I think you had my card? [laughs]

Yes, I did.

It’s the same one. There’s no change.

Thank you.

There’s no change. How can I help?

He’s from Japan. He came especially to…

Meet you.

…to Taiwan for meeting you again and also meeting someone else from Taiwan.

I’m not sure if you remember, but we met the last time because…He has been improving satellites, he is providing Earth’s imagery. He will present it to you.

Please.

He has a very innovative idea for Taiwan to open satellite data.

Thank you. I’m from Axelspace. Axelspace is based in Tokyo. We established our company out of Tokyo University lab back in 2008. Why? Because we felt the space technology should be available for more people.

At that time, almost 13 years ago. It was not available for most people. It was the elite’s technology. You need to be a scientist or from the specific meaning. We thought that’s wrong because space technology can bring a lot of things, positive things for our society.

We decided, OK, we’ll just do it because no one else was doing it. We decided to start a company to make microsatellites and using microsatellites to visualize the planet on a daily basis, so we can read clarity on what’s going on here. I showed you…

Yeah, I remember what we have talked about.

…Yes. What changed is that now we have four strong leadership including myself and most almost 90 people. When I came to you, it was probably around 30 to 40 people, very small compared to now. Now, we have almost 90 people from almost 30 different countries all gathered in the heart of Tokyo…

Congrats.

…with the mission to bring space within everyone’s reach. Last week, we successfully launched our new satellite into orbit. It’s a 100 kilogram size and this is actually a clean room we’re very proud of, and we take images of the planet.

Why am I here? Very, very simple reason. I have this radical idea called AxelTaiwan and let me explain what it is. Axel Taiwan is an idea to create open data for all Taiwan.

Now, what I mean by this is we believe that satellite data has influential power to bring clarity and change people’s cognitive perspective on how we view our planet. It’s the overview effect.

We want to try to deliver as much as possible to people, but there’s a problem because our project is very expensive, so we end up having to charge the people a fair amount in order for us to sustain. We are a private company.

Yup, we talked about that last time.

Exactly.

About the pricing model and how it’s difficult because the people is an abstract concept and hard to crowdfund this thing.

Exactly. I think you’re thinking hard. I came up with this idea called AxelTaiwan. This shows the entirety. It is a true open data concept where people in Taiwan can get access to the satellite imagery data of Taiwan through open data API for free.

The community in Taiwan, which I define it, like entrepreneurship, and all these people, and maybe you, can get access to our data of satellite imagery of Taiwan so that they can focus on creating box.

Now, here’s a catch. There’s something wrong with this picture because I’m saying I want to provide for free. Somebody has to sponsor this.

Why am I here today is because I want to seek your help to promote this idea so that we can find a sponsor who will embrace this idea so that people in Taiwan can get free access to our open data and create a product which can be potentially utilized here. What I’m more excited is this could be another export product for Taiwan.

First, we can do a product and services for the local market. Once it’s matured, this could be another source of export product service that Taiwan can potentially nurture. This project will cost me roughly $2.8 million per annum.

For what exactly?

The data.

For producing the data?

For producing the data.

It’s the same cost to you in any other corner of the world, or are you aiming for a satellite specifically for Taiwan?

To capture entire Taiwan?

Yeah.

I calculate it and it will come down to…

It’s dependent on the various area’s sizes. For example, if only the Pescadero Island or only the Taipei City is interested in this collaboration, then the cost will shrink proportionally, as linear.

Exactly. We do fast prototyping, of course. That is the entirety of the project. If somebody is interested in exploring the idea, we can start prototyping by focusing on specific area.

How small is the smallest?

[laughs] Let’s say we can do the City of Taipei. I’m more interested in contributing to agriculture here. Maybe find an agricultural area where it makes sense — I’m not an expert — and where is the best place.

We may be able to identify an agricultural area, which I see taking our HSR down to Tienen all the time, beautiful rice paddy. Maybe we can identify one of those as a target area. Start from there if that’s a good option, and then if it works out and people are happy, we can fast prototype.

I see that.

That’s one idea, by the way.

It could be Axel Taipei, Axel Kaohsiung or whatever, Axel Tainan.

Exactly. Maybe we can start mosaicing and then finally become AxelTaiwan. Basically, I borrowed your time today to share my idea for this and to seek your blessing so that I can find an opportunity to talk to people and maybe seek your help to talk to the right people who can help drive us forward.

