Knowledge is the foundation for a just society,

and if the citizens are not actively pursuing this knowledge,

then justice cannot happen.

I believe that we're in a situation

where more than ever, we need to have this knowledge

because there are so many difficulties in this area;

and especially, about environment,

because if we want to have environmental justice,

knowledge is really a condition.

Environmental justice can sound like a very abstract or grand idea,

but I'd like to use two simple examples

and show tangible, simple ways that anybody can contribute

to this knowledge and environmental justice.

The first example I'll be taking is about oil spill, or oil pollution.

In 2010, the BP oil spill happened in the Gulf of Mexico.

I was responsible for a team at MIT in Boston,

and we were trying to develop a technology to clean up the BP oil spill.

But that was really a terrible and enormous environmental catastrophe.

If you look at the scale of it,

it'd be just like if half of the coasts of Japan would be covered with oil;

that was the scale of the accident.

The technologies we were developing at MIT were extremely cool,

but they were going to be really expensive

and it would take a lot of time to develop them.

So, I left my dream job, and I moved to the Gulf of Mexico,

where I lived for two years to work with the local communities.

And this is what we did.

We didn't have much money, so we started with what was around us.

We cut plastic bottles and we'd put a simple 100-dollar camera in them,

and then we'd inflate those party balloons,

and attach the camera under the balloons;

or would fly it with kites,

we'd attach the camera to the kites and take pictures from the sky.

Sometimes, we'd walk on a beach or get on a boat,

and we'd take literally hundreds,

or often times, thousands of pictures in one session.

Eventually, we'd stitch them

into many small maps and more small maps,

and eventually, we'd make those very large maps.

Those maps had the resolution

a hundred times the average of satellite imagery,

but they cost much less, as you can imagine,

maybe not that much less than Professor Yamada's.

What's really special about them

is that we could make those maps whenever we wanted,

and they were made by the residents.

That was really important for the people so they can reclaim environmental justice.

BP oil spill was recognized as an environmental crime,

BP was recognized as guilty of neglect.

What's special about this

is that it is the victims of the environmental catastrophe

that had to collect themselves the evidence

to reclaim environmental justice,

they had to be extremely creative and resourceful

to reclaim environmental justice.

And I think it's a very similar situation here in Tohoku.

It was a very fun activity as well.

Beyond the community aspect, I kept being more interested

in how I could actually clean up the oil spill.

Making the image map was a very useful thing,

but how can we actually clean it up?

700 of these boats were deployed, thousands of men worked on them,

and many of them had health problems because of being exposed to toxic [fumes].

They collected only 3% of the oil on the surface,

because they didn't really pay attention to the natural patterns,

that's my feeling.

and so they were just eyeballing where the oil was,

and basically going where they could get it.

But if you take the same amount of oil absorbent

- that they'd put in like this -

and if you straighten it, you have more surface area.

You cannot collect everything, but if you have multiple paths,

maybe there's more chance to collect more material.

But it's really hard to move such a large object

against the wind, the waves and the currents.

So, I thought:

" What about if we use a technology that's thousands of years old, sailing,

and could we sail up the wind,

and intercept the oil that's drifting down the wind?

That's a very simple idea.

I didn't know if it was going to work,

I just took a small boat and try to sail around.

What I found is that you're losing two things.

First, you're losing the pulling power,

and second, you're losing the capacity to steer.

So I thought, maybe if I changed the architecture of the boat,

and put the rudder at the front and the centerboard motor back,

I could control more.

So I did that, and with a robot that's one meter,

I could control a payload of four meters,

so that was a very encouraging first test.

Then I thought, OK, it's a bit like cars; if you have a four-wheel drive,

and you have two wheels that can move at the front and maybe two at the back,

and maybe you can increase control.

You can see, if you have a boat that has the rudder at the front,

you have a very maneuverable boat, but it's going a little less fast.

So, we said, OK, let's make one with two rudders.

It didn't work so well. It was a very clumsy machine.

But I thought, what if we made the whole board become the rudder?

If the whole boat can start to change shape

so the whole boat becomes the rudder?

That's the first shape-shifting sailing-robot.

What's happening there

is that, the same as you can control the shape of the sail,

- which you can adjust, you can trim the sail -

now you can do the same with this kind of boat,

you can trim the hull

so you can really define the trajectory of the boat and how you go around.

So, you have a boat that's... well, not at this stage and at this scale,

but we hope that we can make an almost optimal boat

in terms of how much you can maneuver,

stability, absorption of the wave impact, and so on.

