Even in an Antarctic research ship, ninja tech skills can come in handy, as one software engineer found in the trip of a lifetime.

A research trip around the Antarctic gave a Software Engineer Carles Pina i Estany a new perspective on how the very product he helped build was being used by scientists. Aboard a research vessel thousands of miles from shore and the nearest reliable internet connection, these modern explorers routinely relied on Mendeley to do their work, even in subzero temperatures.

A research trip around the Antarctic gave a Software Engineer Carles Pina i Estany a new perspective on how the very product he helped build was being used by scientists
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The opportunity to take part in this unique expedition came when Carles’ partner, Jen Thomas, was invited to become Data Manager on a a research trip led by the newly created Swiss Polar Institute, which has a mission to connect researchers active in polar or extreme environments, promotes public awareness of these environments, and facilitates access to research facilities in those extreme environments. As they were short of an IT person and Carles was already on a sabbatical from his work at Elsevier – during which he had already planned to travel around the world – he seized the opportunity to fulfill a longstanding ambition to take part in a polar expedition.

Aboard a research vessel thousands of miles from shore, modern explorers rely on technology to do their work in subzero temperatures
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Carles joined the Mendeley team as a developer in June 2009, back when the start-up consisted of about a dozen people working in a small office near Farringdon, a historic section of London. Four years later, the company he helped build was acquired by Elsevier. Carles, along with the founders and the now much larger team, stayed on through the transition. Now he’s a Senior Software engineer.

I first met Carles when I was also part of the Mendeley team back in 2013-15 and saw how resourceful and creative he and his colleagues were with technology (specially during the monthly hack days he helped organise). I also knew he had a penchant for adventure, as many a fascinating tale was told by the espresso machine at our old White Bear Yard office when he returned from trips to places like China and Africa.

Carles joined the Mendeley team as a developer in June 2009, back when the start-up consisted of about a dozen people working in a small office near Farringdon
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So I wasn’t exactly surprised when I learned that he had taken this rather adventurous sabbatical as IT Systems Engineer aboard the Akademik Tryoshnikov research vessel on an ambitious Antarctic circumnavigation via Cape Town, South Africa, Hobart, Tasmania and Punta Arenas, Chile.

When he returned to London and his work at Mendeley — now in the Alphabeta building in London’s Tech City — I caught up with him to find out more about the trip. As it turns out, the experience had been an eye-opener about how important the work he had done for all those years has helped to advance science. Seeing the sometimes unexpected ways researchers in this Antarctic expedition used tools like Mendeley left him with a sense of renewed appreciation for how his own work has played a part in enabling scientific research.

The opportunity to take part in this unique expedition came when Carles’ partner, Jen Thomas, was invited to become Data Manager on a a research trip led by the newly created Swiss Polar Institute, which has a mission to connect researchers active in polar or extreme environments, promotes public awareness of these environments, and facilitates access to research facilities in those extreme environments. As they were short of an IT person and Carles was already on a sabbatical from his work at Elsevier – during which he had already planned to travel around the world – he seized the opportunity to fulfill a longstanding ambition to take part in a polar expedition.

Carles joined the Mendeley team as a developer in June 2009, back when the start-up consisted of about a dozen people working in a small office near Farringdon, a historic section of London. Four years later, the company he helped build was acquired by Elsevier. Carles, along with the founders and the now much larger team, stayed on through the transition. Now he’s a Senior Software engineer.

I first met Carles when I was also part of the Mendeley team back in 2013-15 and saw how resourceful and creative he and his colleagues were with technology (specially during the monthly hack days he helped organise). I also knew he had a penchant for adventure, as many a fascinating tale was told by the espresso machine at our old White Bear Yard office when he returned from trips to places like China and Africa.

So I wasn’t exactly surprised when I learned that he had taken this rather adventurous sabbatical as IT Systems Engineer aboard the Akademik Tryoshnikov research vessel on an ambitious Antarctic circumnavigation via Cape Town, South Africa, Hobart, Tasmania and Punta Arenas, Chile.

