once upon a time I lived in Africa
working as a journalist and teaching
journalism to people living in conflict
zones and very difficult parts I was
doing this so that my students could
tell the world what was going on in
cases of atrocity and also they could
have a career to support their families
through the media training during this
time I found myself from the
northeastern part of dr congo during one
of the periods of escalation and
violence it was a hope and expectation
of mine that by bringing these photos to
the world they would reach people who
could potentially stop the killing or
help stop the killing and bring in an
air of peace one of the duties of
journalism is to report the facts and
then the public will do with the
information what it will however kind of
a frustration i had was that the tropes
of journalistic storytelling could never
really convey with the terror of the
place what it feels like when people are
just constantly under the stress of
having their lives almost undid so one
of the horrible things about war is
landmines this is a landmine actually no
it’s a replica this is called an
anti-personnel mine and the military
logic of this is that when it explodes
it mames rather than kills the soldier
and then at least two of the soldiers
comrades will have to drag that person
off to receive medical attention and
then this creates kind of further terror
while costing military resources so as
you can see these are prevalent all
around the world and long after the
conflict ends the mines remain active
there’s no way to turn them off so this
means that women children and men who
are largely farmers but going about
their lives when they step on one they
lose at least a limb and possibly their
lives so I kind of mentioned the
frustration that the journalistic tropes
don’t convey what what things feel like
to be in these areas so after I got out
of Congo I started to write short films
to kind of explore what it was like to
be there because the duty of a filmmaker
is to bring the audience into the world
characters and so I thought if audience
members could come into the world then
they would have the better sense of
empathy towards what it’s like to
actually be in these places and perhaps
we could do what I came to call closing
the empathy gap so an idea I had was to
use science fiction as a genre to
hopefully inspire people to work on new
solutions to the landmine problem in
some way that the Star Trek inspired a
whole generation of innovators through
that through its use of technology and
so one of these amazing things in the
world is an organization called a Poe
poem and a popo is founded by a Belgian
Buddhist product designer who grew up
loving rats and at a certain point in
his life he started to train rats to
find landmines and so for 20-some odd
years this organization has been
clearing minefields with the use of the
giant African pouch trap
this is all true it’s amazing so I I was
like oh that would be that would be kind
of a fascinating short film about a rat
and then I was kind of looking for a
plot though right it’s got to be a movie
and around this time I was asked to be a
judge on this thing called the robot
Film Festival and the Rowett Film
Festival is a kind of fun quirky event
but it’s basically trying to showcase
benevolent human machine relationships
through the use of cinema so like one of
the slogans of the film festivals like
what if Skynet loved us right it’d be
entirely different Terminator series but
then when I was a judge in this I was
like wait a minute
if robots and humans are working
together what if rats and robots could
work together so with that voila
I had my plot a love story between a rat
and a robot who guide humans out of a
landmine field after they’ve gone insane
it’s perfect perfect short film thing
right so I was making the film and it
was getting this great community and
people started to kind of become
involved and landmine removal work and
kind of educating themselves and then
while we had this kind of little barely
functioning robot type thing on set I
got kind of interested in the metaphor
if like what if robots are kind of like
puppets that you throw electronics on
right like what if they have that kind
of magic so then just kind of as a you
know side quest as I do I started to try
and make the robot from my movie in the
real world and the process of doing this
I came across this fantastic thing which
many of you were probably
but if you’re not called the maker
community and basically makers are
people who are interested in technology
who strongly believe in open source
collaboration and also like showcasing
their project so it’s all about sharing
high-five you go go team this is also
seminal and a lot of the steam education
initiatives you see coming around
America these days so anyway there I was
I was in LA and trying to make a robot
so I found some makers and this is kind
of kind of someone what the community
looks like and what it does so I was
actually kind of kidding okay at this
and another cool thing that’s actually
enabling the maker movement is that a
lot of the technology that previously in
like the very very recent history would
have required advanced degrees in order
to utilize is now really available so
someone like me who’s you know I want to
make a robot um can actually make a
robot so I was I was on cloud nine you
know you just you feel like an on evil
dr. Frankenstein right like ah it lives
so right things are going great I got
the robot and then I start mixing the
robot with the rats because I’m like
well worked in the movie why can’t it
work in reality so um I started kind of
playing with rats and they’re just
amazing creatures like check them out
and when I started but kind of what
happened here is when I started to mix
the rat and the robots together while
