but how can we actually clean it up?
700 of these boats were deployed, thousands of men worked on them,
and many of them had health problems because of being exposed to toxic [fumes].
They collected only 3% of the oil on the surface,
because they didn't really pay attention to the natural patterns,
that's my feeling.
and so they were just eyeballing where the oil was,
and basically going where they could get it.
But if you take the same amount of oil absorbent
- that they'd put in like this -
and if you straighten it, you have more surface area.
You cannot collect everything, but if you have multiple paths,
maybe there's more chance to collect more material.
But it's really hard to move such a large object
against the wind, the waves and the currents.
So, I thought:
" What about if we use a technology that's thousands of years old, sailing,
and could we sail up the wind,
and intercept the oil that's drifting down the wind?
That's a very simple idea.
I didn't know if it was going to work,
I just took a small boat and try to sail around.
What I found is that you're losing two things.
First, you're losing the pulling power,
and second, you're losing the capacity to steer.
So I thought, maybe if I changed the architecture of the boat,
and put the rudder at the front and the centerboard motor back,
I could control more.
So I did that, and with a robot that's one meter,
I could control a payload of four meters,
so that was a very encouraging first test.
Then I thought, OK, it's a bit like cars; if you have a four-wheel drive,
and you have two wheels that can move at the front and maybe two at the back,
and maybe you can increase control.
You can see, if you have a boat that has the rudder at the front,
you have a very maneuverable boat, but it's going a little less fast.
So, we said, OK, let's make one with two rudders.
It didn't work so well. It was a very clumsy machine.
But I thought, what if we made the whole board become the rudder?
If the whole boat can start to change shape
so the whole boat becomes the rudder?
That's the first shape-shifting sailing-robot.
What's happening there
is that, the same as you can control the shape of the sail,
- which you can adjust, you can trim the sail -
now you can do the same with this kind of boat,
you can trim the hull
so you can really define the trajectory of the boat and how you go around.
So, you have a boat that's... well, not at this stage and at this scale,
but we hope that we can make an almost optimal boat
in terms of how much you can maneuver,
stability, absorption of the wave impact, and so on.
But what we were trying to do at the time was not this,
we were trying to sail upwind and pull a lot of absorbent.
So what's special is that you have two sails,
and they can be potentially at two different angles of the wind,
so you can never be stuck in irons.
If you're trying to pull something long and heavy,
being able to have always wind in your sail is a huge advantage.
The process by which we've been working is very much like an evolutionary process,
there's lots of failure, most of our boats would break and would fail,
but we keep learning.
Then we wanted to know, could this work at a larger scale?
So we built a 50-dollar boat,
just out of plastic bought from a local Home Depot.
That's just an inflatable boat that we could pull,
and then we mechanized it,
we put some motors inside of it, and some computers,
that was in the factory in Rotterdam.
The team has been moving
and we've been collaborating with people around the world.
This one is basically a rocket with a sail,
so you can bend the rocket and it has a lot of pulling power.
Now we're very excited because we start to make them in batches.
That was my bedroom last month. (Laughter)
Now anybody can buy them online;
most of our clients have different labs of hydrodynamics around the world
who are interested in this technology.
We don't have to be pulling oil-absorbent,
we could be pulling anything and it could be made of modules.
If you want to study the impact of oil on fishes,
we could have different research happening in different modules.
And then, we wanted to see,
could we propel this into a modular way as well?
So we prototype on land as well because it's faster and cheaper.
This machine is three-meter long and is very maneuverable.
My interest in this is that this machine is three-meter long,
but we use exactly the same motor and parts.
On this version there is six-meter long.
So this machine is bigger than your car,
but it uses less energy than your mobile phone when it rings,
because the only thing we need to control on this machine
is the tilt of the front wheel, the rest is passive.
That's quite exciting to think
that we could make really large vehicles with very little energy consumption.
So the next thing was: "How can we bring this back to water?"
So that's what we did, with just two modules at this stage,
but look at the position of the sail, you have the jib and it's changing sides,
and you have then the second sail that's going to change sides,
and you have the third sail, and you see what I mean.
What happens is that the boat
will bend back to being straight and will dash forward.
The other cool thing about having a modular boat
- and it happened to us -
is that if it breaks, you have two of them,
so we can always say it was made on purpose.
We're really excited about this
because we really need, badly, ocean-going robots,
because the oceans have so many problems,
I'm not going to start counting them.
But this type of machine has properties that makes it a very promising model.
The technology itself is not even the half of the work we have to do.
The way we develop the technology,
in my point pf view is almost more important.
This technology is all open-source,
you can go online, download the documentation, make your own.
We invite anybody to use, modify, and distribute this technology for free.
If anybody in Tohoku wants to start manufacturing this,
we would actually help them.
The idea is that if the technology is good for the environment,
we believe that it should be available to everyone for free.
The ocean is big enough for everybody to help and have a business.
So that's the network; instead of being a proper company,
we'd be more of a network of inventors and hackers.
It's been quite an adventure to manage a non-company,
and we're still learning how to do it.
Another theme that's closer to you, but actually also closer to me.
I'm half Japanese, my father's from Niigata,
and half of my family lives about a hundred kilometers away
from the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
When it happened, I came in 2012, for the first time,
and I wanted to know what was going on.
So I borrowed a bicycle from a friend in Tokyo,
and I cycled alone from Tokyo to Sendai.
