(upbeat music) >> Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of this special program series from theCUBE highlighting the brilliant women of the cloud. I am absolutely thrilled to be joined today by a transformative visionary, accelerating the route to market for many of North Americans' top businesses. Please welcome Tia Wiggins of AWS. Tia, thank you so much for being here. >> Hello. Hello everyone. Thank you for having me. >> I know there's a lot that we're going to talk about tech and innovation and the very exciting parts of your role, both at AWS as well as on the philanthropy side. Excuse me. But before we get there, I want to know how you got to where you're sitting right now. >> Yes, yes. Well, I'm proud to say my entire family is STEM born and bred. You know, I think I have a more traditional American upbringing of parents that did not have college degrees, but they've always had us in programs. So, you know, like I say, proud today. I have two sisters who are doctors and I was on a path to be a pharmacist. And, you know, I had got sponsored by a leader that took me on through the business journey and allowed me to connect the STEM side of my life to helping businesses grow. I'm also, I'm proud to share that I'm a philanthropist. I do believe in building communities and removing barriers to help people grow. Also, you know, as a child of two military parents, you know, my mother leaned on programs, right? I went through local hospital programs that taught me about medicine, that taught me about math, school that taught me about physics, right? That were free and funded, that allowed me to, you know, explore and get exposure. So, with that, you know, I've always had a knack to figure out how do I, in my own capacity, not being a billionaire, not being, you know, a trust fund child, but how do I create resourcing to help others come along on this pathway, leveraging and bringing bridging the two of STEM and community together. So, yeah, that's a little bit about my background. >> Yeah, I mean, it seems like it's a lifelong commitment not just a career long commitment to the industry and you're very clearly a curious person. You mentioned the role that resources and community have played in your journey. How would you recommend others who may be interested in a similar career path or exploring technology and business take actionable steps to do some of the similar things to you've done? >> Absolutely. So, as I believe that I have everyone watching this from from early career before actually in college. So I would tell for the entry level for you to focus on first finding programs, you know, AWS we have programs that help you come into the cloud computing. We will help you get your cloud certification. We have great internship programs but then also too, you know, there's diverse programs like National Society of Black Engineers, Society of Women Engineers, Society of Hispanic Engineers. There's so many programs, right, that can help you gain those actual training will actually provide you a job and exposure so they can help you actually figure out what the path you want to take when it comes to STEM. What I would share for mid-level something that I do personally for myself is, after you're in the industry, is to write a vision. So my superpowers or is transformation and a vision and every year I start off with like a love letter to myself and it includes something related to my career; a bold move. And as I get crisp on to saying something dangerous that I want to go do, I share that with my sponsors. I share that with my network, what I call my tribe, and those individuals help me gain the experiences that actually make the moves to get there, right? And it might not be exact, right? I might not actually hit that move that year. But if I look backwards, I actually looked I actually took some of the steps that were needed and essential for me to thrive when I actually get there. So definitely I would say, you know, one, in terms of exposure with programs. Two, for if you're actually in your career, write your vision, right? Get real crisp what you want to go do about it and then share it with your team. And then the last point that I think is essential that we don't really talk about a lot is feedback, right? It sounds it's easy, but feedback is communication and how you perceive yourself is not how others always perceive you, right? And I do believe in having pride. I do believe you need a certain level of ego for yourself, right, to thrive. However, there is nuggets in there that can help you accelerate on your journey, right? So I take time and I actually go on listening circles and I ask about what are my blind spots? Like, just be honest, right? Something about the AWS culture I love is that we use this principle of being vocally self-critical, right? That creates a level of transparency and honesty for others to be honest with us about something that we might not see, right? Or we might have failed, right? Or we might need to improve. So I would say, again, programs, write your vision, right? You know I call it a love letter to make it more personalized. And then three, get your, get feedback. It's essential. >> I like that, there's almost like an id, an ego and an external to that, as well as a qualitative and a quantitative component to that which I think is really interesting. You know, I went to five different classes, or I try, I looked at six different YouTube videos to learn about these skills, versus I took the time to think about what that would actually mean to me and to myself. And I think a lot of folks at any stage in their career journey don't necessarily give themselves the time to have that type of reflection. So it's wonderful to see someone who's been as successful as you talk about both your process as well as that level of transparency and communication. Taking feedback is a skillset that you'll have to use in many aspects of your life moving forward. >> Yeah. It's just communication. That's all it is. Just communication. >> Absolutely. Yes, and working on that is a certainly a lifelong journey. You've had a lot of success in your 15 years of being in the cloud. Can you give us some examples of your favorite moments? >> Yeah, you know, I'm proud. Like I took some, I took very... I got along with that vision, right? I took some very critical steps to ensure that I was taking roles that created mobility, right? You know, going back to starting at BAE systems, working with a aerospace and defense contractor where I had to move different states and get exposure to different platforms and lines of business, IT, manufacturing, down to actually stepping into an international nonprofit firm where I worked the redesign of that company, right? You know, understanding different levels of contracts how do we go to route in the market with other foreign countries, right? And then coming back into my previous- >> Not simple problems there. >> Not simple at all! But pretty amazing. >> To give you a shout out on complexity, yeah. >> Complexity, right? And it constantly be moving. And also, side note to everyone, you know obtaining my additional degrees. So, you know, if you look at my background, you know you'll see a lot of HR former roles. But if you look at the components of those jobs, it was business building, project management agile management, change management, right? So when I, I will say two of my major success moves, well one would be I was chair at Northrop Grumman. It actually allowed me to crack my teeth when it comes to new business acquisition, business proposals, right? So take all that idea of programs but actually being a part of a team to go after some of our most sacred nation contracts and programs that protects our country, right? Building, coming up with a solution and strategy, using technology, using data modernization, pulling together cloud components and then actually going out there and actually identifying the talent across the world that will be aligned to this. And making that and being a part of that team and actually signing off and saying, "Alright, this is what we believe is the best program for our solutions, for our employees for our world, for our nation," right? Had several multiple multi-billion dollar contracts that I worked on that we actually won with the Northrop Grumman that really also, from a side note, helped me build my confidence to say, "Hey, I can do more." Like, "Hey, I don't have 50 years in this industry but you know what I know is I have exposure, I have experience, I have, hey, I have an idea," right? And I know about technology and tools and how this links together into a story to say, "Hey, how does this bring value?" So I would say we had several, again national security programs that I was a part of, and then here at Amazon to speak more for our partners, right? Our partner experience. Just this year, you know, coming into my role within two quarters, we actually delivered, we actually confirmed that we actually identify Amazon opportunities for our partners, right? We believe Amazon opportunities helping our partners route to market helps them actually identify better partner opportunities so we can actually help them attach them to an actual customer. With that, within two quarters we were able to deliver over- >> Just to insert number for scale for folks listening. >> Yes. >> You have over a hundred thousand partners, correct? >> That's right, we have over a hundred thousand partners. >> So echoing on the complexity, it's not just like you're matchmaking, you know, two different people from two different sides of the fence here. >> No. >> The matrix is massive in the flywheel. That's wild. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, with that, we took a subset to start with a subset of partners to say, "Hey how do we just pilot an experiment," right? If we did an exercise where we actually you know, do, you know use tools to identify opportunities that better aligned to partners, and how do we deliver that to them, right? Versus us reacting to just waiting for them to provide something to us. Within- >> What's the biggest challenges for you there? >> Oh gosh. Complexity, right? >> Yeah. >> Complexity partner types. You know, we deal with, you know, system integrators, we deal with independent software vendors, resellers - everyone has their own additional needs. They have their own complexity, they have their own in terms of their makeup, right? In terms of resourcing. So, you know, we have to, on top of that, we have to work with the partner to make sure they're actually ready and equipped to actually receive opportunities from us. And then also how do we help work with them to build a sales plan to go after those opportunities. So it's, it's all of the if you think about the flywheel, yeah we could throw something over the line, but we also have to work with them as one team to say, okay how do we help make this help you launch this opportunity with the customer, with us? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And so what do you hope to see coming in the next five years? Where do you hope your role takes you at the next... >> Oh gosh. You know, I don't actually go off five years because if I look back at the last 15, I didn't imagine all those different opportunities, by the way. Right? >> Love that. So true. >> So, yeah. So I don't, again, it goes back to like I hate putting boxes over myself and but vision-wise, you know, just to say thank you to my mentors, to my sponsors, you know, I see myself C-suite, right? I see myself over an organization helping again connecting the dots with business growth and opportunities. Now, is it Amazon, I hope? Be wonderful, right? But if it's another large Fortune 500 company, absolutely. But in far, in terms of the cloud computing industry I mean, we're the unimaginable, right? You already, you talk about, you know AI we've talked about in the past, we talk about this meta, you know, this digital transformative world where we're living virtually. That scares me, right? By the way, just to be honest, everyone. But, I do believe that as a company, we are going to be moving to be more digital, you know, I do believe our customers will be more digital. I do think in more virtual engagement, right? And I see myself building those programs to help ensure that our workforce is there, that our sellers are there, that we can actually continue to drive growth and that they're actually equipped to actually align to those opportunities to help our customers grow their business. >> Yeah. The acceleration and the evolution of the modern workforce is a challenge that so many businesses are facing right now. I'm sure tens of thousands, if not all of the six-figure plus partners in your program are experiencing a dynamic range of challenges as a result. And they are all very lucky to have you there to support them. Hopefully everyone at AWS is listening to that nice plug and opportunity to promote you to the C-suite where I'm sure you belong, as time goes on. Switching from digital to diversity just a little bit, it's clear that you have had people in your community who have mentored you and taught and been a part of the education side of your journey. And I'm curious to see, or curious to ask you rather, what are the challenges that you still see in diversity in general today? >> Yeah. Well, you know, it unfortunately is still here. You know, we still have unconscious bias, right? In senior level career advancement. I think that's embedded in our culture and that's something that we constantly have to combat. You know, I was also trained under the mindset and had this belief that say, "Hey let your work speak for yourself." And in reality, it's not about your work, it's also about who knows you and who actually wants to know about you, right? And that equals unconscious bias, right? Someone that actually, you know, for people to see you for who you are and see what you actually contribute versus they just liking you. So, you know, and also too, you know we've run into the issue of being taught in our culture to lean in, right? For a moment there, I believe that, but at some point when you look around and you're like, "Oh gosh, you know I worked all last year, but my pay was only this." Or, "Hey, that person got promoted and they only worked on this one thing." And then you, and then it pinches like, oh, it's still there, right? So I just believe as leaders and including myself as my commitment is like any organization of my part like how do I advocate for others? How do I create opportunities? How do I address it? I'm very blessed to have a leader that also sees what's possible in me and creates those opportunities and, you know, removes those roadblocks and those barriers. But I, you know, I can't lie is that, you know, I've also personally been through that. But then again, I look around my family and my community and I have, you know family that's also civil servants, public servants. This is nothing new, right? And, you know, and I go around them and I get empowered to say, "Hey, you know you can actually do this and this is how you can overcome this." But then also with your commitment as a leader my commitment is how do I create those pathways for others and remove those barriers. And when I see that, how do I address it? >> And how to really be what you're touching on there so much is allyship. >> Yes! >> I think there's, it takes, being an ally takes many forms across workplaces and functions and genders and demographics and anything quite frankly. And not everyone can advocate for themselves as loudly as someone else can. And that's particularly if whatever that demographic is sees itself a lot on the leadership side of things. But it's really easy to compliment a friend or a teammate, and I think it's actually pretty easy to say nice things about them in the room when they're not in there. And that's one of the easiest ways to be an ally. And I love that you just brought that up. I think that, yeah, we just, we forget that someone else is still fighting to be noticed. And when I was looking at your, you let the work speak for itself. One of the lines that I've always referenced is "be so good they can't ignore you" which kind of combines exactly what you just mentioned is the being noticed piece. And I think it's all of our jobs to help other people and the right people and projects get noticed. So, I really love that. >> Yeah. >> Final question for you- >> So actually, just another quick line about that, you know. >> Yeah. >> And also, you know, and this is another reality about this is knowing when to walk away, right? Cause some people can chew and, you know, I do believe in closed doors are a blessing. You know, when you face rejection, you know it's redirection to where you need to go. But I also do believe like I was at this conference years ago and this woman made this analogy. There's, you know, she said, "There's a million men out there, you know, if it doesn't work for you, go get another one." And that's the idea is that your one company is not your only company. There's other companies that might be better aligned to you. Believe in yourself that you're worth it to go find another opportunity that's better aligned where people can actually celebrate you versus where they say this concept of tolerates you. So I just put that out there, is that bold belief that you have to know that about yourself to know that, hey, you're worth it, and there is another company that you can thrive and you're going to be okay. And when you do it, you'll be happy that you actually took that leap of faith. And that's something that I've taken. And when I know that, hey, my time's up, if I sense that if I see that, then I just will move on it. And I'm okay. >> I've been back here behind the curtain just snapping as you've been talking. I couldn't agree more. The only brand you're ever going to represent your whole life is you. >> Yeah. >> And I think you just nailed it. I was going to ask you for some closing inspiration, but I think you you just nailed it with that statement to be quite honest. So I don't want to poison the well. Tia Wiggins, thank you so much for joining us. It is very clear why you are a go-to market leader and AWS is very lucky to have you. And thank you to our audience for joining us for this a special program series here on theCUBE where we are featuring women of the cloud. My name's Savannah Peterson, and may the skies be clear and blue and with beautiful clouds in your universe today. (upbeat music)

>>Yeah, yeah. >>Welcome back. I'm so excited to introduce our next session empowerment through inclusion, reimagining society and technology. This is a topic that's personally very near and dear to my heart. Did you know that there's only 2% of Latinas in technology as a Latina? I know that there's so much more we could do collectively to improve these gaps and diversity. I thought spot diversity is considered a critical element across all levels of the organization. The data shows countless times. A diverse and inclusive workforce ultimately drives innovation better performance and keeps your employees happier. That's why we're passionate about contributing to this conversation and also partnering with organizations that share our mission of improving diversity across our communities. Last beyond, we hosted the session during a breakfast and we packed the whole room. This year, we're bringing the conversation to the forefront to emphasize the importance of diversity and data and share the positive ramifications that it has for your organization. Joining us for this session are thought spots Chief Data Strategy Officer Cindy Housing and Ruhollah Benjamin, associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Thank you, Paola. So many >>of you have journeyed with me for years now on our efforts to improve diversity and inclusion in the data and analytic space. And >>I would say >>over time we cautiously started commiserating, eventually sharing best practices to make ourselves and our companies better. And I do consider it a milestone. Last year, as Paola mentioned that half the room was filled with our male allies. But I remember one of our Panelists, Natalie Longhurst from Vodafone, suggesting that we move it from a side hallway conversation, early morning breakfast to the main stage. And I >>think it was >>Bill Zang from a I G in Japan. Who said Yes, please. Everyone else agreed, but more than a main stage topic, I want to ask you to think about inclusion beyond your role beyond your company toe. How Data and analytics can be used to impact inclusion and equity for the society as a whole. Are we using data to reveal patterns or to perpetuate problems leading Tobias at scale? You are the experts, the change agents, the leaders that can prevent this. I am thrilled to introduce you to the leading authority on this topic, Rou Ha Benjamin, associate professor of African studies at Princeton University and author of Multiple Books. The Latest Race After Technology. Rou ha Welcome. >>Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be in conversation with you today, and I thought I would just kick things off with some opening reflections on this really important session theme. And then we could jump into discussion. So I'd like us to as a starting point, um, wrestle with these buzzwords, empowerment and inclusion so that we can have them be more than kind of big platitudes and really have them reflected in our workplace cultures and the things that we design in the technologies that we put out into the world. And so to do that, I think we have to move beyond techno determinism, and I'll explain what that means in just a minute. Techno determinism comes in two forms. The first, on your left is the idea that technology automation, um, all of these emerging trends are going to harm us, are going to necessarily harm humanity. They're going to take all the jobs they're going to remove human agency. This is what we might call the techno