I just — I say, “I just.” because in our space industry, this is very low price comparatively. — I just need $2.8 million per annum to drive this forward. If I can find a proper resource, we can do this right away.

We did some ballpark comparisons with your CubeSat. We say the foremost at last time. You show me an upgraded model of it. I assume the specifications of the image resolution that it’s already on your website.

Yes. Today, I’m going to be showing you some stuff as well. Our satellite imagery…I’m going to remind you that we take from 600 kilometer altitude at roughly 11:30 AM every day.

Right now, the frequency is 12 days, but because we launched four additional satellites, it’s going to be three days in June. We also have attitude control system which allows us to do this kind of maneuver to take a 3D image. In urban setting — this is Tokyo — it’s quite useful to have first of the beautiful image.

Stereoscopic.

Stereoscopic. It’s cool. We’re just playing around.

I see that.

The other thing is that this is a proud image for us. Our satellite is 100 kilogram size, not so big, but because of our relatively big CubeSat arena, it allows us to capture 50 kilometer with 500 kilometer length in one capture.

In the context of Taiwan, as you can see, it makes it very easy for us to cover the entirety. Now, this is a stark contrast, for example, from aerial or maybe drone. Yes, you have other options, but to do this, not so easy. That’s one.

The other thing is even though we are getting this big image, each of the image itself you get is 2.5 meter per pixel, which is another fascinating thing for me because you have a useful image. I’m just skipping. We have basically six spectral buttons. We are proud of what we call reddish brown, very good for vegetation monitoring.

Again, what I want to start off with here is agriculture because I heard that there are more and more imports into Taiwan for rice, for example. I went to some of the organic shop here. It’s exciting that you see organically grown rice.

If we are able to bring some technology, maybe we can help identify a way to make it more efficient and environmentally friendly. I’m very passionate about sustainable business since 20 years.

One other thing we can do with our satellite is identify the vegetation. This is just nothing but using an IRR to do this and giving you an example on the rice paddy. This is time series of rice paddies being captured.

The other thing that we do is, because we have a lot of data, we do parcel delineation, training the computer to do this automatically, and visualizing so that anyone can understand difficult numbers, just pictures.

What we also are passionate is trying to convert difficult concepts into an intuitive visual so that people with no background can just get it. This is from Taiwan, in one of the farm in Taiwan. We played around. We didn’t have enough data because we don’t continue to take Taiwan yet.

This is not a partnership with, say, the Yunlin County? You just did it yourself.

I just did it. Nobody paid for me. This is very expensive. Every time I do this, I invest my money.

I imagine you also need some GPU time too to run the machine learning algorithms.

Exactly. I love talking to you because you get it. When I share this to people, they’re like, “OK. Yeah.” This is expensive. I just did it because I wanted to see how it works, and it actually works.

What I want to do is I want to do this for a bigger area. If you can tell me or some of our friends can tell me the right area to monitor the agricultural studies here, that’ll be great.

The other thing we’re passionate is in the urban setting, identify greenery and also find anomaly that’s happening in the city. I’m wearing this, but I’m not wearing this because I know there’s a thing up. That’s not true. [laughs] That’s not the reason.

I have some discussions with the SDG director in Rwanda. I’m trying to help them visualize their reports because they have no way to validate what people are sharing with them. I’m trying to bring facts for them by using satellite.

Anyway, I’m very passionate about this. Using satellite, basically, I’m highlighting that this area, for some reason, we don’t know why, but somehow the vegetation just dropped. If we continue to monitor the urban settings on a continued basis, potentially we can highlight some anomalies.

I don’t know what this is because we tried, but we don’t understand what it is. Let’s say this is like hail or something. If the vegetation is dropping, it could lead to a landslide potentially. This could be a disaster management product as well.

The other thing that we were monitoring is your reservoirs because island of Taiwan, very important to keep the water. I surf, so I know different islands. Water is very important.

What we notice accidentally is that suddenly, last year and this year, same season, water is dropping significantly. Now, what this made me realize is that if you monitor the entire reservoir with satellite, maybe you can use a computer to help identify the changes in the water level.

We already know the water level, though?

