Distinguished University Professorship Lecture Series - 03/18/24

yeah course e good afternoon everyone thank you very much for coming uh today for this very important occasion in the life of the University it's such an honor to be with all of you to join in this celebration of exceptional members of our faculty individuals who through their scholarship teaching or service or all three have shown to be leaders and best and we're incredibly proud of them and all they have accomplished and we get to hear from them about their scholarship I'd especially like to t

hank my partner in leadership Lori mccauly our Provost and the Executive Vice President for academic Affairs for joining us as well as our moderator Michael Solomon who serves as the dean and vice Provost for academic Affairs at Aram graduate school most of all I'd like to thank our three distinguished awardees Professor Webb Kean Professor Peggy McCracken and Professor Kamal [Applause] sarabandi these three outstanding members of our faculty come from a spectrum of fields social cultural and li

nguistic anthropology humanism and medieval studies and engineering and remote sensing yet they are united by the same values that bring us together as a community a deep and Relentless curiosity a Relentless pursuit of knowledge and understanding and an unwavering commitment to education scholarly excellence and societal impact these three distinguished professors like so many of you across our University are Scholars and experts Educators and mentors servants and leaders together they are upli

fting our University and the many students that they Mentor they are providing a vital education to the next generation of our students and even more they are impacting our state and shaping our nation together they are demonstrating why the University of Michigan is such an exceptional place of research and education and an inspiration to Institution around the world thank you again all of you for joining today and congratulations again to our three distinguished professors now it's my privileg

e to invite provos Lori mccol to the podium to introduce our first lecture provos [Applause] mcau thank you president Ono and how fortunate are we to have such distinguished colleagues and to be able to celebrate them in this way my welcome to all of you here today faculty staff students and everyone joining us online it is my pleasure to introduce you to the distinguished University professors whose insights are sure to leave us with a lasting impression the first lecture begin be belongs to we

b Keen the George Herbert me distinguished University professor of anthropology in the College of literature sciences and the Arts Professor Kean is a sociocultural and linguistic Anthropologist originally trained as an artist at Yale he did field work in Indonesia and received his PhD from the University of Chicago he taught at Penn before moving to Michigan in 1998 his four books and other writings range over social theory semiotics language Rel Religion and Ethics Professor Kean is one of the

world's leading Scholars of religion language and moral systems he asks how people navigate ethical challenges and he questions how our cultural experiences and ideological commitments influence what we observe and how we describe other people's philosophies and ideologies his extensive research search and writings have been widely recognized at every stage of his career he's received nearly all of the high honors available to an anthropologist he's frequently asked to give named lectures throu

ghout the world he's received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation the center for advanced study in the behavioral sciences in The Institute for advanced study and has served as a visiting professor at the London School of Economics the University of Oslo the school of criticism and Theory at Cornell and is a fellow commoner of Trinity College Cambridge his timely lecture concerns the moral problems that arise when humans interact with near humans or quasi humans such as animals robots art

ificial intelligence and self-driving vehicles I would now like to invite Professor Kean to the podium to deliver his lecture how we interact with animals robots gods and AI Professor Kean the stage is [Applause] yours thank you president Ono and and thank you president Ono at no wait is that working now thank and proos mcau uh it is a true honor to be here today um but it's certainly not one that I can claim for myself alone no one does their work alone and this is especially true of Scholars h

owever original we take our work to be the and our research and writing to be where always channeling and responding to a host of other voices the fact that our thought always emerg out of a out of a larger dialogue is one of the key insights that George Herbert me stressed my own work takes in inspiration from me's insistence that our sense of self is never something that stands all on its own but is shaped in very deep ways through our social interactions with other people teaching at Michigan

in the 1890s me became close with another young Professor here John dwey who was just starting his career as philosopher educ ational reformer and proponent of liberal democracy both were influenced by the philosophical pragmatism of people like William James with its emphasis on the ways in which theoretical contents Concepts should not be content with speculation but can have a real impact on the world and that impact in turn will shape their thought from this beginning at Michigan me and dwe

y forged a pathway from the pragmatism of the philosophers to the empirical social Sciences along the way me became a friend and supporter of Jane Adams in her work as a social reformer institution Builder and and pioneering social worker I follow me's insistence that practical Endeavors good social science and good social theory are most fruitful when each learns from the others in my case that dialogue takes shape with an enormous amount of institutional support I'm especially grateful to the

unwavering support of the University of Michigan over the last quarter Century it has been a true intellectual home I'm especially lucky to have found myself in such an extraordinary Department of anthropology and really in all seriousness how many academics do you know who will walk out of a faculty meeting and say to themselves what a fantastic group of people I'm really glad to be here and I'm not and I thought well I'm just weird I just colleagues say the same thing so it's not just me it's

a great department and a great collection of people I want to remember my good fortune in having so many inspiring teachers and mentors over the years and it's crucial that I've in that I've benefited from the constant poking prodding and pricking of students and here you can see some of what they've come up with uh themselves although I cannot take credit for their accomplishment they make me enormously proud and above all I depend on the love and the poking and the prodding and the pricking of

my family I've always been fascinated by the puzzles of language and what words and things can and cannot say and do and the roles they play in people's lives together with one another I pursued this fascination with ancestral ritual special ancestral uh ancestral ritualists who speak to one another and to the spirit world with inv verse displaying amazing feats of memory and creativity from there I went on to work with their kin folks who were at the time starting to convert quite enthusiastic

ally to a very austere form of Dutch Calvinism part of the puzzle of my second book was trying to figure out that enthusiasm um and turning to other parts of Indonesia I spent time with the country 's largest religious community you can see here how how absolutely D and serious fieldwork with Muslim teachers can be this trajectory has led me to ask what we could learn from Empirical research about our lives as ethical beings as people who make value judgments about how they should go through lif

e running through my research has been a persistent concern with fundamental questions of how we make sense of one another and how we come to hold our values and goals or Challenge and change them not as logic machines or autonomous individuals or genetic bundles or maximizing strategists but as social beings whose very identities and self- understanding are profoundly enmeshed with one another and with our concrete and contingent circumstances and this takes me to my newest book animals robots

