cesarharada.com/blog

About Me

Cesar Harada (28) is an French-Japanese inventor and entrepreneur.
Cesar invented a ground-breaking sailing technology, a boat that changes shape, “Protei”. Originally developed to clean up the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Protei is an Open Hardware project now developed by an international community of scientists, engineers and designers for many other applications such as nuclear radiation sensing off Japan, plastic sensing in the Pacific garbage patch, red tide studies in Mexico and much more.
Cesar is also the general coordinator of the future International Ocean Station. Former Project leader at MIT, Cesar teaches Masters in Design & Environment at Goldsmiths University in London. Cesar graduated in 2009 from the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Arts in London, his collaborative project Open_Sailing received the Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for the [NEXT IDEA].

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Grassroots mapping

A couple of days ago, we went with the folks of LA Bucket Brigade (again!) to do some grassroots mapping (aerial photography actually) in the Bay Jimmy & Wilkinson Bayou (29.45193, -89.89812), and it was superb ~ and dystopic :/


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Seen from up there is so different from what you see from the water :


We went in those super cool (noisy though) boats :
 
Boat seen from the balloon (!!!) :
 
This is how it works :
 
So we do the same but with a helium Balloon flying at ~1000ft, with a camera attached to it, looking down, taking a picture automatically every 5 seconds or so : 

I took a chance to try to enhance the "photography cabin" with Sue Stoessel, Bennie Gregory and Hunter Daniel (in a previous mapping trip though): 
 



You see, it is just a bottle of soda and some duct tape, you can DIY it!
 
Now you may wonder why we take these pictures :
- for science study and evaluation of the impact of the oil spill on the coast and the marsh lands.
- for legal purposes, so we have evidences of the impact of the oil spill at the court of justice ;) 

I'm in love with this technique Gonzo Earth and Grassrootsmapping keep on improving, also because I really need it to assess the efficiency of the oil spill collecting robot I am working on : protei.org. Here we were testing to see how well we can sail the robot upwind with a long tail : 

 
that's the robot I am prototyping this week : 
 
If you want to help on the making of the protei robot, or do some aerial photography of the oil spill, get involved at LA Bucket Brigade, contact Shannon Dosemagen <shannon@labucketbrigade.org>, or Hunter Daniel <hunterdaniel@gmail.com> 901-550-7667 directly by phone to arrange a trip in the sun :)

Filed under  //  Aerial   Balloon   Barataria   Bay   Grassrootsmapping   Helium   Jimmy   LA Bucket Brigade   LABB   Louisiana   Mapping   NOLA   New Orleans   Oil Spill   Photography   Stitching   TEDxBoston   TEDxOilSpill   Tilling  
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TEDxBoston : the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

This is NOT an Official TED video, it is simply an archive of the TEDxBoston Adventure.

What academic light can two Boston College professors shed on the nation’s largest environmental disaster?
What lessons for oil extraction, transport, crisis prevention, and response can be drawn from this present calamity? Meanwhile, can a 2010 TED Fellow on the frontline in the Gulf contribute to the design of autonomous robots that collect oil?
Join Boston College Professors Noah Snyder of the Geology and Geophysics department and Zygmunt Plater of the Law School for an interactive briefing on the situation in the Gulf. Professor Snyder is the Director of BC's interdisciplinary Environmental Studies program. Professor Plater served on the State of Alaska Oil Spill Commission during the Exxon Valdez crisis; he has been involved with Alaskan efforts to assist Gulf communities in the aftermath of the BP Gulf blowout and attempts to draw systemic lessons for the future from the Exxon Valdez and the BP blowout. We also will be joined via Skype by Cesar Harada, a former MIT researcher in New Orleans. Ask critical questions about environmental science and law, as well as some of Harada’s other ambitions, from creating the International Ocean Station as an open-source architecture project to crowdsourcing environmental data on the web.

Thanks to John Werner and Grier Tumas. 

Devlin Hall, Room 201, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, 02467
DATE: Thursday, July 22nd, late morning

Filed under  //  Boston   Grier   John   LABB   Louisiana   NOLA   Noah    Oil Spill   Plater   Snyder   TED   TEDxBoston   TEDxOilSpill   Tumas   Werner   Zygmunt   cesar   harada  
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