Inspiring Minds:
Looking back at the 2018 Enrichment Programs
Returning to the future The past year's Enrichment Programs were focused on aspects of how we create what is to come. Participants explored three interrelated topics: Human-Machine Future, Designing Tomorrow and Cities of the Future. NASA's Carolyn Porco dazzled us with images from the edges of our solar system. The CEO of the Saudi Electric Company, Khaled Alrashed, held the audience enthralled as he laid the foundation for our future cities. Stanford's Oussama Khatib transported us deep under the ocean waves to where a futuristic humanoid robot is exhuming treasures from a lost time. And Saudi Aramco's Nasser Al-Nafisee helped his audience peek into the future of work and how they can leverage it for personal fulfillment and success.
Amazingly, the 2019 Winter Enrichment Program promises an even bigger experience. From January 13 to 24, 2019, a range of top international academics, inventors, artists and entrepreneurs will explore aspects of Time and how it shapes our experience of the world. Communicating about time creates an interesting problem. Time is a linear experience for humans, and yet our capacity for suspension of disbelief, role play, storytelling and more allow us to inhabit past, present and future spaces at once—we are highly non-linear beings trapped in a seemingly linear universe. Let's meld past, present and future in this celebration of the Enrichment Programs we all spend the year waiting for.
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Leaders — be the impact Fahad Alsherehey, vice president for technology and innovation at the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC), spoke recently as part of the 2018 Winter Enrichment Program (WEP) at KAUST. Alsherehey set his company as an example of how authentic leadership is the right foundation for successful establishments. "40 years ago, [SABIC] was a dream that people did not take seriously. This wouldn't have happened without having authentic leaders at that time," Alsherehey said during his keynote entitled "Leaders— Be the Impact." In 1976, a newspaper headline read: "Some dreamers want to establish petrochemicals in the middle of the desert" a day after a press conference that presented the idea behind SABIC. "SABIC started with the dream and the idea of producing petrochemicals in the desert since 1976—and it happened," he added.
SABIC has created and followed its own model of the four leadership priorities—to inspire, create, engage and deliver—which Alsherehey described as "the SABIC way for leadership." "In our changing world, we are faced with challenges at many levels. We need authentic leaders to turn challenges into opportunities," he said. Alsherehey said that in any business, there has to be strong leadership that can drive and direct that business. The key role of a leader is to have an impact "not any impact, [but] a positive impact." "There is a difference between leadership and a leader. Leadership is about the process and the mechanism…The leader will pave the way and guide people, while a manager will just give orders to subordinates to get the job done. You need to listen to the voice of your people, your team, your peers, your customers, "he added. By Lulwah Shalhoub
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The day the earth smiled
It occurred to Porco that an interesting way to differentiate the latest family portrait of the solar system from the one previously taken by Voyager (and every other mission since) would be to build up the public's anticipation. Instead of publishing a picture of Earth from the surface of Mars, from an orbit around Mars or on the way to Jupiter and then publishing it two weeks or a month later, her idea was to tell the world ahead of time that "at such and such a time, at such and such a date, your picture is going to be taken from Saturn," she said.
On July 19, 2013, Cassini's cameras were turned to look at Saturn when Saturn eclipsed the Sun to take another Pale Blue Dot image of Earth. On the right-hand side, below the shoulder of Saturn in that now famous picture, one can observe a billion miles in the distance the Pale Blue Dot of planet Earth.
"People responded how I had hope," said Porco. A website was set up to allow people from all over the world to write in and share their experiences contemplating—at the appropriate time— "the utter isolation of the Earth in the blackness of space," she described.
"There's something very powerful that we feel when we see our own small, fragile blue ocean planet as it would be seen by others in the skies of other worlds," she added. "It's a picture that I called: The Day the Earth Smiled."
"When examined closer with Cassini's high-resolution cameras, the Earth and its moon could be seen for the first time as distinct objects from the outer solar system," Porco said.
By Meres J. Weche
Among the 2018 Winter Enrichment Program (WEP) keynote speakers was American planetary scientist and UC Berkeley visiting scholar Carolyn Porco. After working on the imaging team for the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s, she was appointed the imaging science team lead for the Cassini mission to Saturn. The Cassini spacecraft was launched in 1997 following seven years of development after her appointment, and it spent the next seven years trekking to Saturn until finally entering the planet's orbit in the summer of 2004.
