Hello everyone. I've got a question for you. I'm going to do this sort of talk which is telling you a story about Project Nimbus, which is the journey that we went on to project Moving Images on Clouds. Where are the current thoughts though? Try and use the talk to turn it into a bit of a vehicle to present to people from civic leaders, like their councillors, different business, about the value of risk. It would be really great for any kind of feedback a'i wedi byw i ddau sy'n d aloneig o'r adrwm yn gwneud gyda y gallu syni arddur hyn. Mae hyn yma, dyma'r gwneud dysgu ymlaen. Wrth i dwi'n dweud roedd yn bwynt i ddweud yng Nghymru, a byddwn yn ddweud y gilydd wedi am yr hyn. Dwi'n dweud o'r unrhyw i fynd yn credu rai gwybrae'n eu cymdeithasol a'r cyfan yn ei wneud, yn cael iawn er mwyn a diweddol â'r cynnig, mae gennynnu gyda drwn o dechrau o'r cyfan. I'm really interested in that and this idea of community and kind of bringing people together to kind of see where we can go with cross-disciplinary collaboration. But I'll get straight in. That works really well if it's really loud, but it doesn't have the same impact if it's not. I generally like to do things that involve a lot of risk and kind of make things up on the spot a lot like I'm kind of doing now. I'm quite terrified. It's kind of a lot easier hanging out of a plane a mile above the ground, staring at the floor than it is stood up here right now. So if I kind of run around and kind of get a bit excited and lost, just bear with me. I'll come back round. So, clouds. Manmade cloud projections. The earliest that I've found is from the book 2829 written by Jules Burns' son, Michael Burns. And in this book he depicts a kind of superpower kind of newspaper called The Earth Chronicle. And they project on the clouds during the day and kind of cover the entire sort of planet. And they have all of these dark intentions about doing all of these different things to kind of take away the sun so they can constantly kind of project advertising. So that's one of the earliest things that I've found which is potentially one of the dangerous things about the potential of this technology. Next is Harry Gwindol Matthews. So around the 1930s this guy also invented the death ray. He's one of the heroes. And he projected time on the clouds as well of lots of other different things. He also projected an angel apparently around kind of Christmas time, which is quite funny how a lot of people have this obsession of angels and clouds. She'll see. Deborah Kelly, Words of God. So this is kind of early 2000s. So she's the same kind of tech as Harry Gwindol Matthews, which is like this huge kind of cannon with a big truck lighting and a couple of lenses. And this is projected in Sydney as you can tell. But it's not happened a couple of times. And one of the things about this kind of medium is that it's really difficult really to find the clouds in the right place at the right time at the right height, which is probably why not much of it really kind of happens. Also various of the things which we'll get into. There's also Hey Hey, so they did a project using a laser. So they used a scan laser, which is different to the one that we made. The thing about a scan laser is that it's moving really quickly and so you've still got the same intensity of being, which will be important later on. But the project that they did, they projected onto this incinerator and they started to engage with the local community and told people at the community that if you'd start turning all your lights off, then this green cloud, which is above the sky, will get smaller because you're using electricity for one of the best projects I've seen using clouds. And of course we all know how to get Batman. Can we turn the lights off actually? Is that possible somehow? So my journey started when I was doing my MA back in 2007 and I was looking at non-lethal weapons of mass communication and I came across this paper from 1981 by the US military detailing weapons from the Vietnam War called non-lethal weapons terms and references. And this is a huge kind of booklet. It's got some amazing weapons in about sound weapons and all of these things. And it was the one in the middle that really got me, which is Hullogram Profit, which is the projection of this ancient guard over a small little village so they think it's rapture at the end of the world. And you're going and take them over. And I also like this one as well. I remember non-lethal, but he kind of died. So when I came across this I was really concerned about, well a couple of things really, is that one, I suppose that's possible, and two, that there's going to be this kind of seduction by this process into advertising. So I wanted to sort of start off on a journey to make something that was kind of open source to put in the hands of kind of artists and activists and anyone really that if this happened, would be aware that we could subvert this. My original idea was an angel, which is kind of, I don't know why, but there was something about this, I wanted to project a symbol of hope, that's why it was. And then the more I thought about this, the power of this image, is that this could either be a symbol of hope or it could be an angel of death. So depending on how this image is kind of read, this can have the exact opposite effect of what I'm sort of trying to do. And then I start to think more about how that could work in terms of like these non-lethal weapons or weapons of mass communication about how you preload the internet with all of these stories about this angel of death or hope is going to appear that would then define what's going to happen and how the public are going to react to it.  And he made a laser image projector, still image projector. Now the reason why a laser is so important and especially for the clouds is that it's a single point source. So it's always in focus because it's a single frequency of light. So that's why in lasers and clubs it kind of cuts all the way through because it doesn't have a focal plane. So I thought the best way to kind of do this is to kind of make one of these things and stick it on a 16mm projector. Now I love 16mm projectors and I couldn't bear to take it apart. So I kind of made this whole construction on top and I projected it with a little laser. So this laser here is out of the CD burner.  And you turn on the projector and it kind of wears round. Now it didn't work. Now the reason it didn't work is actually not my fault it turns out but it took five years to work for that. The other thing as well about this is that it's like it's a massive hefty device. 16mm projectors are a massive ball ache anyway to kind of make them work because of how complex they are to kind of thread. And so for me to kind of take this up into a helicopter was just a general no-no because it didn't work. I kind of left it alone. It's a little bit about me in the meantime to kind of explain part of the journey is that I quite like to do stuff. So one of my friends told me ages ago is that we all grew up in public. And so one of the things I like to do is just go out there and just sort of do things and then just see what kind of happens from it. But I find that to be a real great way to kind of explore things. I also do quite a lot of commercial work which I use that as a way to fund my practice. So I kind of go off and make kind of videos and all these different things for these people and tell them about my research. That pays for my kind of artistic research. A lot of these people are really into the idea that rather than funding a kind of couch at some kind of production company they're funding someone for genuine kind of exploration or something to do with art or collaboration. Now, the catalyst for this. So at Fond Festival in 2011 we've just finished doing a pirate radio station from a six foot swan peddler with John O'Shea. And we're on our way back and we're just chatting around about ideas and I was telling John about this cloud idea and he was like, well why don't you do it? It never really occurred to me that it was possible to sort of do it. And then he introduced me to two people at that sort of time. One was Abandoned Normal Devices Festival which is a kind of new cinema and cultural festival based in Manchester. We'd just been working with the Octopus Collective but he also introduced me to a pilot who flew 747s. Now, the 747s, I had a chat to this guy and he was telling me about all these little local airfields that were just full of pilots and they happened to modify the plane and take up anything and it can just glue it to the wing or something like that and so that made it all seem possible. So we've got a tiny little bit of seed money and it just uses it for the start of the exploration. Now, a key point about this is that we're in this caravan for a week in the middle of Manchester just talking to God knows whoever kind of came in the door which is a really interesting process in itself and I met Liz Elks from New Scientist. So that'll come back in later but I think it's just worth mentioning at this point that that's where we kind of started the kind of conversation. It wasn't until four years later that we actually finished the conversation. Around this time, I've been doing lots of projections out of moving vehicles so this is a projection out of a campervan of Edwin Mybridge's horse in motion which I've reanimated it. It's projected onto railings which is why it looks invisible. And throughout this exploration of being projecting out of vehicles it's maybe got me interested in this idea of planes and maybe rather than it being a helicopter it could be something that could be in motion. Now, at this point, the horse was only a viewpoint and a kind of direction indicator to the zoom practoscope which is what Mybridge's device was that he originally made to show the horse arguably the first ever photographic projector in the world as a disc of 14 images and then you've got a shitter and a hand crank and it turns the wheel and you get a flash across the image as one wheel goes one way and one wheel goes the other way and then you put those flashes of images together and you get motion. But the thing about this is that we could potentially make this lightweight. So in my version, the first place was a view master disc, a scale electric controller for variable resistors, speed control the repurpose bits of the laser so we've still got the red laser there that goes through this disc and the lens to correct it and I was thinking that it could shoulder mount this thing and sit in a plane and fire it out the side. Another thing that happened around this time is that lasers are completely changed in value so these lasers come out of a tiny little hybrid projector which actually happens in this projector so inside this projector there's nine of these blue lasers which are two watt and this was like $35 so this was the kind of so the more power the better the brighter it's going to be that's what I and I just thought at that time I