But what we were trying to do at the time was not this,

we were trying to sail upwind and pull a lot of absorbent.

So what's special is that you have two sails,

and they can be potentially at two different angles of the wind,

so you can never be stuck in irons.

If you're trying to pull something long and heavy,

being able to have always wind in your sail is a huge advantage.

The process by which we've been working is very much like an evolutionary process,

there's lots of failure, most of our boats would break and would fail,

but we keep learning.

Then we wanted to know, could this work at a larger scale?

So we built a 50-dollar boat,

just out of plastic bought from a local Home Depot.

That's just an inflatable boat that we could pull,

and then we mechanized it,

we put some motors inside of it, and some computers,

that was in the factory in Rotterdam.

The team has been moving

and we've been collaborating with people around the world.

This one is basically a rocket with a sail,

so you can bend the rocket and it has a lot of pulling power.

Now we're very excited because we start to make them in batches.

That was my bedroom last month. (Laughter)

Now anybody can buy them online;

most of our clients have different labs of hydrodynamics around the world

who are interested in this technology.

We don't have to be pulling oil-absorbent,

we could be pulling anything and it could be made of modules.

If you want to study the impact of oil on fishes,

we could have different research happening in different modules.

And then, we wanted to see,

could we propel this into a modular way as well?

So we prototype on land as well because it's faster and cheaper.

This machine is three-meter long and is very maneuverable.

My interest in this is that this machine is three-meter long,

but we use exactly the same motor and parts.

On this version there is six-meter long.

So this machine is bigger than your car,

but it uses less energy than your mobile phone when it rings,

because the only thing we need to control on this machine

is the tilt of the front wheel, the rest is passive.

That's quite exciting to think

that we could make really large vehicles with very little energy consumption.

So the next thing was: "How can we bring this back to water?"

So that's what we did, with just two modules at this stage,

but look at the position of the sail, you have the jib and it's changing sides,

and you have then the second sail that's going to change sides,

and you have the third sail, and you see what I mean.

What happens is that the boat

will bend back to being straight and will dash forward.

The other cool thing about having a modular boat

- and it happened to us -

is that if it breaks, you have two of them,

so we can always say it was made on purpose.

We're really excited about this

because we really need, badly, ocean-going robots,

because the oceans have so many problems,

I'm not going to start counting them.

But this type of machine has properties that makes it a very promising model.

The technology itself is not even the half of the work we have to do.

The way we develop the technology,

in my point pf view is almost more important.

This technology is all open-source,

you can go online, download the documentation, make your own.

We invite anybody to use, modify, and distribute this technology for free.

If anybody in Tohoku wants to start manufacturing this,

we would actually help them.

The idea is that if the technology is good for the environment,

we believe that it should be available to everyone for free.

The ocean is big enough for everybody to help and have a business.

So that's the network; instead of being a proper company,

we'd be more of a network of inventors and hackers.

It's been quite an adventure to manage a non-company,

and we're still learning how to do it.

Another theme that's closer to you, but actually also closer to me.

I'm half Japanese, my father's from Niigata,

and half of my family lives about a hundred kilometers away

from the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

When it happened, I came in 2012, for the first time,

and I wanted to know what was going on.

So I borrowed a bicycle from a friend in Tokyo,

and I cycled alone from Tokyo to Sendai.

It took me about 10 days,

because many roads, as you know, were broken at the time,

so that was a very instructive trip.

I saw moonscape, almost, and people walking like ghosts.

That was really hard.

I was amazed by the people I met on the way,

and how courageous they were,

and how much energy they were putting

into reconstructing their lives, and the economy, and their families.

I stopped every half an hour on the bicycle,

and I would measure the radioactivity.

I'm going along the coast, I'm looking for places to launch my boats,

because I'm dreaming, I'm cycling and thinking,

maybe my boat can help understand radioactivity in the ocean,

and that gives me energy to cycle.

I came back last year, this time more organized.

We got a nice car.

This is my hands-off Safecast.

They make these Geiger counters, they're open-source Geiger counters.

They have a GPS, so you carry it around, and you go back home at night,

you plug your SD card,

and you can contribute to a global map of almost real-time radioactivity.

Anybody can actually help.

But what we did is that we...

they were not very happy, but we broke the Geiger counter, took it apart,

and tried to make it water-proof.

And we tried to fit it onto a boat,

so that's why we developed it in an underwater Geiger counter.

We tested it, and it worked, but it was very, very unreliable,