dystopian version of the story and this is what Hollywood loves to sell us in the form of movies like The Matrix or Terminator. The other version on your right is the techno utopian story that technologies automation. The robots as a shorthand, are going to save humanity. They're gonna make everything more efficient, more equitable. And in this case, on the surface, he seemed like opposing narratives right there, telling us different stories. At least they have different endpoints. But when you pull back the screen and look a little bit more closely, you see that they share an underlying logic that technology is in the driver's seat and that human beings that social society can just respond to what's happening. But we don't really have a say in what technologies air designed and so to move beyond techno determinism the notion that technology is in the driver's seat. We have to put the human agents and agencies back into the story, the protagonists, and think carefully about what the human desires worldviews, values, assumptions are that animate the production of technology. And so we have to put the humans behind the screen back into view. And so that's a very first step and when we do that, we see, as was already mentioned, that it's a very homogeneous group right now in terms of who gets the power and the resource is to produce the digital and physical infrastructure that everyone else has to live with. And so, as a first step, we need to think about how to create more participation of those who are working behind the scenes to design technology now to dig a little more a deeper into this, I want to offer a kind of low tech example before we get to the more hi tech ones. So what you see in front of you here is a simple park bench public bench. It's located in Berkeley, California, which is where I went to graduate school and on this particular visit I was living in Boston, and so I was back in California. It was February. It was freezing where I was coming from, and so I wanted to take a few minutes in between meetings to just lay out in the sun and soak in some vitamin D, and I quickly realized, actually, I couldn't lay down on this bench because of the way it had been designed with these arm rests at intermittent intervals. And so here I thought. Okay, the the armrest have, ah functional reason why they're there. I mean, you could literally rest your elbows there or, um, you know, it can create a little bit of privacy of someone sitting there that you don't know. When I was nine months pregnant, it could help me get up and down or for the elderly, the same thing. So it has a lot of functional reasons, but I also thought about the fact that it prevents people who are homeless from sleeping on the bench. And this is the Bay area that we were talking about where, in fact, the tech boom has gone hand in hand with a housing crisis. Those things have grown in tandem. So innovation has grown within equity because we haven't thought carefully about how to address the social context in which technology grows and blossoms. And so I thought, Okay, this crisis is growing in this area, and so perhaps this is a deliberate attempt to make sure that people don't sleep on the benches by the way that they're designed and where the where they're implemented and So this is what we might call structural inequity. By the way something is designed. It has certain effects that exclude or harm different people. And so it may not necessarily be the intense, but that's the effect. And I did a little digging, and I found, in fact, it's a global phenomenon, this thing that architects called hostile architecture. Er, I found single occupancy benches in Helsinki, so only one booty at a time no laying down there. I found caged benches in France. And in this particular town. What's interesting here is that the mayor put these benches out in this little shopping plaza, and within 24 hours the people in the town rallied together and had them removed. So we see here that just because we have, uh, discriminatory design in our public space doesn't mean we have to live with it. We can actually work together to ensure that our public space reflects our better values. But I think my favorite example of all is the meter bench. In this case, this bench is designed with spikes in them, and to get the spikes to retreat into the bench, you have to feed the meter you have to put some coins in, and I think it buys you about 15 or 20 minutes. Then the spikes come back up. And so you'll be happy to know that in this case, this was designed by a German artists to get people to think critically about issues of design, not just the design of physical space but the design of all kinds of things, public policies. And so we can think about how our public life in general is metered, that it serves those that can pay the price and others are excluded or harm, whether we're talking about education or health care. And the meter bench also presents something interesting. For those of us who care about technology, it creates a technical fix for a social problem. In fact, it started out his art. But some municipalities in different parts of the world have actually adopted this in their public spaces in their parks in order to deter so called lawyers from using that space. And so, by a technical fix, we mean something that creates a short term effect, right. It gets people who may want to sleep on it out of sight. They're unable to use it, but it doesn't address the underlying problems that create that need to sleep outside in the first place. And so, in addition to techno determinism, we have to think critically about technical fixes that don't address the underlying issues that technology is meant to solve. And so this is part of a broader issue of discriminatory design, and we can apply the bench metaphor to all kinds of things that we work with or that we create. And the question we really have to continuously ask ourselves is, What values are we building in to the physical and digital infrastructures around us? What are the spikes that we may unwittingly put into place? Or perhaps we didn't create the spikes. Perhaps we started a new job or a new position, and someone hands us something. This is the way things have always been done. So we inherit the spike bench. What is our responsibility when we noticed that it's creating these kinds of harms or exclusions or technical fixes that are bypassing the underlying problem? What is our responsibility? All of this came to a head in the context of financial technologies. I don't know how many of you remember these high profile cases of tech insiders and CEOs who applied for Apple, the Apple card and, in one case, a husband and wife applied and the husband, the husband received a much higher limit almost 20 times the limit as his wife, even though they shared bank accounts, they lived in Common Law State. And so the question. There was not only the fact that the husband was receiving a much better interest rate and the limit, but also that there was no mechanism for the individuals involved to dispute what was happening. They didn't even know what the factors were that they were being judged that was creating this form of discrimination. So in terms of financial technologies, it's not simply the outcome that's the issue. Or that could be discriminatory, but the process that black boxes, all of the decision making that makes it so that consumers and the general public have no way to question it. No way to understand how they're being judged adversely, and so it's the process not only the product that we have to care a lot about. And so the case of the apple cart is part of a much broader phenomenon of, um, racist and sexist robots. This is how the headlines framed it a few years ago, and I was so interested in this framing because there was a first wave of stories that seemed to be shocked at the prospect that technology is not neutral. Then there was a second wave of stories that seemed less surprised. Well, of course, technology inherits its creator's biases. And now I think we've entered a phase of attempts to override and address the default settings of so called racist and sexist robots, for better or worse. And here robots is just a kind of shorthand, that the way people are talking about automation and emerging technologies more broadly. And so as I was encountering these headlines, I was thinking about how these air, not problems simply brought on by machine learning or AI. They're not all brand new, and so I wanted to contribute to the conversation, a kind of larger context and a longer history for us to think carefully about the social dimensions of technology. And so I developed a concept called the New Jim Code, which plays on the phrase Jim Crow, which is the way that the regime of white supremacy and inequality in this country was defined in a previous era, and I wanted us to think about how that legacy continues to haunt the present, how we might be coding bias into emerging technologies and the danger being that we imagine those technologies to be objective. And so this gives us a language to be able to name this phenomenon so that we can address it and change it under this larger umbrella of the new Jim Code are four distinct ways that this phenomenon takes shape from the more obvious engineered inequity. Those were the kinds of inequalities tech mediated inequalities that we can generally see coming. They're kind of obvious. But then we go down the line and we see it becomes harder to detect. It's happening in our own backyards. It's happening around us, and we don't really have a view into the black box, and so it becomes more insidious. And so in the remaining couple minutes, I'm just just going to give you a taste of the last three of these, and then a move towards conclusion that we can start chatting. So when it comes to default discrimination. This is the way that social inequalities become embedded in emerging technologies because designers of these technologies aren't thinking carefully about history and sociology. Ah, great example of this came Thio headlines last fall when it was found that widely used healthcare algorithm affecting millions of patients, um, was discriminating against black patients. And so what's especially important to note here is that this algorithm healthcare algorithm does not explicitly take note of race. That is to say, it is race neutral by using cost to predict healthcare needs. This digital triaging system unwittingly reproduces health disparities because, on average, black people have incurred fewer costs for a variety of reasons, including structural inequality. So in my review of this study by Obermeyer and colleagues, I want to draw attention to how indifference to social reality can be even more harmful than malicious intent. It doesn't have to be the intent of the designers to create this effect, and so we have to look carefully at how indifference is operating and how race neutrality can be a deadly force. When we move on to the next iteration of the new Jim code coded exposure, there's attention because on the one hand, you see this image where the darker skin individual is not being detected by the facial recognition system, right on the camera or on the computer. And so coated exposure names this tension between wanting to be seen and included and recognized, whether it's in facial recognition or in recommendation systems or in tailored advertising. But the opposite of that, the tension is with when you're over included. When you're surveiled when you're to centered. And so we should note that it's not simply in being left out, that's the problem. But it's in being included in harmful ways. And so I want us to think carefully about the rhetoric of inclusion and understand that inclusion is not simply an end point. It's a process, and it is possible to include people in harmful processes. And so we want to ensure that the process is not harmful for it to really be effective. The last iteration of the new Jim Code. That means the the most insidious, let's say, is technologies that are touted as helping US address bias, so they're not simply including people, but they're actively working to address bias. And so in this case, There are a lot of different companies that are using AI to hire, create hiring software and hiring algorithms, including this one higher view. And the idea is that there there's a lot that AI can keep track of that human beings might miss. And so so the software can make data driven talent decisions. After all, the problem of employment discrimination is widespread and well documented. So the logic goes, Wouldn't this be even more reason to outsource decisions to AI? Well, let's think about this carefully. And this is the look of the idea of techno benevolence trying to do good without fully reckoning with what? How technology can reproduce inequalities. So some colleagues of mine at Princeton, um, tested a natural learning processing algorithm and was looking to see whether it exhibited the same, um, tendencies that psychologists have documented among humans. E. And what they found was that in fact, the algorithm associating black names with negative words and white names with pleasant sounding words. And so this particular audit builds on a classic study done around 2003, before all of the emerging technologies were on the scene where two University of Chicago economists sent out thousands of resumes to employers in Boston and Chicago, and all they did was change the names on those resumes. All of the other work history education were the same, and then they waited to see who would get called back. And the applicants, the fictional applicants with white sounding names received 50% more callbacks than the black applicants. So if you're presented with that study, you might be tempted to say, Well, let's let technology handle it since humans are so biased. But my colleagues here in computer science found that this natural language processing algorithm actually reproduced those same associations with black and white names. So, too, with gender coded words and names Amazon learned a couple years ago when its own hiring algorithm was found discriminating against women. Nevertheless, it should be clear by now why technical fixes that claim to bypass human biases are so desirable. If Onley there was a way to slay centuries of racist and sexist demons with a social justice box beyond desirable, more like magical, magical for employers, perhaps looking to streamline the grueling work of recruitment but a curse from any jobseekers, as this headline puts it, your next interview could be with a racist spot, bringing us back to that problem space we started with just a few minutes ago. So it's worth noting that job seekers are already developing ways to subvert the system by trading answers to employers test and creating fake applications as informal audits of their own. In terms of a more collective response, there's a federation of European Trade unions call you and I Global that's developed a charter of digital rights for work, others that touches on automated and a I based decisions to be included in bargaining agreements. And so this is one of many efforts to change their ecosystem to change the context in which technology is being deployed to ensure more protections and more rights for everyday people in the US There's the algorithmic accountability bill that's been presented, and it's one effort to create some more protections around this ubiquity of automated decisions, and I think we should all be calling from more public accountability when it comes to the widespread use of automated decisions. Another development that keeps me somewhat hopeful is that tech workers themselves are increasingly speaking out against the most egregious forms of corporate collusion with state sanctioned racism. And to get a taste of that, I encourage you to check out the hashtag Tech won't build it. Among other statements that they have made and walking out and petitioning their companies. Who one group said, as the people who build the technologies that Microsoft profits from, we refuse to be complicit in terms of education, which is my own ground zero. Um, it's a place where we can we can grow a more historically and socially literate approach to tech design. And this is just one, um, resource that you all can download, Um, by developed by some wonderful colleagues at the Data and Society Research Institute in New York and the goal of this interventionist threefold to develop an intellectual understanding of how structural racism operates and algorithms, social media platforms and technologies, not yet developed and emotional intelligence concerning how to resolve racially stressful situations within organizations, and a commitment to take action to reduce harms to communities of color. And so as a final way to think about why these things are so important, I want to offer a couple last provocations. The first is for us to think a new about what actually is deep learning when it comes to computation. I want to suggest that computational depth when it comes to a I systems without historical or social depth, is actually superficial learning. And so we need to have a much more interdisciplinary, integrated approach to knowledge production and to observing and understanding patterns that don't simply rely on one discipline in order to map reality. The last provocation is this. If, as I suggested at the start, inequity is woven into the very fabric of our society, it's built into the design of our. Our policies are physical infrastructures and now even our digital infrastructures. That means that each twist, coil and code is a chance for us toe. We've new patterns, practices and politics. The vastness of the problems that we're up against will be their undoing. Once we accept that we're pattern makers. So what does that look like? It looks like refusing color blindness as an anecdote to tech media discrimination rather than refusing to see difference. Let's take stock of how the training data and the models that we're creating have these built in decisions from the past that have often been discriminatory. It means actually thinking about the underside of inclusion, which can be targeting. And how do we create a more participatory rather than predatory form of inclusion? And ultimately, it also means owning our own power in these systems so that we can change the patterns of the past. If we're if we inherit a spiked bench, that doesn't mean that we need to continue using it. We can work together to design more just and equitable technologies. So with that, I look forward to our conversation. >>Thank you, Ruth. Ha. That was I expected it to be amazing, as I have been devouring your book in the last few weeks. So I knew that would be impactful. I know we will never think about park benches again. How it's art. And you laid down the gauntlet. Oh, my goodness. That tech won't build it. Well, I would say if the thoughts about team has any saying that we absolutely will build it and will continue toe educate ourselves. So you made a few points that it doesn't matter if it was intentional or not. So unintentional has as big an impact. Um, how do we address that does it just start with awareness building or how do we address that? >>Yeah, so it's important. I mean, it's important. I have good intentions. And so, by saying that intentions are not the end, all be all. It doesn't mean that we're throwing intentions out. But it is saying that there's so many things that happened in the world, happened unwittingly without someone sitting down to to make it good or bad. And so this goes on both ends. The analogy that I often use is if I'm parked outside and I see someone, you know breaking into my car, I don't run out there and say Now, do you feel Do you feel in your heart that you're a thief? Do you intend to be a thief? I don't go and grill their identity or their intention. Thio harm me, but I look at the effect of their actions, and so in terms of art, the teams that we work on, I think one of the things that we can do again is to have a range of perspectives around the table that can think ahead like chess, about how things might play out, but also once we've sort of created something and it's, you know, it's entered into, you know, the world. We need to have, ah, regular audits and check ins to see when it's going off track just because we intended to do good and set it out when it goes sideways, we need mechanisms, formal mechanisms that actually are built into the process that can get it back on track or even remove it entirely if we find And we see that with different products, right that get re called. And so we need that to be formalized rather than putting the burden on the people that are using these things toe have to raise the awareness or have to come to us like with the apple card, Right? To say this thing is not fair. Why don't we have that built into the process to begin with? >>Yeah, so a couple things. So my dad used to say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so that's >>yes on. In fact, in the book, I say the road to hell is paved with technical fixes. So they're me and your dad are on the same page, >>and I I love your point about bringing different perspectives. And I often say this is why diversity is not just about business benefits. It's your best recipe for for identifying the early biases in the data sets in the way we build things. And yet it's such a thorny problem to address bringing new people in from tech. So in the absence of that, what do we do? Is it the outside review boards? Or do you think regulation is the best bet as you mentioned a >>few? Yeah, yeah, we need really need a combination of things. I mean, we need So on the one hand, we need something like a do no harm, um, ethos. So with that we see in medicine so that it becomes part of the fabric and the culture of organizations that that those values, the social values, have equal or more weight than the other kinds of economic imperatives. Right. So we have