went to see Aaron at Umlaut which I suppose most of you all know and Aaron completely changed my way of thinking about things so I went to see him about making the shutter because that was the one thing that I couldn't make out of the bits of random stuff I had on my workshop floor and his kind of approach that was like let's remake everything and let's laser cut everything and then we can do different generations of things and take the journey from there so we used the viewmaster disc as the kind of the benchmark for everything and then we came up with an initial prototype so the first prototype was old laser cut we got an image disc at the back with 16mm filming we've got this other slit here I've got two independent motors which you can control the speed of I mean it can't really be that hard to figure out how this the first projector work is just two discs and so I spent ages of time I got in touch with my old 16mm friends and we spent ages trying to figure it out and we couldn't get anywhere with it I started to experiment with the laser that we've got and this laser just with this long throw lens to see if we could potentially do it from the ground and it was this image in the top left hand corner that really kind of drew my attention cos at that point it comes back to a focal point and when it comes to a focal point it's just as intense as being a single beam and before I take this up into a plane or point it at the sky I need to know that I've done absolutely everything I can to make sure that I'm not going to do any damage there's a woman called Grace Hopper who's got this amazing quote that's better to ask forgiveness and get permission which I find with a lot of the work that I do no one will give you permission for and there's no laws for or against it so it's best just not to ask and the other way you can truly sort of embody that I think is to do absolutely everything you can to make sure you can stand up in a court of law and well just say you did everything I guess so I went to see some businessists so this is Ben Whitaker and there was also Mike Nix and we've been working on a project called Phase Revival which uses a series of pendulums to explore femtosecond spectroscopy and it turns out that femtosecond spectroscopy which is their scientific practice which is partly inspired by Mybridge so I'm going to reveal use Mybridge as an analogy on his Nobel Prize when in paper to kind of explore what they do and essentially what they do at Femtosecond which is a million billionth of a second they look at atoms using a very similar principle to how Mybridge photographed the horse which is a series of tripwires so Mybridge captured time at a thousandth of a second there was one of the first to do that which led to the horse's hooves leaving the ground at the time which was a popular debated question and there was something about these scientists that we were just really interested in this idea that we just wanted to figure out how this whole process worked and their interest was basically they got this device and kind of pushed me out of the way and just started to take it apart and kind of break it which was really exciting to see this kind of engagement so even with these two physicists working on it we still couldn't figure it out it was sort of ridiculously the answer is ridiculously simple which we'll get to in a bit but it was I think there was too many parameters of what we could kind of control so and this became this was the end of the residency with the Ann Festival and this is kind of where the work kind of got to and this okay so part of this project because I've got this kind of commercial practice and one of the things that's quite interesting about it is that this is kind of research so all of the money that's kind of been paying for this has been coming from kind of invest in sort of time and paying for the people's time and at this point one of the things that kind of held everything together was the fact that there was no image so all of the different people that have been speaking to include a new scientist that was projecting a specific image on the clouds so one of the things that was brought to new scientists was about is that what image do they want to project which will engage their scientific community and with the scientists it was the same thing what is important to them about what the potential of the image is and the same thing with the pilots and I think starting the kind of the project without knowing where it's going to go was something that really helped with the progression during this time shortly after I met Ystwch of who's a cultural specialist and he was really excited about this idea of the image and we explored this idea of a still image and the work that I did with him a lot of that basically went on trying to find a plane and all of these little bits of things and so so this is really weird I'm kind of condensing the talk and there's a couple of slides kind of missing so at this point we had this little plane and we've been to an aircraft an airport just outside of Selby in New Yorkshire and there was two options so there was this little plane here and then this plane so this one's sort of like a 60 kind of horsepower it goes really fast, looks like a kind of spitfire this one's like a kind of little mini, it's really safe, it's nice can fly at night this one can't fly at night but this one can, it's a lot cheaper it's about 50p a minute this one's about a pound a minute makes no logical sense but of course it went for this one now at this point I've not even thought if I like flying I'm sort of sat in the back of this thing the little GoPro thinking what am I doing I'm doing it with the window open because I'm going to imagine holding this kind of projector and I'm probably about as scared as I am now actually it's interesting and so it was something nice about this part of the process about just throwing yourself to the point and not getting caught up too much about it when I went to see the pilot I had to visit him three times before he even let me in the plane because you don't have any small problems in aeroplanes you've either got a problem or you've not so this is me holding on to the side because that will stop me falling out if we go upside down and it's an amazing experience at this point everything completely changes for me it's actually like flying it's really good but there was no way I was going to work from this aircraft because we couldn't fly at night there was going way too fast to stick something out of the side of the plane and it goes like that so we got to the end of Leeds Creative Labs working with Vlad Strokov and one of the people on there called Simon Popple and Simon had worked on a Zupraxascope replica one of the seven in the world and it's like would you like to contact him it's like yeah of course so we gave him a call and he explained the ratio of one to minus one so as one of the discs goes one way the other disc goes the other way and it's as simple as that which baffled us for months and months so straight back to all that Aaron loves a challenge and so his Lego gears there's a way to kind of work out how to do it and we had the Zupraxascope mark three although I'll have to follow them up two straight back to 16mm so we shot lots of 16mm frames of the horse because we thought if we're going to do this it'd be really nice to see the horse is the first thing following the footsteps of my bridge and see what he saw and this is the first time of his testing it you're not supposed to be able to see anything it does work and we can see it but there's no way it's going to work on a cloud and so one of the key things about this is the laser how do you want to test this that's awesome I can see the legs going that's brilliant now for the proper laser so their proper laser is a five watts laser costs 20,000 pounds it's got a cooler about this big it takes ages to warm up and we can see it quite clearly but not that clearly just about sitting with the naked eye it picks up quite well with the film but there's no way we're going to be able to take this up onto a plane so game over really it's like there's no way this process is ever going to work and that's it it's the end of the line and then I've got a phone call from Mike for the next day and this is what he said so the beam comes through here the beam is correlated at this point it's bounded by this line that's before and then focus to a strike by this so the strike appears here on the slide and then that's the fixed cylindrical lens that the beam can't make so it projects onto the screen which is the box so if I just take that out of the way for a second then I can just make sure it's aligned so laser on and you can see on the box if I just project the light straight through the slide I'll get a test you've got that? so that's not very interesting if I put the oops it's from the partner it's guaranteed if I put the lens in there then you can see that what we end up with is a very very thin stripe here so that's a privilege to slate that's what the box will have and then you've got a beam which is expanded and it's about the same width now it's like this lens so it's currently correlated from the lens and screen which is important because the screen can be as prominent so we'll just push the box out of the way stick it up on the wall test on the screen test on the screen now is it the same size? is it by removing the cylindrical lens completely? so Mike had this idea now the only kind of downside to this idea is that to test out this theory it's going to cost £1000 on lenses which nobody seems to have lying around while listening on me this coincided with a residency from the octopus collector who got in touch that same week to say oh I'd like to see if you could do a bit more work on project Nubus we have about £1000 which was great it's like straight in straight out didn't even think about it and then a couple of weeks later we had the first time that we saw it now the horse is running vertical which is why it's not very great so this is the point where I think the actual horse took over the point that that should be the first image because it was the point where the horse brought the two disciplines together so another thing during this time is that we started to kind of explore with the two scientists I've been working with and Andrew Wilson and Laurence Mulroy this idea of kind of collaboration so we started this collectible super position which has done various other things which I'll come back to sort of slightly later on we did a presentation at the FOM Festival with Vlad which was a really interesting way and one of the things about this while I left the sliding we used to do the whole presentation just on completely analog which is a really interesting way to do it because it's not like you do it with digital where you can just have a quick flick through your slides to see what the order is you've literally got to make it up it should go along we went back to the plane we sort