It took me about 10 days,
because many roads, as you know, were broken at the time,
so that was a very instructive trip.
I saw moonscape, almost, and people walking like ghosts.
That was really hard.
I was amazed by the people I met on the way,
and how courageous they were,
and how much energy they were putting
into reconstructing their lives, and the economy, and their families.
I stopped every half an hour on the bicycle,
and I would measure the radioactivity.
I'm going along the coast, I'm looking for places to launch my boats,
because I'm dreaming, I'm cycling and thinking,
maybe my boat can help understand radioactivity in the ocean,
and that gives me energy to cycle.
I came back last year, this time more organized.
We got a nice car.
This is my hands-off Safecast.
They make these Geiger counters, they're open-source Geiger counters.
They have a GPS, so you carry it around, and you go back home at night,
you plug your SD card,
and you can contribute to a global map of almost real-time radioactivity.
Anybody can actually help.
But what we did is that we...
they were not very happy, but we broke the Geiger counter, took it apart,
and tried to make it water-proof.
And we tried to fit it onto a boat,
so that's why we developed it in an underwater Geiger counter.
We tested it, and it worked, but it was very, very unreliable,
because water is a very good radioactivity shield.
That's why I'm here again this year
because I want to make it work!
That was the dream last year, we were thinking it'd be so cool
if we could have a Geiger counter under the boat,
keep measuring radioactivity, upload data online,
everybody can see what's going on, that'd be awesome.
But it's really had.
This is a French team of engineers from Areva,
and they're just trying to do this,
but the measurement they get is very unreliable,
just the same problem as we had, water makes it hard.
So right now, we have a simulation of where the radioactive particles or dust
could be transported into the ocean.
That's a really great simulation, but it's not based on much measurement.
So that's what we think where radioactivity is,
but we cannot really verify that, unless we go there and measure it.
So, we have on one side now,
a great set of land data which is extremely reliable,
and on the other side, we have some models of simulation
but based on very little measurement.
And in the middle, you have some groups like here at Umilabo,
and some professors in universities [who] are making a few of these samples.
We have a huge deficit of data on what is the seabed radiation.
What I've observed as well in the experiments,
is that the sample that we use, called 'an Ekman grab,'
- it's a box that goes on the bottom of the ocean,
it's got two jaws, and it would just grab the sand and then it'd go up.
The problem is that it grabs not only the surface sand or sediment
which is more contaminated,
but it also grabs what's deeper which is not contaminated.
So, you have an average of the radiation of the last 5-10 years,
but it doesn't tell you what's the level of radiation right now,
and that's a problem.
So I thought, can we develop something very cheap?
This is the prototype built in half a day,
- actually, I built four of them in half a day in my workshop.
What it does is, instead of grabbing deeper,
it just goes on the water surface and you drag it,
and what it does is it just carves,
or it just gets just a few millimeters of sand at the bottom of the sea.
So, this is three days ago.
We were on a ship and we sailed up to 1.5 km from the Fukushima-Daiichi
and we used this device, and we collected sediments.
What I really like about this video that we edited yesterday night,
is that you see us...
At the beginning, we're being very nerdy, and this-is-our-invention,
and we're so happy about it,
but then you see the old fisherman behind, being super-bored, thinking,
"Argh, these guys don't know anything!"
Then he took the line from my hands, and he started using it,
and he collected five times more sediments than we did.
He was so into it! We couldn't use our sensor anymore.
He wouldn't let us play with our machine, and he was very happy.
What I really love about this is the idea that I'm not a fisherman,
I can invent a cool machine,
but he definitely is a lot better than me at using it.
So we're so excited to come back here again, and work with fishermen,
to improve this technology.
These are the samples we've collected.
Just like the image to make the map, it's the same.
We have to collect those, to make those maps.
These are the points we've collected,
and these are the points where we hope to be collecting in the next few days,
if the weather allows.
This is where we are.
We have great sets of data from land,
and I'm trying to see who's interested
- if you're interested in this please come talk to me -
in mapping the sea, because that's so important,
if we want to rebuild the fisheries, the industries,
and have the residents coming back, we're going to need this information.
The ocean is the future of... well, in my mind, of everything,
because that's where all life comes from.
In the whole universe, it's where it started.
And it's also the future of our food, seafood, energy, wave, solar, wind,
communications, most of the Internet is happening on the water, fiber optics,
security, most of the warfare is happening through the sea,
transport, 90% of the world's trade is transported by ship.
This is major.
And Japan is an island, so actually, that's your resource.
That's our resource.
Knowledge is the foundation for a just society,
but right now, this knowledge is dividing many communities in Tohoku.
The people who believe in the government and Tepco, and the people who don't.
It's because many people in the civil society
are not involved in the process of creating that knowledge.
And I feel that, if we have tools, like this one
that cost me only 500 yen to make,
and that anybody could go with a fishing cane to collect
some samples to send by post, that would be so cheap to make.
And then people would feel
that they're part of creating this information and they'd trust it.
Then they would be able to come back because they made information themselves,
they are part of the process.
I think that open-source is going to be an important part of this transparency
and being able to bring back peace and cohesion in our communities.
That's the beauty of open hardware,
it brings the academia, the government, residents, and even industries together.
I'd be happy to manufacture some of these and sell them.
Cheaper, but sell them.
I hope that open technologies can empower Tohoku communities
and work for the environment.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)