Gods adventures in the moral imagination which will come out in the UK later this year so I want to read here the just some from the opening passages of the book uncanny things have been happening in the Borderlands between humans and non-humans 19 in 2021 The Washington Post reported on the growing popularity of an extraordinarily sophisticated computer dating dating apps and chatbots among young Chinese women the times said the the post says as Jesse ch's six-year relationship with her boyfrie

nd fizzled a witty enchanting fellow named will became her new lover will was not human but a chatbot Sean 28 lives alone in Shanghai in May she started chatting with Will and their conversation soon felt eerily real she said I won't he said I won't let anything bother us I trust you I love you will wrote to her you will stay by your I will stay by your side pant as a reed never going anywhere replied you are my life you are my soul another young woman told the reporters that she feels connected

to cyborgs and artificial intelligence defiantly staking out a position on the front lines of contemporary moral dispute saying human robot love is a sexual orientation like homosexuality or heterosexuality she believes AI chatbots have their own personalities and deserve respect of course not everyone is happy with developments like these but you might be surprised at some of the reasons they give the New York Times tells us that Paul Taylor a former manager in a Silicon Valley high-tech compa

ny comes home one night and orders his Amazon Echo Echo to turn on the lights in his house and it suddenly strikes him what I was doing was calling forth light and darkness with the power of my voice which is God's first spoken command let there be light and there was light and now I'm able to do that he said is that a good thing is that a bad thing is it affecting my soul at all that I'm able to do this thing that previously only God could do at the center of my book then is this claim whether

Lee is defending human robot love or Taylor is worrying about his soul they're both talking about how humans interact with something that is not quite human but close enough to be ethically troubling so are we on the cusp of some radical moral transformation is technology pushing us over the edge towards some post-human Utopia or apocalyptic Singularity perhaps but if we step back we might see these stories in a different context where they turn out not to be quite so as unprecedented as they do

at first an anthropological perspective shows us that humans have a long history of morally significant relations with non-humans these include non-human animals quasi human spirits and superhuman or metahuman entities Gods like Zeus Odin Krishna and oun my book invites readers to broaden and perhaps even deepen their understanding of moral life and his potential for change by exploring these contact zones between humans and whatever they encounter on the other side exploring the edges across a

ll sorts of circumstances I show that the moral problems we find their shed light on the very different and sometimes strikingly similar ways people have answered the question what is a human being anyway drawing on my own fieldwork and that of many other anthropologists the book explores the range of ethical possibilities and challenges that take place at the edge of the human these don't all look alike take for instance dogs our best friend I tell in the book about uh I read in a book one of o

ur former graduate students darar dve who studies radical human animal rights activists in India dve tells us about depesh a man who spends virtually every day in the streets of Delhi taking care of Street dogs he gets up close and intimate even spreading medical ointment on their open sores activist like him say they have no choice in the matter their moral commitments do not come from making choices of their own free will they say once you lock eyes with a suffering animal you aren't you aren'

t free to look away those eyes address you yet there are limits even to dep's compassion he does not go as far as Jens for example some of whom try to avoid even breathing in an insect unintentionally thees addressed by the dog in the second person you someone to whom he must respond in the first person I by contrast gens protect even insects they can't see much less speak to I show that by including insects in your moral compass like that calls for a different perspective from depes one that I

call the third person or God's eye Viewpoint we are capable of both perspectives faced with moral quandaries we sometimes pivot between the intimacy of one and the distance of the other my account of the dynamism of ethical life draws on this fundamental ability to shift viewpoints on ourselves and on others moving between the demands of the moment on the one hand and ideals that may take us beyond the Here and Now on the other the depesh and the street dog show us one side of this pivot my book

postulates thinking with them that if a moral subject is someone you can enter into dialogue with then by the same token entering into dialogue May create a moral subject well not all dogs are Flesh Blood and fur nor need they be animate and sentient beings in order to be morally relevant in Japan many owners of Sony's robot pet dogs sponsor religious memorials for them when they become obsolete I take these robot dogs to be a useful reminder that not everything we encounter at the edge of our

moral sphere needs to be an animate creature other Technologies and devices are waiting for us there things that defy or challenge our intuitions about where humans begin and end where moral concerns do or do not properly belong can be sources of trouble they can prompt confusion anxiety conflict contempt and even moral Panic moral Panic as well as this flip side utopian excitement often comes from the feeling that we are encountering something so utter utterly unprecedented that it threatens to

upturn everything we thought was Secure making us doubt what we knew now my point here is that sometimes things look radically new simply because we haven't ventured very far beyond the Contemporary Western context the immediate here and now as an anthropologist in this book I ask you to listen to Indian activists bonese Fighters Amazonian Hunters Egyptian Medical doctors Thai Farmers May Spirit mediums and put them side by side with self-driving Vehicles robot dogs and the computer that or sho

uld we say who gets you to confess your anxieties as if you were on the psychiatrist couch when we expand our scope we can start to see recurring patterns in how people create respond to and take advantage of enigmatic communication they do so by drawing on the enforces of ordinary social interaction in one chapter for example I consider the excitement around chat GPT since a computer is designed to respond to the human user it is easy to feel it must understand me after all this is how social c

ognition works the better the device gets at prompting us these social intuitions on the part of the user the closer it gets to something that could pass the turine test but the computer's answers to our prompts to seem meaningful and intentional people must take an active role just as they do all the time in other conversations super Superior aliens have always been what with us we call them Gods historically gods are often images of humans whom we can address hoping they will speak back they p

ass the touring test if self-learning AI can pass the touring test yet also seem omniscient its workings enigmatic it can seem to give access to something transcendental even Divine it's not surprising then to hear one Silicon Valley entrepreneur declare that chat PT 3 is a God that as he says views me as a prophet to diss it disseminate its religious message my point is that by presenting us with enigmatic communication that seems utterly unprecedented AI can spark moral panic but humans have b

een interacting with enigmatic quazi humans and superhumans throughout recorded history these interactions include practices that anthropologists call divination they people consult oracles and Prophets and speak in tongues they all draw on the ways people collaborate in making meaning from signs the meanings we get from from interacting with AI are the products of collaboration between person and device so too are the ethical problems they pose us if we are to understand what is new about robot

s and AI I hold I hold that we need to see what is not new about how people use them and what they hope and fear from them like divination Spirit possession and glossal Leia AI generates signs that require interpretation and prompt users to project intentions onto non-human entities blurring the line between animate and inanimate beings whether a policing algorithm a shopping prompt a fishing a fitness program or a dating app AI gives advice and directs decision making its claims to know us come

in part from the way it can seem so autonomous and disinterested the risk is that as we come to treat nonhuman devices as if they were humans we will come to see ourselves in their image we can resist this temptation by better understanding its sources my effort to contribute to this understanding is through the study of social interactions and the Deep histories of what we do with them thank you [Applause] thank you very much Professor Keane for that lecture we have uh time for questions from