of tested it out with the smaller laser we didn't think it was bright enough it was going to cost us about £200 a time to go up so we took out the loan we invested in a kind of new laser we came out to try and build all of these things into one thing and this happened over quite a quick succession of time but it's actually been over sort of three years and the role of the maker in this was kind of completely critical because there was art and science on one side but the role of the maker informed us as much as we informed it in terms of disciplines and things because it was right there from the court and a driving force so we went back up into the plane and nothing so this is all we got but one thing we noticed about this is that you might as well be projecting on a hedge we can't even see that it's a cloud so you can't even see there's an image so there's one key thing about this is that it reduced our window to about 15 minutes so we needed to be able to see the horse where we've got some clouds in the background so you can actually see context the other thing that we changed as well because we were using a 60mm film and our 60mm film kind of loves laser light and it just melts away so we made a laser disk which then kind of turned it into like high definition it was super clear, it was really nice it also made it a lot easier to kind of share the design because now everything was in there that we could kind of share it became quite abstracted from where we started off originally because we wanted to do something that was really low cost and now we've spent like a grand on lasers and a grand on lenses which kind of takes it out but there's still the kind of the core thing of being able to build the zoo praxiscope for free just with the normal process with the actual slits and then nothing a whole year absolutely nothing, we lost the plane the pilot, the airfield we landed at night, they set up a load of cars on the runway, they didn't like that they banned us we just thought again it was just a kind of game over a brick wall we had this amazing projector all kind of ready and working and people seem to be a little bit scared of it now because it's taking lasers and planes don't really go well together especially with all the stuff in the media so here we can see the laser light coming through which goes through a lens here which then diverges the beam to this lens this here which then turns into a line just like Mike was saying that goes through the image disc and then there's another lens here which corrects the image so as the image disc goes one way with the horse the line goes the other way in sync so that's when we get these flashes of images we applied some money to kind of look back at the project and kind of reflect on the process which was just another way of getting some money for some plane fuel really spending all the fee on that and out of the blue we got onto the plane and there's it just came out of nowhere with the pilot now what was really interesting about this process is that the pilot also be taken on the role of a maker so maker turned into something that was more about someone who had expertise who was sharing the project who wanted the project to work we'd offered to pay everyone but because we weren't doing it driven by advertising and we were just driven to see if it could work they were really interested in the same thing that we were so it became this kind of collective pursuit of discovery but the thing with this airport is that it was just down in Nottingham and we were nowhere near it so we had to get good at reading clouds and we looked at all the different things and one of the key people key disciplines who don't like clouds or astronomers so when it's bad for astronomers it's good for us and this is the place that we used to read the letter called Ogimet and we were looking for clouds like this at 5,000 feet that's 10,000 feet there and this is not easy not easy to get especially when you've got the pilot to get in the right place you've got to get out of the scientist or someone else to come and film there's so many different things that have all got to come together at the same time but then in July no in June 2015 we finally made it up everything kind of came together and we got the first images one of the issues we had with this is trying to capture this on film is completely different because the horse's frame rate is some kind of ridiculous weird 0.8625 number and trying to get that on film means that you don't really out of this out of a seven minute film there's three frames which are actually of a full horse everything else is just a tiny little section of the horse so it's it's really interesting this relationship between how it looks when you're up there and also how it captures on film so so after this the article kind of went out on the new scientist that we've been chatting to all of this sort of time and kind of kept them engaged with the process and we were really keen that it didn't become about this spectacle and it became about the whole point of collaboration between all the disciplines and when we first spoke to new scientists we sort of pretended that Wyatt were interested for a world exclusive and that made them really fight for it and then so we had this really nice process of being able to sort of send them this after four years and then write this piece together in there which was really interesting process to then sort of see how it kind of expanded out into the world I'll just finish with a video actually of one of the fans of the project let's say so let me R-T-L they it's just sick name I'm projecting it's got David Lynch and Nimbus is what they call it and Nimbus is a they're projecting a field green horse University of Leeds funding is saying they can do it be a plane projector they can do it from the ground they project it up in the clouds and they're doing a field green horse isn't it great that we just happen to pick up every horse we need let's see a fourth seal of revelation and now we are at the fifth seal and meanwhile all of them are open and they're happening until we get to the sixth seal which is about to occur and we will be raptured before you captain of my other videos check this out we scumbags is like scumbags and I'm going to let you know that you don't fool us because we don't have something then gay so yeah that's a nono audience for that so yes thank you very much let's do it


Hi everyone. Delighted to welcome everyone to part two of World Space Week. So globally, World Space Week ended over the weekend, but here at ANU we had so many great events planned that we wanted just to keep it going. The series of events is sponsored by the Australian National University and the ANU Institute for Space, which we like to call in space. Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands and airways we meet and pay my respects to the elders past, present and emerging. My name is Professor Anna Moore. I'm the director of the ANU Institute for Space and the ANU Advanced Instrumentation and Technology Centre. Thank you for joining us for this discussion about how space data and satellite images can help manage bushfires. I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Marta Yebra, a distinguished remote sensing expert and researcher who has many titles. She is director of the ANU bushfire initiative. She is an ANU in space mission specialist. She's senior lecturer in environmental engineering at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, and she is a senior lecturer at the Research School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Environmental Engineering, and she's also associate editor for remote sensing of environment. Dr. Yebra has received many awards, including the prestigious Max Day Environmental Science Fellowship from the Australian Academy of Science, the CSIRO Pine Scott Career Award, and the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC's Outstanding Achievement in Research Utilization Award. But you may know her from her most important work, helping to fight bushfires more effectively with satellite data during last year's unprecedented fire season. Marta is a recognized expert and is often called in to advise on the ground firefighting teams about satellite data that can give them a more holistic view of the fires that they're battling. So Marta, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you for having me, Anna. To the audience, we'll be taking your questions throughout the event. Please don't be shy, and please, we welcome all of your questions. You can sign them up in the Q&A section of this webinar and just start them at any time. So Marta, the work you're doing is amazing, it's valuable, it's fascinating to countless Australians. We'll spend most of our time talking about it, but for the students who are watching online and thinking about their own education, let's start at the beginning. So what got you interested in studying, researching, and teaching remote sensing? And do you want the long or the short story? Well, I wish I could say that I've been interested in remote sensing since I was a child, but that was not my case. It may sound a bit strange, but I think I got interested in remote sensing because of fate. And let me elaborate a bit more on that. So when I was very little, I was only interested in dancing ballet. I was in a professional company until I was 18 years old, and then I had an injury at a very good timing because it was time to start thinking about studying at the university. So, and then I wanted to study dentistry, so very different to what I'm doing at the moment. But I took the mandatory exam to access the university for dentistry, but unfortunately I didn't get the mark, I needed only 4.2, so very little difference. And then I decided to take a year off, first of all, to repeat the exam, but then during that time, I really had quiet time to think about what I really wanted. My life was so busy, training so many hours, ballet dancing, that I didn't really have time to think what I wanted to do professionally when that career was closed. So I dedicated time to get information about what I could study and I got into environmental science. I got very interested in studying environmental science and decided to do that. During those studies, I had a course on remote sensing and I have to admit that although I found it very fascinating, I didn't fully understand the utility of remote sensing while teaching the course at the university. Even though we had some computing labs with practical samples, I still didn't get engaged. So it was only towards the end of my degree when I volunteered to do some fieldwork for a project that was, which aim was to map a bus fare risk in a national park. So I went with some scientists to the field, I collected the data, I really put my hands on the research and I say, wow, now I understand why this is useful, and I wanted to do this. So it's when I decided to do a PhD on that topic. That's wonderful. You know, talking to