About

We met with Cesar Harada, an inventor, environmentalist, educator and researcher working on floating and sailing structures monitoring water conditions in the Hong Kong Area. Cesar has a remarkable approach to design, made evident by his commitment to open-source innovations and his dedication to increasing sustainability and remediating pollution. We discussed about the power of information processing, sustainability, and applications of our bio-electronic system.

Fig 1: Cesar Harada

Information processing

When we explained to Cesar our aim of converting gene expression to an electronic one he suggested that we take an information processing approach. Do we know what is the minimum impulse we need to generate a signal, and what is the maximum impulse a bacteria can take before it dies? From this information we can optimise and reinforce our signal. He suggested that we develop ranges of signal to establish a modular language instead of a binary one.

Sustainability

We questioned Cesar on his innovative solutions to environmental challenges. Many of Cesar's projects involve monitoring the health of the aquatic environment. The "Coral Reef Mapping Robot" is a floating robot which monitors the health of coral reefs by following a GPS track and creating a reef map. Another project of his is the "Ocean Imagineer" a lab which floats on water with many functions, one of which is to collect data on the chemistry of the water to favour the restoration of natural water filtering ecosystems such as oyster reefs, mussels and clams. Throughout this discussion, we learned that aqueous environment can be hostile to humans and that automation of data collection is relevant in these environments. He also pointed out that using bacteria to sense the ecosystem can deliver us new information which is harder to detect with electronics, for example, he proposed that we use our biosensing bacteria to monitor sewage spills or algal blooms on the beach to inform swimmers of the safety of the waters.

Integration

Cesar inspired us to think of implementations which would collect data to monitor the health of ecosystems. His commitment to open source and making his designs as user-friendly as possible for the stakeholders inspired us to do the same. We decided to make the use-cases of our project as limitless as possible by creating modular genetic parts and modular open-source hardware.