When he returned to London and his work at Mendeley — now in the Alphabeta building in London’s Tech City — I caught up with him to find out more about the trip. As it turns out, the experience had been an eye-opener about how important the work he had done for all those years has helped to advance science. Seeing the sometimes unexpected ways researchers in this Antarctic expedition used tools like Mendeley left him with a sense of renewed appreciation for how his own work has played a part in enabling scientific research.

Here, Carles talks about those experiences and shares the photos he and Jen took during the voyage. (He explained that they were not allowed to go on deck or outside when the weather was rough, so all of the pictures are in calm weather.)

What was this expedition about, and what role did you actually have in it?

I was the software engineer on board the ACE expedition, which had 22 cross-disciplinary teams of scientists, about 150 researchers in all, who changed around at various stages of the expedition, each of which lasted about a month. Some were PhD students, some veterans of many expeditions with many years of experience, so it was a real mix.

Carles Pina i Estany diagnoses a broken hard disk. (Photo by Jen Thomas)

On the ship, each team set their own equipment up for their labs. Quite often these pieces of equipment are either connected to a computer or have a computer built into them already, to collect data and operate a machine, for example. I’d help them with things such as backing up data and any other issues that came up with those computers. I learnt a lot about oceanography and had to think on my feet because of the limited resources. Think of programming almost off-line for four months! No Google, Stack Overflow or any documentation besides the off-line versions.

Were many of those scientists using Mendeley, and how did you find them?

I knew that many of them would be Mendeley users. I do like talking to users and finding out how they use Mendeley (specially Mendeley Desktop, since that is the part of it I’ve been most involved in for many years). As they explain to me their favourite features and tell me what they would add, I can often point out useful features in the product that they are missing out on. Sometimes the features they ask for are already there, so I love helping them discover these.

 

Personally though, I like meeting users because what I do every day is for them, and it reminds me that there are humans using the software and that they have feelings. So if the software works well they love it, but they can also hate it if it ends up causing them stress, makes them lose work, miss a deadline for writing a paper or a thesis… At the end of the day, it’s very emotional and personal work, and it helps to keep that into perspective, even when you’re deep in the code. I like it when I can put faces to our users – I think in terms of “this user does this” rather than “just 23 percent of our users do this.”

How did the researchers react when they learned about your background?

Sometimes I’d get talking to them, and as I explained that this was my “year off” from my job working on the Mendeley Desktop team, their first reaction was that it was pretty intense for a year off. But the second one was that often they would say, “Oh, Mendeley Desktop – I love it! Ah, OK, OK, do whatever you want with this equipment!” So I ended up getting extra leeway for doing things around the ship because they liked and trusted Mendeley (and therefore me).

If I worked on some unrelated industry that they didn’t know about, they would have been more reluctant to let me change things around, I believe. They were really happy that I came from a place where I actually understood part of their work, what they actually do, etc. But I have to say that after this trip I now know waaaaaaaaaaaaay more than before!

An iceberg near Mount Siple in February. (Photo by Jen Thomas)

Were there any awkward moments?

One user was scared about the fact that Mendeley had been acquired by Elsevier, so we had a long talk about how Mendeley was publisher agnostic, and how that could still work in the Elsevier business model. Many users came up with long lists of ideas. Some of them turned out to be things that we already had tools for – deduplication, for example – but sometimes there were things that we could do, or that we hadn’t considered. I always encouraged them to tell me about these so I could either email them to the Desktop team back in London or consider them once I got back – which I have!

Did you get any surprising product insights during your time on the ship?

We were mostly working from the “expedition office,” where we had two “hot desks,” so lots of different people were coming and going to do their printing, use the intranet, send something over the Internet, etc. One of my favourite things to do was spot whether they were using Mendeley Desktop, and if they were, I’d sometimes ask if they liked it or not before confessing that I’d actually done part of that. I felt a bit like a “mystery shopper” or perhaps an undercover “Mendeley investigator.”