toe have a reckoning in house, but we can't leave it to people who are designing and have a vested interest in getting things to market to regulate themselves. We also need independent accountability. So we need a combination of this and going back just to your point about just thinking about like, the diversity on teams. One really cautionary example comes to mind from last fall, when Google's New Pixel four phone was about to come out and it had a kind of facial recognition component to it that you could open the phone and they had been following this research that shows that facial recognition systems don't work as well on darker skin individuals, right? And so they wanted Thio get a head start. They wanted to prevent that, right? So they had good intentions. They didn't want their phone toe block out darker skin, you know, users from from using it. And so what they did was they were trying to diversify their training data so that the system would work better and they hired contract workers, and they told these contract workers to engage black people, tell them to use the phone play with, you know, some kind of app, take a selfie so that their faces would populate that the training set, But they didn't. They did not tell the people what their faces were gonna be used for, so they withheld some information. They didn't tell them. It was being used for the spatial recognition system, and the contract workers went to the media and said Something's not right. Why are we being told? Withhold information? And in fact, they told them, going back to the park bench example. To give people who are homeless $5 gift cards to play with the phone and get their images in this. And so this all came to light and Google withdrew this research and this process because it was so in line with a long history of using marginalized, most vulnerable people and populations to make technologies better when those technologies are likely going toe, harm them in terms of surveillance and other things. And so I think I bring this up here to go back to our question of how the composition of teams might help address this. I think often about who is in that room making that decision about sending, creating this process of the contract workers and who the selfies and so on. Perhaps it was a racially homogeneous group where people didn't want really sensitive to how this could be experienced or seen, but maybe it was a diverse, racially diverse group and perhaps the history of harm when it comes to science and technology. Maybe they didn't have that disciplinary knowledge. And so it could also be a function of what people knew in the room, how they could do that chest in their head and think how this is gonna play out. It's not gonna play out very well. And the last thing is that maybe there was disciplinary diversity. Maybe there was racial ethnic diversity, but maybe the workplace culture made it to those people. Didn't feel like they could speak up right so you could have all the diversity in the world. But if you don't create a context in which people who have those insights feel like they can speak up and be respected and heard, then you're basically sitting on a reservoir of resource is and you're not tapping into it to ensure T to do right by your company. And so it's one of those cautionary tales I think that we can all learn from to try to create an environment where we can elicit those insights from our team and our and our coworkers, >>your point about the culture. This is really inclusion very different from just diversity and thought. Eso I like to end on a hopeful note. A prescriptive note. You have some of the most influential data and analytics leaders and experts attending virtually here. So if you imagine the way we use data and housing is a great example, mortgage lending has not been equitable for African Americans in particular. But if you imagine the right way to use data, what is the future hold when we've gotten better at this? More aware >>of this? Thank you for that question on DSO. You know, there's a few things that come to mind for me one. And I think mortgage environment is really the perfect sort of context in which to think through the the both. The problem where the solutions may lie. One of the most powerful ways I see data being used by different organizations and groups is to shine a light on the past and ongoing inequities. And so oftentimes, when people see the bias, let's say when it came to like the the hiring algorithm or the language out, they see the names associated with negative or positive words that tends toe have, ah, bigger impact because they think well, Wow, The technology is reflecting these biases. It really must be true. Never mind that people might have been raising the issues in other ways before. But I think one of the most powerful ways we can use data and technology is as a mirror onto existing forms of inequality That then can motivate us to try to address those things. The caution is that we cannot just address those once we come to grips with the problem, the solution is not simply going to be a technical solution. And so we have to understand both the promise of data and the limits of data. So when it comes to, let's say, a software program, let's say Ah, hiring algorithm that now is trained toe look for diversity as opposed to homogeneity and say I get hired through one of those algorithms in a new workplace. I can get through the door and be hired. But if nothing else about that workplace has changed and on a day to day basis I'm still experiencing microaggressions. I'm still experiencing all kinds of issues. Then that technology just gave me access to ah harmful environment, you see, and so this is the idea that we can't simply expect the technology to solve all of our problems. We have to do the hard work. And so I would encourage everyone listening to both except the promise of these tools, but really crucially, um, Thio, understand that the rial kinds of changes that we need to make are gonna be messy. They're not gonna be quick fixes. If you think about how long it took our society to create the kinds of inequities that that we now it lived with, we should expect to do our part, do the work and pass the baton. We're not going to magically like Fairy does create a wonderful algorithm that's gonna help us bypass these issues. It can expose them. But then it's up to us to actually do the hard work of changing our social relations are changing the culture of not just our workplaces but our schools. Our healthcare systems are neighborhoods so that they reflect our better values. >>Yeah. Ha. So beautifully said I think all of us are willing to do the hard work. And I like your point about using it is a mirror and thought spot. We like to say a fact driven world is a better world. It can give us that transparency. So on behalf of everyone, thank you so much for your passion for your hard work and for talking to us. >>Thank you, Cindy. Thank you so much for inviting me. Hey, I live back to you. >>Thank you, Cindy and rou ha. For this fascinating exploration of our society and technology, we're just about ready to move on to our final session of the day. So make sure to tune in for this customer case study session with executives from Sienna and Accenture on driving digital transformation with certain AI.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Welcome to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. The virtual version. I'm Lisa Martin here with the guests from Bumi. Please welcome Ed Makowski, its head of product of the program and nice to see you today >>I see you, Lisa. >>So here we are in a very socially distant world. But I know a lot about movie, and that movie is really all about connecting people with what they want now. So talk to me before we dig into kind of what's going on with AWS. What's the landscape? That movie like in this year that has had so much change? >>So things have been going really well for us business wise, I think you know, as we've come through this pandemic or we continue to work through the pandemic, we're seeing a lot of our customers accelerating their their migration to the cloud acceleration, accelerating their modernization journeys. Um, in fact, we see the 30% uptick and usage in our platform. You know, in the last several months, as as people just continue to double down on automating, integrating their systems, working through integrated experiences. Toe Really like you said put put data in the hands of the users, the data that they're looking for on the work clothes that they're looking to automate. They're accomplishing that our platform. So things have been good. >>That's good in a year of such uncertainty. So as we kind of look at, you know, you talked about it. We've been talking about it for months now. This acceleration of the digital journey, that Cove it is really catalyzing. Let's get specific with from an integrated experience perspective, I think we're all as consumers, even Mawr demanding oven integrated experience. Now more than ever. How are you working with customers To help them achieve that? >>Sure. So So the way we look at the world through our lenses, data collectivity and user engagement, or are critical pieces to a cloud modernization or a cloud migration journey. So, just like in life, people make connections early on, and as they work through life, they leverage those connections to make advancements, that sort of thing. I did an interview actually a couple of weeks ago with an A list celebrity, where he gave us a bunch of feedback around connectivity where he talked about early on in his life. He made connections that that provided him value later in his career. We think of the same thing for a business, right? If you think about as a business, your customers, your employees, urine users, it's important to take your most strategic asset, which is your data, and and put that toe work for you and make connections with those users, employees, partners, etcetera, eso we look at those is integrated experiences, right, and we we offer a platform that, in a low code way, allows the business to make those connections with users in those integrated experiences. >>Love to know who the A list celebrity was, but I won't ask you to develop that information because we look at that, you know, nowadays we had this massive shift in the last eight months or so where I think as consumers we've been everything's been on demand for a while. We're used to getting what we want. And in the business world there was a big shift and trying to figure out companies well known companies, you know, filing for Chapter 11 and trying to figure out How do we pivot? Not just once, but it's a Siris of pivots, right? So talk to me about From From an integrated experiences perspective, any customers that you kind of think in particular really, really highlight what Bhumi is doing there to allow these customers to have connected integrated experience while you're helping those customers modernized and transform their businesses. >>Yeah, I mean, I could talk to a couple of examples where you know, when when the pandemic hit in the coven situation hit, we had a lot of, you know, I think the world saw there were a lot of mom and pop shops downtown Main Street where they were trying to collect information from industry from from their governments and industries. And they were trying to really relay that information out to, um, their customers and users. And most of them, those small businesses, uh, weren't I t enabled in any way, shape or form, and we tried to figure out what is the business can we do to help solve some of these challenges and a booming for good initiative? And we put out a solution called answers on demand that we gave out to free for free and within I believe it was two weeks. We had only over 2500, you know, customers from all different shops around the country that that registered and basically were ableto themselves stand up a frequently asked question. Ah, site within their Web page chatbots that they were embedded. They were able to bed in the Web page on a low code way, and that was kind of one example. Another from an enterprise example, is you think of things like, Hey, a new employee starts and typically they can walk in the first day. People hand them forms, they walk around, they meet with different departments. How do I get myself on boarded to an organization? Well, in the world today, everybody expects things to be on their mobile. They expect things to be done immediately, and they're not gonna goto 10 different APs in order to onboard themselves to go get swag or sign themselves up for their payroll, etcetera. That's a classic, you know, integrated integrated experiences use case that we help with where it's Hey, we can help with integrating those systems in the back end and provide an integrated experience to your new employees that come on board so they can walk through and be up and running within your company very quickly in a remote way. So we offer all the tooling that businesses can customize. Those make them look like they're, you know, they're color schemes of their business. So on and so forth create custom work flows all again in a low code way because we focus on time to value. It's about getting something done very quickly versus along I t projects That's going to take, you know, 23 years. >>Yeah, I remember. I think it was booming world last year where Chris, your CEO, was talking about, uh, the on boarding experience when he started at Bumi and how massively transformed that is. But to your point right now, there's so many things that we don't have time for. And so when there's obstacles in our way or processes or more convoluted, it just makes everything you know, not function well together or allow customers really maximize their investments in particular technologies. I wanted to get your take on Speaking of maximizing investments, How does booming help have you worked with partner with AWS to help your customers maximize their investments in AWS is technology and services. Sure >>so So we you know, we built our platform first and foremost on top of the AWS platform. So we sit there natively and we take advantage of all of a W s S s services. Behind the scene seems to offer secure platform that customers can work in from a loco development environment. From there you can take advantage. You can take your Bumi integrations and you can run them within three a w your own A w s environment if you'd like to. So we've actually launched a ah Bumi Quick start that allows you to Okay, quickly deploy a run time that spends up in the AWS cloud so you can run your workloads there in a secure way. If you've got your own security set up, you can run within that domain versus going within boonies cloud if you'd like. We're also about to release an elastic version of that That's kubernetes base so that you could, you know, scale that up and down and take advantage of your AWS. Resource is not in a fixed way. But Maurin, a survivalist type capacity. We also have data catalog and prep capabilities now, which we didn't have last year. But we have We've added these so that you can explore your AWS endpoints. You can explore any business and points that you have and kind of look at what data you have that you can, you know, harvest thio, pull together and and offer that make that available to your customers and users. You can run all of that in your AWS environment as well. We put >>a >>bunch of focus and adventure oven architectures so as a you know, as a classic integration scenario, a lot of people focus on pub sub patterns, those types of things. So we're we released connectivity to event bridge, sqs, etcetera. We also support connectivity to red shift so you can handle data warehousing scenarios. So and a lot of investment in the AWS ecosystem in the last year and a half to two years, and we continue, you know, we're going to continue doing that. We're just kind of at the beginning of that. So >>Bumi has over 12,000 customers ranging from, you know, the big guys, nonprofits like American Cancer Society, etcetera. How do you work with customers as head of product toe help them influence the road back to be able to take in the information that they need to. For example, we wanna we wanna be ableto work with me and really modernized but also maximize or a W s investment. What is that customer feedback loop like? >>Sure, So we've got within booming. We have a customer success team that focuses on all of those customers and different tiers. Verticals, um, you know, different horizontal plays, etcetera. But we have success. People that look out, you know, for our customers meet with them on a regular basis. They bring a lot of that feedback back into product. I'm an executive sponsor for a number of our customers where I meet with them directly to understand the projects, use cases. What are they trying to achieve and take? That is input, but but very specifically, we do quarterly webinars for our customers where we get each of our product managers, including myself, do a two hour session where we go through every single detail of here is what we are expecting ourselves that delivered to you as a customer over the next year, and that gives our customers the opportunity to see all those details. We published them online publicly. We then allow them to come back through direct relationships with product or customer success. To request these enhancements. We score them, we go through. We do commit a tely east. 25% of our roadmap to customers specific requests. Um, you know, even the 75% other piece of the road map we're looking at what we feel is the best interest of our customers and what we want to take them in an innovative way. But like I said, the 25% are direct commitment to Hey, customer wants X Y Z feature will put that in the 25% >>That's he, especially right now to be able to be able to. I don't want to be reactive because we often use that as a bad term. But be able to pivot quickly and and take that information in and make the changes needed that will benefit countless others if we go back to integrated experiences, you know, here we are at this virtual aws reinvent. We're so used to being surrounded in Vegas by 45,000 people. But talk to me about how Bhumi is helping AWS customers with their integrated experiences. What are some of the things that you guys are really excited about that you're enabling now? >>So with an integrated experience, you know, again, I go back to the three things that any customer AWS customer specifically need thio think about in order to create an ingrate experience. So data readiness is the first piece. So with a W s, you'll be spinning up a number of the services. You'll be putting data in the cloud so on and so forth. But you need to make sure that that data is of high quality. Um, it's secure. It's understood something like, you know, 60 to 70% of data that you haven't enterprises is unknown, and we help solve some of those challenges through our catalog and prepping tools. So even if you're moving a bunch of your processes and data applications into the cloud, we can help customers with data readiness and making sure it's security of high quality. The second piece is pervasive connectivity. So it is about connecting all of your data sources. So we do have an open platform. You have all your AWS services that we can help you connect to get data from those sources or or transfer them to those sources. But we also allow you to extend out into on Prem or other clouds as well. So as much as we love and work with a W s, we do understand that people need to move things into the cloud out of the cloud, etcetera. You know, we help with all of those connectivity challenges that an organization may face. Uh and then the third is that user engagement engagement piece So you could move data all around all you want. You can understand your data, but unless you're putting it in the hands of the user and allowing them to act on that data in some way, shape or form the tools we have, you know, around workflow and building those in a low code way, you could do all of this in a, you know, a unified platform that we have that you can go in and building a low code way. You don't have to be a pure hardcore Java developer to get things done. We focus on time to value. So you can. You know, we have stories of customers building their first set of integrations or work flows and, you know, minutes or a couple of hours versus some of our competitors who take days, weeks or months. >>So from a local perspective, something I'm just curious about, that's kind of be a facilitator of during the last, you know, eight months of things changing and customers not being able suddenly to get into their data centers air on site, talk to me a little bit about some of the things maybe even anecdotally, that you've heard about Bhumi Loco development platform being facilitator of people that couldn't get to a data center. >>Yeah, so I mean, all of the development even before covert, all all loco development that you did for Bumi was in a Web browser. We've always been that right. So we have that capability. And then from a run time, I was talking earlier about how you can run in a ws cloud. But you can also set your runtime behind a firewall. If it is at a facility, you can put it in. You know, any locations around the world. So when the pandemic hit and folks started needing to work remotely, it was kind of a non event for many of our developer, our local developers, because they can now access the browser from home and still access. All those resource is whether it's on site in a W s or wherever they were then forced to Okay, The rest of the business is saying we need to make data available. We need to actually now put processes in place. And and Bumi became an asset to say, Wait a minute. It's not about just integration behind the scenes, that's plumbing that nobody sees. Our users started becoming heroes in their business by standing up work flows and saying I can quickly because it's low code. Oh, you need to collect information about, you know, in some cases, you know, citizen information that they used to go to. You know, I don't know that I could talk about this government, but citizens used have to go into a building in order to fill out forms and whatnot. We need to collect data live. How can I do that? Okay. This government now just use boom me to start posting these on their website. These work flows in a secure way. You know, that's just, um, examples. I talked about answers on demand before, but but we've seen this pivot of user engagement Mawr out of, you know, bringing middleware and integration out of the shadows of I t into solving real problems as people are now this first around the world at home. So >>solving your problems and probably helping a lot of businesses not just survive the last few months and forward but thrive as well as theirs. We know some things from this will be permanent. Let's question to you just can you give us a sneak peek into some of the solutions and the initiatives that Booby and AWS are working on together? Yes. >>So I talked a little bit about this before, so we are in Advanced Tech Partner were a public sector partner. We run our platform on AWS again, so we continue to work on how we can keep expanding and taking advantage of A W S two services To make things more scalable. Onda were more and more secure. It's always a top priority given the shift to the cloud and a W s is helping us with those we have are quick starts that we're working on again to make things quicker and easier for people to stand up integration workloads in AWS catalog and prep again. All of the connectivity that we have to things like event bridge, sqs Red shift, etcetera. Um, you know, those are all the things we're collaborating on with them. And again through the next year, we'll continue to keep focusing on more and more to just make running your booming environment in AWS more and more seamless. >>Seamless. I'll take it well and thank you so much for sharing what's going on with Louis and AWS in this virtual event. We appreciate your time. >>Yeah. Thank you so much. >>Bread. McCaskey. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 A virtual edition