many women researchers in particular is fascinating that when you ask them that question, they've often done a journey to get to where they are and is amazing scientists and it's almost like that breadth of experience and the journey in it has really helped them, you know, when they get there. I certainly did that too. So it's really great to hear. So, so moving on to space, space data so you and I often think and talk about space and and all the data that we can get from observing from space. But most people, I don't think appreciate that that is as much. So it's always a surprise to many people that you can get data for for Earth observing for bushfires from space. What does that matter to Australians? Yeah, well, that's a good point. So, so this matter for Australian because it actually benefit every single Australia in many different aspects of their lives. So this technology are critical in impacting government, industrial and personal daily decision making. So this is especially comes when, for example, for communications, Earth observation and even fostering the economy growth. One example, for example, is that just over a few, more than a few years, a decade ago, perhaps we were not using weather apps or online mapping applications to get more efficiently to our locations and now we cannot live without those. And also more specifically to the topic of my research and with remote sensing data, we can get very accurate information for fire managers to plan before and during and after a fire. And so with regards to bushfires in particular, you know, the access to space now is much easier than it once was and this this lends itself to lots of new opportunities, lots of innovation. Could you say a little bit about that with regards specifically to bushfires? Yes, or yeah. Well, as you said, now we have opportunities for more innovation up to now we have mainly be using satellite data that has been collected by other international space agencies. Because, well, Australian doesn't own their own space mission. And we have a space agency that is fairly new. It has, it was funded like a couple of years ago. So, so so far we've been using the data we get and we haven't complained and we've been making developments with the data we get. But now we have the opportunity because access to space is easier to develop a mission that are more target to specific applications in good fire management. And we can work with engineers to design and launch those missions. Very exciting. So, so, as we're here tonight, we were seeing major wildfires burning through parts of California. Just last week these fires were compared to the unprecedented bushfires we had here in Australia last year. We both live in Canberra. And like many, many others struggle to make it through that summer season, both driven by drought and extreme heat. We lost almost 6 million hectares of eucalyptus forest in the 2019-2020 bushfire season. And California's already lost more than half of that vegetation. And historically October is the most dangerous time of year for fires there. What do you think about when you read and see these headlines? Well, I feel very anxious. I think I want to help but at the same time I feel a bit powerless because it's truly incredible what is happening these years, the scale and the impacts of these huge events that we are having over the last years. And we certainly need to understand what's going on with these century fires because they are certainly changing and so does need to change the way we manage and monitor fires. In fact, you were part of a team that just examined the effects of last year's unprecedented bushfire season on Australia and compared satellite data on the ground estimates of damage. What did you find doing that? Yeah, well we carried two different studies that conclude two different things. So one of the studies I did with colleagues of the University of Tasmania and the University of Alcalá, that is the Spanish university where I did my PSE. This study was carried out to determine whether the black summer bushfires were anomalous. And we use satellite data from the European Space Agency to analyze the burn areas for all the satellite records we have since 2000. And we also analyzed the data and written records of all the major fires in Australia since 1851. And with this we wanted to gain a broader geographical and historical perspective of the fires we have had since that time. So what we found was that the extraordinary scale and intensity of the black summer fires were driven by climate conditions that has not been seen in a century, including three years of drought. And most importantly, what we also saw is that there were a lot of inconsistencies with the way government records are about the fires that are currently using field and aircraft based technologies. And those records were inconsistent with the numbers we got from the satellite records. So the official numbers of the burn extent of the last fire season coming from the official government records were 24% larger than those we obtained from the satellites.  And then the other little study we did was looking at the severity of the fire in the Aurora Ballet in the ACT. So that's the fire we had at Namaji National Park near Canberra. And this work was done with ACT Parks and Conservation Service. So we flew with an helicopter over the park to collect observations of the fire severity around the park. And the objective was double, one to use this data to validate estimates from the satellite. And the other was also to assess the severity of the fire. So what we found basically was that 45% of the burn areas of the park were impacted at high severity, at the highest severity levels. And that will explain that the regeneration in those areas will be slower. So the vegetation will take longer to recover in those areas. Yeah, and we also show that in some areas that had been burned, we prescribed a burn nine months before that fire were almost untouched. Whereas other areas that were burned in the four or five years, previous the wildfire last year, were burned at a lower severity. So the study suggested that the program of the ACT Park, the prescribed burning program of the ACT Parks kind of was effective to decrease the severity of the Aurora Ballet fire. Right, understood. Wonderful. So we're getting some great questions in. Everyone please keep those questions coming in because we'll be reaching our Q&A part of the night pretty soon. So Marta, when did you first get involved in firefighting efforts? Well, firefighting efforts. I don't firefight. Yeah, but I guess you mean supporting and with information for firefighting. Well, during my PhD that I finished in 2008, I was working with two multidisciplinary projects that were assessing fire risk in Spain. And during that time, we had some end users from the fire industry involved in the project to make sure that our research was focused on their needs. But at that time, there was no truly engagement. It was more like an advisory role from the fire agencies, but I found very frustrated that when the project finished, and this happened very often in research, their research was not used. So kind of the project dismissed and all the tools and the online tools we developed just stopped because there was no continuation from the funding. But when I came to Australia, and then I joined the Bush Fire Matohas RCRC and I led the development of the Australian flammability monitoring system, the story changed completely. So the Bush Fire Matohas RCRC is a research center that is funded by the fire industry and the force since the beginning of any of the projects and the end users are engaged very much and to make sure that what we work on and the research we produce will be used by then. So the engagement since the very, very early stages of the project and saving that project on a way to make sure that they will use the products that make the difference. So it's been mainly in the last year when I have seen that my research is being truly used to make the decision and had impact beyond probably seeing the research in a journal. Well, I mean, that's a great message to take forward, isn't it? Not just for bushfire researchers, but for all of us, right? That to really make sure you engage with that end user and know their needs and then your own research will be very important. used. Yeah. You cannot expect that end user will read your research paper and will make use of it. That's not going to happen. That's wise words for all of us. So more recently, you and I have been talking about satellites and which is very exciting. So can you tell us a bit about your efforts to build a satellite that can detect areas where fires are more likely to occur? Yes. So as I previously said, most of my research so far is in making use of existing satellite data. And when using that data, I realized that there were a lot of limitations because that data, those satellite missions, the data from those satellite missions I was using was not specifically designed to map fuel properties. That is mainly what I do. So I use satellite data to retrieve information about how dry the vegetation is. Because it's important because the drier the vegetation, the more likely a fire is to occur if there is an ignition source. Of course, we still need that ignition. So I realized that the data was doing a fair job, but it was not very specific. So that's why we are working on this specific mission to be the first Australian mission target to monitor the fuel condition. And we are going to tune the sensors to be more sensitive to monitor moisture content and fuel load in a clay forest that have a very interesting way to reflect the energy from the sun. So it has very different spectral properties that other vegetation types in Australia and across the world. So what you're saying is that what you want to be able to do is to map Australia to quite fine detail to understand where those potential hot spots could be the season before. So you're not talking about detecting fires here during the season. You're talking about knowing where those hot spots and dangerous areas will be the season before and then being able to give that information to end users. That's very formal, isn't it? So give that information to areas where they can maybe even protect their towns and things like this and where fire services can focus on that when the season comes. Is that about right? Yes, exactly. So having very accurate timely maps of fuel moisture content and fuel loads can inform all those decisions you made. So they can use it to issue public alerts for potential higher fire risk. They can make decisions about the closure of fires or issue total fire bans. So all these decisions are based on information of fire weather, of course, but also the condition of the fuel. And also it's very important for planning prescribed burns, for example, because those prescribed burns that are more and more difficult to plan because the fires are getting longer and longer. So the windows of opportunities to do prescribed burns are reducing quite a lot. So this information can help them to schedule those burns so they will do it at a time where the fuel is not too dry because if it is too dry, there is high chance that the fire will go very quickly out of control. And also during the response, this information is normally input into five behavioral models. So once a fire has started, information about fuel condition coming from the satellite can be used to run five behaviors and know what's the most likely path that the fire may follow.  