Alex Waibel fiddled with his computer and a headset-mounted microphone that transcribed his every word.
And he waited. And waited.
Around 8 a.m. July 14, 2022, the Carnegie Mellon University professor boarded OceanGates Titan submersible the same one that would implode deep below the surface of the north Atlantic Ocean last week, killing all five passengers and dived for 212 long hours to reach the storied wreckage of the Titanic.
Waibel, who was researching the use of text-to-video technology by sonar, knew the risks. The OceanGate waiver he signed mentioned death three times on the first page. But, as Waibel descended deeper into darkness, he distracted himself with music anything except country-western and dramatic concerns never surfaced.
Its like youre in a minivan driving to a concert you dont think about tragedy, said Waibel, 67, of Murrysville. Everybody accepted the risks. Everybody thought through the risks in order to have an awesome exploration.
The Titan submersible Waibel rode launched again June 18, carrying five people most of them extremely wealthy to the same Titanic site. After a media frenzy at sea level, the submersible imploded near the site of the shipwreck, killing everyone on board instantly. Reports of the implosion deep at sea tragically ended a saga that included round-the-clock search-and-rescue missions and a worldwide vigil for the missing vessel.
A sliver of hope to save the Titanic explorers evaporated Thursday, when the submersibles 96-hour oxygen supply was set to run out, and the Coast Guard found debris about 1,600 feet from the famous shipwreck.
We just dont know what directly created this tragedy, Waibel told the Tribune-Review Saturday, speaking by Zoom from his second home in Karlsruhe, Germany, a city an hour south of Frankfurt. Hindsight is 20/20, as they say. After the fact, you know better.
But those of us who got to ride this and survive were extremely lucky, he said. And it is very, very sad to have lost these great friends.
The Face Dubber
Waibels research about computer science and text-recognition technology has spun off 11 start-ups.
That includes M*Modal, a Squirrel Hill-based developer of speech and natural language-understanding technology founded in 1998, and Kites, an AI-based language translation tool Zoom acquired in 2021. Waibel also helped found Jibbigo, a language-translation app Facebook bought in 2013. (Waibel likes to show a photo of himself smiling next to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, both men flashing a thumbs-up.)
Waibel, who speaks five languages, works tirelessly at computer science labs in Pittsburgh and in Germany. And his research helped create the first computer-based interpretation service in the world, Waibel said.
The European Parliament, whose 705 directly elected members speak 23 different languages, uses translation services Waibel pioneered, he said.
In 2022, Waibel was developing technology he called The Face Dubber, which used speech recognition and voice conversion to create videos of people speaking in their own voice based on simple text messages.
This led to the entire thing with the Titanic, he said.
Safety questions
In July 2022, Waibel was waiting and waiting and waiting for the weather to be just right.
A year earlier, while teaching remotely in Seattle during the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, Waibel Googled Whats going on with the Titanic? The search engine turned up OceanGate, a privately owned, experimental submersible agency headquartered in Everett, Wash. just a 30-minute drive from Waibels Seattle home.
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who died this week in his Titan submersible, was famous for trekking explorers and researchers to the Titanic wreckage, which rests about 350 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.
One of the problems for their missions is that, at 4,000 meters deep, they have no GPS, Waibel said. The surface ship has sonar and only knows roughly where they are.
Could Waibels text-to-video technology work via sonar, which employs very slow, low-bandwidth acoustic signals to cut through the signal-disrupting salt water of the Atlantic Ocean?
We wanted to test it in the real environment, he said, so I went down in the submarine.
That brings us back to July 14, 2022, as Waibel, Rush and Titanic expert Rory Golden, all clad in helmets and maroon jumpsuits, boarded a huge cargo ship at 4 a.m. Then, they squeezed into the Titan submersible, with its one porthole-style window, and dove 13,000 feet below the surface of the sea.
It was a comfort that things were actually safe, Waibel said.
What about the experimental design? Are reports accurate that the Titan construction was shoddy compared to other vessels of its kind?
I cant really say thats true, he said. There were constant briefings and there always was the question: Is it safe to dive? Everyone really did believe it was safe to use.
For his journey, Waibel said he made a personal donation to OceanGate. He declined to specify the amount.
Viewing the Titanic
The Titan submersible used a detachable antenna to maintain radio connection to the cargo ship as Rush prepped for the mens journey.
Around 8 a.m. on July 14, 2022, as the submersible sat on a inflatable platform, Rush radioed the ship and methodically went through each system and a long checklist of several sub-systems, including oxygen and electronics.
OK, Rush said eventually, Ready for launch.
Nearly three hours into the dive, the 5-inch-thick titanium hull of the Titan submersible faced incredible pressure 13,000 feet underwater, Waibel said 400 times more intense than what it experienced at sea level.
And, at the bottom of the ocean, the submersibles exterior high beams glowed magically and lit up what was left of the Titanic.
Waibel saw the ships gigantic boiler, first discovered by sonar in 1985, and its three distinctive, circular doors, into which the crew shoveled coal to feed the beast. The entire boiler was covered in what Waibel called rusticles, which ate at the aging metal and bore a patina of seafoam green.
He saw a slice of the Titanics side, including portholes it might have been the second- or third-class section of the massive vessel, Golden told Waibel on the submersible. Then, the submersible passed the stern of the ship, where Rush collected a water sample.
Waibel saw a suitcase and a random plate from a dining room set. Chandeliers miraculously still hung from two exposed dining room ceilings.
Boulders dropped by melting icebergs littered the sandy sea floor. And then there, before the submersible, lies an extensive debris field chock full of jagged metal chunks of the ship.
They were huge and they were sharp, Waibel said. You can get tangled up in them.
As they neared the ships bow made famous by actor Leonardo DiCaprio in the 1997 box-office hit on the fabled ship Rush said the tour of the shipwreck, which lasted more than two hours, had come to an end.
Nearly three hours later, after traveling this time from darkness to light, they were back on the cargo ship.
Waibel consulted at sea level with fellow researcher Christian Huber, a graduate student from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where Waibel also teaches.
Yes, Waibel discovered, the text messages he sent from the Titanic site were successfully converted into video.
Exploration must go on
Waibel, a native of Germany and Spain who moved to Pittsburgh nearly 40 years ago to pursue his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon, closely followed news coverage last week of the lost-at-sea submersible.
It could be tough to watch. Some made jokes about the wealthy men on board, which upset him.
OceanGate was not just offering Disneyland tours for rich people, Waibel quipped.
I dont think thats a fair categorization, Waibel said. There was a lot of attention to safety.
Waibel, like many, also wondered what happened after crew on the ship above lost contact with the Titan after just 90 minutes, which Waibel said was not long enough to reach the Titanic wreckage.
I had a bad feeling, he said. It was sad and it was really difficult to process.
If Rush and the submersible did indeed make it to the surface, finding the Titan which only could be opened from outside the vessel, removing 17 different bolts in the hull would be tricky.
They could have just been drifting around, Waibel said.
Waibel feels the most likely scenario is that the Titan did implode dramatically, killing all five men onboard before they even had realized what was happening. He feels that death beat the alternative, which would have been running out of air to breathe in a floating coffin.
Now, Waibel is looking forward. And he hopes that the spirit of exploration that drove Rush and others does not fade into the background.
I think people will study this and learn from it, Waibel said. And I dont think its fair to dismiss it as a stupid parlor trick.
Its a tragedy, when this happens, he added. But I think exploration must go on.
Justin Vellucci is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Justin at jvellucci@triblive.com.
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