 

One really amazing thing for me was seeing how Mendeley Desktop was being used offline during the expedition because the Internet connection was almost non-existent (we only had a limited satellite link, but this was only for email and data, not normal use). It was good to see that users really appreciated that they could carry on accessing all their notes and information easily even when there was no Internet connection.

One of the researchers said to me (and I think he was only half joking) that usually he did not use Mendeley himself because he was a professor now, and “that’s the reason why I have assistants –they use it for me!” I thought, well, maybe that’s one of the reasons that some of our users stop using Mendeley – they become professors!

 

Some days, when I was feeling like talking to more researchers about Mendeley, I’d just put on my Mendeley T-shirt, and that would soon get some conversations started.

King penguins in South Georgia in March (Photo by Carles Pina i Estany)

My favourite day was when four of us were having dinner round a table – myself, my partner Jen, who was the expedition’s Data Manager, one researcher who already knew I worked at Mendeley, and one who didn’t.

The one that didn’t know where I was from saw the T-shirt and started saying, “OH WOW! MENDELEY! I LOVE MENDELEY! I use it every day! It’s fantastic! I added all my papers, I can find them, cite them, share. I really like how it’s done and what it can do! It’s AWESOME!”

So I was sitting there blushing, until she asked me where I got the t-shirt, and when I told her I worked at Mendeley, she actually jumped up and went “WHAAAAAAAAAAT??!!! YOU WORK AT MENDELEY?!?! It’s best thing ever!!!!”

As I said, it can be an emotional thing for researchers, and it sometimes feels good to be reminded of that.”

This article was originally published on Elsevier Connect

Antarctic exploration in the digital agehttps://t.co/EAkPBDwQya (w/ @mendeley_com) pic.twitter.com/Lmz0MrMvGa

— Elsevier (@ElsevierConnect) January 16, 2018

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post When Polar Exploration Gets Techy appeared first on Tech Trends.

A father and son team plan to walk 600 miles in 60 days across the Antarctic, all in the name of green energy.

Robert Swan OBE is certainly no stranger to adventure. At 33, he was the first person to walk to both the North and South Poles. His 900-mile journey to the South Pole, ‘In the Footsteps of Scott,’ still stands as the longest unassisted walk ever made on earth.

Swan was the first person to walk to both the North and South Poles aged 33
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His eyes changed colour due to UV exposure under the hole in the ozone layer
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But the world has changed a lot since the 1980s, and nowhere is that more evident than in the extreme environments of the Antarctic, where he’s felt first-hand the impact man is having on the environment. His team survived near-death encounters as the oceanic ice melted prematurely due to climate change, and his eyes also permanently changed colour due to prolonged UV exposure under the hole in the ozone layer.

Robert Swan's 2041 Foundation promotes a broad range of global and local environmental missions
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It made him determined to try and make a difference, and he founded the 2041 Foundation to help spearhead a broad range of global and local environmental missions which have inspired youth around the world to become sustainable leaders and promote the use of renewable energy.

Swan's teams helped build the world’s first Antarctic renewable energy education station
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Their 60-day trek on foot to the South Pole started last week
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But his latest journey – a 60-day trek on foot to the South Pole which started last week – is rather more personal for Robert, as he’s taking his 23-year-old son Barney along with him. Although he’s still got some ground to make up before filling his dad’s snowshoes, Barney has led a rather colourful existence himself.

He was born in London and lived in Yorkshire before moving with his mother to Queensland in Australia, where they lived off-grid. He says that being brought up in such an unorthodox environment gave him a real appreciation for the importance of energy. Barney now lives in California and works as logistics & team manager at his father’s Foundation.

