Beyond Ourselves - Amr mohamed, harine ravichandran & joel mwale - Zeitgeist 2012

>>David Jones: We're going to start with you, Harine. 17 years old. Passion for physics and electrical engineering. Won the finalist of the Google Science Fair and your whole project, as we'll see a little video about, is how you eliminate voltage fluctuations in rural and remote areas of the world. And you competed against 10,000 students from 91 countries to get to the finalist, and if we could roll Harine's video, please. [ Video playing ] [ Applause ] >>David Jones: So I met your mom in this feature, and tell me a bit about your mom and how she played a role in where she got to today. >>Harine Ravichandiran: My mom's an electrical engineer and she had her students come home and she would teach them electrical engineering, and I used to listen to them talk and after they left, I used to ask her a million questions and go on the net and surf. And that's the way I understood what they were talking about. That's how I got interested in electrical engineering. And I learned MATHLAB from my mom and she's the one who helped me do the real-time implementation of my project. >>David Jones: And talk a little bit more about the project. Where did the idea for that come from? >>Harine Ravichandiran: When I was in (saying name), voltage fluctuations were part and parcel of life, and it was worse in the village nearby. Like if -- we used to have power, but it used to be very low. The fans used to not work. The lights would not work. And my grandparents were farmers. They used to wake up at 3:00 in the morning just so they could water their fields, and they used to have stable power for just like one hour, so they have to water all their fields within one hour. So it was very tough. And I was eight when I thought I could probably put my MATHLAB knowledge and power electronics knowledge together and find a solution to it. I worked with MATHLAB and came up with a regulator which could effectively compensate all these fluctuations in less than .20 milliseconds, and it could use locally available renewable energy sources, so -- >>David Jones: That's an important point. Talk about where the energy actually comes from. >>Harine Ravichandiran: In the villages of India, we have lots of energy, like solar energy and bioenergy like animal waste, but they do not have stable voltage. So this voltage regulator can use all those locally available renewable energy sources and give them stable voltage. So this can be used in all remote areas of world and most developing countries. [ Applause ] >>David Jones: What's been the biggest obstacle to getting to where you got to? What's been the hardest thing? >>Harine Ravichandiran: I'm a 16-year-old girl meeting industries that I want to come work with them and do the real-time implementation of my design, so most of them, they're reluctant to give me that opportunity and I got a lot of "nos," and just one company accepted, and I went there for the summer and I worked for two months before I could build my regulator, actually. >>David Jones: Excellent. Well done. [ Applause ] >>David Jones: You'll be able to find out how you can help these three at the end of the session. So next up is Am, who is the YouTube global lab winner in the 17- to 18-year-old category. Later this year he's going to become the first Egyptian to send a science experiment into space. He's 18 years old now, but what's probably more remarkable about this is he did it all through the height of the Egyptian revolution. So if we could play the next video, please. [ Video playing ] [ Applause ] >>David Jones: So most 18-year-olds are always looking for an excuse to not study for A-levels, and I would have thought, "Oh, look, mom and dad, there's a revolution going on outside, I can't work," would have been a pretty good one. So talk to me about how it was and what it was like actually doing that. >>Amr Mohamed: When the revolution started on the 25th of January, one day or two later, all the schools were closed by order from the military, and then -- I study in the A-level system, so the A-level exams were not postponed. And so at that time we started wondering whether the situation in Egypt and the protests will continue until the exams or not. So there was a time of uncertainty where I was really afraid that maybe I wouldn't be able to finish my work and be ready for the exam. So I started working on my own, studying from books or from when the Internet -- the Internet was shut down several times during the revolution, so whenever the Internet access is -- whenever I had access to Internet, I used to watch online lectures from universities. >>David Jones: You said you had to go out and actually, you know, march in the streets and do various things. Talk to us a little bit about that. >>Amr Mohamed: Yeah. So I joined the protests on the 28th of January, and policemen were still in the streets, and so it was a very intense day. I walked with my friends to -- in a protest. It was a large protest that was organized this day. And when we walked in Alexandria, we watched the city hall, which was on fire, so we tried to put down the fire, and two or three minutes later, the guards, police guards, come and we tried to tell them to come and help us put down the fire, but they just stood there silent. And then all of a sudden, I'm teargassed and I'm hearing gunfire shots and rage, so I just went away with all my friends. And then after we go away from the teargas and the fire, we realized that we were missing someone, so we go back and he's injured and we try to fight off the police to get him and arrive him to the hospital. So -- and until then, for