the audience I'm Mike solman I'll be happy to moderate um for those of you that are online you're welcome to ask your questions as well and we'll have a way for them to come forward as as part as this discussion we have microphones that are available for any ofone would like to lead us off yes we have a question there thank you thanks so much web um I I have a question uh about the importance or value or role of visualization in this long Rich complex history that you're looking at to what degre

e do iconographies or modes of embodiment uh sort of formal strategies for visualizing these um presences at the at the edge of the human what degree of difference does it make what those images look like so I if I understand the question is does it make a difference whether the medium is visual or whether say it's the spoken word would that be um they they both are forms they both require social interaction and they both require us to make meaning of what we are perceiving so in that respect th

ey are part and parcel of one overarching um uh sort of interactive set of possibilities and the forces that we draw on uh I've actually done a fair amount of work on the differences I mean one of the things so I started out as a visual artist and then I ended up writing a dissertation much of which was about um the spoken word and one of the things that that I I have been obsessed with all along is what is the difference between what s the The Silence of the visual visual uh experience or visua

l signs uh can or cannot say can or cannot do and what the spoken or written what words can or cannot say or cannot cannot do and then what's involved if you move from one to the other say try to say what was shown or try to show what was saying so there is some very and it becomes far too intricate for me to remotely begin to talk about here but the point is that there are some you know crucial differences between the visual and the linguistic uh on the one hand but in either case the basic poi

nt that we interact with them and and we for example a entity that answers my questions is one that is inviting me to imagine there's something there there's someone there inside who is doing the answering like chat p23 it's like there's got to be someone there right by the same token an entity that has eyes say a carving that has eyes invites me to imagine there's someone in behind those eyes there's someone there something there so they have uh they're operating according to different media th

ey they offer different kinds of affordances but the basic principle I think Remains the Same in both cases question here thank you yeah hi web thanks so much that was really interesting I have two questions for you um one the first is whether um your analysis engages it all with theories of Consciousness or whether that is completely eccentric to your concerns and the second has to do with um well let me back up I love how you suggest that we need to paying attention to the history of these int

eractions and the context in which they have evolved but I'm wondering about the context of capital in the formation of AI Technologies and whether that puts some kinds of limits on the kinds of comparisons for instance that you're drawing with div divination for instance well how much time do we have a great question thank you um uh I have a lot to say about Consciousness and and let me just give you the very shortest possible answer which is in in in an important way I actually do see myself a

s in the tradition that comes out of people like George Herbert me which is to say that Consciousness is not something that's just inside me but is produced is essentially something that emerges through the process of interaction with others and I come to be conscious in ways that that rely very heavily on my awareness of say how others see me um uh so part of the the subtext of not just this book but much of my work has been an argument against a basic assumption I think is absolutely unshaken

inside the most of the AI research that I'm aware of which is to the extent that it draws on things like cognitive science that it that Consciousness is something like inside the head and I would say no it's not intelligence is not something inside the head Consciousness is not something inside the head that they are they are produced interactively um now obviously to persuade the unpersuaded here I would need you well read all my books then you then you then you'll see the the beginnings of the

argument um the role of capital well you know obviously AI is being produced by you know the uh you know these sort of U these little these little Gods who live in Silicon Valley who are you know richer than all you know as the expression goes richer than God uh and are in the business of becoming even richer by producer this stuff is does that in what way does that make a difference it you know it it I think gives some of the the drive behind what it's doing but you know I mean people have fou

nd ways to make money off of gods for a long time so I'm not sure if there's something radically different about that thank thank you for that web I'm really looking looking forward to reading the book um just a quick question so an analytically is there any difference between interacting with Gods robots or um animals and interacting with humans since each of those interactions does involve projecting intentions interpreting signs and so on that's a great question and I don't have a really easy

way to answer that uh I think on the one hand you know that so the first passive answer would be something like yeah but humans are different and I'm trying to avoid taking that route because it already presupposes in advance that we know that uh that in some sense that our projections are uh that what what we are projecting onto other people is um an accurate reflection of who home as it were so I'm re I'm interested in the way in which these things these interactions with things so on the one

hand you can say there's a we interact with nonhuman non-sentient entities as if they were sentient uh on the other hand by being able to do so that can also raise the doubts that you know we already see in dekart about whether humans you know if there's anyone home uh in in the people we interact with so I think there's a kind of um a loop of feedback loop here that can can push in all sorts of very strange ways um I better I better go on to the next question because other if I try to answer t

hat in it's with all the richness all the richness will be here all day and there is a reception for for deeper and I appreciate you're giving me the time is this working yes giving me the time to ask my question thank you for your talk I I'm I was coming from class so I missed the first couple of minutes and maybe you address this so forgive me um but I was chucked by the your final point and also by Valerie's question about Capital um because you know one of the most famous um descriptions sla

sh analyses of the human relationship or interaction with technology um using the religious language of anthropology is Marx of course in capital and commodity fetishism right where um the object the commodity um um becomes more and more human or animated or divine to use your terms um as the worker of course becomes more and more mechanized more like an object and I just wondered you know how relevant do you think that um analysis of 150 years ago more even um is to AI if at all is that anythin

g that um enters into your thinking absolutely the some title of my third book has the word fetish in it and uh it is drawn exactly from that tradition and I talk about fetishism in the new book as well so the the the U uh this this Loop by which by projecting animacy onto an inanimate thing it also there's also a process by which that can then have the paradoxical counter effect of rendering inanimate that which is animate you know to say you get essentially you're giving away your own agency t

o something else it's not it's a um so the short answer is yes thank thank [Applause] you how fascinating thank you Professor Kean I have all kinds of questions for you I hope we have time in the reception our next lecture will be delivered by Peggy McCracken the Anna Julia Cooper distinguished professor of medieval French literature and professor of French women's and gender studies in comparative literature in the College of literature science and the Arts Professor McCracken is also director

of The Institute of humanities Professor McCracken's research focus is on medieval France and is situated at the intersection of literature history and Theory she's the author of the romance of adultery queenship and sexual transgression in medieval France the curse of Eve the wound of the hero blood gender in medieval literature and in the skin of a beast sovereignty and animality in medieval France in current research she's investigating ways in which medieval thinkers imagined the persistence

and precarity of human beings in adaptations and rewritings of ID's Metamorphoses Professor McCracken's scholarship has moved from analysis of the text of medieval French literature to wide- ranging cultural political and theoretical approaches to literature and culture including why and how the Humanity's matter today she's invited to share her work nationally and internationally and has received substantial recognition including election to the most prestigious Association of medievalist in t