They hope this will help strengthen the case for transitioning into a lower-carbon future
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Their journey is also significant because it will be the first to be powered solely by renewables: “The greatest exploration left is our ability as humans to learn how to live on the earth sustainably,” says Robert.

The aim of the expedition is to demonstrate that if renewables can be used in such a remote and hostile environment, then they can be developed for use anywhere. They hope this will help strengthen the case for transitioning into a lower-carbon future.

“Our expedition is a small example of how we can all make choices to help us transition to a cleaner energy future,” adds Barney. “For people at home who are wondering what they can do, just making small changes like eating from sustainable sources, using less plastic cups and bags, and using solar-powered appliances to charge your phone will all help. My generation has too much information and we’re tired of the inconvenient truth but this expedition is about the convenient solutions that can address the current climate change challenges.”

Solar technology will be used to charge lithium batteries that will power cameras and communication devices, which will be used to send out video, audio and still images to social media and other channels. Robert and Barney will also take heart and pulse monitors that will send daily updates to the Swans manager.

Solar technology will be used to power cameras and communication devices
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By only using renewable sources of energy, Robert and Barney will be able to power their cooking stove and keep warm in temperatures as low as minus 40°C, as they trek through some of the most inhospitable terrain on Earth.

The pair are being supported by some of the world’s most technologically advanced companies, including NASA who are providing a state of the art solar-powered ice melter, biofuels provided by Shell and technical clothing for extreme conditions by Patagonia.

The pair are being supported by some of the world’s most technologically advanced companies
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The only other kind of fuel the explorers will carry is their meals, consisting mostly of dehydrated food, chocolate and nut bars. They’re expected to need around 5000 calories and some pretty sturdy trekking poles per day to get through the 600-mile trek.

They will need to consume around 5000 calories per day to get through the 600-mile trek
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Barney and Robert are joined in the expedition by guide Martin Barnett and documentary filmmaker Kyle O’Donoghue. Together, they will brave risks such as snow blindness, frostbite, altitude sickness and crevasse dehydration, to name but a few. It’s certainly not for the faint hearted, so we wish them luck!

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Polar Trekking Powered by Renewable Energy appeared first on Tech Trends.

Technology is a big part of modern scientific exploration, as one IT expert found out when he embarked on the adventure of a lifetime.

Carles Pina i Estany is not what comes to mind when you picture your typical Polar explorer. A native from sunny Barcelona, he works as a Software Engineer at Mendeley – a London-based technology company owned by science publishers Elsevier – and before this year, he had never even slept aboard a ship. Nevertheless, when the invitation came for him to embark on a 3-month expedition around the Antarctic, he jumped at the chance.

Carles might not be your typical polar explorer, but he played a key part in the trip
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It all happened rather quickly; his partner Jen Thomas – who had previously worked with the British Antarctic Survey – was engaged as Data Manager for a research trip led by the newly created Swiss Polar Institute which was sponsored by the billionaire adventurer Frederik Paulsen.

The Akademik Tryoshnikov research vessel undertook an ambitious Antarctic loop
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Having an IT person on board (in addition to the two maintenance and electronics engineers) was essential and so Carles found himself alongside Jen on board the Akademik Tryoshnikov research vessel undertaking an ambitious Antarctic loop via Cape Town in South Africa, Hobart in Tasmania and Punta Arenas in Chile.

Having an IT person on board is essential these days
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This was about the time when things started to go wrong, as he recalls. They had bad weather, the food was poor, and the telecommunications setup didn’t work properly. And while some troubleshooting is to be expected on any such trip, the fact that they’d had such little time to prepare the equipment before setting off presented Carles with a unique set of challenges, or – as he optimistically puts it – “more opportunities for me to solve things.”

“I am 35 now, and I have been working with computers for over 20 years – hack days, evenings, weekends, personal projects – I tell you, in this expedition I used everything I know, even little bits of knowledge I thought were pretty useless, it all becomes useful in the Antarctic!”

