Impact Summit Keynote Recap: Sarah Maston’s Project Edison Saves Elephants

Hackster’s Impact Summit celebrates, uplifts, and explores technological innovations intended to improve our shared Earth. Few causes are nobler than endangered animal welfare, which is why Hackster was proud to have Sarah Maston give our Impact Summit keynote address.

Sarah Maston (tech expert)

Sarah Maston currently works as the Director of Global Partner Development at Microsoft and has an impressive history of experience in the field of data architecture. She is the recipient of multiple prestigious awards, including IBM’s Outstanding Innovation Award and Microsoft’s Polaris Award for Project Edison. But her sustainability passion projects are what caught our attention. To help others accelerate and scale scientific solutions with the benefit of modern technology, she founded Project 15 within Microsoft.

Project 15 Open Platform is an “Open Platform for conservation and ecological sustainability solutions.” It is set of Microsoft Azure IoT technologies streamlined for easy development and deployment in the real world.

Maston correctly surmised that a major roadblock towards real ecological change is technological inaccessibility. Even for experts in the field, deploying IoT systems at scale in remote locations is a challenge. For the scientists and activists who dedicate their lives to conservation, this technology is opaque and unapproachable. Few organizations have the funds to hire expert IoT developers, which has kept them from implementing some great ideas.

Microsoft and Maston hope Project 15 helps to close the skills gap and give scientists the ability to develop effective IoT solutions. This solves something of a catch-22 within the field: teams cannot receive grant funding until they have proof of concept (PoC) and they can’t develop that PoC without funding. By giving those scientists — who are not IoT experts — the tools to easily develop PoCs, Project 15 can help them achieve the milestones necessary to receive grants.

Project 15 provides value through every step of the process:

• As an Open Platform, teams can see what is possible and determine how IoT technology can serve their cause.
• Using Open Platform and off-the-shelf Azure IoT hardware, they can develop an affordable PoC.
• Open Platform provides the data and visualizations necessary for grant proposals at little to no cost.
• With grant funding, the team can hire affordable generalist developers that can easily move the PoC to a release candidate.
• When ready for deployment, there is no need to switch platforms.
• As the scope of the project expands, Open Platform scales to match.

This isn’t just another hollow corporate outreach program designed for PR — Sarah Maston proved that she has a genuine interest in solving real problems in the world.

Sarah Maston (inventor)

Project Edison, Maston’s brainchild, protects people during emergency situations was the origin to Project 15. She got the idea in April 2018 when two things happened in quick succession: she had to rescue her cats from an apartment fire.

Don’t worry; Maston’s cats were fine — it turned out that the smoke she saw was lingering from a neighbor’s fireplace mishap that was already under control. The events got her thinking about how to help people find out if they’re in danger during an emergency situation. There were a lot of systems for first responders but for those inside of an event, communication is difficult and stressful.

IoT technology provided the perfect solution and Project Edison was born. The idea is quite simple: the PoC was a connected lightbulb mounted throughout buildings. A centralized system can geofence and light up areas with yellow to be on alert and red for immediate action.

There are many ways for deployed systems to detect danger. The simplest is for a Good Samaritan to push a button on site. But this is an IoT system and there are more automated approaches available. For example, a system could respond automatically by detecting smoke or gunshots. A system could also activate in response to a remote command from police or security, or even by looking at local news and police reports.

Sarah Maston (hero)

Maston devised Project Edison for such use cases safe workplaces and safe schools, but later realized that it could also help to fight elephant poaching. Using the same proximity-based danger indication, rangers in national parks and other conservation areas can determine if elephants are at risk of poaching — a problem that is still rampant (WWF reports that poachers kill at least 20,000 elephants per year for their tusks).

There wasn’t any difference in the concept of a smart camera in a retail space sending alerts or a camera trap in a park sending an alert.

Maston launched Project 15 to help scientists go faster by giving them processes and tools that we are already using in the commercial space.

Project 15 from Microsoft and Maston’s team has partnered with many organizations over the years working to pair NGOs like WildTracks, Red Panda Network and Elephant Listening Project with University capstone programs. Maston has also collaborated on hackathons to get to scale including Hackster’s Elephant Edge partnering with Smart Parks which built 10 elephant collars! One is already on an animal in Zimbabwe and the others will deploy soon.

Maston chose to give the Impact Summit keynote address to share her learnings over the past three years with other technologists looking to get involved. She also came bring awareness the Project 15 Open Platform available on Github and announce the team at Microsoft is adding integration to Power Platform and Microsoft’s Planetary Computer. We all have skills that are valuable and can contribute. From climate science to elephant protection, strategic IoT deployment can make a difference in the world.

Project 15 and Maston’s work are just the beginning and Hackster’s Impact Summit highlights many other efforts. Last year, Hackster partnered with the UN for the COVID-19 Detect & Protect Challenge that attracted more than 2,000 participants and received 355 tech submissions designed to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic. This year’s Impact Summit contained equally lofty sessions from presenters all around the world who use technology to make a difference. Be sure to check out our full event recap.