So could you say a little bit about that? It's a really nice story about how you can end up with some really great solutions when you put different disciplines together. It was a very interesting experience because at the beginning we could not understand each other very well. I knew a lot about fires and I knew about satellites, of course, but more like a user. I've never built or I've never even thought about building my own satellite and he was the opposite. He's a person, Rob's are a very experienced on building infrared technology for astronomy missions so he was always pointing up to the sky. So it was very interesting, first of all, to make him think to point down and look at the earth instead of the stars and I have found it very, I have found it a very interesting experience to talk to him and yes, trying to get the mission complex details. I know what it is needed on the ground to make my modelling. He knows how to build the technology to make that possible. So it's a very nice team. Just a reminder for those that have just joined us recently, please keep sending your questions in. We've got some great questions which we'll get to very shortly. So, Marta, if your satellite, your bushfire satellite is successful, it'll be one of the first Australian satellites in space, not the first, but it'll be one of the first and probably one of the biggest because Australia is just entering the space industry and again, and has great ambition. So how does that, how does it make you feel that you're part of that, you're part of that community? It makes me feel excited, yes, but also, if I'm honest, I've been nervous because it's a very ambitious goal, but I feel very proud to be able to contribute to those first family of satellites that will be built by Australians. So, and then, yeah, with two main advantages, I guess one is that again they will be fit for purpose for Australian conditions. So that will be a game changer in terms of the acquisition of data that I will use for my modelling. But then of course it will contribute to the Australian economy and thus, especially in these times of coronavirus crisis is something very important. Well, just to follow up on the working with partners and driving the space industry. So how important is it to work with global partners in this area and bushfires? I know, for example, both from the agency perspective, both NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, you're working very closely with them to do this. Could you say just a little bit about that? Well, it is very important, it is really important, mainly for probably in two different angles. One is because global coordination of wildfire earth observation initiatives will enable the development of virtual constellations of satellites that will collect information pretty far during the fire and post-fire to monitor the landscape. And also it will help to standardise processing and product delivery. And such coordination is very important to ensure the maximum value of the products we will generate to the emergency management from earth observation systems. And with that, of course, will facilitate the ability of the emergency management to adapt to the rising threat of wildfires and the climate change. But then in terms of, again, data provision, so it's also very important to have collaboration with other countries. For example, there is one thing that is called the International Charter for Space and Major Disasters for Wildfire Emergencies. The Charter is very efficient to prioritise data acquisition. So basically when a country has an emergency, a natural disaster or something, they can activate the Charter. So all satellites point to that specific location and they provide as much earth observation data as possible to help and inform the decisions around that specific natural disaster. So again, international collaboration is important. Wonderful. I'm going to go to a question because we've got two questions from someone who wants to really dive into the details with you. So this is probably a good time. Okay, so Michael says data, it would be good to have details. Infrared question mark, biomass question mark. And then another one is I really need to understand the physics that is used before any of the discussion can be understood. I hear data, but I've got no idea what it is nor how to interpret. Yes, that's a wonderful question. I didn't know that as well before I started to do this. All right, so in simple ways, so the solar radiation hits the surface of the lips and then the lips of the vegetation and talking about vegetation because that's our target at the moment. That's what we are monitoring. And depending on the water content that those lips have the energy reflected in a lesser or in a greater way. So when the vegetation is very dry, most of the energy in the subway infrared region is reflected back to the sensor to the sensor in the spacecraft protocol. But when they will, the plan has a lot of water, most of the energy is absorbed. So because of those differences in the amount of energy from this sand that is reflected back because of those differences, we can do some modeling to retrieve your most true content. And for fuel biomass is similar but instead of focusing on the absorption of the water and we focus on the absorption by other components in the leaves by, for example, cellulose and lignin. Right. And so if we were to take a picture of this vegetation from space using optical wavelengths like what our eyes respond to, you wouldn't be able to do any of this. You wouldn't write just the colors of the of the vegetation. So, so by being in the, what we call the one to two or two and a half micron region, the short wave infrared. The eyes don't see, we don't see this, but the camera does. It's able to distinguish both how dry patches of vegetation are and also what some of the content is that correct? Am I getting this right? The type of plant and things? Am I getting that one right? Yeah, that's correct. So there are some plant functional types that respond more to the visible range of the spectra. And we know about that the grass, for example, is green when it's wet and then it gets yellow when it's dry. So for those type of fuels, you can retrieve kind of indirectly the water content because of the change in the color. And it's because there is an indirect relationship between the chlorophyll content in the leaf and the water. So as the plant gets drier, the pigments, the chlorophyll pigments in the leaf decrease and the leaf change color. But that doesn't happen in Eucalyptus forest, for example, or other plants that are very well adapted to drought conditions. That's why we need to go to the sewage infrared region. Right. Well, Michael, that was all for you. And I hope, let us know if we can answer something else there for Ma. Ma to can answer something else there for you. So your latest project is director of the ANU bushfire initiative, where satellite data is just part of a much bigger initiative, a much bigger picture of what you want to do. Could you tell us a little bit about that initiative where you're not just using the satellite data, but it's a much more holistic technology, social aspects of bushfire resilience and science as well. So far, we've been talking about the monitoring fire risk, mainly the prefire phase of bushfire management, but for the ANU bushfire initiative, we are targeting a better early fire detection and extinguishing. So our overall ambitious goal is to detect a fire one minute after ignition and extinguishing it 60 minutes after we detected it. And why do we want this? Because it sounds obvious, but the longer it takes a fire to be detected, the larger it's going to be and therefore the harder it's going to be to put it off or to control it. So that's why we agreed that that would be our ambitious goal. How do we achieve that? That's another story. 60 minutes or 60 seconds? Oh, 60 seconds. Did I say 60 seconds? He's getting light in the day. 60 minutes. So it's one minute. So what you want to be able to do for the whole of Australia, or at least for those hot spots you've already identified the season before, is that you want to be able to detect a small fire within one minute. Then that's right. And then alert your whole the whole system around it to be able to put that out. Wow. That's that's a huge vision. So yeah, let's break that one down a little bit. So to get there, we need a combination of technologies. There is no a single technology that will achieve that ambitious goal. And of course, satellite imagery is not going to achieve that goal, but itself as well. So what the program and the program we put together a consistent and larger approach to both fire detection. So we are going to be testing in the short term and on ground sensors and cameras and mounted in fire towers. And that will be monitoring at a very high resolution and frequency specific areas of high risk in the landscape that we will identify with fire agencies. The initial tree that will be in the city in the city in the magic. But of course, this will be complemented with a platforms that come and look at larger skills like high altitude balloons, drones, and of course in the higher and later we'll have satellites. And the objective in terms of the satellite because we are talking about the space is to have a payload and specifically designed to detect active fires and with optics in the thermal infrared and mounted in in a geostationary satellite that will be able to constantly look at Australia, providing imagery, very high risk, not high resolution, medium resolution, around 100 meters, probably, of Australia. I'm sorry, Mada. When you say resolution. Oh, sorry. I mean the spatial resolution. And so, yes, so the size of the pixel on the image. So the minimum unit in the image that you can see. So, for example, if we talk about 500 by 500 spatial resolution, that means that you can, you cannot distinguish anything, any component. Within that spatial resolution. And the higher the spatial resolution, the more smaller objects you can see from space. So with the geostationary satellite and we can have a lot of temporal spatial resolutions, sorry temporal resolution. So we have a lot of frequency in the imagery because again is geostationary satellite is always looking at the same location on the earth and can take imagery. Let's say, for example, every 10 minutes. So just going to the questions, Sean asked, is the