Science4Parliament - Episode Five - Dr Boris Galkin – Civilian drone technology
Speakers
Denis Naughten, Dr Boris Galkin
Denis 00:00
Welcome to signs for parliament the first podcast which aims to foster the relationship between science and decision makers and show how research and innovation are vital to the equitable and sustainable functioning of our societies and economies. My name is Denis Naughten. I'm a directly elected member of parliament in Ireland for the last 26 years, and I've served as an Irish cabinet minister, and on the Council of the European Union of ministers. I'm chairperson of the inter parliamentary union Working Group on science and technology, which is based in Geneva, and which aims to inspire global parliamentary action through legislative work in the field of science and technology. This podcast aims to highlight the work of innovative scientists and to get their perspective on what needs to be done to bring the world of science and policy closer together. And to add something different to the conversation. My guests will be asked to pick two numbers, each of which was related to one of 10 random questions, some of which will be asked during the interview. So on today's show, I'd be talking about drones, or to give them their former name, unmanned aerial vehicles, and the effects that they are having on society and their possible future uses with Dr. Boris Galkin. Dr. Galkin spent three months as a researcher in residence in the Irish parliament in 2021, as part of the Science Foundation, Ireland Public Service Fellowship programme, and produced a report on drones and the opportunities and challenges that they pose in the future. Good morning, Dr. Galkin.
Boris 01:36
Good morning. Thanks for inviting me.
Denis 01:38
So you're very welcome onto the podcast. First of all, I could ask you to pick two numbers between one and 10
Boris 01:44
Sure, I'm going to go with number one, and number seven, please
Denis 01:45
Numbers one and seven. So maybe please explain to us in simple terms, what your research area is all about. What are drones, and what are they currently being used for?
Boris 01:58
Of course? Well, to answer that question, I'd like to give a little bit of a context regarding wireless communication. wireless communication is a core technology in our modern society. Your mobile phone uses wireless communication to talk to the phone your laptop uses wireless communication in the form of Wi Fi to connect to the internet and the deed. Emergency organisations such as the ambulance service to guardai, firefighters, and organisations such as the defence forces use wireless communications in the form of radios communicate with each other and coordinate their activities. Now unfortunately, wireless communication has its limitations. You would notice yourself every time your phone loses service or when your Wi Fi connection is particularly slow. My research asks the question, can we use flung devices unmanned aircraft such as drones to support wireless communications for people on the ground and improve that communication?
Boris 02:52
Previously, during my time at Trinity College Dublin, my research focused on integrating unmanned aircraft drones into cellular networks. So having drones flew over an urban area like a city and provide mobile phone service to people on the ground who may be gathered for an event such as an outdoor food market to ensure that they have better phone service, better data rates and better quality of a connection than they would if they were simply relying on the existing fixed terrestrial base stations that are built on rooftops. My current research is expanding away from that and looking at the question of how can we use drones to support emergency organisations such as civil defence here in Ireland, and even support our defence forces. The Irish defence forces work in humanitarian and peacekeeping roles all over the world, in places like Mali and in Middle East, and their missions require them to travel through some of the most challenging environments on the planet, to provide aid to civilians in distress. And during these missions, they of course, have to rely on wireless communication, to communicate with each other and communicate with their headquarters.
Boris 04:01
My current work is looking at using flying drones that will operate over the mission area and will support their radio connections so that they can always be in touch with each other and with their headquarters, which should improve their effectiveness, increase the safety of their missions, and overall lead to better outcomes for everyone involved from the soldiers themselves to the civilians that are being assisted. So
Denis 04:26
in other words, this technology can be used for outdoor concerts in terms of improving coverage, right through to security of Defence Force personnel in some of the most isolated parts of the world. And can this technology or in the future has this technology the potential to improve communication for ordinary citizens in parts of the world where there's limited infrastructure at the moment, wireless or telecommunication infrastructure?