We don’t know the actual water level. Not easy, but at least by identifying the land and sea area coming up, we can see the changes. For example, not just here but the side is receding as well. Simply using the NDVI, by checking the vegetation, the water is negative reflection. By seeing that, we can see the water increasing and decreasing. Not a perfect measurement but a useful measurement.

Just wanted to end by showing you some beautiful images taken by our satellite of our Taiwan. This is Taipei. Another image, as you can see, we like to take natural beauties because I think one of the advantage of our satellite data is obviously taking large area. Also, because we have the sensors, we can do vegetation monitoring.

Urban setting is cool, like this, but I want to do meaningful stuff. Monitoring like forest trees for disaster management, or at least seeing the healthiness of it, could be interesting.

The other thing I’m thinking is the reservoir, maybe monitor the entire reservoir on a frequent basis. See what’s going on, making sure everything’s OK.

The other thing is, we noticed that there is a lot of power plans along your coasts. It’s necessary because you need energy, but then that’s also usually in a very beautiful place. My proposal is, why don’t we monitor all the power plants to make sure there’s no destruction in the neighboring environment.

If there are, let’s do something about it. Let’s expose this. I mean, expose is a strong word. Let’s make it clear. Let’s get the help from everybody to watch it by having this data available to everyone to see.

Because if one person is watching, maybe we miss it or one person may make a wrong decision. If we have 100 people watching, we can [laughs] have a better management of what’s going on with the plants.

I love the beach. I love nature. It’s so sad to see if anything is causing a destruction. I’m not saying it’s causing a destruction. I’m just saying that let’s try to work to not cause a destruction.

This is another beautiful area. Initially, we didn’t know that there was anything potentially harmful, but we noticed that, “Oh, this is a nuclear power plant.” We couldn’t believe it because it’s so beautiful. I would have wanted to at least go to the beach here.

Same idea. Instead of, I mean, not instead of. Why don’t we keep monitoring them? In case something is going on, let’s say, potentially, there’s effect in the vegetation here, we can maybe do something about it, so there’s no landslide to cause some problem.

Taoyuan, I just took it because it’s so cool. Again, to operate this, it costs us roughly $2.8 million. I calculated. It’s a real number. It’s not rounded [laughs] because I calculated. This will allow us to provide free open data to the people of Taiwan per year and here to push this forward. I want your help.

First of all, if you embrace this idea…First of all, I want your feedback on this. If you feel this is a good thing for Taiwan, I want to get your opinion on how to push this forward. For us, it’s about getting the right resource because technically, we have the resource. We just need to find a way to support this financially. This is what I came for.

OK. Input?

Yes, I was saying when the last time we met, you told us that you needed more user cases, more users or…

Yeah. I think I specifically said, if you find a small, minimal viable project, like, you’re releasing one batch for free and see what people may do with it through hackathons and so on that will improve your chances because people would have already built something since this is per annual product, which is really not a product, service, a subscription service. The first free sample, I mentioned could be important. Sorry.

I just wanted to stress out again, we did rehearsal last year, conducted many people in Taiwan always want feedback and usefulness of…

We also today, in this week met more and more people to get our support, we had amazing feedback from them. They’re always craving for more data, and getting something worthy trying to make their service better, and maybe a bit more competitive, it does a huge impact for them.

We are now gathering support from the community so that we can come up with the support we need from the top.

The way the central government works is by highlighting successful pilots of the municipal or township level collaborations, that’s always the case. If you had already some buy in from a municipal or a township that showed one specific use case like agriculture, it is a value and we at the central government could amplify that success case.

Because it’s shaped like an open data, it’s not actually possible for us to say, “Hey, this municipality have to buy this for this particular vendor,” because the central government wants it. [laughs] It doesn’t quite work like that, which is why I was inquiring about this, either every sample so that people who do interesting things with that may come forward for you to get a relationship with, or that you have an existing relationship.

Because of your visit or the previous visits that could be reported somehow through, for example, investigative journalists, which can prove that they expose something due to this work. Then we can help amplify that fact.

Let me bring a context on why I’m so passionate on our work. I used to be an investment banker. Because we had the means and the resource, we decided to invest or rather invest in our future by planting trees.

That was great, but we realized something, the efforts that we were doing was great. We were planting trees in Virginia, US. That was creating some impact, but then because back then there was not much Internet or very limited way to communicate.