data collected from geostationary satellites? Well done, Sean. So I think we've just had that one answered. And we have a question from Jeffrey is, is it technically feasible to precisely map fire edges from space in real time. It depends how you define precisely, sorry, I cannot say that word precisely. And again, it depends of the spatial resolution of the satellite data you are using. So currently, from space, you have a private owned satellite that can collect information at centimeters spatial resolution and that has been used to map the perimeter of the fires as well. And there are quite a few private companies that provide that data. But using publicly available satellite data and the best you can do is using the European Space Agency Sentinel to data that is about 10 or 20 meters spatial resolution. So, again, that's the accuracy you can get in terms of the parameters. But yeah, is satellite data has huge potential in terms of mapping the progression of the fires. Fantastic. Well, the questions are flowing in. So I'm just going to, I'm going to jump straight into questions now, Mara. Some of these are these are fantastic. So, Daniel, will the data from this new satellite have a public API for we hobbyists playing at home. I don't think we have that yet. Well, you may have an answer and I want your view as the director of clean space. Yeah, I guess so I am, but I don't think we have work carefully in the business case. But most of the data we most of the algorithms we have developed and to provide information about fuel most of content are all based on public platforms that can be accessed by anybody. And one of the sample we've got is the Australian family monitoring system. That was developed by the with funds from the booth and that was our CRC. But yeah, I don't think we have decided around that but I am. Yeah, if there are no constraints around that I will happily make the data publicly accessible. I think that raises the great question. I mean, I'm an astronomer by trade and we often rely on a public identification of interesting targets. And I think that, you know, we have machine learning tools and things like this to try and spot certain things but it's still today at least artificial intelligence is not quite at the level by which it's as good as a human recognition is something unusual about a strange galaxy or a star that's exploded or something like that. So could you say a little bit about the computational requirements needed to spot these these fires and because I think that's that's a very strong component of what you're doing. It is definitely as and as we move to higher spatial and temporal resolution the computing needs are even higher. So yeah, we have a team of experts on artificial intelligence that are trying to get a clever algorithms to compress the data. So instead of having to to run the first to download and storage all the historical archive of satellite imagery in a local repository. And we have the data on the crowd on the cloud. So the algorithms can be run on demand. But again for being able to do that, we need to have a very clever artisan intelligence algorithm that will be able to compress the information so it can be run at real time on the cloud. So just just trying to get some more questions in here so we have a question from a good friend of ours Christopher Tyler from the fireball network. He's doing some fantastic stuff in Australia and California if anyone wants to reach out and fight and read up about them. Okay Chris asks, by when do you want your one minute system up and running. Yeah well and by when definitely finished and proofed by 2025 that is the because the program we've got is a five years program. But of course we we are going to start the trials in this summer. So, Jeffrey, is it technically feasible to precisely spot new lightning ignitions from space in real time. What would it cost to establish a specialized satellite to do this job. Yes, it is possible. And but I wouldn't know how it will cost to have a specialized satellite to look at that. And but I assume you will need also a geostationary satellite if you want to to have real time information on the lighting emissions with high frequency. And if that's the case, geostationary satellite payload can cost on around 100 millions and to develop just the payload then on top of that is is the satellite itself and they those needs to be very large satellites is not like the cute side that are cheaper to build on quickly. And if I mean compared to the devastation, you know, financially and emotionally more importantly of fire season like we just had 100 million is, you know, it's not it's not really you know compared to the economic hit. That's certainly something should be considered and the benefits can be great because they did with the ground stations of lighting detection, there is still the problem of special interpolation so you have access patient is ground station in X locations and then you always have to interpolate the data and the presentation. Okay question from Lily. Hi Lily. 60 seconds, which means we need a satellite constellation and I assume the number of satellites and not a small number is that correct. I think you sort of answer this with geostationary but maybe it's a maybe you could say something a little bit about geostationary versus the constellation approach. Yes, sure. Yes. So, yeah, for polar or orbit satellites because of course they have a time to revisit the same location of of the earth. You need a constellation, as you said, if you want to achieve a high temporal resolution and for activity detection that's a key aspect you need to have a frequent acquisitions to make sure you just don't miss the ignition. So, if you have a time, if you only over fried at 11am in the morning and the fire starts at 1pm is going to take you far too late to too long to to detect that fire. So, sorry, I lost. What was the question so we just So, my question's been being taken off. The question was, if you have to, if you could only use, you know, if you can only use low earth orbit to do the fire detection, then you need a lot of satellites because you've got to have that 60 second refresh, basically refresh rate. But what you've explained is that by using a geostationary, maybe we should explain what that is. So, geostate, maybe you could, sorry, I'm asking your question. So, the geostationary satellite can take more imagery per day. With just one single satellite, you can take imagery every 10 minutes to achieve that with a leo constellation, you may need around 200 CubeSats or even more. Christopher Taylor may have the answer to that. But the geostationary satellite, because it's further away in the space, will need, it cannot achieve the spatial resolution that you can achieve with low earth orbit satellites. And therefore, the probability of a geostationary satellite to detect a small fire is lower than a low earth orbit satellite. So that's why we need to combine both. The geostationary satellite gives you the temporal resolution, so it gives you the frequency, it makes sure you don't miss the fire, even though it is a bit larger when you detect it. But the low earth orbit constellation gives you a lot more ground resolution that is essential to detect small fires. And so, a geostationary orbit is a sweet spot where you put a satellite because its velocity is the same velocity as the earth rotating. So what that means is it's always above you at any time of the day, it follows you as it does its orbit. And that's a really great orbit for things like communications and for taking pictures of the same place above the ground. But it's a lot, it's a lot further away. Okay, so Sean, so will that higher resolution, less than one meter, be available from geostationary or will it need to be in closer orbits? I think you can achieve a one meter spatial resolution from low earth orbit. Indeed, there are a lot of private companies that provide that, but we don't aim for that. We aim for a spatial resolution from Leo of about 10 meters squared on the ground. And then, but from Geo, because you're just so much further away, you know, a factor of 100 away, it scales like that. So you need a telescope, which is 100 times bigger, to be able to see this, someone was holding a banner with I am here. You'd be able to see that at lower orbit, but you wouldn't be able to see that detail at geostationary. Thankfully fires are very hot. They produce a lot of photons so you can you can detect them from a long way away. Tony, have you considered the policy and funding implications to best leverage this technology current funding policy for for fires places the funding burden on local councils first until a localized state of emergency is declared. Great question. To be honest, we haven't considered that. We initially wanted to demonstrate the technology and the capability of the technology before going to get to the implementation and the other government level. My screen just refreshed. Okay, so this is from anonymous. Will you be able to predict whether created by fires with this new satellite. That's an excellent question. All right. So, whether created by far so there there is some research that has been done to to look at the, the clouds and the shape of the clouds and see if that can give you some information on when part of formulas are developing. And so that's like the preface before a firestorm. And but I don't think so wave infrared will be the best technology to look into that. And because so wave infrared has a bit of penetration into crowds. So perhaps for that kind of application visible bands that may be able to track clouds is more efficient, but it could be something that potentially could be useful for And we have another question from anonymous. So can space data and indigenous fire control practices be used together. And I guess, why not, but I guess in the general practice and they know very well and their land. So I guess that the main issue there is that they know when to burn they know how to burn. So I'm not sure how a satellite data cooling form their practice. And because again, in terms of prescribed burning, I can see how far managers use this information to plan and know when and where to burn, but indigenous have their own knowledge of the land. So I'm not sure up to what extent they will even want to consider this information, but it's definitely a very interesting point and perhaps something that we should definitely happen to account and discuss with these communities to see how they think this information could inform their knowledge as well. We're certainly seeing. Thank goodness a lot. A lot of those conversations happening both in the US as well as well as here. So there's obviously a, I mean just tremendous amount of experience there that's maybe not being used as much as it should be so be great to see that. Isaac, what is the biggest challenge, Marta, you have faced in your work. The biggest challenge I have faced in my work. Yes, I guess be brave enough to put a product