this rat would be very loving and you
can put it on your shoulder and it eats
food when I put the food in the robot
the rat would just Jack the row but it
was the first I think rat on robot
mugging and witnessed by a human and I
was like okay you know I learned a lot
now just it’s not there so I was kind of
like moving away from my dream of the
rat and the robot working together when
I got one of those like chance emails
like hey McGregor you should go check
this guy out to see a lecture by a robot
assistant artist named Ian Ingram Ian
Ingram makes robots that communicate and
commune with animals in nature what you
have featured here is his work called a
lizard legs and the robot is on the left
and so basically there’s a certain
species of lizard that does push-ups to
declare dominance on the hot spots of
the rock and that robot emulates the
that the lizard perceives as I’m the
dominant man on the rocker she man or
she she whatever the lizard gender sorry
and then the lizard will run away and so
it does this all autonomous me so I want
to go see his lecture I got there at the
end I was like really excited to find
someone else who kind of be interested
in this stuff and I got there I was like
blathering and he looked at me kind of
bemused and he hands me GPS coordinates
he’s like tomorrow I’ll be with my robot
lizard come to these GPS coordinates so
now I’m not seeing to always follow GPS
coordinates to a man with a robotic
lizard and some locale unknown but it’s
a world view I’d strongly endorse so I
met him saw the lizard and it was just
like completely enthralled and then I
went into what I call the kung-fu
modality of life and that’s basically
when you find the master I
you just go and offer to be the
assistant in his dojo until he teaches
you the sacred things
so I started bugging me and let me be
his assistant and eventually he
graciously allowed me and I started
working on him repairing this robot this
is a robotic squirrel that scans the
environment for humans or dogs and when
it finds one it flicks that squirrel
tail and in the squirrel kind of lexicon
if you want to call it that or language
that means head to the trees there’s
danger so once I started kind of work on
the squirrel is like whoa man and I was
also now in conversation with one of the
world’s foremost experts on you know
robot animal communication and the more
I talk to him the more he just made it
really probably clear that my dream of
rats and robots working together wasn’t
gonna be but I was I was with him so
it’s like there must be something some
way to kind of make this all happen and
so Ian got me into this philosopher
biologist named jakob von hooks call and
jakob von hooks call is one of the the
founders of a field called biosemiotics
he’s an adventure of a concept called
the ohm belt basically what the belt is
is a description that organisms and
different species have relationships to
each other based on what they can
perceive and so in terms of thinking
like how can one communicate with a rat
the oome belt in his work would be
pretty seminal
one of his famous studies is about a
animal that’s probably not near and dear
to our hearts but it’s eating you or
someone you love in your life and it’s
blind deaf and can barely move and I
find that amazing I’m obviously talking
about the tick so look it’s cool did a
study on the ticks and basically the
tick has very few ways to perceive the
world so you think of like all the vast
you know spectrums of sound and UV and
ultraviolet that did that how is it tick
able to get on to you it doesn’t have
eyes so basically how the tick works is
it has general light sensitivity in its
skin and that lets it climb to the top
the top of grass and then once it’s on
the top of grass it just waits for
something to come by and how it knows
something that waits for a mammal to
come by because all mammals emit
something called butyrate
acid from their skin and so once the
tick detects beti rock acid then the
tick immediately drops and if the tick
drops him since his Heat all mammal
blood runs at 98.6 degrees the tick will
then climb up find a spot with not too
much hair suck blood have a meal and
then it drops off reproduces and dies
that’s it’s got that lifestyle going so
anyway so I was around so but this kind
of looks like opened up my world right
like so can you can think of like other
ways that an animal perceptions can be
really readily integrated into
electronics projects you have Hawks they
have kind of a telephoto lens
Viper’s are able to hunt in complete
darkness using infrared of course
there’s kind of the classic example of
the bat but all these sensors are really
affordable and they’re really available
and like particularly the way the maker
community has worked with them it was
like there’s a possibility here alright
so we had our we had our philosophy and
then but how we’re going to connect the
belt of a human with the belt of a rat
so as you probably noticed as a human
you’re a visual creature human zoom belt
is mostly mostly visual however rats are
mostly olfactory it’s through scents so
for example if a rat comes into a rat
convention the rat knows like who’s
having sex with who who’s eaten last
who’s hungry
who needs food who wants to have a
family you know who doesn’t want to all
this stuff is just immediately apparent
to the rat and you can kind of wonder
what the sense of time would even be
like that right when social
relationships are all known in the
presidents it’s it’s a fun thought
experiment but how do you connect these
two creatures and so the brilliant
insight Ian came up with was to put an
accelerometer which is something that
detects motion it’s in all smart phones
on the rats in an adorable waistcoat
well the adorable waistcoat was my idea
but then when the rat which one more bit
of information so the popo organization