Named by Time magazine as one of the 25 most influential people in space, Porco has also been recognized for her science communications efforts. Processing images from Cassini's journey to Saturn for the public was important to her. "It was like running a news magazine," she said. From selecting images and producing captions, Porco felt it was demanding work but an entirely worthwhile endeavor.
An important goal Porco set out for herself was to recreate—in a better way and at higher resolution—the famous Pale Blue Dot photograph of planet Earth taken from outer space by the Voyager 1 space probe on February 14, 1990, from a record distance of 6 billion kilometers. In the photo, the Earth appeared as a tiny white dot in a grainy background darted by a ray of light.
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2.2 million people A network that goes far beyond KAUST
We have a large online presence that includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram. In total for the month of January, 2018, we reached more than 2.2 million people.
Engagements: 211,000 340,600 342,500 12,500 29,000
Instagram impressions Facebook impressions impressions on LinkedIn YouTube views
Followers: 74,000 on Facebook 47,600 on Twitter 71,300 on LinkedIn 9,600 on Instagram
Viewership:
Facebook keynote lectures:
Facebook on-air interviews:
164,706
93,566
engagements on Twitter • Arabic Channel: 14,000 • English Channel: 15,000
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Laying the foundation for future cities "By 2030, 60 percent of the global population will live in cities. That's a challenge. Creating a high quality of living in cities is indeed the challenge of the century," said Khaled Alrashed, president and CEO of Saudi Electricity Company for Projects Development, during his recent KAUST Enrichment in the Spring keynote. "It is a challenge for all of us, including the utilities." As part of his leadership role at the Saudi Electricity Company, Alrashed has embarked on an evolving partnership with KAUST to help his institution tackle fostering research, development and innovation.
"KAUST is one of the great resources within the Kingdom, and I hope that we will work on more initiatives in the future," he highlighted. "We do have great lines of communication with the University, especially KAUST Innovation." "We have plans to establish a collaboration to make use of the Shaheen supercomputer at KAUST. We have big data—we have a lot of information. If we can implement a kind of algorithm which can predict what the load on the grid will be, we can better plan our generation resources," he explained.
The role of renewable energy in the future The development of renewable energy infrastructures in the Kingdom is a major pillar of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030. The vision and mission of the Saudi Electricity Company provide the country with world class power services and empowering the Kingdom to energize the world. During his presentation, Alrashed displayed a quote from Wellington Webb, former mayor of Denver, Colorado, U.S., which read: "The 19th century was a century of empires, the 20th century was a century of nations and the 21st century will be a century of cities." Alrashed argued that smart cities of the future face eight major challenges: traffic congestion (reducing urban mobility and general comfort), air pollution (which causes fatal illnesses), CO2 emissions, crime, water scarcity, waste, population density (challenging urban logistics) and extreme weather. "KAUST is one of the contributors of the solutions to these challenges," said Alrashed. Indeed, the major research pillars at KAUST—water, food, energy and the environment—are focused on developing the country and region's burgeoning knowledge-based economy.
Some of the solutions highlighted by Alrashed during his talk, which the Saudi Electricity Company is tackling with the help of in-Kingdom universities and institutions, are based on the fundamental premise that smart cities of the future must be highly connected urban spaces. This means they must be based on smart energy, smart water and waste, smart transport and smart buildings—to name a few. Utility providers must also play a major role in providing solid infrastructure in the form of rooftop PVs, a robust intelligent grid, decentralized energy storage systems, smart homes, electric vehicles and charging stations. Most importantly, as Alrashed cautioned, "smart cities without the participation of the citizens will not be smart. We all need to be participants." By Meres J. Weche enrichment.kaust.edu.sa
Exploring deep-sea exploration The promise of oceanic discovery has intrigued and captivated scientists and explorers for centuries—be it to study underwater ecology and climate change or to uncover the natural resources and treasures buried beneath the waves. As the team leader of the OceanOne project, Oussama Khatib, professor of computer science and director of the Robotics Laboratory at Stanford University, discussed the growing demand for deep-sea exploration and the increasing role remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) play in exploration.
