IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2015 - 47

Brian monks
ieee member

calls White's system "a powerful tool
that could do a lot of good on the planet."
Getting to this point hasn't been easy.
When White started the project, he was
still working for ITER, the international
consortium that is building a nuclear
fusion reactor in southern France. In his
spare time, he tinkered with used cellphones on a workbench in his bedroom.
The following spring, he left ITER and
moved to California to join a startup. But
he couldn't stop thinking about the system he had conceived in Borneo. And so
after just a few months, he left to focus
full time on finishing the prototype and
launching a nonprofit called the Rainforest Connection.
He opted for Android phones over
iPhones because the former were easier to configure, and he replaced the
manufacturer's version of the operating
system with CyanogenMod, a popular
alternative. For the acoustical-analysis
software, White wrote scripts that scrutinize recorded sounds using Fourier
transforms. An ornithologist suggested
looking at chain-saw harmonics, which
White discovered easily stood out from
the forest soundscape.
The biggest challenge was power consumption. To cut the current draw, he
shifted the number crunching to cloud
servers, underclocked the processor, and
disabled or ripped out every system on the
phone that wasn't necessary, including
the speaker, the vibrator, and the screen.
White had counted on using commercial solar panels, but he hadn't considered
the diminished light under the tree canopy. Diving into the scholarly literature,
he learned about sunflecks-transient
spots of direct sunlight that comprise
most of the solar radiation in the rain forest. He designed petal-shaped panels to
harvest the sunflecks. Each petal consists of three 0.5-volt cells, wired in series,
and seven petals are then wired to each
device in parallel. White's solar flowers
reliably generate 1.5 V, which he boosts
to 5 V using a simple circuit.
After a successful test in the Santa
Cruz Mountains, White headed back to
Indonesia to test | co nti n u e d o n pag e 57

57
aGe

Anticounterfeiting expert,
Underwriters Laboratories
occupation

The
Counterfeiter's
Nightmare
Brian Monks keeps bogus electronics out of
consumers' hands

Brian Monks, vice president of
anticounterfeiting operations
for Underwriters Laboratories
(UL), is an affable guy, poking
fun at himself in a gruff voice
that bears traces of a British
accent. But he approaches his
job with severity and focus,
operating his division like a
highly trained police unit.
He and his team spend their days
improving security on UL's certification
marks, conducting undercover surveillance, scouring intelligence reports, and
coordinating with law enforcement on
raids. His work and determination have
made Monks an international leader in
anticounterfeiting. But even after two
decades, the mission is still the same:
stopping the criminals.
"Counterfeiters are trying to cheat and
deceive," Monks says. "They only care
about money, not our well-being, and it
jeopardizes the safety of all of us."
A simple extension cord can be rendered dangerous by a counterfeiter. "It
will look and feel like a real extension
cord, but inside it's actually more like a
telephone wire," Monks explains. "A hazSPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

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ard waiting to happen," it
could eventually result
in electrical shock or fire.
U L's m a i n l i n e o f
business is certifying a
vast range of products,
including batteries, lighting, appliances, even missile launchers. Last year
nearly 23 billion legitimate products carried
the UL logo. But countless counterfeit products camouflaged with
a phony UL designation also
turned up on the market, and
detecting and deterring the
counterfeiters has become an
increasingly important part
of the company's operations.
When Monks-who holds
a B.S. in electrical and computer technology from New
York Institute of Technology-joined UL in 1983, the
company wasn't focused
on counterfeiters. That all
changed in the early 1990s,
when customs agents at John
F. Kennedy International Airport seized a shipment of fake
goods bearing false UL labels.
Monks suggested that UL start

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