that trains the rest to find landmines
trains them to scratch and on the ground
when they find a landmine so in doing
this it’s a part of the natural behavior
of the rat that a human can also
visually identify with it zoom belt so
in order to kind of facilitate the wrath
to human belt communication we started
making an accelerometer waistcoat
devices and putting on the rat and then
that would send out X Y Z data that is
then leading me to my next little phase
of life which is as a rat bionics
researcher so now we had our idea we had
kind of our methodology we had some
technology and we had been in touch with
the opal organization about potential
ways that automating the the perception
of the rat indication on a landmine
could be of service they’re fantastic
landmine system and so he and I did the
next logical thing and flew to Tanzania
to test it all out this is the a Popo
landmine training facility in beautiful
Morra Goyo Tanzania you can kind of see
those little markers there but this is
just a KERS and acres full of
deactivated landmines where they put the
ratchet this kind of rigorous behavioral
training kind of from birth into when
they are capable of going to minefields
and shipped off to the cambodian places
like that so once you and I were there
we started it that’s in we started to
like test this all out and then give me
and that’s the waistcoat in the rat and
then so this is what happened is we were
kind of testing our theories and things
like this and this is what the data
looks like
when it comes out of the rats weight
waistcoat and so at this point it became
quite obvious that like no human can
really draw out what that is remember
the tick I described out had the three
factors so we now need to use a machine
learning algorithm that kind of has the
brilliance of the tick that can find
three factors in the XYZ data here that
indicates that the rat has found a land
mine which brings us to our next
challenge of actually yeah using the
machine learning algorithms to do all
this so I want to kind of take it
briefly back to just note that a simple
screenplay has now led to the sensory
experience of a trained rat being
translated by wearable technology that
is then interpreted by machine learning
algorithms all to work towards reading
the world of landmines and the children
don’t have to grow up in fear of the
ground beneath their feet and that’s
where we’re at now and I predict a bold
and wonderful future for you know Bionic
rat communication technology and I want
to bring this back one further step to
remind you all that this started with a
robot and a rat and if there’s something
that you can take from my story I want
you to explore the barriers within you
to serve as the foundation to forge the
bridge to other communities in the world
because you never know where those
bridges are coming from or where they’re
going or how far they’ll take you thank
you
you
working as a journalist and teaching
journalism to people living in conflict
zones and very difficult parts I was
doing this so that my students could
tell the world what was going on in
cases of atrocity and also they could
have a career to support their families
through the media training during this
time I found myself from the
northeastern part of dr congo during one
of the periods of escalation and
violence it was a hope and expectation
of mine that by bringing these photos to
the world they would reach people who
could potentially stop the killing or
help stop the killing and bring in an
air of peace one of the duties of
journalism is to report the facts and
then the public will do with the
information what it will however kind of
a frustration i had was that the tropes
of journalistic storytelling could never
really convey with the terror of the
place what it feels like when people are
just constantly under the stress of
having their lives almost undid so one
of the horrible things about war is
landmines this is a landmine actually no
it’s a replica this is called an
anti-personnel mine and the military
logic of this is that when it explodes
it mames rather than kills the soldier
and then at least two of the soldiers
comrades will have to drag that person
off to receive medical attention and
then this creates kind of further terror
while costing military resources so as
you can see these are prevalent all
around the world and long after the
conflict ends the mines remain active
there’s no way to turn them off so this
means that women children and men who
are largely farmers but going about
their lives when they step on one they
lose at least a limb and possibly their
lives so I kind of mentioned the
frustration that the journalistic tropes
don’t convey what what things feel like
to be in these areas so after I got out
of Congo I started to write short films
to kind of explore what it was like to
be there because the duty of a filmmaker
is to bring the audience into the world
characters and so I thought if audience
members could come into the world then
they would have the better sense of
empathy towards what it’s like to
actually be in these places and perhaps
we could do what I came to call closing
the empathy gap so an idea I had was to
use science fiction as a genre to
hopefully inspire people to work on new
solutions to the landmine problem in
some way that the Star Trek inspired a
whole generation of innovators through
that through its use of technology and
so one of these amazing things in the
world is an organization called a Poe
poem and a popo is founded by a Belgian
Buddhist product designer who grew up
loving rats and at a certain point in
his life he started to train rats to
find landmines and so for 20-some odd
years this organization has been
clearing minefields with the use of the
giant African pouch trap
this is all true it’s amazing so I I was