Boris 04:51
Absolutely. And in fact, we have seen some examples of this technology being used in exactly this way. Google's parent company Alphabet had a project called Project Loon, which involves launching these large balloons, carrying communication equipment, which would hover about 20 kilometres in the sky over a certain area, I would provide basic phone connectivity to the people on the ground who would otherwise not have any phone service. They successfully use this after the hurricane Maria, which affected Puerto Rico in 2017, I believe. And they were able to provide phone service to hundreds of 1000s of people who had experienced a collapse of infrastructure. Unfortunately, that project was cancelled for a variety of reasons. But the core concept was shown to be viable and valuable to the end user. And what we're trying to look at here. And what I'm trying to achieve with my research is a continuation of that concept where these drones will be able to be launched by network operators, or emergency crews to support phone service, whether it's phone service in emergency situations when the mobile phone network is down, or whether it's phone service during particularly busy periods when there's a lot of people gathered in a certain area, and they simply want to download videos or upload content onto social networks.
Denis 06:16
Great. And why did you take an interest in this particular area in the first place?
Boris 06:21
Well ,I come from an aviation family myself, my parents and my grandfather were involved in aviation in different roles. So I started my PhD in Trinity College in 2014. And my supervisor, Professor Luis de Silva, a fantastic man, he said to me, Look, we're good for funding for next couple of years, I want you to have a read, look at what's being published by the research community in the telecommunications field, what are they talking about? What are they interested in? Where are the gaps in the research, if you find an interesting topic, and you bring it to me, and if I think it's interesting, too, I'll let you do it for your PhD. So that's what I started doing.
Boris 06:58
In 2014, a Chinese company called DJI had come out with their first commercial drone called Phantom. And this drone was making waves in the photography community. This was a low cost device carrying a high quality camera that professional photographers could now put into the sky to use for taking aerial photographs, something that previously they'd have to rent a helicopter for, you know, this was absolutely groundbreaking in the photography world. But people also started asking other questions, they start saying, Well, what if it's not a camera that we put onto the drone, but some other piece of equipment? What else can we start doing? So being a telecom engineer, and going into that research area, I asked the question, well, what if we attach phone infrastructure to the drone and make it into a little flying access point, similar to a Wi Fi repeater that people can connect to with their phones? If we do that, and we integrate these drones into the mobile phone network? Can we use them to improve phone service for people?
Denis 07:56
Very interesting. Now, you spent three months in the Irish parliament, and you're telling me something that you learned about politics or the operation of Parliament? From your fellowship there? Absolutely.
Boris 08:08
Well, first of all, I learned how hard working people are and how good they are at adapting to difficult situaions. I have to acknowledge the Library and Research Service team and the extreme challenge that they were under due to the 2020 pandemic; the fellowship started right as the pandemic reached Ireland and as we went into lockdown, so the entire fellowship had to move from the planned format of us presenting ourselves and attending Leinster House and working shoulder to shoulder with the LNS staff to a online format where everybody worked remotely. And the sessions were held over zoom meetings were held remotely. Everybody was communicating over over wireless networks. So one thing I learned was that just how incredibly everybody was able to carry on. How well people were able to continue through those unprecedented times and that the system, continued working sessions were still held. The transport committee, I attended the transport Committee, which met to discuss the very serious issues that the Irish aviation industry was facing due to COVID lockdowns. And I was delighted to see that, you know, the country was still running even during such a crisis.
Denis 08:09
What exactly were you working on when you were in the Irish parliament?
Boris 09:23
OF course. So I was working on essentially a document a paper that would outline what is essentially drone technology, discuss its main components, how it functions, what it can and can't do discuss the research trends and innovation trends. Where is the technology going? What can we expect to see next couple of years, I talked about the existing use cases for drone technology, photography, emergency services, food delivery in some cases, and where that is all going. And then I gave an overview of the rapidly changing legislative background of drone technology over the past several years or so we've gone through three iterations of regulations on drone use in this country. So this is a very rapidly changing field. And I wanted to make sure that all the policymakers and members of the public who would read the document had an appreciation for how much work was done on ensuring the safe and legal use of drones in this country and in the EU as a whole.