the 18 days of the revolution, we used to go protesting every day in protests all over Alexandria. And also so with my study, I had to walk in protests, and on the 28th, that day, the policemen were withdrawn from the streets and the military was deployed and there was news about *** and theft and burglary, so we had to form committees of young people who would patrol the streets at night so that the people would feel safe. So in my neighborhood, you'd get assigned like three or four hours of the night where you must patrol the streets of the neighborhood around the neighborhood, so on some days I would stay late at night patrolling the streets and then I'd still have to study for my A-levels and still go and protest. So it wasn't an intense time. >>David Jones: And then from there to spiders, spiders in space, do you want to just explain where that comes from? >>Amr Mohamed: Well, spiders have been in space before. The kind of spiders that have been in space before was the orb weavers. It was featured in the famous children's book "Charlotte's Web." So they have been in space before, and what's really interesting is that the webs they built in space were different from the webs that are here. They were somehow less dense and they were weaved in different ways. So spiders could realize that they are in zero gravity and they could adjust their webs to the zero gravity environment. So when I heard about the YouTube Space Lab and I -- I read an article about the animals that have been in space, I watched the video of the orb weavers in space and I thought that it would be really nice if we can make things harder and take away a huge advantage, which is their webs, and see if they can still survive. So I got the kind of spiders, they're jumping spiders and they cannot weave a webs, and they can do trajectory physics. We can measure distances and adjust the angle that they jump to land precisely on the prey. So when they adjust the angle here on Earth, they compensate for gravity. All they have to do in space is realize that they don't have to compensate for gravity anymore and they just jump in a straight line. So the -- there will be trial and error and trial and error and -- >>David Jones: You said astronauts have a harder time with this, you were saying earlier? >>Amr Mohamed: Yes. Yes. I spoke to some astronauts and some of them said that it would take them three months to begin throwing things in a straight line instead of throwing it with an angle, so -- >>David Jones: So spiders will get there much quicker? >>Amr Mohamed: No. They're pushed by survival or they won't last three months. So the thing is, I suggested it would be trial and error and trial and error until they realize that they can jump -- only jump straight line, and the amount of time it will take them to realize this is a good measurement of how developed their brains are. >>David Jones: Excellent work. And Am got into Stanford on the back of studying through a revolution, so anybody whose kids give them an excuse that they can't concentrate or focus, a great example that you can. Well done. [ Applause ] >>David Jones: And last up is Joel, from a rural village in Kenya, the winner of the Zeitgeist Young Minds, and he has a fantastically interesting social business idea which is all about bringing water to communities in his local village but can't actually get access to water, but also making money out of doing that. So let's have a look at the video, please. [ Video playing ] [ Applause ] >>David Jones: So great social business idea, both making money and doing good. What is your motivation? Where did it all start? >>Joel Mwale: I started Sky Drop in the year 2007. I fell ill of dysentery and I was taken to hospital. And while I was in that hospital bed yearning for strength and medication I decided to ask myself that what if three, four, five years down the line, the same thing keeps on recurring. I probably might end up dying out of dysentery. And so I told myself when I recover, then I should do something. So when I came from hospital, I built a manual wheel-driven borehole for members of my community. And six months down the line this borehole was being used to deliver access to clean drinking water to a population of 5,000 households. Then that was how I started my passion into water. And then two years down the line I dropped out of high school because I could not afford $100 school fees for a whole year. And when I went back home, I started asking myself, what can I do to be able to raise money for school and money to sustain my family because we were experiencing heavy financial constraints. So I came up with an idea that if I can be able to rent out someone's property which had a concrete tank a processing plant, then I can be able to look for money and buy a purifying machine, then I can be able to process this water, purify it and then sell to the public at an affordable price. So the first piece of the puzzle had been solved. There was somebody who was willing to rent out to me his property. But the other thing was looking for capital, which growing up in a rural Kenyan village, who will give you $5,000 to buy a purifying machine. So I went to the states for five months looking for capital, but I wasn't able to get anything. I mean, who will invest in a 16-year-old kid saying that he wanted to start purifying water? And so at the end of the day, I went back home. I was quite frustrated, and in the midst of frustration and about to give up I realized that there was one thing that I had with me and that was the fact that when my daddy died in the year 2000, he left for us a 20-acre piece of land. And this piece of land was laying there