like oh that would be that would be kind
of a fascinating short film about a rat
and then I was kind of looking for a
plot though right it’s got to be a movie
and around this time I was asked to be a
judge on this thing called the robot
Film Festival and the Rowett Film
Festival is a kind of fun quirky event
but it’s basically trying to showcase
benevolent human machine relationships
through the use of cinema so like one of
the slogans of the film festivals like
what if Skynet loved us right it’d be
entirely different Terminator series but
then when I was a judge in this I was
like wait a minute
if robots and humans are working
together what if rats and robots could
work together so with that voila
I had my plot a love story between a rat
and a robot who guide humans out of a
landmine field after they’ve gone insane
it’s perfect perfect short film thing
right so I was making the film and it
was getting this great community and
people started to kind of become
involved and landmine removal work and
kind of educating themselves and then
while we had this kind of little barely
functioning robot type thing on set I
got kind of interested in the metaphor
if like what if robots are kind of like
puppets that you throw electronics on
right like what if they have that kind
of magic so then just kind of as a you
know side quest as I do I started to try
and make the robot from my movie in the
real world and the process of doing this
I came across this fantastic thing which
many of you were probably
but if you’re not called the maker
community and basically makers are
people who are interested in technology
who strongly believe in open source
collaboration and also like showcasing
their project so it’s all about sharing
high-five you go go team this is also
seminal and a lot of the steam education
initiatives you see coming around
America these days so anyway there I was
I was in LA and trying to make a robot
so I found some makers and this is kind
of kind of someone what the community
looks like and what it does so I was
actually kind of kidding okay at this
and another cool thing that’s actually
enabling the maker movement is that a
lot of the technology that previously in
like the very very recent history would
have required advanced degrees in order
to utilize is now really available so
someone like me who’s you know I want to
make a robot um can actually make a
robot so I was I was on cloud nine you
know you just you feel like an on evil
dr. Frankenstein right like ah it lives
so right things are going great I got
the robot and then I start mixing the
robot with the rats because I’m like
well worked in the movie why can’t it
work in reality so um I started kind of
playing with rats and they’re just
amazing creatures like check them out
and when I started but kind of what
happened here is when I started to mix
the rat and the robots together while
this rat would be very loving and you
can put it on your shoulder and it eats
food when I put the food in the robot
the rat would just Jack the row but it
was the first I think rat on robot
mugging and witnessed by a human and I
was like okay you know I learned a lot
now just it’s not there so I was kind of
like moving away from my dream of the
rat and the robot working together when
I got one of those like chance emails
like hey McGregor you should go check
this guy out to see a lecture by a robot
assistant artist named Ian Ingram Ian
Ingram makes robots that communicate and
commune with animals in nature what you
have featured here is his work called a
lizard legs and the robot is on the left
and so basically there’s a certain
species of lizard that does push-ups to
declare dominance on the hot spots of
the rock and that robot emulates the
that the lizard perceives as I’m the
dominant man on the rocker she man or
she she whatever the lizard gender sorry
and then the lizard will run away and so
it does this all autonomous me so I want
to go see his lecture I got there at the
end I was like really excited to find
someone else who kind of be interested
in this stuff and I got there I was like
blathering and he looked at me kind of
bemused and he hands me GPS coordinates
he’s like tomorrow I’ll be with my robot
lizard come to these GPS coordinates so
now I’m not seeing to always follow GPS
coordinates to a man with a robotic
lizard and some locale unknown but it’s
a world view I’d strongly endorse so I
met him saw the lizard and it was just
like completely enthralled and then I
went into what I call the kung-fu
modality of life and that’s basically
when you find the master I
you just go and offer to be the
assistant in his dojo until he teaches
you the sacred things
so I started bugging me and let me be
his assistant and eventually he
graciously allowed me and I started
working on him repairing this robot this
is a robotic squirrel that scans the
environment for humans or dogs and when
it finds one it flicks that squirrel
tail and in the squirrel kind of lexicon
if you want to call it that or language
that means head to the trees there’s
danger so once I started kind of work on
the squirrel is like whoa man and I was
also now in conversation with one of the
world’s foremost experts on you know
robot animal communication and the more
I talk to him the more he just made it
really probably clear that my dream of
rats and robots working together wasn’t
gonna be but I was I was with him so
it’s like there must be something some
way to kind of make this all happen and
so Ian got me into this philosopher
biologist named jakob von hooks call and
jakob von hooks call is one of the the
founders of a field called biosemiotics
he’s an adventure of a concept called
the ohm belt basically what the belt is
is a description that organisms and
different species have relationships to
each other based on what they can
perceive and so in terms of thinking