Denis 10:22
And look, politics works in five year cycles at the parliamentary cycle. So what would you like to see happen with your work over the next five years,
Boris 10:31
I would like to see more engagement with policymakers and members of government. Like I said, this is a very rapidly developing area, we are seeing a lot of work being done by aviation organisations, professional pilots, researchers, engineers work in this field to develop this technology and make it as valuable and as capable as possible. I believe that the next step is for us to work with the public, to see what it is that the public would like to see out of this technology, what kind of uses they would like to see what uses would benefit them the most. And as representatives of the public, I believe working with policymakers and elected representatives is critical to ensure that this whole process proceeds smoothly and as quickly as it can.
Denis 11:16
So we'll take a step back a little bit at the start, you picked two numbers. And one of those numbers, as the question was, what would you consider the most life changing piece of technology we have today?
Boris 11:29
Well, of course, technology, as I said, it's small men standing on the shoulders of giants. So everything is built up on technology that was created previously. So in terms of technology that I've seen, with a with my own eyes develop over my lifetime, it has to be the internet, the global communication network that is connected all people allowed people to communicate with each other in ways that were previously impossible allowed for knowledge exchange that was unprecedented, and allowed for rapid development of things, I believe science in in a pace that was previously unseen. So we have an a completely unprecedented world that has been created by internet. And I believe this is going to just continue changing our lives mostly for the better, I'm sure. And so I would have to say the internet,
Denis 12:15
Can I talk to you for a minute about, for better or for worse, we've seen the way telecommunications technology has changed into the use of drones. And you've outlined in your conversation here with us about that. But I suppose the big fear for us as members of parliament now is the whole area that's emerging in terms of artificial intelligence, huge potential right across society, but huge concerns as well ethical concerns as well, in relation to it, and one of the negative ones that is frequently referenced is AI and drones and how AI with drone technology could be used to deliver weapons to cause death cause mayhem. I would like to comment on that where you see that going? Or how will you see we could try and manage to regulat it.
Boris 13:06
Absolutely. Now it should be noted that at the United Nations level, there are already proposals being made to regulate and even ban the use of AI and autonomous weapons, essentially, AI driven drones that are able to fly and choose their targets without any human involvement and attack them indiscriminately without asking for human approval. This is, of course, a very serious issue that technology has made this possible. I believe that in Libya, autonomous so called loitering munitions have already been used where a drone was deployed in the sky. And it was essentially left to its own devices to decide which target to attack. Of course, this is very worrying. And if this proliferates, it will have serious consequences for civil society, not just for the battlefield. Regulation is, of course, going to be one of the ways to address this. But there is going to be a challenge associated with this, I often see a comparison being drawn between regulating AI and autonomous weapons like this and regulating nuclear weapons. Now, unfortunately, that's not a very accurate comparison. Nuclear Non Proliferation works because obtaining nuclear materials is difficult. And refining those nuclear materials into a weaponized before is even more so as such, because it's difficult. It can be overseen, it can be controlled, we can track nuclear material, who has it, who's using it, and we can regulate it with artificial intelligence that doesn't require any special materials. A lot of these emerging generative API's that we are talking about GPT, stable diffusion and so on, they are running on general purpose computer hardware, something that you can go to the shop and buy yourself. In fact, there are hobbyists who are developing their own variants of these AIs at home. So the question of regulating and banning this, it has to take a very different form to how we were previously regulated and banned. The use of nuclear weapons. So we're talking about a 21st century problem which requires a 21st century solution, not a 20th century solution as has been applied previously.
Denis 15:08
Thanks for that and thanks for your final thoughts. Can I thank Dr. Boris Galkin for talking to me and to remember that you can find a link to his paper and to all the signs for Parliament podcasts at denisnaughten.ie or on whatever platform you use to find your podcasts. Thank you, Boris for being with me today.
Boris 15:26
Thank you very much pleasure to be here.
