US Special - Part Two Click

This week - madness in the States with superhuman diving drones,

a robot in a hat and four hackers doing the Macarena.

So here we are again, the hottest place on earth.

Silicon Valley, stretching from San Francisco all

The cafes are awash with start-ups, people are brimming

with ideas and the streets are paved with silicon.

And at the heart of it all is Stanford University.

As you would expect, there's tonnes of innovation around this place.

In fact, you never know who you're going to bump into next.

And actually, he's trying not to bump into you.

He's bristling with sensors and trying to learn how the people

What social conventions they follow, whether they group together,

whether they get out of your way. Or not.

The hat and tie are there, apparently, to show

The whole look, I have to say, is a little too Westworld for me

but the aim, according to his master is to create an algorithm that can

help a robot learn how to move through pedestrian environments

and how to behave in different parts of the world.

We often refer to it as a socially aware AI.

Having artificial intelligence that is socially aware

of its surroundings, or going beyond IQ,

to emotional intelligence. That is our goal.

So how is this different from self-driving cars?

In self-driving cars, you have well-defined rules.

But in social crowds, you have unwritten rules.

Humans interact with each other based on social conventions,

Nobody has really sat down and started to write that.

We want to see if the machine can learn these rules by observation.

Have you found that people react differently in different

We believe that every culture, every country has its own behaviour,

and that is why we have decided to develop an algorithm that

can learn on the fly, that can learn from observation how

humans interact with each other and simulate it.

Just to be clear, Jack is not learning how to move,

he is learning how to learn how to move.

The resulting algorithm can then be used by any bot,

to learn the social conventions of the place it finds itself in,

be it an Asian market, a European hotel or an American city.

Mind you, not all American cities are the same.

Marc Cieslak has been to a place with a slightly different

These are the silicon slopes of Utah.

Welcome to the streets of Salt Lake City.

Salt Lake City in Utah is perhaps most famous as the home

of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,

Perhaps less well-known is that in recent years a whole number

of established and start-up tech companies have moved

into the surrounding areas, and the state of Utah itself.

Josh Coates is a veteran tech entrepreneur whose business life

And here he is dressed as a panda melting a ribbon

with a flame-thrower to open his offices in Utah.

He is CEO of Instructure, a company which creates training

and learning management software for education and business.

He tells me they do things a bit differently around here.

When I moved here in 2005 and I was doing a start-up,

The first year I was here, I was like, oh my gosh,

it's seven o'clock and the parking lot is empty.

It's a really hard-working, exciting, driven culture

You've got young people but they're married and they have kids.

And they don't go out and party, generally speaking.

They have good times in more family-friendly kind of ways,

and they're not working 80 or 90 hours a week.

Utah has a unique culture, it is kind of a weird state.

Whenever you get a lot of young people and you sprinkle in some

ambition then cool stuff comes out of it.

While property in Silicon Valley is at a premium, Utah has

With properties commercial and domestic costing less

That combined with an abundance of tech talent from local

Brigham Young University is the largest private religious

99% of the students are members of the Church of Jesus Christ

The Mormon faith focuses heavily on family values.

It also prohibits the consumption of alcohol, tobacco and caffeine.

I think we have a really unique group of students.

I remember when I was at college, if I had an 8am class,

I would get there and there was about 60 students supposed to be

at the class, and there would probably be about three

or four of us there at the start of the class.

A lot of them tired or hungover from the night before.

And it's really different to see them awake and alert at 8:00am

in the morning and just ready to absorb and learn information.

Professor Rowe runs the University's information technology course.

A team of its students recently took part in a national

The National Collegiate Cyber Defence Competition is one

where teams from around the United States come

together and basically we are given a scenario.

We're put in individual rooms by team where we have an IT

infrastructure that has been given to us and our job is to defend that

infrastructure from active attacks that are happening

It's kind of two days of anxiety, but it's also incredibly fun.

To relieve the stress of the competition, the team

The BYU team ultimately took second place in the competition overall.

We were the first team that has gone to NCCDC that had

an equal amount gender wise, so we had 50% women, 50% men.

Not really having any opportunity to have a criminal record of any

sort has made it really nice to be able to go up to companies

and they can look at your record and say, oh, you look

like someone who we can trust with sensitive data.

However, there is a perception that the Mormon faith places

an emphasis on men working while women stay at

One of the reasons that I actually became an IT major was

because it is so adaptable to be able to work from home,

or I can just work on projects if I would like.

And so that was actually a big selling point for me,

that it was something that I could do and be with a family.

So this is a state with a vibrant tech scene which differentiates

itself from Silicon Valley in more ways than one.

Welcome to the Whee Kim Tech. It was the week that poor command goal

proved controversial. Players move around in the real world to achieve

objectives in the game. Some have injured themselves. Some have good

players into remote areas to rob them. We might be closer to

hypersonic travel. That would mean a plane travelling from London to

Sydney in four hours. The European Space Agency has provided the final

cash and get -- cash injection for this vehicle. It could jet into

space. Land Rover's research could make it tonne is striving possible

on any surface or to rain. The camera and sensors should be able to

see better than a human. It should allow the vehicle to plan a route.

Do you think there is not enough room for everything? Maybe you need

some reported furniture. Created using MIT media lab technology, this

moves the river around making space in the right place at the right

time. This has already been deployed to

investigate sea beds. It can doubt be deeper than a human can. The

controller sets on a boat. He can feel through feedback in the

controllers. Although the robot has eight thrusters and 14 motors, they

have managed to make it intuitive to control where you can steer the

entire robot using these two controls here. Today and driving the

3-D simulation and taking me through my paces is this researcher. You can

rotate your wrist. This is the first time I have done this. I got. Why

did you decide to make a robot in the shape of a human? Partially it

is due to functionality. If it has two arms and two legs than as you

control it you feel like you are there and there is one-to-one

mapping in terms of manipulation. The robot is meant to work around

humans and the human friendly sold by shaping it in a human manner it

comes across as a friendly robot and we want to get the right impression,

it is a robot that it is safe to be around. Per8-mac I will just pop the

stone there. -- I will just put this down here. Per8-mac for controllers

with more expertise, Ocean one has already created Treasurer. It found

this has lain at the bottom of the Mediterranean for 350 years.