There was Internet but not many people were active on it. There was no social media, or very limited people were on social media. We realized that the impact we’re creating is not amplified, because it’s really not scalable unless you visualize it and unless you communicate it.

That experience taught me, and then we decided to start hosting a conference on climate change, and downward success. That led to carbon trading and all these beautiful things.

From that experience, I now know that you need to involve people. When you involve people, no one great man can do a work of 1,000 people. That’s my belief ever since. That’s why I’m passionate about this open data approach because I just feel excited just thinking about it, that everyone has this access, and not have to worry about paying for the data, but just thinking creatively how to use it.

That creates really unprecedent imagination and why I notice because I have data scientists in my company. Half of our engineers are data scientists. We build satellites but we also do a data analysis. Our data scientists are probably one of the luckiest in the world because they get free data obviously because we have the satellites.

They’re the luckiest people on Earth because they love data, and they can capture anywhere they want for free with our satellite. That’s leading to blossom of imagination because they don’t need to worry about sourcing data. They can get as much as they want.

Their algorithm is going crazy because the amount of data that they’re feeding into, according to them, because they joined from somewhere else, it’s just unreal for some of them, coming from somewhere they had to pay for it.

Imagining that this becomes true for millions of people, that really excites me. That’s why I want to do this. I have this passion, but I’m seeking advice from various people to see how we can push forward this. I’m confident that it’s going to change positively to the society in Taiwan and potentially to the world.

I remember the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap task force did a conversation with a satellite company during the Nepal earthquake for them to release pro bono, the pre and post earthquake imagery for people to crowdsource and label.

That data set with the label eventually became one of the foundation for the machine learning out of classification of parcels of roads and buildings that you just showed me. Of course, there are existing cases where humanitarian or public health related or whatever other public benefit applications.

I’m glad to hear that your teams of data scientist is finding joy in working with the data, but I haven’t yet heard about the crazy algorithms they do, how it improves for any particular use case, for any particular parcel or township the way that we describe. For example, the Nepal humanitarian response.

Absolutely. Sometimes, we work on algorithm like crazy but simple visual already.

That’s right.

It’s amazing. We continue to monitor the refugee camps, for example, because it keeps growing and growing. We’re not doing anything, just keep capturing and visualizing it, and read the overview effect of seeing the camp growing annually, almost sometimes monthly.

It’s something to think about. We do this in various areas around the world. We know for a fact that it does create some new framework in our cognitive thinking, but we haven’t been able to share. We should…

You haven’t been able to share because…?

We don’t know the right means to share. We do share through our SNS. We share through some of the media.

I imagine you have partnered with journalists.

Absolutely. They do, but then sometimes good news. Right now, there are certain news that they’re interested in. For some reason, some of the things that we capture is not their interest. Maybe we’re not a good storyteller. Maybe we need to improve our story. [laughs]

I don’t know. The recent news stories about Qinsheng is all about satellite imagery.

If you find the news reports, half of the images were satellites.

There’s so many interesting images that we take. For example, one area in the world, they have this restriction that you cannot build buildings near this mountain. You have this perfect circular situation when you see from the top, because there’s a restriction on how far you need to be from the mountain.

Humans are so interesting. They tried to build man made building until the border of this restriction. Everybody’s building, so it becomes a circular when you see from the top.

We have all these things. It’s amazing. We also want to introduce too our daily lives. That’s one of our passions. We want to create true impact today, so that people realize that, “OK, this technology actually works,” and then maybe explore more how to use it.

What we found is that you need to impact the daily lives. How he’s going to make my life better today? Not everybody is visionary. We always see the future. I have been always seeing…

That’s why you’re planting trees, even though they do nothing to today.

Then they’re changing it.

Exactly, but we know it’s going to be better. That was 20 years ago. I’m sure it’s now amazing. This is our passion. Basically, I’m here to share what we want to do together with my friends here and seek your advice. Thanks for the input that you just shared with us. What should we do? Should we go to…? We did go to various people.

Who did you talk to? The National Space Organization?

Yes, the new NSPO director, Professor Wu, honestly, very crazy guy. I love crazy people. Crazy people is passionate people and people who can do something. Yes, we went to see him on Monday. He loves this idea. He promised that he’s going to try to find us a way to move forward. He’s actually meeting us again.