"Our collaboration could not have happened without KAUST" To meet the challenge of operating a dexterous ROV at oceanic depths, Khatib and his team at Stanford, in collaboration with KAUST professors Khaled Nabil Salama and Christian Voolstra from the University's Red Sea Research Center and with MEKA Robotics, developed the fusion of human ingenuity and artificial intelligence (AI) that is OceanOne.
OceanOne is a bimanual underwater humanoid robot avatar with haptic feedback that allows human pilots to experience an unprecedented ability to explore the ocean depths in high fidelity.
"Our collaboration could not have happened without KAUST. This project started with the Red Sea and its corals. When we moved forward with the project, we realized there were so many applications for this type of robot," Khatib noted.
At five feet long, OceanOne features a head with stereoscopic vision that relays instantaneous images back to the human pilot. The avatar also features two fully articulated arms and a tail section that houses batteries, computers and eight multi-directional thrusters. "Creating a robot like this is not an easy feat. [Underwater] robots require capabilities that are beyond human limits. Our concept is that we connect the human and the robot in a unique way," he said. Khatib described OceanOne's maiden voyage, which saw its deployment off the coast of southern France in the Bay of Toulon to explore King Louis XIV's 352-yearold wrecked flagship La Lune. Up until last year, the 17th century ship has remained relatively undisturbed, lying 32 km off the coast and in 90 meters of water. "Before OceanOne our robots were incapable of examining shipwrecks. They simply weren't dexterous enough," he said. "On the La Lune dive, we touched a vase that had remained untouched by a human hand since 1664," Khatib added.
A harmonious marriage of human and machine "In the last 15 years, robotics has been developing extremely fast— there are so many applications and industries that could benefit from robots. Something like mining could be revolutionized with a robotic presence instead of humans," Khatib emphasized. He maintains that robotics actually bring us closer to the social sciences—to marine science, to archeology, etc. In his talk he highlighted how his team was constantly aware that with any deployment of technology, they must consider existing ethical issues and the wider impact on society. "We've been harnessing AI technology since the 1950s. In modern robotics, we bring the muscle, but we rely on the human brain. Current technology is bringing the human and the machine much closer than ever before," he said. By David Murphy
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A career with purpose Nasser Al-Nafisee, vice president of corporate affairs at Saudi Aramco, spoke about how pushing the boundaries can pave the way towards "a career with purpose" during the University's 2018 Winter Enrichment Program (WEP). During his keynote, he spoke about the early stages of turning KAUST from a concept into reality. "Pushing the boundaries is really what we did at KAUST. This is what this institution is all about," Al-Nafisee said. In mid 2016, Saudi Aramco received a mandate to build a university, as the late King Abdullah envisioned it to be the 21st century House of Wisdom. The scope of the project was enormous and the schedule was "mission impossible," as Al-Nafisee described it. He was asked to join the KAUST team, an opportunity that he was reluctant to take yet ended up devoting 16 to 18 hours a day for three years to accomplish the mission. He added that building KAUST was equivalent to "building an aircraft while it was airborne‌We were pushing boundaries left, right and center, and we were doing something no one has ever done
before anywhere in the world‌ We invented the eighth day. We were working 16 to 18 hours a day for three years," he said.
Mind boggling reality The facts and figures behind building KAUST were "mind boggling," as Al-Nafisee described them. The University's construction was by far the busiest construction site in the world at that time. It had a record number of more than 300 tower cranes. There were 60,000 workers and the machinery and equipment on site numbered in the thousands.
He concluded by saying, "To overcome internal voices saying, 'Don't do it. I can't or it can't be done,' rather [say,] 'It is doable and adapt the can-do attitude.' Put in the extra effort, as nothing pays off like hard work." By Lulwah Shalhoub
"Delivering KAUST in less than three years was truly a mission impossible. It became the impressive reality in which you are hopefully living, enjoying and producing research. To make it happen, we had to break through and get rid of all of the boxes and push all boundaries where the sky has no limit," he said. Al-Nafisee advised attendees from students to faculty to reach their own potential. "Our worst enemy is staying in our comfort zone," he noted. enrichment.kaust.edu.sa
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