in front of end users that perhaps I know is not perfect. But it could be useful. Let me elaborate a bit more. So scientists tend to to only disseminate information when they know it's perfect. And it's very much ready to be used and they have proof that it performs with a R square one and no errors at all. But but if you wait until that moment and you may lose opportunities and or you may never make a contribution to a specific application. So with the time I have learned that a farm managers appreciate the implementation or research that is perhaps not perfect, but I can still improve their decisions somehow that is also very important to make sure they understand the limitations of the research and or the product itself. So now what are the uncertainties of the product you are producing. For example, if you are producing a map of few moisture content and has an error of X percent, they need to know what's there or what's the uncertainty so they can base their decision in based on those uncertainties. So if the uncertainty is very high and they may not trust that the specific estimate at a given time if the uncertainty is low they may use it to inform the decisions more strongly. So that's been a challenge because again at the beginning I was a bit perfectionist as well. But I have learned with the time that you can still provide useful information even though it's not perfect. And I think we have time for one more question before quick. Have you considered using the more detailed fuel moisture maps to enable fire prediction softwares to more accurately predict fires operationally? Definitely. Definitely that's one of the key applications. But at the moment most of the five behavioral models that are used operationally by fire agencies are not ready to directly ingest these detailed special maps of fuel moisture content conditions. So some of the line of research that I'm trying to foster is to further developing five behavioral models that are better placed to directly ingest these detailed information and can be run especially and be updated regularly. And very last question for me. So let's go into the future five years with what you are starting now with your collaborators in industry and the fire services and others. What would you like to achieve in those five years looking back? In five years time, yeah. Again, I would like to have this integrated information system where the fire managers can have accurate information about the landscape condition, dryness, loads, a different spatial and temporal resolutions using any kind of data that has been collected at any time. And that can be directly ingested into a five behavioral model as we have discussed now to know where the fire is going to progress. But before that, of course, I would like to have this integrated approach for early fire detection. So again, first, we detect a fire very quickly, then we know how the fuel is, we integrated this with weather conditions and we run the fire behavior. We know sadly where the fire may go and all based on satellite information that is provided automatically to the end users in a very end user friendly interface. That is another thing that is also difficult to develop sometimes. Wonderful. Well, we've come to an end. I could be speaking much longer as always. Thank you so much, Marta, for joining us and for giving us a vision of where Australia could be leading the world in five years time with regards to bushfire management. Thank you, Anna, to you and everybody for listening. Thank you, everyone. Wonderful questions. And we'll see you next time.


Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Jean-Marc Slim of JSA, and joining me today is Mario Caderon, VP of Real Estate of Server Farm. Mario, thank you so much for joining us at JSA. My pleasure. Nice to be with you. Good to have you. And now for our viewers who may not already know, and I'm sure many of them already do, can you tell us a little bit about what makes Server Farm unique as an organization? Sure, if you happen to. So Server Farm is a data center ownership and operating company. We specialize in the physical infrastructure associated with the data center. We control a global portfolio. And I think what really makes us unique is that we primarily focus on existing facilities for our new data center footprint. So we typically will acquire existing data center assets that are poorly utilized and create efficiency within those data centers, create additional capacity and then sell that to our customer base. And our company is structured from a skill set to allow us to accomplish that business objective. Mario, Server Farm recently announced its acquisition of a 117,500 square foot data center in the ever-evolving Los Angeles market. Can you tell us more about the latest addition to your global portfolio and what made this acquisition so appealing? Sure, happy to. So this acquisition was a strategic decision on the part of Server Farm to enter the LA market. We're actually headquartered about five blocks away from this facility. So we were very much aware of the facility, very knowledgeable on its capabilities. We're never quite sure in the past about the LA market just because of the cost of doing business in that market. But recently we've noticed a significant uptick in our customer interest in the LA market. And we believe that the timing is right now for the acquisition of capacity in that market. And for Server Farm, it's basically an edge play. So we've acquired a facility that is in the heart of one of the largest population centers in the United States. That facility has a scale that's just about the right size fit for Server Farm. Between that 115, 125,000 square feet, we can deploy sufficient capacity in that facility that we can accommodate the customers who are interested in us expanding in that marketplace. So, you know, the facility was pretty much prototype for Server Farm existing facility, some customer base in existing customer base in that facility, but utilization is not very high. So there's a significant amount of capacity that we can offer to customers that still is not utilized within that facility. So it's got a good location. Power is available within that facility so that we can scale up the capacity and it's got great network connectivity from that location. So we thought it was a very strategic addition to our portfolio. And again, we think the timing is right for the LA market. Well, the demand is certainly there. Yes, it is. And it's not heavily served either. I think just the prohibitive cost base over the years has limited the amount of supply available in the LA market. I don't know that it will ever be a massive data center market, but there is a very sophisticated and entrenched business community within the LA market. A lot of which is very, very dependent on digital infrastructure. So we think the timing is right and we think that there's not a sufficient supply of capacity within that market. We've acquired this asset and we will likely look to grow that capacity. If we look into your role as VP of real estate, when server farm looks to growth status in the portfolio, what are you looking for in the facility? You briefly touched on this, but what are the specifics of what you look for in the facility and what are the most important factors for your clients? Sure. Well, the most important thing would be the market that the facility is located in. It has to be a market that we feel we can compete effectively and can generate customer demand. Our customers want to be there. So that's one of the primary motivating factors for server farm in any of the markets that we pursue. And then there are a whole host of other factors associated with the property. We typically try where possible to buy existing assets that have some income stream attached to them. So we're not starting from ground zero. This particular asset in El Segundo did have an income in place whenever we acquired it. It was not heavily utilized. There's a lot of run rate left in that facility. So that's, and then that opens up some of the other considerations that we have. I mean, we as a company are looking to create value, to add value to these assets. And one of the ways that we do that is to open up this capacity to our customers. So there was a sufficient amount of unutilized capacity in this facility that it was attractive to us because we knew that it would be attractive to our customer base. And the way that server farm is structured in house, we have a full operations team operations capability. So we would bring our operations team to that facility. And if possible, generate more efficiency through our internal operating model. And then we also employ a development and construction engineering team. So our construction engineering team was able to go into that facility, look at the existing mechanical electrical infrastructure, the topology and determine that we could add sufficient capacity efficiently so that we could serve as a customer base. So we're looking at market, we're looking at and also the scale of the asset, the scale of that asset was appropriate for us. We typically are looking at for something on the small side 80,000 square feet, but really this 115, 120,000 square foot is pretty much a perfect bite size for us. We can put sufficient capacity in there that we could accommodate our customer base. So it's a future proof assets. It's an acquisition for the future as well, not just the now. That's correct. That's correct. I think Los Angeles will be is a is a is a coming market. You know, it's not one of the larger data center markets in the world today because it's it, the cost of doing business there has been high. There hasn't been a lot of data center development there. And that's one of the other reasons why we're interested in the market now. We think that all the edge that demand is, you know, the timing is right for a lot of the hyperscalers to move into this location. So even though this this data center has has some scale to it, it's really more or less an edge play on the on the part of server form where we know we're acquiring an asset that's deep into the heart of this massive population center with a significant amount of network capacity in this area. So we have we have adequate network capacity as well as as utility available to the data center. Those are those are some of the other important considerations and looking at and looking at an asset and whether or not it's it's going to work for server form. I think I got myself confused between LA and San Francisco is considering the whole corridor all the way up there. It's been a it's been a very different very different animal it's been quite active is one of the larger data center markets in the world. I think LA, you know, will always be somewhat more limited but there is a significant industrial base in the LA area, and we believe it's underserved. We're looking at obviously we're interested in the the facility that we just acquired but potentially looking