>>Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be in conversation with you today. And I thought I would just kick things off with some opening reflections on this really important session theme, and then we can jump into discussion. So I'd like us to, as a starting point, um, wrestle with these buzz words, empowerment and inclusion so that we can, um, have them be more than kind of big platitudes and really have them reflected in our workplace cultures and the things that we design and the technologies that we put out into the world. And so to do that, I think we have to move beyond techno determinism and I'll explain what that means in just a minute. And techno determinism comes in two forms. The first on your left is the idea that technology automate. Um, all of these emerging trends are going to harm us are going to necessarily, um, harm humanity. >>They're going to take all the jobs they're going to remove human agency. This is what we might call the techno dystopian version of the story. And this is what Hollywood loves to sell us in the form of movies like the matrix or Terminator. The other version on your right is the techno utopian story that technologies automation, the robots, as a shorthand are going to save humanity. They're going to make everything more efficient, more equitable. And in this case, on the surface, they seem like opposing narratives, right? They're telling us different stories. At least they have different endpoints, but when you pull back the screen and look a little bit more closely, you see that they share an underlying logic, that technology is in the driver's seat and that human beings, that social society can just respond to what's happening. But we don't, I really have a say in what technologies are designed. >>And so to move beyond techno determinism, the notion that technology is in the driver's seat, we have to put the human agents and agencies back into the story protagonists and think carefully about what the human desires, worldviews values assumptions are that animate the production of technology. We have to put the humans behind the screen back into view. And so that's a very first step in when we do that. We see as was already mentioned that it's a very homogenous group right now in terms of who gets the power and the resources to produce the digital and physical infrastructure that everyone else has to live with. And so, as a first step, we need to think about how to, to create more participation of those who are working behind the scenes to design technology. Now, to dig a little more deeper into this, I want to offer a kind of low tech example before we get to the more high tech ones. >>So what you see in front of you here is a simple park bench public it's located in Berkeley, California, which is where I went to graduate school. And on this one particular visit, I was living in Boston. And so I was back in California, it was February, it was freezing where I was coming from. And so I wanted to take a few minutes in between meetings to just lay out in the sun and soak in some vitamin D. And I quickly realized actually I couldn't lay down on the bench because of the way it had been designed with these arm rests at intermittent intervals. And so here I thought, okay, th th the armrests have a functional reason why they're there. I mean, you could literally rest your elbows there, or, um, you know, it can create a little bit of privacy of someone sitting there that you don't know. >>Um, when I was nine months pregnant, it could help me get up and down or for the elderly the same thing. So it has a lot of functional reasons, but I also thought about the fact that it prevents people who are, are homeless from sleeping on the bench. And this is the Bay area that we're talking about, where in fact, the tech boom has gone hand in hand with a housing crisis. Those things have grown in tandem. So innovation has grown with inequity because we have, I haven't thought carefully about how to address the social context in which technology grows and blossoms. And so I thought, okay, this crisis is growing in this area. And so perhaps this is a deliberate attempt to make sure that people don't sleep on the benches by the way that they're designed and where the, where they're implemented. And so this is what we might call structural inequity, by the way something is designed. >>It has certain yeah. Affects that exclude or harm different people. And so it may not necessarily be the intent, but that's the effect. And I did a little digging and I found, in fact, it's a global phenomenon, this thing that architect next call, hostile architecture around single occupancy, benches and Helsinki. So only one booty at a time, no Nolan down there. I've found caged benches in France. Yeah. And in this particular town, what's interesting here is that the mayor put these benches out in this little shopping Plaza and within 24 hours, the people in the town rally together and have them removed. So we see here that just because we, we have a discriminatory design in our public space, doesn't mean we have to live with it. We can actually work together to ensure that our public space reflects our better values. But I think my favorite example of all is the metered bench. >>And then this case, this bench is designed with spikes in them and to get the spikes to retreat into the bench, you have to feed the meter. You have to put some coins in, and I think it buys you about 15, 20 minutes, then the spikes come back up. And so you will be happy to know that in this case, uh, this was designed by a German artist to get people to think critically about issues of design, not the design of physical space, but the design of all kinds of things, public policies. And so we can think about how our public life in general is metered, that it serves those that can pay the price and others are excluded or harmed. Whether we're talking about education or healthcare. And the meter bench also presents something interesting for those of us who care about technology, it creates a technical fix for a social problem. >>In fact, it started out as art, but some municipalities in different parts of the world have actually adopted this in their public spaces, in their parks in order to deter so-called loiters from using that space. And so by a technical fix, we mean something that creates a short-term effect, right? It gets people who may want to sleep on it out of sight. They're unable to use it, but it doesn't address the underlying problems that create that need to sleep outside of the first place. And so, in addition to techno determinism, we have to think critically about technical fixes, that don't address the underlying issues that the tech tech technology is meant to solve. And so this is part of a broader issue of discriminatory design, and we can apply the bench metaphor to all kinds of things that we work with, or that we create. >>And the question we really have to continuously ask ourselves is what values are we building in to the physical and digital infrastructures around us? What are the spikes that we may unwittingly put into place? Or perhaps we didn't create the spikes. Perhaps we started a new job or a new position, and someone hands us something, this is the way things have always been done. So we inherit the spiked bench. What is our responsibility? When we notice that it's creating these kinds of harms or exclusions or technical fixes that are bypassing the underlying problem, what is our responsibility? All of this came to a head in the context of financial technologies. I don't know how many of you remember these high profile cases of tech insiders and CEOs who applied for apples, >>The Apple card. And in one case, a husband and wife applied, and the husband, the husband received a much higher limit, almost 20 times the limit as his, >>His wife, even though they shared bank accounts, they lived in common law state. Yeah. >>And so the question there was not only the fact that >>The husband was receiving a much better rate and a high and a better >>The interest rate and the limit, but also that there was no mechanism for the individuals involved to dispute what was happening. They didn't even know how, what the factors were that they were being judged that was creating this form of discrimination. So >>In terms of financial technologies, it's not simply the outcome, that's the issue, or that can be discriminatory, >>But the process that black box is all of the decision-making that makes it so that consumers and the general public have no way to question it, no way to understand how they're being judged adversely. And so it's the process, not only the product that we have to care a lot about. And so the case of the Apple card is part of a much broader phenomenon >>Of, um, races >>And sexist robots. This is how the headlines framed it a few years ago. And I was so interested in this framing because there was a first wave of stories that seemed to be shocked at the prospect, that technology is not neutral. Then there was a second wave of stories that seemed less surprised. Well, of course, technology inherits its creators biases. And now I think we've entered a phase of attempts to override and address the default settings of so-called racist and sexist robots for better or worse than here. Robots is just a kind of shorthand that the way that people are talking about automation and emerging technologies more broadly. And so, as I was encountering these headlines, I was thinking about how these are not problems simply brought on by machine learning or AI. They're not all brand new. And so I wanted to contribute to the conversation, a kind of larger context and a longer history for us to think carefully about the social dimensions of technology. And so I developed a concept called the new Jim code, >>Which plays on the phrase, >>Jim Crow, which is the way that the regime of white supremacy and inequality in this country was defined in a previous era. And I wanted us to think about how that legacy continues to haunt the present, how we might be coding bias into emerging technologies and the danger being that we imagine those technologies to be objective. And so this gives us a language to be able to name this phenomenon so that we can address it and change it under this larger umbrella of the new Jim code are four distinct ways that this phenomenon takes shape from the more obvious engineered inequity. Those are the kinds of inequalities tech mediated in the qualities that we can generally see coming. They're kind of obvious, but then we go down the line and we see it becomes harder to detect it's happening in our own backyards, it's happening around us. And we don't really have a view into the black box. And so it becomes more insidious. And so in the remaining couple of minutes, I'm just, just going to give you a taste of the last three of these, and then a move towards conclusion. Then we can start chatting. So when it comes to default discrimination, this is the way that social inequalities >>Become embedded in emerging technologies because designers of these technologies, aren't thinking carefully about history and sociology. A great example of this, uh, came to, um, uh, the headlines last fall when it was found that widely used healthcare algorithm, effecting millions of patients, um, was discriminating against black patients. And so what's especially important to note here is that this algorithm, healthcare algorithm does not explicitly take note of race. That is to say it is race neutral by using cost to predict healthcare needs this digital triaging system unwittingly reproduces health disparities, because on average, black people have incurred fewer costs for a variety of reasons, including structural inequality. So in my review of this study, by Obermeyer and colleagues, I want to draw attention to how indifference to social reality can be even more harmful than malicious intent. It doesn't have to be the intent of the designers to create this effect. >>And so we have to look carefully at how indifference is operating and how race neutrality can be a deadly force. When we move on to the next iteration of the new Jim code, coded exposure, there's a tension because on the one hand, you see this image where the darker skin individual is not being detected by the facial recognition system, right on the camera, on the computer. And so coded exposure names, this tension between wanting to be seen and included and recognized whether it's in facial recognition or in recommendation systems or in tailored advertising. But the opposite of that, the tension is with when you're over, it >>Included when you're surveilled, when you're >>Too centered. And so we should note that it's not simply in being left out, that's the problem, but it's in being included in harmful ways. And so I want us to think carefully about the rhetoric of inclusion and understand that inclusion is not simply an end point, it's a process, and it is possible to include people in harmful processes. And so we want to ensure that the process is not harmful for it to really be effective. The last iteration of the new Jim code. That means the, the most insidious let's say is technologies that are touted as helping us address bias. So they're not simply including people, but they're actively working to address bias. And so in this case, there are a lot of different companies that are using AI to hire, uh, create hiring, um, software and hiring algorithms, including this one higher view. >>And the idea is that there there's a lot that, um, AI can keep track of that human beings might miss. And so, so the software can make data-driven talent decisions after all the problem of employment discrimination is widespread and well-documented, so the logic goes, wouldn't this be even more reason to outsource decisions to AI? Well, let's think about this carefully. And this is the idea of techno benevolence, trying to do good without fully reckoning with what, how technology can reproduce inequalities. So some colleagues of mine at Princeton, um, tested a natural learning processing algorithm and was looking to see whether it exhibited the same, um, tendencies that psychologists have documented among humans. And what they found was that in fact, the algorithm associated black names with negative words and white names with pleasant sounding words. And so this particular audit builds on a classic study done around 2003 before all of the emerging technologies were on the scene where two university of Chicago economists sent out thousands of resumes to employers in Boston and Chicago. >>And all they did was change the names on those resumes. All of the other work history education were the same. And then they waited to see who would get called back and the applicants, the fictional applicants with white sounding names received 50% more callbacks than the, the black applicants. So if you're presented with that study, you might be tempted to say, well, let's let technology handle it since humans are so biased. But my colleagues here in computer science found that this natural language processing algorithm actually reproduced those same associations with black and white names. So two with gender coded words and names as Amazon learned a couple years ago, when its own hiring algorithm was found discriminating against women, nevertheless, it should be clear by now why technical fixes that claim to bypass human biases are so desirable. If only there was a way to slay centuries of racist and sexist demons with a social justice bot beyond desirable, more like magical, magical for employers, perhaps looking to streamline the grueling work of recruitment, but a curse from any job seekers as this headline puts it. >>Your next interview could be with a racist bot, bringing us back to that problem space. We started with just a few minutes ago. So it's worth noting that job seekers are already developing ways to subvert the system by trading answers to employers tests and creating fake applications as informal audits of their own. In terms of a more collective response. There's a Federation of European trade unions call you and I global that's developed a charter of digital rights for workers that touches on automated and AI based decisions to be included in bargaining agreements. And so this is one of many efforts to change the ecosystem, to change the context in which technology is being deployed to ensure more protections and more rights for everyday people in the U S there's the algorithmic accountability bill that's been presented. And it's one effort to create some more protections around this ubiquity of automated decisions. >>And I think we should all be calling for more public accountability when it comes to the widespread use of automated decisions. Another development that keeps me somewhat hopeful is that tech workers themselves are increasingly speaking out against the most egregious forms of corporate collusion with state sanctioned racism. And to get a taste of that, I encourage you to check out the hashtag tech, won't build it among other statements that they've made and walking out and petitioning their companies. One group said as the, at Google at Microsoft wrote as the people who build the technologies that Microsoft profits from, we refuse to be complicit in terms of education, which is my own ground zero. Um, it's a place where we can, we can grow a more historically and socially literate approach to tech design. And this is just one resource that you all can download, um, by developed by some wonderful colleagues at the data and society research Institute in New York. >>And the, the goal of this intervention is threefold to develop an intellectual understanding of how structural racism operates and algorithms, social media platforms and technologies not yet developed and emotional intelligence concerning how to resolve racially stressful situations within organizations and a commitment to take action, to reduce harms to communities of color. And so as a final way to think about why these things are so important, I want to offer, uh, a couple last provocations. The first is pressed to think a new about what actually is deep learning when it comes to computation. I want to suggest that computational depth when it comes to AI systems without historical or social depth is actually superficial learning. And so we need to have a much more interdisciplinary, integrated approach to knowledge production and to observing and understanding patterns that don't simply rely on one discipline in order to map reality. >>The last provocation is this. If as I suggested at the start in the inequity is woven into the very fabric of our society. It's built into the design of our, our policies, our physical infrastructures, and now even our digital infrastructures. That means that each twist coil and code is a chance for us to weave new patterns, practices, and politics. The vastness of the problems that we're up against will be their undoing. Once we, that we are pattern makers. So what does that look like? It looks like refusing colorblindness as an anecdote to tech media discrimination, rather than refusing to see difference. Let's take stock of how the training data and the models that we're creating. Have these built in decisions from the past that have often been discriminatory. It means actually thinking about the underside of inclusion, which can be targeting and how do we create a more participatory rather than predatory form of inclusion. And ultimately it also means owning our own power in these systems so that we can change the patterns of the past. If we're, if we inherit a spiked bench, that doesn't mean that we need to continue using it. We can work together to design more, just an equitable technologies. So with that, I look forward to our conversation.