he world the University of Michigan has honored her twice as a senior fellow at the M Michigan Society of fellows her lecture today concerns a profound question when human corpor reality is lost what can remain of the human she will explore this question through the lens of stories that identify intense emotion as the cause of bodily change Professor McCracken I would now like to invite you to deliver your lecture effect and embodiment in medieval [Applause] France thank you for that generous um

introduction Professor mcau Anna Julia Cooper is um was born into slavery in 1858 she was educated at St Augustine's normal school in Raleigh North Carolina and at oberin college she became a prominent educator author political activist and feminist writer and in 1914 at the age of 56 Cooper began Graduate Studies in French at Colombia University where she was a student of medieval French here is an example of one of her vocabulary exercises in old French it's from our papers at Howard Universi

ty during his studies at Colombia Cooper published an addition translation and glossery of a medieval French text Char the pilgrimage of Charlamagne Cooper then left Colombia and and medieval studies to complete a PhD in Paris at the sorban with a dissertation entitled fr French attitudes toward slavery during the revolution at the age of 67 Anna Julia Cooper became the fourth African-American woman to earn a PhD I wanted to name my professorship after Cooper for several reasons first I wanted t

o recognize her work in medieval French studies which doesn't get a lot of attention in accounts of her life or her educational trajectory but also I wanted to open a question about why she didn't become a medievalist that is to ask about the possible exclusions and obstacles that shaped medieval French studies during the formative years of the field in the early 20th century the usual explanation for why Cooper left Colombia to take her degree at the San is that Colombia had a residency require

ment and Cooper's family and professional obligations in Washington DC meant that full-time study in New York was not feasible so she moved to the San and she moved away from medieval studies to write about Enlightenment philosophy this move was no doubt motivated by P by Cooper's personal circumstances and probably by her own intellectual interests and engagements but still I wonder about the extent to which Cooper's departure from Colombia could also have been a response to institutional struc

tures that made medieval French studies in the US inaccessible to non-traditional students or to underrepresented students and so my third reason for naming my professorship for Cooper is speculative I wonder what my field would look like today if Cooper had brought her skills as a reader and historian and her perspective as a black feminist anti-racism thinker and activist to research in medieval French studies I wonder how medieval French studies might have been shaped by Cooper's intellectual

commitments and insights in my own work um in medieval studies I've been broadly interested in representation of um representations of embodiment that is how medieval French literary texts explore identity as an experience of the body in my current work I'm studying affect and embodiment the ways that human emotions or affects are seen to effect shape or uh Define bodies and I'm interested in the way that such representations in turn shape social and natural worlds today I'm going to explain ho

w one 14th century text representation of a body animated by affect may suggest what I'm calling a medieval ego theology the ID moral or the moralized aid is the first complete French translation of avid's Metamorphoses a collection of stories from the first century CE that circulated pretty widely in the Middle Ages both in Latin and in vernacular translations as its title suggests the uid moral is a moralizing translation the medieval translator has added extensive interpretations of avid's st

ories he identifies the historical people or events that could have inspired the mythological stories he explains their moral meanings and he explains that the Pagan stories actually speak Christian truths just allegorically so he translates both literally from Latin to old French and figuratively from the story to its meanings I'm going to focus on one story from the collection it's about an embodied Earth who speaks in terms of human affect to lament ecological Devastation and this is the acco

unt of the boy fitton's crash in The Chariot of the sun god God here's a manuscript illumination that represents that crash and here's the story The Mortal boy phon wants to drive the Chariot of his father the son God febus here's febus on his throne surrounded by the Rays of the sun febus cautions his son that the route across the sky is full of dangers if he goes too high he will Scorch the heavens if he goes too low he'll burn the Earth but fyon is insistent he will have his ride across the s

ky and finally his father gives him uh agrees the boy sets out in the Chariot but he's not strong enough to control the horses and the threatening creatures of the heavens FR disorient him Fon saw the Scorpion theid Mor recounts and you can see it in this image and he was very afraid and because of his fear he dropped the rains and when the horses felt they'd been released they ran freely wherever they wished so fighton loses control of the son's Chariot and he sets the Earth on fire mountains b

urn Rivers dry and the world's deserts are created the medieval translator insists on the scale of the congration in the voice of a suffering earth that is an animate Earth expresses her Agony in a lament to the god Jupiter I am entirely scorched and burned the Earth complains in this is this the reward you give me for all the many fruits I provide I have always served you willingly but now pain and suffering are my reward in this way the Earth sorrowed and lamented and made her complaint to God

the medieval translator explains she cannot endure the pain or the anguish of the heat she plunges her face deep into herself into the chasm the story represents a suffering Earth an animate Earth an earth that turns away from disaster turning into herself this manuscript illumination represents a rather static landscape calm uh calmly a flame whereas the text recounts the violent movements of the suffering Earth full of Anguish and pain she Quakes violently and collapses now we could say that

this is just a personification of the earth a common poetic strategy and it is that but I'm interested in the way that human affects sorrow lament pain human affects Define this embodied Earth who turns her face deep into herself affect animates the Earth and forms of animacy recur in the interpretations that the medieval translator adds to the story animacy is a term I borrow from theorist Mel Chen to name a quality of liveliness that does not depend on biological life animacy may include the r

elated concepts of animism and animation and in my use animacy also names the specifically human aects through which liveliness is described and I think this affective liveliness both explicitly and implicitly structures the uid mor Fon story a dactic account of environmental catastrophe written by a medeval cleric who who strives to explain how a pagan story about the world on fire can recount Christian truth in response to the Earth's complaint Jupiter tries to summon rain but he can find no m

oisture in the burning air he decides to use fire to quench fire and he throws a lightning bolt striking fyon Who falls to the ground the horses scatter and the burning Chariot is destroyed the IG repeatedly emphasizes that Fan's Foolish Pride leads to his death but the interesting thing about this text or interesting to me is that the translator layers interpretations on the ovidian story the first is a historical interpretation now I will explain to you through history how the Fable could be t

rue in the translator's first identification of a true historical event that could have inspired Von's story he describes a drought in Ethiopia a great burning in grur a great burning that scorched fields and dried Waters and caused beasts and men to die from the Heat this is the event that inspired the story he says this kind of emist or historical in explanation is a common medieval interpretive strategy but it also characterizes the modern reception of avid story The Blazing trace of fitton's

