who are you?
what mainstream view do you agree with?
what is your project?
(1500 words)
My story begins with my great-grandmother selling vegetables in the baking sun of colonial India to pay for my grandfather’s (ಅಜ) medical degree. ಅಜ went on to establish one of the first hospitals in his village and his four sons all wound up taking the hippocratic oath. My substrate growing up was perfuse with the practice of medicine, from afternoon’s at my parent’s (ಅಮ and ಅಪ) clinic to family gatherings. I saw how hard the work was — my ಅಪ developed varicose veins from the hours at the surgical table — and how tangible the fruits of labor were. What is more radical than the transformation of sickness to health? Yet, ಅಜ, ಅಪ and ಅಮ had only so many hours in a day, and in a country of 1 billion plus people, there is always sickness going unattended. Thus began my search for deep leverage points — places within a complex system where interventions are difficult but have great potential to bring about transformative change.
The mainstream view that I wholeheartedly agree with is that an education at a liberal arts university holds immense value, much of it found in intangibles. I consider myself lucky that my seeking was allowed to flourish amidst an undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science at UC Berkeley. Infused with an interdisciplinarity that knew few limits or boundaries and an intimate engagement with the epistemological processes of a research university, my education armed me with an ability to bridge cognitive islands, to trace uncertainties back to their ontological-methodological roots, and to appreciate the value of approximate answers to the right questions over exact answers to the wrong questions.
My idea is called Dogluk. Dogluk stems from a resolute belief in the potential of technology and a growing concern that this potential is failing to see the light by being entombed in a particular mode of thinking - what Heidegger calls a mode of challenging - where technology is viewed as extraction of value from beings and objects that end up being reduced to their degree of ‘standing-reserve’. What I believe is needed and my proposal attempts to embody is a paradigm shift of viewing technology as a means of revealing or disconcealing truth - a mode of technology Heidegger called poiesis.
Concretely, I want to work towards the blue sky goal of equipping dogs to detect disease by digitally transforming their olfactory perceptual abilities from an analog and binary signal to a digital and multidimensional signature. We already know dogs are capable of detecting, in real-time and with a high degree of accuracy, at least 16 different types of diseases in humans, animals, and plants, [Kulgod, 2022] with a recent study finding dogs to be more accurate than the gold-standard PCR test for Covid-19. [Hag-Ali, 2021] With more dogs than children in the United States in 2022 and a global population of around 1 billion, the potential for real-time, accurate detection of multiple diseases by dogs is unprecedented. Moreover, existing infrastructure devoted towards drugs and explosives detection by dogs at airports can be leveraged to augment biosecurity and pandemic safety measures.
The biggest barrier preventing large-scale deployment of disease detecting dogs, or dognosis, is its black-box nature that disallows standardization, replication, and scalability. Lighting up this black box will require two streams of photons — a better understanding of dognosis and tools that increase the bandwidth of canine-human communication. Embedded in these tasks are outstanding unsolved problems, including ‘cracking’ the olfactory code and establishing novel cross-species communication interfaces.
The idea for Dogluk first took root in the summer of 2021 when I stared into Mother Lily’s eyes on the eve of her death during a pregnancy that never ended. In my hometown of Belagavi in India, veterinary doctors were unskilled in canine cesarean sections as their limited resources were directed towards cattle and other more economically important animals. In the ensuing days, I was haunted by a sense that easing canine suffering on a large-scale was only possible if they were economically valuable. In other words, we had to allow dogs to help us if we wanted to help them.
In the year since, I created two foundational texts to ground and orient Dogluk’s aspirations. In a final essay for Expanding A Science of Consciousness, I wrote Uncannis Familiaris, where I sketched how psychedelic science and VR-AI technologies could allow for the expansion-upliftment of the canine consciousness. In my Cognitive Science Honors Thesis - ‘Towards a 4E Approach for Canine Olfaction’ - I detail a theoretical framework that synthesizes 4E Cognition, evolutionary neuroscience, and canine cognition to propose a novel conceptualization of canine olfaction that presents multiple lines of further inquiry. Uncannis envisions a horizon to orient towards, while my thesis reinvigorates foundational scholarship to ground in. During the same year, my team during the Berkeley Methods of Entrepreneurship Bootcamp pitched a profitable model of deploying dognosis at airports based on the TSA’s explosive detection dog program. I also began building a rudimentary EEG headset using an awarded Innovation Catalyst grant.
Given the ambitious scope of Dogluk, I expect to need to go to graduate school to further its trajectory. I plan to do so two years from now, with my choices being either MIT’S Media Lab or Harvard University’s Evolutionary Neuroscience lab. In the two years between then, I hope to flesh out Dogluk by building technological prototypes and creating and empowering networks and communities.
I plan to work with co-founder(s) who are exceptional engineers to build models of canine-human interfaces that will allow for the digitisation of canine olfactory perception. As I highlight in my thesis, this can be done by monitoring brain, respiratory, heart and movement-posture data to extract relevant neuro-behavioral patterns that can be matched using ML models to specific odors smelled. White papers of such ‘cyber-enhanced canine vests’ already exist and prototypes that capture individual parameters, such as a canine ECG vest, have been created to aid search-and-rescue dogs. [Bozkurt, 2014] A complete functional prototype is yet to be created and the idea of deploying such a canine vest to digitally translate olfactory perception is wholly novel.
I am in conversation with the ManyDogs consortium and the Dog Lab in Kolkata on forging a multi-site collaboration to include Indian free-ranging dogs in explorations on fundamental questions about canine cognition. I have established or plan to establish contact with the Canine Research and Information Center on Mudhol Hounds, the K-9 unit of the Central Industrial Security Force, and the Conservation Dogs Unit of the Wildlife Conservation Trust. The goal here is to forge collaborations with key stakeholders who possess professional knowledge of canine-human relationships that will allow for advanced testing and deployment of the above Dogluk technology.
Finally, I believe Dogluk will only succeed if it is backed by a large and empowered community. During my time at Berkeley, I co-led the undergraduate club Psychedelic Science at Berkeley with a current engineer at DAODAO, and we are laying the foundations for PsySciDAO. I plan to use this experience to launch DoglukDAO, which will allow for wide-scale and decentralized collaboration to fuel Dogluk’s growth. I expect there to be creative ways to tap into the already existing vast communities of ‘dog’ coin holders that may engender useful network and growth effects.
I am asking for $50,000 USD, although I expect to be able to derive benefits and productively use amounts ranging from 10-100k. I plan for funding to be channeled in approximately the following ways -
20k - honorariums for co-founders/freelancers to build Dogluk hardware and software
15k - materials and tools to build prototypes
10k - sustain personal agency, upkeep for canine companion(s), travels over two years
5k - establish an empowered DoglukDAO