Because he’s your natural ally. There’s no other natural allies within the government as close as he is.

Yeah. He loves the idea. We’re meeting next week on Wednesday. We’re meeting him. We have been meeting some of the users of the satellite data imagery.

They’re all excited and they said that they support the idea. They’re waiting for us to make this happen, basically.

We are also been thinking of ITRI?

ITRI, Taipei city government and GoSmart.

Yeah, GoSmart is maybe one of your natural allies. Of course, they all have their own drone based imagery solutions, which for municipal users is a better fit actually for a lot of cases. The challenge here is to find something that drones can’t cover whether it’s a very long term observation, very large area or some specific thing that only your cameras can do. These are, of course, important.

The Formosat’s team works closely with the data markets of the National Center for High performance Computing, the NCHC, which is the place that has a bunch of GPUs so that anyone can fire up a Jupyter Notebook, and just use random amount of GPUs already stored in the same data center. Data for the sort of machine learning that you just mentioned.

From what I understand, the Formosat people are quite interested in this kind of in place computation because they just have to contribute the data once on that NCHC. You don’t have to really copy it anywhere outside of that in the sense that the people can just end up machine learning entities directly. Also, create a sustainable business model for the TWCC clusters, the Taiwan computing cloud.

I don’t know whether you’ve talked directly to the Taiwan computing cloud, but if you are interested in making an initial data contribution like these ones, I’m sure in one slice with Taiwan or whatever, then the data market is the natural place to put such a thing for everyone to try out, especially the middle schoolers and high schoolers who are learning data science.

That would be a wonderful, interesting data set to work with. It also works if for my set, want also to upload his image in a compatible format so that people can also compare the two different satellite configuration solutions.

If you’re already talking to The Ministry of Science and Technology they are also the competent authority, currently, in The Parliament National Space Act, you are already talking to the right people. They can make the technical connection more smooth by the political funding is already there in The Ministry of Science and Technology. Just talking to the competent authority in your case the…

We are talking to…

The space director.

We’re talking to the space director.

I understand that you’re already talking to the space director.

Professor Wu.

You’re already talking to him, right?

What you just mentioned excites me. I’m very passionate about the next generation. I want to inspire kids to study science because it’s going to change how they perceive life.

We have that issue in Japan, people are not interested in science, I don’t know why. I’m a regular speaker at schools all the way to elementary school. I try to be a hero so that they think that he’s cool and how do I become him.

You’re pretty cool too.

I just tell them, you want to be me. Study math, study whatever, hopefully when I’m still alive hit my door with…You don’t need to wait until you’re 20. Come with your knowledge when you’re 15, it’s OK. I started doing many things when I was a teenager.

You don’t need to wait until that age. I’m passionate about having the opportunity if possible to inspire the next generation, although I have a little problem because I don’t speak Chinese, I only speak English. Maybe that could be an inspiration. Oh my God, I have to study English.

Hopefully that’s a good way for inspiring kids. I really feel that English is the key to knowledge. Global knowledge is based on English and that’s why I embrace English and that’s also a problem in Japan.

People cannot read documents on the Web. There’s so many free information out there. People don’t get it. You get free education on the Web. I am always learning. Japan has a problem. Sorry, I just got carried away.

That’s great.

I guess we’re talking to the right people.

We definitely need to, maybe NCHC or…

I’m sorry?

NCHC, we’re not talking with them.

NCHC did not talk with you?

No.

No.

Did you write to the director or did you talk to the data market team?

We haven’t talked to.

We haven’t talked to…

You have not yet talked with them.

You don’t want to talk to them?

That’s for your own.

Just write an email.

You have my email. Feel free to Cc me if that helps. The point here is to get a minimal about forestry, about agriculture, about any middle schoolers who have a Jupyter Notebook, like what’s the how many seconds until they actually perform useful work using your data, using your sample data.

That’s something that the market people in the Taiwan computing cloud is excited about because they’re going to do the same with for most anyway.

I’m sure you noticed, but one of the things I mentioned is hackathon because first of all, you need to know how to use it or you need to have a reason or inspiration to use the data. We’re thinking of organizing a hackathon here in Taiwan. What would be your advice for us?

Looking into how NASA hackathon.