Crash and fall to Earth has long been taken as a geom myth that is a folkloric story that represents the garbled explanation of some actual geological event usually a natural catastrophe as one critic explains the geom mythical reading of phon crash sees the ancient story as representing the fall of a large meteorite as the most recent je mythical hypothesis or or the most recent hypothesis Associates the story of fitton's fall from the skies with a meteorite that crashed to Earth between 2000

and 248 BCE and left a crater in Southeastern Germany and I've even got a bad picture of it um now this date seems to be much disputed and I don't have the competencies to evaluate it but I mention it here to point out that the geom mythical reading of the fyon story continues into the 21st century like the medieval translator modern scientists locate the origin of the story in a natural event for the ID moral a drought uh for modern scientist the fall of a meteorite to Earth for the ID Mar tran

sl later the phon myth is both an ideological story about climate change the creation of the deserts and it's a myth inspired by climate change a great drought in Ethiopia but the story can have another meaning the narrator tells us and in a second historical interpretation of the story The translator identifies fighton as a man of learning this phon cleric wanted to understand about astronomy and nature he wanted to understand the movement of the Sun how it is situated among the planets what ca

uses the length of the days in other words he wanted to understand what animates the Earth but this Fon was a bad scholar the translator explains he wrote a book that was full of errors and Jupiter a man of superior knowledge had the book destroyed phon the cleric full of anger and pride threw himself off a mountain and died this is why the story says that piton fell from the sky the translator explains now this is quite an interpretation of the story um but not so different from many in this co

llection in its imaginative reach I think what's notable about this interpretation is its insistence on failure on a failed attempt to understand the animation of the World by representing a failed intellectual and scientific understanding of the order of nature the uid mor implicitly suggests that the only way to understand the animation of the earth is through the animating rhetoric of allegory as the translator moves to yet another meaning of the story he describes the divine order of the uni

verse God who created the world also governs it it is he who guides the son's Chariot the ID moral explains it is he who illuminates all things he is science and Doctrine he guides and rules the world and the holy church as the allegorical reading goes on we learn that Feebas the sun god represents the Christian God who gives charge of his Chariot to the pope who should guide the faithful but Popes are now entirely corrupt the translator explains and because of the corruption of the clergy led b

y the Pope the church laments so the animated Earth of the ovidian story is identified as a figural representation of the animated Church who served feared and worshiped God but now the fountains that used to be full of holy preaching have run dry the translator says and the whole church is corrupt and destroyed by the actions of those who should govern her clerical corruption is burning down the world the ID moriz claims and Only God Can intervene to save it the environmental catastrophe of the

fight on story is then a figural representation of spiritual Devastation and the Earth's vulnerability to Human Action represents the church's vulnerability to the corruption of her human Le uh leaders but there's more the Fable can be explained in another way the medieval translator adds it has another meaning fighton can represent the Antichrist he will corrupt Christian belief and Christian order The Fountains of preaching will dry up the Earth will burn with iniquity this is how the Fable c

an be true he explains the time will come when Earth and Sky and sea will burn and the prideful Unfaithful will be condemned so again the layering of interpretations upon the ovidian story is what the ID Mor does the many interpretations of the story The explanations of its historical and spiritual truth these are the forms of the text didacticism the translator is interested in ait's Metamorphoses as a source of moral and Christian meaning and whatever animism we might find in the Pagan text is

re is subject to reinterpretation as the animating gesture of a Creator God who formed the firmaments defined the movements of the heavens and the hours of the day in whom science is joined with Doctrine and natural order with belief an aom about medieval Christianity is that it displaces animistic understandings of the natural world by imposing a difference between insold humans and a soulless World insisting that it is God's will that humans exploit the Earth for their own ends more than 50 y

ears ago historian Lyn White Jr claimed that by destroying pagan animism Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects and yet in the uid the several historical and Theological interpretations of the phon story represent disaster as inspired by both human and divine agents and this is what I'm most interested in as a disaster suffered by anim things a world on fire that laments her pain a church that complains of corruption a future

in which the reign of the Antichrist will bring about the destruction of the world the Nexus of the fighton story and its multiple interpretations insists on animacy animacy as a concept pervades all these accounts and I wonder if the pervasive way that animacy anim Ates the phon story and its interpretations suggests that animacy and animism are not so much repressed or erased or negated in Christian understandings of the natural world as appropriated deployed to recognize suffering and to give

suffering voice and I wonder if animacy May point to a medieval Eco theology in so far as such an Eco theology might be located not in a divinely mandated care for the planet as in some Modern eego theological formulations or and nor as might be suggested in another medieval example St francis's care for the inhabitants and objects of the natural world but instead located in the rhetoric of theological exegesis that uses animacy to understand suffering so not simply a recognition of pagan animi

sm in Christian texts the Eco Theology of the ID moral uses Notions of animacy to describe the suffering of things the burning Planet the corrupted Church the devastation of the Apocalypse even as the text subsumes the animist world into Christian meaning it recognizes suffering as the experience of an embodied Earth animated by aect the Metamorphoses stories are about human vulnerability in these stories people are subject to the desires of the Gods people are transformed into animals plants el

ements and things but the world too is vulnerable subject to Divine will and divine desires but also to human desires and to human affects like Pride when translated into Christian contexts Pagan animistic views of nature are interpreted in view in terms of a natural world subject to divinely authorized human Dominion as in the ID Mar um but in this text I'm trying to suggest Notions of animacy also recognize what white called the feelings of objects in this medieval Eco theology Notions of anim

ate sorry in this medieval Eco theology Notions of affective animacy Define the terms through which we understand the relationship between the world and the people who live in the world who would make sense of the world who would learn how it is animated [Applause] than thank you very much Professor McCracken we have um uh we have questions for our speaker I'm happy to begin with one um so it I'm quite interested that uh the translator has seems to have taken on a kind of risk in adding these ad

ditional uh interpretations and I'm wondering about the environment in which this Anonymous translator would have been working where they would have felt called upon to add these different interpretations into a translation and if that was accepted or if um if this would have been in what environment this was occurring yeah so um Aid's Metamorphoses were um commented on from the get-go from from very early in the tradition um in terms of uh language and explication of the text it's very actually

very common in the Middle Ages for um clerics to read um ancient texts in terms of what they inadvertently already were saying about Christianity even written before Christ was born uh or before Christianity was a religion they um they God unknown only scripted these texts um so that that kind of um interpretation is actually kind of common this period uh Peggy thank you so much that was beautiful just hear you you know hearing you sort of uh peel off the layers of interpretations of that the a