When Pina i Estany’s unusual office time wrapped up this summer and he returned to London in late July, he found time to meet with Ars and regale our inner networking nerd with tales of IT at the high seas. If there’s anything to take away from his experiences, it’s that tech support in the most extreme places in the world isn’t so different from tech support in more familiar settings—that is, except for the lack of reliable connectivity and ability to snag parts and equipment from Amazon or your local shop. But the need for help is constant, the emotions can run high, and requests run the gamut from simple e-mail server stuff to things no computer science curriculum will train you for.

The winch

One evening, about a month after setting sail, a researcher cheerfully approached Pina i Estany with what he called a “new challenge.” Up until then, he dealt with the sort of familiar equipment that was well within his comfort zone: computers, routers, hard drives, and Raspberry Pis.

But this support ticket fell into an entirely different league. A massive winch—which is a hauling mechanism made of a cable and a crank—had started to fail.

Until this point, Pina i Estany didn’t even know what the word “winch” meant (that was about to change, naturally). This particular winch was responsible for lowering the ship’s only CTD device, which collected and analyzed water. The CTD normally would be lowered to depths of up to 1,500 meters, and it proved crucial to most of the 22 separate research teams onboard.

The problem, as it turned out, was a software malfunction. And the error was interfering with the winch’s ability to lower the extensive cabling into the water smoothly. Pina i Estany attempted some debugging, but the manufacturer soon told him that inputting new parameters on the CTD winch computer remotely was impossible. Considering the Akademik Tryoshnikov was in the middle of the ocean, this presented a bit of a problem.

The solution, as it turned out, called for some “semi-hacking skills” in addition to willingness to brave the elements:

“The temperature was around 0 or -2, windy with lots of sea spray; the boat was rocking, and my hands were freezing. People were asking me what I was doing out there with a computer, but the CTD was connected with a very short network cable. So I had to work outside,” he tells me. “So I accessed the winch computer, which operated Windows CE, using my Linux machine. I discovered the IP from the boot screen; using nmap, I found that it had a remote desktop server. I had a moment of joy when I pressed enter and, Yes! I could change the parameters.”

Pina i Estany’s joy was short-lived, sadly; that didn’t quite solve the problem. After the winch manufacturers begrudgingly agreed to let him reinstall the software, he had to wait until they docked at Hobart for resupply in order to download it through the hotel’s Wi-Fi.

“So we reinstalled the software, and it still wouldn’t boot up,” Pina i Estany said. “That was one of the worst moments of the expedition IT-wise. The problem was that the CTD was one of the most essential bits of science equipment onboard, but you know, this is a big winch, and I really had no idea about it… ”

Luckily, this particular story had a happy ending. After reinstalling the update in a different way, the winch finally stopped acting up. Soon enough, all the scientists got their water samples safely collected, and Pina i Estany could finally take his computer back out of the cold.

Hacked networking

In another memorable help request, one day a scientist approached Pina i Estany with a machine she used to measure the reflection of light on the sea. She needed to retrieve data from the device but could only do that by connecting it to a remote access point.

“So I was like, ‘yeah, no problem, where’s the router?’” he recalled. “It wasn’t on the ship at all—it turned out to be somewhere in Australia.”

The extremes of this Cape Town to Punta Arenas loop are easily 6,500-miles-plus away from Australia, and Pina i Estany recalls being roughly 2,000 miles away from South Africa at this time. Not that this stopped him, of course, as he used his laptop as a remote access point to connect to the equipment’s FTP server to get the data. “But that was a bit of a faff, since every time they needed more data, they had to get me and my computer,” he said.

Instead, Pina i Estany looked to a simple yet favorite device for network hackers—a smartphone.

“I figured out a way to hack together a network for her by using an Android phone,” he explains. “With Android, you can set up a hotspot, even with no signal, so the device can connect to their own laptop via this phone. That way, the scientists could retrieve their data whenever they wanted without me getting involved.”