>>from around the globe. It's >>the Cube with digital coverage of Dev >>Ops Virtual Forum Brought to You by Broadcom. Welcome to Broadcom, Step Ups, Virtual Forum I and Lisa Martin and I'm joined by another Martin very socially. Distance from me all the way. Coming from Birmingham, England, is Glynn Martin, head of Q. A transformation at BT Glenn. It's great to have you on the program. >>Thank you, Lisa. I'm looking forward, Toa. >>As we said before, we went live to Martin's for the price of one in one segment. So this is gonna be an interesting segment, Guesses. What we're gonna do is Glen's gonna give us a really kind of deep inside out view of Dev ops. From an evolution perspective, Soglo's Let's start transformation is at the heart of what you dio. It's obviously been a very transformative year. How have the events of this year affected the transformation that you are so responsible for driving? >>Yeah. Thank you, Leigh. So I mean, yeah, it has been a difficult year Bond, although working for BT, which is ah, global telecommunications company. Relatively resilient, I suppose, as an industry through covert, it obviously still has been affected and has got its challenges on bond. If anything is actually caused us to accelerate of our transformation journey, you know, we had to do some great things during this time around. You know, in the UK for our emergency and health workers give them unlimited data and for vulnerable people to support them and that spent that we've had to deliver changes quickly. Um, but what? We want to be able to do it, deliver those kind of changes quickly, but sustainably for everything that we do, not just because there's an emergency eso we were already on the kind of journey to by John, but ever so ever more important now that we are what we're able to do, those that kind of work, do it more quickly on. But it works because the implications of it not working is could be terrible in terms of, you know, we've been supporting testing centers, new hospitals to treat covert patients, so we need to get it right and therefore the coverage of what we do, the quality of what we do and how quickly we do. It really has taken on a new scowling what was already a very competitive market within the telco industry within the UK. Um, you know, what I would say is that you know, we are under pressure to deliver more value, but we have small cost challenges. We have to obviously deal with the fact that you know, Cove in 19 has hit most industries kind of revenues and profits. So we've got this kind of paradox between having less cost, but they're having to deliver more value quicker on bond, you know, to higher quality. So, yeah, certainly the finances is on our minds. And that's why we need flexible models, cost models that allow us to kind of do growth. But we get that growth by showing that we're delivering value, especially in, you know, these times when there are financial challenges on companies. >>So one of the things that I want to ask you about again looking at, develops from the inside out on the evolution that you've seen you talked about the speed of things really accelerating in this last nine months or so. When we think Dev ops, we think speed. But one of the things I love to get your perspective on we've talked about in a number of the segments that we've done for this event is cultural change. What are some of the things that scene there as as needing to get, as you said, get things right but done so quickly to support essential businesses, essential workers? How have you seen that cultural shift? >>Yeah, I think you know, before, you know, test test team saw themselves of this part of the software delivery cycle. Andi, actually, now, really, our customers were expecting their quality and to deliver for our customers what they want. Quality has to be ingrained throughout the life cycle. Obviously that you know, there's lots of buzzwords like shift left. How do you do? Shift left testing. But for me, that's really instilling quality and given capabilities shared capabilities throughout the life cycle. That Dr you know, Dr Automation drive improvements. I always say that you know, you're only as good as your lowest common denominator on one thing that we're finding on our Dev Ops Journey Waas that we were you know, we would be trying thio do certain things quicker and had automated build automated tests. But if we were taking weeks to create test scripts or we were taking weeks to manly craft data, and even then when we had taken so long to do it that the coverage was quite poor and that led to lots of defects later in the lifecycle or even in in our production environment, we just couldn't afford to do that. And actually, you know, focusing on continuous testing over the last 9 to 12 months has really given us the ability Thio delivered quickly across the the whole life cycle and therefore actually go from doing a kind of semi agile kind of thing where we did you use the stories we did a few of the kind of, you know, as our ceremonies. But we weren't really deploying any quicker into production because, you know, our stakeholders were scared that we didn't have the same control that we had when we had more water for releases. And, you know, when way didn't think ourselves. So we've done a lot of work on every aspect, especially from a testing point of view, every aspect of every activity, rather than just looking at automated test, you know, whether it is actually creating the test in the first place, Whether it's doing security testing earlier in the light and performance testing. Learn the life cycle, etcetera. So, yeah, it Z It's been a riel key thing that for for C T for us to drive, develops, >>talk to me a little bit about your team. What are some of the shifts in terms of expectations that you're experiencing and how your team interacts with the internal folks from pipeline through life cycle? >>Yeah, we've done a lot of work on this, you know, there's a thing. I think people were pretty quiet. Customer experience. Gap. It reminds me of a cart, a Gilbert cartoon where, you know, we start with the requirements here on Do you know, we almost like a Chinese whisper effects and what we deliver eyes completely, completely different. So we think the testing team or the the delivery team, you know, you know, you think they've done a great job. This is what it said in the acceptance criteria, but then our customers the same Well, actually, that's not working. This isn't working, you know, on there's this kind of gap Way had a great launched this year of actual Requirement Society, one of the board common tools Onda that for the first time in in since I remember actually working within B. T, I had customers saying to may, Wow, you know, we want more of this. We want more projects, um, to have a actual requirements design on it because it allowed us to actually work with the business collaboratively. I mean, we talk about collaboration, but how do you actually, you know, do that have something that both the business on technical people can understand? And we've actually been working with the business using at our requirement. Designer Thio, you know, really look about what the requirements are. Tease out requirements to the hadn't even thought off and making sure that we've got high levels of test coverage. And so what we actually deliver at the end of it, not only have you been able Thio generate test more quickly, but we've got much higher test coverage and also can more smartly, you're using the kind of AI within the tour and with some of the other kind of pipeline tools actually deliver to choose the right tests on the bar, still actually doing a risk based testing approach. So that's been a great launched this year, but just the start of many kind of things that we're >>doing. But what I hear in that Glenn is a lot of positives that have come out of a very challenging situation. Uh, talk to me about it and I like that perspective. This is a very challenging time for everybody in the world, but it sounds like from a collaboration, perspective is you're right. We talk about that a lot critical with Dev Ops. But those challenges there you guys were able to overcome those pretty quickly. What other challenges did you face and figure out quickly enough to be able to pit it so fast? >>I mean, you talked about culture. I mean, you know, Bt is like most come countries companies. So, um, is very siloed. You know, we're still trying to work to become closer as a company. So I think there's a lot of challenges around. How do you integrate with other tools? How do you integrate with you know, the various different technologies and bt we have 58 different whitey stacks? That's not systems that stacks all of those stacks of can have, you know, hundreds of systems on we're trying to. We're gonna drive at the moment a simplified program where we're trying Thio, you know, reduce that number 2 14 stacks. And even then they'll be complexity behind the scenes that that we will be challenged. Maurin Mawr As we go forward, how do you actually hired that to our users on as an I T organization? How do we make ourselves Lena so that even when we you know, we've still got some of that legacy and we'll never fully get rid of it on that's the kind of trade off that we have to make. How do we actually deal with that and and hide that for my users a say and and and drive those programs so we can actually accelerate change. So we take, you know, reduce that kind of waste, and that kind of legacy costs out of our business. You know, the other thing is, well, beating. And I'm sure you know telecoms probably no difference to insurance or finance we've got You know, when you take the number of products that we do and then you combine them, the permutations are tens and hundreds of thousands of products. So we as a business to trying to simplify. We are trying Thio do that in a natural way and haven't trying to do agile in the proper way, you know, and really actually work it paste really deliver value. So I think what we're looking Maura, Maura, at the moment is actually, um is more value focus? Before we used to deliver changes, sometimes into production, someone had a great idea or it was a great idea nine months ago or 12 months ago. But actually, then we end up deploying it. And then we look at the the the users, you know, the usage of that product of that application or whatever it is on. It's not being used for six months, so we're getting much we haven't got, you know, because of the last 12 months, we certainly haven't got room for that kind of waste and you know, the for not really understanding the value of changes that we we are doing. So I think that's the most important thing at the moment is really taken that waste out. You know, there's lots of focus on things like flow management. What bits of the our process are actually taking too long, and we've We've started on that journey, but we've got a hell of a long way to go, you know, But that that involves looking every aspect off the kind of software delivery cycle. >>What are some? Because that that going from, what, 58 i t stocks down to 14 or whatever it's going to be go simplifying is sounds magical. Took everybody. It's a big challenge. What are some of the core technology capabilities that you see really as kind of essential for enabling that with this new way that you're working? >>Yeah. I mean, I think we've started on a continuous testing journey, and I think that's just the start. I mean, that's really, as I say, looking at every aspect off, you know, from a Q, a point of view. It's every aspect of what we dio. But it's also looking at, you know, we're starting to branch into more like a AI ops and, you know, really, the full life cycle on. But, you know, that's just a stepping stone onto, you know, I think oughta Nomics is the way forward, right? You know all of this kind of stuff that happens um, you know, monitoring, you know, monitoring systems, what's happening in production had to be feed that back. How do you get to a point where actually we think about a change on then suddenly it's in production safely. Or if it's not going to safety, it's automatically backing out. So, you know, it's a very, very long journey. But if we want Thio, you know, in a world where the pace is ever increasing the demands of the team and you know, with the pressures on at the moment where with we're being asked to do things, you know more efficiently Ondas leaving as possible. We need to be, you know, thinking about every part of the process. And how do we put the kind of stepping stones in players to lead us to a more automated kind of, you know, their future? >>Do you feel that that plant outcomes are starting to align with what's delivered? Given this massive shift that you're experiencing, >>I think it's starting to, and I think you know, Azzawi. Look at more of a value based approach on. Do you know a Zeiss? A princess was a kind of flight management. I think that's that will become ever evermore important. So I think it's starting to people. Certainly realized that, you know, people teams need to work together. You know, the kind of the cousin between business and ICT, especially as we go Teoh Mawr kind of sad space solutions, low cold solutions. You know there's not such a gap anymore. Actually, some of our business partners expects to be much more tech savvy. Eso I think you know, this is what we have to kind of appreciate. What is I ts role? How do we give the capabilities become more for centers of excellence rather than actually doing Mount amount of work And for May and from a testing point of view, you know, amount, amount of testing, actually, how do we automate that? How do we actually generate that instead of created? I think that's the kind of challenge going forward. >>What are some? As we look forward, what are some of the things that you would like to see implemented or deployed in the next say, 6 to 12 months as we hopefully round a corner with this pandemic? >>Yeah, I think you know, certainly for for where we are as a company from a Q A perspective. We are. Yeah, there's certain bits that we do Well, you know, we've started creating continuous delivery. A day evokes pipelines. Um, there's still manual aspects of that. So, you know, certainly for May I I've challenged my team with saying, How do we do an automated journey? So if I, you know, I put a requirement injera or value whoever it is, that's why. Then click a button on bond, you know, with either zero touch of one touch, then put that into production and have confidence that that has been done safely on that it works. And what happens if it doesn't work? So you know, that's that's the next in the next few months, that's what our concentration is about. But it's also about decision making, you know, how do we actually understand those value judgements? And I think there's lots of the things Dev ops, ai ops, kind of always that aspects of business operations. I think it's about having the information in one place to make those kind of decisions. How does it all tied together, as I say, even still with kind of Dev ops, we've still got elements within my company where we've got lots of different organizations doing some doing similar kind of things but the walking of working in silos Still. So I think, having a eye ops Aziz becomes more and more to the fore as we go to the cloud. And that's what we need to. You know, we're still very early on in our cloud journey, you know. So we need to make sure the technologies work with Cloud as well as you kind of legacy systems. But it's about bringing that all together and having a full visible pipeline. Everybody can see and make decisions against >>you said the word confidence, which jumped out at me right away. Because absolutely, you've gotta have be able to have confidence in what your team is delivering and how it's impacting the business and those customers. Last question for you is how would you advise your peers in a similar situation to leverage technology automation, for example, dev ops to be able to gain the confidence that they're making the right decisions for their business? >>Yeah, I mean, I think the the approach that we've taken actually is not started with technology we've actually taken human centered design a za core principle of what we dio within the i t part of BT. So by using humans tend to design. That means we talked to our customers. We understand their pain points, we map out their current processes on. But when we mapped out, those processes also understand their aspirations as well, you know, Where do they want to be in six months? You know, Do they want to be more agile and you know, or do they want Teoh? Is this apart their business that they want thio run better? We have to Then look at why that's not running well and then see what solutions are out there. We've been lucky that, you know, with our partnership with Broadcom within the P l. A. A lot of the tortures and the P l. A have directly answered some of the businesses problems. But I think by having those conversations and actually engaging with the business, um, you know, especially if the business hold the purse strings, which is you know, in some companies, including as they do there is that kind of, you know, almost by understanding their their pain points and then saying This is how we can solve your problem We've tended to be much more successful than trying Thio impose something and say We're here to technology that they don't quite understand doesn't really understand how it could have resonate with their problems. So I think that's the heart of it is really about, you know, getting looking at the data, looking at the processes, looking at where the kind of waste is on. Then actually then looking at the right solutions. And as I say, continuous testing is a massive for us. We've also got a good relationship with capitals looking at visual ai on. Actually, there's a common theme through that, and I mean, AI is becoming more and more prevalent, and I know yeah, sometimes what is A I and people have kind of the semantics of it. Is it true, ai or not? But yes, certainly, you know, AI and machine learning is becoming more and more prevalent in the way that we work, and it's allowing us to be much more effective, the quicker and what we do on being more accurate. You know, whether it's finding defects, running the right tests or, you know, being able to anticipate problems before they're happening in a production environment. >>Welcome. Thank you so much for giving us this sort of insight. Outlook at Dev Ops, sharing the successes that you're having taking those challenges, converting them toe opportunities and forgiving folks who might be in your shoes or maybe slightly behind advice. I'm sure they appreciate it. We appreciate your time. >>It's been an absolute pleasure, Really. Thank you for inviting me of Extremely enjoyed it. So thank you ever so much. >>Excellent. Me too. I've learned a lot for Glynn Martin and Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube?