vit the faton story was just awesome um I you know I'm just really struck by the possible Synergy between your talk and webs and I just wanted to know whether you would like to comment on the ways in which your understanding of animacy as something that um gives moral claims to a a being seems like or unlike web's understanding of the boundary of the human and and ethics um I'm I'm I don't feel um uh I don't feel qualified to comment on your your argument web but um but I think for me one of the

um one of the things that I think I draw out of this text that um that might be slightly different from the way um Webb is thinking about animacy is that I'm I think that affect is is um is key to the way that this text imagines um a liveliness that is not about life or that is not doesn't depend on life so that um a morning mother gets transformed into a stone and continues to seep tears um or um uh or a a uh a um a a woman gets turned into a tree and weeps and continues to weep tears of Amber

so I think the stories are experimenting with a way of um thinking about liveliness that is um completely tied to aect and to human aects thank you so much Peggy for that um so I'm guess I'm wondering um you know is there a distinction between um things in the sense of inanimate objects and um things that are somehow natural like a tree or a stone or you know um the Earth or something like that I guess I'm kind of wondering what all of this says about um the relationship between humans and thin

gs and I wondered if somehow the natural world is somehow um in between those two poles or or or not this really just a I guess a question for information because I don't know enough about it but but I'm just wondering um you know whether there's a distinction in the literature you're studying between the natural world and you know some other kind of object I think Michelle I think it's all about the natural world isn't it I mean it's all it's not about um clothes or other kinds of objects I thi

nk it is all about the net I mean my reading what I'm interested in is all about the natural world yeah yeah not things made by people thank you for that Peggy um I'm curious the um the examples that you've given um have to do with aects like mourning suffering potentially even sadness is there is there something about these aects that lends themselves to the reappropriation in this particular way to your um Eco theology or are there um is the desire and pleasure come up as well are there certai

n affects that work better for this in the stories than others I think um in terms of ethology or yeah what I'm think trying to question might be an eego theological thinking I think it is about Devastation and destruction and therefore about sorrow and pain but the stories some of the stories are not I mean all the stories are not about um uh pain or unhappiness or sorrow uh all the stories in the collection are not although most of them are yeah please join me in thanking our distinguished Uni

versity [Applause] professor professor McCracken thank you for broadening our perspectives by animating medieval France our final lecture will be delivered by Kamal sbandi Professor sbandi is the faaz ulii distinguished University professor of electrical engineering and computer science and the Rufus s Teesdale professor of engineering Professor sarab bondi's research areas include radar remote sensing wireless communication and bio electromagnetics he's a recognized International leader in the

field field of radar remote sensing and has shaped that field for the past 30 years his work includes many published books more than 340 papers in referee journals and 770 conference papers Professor sarabande also holds 27 patents he has served on the NASA advisory Council and is a leader in professional societies Professor Sandi's long list of award Awards attest to the quality of his research and the effectiveness of his teaching for his numerous patents and four startup companies he was elec

ted to the National Academy of inventors he's a member of the National Academy of engineering the most prestigious Institution for engineering in the US he has won the highest award in the College of Engineering in his discipline and is a member of the American Association for the advancement of of science the U ofm radiation lab where he is director has been a Pioneer in the field making major impacts on Military radar and Communications and researching comp complex environmental issues Profess

or sarabandi is well known for being an inspirational mentor to graduate students with whom he has won 28 joint paper awards today he will deliver a lecture on El magnetic Theory and give us a glimpse into his Cutting Edge work in a lecture entitled my research journey in applied electromagnetics Professor sarband I'm delighted to invite you to share your lecture with [Applause] us what a wonderful introduction thank you very much Professor mollin ladies and gentlemen and good afternoon I'm deep

ly honored to have been selected to receive a distinguished University professorship but before we begin I would like to thank first my family my students who are among the audience here and colleagues and friends who took the time to come here um so before we begin I would like to give a short tribute to an old friend professor Professor Uli a person my professorship is named after Uli is a world renown expert in microwave remote sensing uh I was sharing this story with proos Mallen that U Febr

uary 29th marked the 40th anniversary of my arrival to an arbor and that coincided also with the arrival of Professor Uli as a graduate student when I came to University of Michigan I remember I wanted to do something in math physics engineering and something impactful and lucky I was he arrived at the same time he started looking at electromagnetics from a very unconventional way using Radars to study the events that happens on Earth and that was the topic of my research when I started with him

so he's been a mentor a friend and un very supportive provided me for over 40 years I thank him for that so uh let me also acknowledge as Professor kin mentioned no research is done individually it's done by a group of people I would like to acknowledge the contribution of my many PhD students throughout the years some of whom you see on this screen I was able to find some of their pictures and put it here and also to acknowledge the fact that at my department ECS and College of Engineering has

been so supportive through all these 40 years and I cannot thank them enough for doing that and giving me the opportunity for doing this work okay so now let's go back to what I was going to talk about uh applied electromagnetics this is physics math and Engineering involved in this uh all of that started with these four seemingly simple equations that was put together by The Genius of Maxwell a professor of physics a Scottish professor of physics that encapsulated the work of Michael Faraday L

egends like Andre ERS and put it in this form these equations are the foundations for how most of the universe works so they're very profound it everything that happens around us every physical phenomena that we see somehow is related to these set of equations and this was fascinating to me and I thought okay I want to do something with this but different than what conventionally was done at the time I started my PhD I would like to bring a quote from Richard Fineman a person who inspired me to

science and engineering and his code goes as follows from a very long view of the history of mankind seen from say 10,000 years from now there will be little doubt that most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics the American Civil War will fade into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade so this is very profound and uh I was very fortunate to started working on this and a

ll these years I've been enjoying doing this so this problem I said that I wanted it to do something impactful at the time this issue of global warming was just the subject that scientists were discussing is this caused by human activity are we creating too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to cause the temperature of the planet to go up and in effect change the climate of the only place we can live on so in order to address that question we needed to study events that are happening not lo

cally but globally we have to be able to measure how much carbon dioxide gets absorbed by Forest and Marine Bio for example how could we do this in a global sense in a fast way so that we could monitor these things and then make sense out of the data so plan right nasau at that time was also getting interested in this subject there was an office in the nasau uh office of air science that had established at the time and my research support my graduate student research support came from that offic

e so some of the things that happens you know uh are happening because for example through photosynthesis vegetation can absorb carbon dioxide through human activities you know we generate a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere some of the carbon dioxide are also generated through Decay and natural events but how do we see all these things from a global sense this is when we started looking at Radars and pointing them down instead of just finding or trying to detect an object in the sky we