Mail system

Try and cast your mind back—if you’re old enough—to the days of dial-up. You’d spend eons watching that progress bar as it downloaded a single e-mail or page. What was annoying back then is now maddening for those habituated to modern broadband speeds. But when you have a lot of people relying on an unreliable satellite Internet connection for sending and receiving all their e-mails, it’s a recipe for disaster. Things can quickly become tense.

“I have never seen so many people hitting their computers,” recalls Pina i Estany. “It was very painful for me. I can’t stand watching a scientist standing in front of a computer waiting for things to happen. It breaks my heart, seriously.”

Apart from the widespread frustration, a mounting e-mail backlog meant they couldn’t access some crucial expedition permits and documents. At one point, about 100MB of e-mails were stuck in the system, so Pina i Estany set out to retrieve them.

“It would have been easier to sail back to port to get them than to retrieve them at sea via Outlook,” he explains.

Of course, that kind of rerouting wasn’t an option. Instead, Pina i Estany accessed a remote server, downloaded and compressed all the e-mails to it, and then sent those compressed files to the ship using a piece of software called Rsync, which deals very well with unstable connections. He also wrote a script that meant if the program stopped downloading at any point, it would start again from the same place once a connection was re-established.

“So I left this program running for eight or nine hours and then opened this huge file using Thunderbird,” he said. “With that, I was able to get all the wanted e-mails, including the permits we needed.”

Still, the quick fix didn’t provide a solution to the main problem—the ship may have had these e-mails, but the expedition didn’t have a reliable communications system.

“I knew how to fix this, but I needed a proper Internet connection for a few hours to do it,” Pina i Estany said. “During our three-day break in port after leg one, Jen and I went to a hotel, where I set up a new website domain and webmail server, then created users for everyone. It was very popular. Everywhere I went on the ship, people were using the webmail I had deployed. That was amazing to see.”

For things to continue to run smoothly, however, Pina i Estany needed to limit the size of e-mails that could be sent over this system to 200kb, which meant setting up an alternative solution for sending larger files.

“I designed a system where the e-mails were downloaded in chunks,” he recalled. “It was a bit of a hack since e-mail protocols generally do not allow e-mails to be split—they download it all or not. I got around that so that if the download timed out at 20 percent, it tried again to download the rest of the e-mail rather than starting from zero.”

Pina i Estany also managed a queuing system to deal with the slow connection. With this in place, even though it might take five or 10 minutes for someone to retrieve their e-mail, users got a confirmation message straight away and knew that things were in hand.

“I was obsessed with being fair, so I was downloading e-mails in the order they were received,” he said.

The ferry box

Pina i Estany’s final anecdote involved something virtually every IT pro deals with these days: data management. Managing the vast amounts of data the expedition collected in real time was probably the most consistent (and huge) challenge that he applied his IT skills to, and the best example of this was the Ferry Box. This Linux-based machine remained in regular use, constantly measuring properties such as salinity and temperature of the water from the sea’s surface.

Because it took several days for each batch of collected data to be made available, however, scientists were left with little scope for forward planning. For stretches of time, the researchers could initially be unaware of important happenings, like crossing into different water bodies with distinctly different characteristics.

“So [to solve this], I figured out a way to feed that data into a website that the scientists could access in real time,” Pina i Estany said. “That way, they could make timely decisions about where to stop and take samples, for example.”

This functionality effectively meant that the researchers could shift from a reactive to a proactive approach in data collection. It’s not difficult to see how that would impact the science itself. And after a few tales from Pina i Estany, it’s not difficult to see how even the most extreme science relies on a humble IT pro, either.

This article was originally published on Ars Technica

Tales of an IT professional sailing around the Antarctic loop https://t.co/k7VyECE1wb

— Ars Technica (@arstechnica) August 22, 2017

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Hacking the Antarctic appeared first on Tech Trends.