That has been going on in Taiwan since 2017. Taiwanese teams won quite a few prizes doing climate recovery and so on. US based fish hackathon, the first place was also by Taiwanese team, but the NASA one captures people’s imagination better because the space station…

Space is more exciting. [laughs] The space apps challenge the various things that NASA did. I don’t know about your relationship with NASA, but it could be a co branding. It could be something about your own.

Luckily, NASA’s edge head is my good friend.

That’s good. Ask about hackathons. [laughs]

He covers everywhere including Taiwan as well.

I know. Because your brand is less well known in Taiwan at the moment. NASA is a little bit more…

Just a little bit.

Just a little bit. Maybe part of it.

Maybe.

If you can call brand for example, in the next NASA Hackathon or NASA Grand Challenge or APS or whatever that they’re doing this year or next. This year is hard because of the pandemic. Next year more possible or this year around Christmas. Now this year, everything happens around Christmas. [laughs] Maybe people want a holiday season.

The point is that maybe early next year or whenever NASA resumes its hackathon engagements and they already have a pretty good community engagement in Taiwan.

Maybe you can look into co branding the hackathon a little bit or contributing one layer that NASA isn’t contributing for one specific thing or sponsor your own trophy like out of the innovations. If they use your data set or in some way you envision it, would be cool, then maybe you over internship or something.

It could be arranged. NASA has been working with many other private sector companies in co branding their hackathon for the International Space of Challenge and so on, this is not a new thing for them. They already know how to do this. For space, in Taiwan, this is probably a little bit more common. Again, just work with a leading brand.

I echo that and say we did an event last month with NASA in Tokyo, a physical event. Crazy. [laughs] That attracted obviously a lot of people. Of course, NASA is a little bit known than us. That helped. That was surprising. I’ll be interested in doing it here. My friend happens to be covering this market as well. Any thoughts?

We can do better than we did one in Taiwan.

Fantastic. Great. I want to be efficient with your time.

Does your satellites have names?

Yes.

Like ingenuity?

OK, not like ingenuity.

We named our sublight GRUS bird. It’s [Japanese], a Japanese bird. We wanted to name it [Japanese] but [Japanese] is maybe difficult for people to pronounce. We decided to name it GRUS, which is also the name for [Japanese].

It’s not acronym?

It’s not an acronym.

But it’s all uppercase…

Exactly.

Let’s face it. You need to make acronyms.

I know.

There was a big debate. It’s your fault because we have a French people in our team as well.

I’m responsible for all French people. [laughs]

I was thinking about that logo is something something satellite. I was trying to figure out what RU stand for. [laughs]

No, we decided everybody is doing that. That’s not cool. Just be simple.

What did you say?

The French guy said, “We are a Japanese company.” We should have a symbolic name to indicate that this is coming from Japan. You may know, but we are the only commercialized startup in the space arena that manage a commercialized satellite in Asia.

I’m aware of that.

We’re very proud not for only ourselves, not for Japan, but Asia, because finally, we’re competing against the global market from Asia. That’s very important for us. Although we are a very diverse and international team…

I see that in your group photo.

The manga helps because…

[laughs]

…people love to live in Tokyo. Whenever I say, “Hey, you want to come work for us in Tokyo?” I don’t even know whether they want to work for us, or they want to be exposed to manga. It’s really crazy.

I want to drive this forward. Basically, I will keep pushing. Perseverance is my approach. I’m never giving up. As I came here before, I hope to continue to seek your blessing as I try to make my mark here in Taiwan, your country.

Perseverance is also all over that make NASA a lot famous. [laughs]

Exactly. My friend, a Japanese guy, now working in JPL, is working on this. I visit him all the time, not now because it’s difficult, not possible. That’s another inspiration. He contributed to our event as well, which excites people, obviously.

The Taiwanese people are very excited. There is a lot of interviews with the perseverance driver which happened to be Tony’s person, who co designer the team.

I think I met him when I was at JPL two years ago.

All right.

Great. Thanks for your time.

Let me take your fresh picture. It was a revamped Social Innovation Lab.

You’ve been using the old picture a lot.

…update the picture.

It’s very funny because we don’t have much picture together.

You happen to desert.

All right. We’re on the outside.

Maybe one inside, one outside because this is something that’s easier for me to process.

You can add a Tokyo landscape post-production.