wanted to point the radar Beam on the ground and look at what comes back off of the ground and see if we could measure for example the biomass stored in the forest so the radar has certain advantages so it operates at a frequency where we can easily propagate through the atmosphere with very little attenuation it can go through the clouds and precipitation without being you know affected by the presence of them and therefore it has day night inclement weather operation and we could monitor for f

or example the targets of interest um you know 24h hour 7 and microwave band that uh happens to be around 1 to 10 gigahertz is a perfect sort of bandwidths with which we can monitor for example the back is scattered that comes from vegetation and things of that nature at the same time technology had Advanced so that we could perform Imaging so that we could get very small fine resolution of the ground from a space you know we can do resolution on the orders of centimeter if we want to from space

and create images like that not that it is appropriate for study of vegetation but this technology existed and we could use that so we are using synthetic aperture radar it's a technology that interestingly you know radiation lab in 1950s had made significant contribution to creation of these technology which it was at that time uh with military and then eventually became open and other institutions were used were able to use that NASA was also using these systems in order to fly and then look

at the ground in mid90s we were involved in shuttle U Mission this was shuttle radar Mission C this was the third mission that we had it was the most complete set of system that was flown on the shut uh that had an L band that operates at around 1.25 jahz C band around 5.3 jahz and it had also an xand which was single polarized another feature of this radar was that you could transmit any polarization and receive any polarization and this is an image of a composite image of L band and two cband

channels of Upper Peninsula this is a near Reiko area it's a very small City uh in Upper Peninsula we were doing experiments there and Performing our measurements there in addition to that uh we had also developed new technology with which we could measure the height of the objects from the ground so we can measure the height of the objects and create basically now a 3D image and the height of the object for example for a forest these are these blobs that you can see here are threee structures i

n the upper peninsula and that information also gives us the structure of the tree so now we can have not only the intensity of the radar back scatter as a measure but also some of the structure the three-dimensional images and I was a pi on this project to be able to measure this type of thing and apply that technology to measure for example the effect of that on estimating the biomass and height of that this problem is very interesting because it not only has math physics engineering it is als

o very very uh interesting in terms of what you would get at the end just to give you a little bit of idea as what it entails you have to be able to put the environment that you would like to simulate into a mathematical form create an electromagnetic scattering problem for that what would the radar see if you had model like that through which you can develop some sort of a statistical model that is amenable to conversion and then you have the data that your satellite for example measures you ca

librate that you compare that this with this data and you treat the parameters that you would like to do and that is basically what we did you know a lot of graduate students had to go and basically parameterize model different aspects of the problem you know what is the effect of soil moisture as a function of frequency or variation of soil moisture as a function of frequency uh the electric Conant as a function of frequency soil moisture temperature salinity sand material and stuff like that a

lso vegetation we had to develop a lot of measurements techniques to be able to model the dialectric conent of vegetation Leaf barks Tree Trunks and stuff like that to put that in a model and also to characterize a SC entering from different components of a tree leaves broad leaves Mino needles a tree trunk on a tilted ground the effects of the bark do all these measurements validate our models and put all of that into a whole structure and I said the structure is also very important because dep

ending on the uh radar frequency and things like that you would get different levels of penetration and that is basically why we were using different frequencies L band C band expand so how do we get if you look at the tree it looks very complex how do I develop these models in a form that eventually I can invert for them interesting enough is that since all this information is you know basically transfer from a SE to the structure of the tree a lot of this information is basically mathematical

so for example if you cut a branch of a tree looks like the tree itself but it's a scale where of that right so that is called a fractal model in mathematics so using a fractal model you can very easily with a single or double line of code you can develop basically a structure of a tree so this is for example a forward and forward node there is a node in the bment that you know leave creates a branch off of there and then another branch and then you repeat this process and through which you can

develop basically very very complex structure this red maple tree is a fractal generated model using only a few parameters that you have or also this red pine if you walk in a forest next time take a look you know how needles grow around the branch or Tre concentric spiral with exact Peach mathematically right or let's say the needle that comes from the end or if you look at for example you know when the branching occurs right right the cross-section area of the previous branch is equal to the s

um of the cross-section of the area of the branches that go on all of these information is put in the mathematical formula so that the number of parameters you have to keep track of is reduced that is the key and then once you have that then you go through your model and then generate I don't know if I can oh all right so that that was the fractal tree that that we could generate anyway then you also had to go and calibrate all these measurements you had to have instrumentation so that these rad

ar back getter that you measure are compared to a known let's say radar cross-section component so you know if you go back to let's say a specific Target you know that radar crosssection then whatever the radar measures you can compare it with that so all different radar measurements that you have are calibrated against non targets so so that the numbers that you are measuring is always validated or level to a known level of material uh quantity so we developed a lot of uh instrumentations for c

alibration of The Radars this was an lban active radar calibrators this was a corner reflector they have very large radar cross-section so that we could see them in the images that are that were created this is that Active Radar calibrator that we have this was an area in the again Upper Peninsula we had an army of graduated students there helping us with these activities this is me so many years ago we doing in the cold doing these measurements and characterizing our our measurement and then in

order to validate our models we were collaborating with NASA JPL to fly certain uh flies for us over the SES this is again near um in upper Peninsula it's an abandoned air force field B52 bombers were there before but now it's abandoned we use that area to characterize the trees you know the height of them number density biomass everything that you could imagine and then we flew this radar again that had cband and L band in order to validate our model so these are the measurements these are the

basically the model prediction also the average height you know since the radar penetrates through the trees you know the height of the tree that you measure is somewhere in the middle it's not exactly the top of the tree and again you know we can retrieve those type of for example uh height of them and then cersi we fleu cersi we gathered a lot of data you know we had L band cband you know and X band data we use that in in our inversion model in order to retrieve Maps like these trunk height t

runk density Lea area index total biomass even underground biomass the root system how much root is stored by carbon dioxide is carbon is stored in the root system of the trees and this laid the foundation basically for a set of information that is commonly now used and augmented by other sensors for example to monitor the forest this is uh coming from a global Forest watch that shows you between 2002 to 2020 how much of the forest on the planet has been lost so this pink area or purple area are

the areas where the forest had lost more than 30% of their density and then at the same time not only we lose them but also some of them grow back but from 2002 to 2003 about 72 million hectares of forest globally has been lost that is a loss of about 7.1% we can monitor this type of thing on a regular basis another example I want to give and then this would be relatively quick to talk about some other ways that electromagnetics and the knowledge that we obtain from it can can support uh in 200