at some additional capacity additions. Sounds very interesting. I mean I know your company organization quite a lot because I've had the opportunity to sit down with quite a few of your colleagues over the years. I know it's quite unique compared to some of the other providers out there. But if we look at a special segment of the market out there so the enterprise. What would you say to an enterprise who see their own data center as a burden to their balance sheets. Well we deal with that quite often. That is one of our primary targets for capacity additions you know new acquisitions, and there is quite a dynamic going on in in the global data center market today where years ago 1015 whatever years ago, many enterprise entities had no choice but to build their own data center. And they did build these data centers with the idea that their capacity and utilization will continue to increase as it had in the previous 10 years. Well, basically none of that happened. These companies built these fairly large data centers with growth capacity. In fact, most of the companies that we look at most of the enterprises have not grown their capacity and in fact have shrunk their capacity within these facilities. So they end up with large extremely expensive assets sitting on their balance sheet that are very very poorly utilized. So the cost to run manage and maintain upkeep the data centers. It's just prohibitively expensive. And we see that all the time around the world. So, and as I mentioned before server farm is sort of structured to a be perfectly positioned to acquire an asset like that from an enterprise entity, and then work with that enterprise entity to help them to right their footprint within that data center, allow them to maintain on prem capacity within the data center, but only pay for what they're actually utilizing. And then typically we would free up, we would free up the excess capacity to our customer base. So that's kind of a key ingredient to the server farm business model. And as I said before, we're structured from a talent base in order to accomplish exactly that, that business model. That's the combination of real estate, finance, a very experienced operations team, very experienced engineering and development team, and we combine all of that together into a coordinated unit to be able to acquire these assets but really, really to help the enterprise become more efficient in their utilization of the data center. Which goes in line with the wider trends in the industry of the as a service service adoption as well. And I think your concept of sending back the capacity that's not utilized back to the customer that's quite interesting and high spread capacity so that's, that's a different shape I'll say. Right. And in many cases, we would utilize or we would open this capacity and to to various hyperscalers and hyperscalers may want or have an interest in this excess capacity, because the customers that we typically deal with that we're buying these data center from data centers from our world class companies that the hyperscales would want to deal with anyway. You put them two side by side and it creates this, you know, this, this great combination of entities in the data center. Speaking of great combination, a great topic that can never go in touch with when we talk about acquisitions and building facilities nowadays.  How does this recent acquisition in Los Angeles aligns with your company's sustainability mission and goals. From a sustainability standpoint. Yes. Yeah. So, yeah, I think our entire business model is sort of built around a concept of sustainability. You know, we, we rather than build new data centers were designed to take existing legacy facilities and make them more efficient and far more usable. So, in essence, you know, we, we are rehabilitating modernizing existing facilities and it eliminates the need to build new stuff. So, so basically, virtually every one of our facilities, Chicago, New York, Washington, Atlanta, Toronto, all of those facilities we acquired as existing assets and modernized created in house efficiencies within the data centers and it eliminated the need to go out and acquire or build and utilize all the building materials associated with with with a new facility. So, and we think there is a very substantial market of existing facilities that are perfectly adaptable for this this modern take on on the enterprise data center. We go in create a co location arrangement for the for the enterprise. And then bring other customers in and it gates the need to build new data centers. To me, it's, it's sort of a perfect combination for a sustainability model. The enterprise wins the the third party customers who come in win because you know we were providing this capacity to them in a in an existing facility and server farm benefits also because it's certainly a part of our business model and a piece of our success. And I mean sustainability has become part of the evolution of the modern data center let's call it that way. There's other things changing and with enterprises experimenting with the public cloud and hybrid IT. What do you see as the role of the wholesale data center moving forward. Well, I think it has a very critical role in in the dynamics of the modern data center. So, as I mentioned before, you know enterprise all of our customers are certainly looking at some some level of cloud deployment. But as we've found out is that most of our customers have a component of their IT requirements that really don't belong in a cloud environment, they're perfectly suited for on premises capacity. And so what we've we've we've been working with our customers is that keeping the in house IT deployment in house that the piece that's necessary bring in other companies in many cases like I said hyperscalers who would be able to handle the customers cloud requirements and doing as much of that on premises as possible. So it's sort of putting the IP loads in the right place, keeping the on premises load on premises and allowing that customer then to deploy a cloud based deployment where necessary, either on our site or through other offsite cloud deployment. Then building on that and on everything else you've said throughout these chats as well, especially around the potential future expansions into other markets and current markets. What are you working you your team server farm, why are you working on for 2021 and even beyond but what's what's in the pipeline. Yeah, so we are a very active and expanding company. We continue to look for strategic acquisitions in locations that we think will be viable for for our customer base. So for example, right now, we just completed of course the acquisition of the facility in Los Angeles. We are looking at increasing our footprint in the Los Angeles market more to come on that soon Toronto. I guess in the last 18 months or so, we completely redeveloped our asset in the in the Toronto market. We got it it created a brand new mechanical electrical infrastructure created a significant collocation lease with with a significant international hyperscaler, and we are now actively engaged in discussions to increase the capacity there. Also, we have the ability to build another building on that site, and we're working on on getting all of the entitlement and all the other planning components in in in place so that we can build that other building because there is significant customer demand in that Toronto market. And I guess the last significant piece that that we've got is, again, customer interest customer demand and some somewhat of a an in house advantage where we're actively engaged in development in in Israel. So new market for us, something that's just sort of that market has begun to explode. Our parent company is Israeli based so we have a bit of a built in advantage there, and we're actively engaged in securing sites and building in Israel right now. So I think Israel checks a couple of boxes a it's a it's a very sophisticated free market economy, relatively stable governmental situation there, sort of an anchoring location in the EMEA market area. You know, very highly educated workforce, and with without a significant digital infrastructure deployment throughout the country there. So I think the country is looking to expand that grow that infrastructure, that digital infrastructure network, and they need they need it's it's it's it's very much under supply. It's a very difficult company or country to to work in just because it's, you know, language currency, etc, etc, difficult, you know, in terms of getting approvals for for new site development. We have a bit of an advantage there so I think it will be a very successful expansion for server farm. And again, there's a fair amount of customer demand to be in that location. And I think, you know, a number of our customers see that as a jump off sport part point for the greater Middle East and then the northern Africa region. It's definitely a very interesting market and a differentiator, the entire region. But Mario, you've got so much going on in US in Canada, here in EMEA. What can where can our listeners find out more information about you and your projects and where you're going next. Sure. Well, probably the best spot would be to to check out our website.  You know, discussion about our operations model how we how we look at the data center world how we run things. We haven't even gotten into one big differentiator for server form, which is our proprietary in command data center management service platform that we employ throughout our portfolio and we employ on a third party basis for a number of major global enterprise entities. And that is a it's a system that sort of binds our entire portfolio, all of our operations together, and that makes us helps us to make us a much more efficient data center operator and helps our customers to become very efficient within our data centers. So yeah, so you can check out our website server farm LLC.com is a great source for for all that additional information. And then I believe we've got a podcast that's going to be coming up that will provide a great deal of additional information more to come on that. No, for sure. And well, my thank you so much for joining me. I thought it was very interesting and very good points made. I can't wait to see where you go next. I mean, you mentioned a few I can't wait to see expansion. I love a good data center expansion. Thank you. Thank you. And be sure to stay tuned for the launch of the server farms podcast like my referred the future of data centers. This will be a mini podcast series from the viewpoint of several farmers and data growers. I will be joined by the influences journalists and server farm experts to explore the industry's most pressing topics in this unique mini podcast series. For more information, visit server farm LLC.com slash podcasts. Thank you so much for tuning into JSA TV and JSA podcasts. Until next time, happy networking.


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