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, hosted by Cal Poly. >> Everyone, welcome to this special presentation with Cal Poly hosting the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host with theCUBE and SiliconANGLE here in our Palo Alto studios with our remote guests. We couldn't be there in person, but we're going to be here remote. We got a great session and a panel for one hour, topic preparing students for the jobs of today and tomorrow. Got a great lineup. Bill Britton, Lieutenant Colonel from the US Air Force, retired vice president for information technology and CIO and the director of the California Cybersecurity Institute for Cal Poly. Bill, thanks for joining us. Dr. Amy Fleischer, who's the dean of the College of Engineering at Cal Poly, and Trung Pham, professor and researcher at the US Air Force Academy. Folks, thanks for joining me today. >> Our pleasure. >> Got a great- >> Great to be here. >> Great panel. This is one of my favorite topics. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> Preparing students for the next generation, the jobs for today and tomorrow. We got an hour. I'd love you guys to start with an opening statement to kick things off. Bill, we'll start with you. >> Well, I'm really pleased to be, to start on this as the director for the Cybersecurity Institute and the CIO at Cal Poly, it's really a fun, exciting job, because as a polytechnic, technology has such a forefront in what we're doing, and we've had a wonderful opportunity being 40 miles from Vandenberg Air Force Base to really look at the nexus of space and cybersecurity. And if you add into that both commercial, government, and civil space and cybersecurity, this is an expanding wide open time for cyber and space. In that role that we have with the Cybersecurity Institute, we partner with elements of the state and the university, and we try to really add value above our academic level, which is some of the highest in the nation, and to really merge down and go a little lower and start younger. So we actually are running the week prior to this showing a cybersecurity competition for high schools and middle schools in the state of California. That competition this year is based on a scenario around hacking of a commercial satellite and the forensics of the payload that was hacked and the networks associated with it. This is going to be done using products like Wireshark, Autopsy, and other tools that will give those high school students what we hope is a huge desire to follow up and go into cyber and cyberspace and space and follow that career path and either come to Cal Poly or some other institution that's going to let them really expand their horizons in cybersecurity and space for the future of our nation. >> Bill, thanks for that intro. By the way, I just want to give you props for an amazing team and job you guys are doing at Cal Poly, the DxHub and the efforts you guys are having with your challenge. Congratulations on that great work. >> Thank you. It's a rock star team. It's absolutely amazing to find that much talent at one location. And I think Amy's going to tell you, she's got the same amount of talent in her staff, so it's a great place to be. >> Dr. Amy Fleischer. You guys have a great organization down there, amazing curriculum, amazing people, great community. Your opening statement. >> Hello everybody. It's really great to be a part of this panel on behalf of the Cal Poly College of Engineering. Here at Cal Poly, we really take preparing students for the jobs of today and tomorrow completely seriously, and we can claim that our students really graduate so they're ready day one for their first real job. But that means that in getting them to that point, we have to help them get valuable and meaningful job experience before they graduate, both through our curriculum and through multiple internship or summer research opportunities. So we focus our curriculum on what we call a learn by doing philosophy. And this means that we have a combination of practical experience and learn by doing both in and out of the classroom. And we find that to be really critical for preparing students for the workforce. Here at Cal Poly, we have more than 6,000 engineering students. We're one of the largest undergraduate engineering schools in the country. And US News ranks us the eighth best undergraduate engineering program in the country and the top ranked state school. We're really, really proud that we offer this impactful hands-on engineering education that really exceeds that of virtually all private universities while reaching a wider audience of students. We offer 14 degree programs, and really, we're talking today about cyber and space, and I think most of those degree programs can really make an impact in the space and cybersecurity economy. And this includes not only things like aero and cyber directly, but also electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer engineering, materials engineering, even manufacturing, civil, and biomedical engineering, as there's a lot of infrastructure needs that go into supporting launch capabilities. Our aerospace program graduates hundreds of aerospace engineers and most of them are working right here in California with many of our corporate partners, including Northrop Grumman, Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, JPL, and so many other places where we have Cal Poly engineers impacting the space economy. Our cybersecurity focus is found mainly in our computer science and software engineering programs, and it's really a rapidly growing interest among our students. Computer science is our most popular major, and industry interests and partnerships are integrated into our cyber curriculum, and we do that oftentimes through support from industry. So we have partnerships with Northrop Grumman for professorship in a cyber lab and from PG&E for critical infrastructure cybersecurity lab and professorship. And we think that industry partnerships like these are really critical to preparing students for the future as the field is evolving so quickly and making sure we adapt our facilities and our curriculum to stay in line with what we're seeing in industry is incredibly important. In our aerospace program, we have an educational partnership with the Air Force Research Labs that's allowing us to install new high-performance computing capabilities and a space environments lab that's going to enhance our satellite design capabilities. And if we talk about satellite design, Cal Poly is the founding home of the CubeSat program, which pioneered small satellite capabilities, And we remain the worldwide leader in maintaining the CubeSat standard, and our student program has launched more CubeSats than any other program. So here again we have this learn by doing experience every year for dozens of aerospace, electrical, computer science, mechanical engineering students, and other student activities that we think are just as important include ethical hacking through our white hat club, Cal Poly Space Systems, which does really, really big rocket launches, and our support program for women in both of these fields, like WISH, which is Women In Software and Hardware. Now, you know, really trying to bring in a wide variety of people into these fields is incredibly important, and outreach and support to those demographics traditionally underrepresented in these fields is going to be really critical to future success. So by drawing on the lived experiences by people with different types of backgrounds will we develop the type of culture and environment where all of us can get to the best solution. So in terms of bringing people into the field, we see that research shows we need to reach kids when they're in late elementary and middle schools to really overcome that cultural bias that works against diversity in our fields. And you heard Bill talking about the California Cybersecurity Institute's yearly cyber challenge, and there's a lot of other people who are working to bring in a wider variety of people into the field, like Girl Scouts, which has introduced dozens of new badges over the past few years, including a whole cybersecurity series of badges in concert with Palo Alto Networks. So we have our work cut out for us, but we know what we need to do, and if we're really committed to properly preparing the workforce for today and tomorrow, I think our future is going to be bright. I'm looking forward to our discussion today. >> Thank you, Dr. Fleischer, for a great comment, opening statement, and congratulations. You got the right formula down there, the right mindset, and you got a lot of talent, and community, as well. Thank you for that opening statement. Next up, from Colorado Springs, Trung Pham, who's a professor and researcher at the US Air Force Academy. He's doing a lot of research around the areas that are most important for the intersection of space and technology. Trung. >> Good afternoon. First I'd like to thank Cal Poly for the opportunity. And today I want to go briefly about cybersecurity in space application. Whenever we talk about cybersecurity, the impression is that it's a new field that is really highly complex involving a lot of technical area. But in reality, in my personal opinion, it is indeed a complex field because it involves many disciplines. The first thing we think about is computer engineering and computer networking, but it's also involving communication, sociology, law practice. And this practice of cybersecurity doesn't only involve computer expert, but it's also involve everybody else who has a computing device that is connected to the internet, and this participation is obviously everybody in today's environment. When we think about the internet, we know that it's a good source of information but come with the convenience of information that we can access, we are constantly facing danger from the internet. Some of them we might be aware of. Some of them we might not be aware of. For example, when we search on the internet, a lot of time our browser will be saying that this site is not trusted, so we will be more careful. But what about the sites that we trusted? We know that those are legitimate sites, but they're not 100% bulletproof. What happen if those site are attacked by a hacker and then they will be a silent source of danger that we might not be aware of. So in the reality, we need to be more practicing the cybersecurity from our civil point of view and not from a technical point of view. When we talk about space application, we should know that all the hardware are computer-based or controlled by by computer system, and therefore the hardware and the software must go through some certification process so that they can be rated as airworthy or flightworthy. When we know that in the certification process is focusing on the functionality of the hardware and software, but one aspect that is explicitly and implicitly required is the security of those components. And we know that those components have to be connected with the ground control station, and the communication is through the air, through the radio signal, so anybody who has access to those communication radio signal will be able to control the space system that we put up there. And we certainly do not want our system to be hijacked by a third party. Another aspect of cybersecurity is that we try to design the space system in a very strong manner so it's almost impossible to hack in. But what about some other weak system that might be connected to the strong system? For example, the space system will be connected to the ground control station, and on the ground control station, we have the human controller, and those people have cell phone. They are allowed to use cell phone for communication. But at the same time, they are connected to the internet through the cell phone, and their cell phone might be connected to the computer that control the flight software and hardware. So what I want to say is we try to build strong system and we've protected them, but there will be some weaker system that we could not intended but exists to be connected to our strong system, and those are the points the hacker will be trying to attack. If we know how to control the access to those weak points, we will be having a much better system for the space system. And when we see the cybersecurity that is requiring the participation everywhere it's important to notice that there is a source of opportunity for students who enter the workforce to consider. Obviously students in engineering can focus their knowledge and expertise to provide technological solution to protect the system that we view. But we also have students in business who can focus their expertise to write business plan so that they can provide a pathway for the engineering advances to reach the market. We also have student in law who can focus their expertise in policy governing the internet, governing the cybersecurity practice. And we also have student in education who can focus their expertise to design how to teach cybersecurity practice, and student in every other discipline can focus their effort to implement security measure to protect the system that they are using in their field. So it's obvious that cybersecurity is everywhere and it implies job opportunity everywhere for everybody in every discipline of study. Thank you. >> Thank you, Trung, for those great comments. Great technology opportunities. But interesting, as well, is the theme that we're seeing across the entire symposium and in the virtual hallways that we're hearing conversations, and you pointed out some of them. Dr. Fleischer did, as well. And Bill, you mentioned it. It's not one thing. It's not just technology. It's different skills. And Amy, you mentioned that computer science is the hottest degree, but you have the hottest aerospace program in the world. I mean, so all this is kind of balancing. It's interdisciplinary. It's a structural change. Before we get into some of the, how they prepare the students, can you guys talk about some of the structural changes that are modern now in preparing in these opportunities, because societal impact is a, law potentially impact, it's how we educate. There's now cross-discipline skill sets. It's not just get the degree, see you out in the field. Bill, you want to start? >> Well, what's really fun about this job is that in the Air Force, I worked in the space and missile business, and what we saw was a heavy reliance on checklist format, security procedures, analog systems, and what we're seeing now in our world, both in the government and the commercial side, is a move to a digital environment, and the digital environment is a very quick and adaptive environment, and it's going to require a digital understanding. Matter of fact, the undersecretary of Air Force for acquisition recently referenced the need to understand the digital environment and how that's affecting acquisition. So as both Amy and Trung said, even business students are now in the cybersecurity business. And so again, what we're seeing is the change. Now, another phenomenon that we're seeing in the space world is there's just so much data. One of the ways that we addressed that in the past was to look at high-performance computing. There was a lot stricter control over how that worked. But now what we're seeing is adaptation of cloud, cloud technologies in space support, space data, command and control. And so what we see is a modern space engineer who has to understand digital, has to understand cloud, and has to understand the context of all those with a cyber environment. That's really changing the forefront of what is a space engineer, what is a digital engineer, and what is a future engineer, both commercial or government. So I think the opportunity for all of these things is really good, particularly for a polytechnic, Air Force Academy, and others that are focusing on a more widened experiential level of cloud and engineering and other capabilities. And I'll tell you the part that as the CIO I have to remind everybody, all this stuff works with the IT stuff. So you've got to understand how your IT infrastructures are tied and working together. As we noted earlier, one of the things is that these are all relays from point to point, and that architecture is part of your cybersecurity architecture. So again, every component has now become a cyber aware, cyber knowledgeable, and what we like to call as a cyber cognizant citizen where they have to understand the context. (speaking on mute) >> (indistinct) software Dr. Fleischer, talk about your perspective, 'cause you mentioned some of the things about computer science. I remember in the '80s when I got my computer science degree, they called us software engineers and then you became software developers. And then, so again, engineering is the theme. If you're engineering a system, there's now software involved, and there's also business engineering, business models. So talk about some of your comments, 'cause you mentioned computer science is hot. You got the aerospace. You got these multi-disciplines. You got definitely diversity, as well, brings more perspectives in, as well. Your thoughts on these structural interdisciplinary things? >> I think this is really key to making sure that students are prepared to work in the workforce is looking at the blurring between fields. No longer are you just a computer scientist. No longer are you just an aerospace engineer. You really have to have an expertise where you can work with people across disciplines. All of these fields are just working with each other in ways we haven't seen before. And Bill brought up data. You know, data science is something that's cross-cutting across all of our fields. So we want engineers that have the disciplinary expertise that they can go deep into these fields, but we want them to be able to communicate with each other and to be able to communicate across disciplines and to be able to work in teams that are across disciplines. You can no longer just work with other computer scientists or just work with other aerospace engineers. There's no part of engineering that is siloed anymore. So that's how we're changing. You have to be able to work across those disciplines. And as you, as Trung pointed out, ethics has to come into this. So you can no longer try to fully separate what we would traditionally have called the liberal arts and say, well, that's over there in general education. No, ethics is an important part of what we're doing and how we integrate that into our curriculum. So is communication. So is working on public policy and seeing where all these different aspects tie together to make the impact that we want to have in the world. So you no longer can work solo in these fields. >> That's great point. And Bill also mentioned the cloud. One thing about the cloud that's showed us is horizontal scalability has created a lot of value, and certainly data is now horizontal. Trung, you mentioned some of the things about cryptography for the kids out there, I mean, you can look at the pathway for career. You can do a lot of tech, but you don't have to go deep sometimes. You can as deep as you want, but there's so much more there. What technology do you see that's going to help students, in your opinion? >> Well, I'm a professor in computer science, so I like to talk a little bit about computer programming. Now we are working in complex projects. So most of the time we don't design a system from scratch. We build it from different components, and the components that we have, either we get it from vendors or sometimes we get it from the internet in the open source environment. It's fun to get the source code and then make it work to our own application. So now when we are looking at cryptology, when we talk about encryption, for example, we can easily get the source code from the internet. And the question, is it safe to use those source code? And my question is maybe not. So I always encourage my students to learn how to write source code the traditional way that I learned a long time ago before I allow them to use the open source environment. And one of the things that they have to be careful especially with encryption is the code that might be hidden in the source that they downloaded. Some of the source might be harmful. It might open up back gate for a hacker to get in later. We've heard about these back gates back then when Microsoft designed the operating system with the protection of encryption, and it is true that is existing. So while open source code is a wonderful place to develop complex system, but it's also a dangerous place that we have to be aware of. >> Great point. Before we get into the comments, one quick thing for each of you I'd like to get your comments on. There's been a big movement on growth mindset, which has been a great big believer in having a growth mindset and learning and all that good stuff. But now when you talk about some of these things we're mentioning about systems, there's a new trend around a systems mindset, because if everything's now a system, distributed systems now you have space and cybersecurity, you have to understand the consequences of changes. And you mention some of that, Trung, in changes in the source code. Could you guys share your quick opinions on the of systems thinking? Is that a mindset that people should be looking at? Because it used to be just one thing. Oh, you're a systems guy or gal. There you go. You're done. Now it seems to be in social media and data, everything seems to be systems. What's your take? Dr. Fleischer, we'll start with you. >> I'd say it's another way of looking at not being just so deep in your discipline. You have to understand what the impact of the decisions that you're making have on a much broader system. And so I think it's important for all of our students to get some exposure to that systems level thinking and looking at the greater impact of the decision that they're making. Now, the issue is where do you set the systems boundary, right? And you can set the systems boundary very close in and concentrate on an aspect of a design, or you can continually move that system boundary out and see where do you hit the intersections of engineering and science along with ethics and public policy and the greater society. And I think that's where some of the interesting work is going to be. And I think at least exposing students and letting them know that they're going to have to make some of these considerations as they move