After years of talking about drones they go up, it is nice to see one

that goes down instead. Dave has travelled to one of the most

beautiful places in the United States to see what lies beneath.

People have been living here and visiting here for over a century.

You couldn't drive around the lakes of the only way to get around it was

built. Many ships called the lake their home but only one was referred

to by name. She carried the mail and visitors and cargo to all of these

places where there is no road connecting them, so the connection

was from the steamer. As the boat grew old it was intentionally sunk

in an attempt to preserve it, but it did not work. She sank to deep and

until now all made the most skilled divers could reach it. There are

trucks that let you by sending a live video back to the surface. Our

goal is to inspire curiosity. This underwater drone began as a

kick-start project. Today it is searching for the ship. We will be

doing all our operations from this room, this is Mission control. It

has a camera and lights and batteries. There will be sending a

signal to the surface. We are operating everything from here. The

focus of the project is affordability and accessibility.

This is in a multi-million dollar expedition to the deep, it is a

community effort. We do not know what is going to happen. We are

testing new equipment. Everyone is watching. I guess that is what

explanation is. -- exploration. We are 150 metres down on the lake

and we're just getting a first look at the ship.

No one has been this close to the steamship for more than 70 years.

I think what is most exciting about what is happening here is not so

much that they're able to go to the boat and look around, more the way

they are able to do it. This technology is affordable. That robot

was the same cost as a high-end laptop. The first time anyone who

wants can explore places that we have not been looking at before and

I'm excited to see what they will find.

Last year we revealed the latest multi-dollar idea. We were told that

we should put all our money into the start-up that does this. Delivering

quarters on for your laundry. You pay 15 dollars and you get $10 of

quarries. -- quarters. I do not want to spend time going to the store and

picking out my groceries and I do not want to wait for my close to

watch. I would rather outsource that, pool our pineapple on my phone

and have someone do it for me. It is time to put on this same shirt as

last time and lets see how those ideas are getting on. Thank you for

having this year. Last year we talked about this explosion in

start-ups that were servicing other start-ups, doing your laundry and

you are earning for you. How's that going? That might not have been the

best idea. A lot of start-ups are struggling with that business model.

They were charging too little. They started having a problem making

money and surviving and some have shut down. You can still find

someone to do these things for you, assisted living for the silicon

valley start-up worker is still happening. Is there a bubble? I

think that there is and it shifted six months ago. There are companies

out there we call unicorns, they are meant to be rare, but now there are

many companies worth more than $1 billion. Will it be worth that when

it goes public? We do not know. The problem is that investors are

starting to pull back and really question whether this is a good

business idea. Your laundry start-ups were a perfect example.

Investors are starting to question the value of these businesses. There

is a change in what people are excited about and it is moving

towards artificial intelligence and other futuristic technologies and

less of these OnDemand, subsidise your life options. Thank you for

your time. For all the money that there is this place you do not have

to go far in San Francisco to see the opposite side of things. City

suffers from chronic homelessness. We met one entrepreneur who is

trying to solve one piece of that problem.

It's the world's dumbest problem, according to Komal Ahmad.

So she is using technology to solve it.

The idea sprang while she was at UC Berkeley.

She had invited a homeless man to join her for lunch.

He said, my name is John, I just came back from my second

I have been waiting weeks for my benefits to kick

And then to add insult to injury, right across the street,

Berkeley's dining hall was throwing away thousands of pounds

That lunch led Ahmad to start COPIA, which earlier this

Businesses and event organisers can request a pick-up of their excess

food and have it delivered to feed communities in need.

Click tagged along as COPIA picked up a hefty donation

from The Whole Cart, which caters meals for

COPIA charges for the pick-up and a per pound fee.

For another fee it also provides analytics, an appealing feature

Picking up food from donors, delivering it to recipients

and making sure it doesn't spoil in the process is,

as you might imagine, an enormous logistical puzzle.

But it's made simpler with algorithms.

When somebody opens up the COPIA app, they will say

So they could say, I have 1000 lbs of food, chicken

And our algorithm on the back end will now match that exact amount

and type of food to the nearest nonprofit that can accept the most

amount of food and then it will also match it to a driver

who will have the most efficient route to go and drop

Within an hour, COPIA arrives at a women's shelter run

by the Berkeley Food and Housing Project.

The donated food provides a healthier option to the frozen

And it frees up money to be spent on other services.

It feels good to know that, OK, I won't be hungry,

It is cold outside, it's raining, I'm inside.

In five years, COPIA has helped feed 700,000 people.

An unexpected big donation might require extra staff or vehicles.

And finding nonprofit organisations within close proximity of donors

The plan is to perfect the model in the San Francisco

Other start-ups are also using what would otherwise be wasted.

Spoiler Alert doesn't deliver the food but offers a marketplace

SIRUM collects access medication from nursing homes or pharmacies

and gives it to patients in need at mental health facilities.

The prescriptions are typically for chronic conditions,

It's the sharing economy with a 'waste not, want not' twist.

That was Sumi with a tech idea that seems to be doing some genuine

Next week I'm going to be in LA as our US journey continues.

There are worse ways to spend your summer.

I have been looking for it since they start of June and finally I

have found some hot weather. Things are going to warm up next