( intro music )
Albert Lin: I'm on a quest to
 find the secret burial site.
 The forbidden tomb
 of the man who ruled
 one of the largest
 empires ever known.
 Genghis Khan.
 It's the most incredible
 archaeological puzzle
 of the last millennium.
( applause )
Thanks a lot.
 This is me.
Can anybody in this room
guess which one is me?
( audience laughter )
 It's that one, right.
( audience laughter )
And that's my grandpa
and my grandma
sitting around all their
grandchildren, in Hong Kong.
My grandpa used to tell
me all the time that
he thought that, you know
 that we had come
 from the north.
And he told me to
study hard, you know
to do well in school, but...
to be curious about
those sorts of things
to try to figure out
where we came from.
To always know where we came
from and who we were, right.
 So, I did study hard,
 you know, I'm...
 There's me at a
 microscope studying hard.
 And then one day I
 ended up with this
 Ph.D. in Engineering!
 And I thought about
 my grandpa, you know.
I thought about this guy who--
he grew up at a time of war.
And he travelled all over China
but he never made it north.
And I thought, well, you
know, I'm going to do this.
And I saved up a little money
and I bought a ticket to China.
And I had this plan, I
thought that I would go to
the outskirts of the
capital Ulan Bator
and I'd buy a horse, on the
outskirts of the capital.
I'm a grad-- just like a
fresh grad student, right
I'm like, "I'm going to buy
a horse", you know.
I didn't know how
to ride a horse.
( audience laughter )
And, I was going to go out
into the middle of nowhere
and I was a going to
live with these nomads
and when I had to
come back I would...
press "home" on my GPS, you know
get back to the capital
back to the same place
that I'd bought the horse
and I would trade it back in for
you know, the cash that I had
used to buy the horse and then
you know, I'd break even
and then come home.
And, I met these two
women on this train
you know, these two
Mongolian women.
And, the next thing you know,
they said, well, look I've--
They had a brother and they
introduced me to their brother.
He agreed to take me up to...
...to their uncle's land, and
they would give me a horse.
 And there I lived
 with these nomads.
 Literally lived with
 these nomads for months.
 We think of this place as this
 far off country, you know.
 A place of legends, right?
 And there was one individual
 whose name was Temujin.
He went to this mountain
called the Burkhan Khaldun
or the God mountain.
And he spoke to the sky,
to Tengri.
And he asked what
should he do, right.
What should he do? Should
he live this like...
this life of being a
subservient slave
you know, his wife had
just been stolen from him.
Or should he fight back.
This guy Temujin would one day
take on the name Genghis Khan.
 In Mongolia he's
 thought of as a hero.
 He's thought of as the
 great creator of...
 of not only their nation
 but their... religion
 you know, their
 spiritual leader.
So why is it that we don't know
 this history that
 the Mongols see?
There was never a
painting of him
during the time
that he was alive.
There was never a
document written
about him by his own people
while he was alive.
There's literally
not a single one of...
the Imperial family, he or his
sons or his grandsons, anybody
not a single one of their tombs
have ever been discovered.
It's like it was just this...
this whisper of history, right.
But he also created this world,
which we see today.
He had a system of meritocracy,
which was far beyond its time.
He created the first, you
know, global currency.
He installed a uniform
written language
that he instated across all of
the lands that he dominated.
He created the first empire
which practiced
religious freedom.
We don't really know that
much about him, right
but, he changed the world.
And maybe if we can
go back to this
this zone, this Ikh Khorig,
this forbidden precinct
 maybe we can begin to
 piece his story back
 from the last bit of
 evidence that we have then,
 then we can start knowing more
 about the truth of this story.
 So, that's me, that's
 where I was, right.
I just finished my
Ph.D. in Engineering.
I thought, well, maybe I
can start using my mind
in a way that will allow me to
answer these questions, right.
 I can use satellite imagery
 I'll get the world's highest
 resolution satellite imagery
I'll... use this over the entire
 region of this Ikh Khorig
 I'll scan it with point-five
 meter resolution imagery
then I'll use drones,
with cameras on them
and I'll take
pictures of the earth
where the satellite imagery
told me things were, you know
a little bit off or weird or
something that looked ancient.
 Then I'd use things like
 ground penetrating radar
 like magnetometry, like
 electro-magnetic induction
to try to scan the ground and
find things in the
sub-surface that were off.
And I would use
these tools because
the Mongolian belief is that
if you disturb the
tomb of Genghis Khan--
The reason why that area was
so forbidden is because
if you disturb this tomb then
you might cause this curse
that will end the world, right.
 But I quickly realized how
 am I going to find anything.
I've got 6,000 square
kilometers of data
in which one pixel is less than
half a meter in resolution.
I've got literally a
lifetime of work to do
just to sift through this data
to find that tiny fragment of
information that might be weird.
 This is my data, right.
 Can I have people help me
 find something like a tomb of
 you know, something that
 I don't even know
 what I'm looking for, right.
 Can anybody tell me if I
 said if you had to find a tomb
 what you would say, I
 mean, in this image
 does anybody see something
 that looks off?
Yeah, right.
You know, these
little things, right?
That looks modern, that
looks like a river
and what is that, right.
We thought well, that's simple.
 So let me make it
 simple for everybody.
 Let's make it easy for
 people to do this.
 Let's make it so that you
 can tag data easily.
 We chop up all the information
into all these tiny little bits
and we'll make it simple
and easy for people to see what
you know, to place dots
and tags on things
that they think are weird.
 And, we built this thing
 and we put it online
 we thought, well, this
 is how we'll do it.
 We'll create this website
 where we'll have
 people sifting through data.
And then every single day,
in the field
I would download this data with
satellite communication links.
And I will go and
search for those...
those sites of interest that
are identified by the crowd
and then I'd blog back.
 In less than a few months, we
 started collecting data that
 exceeded over like, 2.5
 million human generated tags.
And then when you look a little
 closer at certain regions
 you can see each
 one of these dots
is an individual tag by a person
 who is sitting on their couch
in San Francisco, New York,
Washington DC
and when they converge
you start to see things,
clusters, right?
When you pulled away the data
you see the same tiniest little
nuances of something weird.