bare, full of grass, and we couldn't be able to cultivate it because we could not afford the agricultural inputs. So I told myself if you can be able to lease this piece of land to somebody for a period of five years and then ask this guy to give me $5,000, which is out of 500,000, then he can use each year that he tills the land to reclaim $1,000 for that money. So after five years, the guy will have recovered this loan, and he will have given me in the meantime money to start the business. And so we went into negotiations, and after one month down the line, I was able to get $5,000 to buy a water purifying machine, and we started processing water. >>David Jones: And how many bottles are you selling today? >>Joel Mwale: By the end of last financial year we were able to sell 200,000 bottles, which represents a thousand percentage growth as compared to the previous year. [ Applause ] >>David Jones: So Harine, a question to the three of you. We hear a lot that your generation can change the world. Can you? >>Harine Ravichandiran: Yes, I think so, because I find many people in my generation asking questions. They don't accept things. They question everything around them. And they're so curious, they look for answers. They don't -- they look for answers and they want to go higher. They're like why can't I go there? Why can't I do this? Why can't I do that. So that questioning tendency I think will take us a long way. >>David Jones: Do you guys agree? >>Amr Mohamed: Yes. Also we have the access to technologies and Internet that I think help me a lot during my studies and also helped me send an experiment to space. In Egypt, when you think about space exploration, it's not an option because we have lots of other things to do. So.... So when you think about that you want to contribute to such an important field and you have access to things that will help you to reach your goal, we can get knowledge, you can get experience, you can get advice all through the Internet. >>David Jones: Joel, you agree? >>Joel Mwale: I also believe that this generation is the most important generation. I look at this information that's available through technology. And so we are -- we are a generation that is empowered than any other generation. And also the level of responsibility in our generation I think is the highest because I think if you look at how youths now, how the youth are engaging themselves, people stop saying that the government will do something. So people are now taking initiatives to start their own businesses, to be able to solve challenges in communities. So I think with this generation, we can be able to do that. >>David Jones: So you are looking at a room of old people. What advice would you give them? >>Joel Mwale: Basically, I think my advice to old people would be to -- [ Laughter ] [ Applause ] >>Joel Mwale: Well, to invest in youths, and youths who are deep involved in entrepreneurship because I believe that if you capitalize on the youths and entrepreneurship, then it can be able to create an amazing change in the world. You see people like Bill Gates. They started at such a young age. People like (saying name). If these old guys here can invest in youths and buck up their entrepreneur activities, then you can create an amazing change. >>David Jones: Harine? >>Harine Ravichandiran: Invest in terms of funding, and I think time and mentorship. I would love to learn from people who are more advanced in the field of power electronics or physics. That would be nice. >>David Jones: Am? >>Amr Mohamed: I agree with Joel that the best investment is to invest in the youth and science, and it's a long-term investment but it's the best kind of investment because investing in science and youth, it will lead to the products that are going to change the world. And I second Joel. >>David Jones: And you have all come here. You have a very important bunch of people here. You obviously would like to get something out of your trip to Google Zeitgeist. If each of you had one tangible ask that if anybody sitting here is motivated to come and help you, what would that be? Joel? >>Joel Mwale: Basically, as an entrepreneur I am looking for people who can be able to mentor me in my growth because a mentor will understand that sometimes growing up as an entrepreneur and getting to experience things yourself, you are bound to make mistakes. And I just incorporated Sky Drop into a company and we are looking for people who can be able to help me model it into a big colossal company that possibly can be the next Nestle or Coca-Cola of Africa. And we also are looking for people who can be able to help my business grow either way through investment or through networking. >>David Jones: Terrific. Harine? >>Harine Ravichandiran: I would like to have a mentor and somebody who would finally help me do my project for the practical world. Like right now I have done it for 20 worlds and five worlds variation, but I have done it to 20 worlds in MATHLAB which means I can actually do it in real time. But I have not done it for the lack of funding and a mentor. So it would be great to get both of those. >> David Jones: Am? >>Amr Mohamed: I still think you should invest and encourage in science and in the young people. That's my request. >>David Jones: Terrific. Well, I think three amazing young people all going to Stanford next year. [ Applause ] >>David Jones: They'll also be attending One Young World in October this year, and anybody, a quick plug, who is interested in getting involved in One Young World, which is now an official charity, track me down later. We'd love your help and input as well. So well done, guys. Thank you very much. [ Applause ]