like how can one communicate with a rat
the oome belt in his work would be
pretty seminal
one of his famous studies is about a
animal that’s probably not near and dear
to our hearts but it’s eating you or
someone you love in your life and it’s
blind deaf and can barely move and I
find that amazing I’m obviously talking
about the tick so look it’s cool did a
study on the ticks and basically the
tick has very few ways to perceive the
world so you think of like all the vast
you know spectrums of sound and UV and
ultraviolet that did that how is it tick
able to get on to you it doesn’t have
eyes so basically how the tick works is
it has general light sensitivity in its
skin and that lets it climb to the top
the top of grass and then once it’s on
the top of grass it just waits for
something to come by and how it knows
something that waits for a mammal to
come by because all mammals emit
something called butyrate
acid from their skin and so once the
tick detects beti rock acid then the
tick immediately drops and if the tick
drops him since his Heat all mammal
blood runs at 98.6 degrees the tick will
then climb up find a spot with not too
much hair suck blood have a meal and
then it drops off reproduces and dies
that’s it’s got that lifestyle going so
anyway so I was around so but this kind
of looks like opened up my world right
like so can you can think of like other
ways that an animal perceptions can be
really readily integrated into
electronics projects you have Hawks they
have kind of a telephoto lens
Viper’s are able to hunt in complete
darkness using infrared of course
there’s kind of the classic example of
the bat but all these sensors are really
affordable and they’re really available
and like particularly the way the maker
community has worked with them it was
like there’s a possibility here alright
so we had our we had our philosophy and
then but how we’re going to connect the
belt of a human with the belt of a rat
so as you probably noticed as a human
you’re a visual creature human zoom belt
is mostly mostly visual however rats are
mostly olfactory it’s through scents so
for example if a rat comes into a rat
convention the rat knows like who’s
having sex with who who’s eaten last
who’s hungry
who needs food who wants to have a
family you know who doesn’t want to all
this stuff is just immediately apparent
to the rat and you can kind of wonder
what the sense of time would even be
like that right when social
relationships are all known in the
presidents it’s it’s a fun thought
experiment but how do you connect these
two creatures and so the brilliant
insight Ian came up with was to put an
accelerometer which is something that
detects motion it’s in all smart phones
on the rats in an adorable waistcoat
well the adorable waistcoat was my idea
but then when the rat which one more bit
of information so the popo organization
that trains the rest to find landmines
trains them to scratch and on the ground
when they find a landmine so in doing
this it’s a part of the natural behavior
of the rat that a human can also
visually identify with it zoom belt so
in order to kind of facilitate the wrath
to human belt communication we started
making an accelerometer waistcoat
devices and putting on the rat and then
that would send out X Y Z data that is
then leading me to my next little phase
of life which is as a rat bionics
researcher so now we had our idea we had
kind of our methodology we had some
technology and we had been in touch with
the opal organization about potential
ways that automating the the perception
of the rat indication on a landmine
could be of service they’re fantastic
landmine system and so he and I did the
next logical thing and flew to Tanzania
to test it all out this is the a Popo
landmine training facility in beautiful
Morra Goyo Tanzania you can kind of see
those little markers there but this is
just a KERS and acres full of
deactivated landmines where they put the
ratchet this kind of rigorous behavioral
training kind of from birth into when
they are capable of going to minefields
and shipped off to the cambodian places
like that so once you and I were there
we started it that’s in we started to
like test this all out and then give me
and that’s the waistcoat in the rat and
then so this is what happened is we were
kind of testing our theories and things
like this and this is what the data
looks like
when it comes out of the rats weight
waistcoat and so at this point it became
quite obvious that like no human can
really draw out what that is remember
the tick I described out had the three
factors so we now need to use a machine
learning algorithm that kind of has the
brilliance of the tick that can find
three factors in the XYZ data here that
indicates that the rat has found a land
mine which brings us to our next
challenge of actually yeah using the
machine learning algorithms to do all
this so I want to kind of take it
briefly back to just note that a simple
screenplay has now led to the sensory
experience of a trained rat being
translated by wearable technology that
is then interpreted by machine learning
algorithms all to work towards reading
the world of landmines and the children
don’t have to grow up in fear of the
ground beneath their feet and that’s
where we’re at now and I predict a bold
and wonderful future for you know Bionic
rat communication technology and I want
to bring this back one further step to
remind you all that this started with a
robot and a rat and if there’s something
that you can take from my story I want
you to explore the barriers within you
to serve as the foundation to forge the
bridge to other communities in the world
because you never know where those
bridges are coming from or where they’re
going or how far they’ll take you thank
you
you
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