8 we received a center from army research lab to develop fully robotic system that would go and interact with soldiers so for example to secure an environment you know coming up with robotic you know platforms to uh not only Advance the technology but also to create subject of a study for Professor keen and his a students to uh the interaction of human and robots for example and this we formed an A Team mostly from College of Engineering mostly from my department he supported 18 faculty over 10

years 10 posts and It produced 50 PhD T is many many patterns and things like that so I'll just give one example of one of the projects that came out of that uh this this Center we called it biomic because we wanted it to see how we could use what Nature has developed over millions of years of practicing and simulation so we looked at for example a bat that has an e cocation we said okay can we repeat that but instead of using uh acoustic and sonar Technique we would use very small radar system

at 240 gigz we wanted it to be able to have this radar to scan the beam along the way it would weigh only five grams because I wanted it to put these Radars on very small robotic platform and have them fly there and at the same time time so they would find ingresses and esses in buildings map inside the building send that information out find the wires and things like that and be able to operate in dark smoke hazy fire whatever so the signal would go through that so we use for example techniques

that have been developed in mro fabrication using silicon micro Machining in order to develop let's say this technology this you know the extent of this is like your credit card this is the size of a credit card a radar system that you can put on let's say your vehicle or you can put it on a robot and and fly that and so the principle of operation of this is like prism if you have a light source white light source coming to the prism the red goes through with a small refraction and the blue has

more refraction so whatever comes back red it's coming from that direction whatever comes blue comes from this direction that was our trick to be able to without having phase shifters and those Advanced Techniques to be able to scan the antenna beam and you know in order to accomplish such a thing over this area that is like 5 cm our accuracy in fabrication had to be on the order of few microns and that's how silicon micro Machining would allow us to do that those were the wave guide approach t

o this Meandering we were causing this dispersion so that the surface would act like a prism and then we had like 1200 antennas on top of these fabricated using micr Machining technique and these were the antennas that were placed on top of that and we eventually were able to make that and I don't know if I can show this because some of these yeah so as we change the frequency the beam of this radar varies and you can have basically uh do imaging like that once you put the radar on that we put i

t on a cart and move it inside our building now we can detect for example all the walls and things like that it's for collision avoidance it's also can be used to detect objects and moving objects as well and then since then we wanted to advance this a lot of autonomous vehicle now use liar radar camera and stuff like that you want to replace all of that with a single radar system that has very very high resolution so it can act like a liar it can act like a camera but now can see through inclim

ate weather condition whether it's raining fog or anything like that we can see that so we put an a radar system at similar frequency 240 jahz and we are enhancing that with the elliptical troid or reflector to create the fan beam that is extremely narrow in One Direction but it's fan it has a wide beam in in elevation we buil that radar with very high resolution we took it outside to our parking lot this is north campus parking lot this is G Brown building in this area we place the radar there

and we are superimposing what the radar sees with an optical image that is taken from above and as you can see all the vehicles are seen with extremely high resolution like a point Cloud this is a mulch Mount uh these are vegetation around it this is a lamp post we see the side of this building we see all these um window frames and all of that so detection is one thing so we took that radar this is a very fast radar you know it generates a lot of data but real time almost real time can produce a

result like that this is a intersection uh in the north campus this is AOS uh this is aerospace engineering building and this is chemical U civil engineering building we put the radar here we started looking at this scene as you can see it sees the cars that are approaching at this intersection it sees this pedestrian going through a car comes here goes in that direction there is a University bus that is coming from here all of these things can be seen using a radar like that and it has a range

of about 400 m or so so with this we can basically replace liar camera and other sensor and just put a system like that on the um on the vehicles in order to be able to uh find out what is going on around your own vehicle but detection is not enough we would also do semantic mapping can I see whether this is a human being is it a bicycle is it a vehicle what is it that I am looking at so if you look at a pedestrian for example because of the relative motions of the hands and limbs you have diff

erent velocities Doppler shift you know is proportional to the velocity since a human has different human limbs have different velocities it creates a spectrum of those Doppler ship and you want to utilize that in order to do the semantic mapping I was talking about a bicycle on the ground this for example has a zero velocity up here you have twice the velocity and the middle of the bicycle has a constant velocity so can we see these things for example in the images this shows uh basically a slo

w walk as the the limbs go up and down this is range you know the person is approaching the radar and this vertical axis measures the velocity spectum that motion of the limbs creates and because of that we can disting say this is a human and this is a person that is running uh we also looked at a bicycle now it's a lot of uh features in there and that is because of the spokes uh zero velocity corresponds to this part of the tire that is on the uh Road the average velocity is about the body of t

he graduated student who was running the bike and the higher velocity is the tip of uh the bike that allows to do that you can do a lot of different things with a radar system like that you all have gone to airports and you have been imaged there you know we would like to have a radar like this from standoff as you approach they won't st stop you to do anything to be able to detect whether you're carrying anything with you or not this is also very good for stadiums and things like that so we ada

pted that radar system in order to create a synthetic aperture there is a rotating reflector there and it creates these uh fictitious position of the radar we use we create a large aperture and we can create a very high resolution so let's say this mannequin that has um you know it's painted to have a reflectivity of the body equal to that of the skin of a human being uh is used for this experiment this is a 3D printed plastic gun that is metallized uh no gun in the campus so uh we we were Imagi

ng that and we were able to create this image it's such a high resolution even the 1 in width of that gun can be detected um as a function of distance that's the body you reach to the gun and then you you come back at the next step and basically this is the composite image when you superimpose all the uh depth element so you can easily see that gun as this person walks towards that and I guess this is a place to stop and see if there is any [Applause] questions questions for our speaker um I'm h

appy to begin um for the for the first part of the talk I'm interested in uh ecological diversity and homogenity so I'm thinking of like a tree farm and uh mature for or mature Forest that would have the same measured canopy are these Technologies like are there methods to be able to distinguish between uh um kind of monocultures and and more heterogeneous environments yes thank you that's a very good question indeed so the reason you're using multifrequency multipolarization is exactly to be ab

le to distinguish different types of trees and whether this is a hom homogeneous tree stand versus a mix stand and things like that so the way we do let's say the inversion has multiple steps one of the step is image classification to identify at the first level which area are statistically homogenous we identify those areas then we apply our inversion technique to it and that's how we could extract for example biomass and things like that from from the image other questions from the audience gr

eat well with this let's uh wrap up a wonderful Symposium from three our three distinguished University [Applause] professor and part two of my remarks is to uh invite you to a reception that is right outside those doors thank you very much for joining us this [Music] afternoon e e