throughout their career is going to be vital as we move into the future. >> Bill, what's your thoughts? >> I absolutely agree with Amy. And I think there's a context here that reverse engineering and forensics analysis and forensics engineering are becoming more critical than ever. The ability to look at what you have designed in a system and then tear it apart and look at it for gaps and holes and problem sets. Or when you're given some software that's already been pre-developed, checking it to make sure it is really going to do what it says it's going to do. That forensics ability becomes more and more a skillset that also you need the verbal skills to explain what it is you're doing and what you found. So the communication side, the systems analysis side, the forensics analysis side, these are all things that are part of system approach that I think you could spend hours on and we still haven't really done a great job on it. So it's one of my fortes is really the whole analysis side of forensics and reverse engineering. >> Trung, real quick, systems thinking, your thoughts. >> Well, I'd like to share with you my experience when I worked in the space station program at NASA. We had two different approaches. One is a compound approach where we design it from the system general point of view where we put components together to be a complex system. But at the same time, we have the (indistinct) approach where we have an engineer who spent time and effort building individual component and they have to be expert in those tiny component that general component they deliver. And in the space station program, we bring together the (indistinct) engineer who designed everything in detail and the system manager who managed the system design from the top down, and we meet in the middle, and together we compromised a lot of differences and we delivered the space station that we are operating today. >> Great insight. And that's the whole teamwork collaboration that Dr. Fleischer was mentioning. Thanks so much for that insight. I wanted to get that out there because I know myself as a parent, I'm always trying to think about what's best for my kids and their friends as they grow up into the workforce. I know educators and leaders in industry would love to know some of the best practices around some of the structural changes. So thanks for that insight. But this topic's about students and helping them prepare. So we heard be multiple discipline, broaden your horizons, think like systems, top down, bottom up, work together as a team, and follow the data. So I got to ask you guys, there's a huge amount of job openings in cybersecurity. It's well-documented. And certainly with the intersection of space and cyber, it's only going to get bigger, right? You're going to see more and more demand for new types of jobs. How do we get high school and college students interested in security as a career? Dr. Fleischer, we'll start with you on this one. I would say really one of the best ways to get students interested in a career is to show them the impact that it's going to have. There's definitely always going to be students who are going to want to do the technology for the technology's sake, but that will limit you to a narrow set of students, and by showing the greater impact that these types of careers are going to have on the types of problems that you're going to be able to solve and the impact you're going to be able to have on the world around you, that's the word that we really need to get out. And a wide variety of students really respond to these messages. So I think it's really kind of reaching out at the elementary, the middle school level, and really kind of getting this idea that you can make a big difference, a big positive difference in the field with some of these careers, is going to be really critical. >> Real question to follow up. What do you think is the best entry point? You mentioned middle. I didn't hear elementary school. There's a lot of discussions around pipelining, and we're going to get into women in tech and underrepresented minorities later. But is it too early, or what's your feeling on this? >> My feeling is the earlier we can normalize it, the better. If you can normalize an interest in computers and technology and building in elementary school, that's absolutely critical. But the drop-off point that we're seeing is between what I would call late elementary and early middle school. And just kind of as an anecdote, I for years ran an outreach program for Girl Scouts in grades four and five and grade six, seven, and eight. And we had 100 slots in each program. And every year the program would sell out for girls in grades four and five, and every year we'd have spots remaining in grades six, seven, and eight. And that's literally where the drop-off is occurring between that late elementary and that middle school range. So that's the area that we need to target to make sure we keep those young women involved and interested as we move forward. >> Bill, how are we going to get these kids interested in security? You mentioned a few programs you got. >> Yeah. >> I mean, who wouldn't want to be a white hat hacker? I mean, that sounds exciting. >> So yeah, great questions. Let's start with some basic principles, though, is let me ask you a question, John. Name for me one white hat, good person hacker, the name, who works in the space industry and is an exemplar for students to look up to. >> You? >> Oh man, I'm feeling really... >> I'm only, I can't imagine a figure- >> (indistinct) the answer because the answer we normally get is the cricket sound. So we don't have individuals we've identified in those areas for them to look up to. >> I was going to be snarky and say most white hackers won't even use their real name, but... >> Right, so there's an aura around their anonymity here. So again, the real question is how do we get them engaged and keep them engaged? And that's what Amy was pointing out to exactly, the engagement and sticking with it. So one of the things that we're trying to do through our competition on the state level and other elements is providing connections. We call them ambassadors. These are people in the business who can contact the students that are in the game or in that challenge environment and let 'em interact and let 'em talk about what they do and what they're doing in life. But give them a challenging game format. A lot of computer-based training, capture the flag stuff is great, but if you can make it hands-on, if you can make it a learn by doing experiment, if you can make it personally involved and see the benefit as a result of doing that challenge and then talk to the people who do that on a daily basis, that's how you get them involved. The second part is part of what we're doing is we're involving partnership companies in the development of the teams. So this year's competition that we're running has 82 teams from across the state of California. Of those 82 teams at six students a team, middle school, high school, and many of those have company partners, and these are practitioners in cybersecurity who are working with those students to participate. It's that adult connectivity. It's that visualization. So at the competition this year, we have the founder of Defcon Red Flag is a participant to talk to the students. We have Vint Cerf, who is, of course, very well-known for something called the internet, to participate. It's really getting the students to understand who's in this, who can I look up to, and how do I stay engaged with them? >> There's definitely a celebrity aspect of it, I will agree. I mean, the influencer aspect here with knowledge is key. Can you talk about these ambassadors, and how far along are you on that program? First of all, the challenge stuff is, anything gamification-wise, we've seen that with hackathons, it just really works well. Creates bonding. People who create together can get sticky and get very high community aspect to it. Talk about this ambassador thing. What is that, industry, is that academic? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> What is this ambassador thing? >> Industry partners that we've identified, some of which, and I won't hit all of 'em, so I'm sure I'll short change this, but Palo Alto, Cisco, Splunk, many of the companies in California, and what we've done is identified schools to participate in the challenge that may not have a strong STEM program or have any cyber program. And the idea of the company is they look for their employees who are in those school districts to partner with the schools to help provide outreach. It could be as simple as a couple hours a week, or it's a team support captain or it's providing computers and other devices to use. And so again, it's really about a constant connectivity and trying to help where some schools may not have the staff or support units in an area to really provide them what they need for connectivity. What that does is it gives us an opportunity to not just focus on it once a year, but throughout the year. So for the competition, all the teams that are participating have been receiving training and educational opportunities in the gamification side since they signed up to participate. So there's a website, there's learning materials, there's materials provided by certain vendor companies like Wireshark and others. So it's a continuum of opportunity for the students. >> You know, I've seen, just randomly, just got a random thought. Robotics clubs are moving then closer into that middle school area, Dr. Fleischer, and in certainly in high schools, it's almost like a varsity sport. E-sports is another one. My son just called me. "I made the JV at the college team." It's big and serious, right? And it's fun. This is the aspect of fun. It's hands-on. This is part of the culture down there. Learn by doing. Is there, like, a group? Is it, like, a club? I mean, how do you guys organize these bottoms-up organically interest topics? >> So here in the college of engineering, when we talk about learn by doing, we have learned by doing both in the classroom and out of the classroom. And if we look at these types of out of the classroom activities, we have over 80 clubs working on all different aspects, and many of these are bottom-up. The students have decided what they want to work on and have organized themselves around that. And then they get the leadership opportunities. The more experienced students train the less experienced students. And it continues to build from year after year after year with them even doing aspects of strategic planning from year to year for some of these competitions. Yeah, it's an absolutely great experience. And we don't define for them how their learn by doing experiences should be. We want them to define it. And I think the really cool thing about that is they have the ownership and they have the interest and they can come up with new clubs year after year to see which direction they want to take it, and we will help support those clubs as old clubs fade out and new clubs come in. >> Trung, real quick, before we go on the next talk track, what do you recommend for middle school, high school, or even elementary? A little bit of coding, Minecraft? I mean, how do you get 'em hooked on the fun and the dopamine of technology and cybersecurity? What's your take on that? >> On this aspect, I'd like to share with you my experience as a junior high and high school student in Texas. The university of Texas in Austin organized a competition for every high school in Texas in every field from poetry to mathematics to science, computer engineering. But it's not about the University of Texas. The University of Texas is only serving as a center for the final competition. They divide the competition to district and then regional and then state. At each level, we have local university and colleges volunteering to host the competition and make it fun for the student to participate. And also they connected the students with private enterprises to raise fund for scholarship. So student who see the competition is a fun event for them, they get exposed to different university hosting the event so that they can see different option for them to consider college. They also get a promise that if they participate, they will be considered for scholarship when they attend university and college. So I think the combination of fun and competition and the scholarship aspect will be a good thing to entice the student to commit to the area of cybersecurity. >> Got the engagement, the aspiration, scholarship, and you mentioned a volunteer. I think one of the things I'll observe is you guys are kind of hitting this as community. I mean, the story of Steve Jobs and Woz building the Mac, they called Bill Hewlett up in Palo Alto. He was in the phone book. And they scoured some parts from him. That's community. This is kind of what you're getting at. So this is kind of the formula we're seeing. So the next question I really want to get into is the women in technology, STEM, underrepresented minorities, how do we get them on cybersecurity career path? Is there a best practices there? Bill, we'll start with you. >> Well, I think it's really interesting. First thing I want to add is, if I could, just a clarification. What's really cool, the competition that we have and we're running, it's run by students from Cal Poly. So Amy referenced the clubs and other activities. So many of the organizers and developers of the competition that we're running are the students, but not just from engineering. So we actually have theater and liberal arts majors and technology for liberal arts majors who are part of the competition, and we use their areas of expertise, set design and other things, visualization, virtualization. Those are all part of how we then teach and educate cyber in our gamification and other areas. So they're all involved and they're learning, as well. So we have our students teaching other students. So we're really excited about that. And I think that's part of what leads to a mentoring aspect of what we're providing where our students are mentoring the other students. And I think it's also something that's really important in the game. The first year we held the game, we had several all-girl teams, and it was really interesting because A, they didn't really know if they could compete. I mean, this is their reference point. We don't know if. They did better than anybody. I mean, they just, they knocked the ball out of the park. The second part, then, is building that confidence level that can, going back and telling their cohorts that, hey, it's not this obtuse thing you can't do. It's something real that you can compete and win. And so again, it's building that camaraderie, that spirit, that knowledge that they can succeed. And I think that goes a long way. And Amy's programs and the reach out and the reach out that Cal Poly does to schools to develop, I think that's what it really is going to take. It is going to take that village approach to really increase diversity and inclusivity for the community. >> Dr. Fleischer, I'd love to get your thoughts. You mentioned your outreach program and the drop-off, some of those data. You're deeply involved in this. You're passionate about it. What's your thoughts on this career path opportunity for STEM? >> Yeah, I think STEM is an incredible career path opportunity for so many people. There's so many interesting problems that we can solve, particularly in cyber and in space systems. And I think we have to meet the kids where they are and kind of show them what the exciting part is about it, right? But Bill was alluding to this when he was talking about trying to name somebody that you can point to. And I think having those visible people where you can see yourself in that is absolutely critical, and those mentors and that mentorship program. So we use a lot of our students going out into California middle schools and elementary schools. And you want to see somebody that's like you, somebody that came from your background and was able to do this. So a lot of times we have students from our National Society of Black Engineers or our Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers or our Society of Women Engineers, which we have over 1,000 members, 1,000 student members in our Society of Women Engineers who are doing these outreach programs. But like I also said, it's hitting them at the lower levels, too, and Girl Scouts is actually distinguishing themselves as one of the leading STEM advocates in the country. And like I said, they developed all these cybersecurity badges starting in kindergarten. There's a cybersecurity badge for kindergartener and first graders. And it goes all the way up through late high school. The same thing with space systems. And they did the space systems in partnership with NASA. They did the cybersecurity in partnership with Palo Alto Networks. And what you do is you want to build these skills that the girls are developing, and like Bill said, work in girl-led teams where they can do it, and if they're doing it from kindergarten on, it just becomes normal, and they never think, well, this is not for me. And they see the older girls who are doing it and they see a very clear path leading them into these careers. >> Yeah, it's interesting, you used the word normalization earlier. That's exactly what it is. It's life, you get life skills and a new kind of badge. Why wouldn't you learn how to be a white hat hacker or have some fun or learn some skills? >> Amy: Absolutely. >> Just in the grind of your fun day. Super exciting. Okay, Trung, your thoughts on this. I mean, you have a diverse, diversity brings perspective to the table in cybersecurity because you have to think like the other guy, the adversary. You got to be the white hat. You can't be a white hat unless you know how black hat thinks. So there's a lot of needs here for more points of view. How are we going to get people trained on this from underrepresented minorities and women? What's your thoughts? >> Well, as a member of the IEEE Professional Society of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, every year we participate in the engineering week. We deploy our members to local junior high school and high school to talk about our project to promote the study of engineering. But at the same time, we also participate in the science fair that the state of Texas is organizing. Our engineer will be mentoring students, number one, to help them with the project, but number two, to help us identify talent so that we can recruit them further into the field of STEM. One of the participation that we did was the competition of the, what they call Future City, where students will be building a city on a computer simulation. And in recent year, we promote the theme of smart city where city will be connected the individual houses and together into the internet. And we want to bring awareness of cybersecurity into that competition. So we deploy engineer to supervise the people, the students who participate in the competition. We bring awareness not in the technical detail level, but in what we've call the compound level so student will be able to know what required to provide cybersecurity for the smart city that they are building. And at the same time, we were able to identify talent, especially talent in the minority and in the woman, so that we can recruit them more actively. And we also raise money for scholarship. We believe that scholarship is the best way to entice student to continue education at the college level. So with scholarship, it's very easy to recruit them to the field and then push them to go further into the cybersecurity area. >> Yeah, I mean, I see a lot of the parents like, oh, my kid's going to go join the soccer team, we get private lessons, and maybe they'll get a scholarship someday. Well, they only do half scholarships. Anyway. I mean, if they spent that time doing these other things, it's just, again, this is a new life skill, like the Girl Scouts. And this is where I want to get into this whole silo breaking down, because Amy, you brought this up, and Bill, you were talking about it, as well. You got multiple stakeholders here with this event. You've got public, you've got private, and you've got educators. It's the intersection of all of them. It's, again, if those silos break down, the confluence of those three stakeholders have to work together. So let's talk about that. Educators. You guys are educating young minds. You're interfacing with private institutions and now the public. What about educators? What can they do to make cyber better? 'Cause there's no real manual. I mean, it's not like this court is a body of work of how to educate cybersecurity. Maybe it's more recent. There's cutting edge best practices. But still, it's an evolving playbook. What's your thoughts for educators? Bill, we'll start with you. >> Well, I'm going to turn to Amy and let her go first. >> Let you go. >> That's fine. >> I would say as educators, it's really important for us to stay on top of how the field is evolving, right? So what we want to do is we want to promote these tight connections between educators and our faculty and applied research in industry and with industry partnerships. And I think that's how we're going to make sure that we're educating students in the best way. And you're talking about that inner, that confluence of the three different areas. And I think you have to keep those communication lines open to make sure that the information on where the field is going and what we need to concentrate on is flowing down into our educational process. And that works in both ways, that we can talk as educators and we can be telling industry what we're working on and what types of skills our students have and working with them to get the opportunities for our students to work in industry and develop those skills along the way, as well. And I think it's just all part of this really looking at what's going to be happening and how do we get people talking to each other? And the same thing with looking at public policy and bringing that into our education and into these real hands-on experiences. And that's how you really cement this type of knowledge with students, not by talking to them and not by showing them, but letting them do it. It's this learn by doing and building the resiliency that it takes when you learn by doing. And sometimes you learn by failing, but you just pick up and you keep going. And these are important skills that you develop along the way. >> You mentioned sharing, too. That's the key. Collaborating and sharing knowledge. It's an open world and everyone's collaborating. Bill, private-public partnerships. I mean, there's a real, private companies, you mentioned Palo Alto Networks and others. There's a real intersection there. They're motivated. They could, there's scholarship opportunities. Trung points to that. What is the public-private educator view there? How do companies get involved and what's the benefit for them? >> Well, that's what a lot of the universities are doing is to bring in as part of either their cyber centers or institutes people who are really focused on developing and furthering those public-private partnerships. That's really what my role is in all these things is to take us to a different level in those areas, not to take away from the academic side, but to add additional opportunities for both sides. Remember, in a public-private partnership, all entities have to have some gain in the process. Now, what I think is really interesting is the timing on particularly this subject, space and cybersecurity. This has been an absolute banner year for space. The standup of Space Force, the launch of commercial partnership, you know, commercial platforms delivering astronauts to the space station, recovering them, and bringing them back. The ability of a commercial satellite platform to be launched. Commercial platforms that not only launch but return back to where they're launched from. These are things that are stirring the hearts of the American citizens, the kids, again, they're getting interested. They're seeing this and getting enthused. So we have to seize upon that and we have to find a way to connect that. Public-private partnerships is the answer for that. It's not one segment that can handle it all. It's all of them combined together. If you look at space, space is going to be about commercial. It's going to be about civil. Moving from one side of the Earth to the other via space. And it's about government. And what's really cool for us, all those things are in our backyard. That's where that public-private comes together. The government's involved. The private sector's involved. The educators are involved. And we're all looking at the same things and trying to figure out, like this forum, what works best to go to the future. >> You know, if people are bored and they want to look for an exciting challenge, you couldn't have laid it out any clearer. It's the most exciting discipline. It's everything. I mean, we just talk about space. GPS is, everything we do is involved, has to do with satellites. (laughs) >> I have to tell you a story on that right? We have a very unique GPS story right in our backyard. So our sheriff is the son of the father of GPS for the Air Force. So you can't get better than that when it comes to being connected to all those platforms. So we really want to say, you know, this is so exciting for all of us because it gives everybody a job for a long time. >> You know, the kids that think TikTok's exciting, wait till they see what's going on here with you guys, this program. Trung, final word on this from the public side. You're at the Air Force. You're doing research. Are you guys opening it up? Are you integrating into the private and educational sectors? How do you see that formula playing out? And what's the best practice for students and preparing them? >> I think it's the same in every university in the engineering program will require our students to do the final project before graduation. And in this kind of project, we send them out to work in the private industry, the private company that sponsor them. They get the benefit of having an intern working for them and they get the benefit of reviewing the students as the prospective employee in the future. So it's good for the student to gain practical experience working in this program. Sometimes we call that a co-op program. Sometimes we call that a capstone program. And the company will accept the student on a trial basis, giving them some assignment and then pay them a little bit of money. So it's good for the student to earn some extra money, to have some experience that they can put on their resume when they apply for the final, for the job. So the collaboration between university and private sector is really important. When I join a faculty normally there already exist that connection. It came from normally, again, from the dean of engineering, who would wine and dine with companies, build up relationship, and sign up agreement. But it's us professor who have to do the (indistinct) approach to do a good performance so that we can build up credibility to continue the relationship with those company and the student that we selected to send to those company. We have to make sure that they will represent the university well, they will do a good job, and they will make a good impression. >> Thank you very much for a great insight, Trung, Bill, Amy. Amazing topic. I'd like to end this session with each of you to make a statement on the importance of cybersecurity to space. We'll go Trung, Bill, and Amy. Trung, the importance of cybersecurity to space, brief statement. >> The importance of cybersecurity, we know that it's affecting every component that we are using and we are connecting to, and those component, normally we use them for personal purpose, but when we enter the workforce, sometimes we connect them to the important system that the government or the company are investing to be put into space. So it's really important to practice cybersecurity, and a lot of time, it's very easy to know the concept. We have to be careful. But in reality, we tend to forget to to practice it the way we forget how to drive a car safely. And with driving a car, we have a program called defensive driving that requires us to go through training every two or three years so that we can get discount. Every organization we are providing the annual cybersecurity practice not to tell people about the technology, but to remind them about the danger of not practicing cybersecurity and it's a requirement for every one of us. >> Bill, the importance of cybersecurity to space. >> It's not just about young people. It's about all of us. As we grow and we change, as I referenced it, we're changing from an analog world to a digital world. Those of us who have been in the business and have hair that looks like mine, we need to be just as cognizant about cybersecurity practice as the young people. We need to understand how it affects our lives, and particularly in space, because we're going to be talking about people, moving people to space, moving payloads, data transfer, all of those things. And so there's a whole workforce that needs to be retrained or upskilled in cyber that's out there. So the opportunity is ever expansive for all of us. >> Amy, the importance of cybersecurity in space. >> I mean the emphasis of cybersecurity is space just simply can't be over emphasized. There are so many aspects that are going to have to be considered as systems get ever more complex. And as we pointed out, we're putting people's lives at stake here. This is incredibly, incredibly complicated and incredibly impactful, and actually really exciting, the opportunities that are here for students and the workforce of the future to really make an enormous impact on the world around us. And I hope we're able to get that message out to students and to children today, that these are really interesting fields that you need to consider. >> Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, and the importance of cybersecurity and space is the future of the world's all going to happen in and around space with technology, people, and society. Thank you to Cal Poly, and thank you for watching the Cybersecurity and Space Symposium 2020. (bright music)

>>Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining this session. I feel honored to be invited to speak here today. And I also appreciate entity research Summit members for organ organizing and giving this great opportunity. Please let me give a quick introduction. First, I'm a Takashi from Marvin American population, and I'm leading technology scouting and global ation with digital health companies such as Business Alliance and Strategically Investment in North America. And since we started to focus on this space in 2016 our team is growing. And in order to bring more new technologies and services to Japan market Thesis year, we founded the new service theories for digital health business, especially, uh, in medical diagnosis space in Japan. And today I would like to talk how health care has been transformed for my micro perspective, and I hope you enjoy reasoning it. So what's happened since the US identify the first case in the middle of January, As everyone knows, unfortunately, is the damaged by this pandemic was unequal amongst the people in us. It had more determined tal impact on those who are socially and economically vulnerable because of the long, long lasting structural program off the U. S. Society and the Light Charity about daily case rating elevator country shows. Even in the community, the infection rate off the low income were 4.5 times higher than, uh, those of the high income and due to czar straight off the Corvette, about 14 million people are unemployed. The unique point off the U. S. Is that more than 60% of insurance is tied with employment, so losing a job can mean losing access to health care. And the point point here is that the Corvette did not create healthcare disparity but, uh nearly highlighted the underlying program and necessity off affordable care for all. And when the country had a need to increase the testing capacity and geographic out, treat the pharmacies and retails joined forces with existing stakeholders more than 90% off the U. S Corporation live within five miles off a community pharmacy such as CVS and Walgreen, so they can technically provide the test to everyone in all the community. And they also have a huge workforce memory pharmacist who are eligible to perform the testing scale, and this very made their potential in community based health care. Stand out and about your health has provided on alternative way for people to access to health care. At affordable applies under the unusual setting where social distancing, which required required mhm and people have a fear of infection. So they are afraid to take a public transportacion and visit >>the doctor the same thing supplied to doctor and the chart. Here is a number of total visit cranes by service type after stay at home order was issued across the U. S. By Ali April patient physical visits to doctor's offices or clinics declined by ALAN 70%. On the other hand, that share, or telehealth, accounted for 25% of the total total. Doctor's visit in April, while many states studied to re opening face to face visit is gradually recovering. And overall Tele Health Service did not offset the crime. Physician Physical doctor's visit and telehealth John never fully replace in person care. However, Telehealth has established a new way to provide affordable care, especially to vulnerable people, and I don't explain each player's today. But as an example, the chart shows the significant growth of the tell a dog who is one of the largest badger care and tell his provider, I believe there are three factors off paradox. Success under the pandemic. First, obviously tell Doc could reach >>the job between those patients and doctors. Majority of the patients who needed to see doctors who are those who have underlying health conditions and are high risk for Kelowna, Bilis and Secondary. They showed their business model is highly scalable. In the first quarter of this year, they moved quickly to expand their physical physicians network to increase their capacity and catch up growing demand. To some extent, they also contributed to create flexible job for the doctors who suffered from Lydia's appointment and surgery. They utilized. There are legalism to maximize the efficiency for doctors and doing so, uh, they have university maintained high quality care at affordable applies Yeah, and at the same time, the government recognize the body of about your care and de regulated traditional rules to sum up she m s temporary automated to pay a wide range of tell Her services, including hospital visit and HHS temporarily waived hip hop minorities for telehealth cases and they're changed allowed provider to use communication tools such as facetime and the messenger. During their appointment on August start, the government issued a new executive order to expand tell his services beyond the pandemic. So the government is also moving to support about your health care. So it was a quick review of the health care challenges and somewhat advancement in the pandemic. But as you understand, since those challenges are not caused by the pandemic, problems will stay remain and events off this year will continuously catalyze the transformation. So how was his cherished reshaped and where will we go? The topic from here can be also applied to Japan market. Okay, I believe democratization and decentralization healthcare more important than ever. So what does A. The traditional healthcare was defined in a framework over patient and a doctor. But in the new normal, the range of beneficiaries will be expanded from patient to all citizens, including the country uninsured people. Thanks to the technology evolution, as you can download health management off for free on iTunes stores while the range of the digital health services unable everyone to participate in new health system system. And in this slide, I put three essential element to fully realize democratization and decentralization off health care, health, literacy, data sharing and security, privacy and safety in addition, taken. In addition, technology is put at the bottom as a foundation off three point first. Health stimulus is obviously important because if people don't understand how the system works, what options are available to them or what are the pros and cons of each options? They can not navigate themselves and utilize the service. It can even cause a different disparity. Issue and secondary data must be technically flee to transfer. While it keeps interoperability ease. More options are becoming available to patient. But if data cannot be shared among stakeholders, including patient hospitals in strollers and budget your providers, patient data will be fragmented and people cannot yet continue to care which they benefited under current centralized care system. And this is most challenging part. But the last one is that the security aspect more players will involving decentralized health care outside of conventional healthcare system. So obviously, both the number of healthcare channels and our frequency of data sharing will increase more. It's create ah, higher data about no beauty, and so, under the new health care framework, we needed to ensure patient privacy and safety and also re examine a Scott write lines for sharing patient data and off course. Corbett Wasa Stone Catalyst off this you saved. But what folly. Our drivers in Macro and Micro Perspective from Mark Lowe. The challenges in healthcare system have been widely recognized for decades, and now he's a big pain. The pandemic reminded us all the key values. Misha, our current pain point as I left the church shores. Those are increasing the population, health sustainability for doctors and other social system and value based care for better and more affordable care. And all the elements are co dependent on each other. The light chart explained that providing preventive care and Alan Dimension is the best way threes to meet the key values here. Similarly, the direction of community based care and about your care is in line with thes three values, and they are acting to maximize the number of beneficiaries form. A micro uh, initiative by nonconventional players is a big driver, and both CBS and Walmart are being actively engaged in healthcare healthcare businesses for many years. And CBS has the largest walking clinic called MinuteClinic, Ottawa 1100 locations, and Walmart also has 20 primary clinics. I didn't talk to them. But the most interesting things off their recent innovation, I believe, is that they are adjusted and expanded their focus, from primary care to community health Center to out less to every every customer's needs. And CBS Front to provide affordable preventive health and chronic health monitoring services at 1500 CBS Health have, which they are now setting up and along a similar line would Mark is deploying Walmart Health Center, where, utilizing tech driven solutions, they provide affordable one stop service for core healthcare. They got less, uh, insurance status. For example, more than 40% of the people in U. S visit will not every big, so liberating the huge customer base and physical locations. Both companies being reading decentralization off health care and consumer device company such as Apple and Fitbit also have helped in transform forming healthcare in two ways. First, they are growing the boundaries between traditional healthcare and consumer product after their long development airport available, getting healthcare device and secondary. They acted as the best healthcare educators to consumers and increase people's healthcare awareness because they're taking an important role in the enhancement, health, literacy and healthcare democratization. And based on the story so far, I'd like to touch to business concept which can be applied to both Japan and the US and one expected change. It will be the emergence of data integration plot home while the telehealth. While the healthcare data data volume has increased 15 times for the last seven years and will continuously increase, we have a chance to improve the health care by harnessing the data. So meaning the new system, which unify the each patient data from multiple data sources and create 360 degrees longitudinal view each individual and then it sensitized the unified data to gain additional insights seen from structure data and unable to provide personal lives care. Finally, it's aggregate each individual data and reanalyzed to provide inside for population health. This is one specific model I envision. And, uh, health care will be provided slew online or offline and at the hospital or detail store. In order to amplify the impact of health care. The law off the mediator between health care between hospital and citizen will become more important. They can be a pharmacy toe health stand out about your care providers. They provide wide range of fundamental care and medication instruction and management. They also help individuals to manage their health care data. I will not explain the details today, but Japan has similar challenges in health care, such as increasing healthcare expenditure and lack of doctors and care givers. For example, they people in Japan have physical physician visit more than 20 times a year on average, while those in the U. S. On >>the do full times it sounds a joke, but people say because the artery are healthy, say visit hospitals to see friends. So we need to utilize thes mediators to reduce cost while they maintained social place for citizens in Japan, the government has promoted, uh, usual family, pharmacist and primary doctors and views the community based medical system as a policy. There was division of dispensing fees in Japan this year to ship the core load or pharmacist to the new role as a health management service providers. And so >>I believe we will see the change in those spaces not only in the U. S, but also in Japan, and we went through so unprecedented times. But I believe it's been resulting accelerating our healthcare transformation and creating a new business innovation. And this brings me to the end of my presentation. Thank you for your attention and hope you could find something somehow useful for your business. And if you have any questions >>or comments, please for you feel free to contact me.

>>Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining this session. I feel honored to be invited to speak here today. And I also appreciate entity research Summit members for organ organizing and giving this great opportunity. Please let me give a quick introduction. First, I'm a Takashi from Marvin American population, and I'm leading technology scouting and global ation with digital health companies such as Business Alliance and Strategically Investment in North America. And since we started to focus on this space in 2016 our team is growing. And in order to bring more new technologies and services to Japan market Thesis year, we founded the new service theories for digital health business, especially, uh, in medical diagnosis space in Japan. And today I would like to talk how health care has been transformed for my micro perspective, and I hope you enjoy reasoning it. So what's happened since the US identify the first case in the middle of January, As everyone knows, unfortunately, is the damaged by this pandemic was unequal amongst the people in us. It had more determined tal impact on those who are socially and economically vulnerable because of the long, long lasting structural program off the U. S. Society and the Light Charity about daily case rating elevator country shows. Even in the community, the infection rate off the low income were 4.5 times higher than, uh, those of the high income and due to czar straight off the Corvette, about 14 million people are unemployed. The unique point off the U. S. Is that more than 60% of insurance is tied with employment, so losing a job can mean losing access to health care. And the point point here is that the Corvette did not create healthcare disparity but, uh nearly highlighted the underlying program and necessity off affordable care for all. And when the country had a need to increase the testing capacity and geographic out, treat the pharmacies and retails joined forces with existing stakeholders more than 90% off the U. S Corporation live within five miles off a community pharmacy such as CVS and Walgreen, so they can technically provide the test to everyone in all the community. And they also have a huge workforce memory pharmacist who are eligible to perform the testing scale, and this very made their potential in community based health care. Stand out and about your health has provided on alternative way for people to access to health care. At affordable applies under the unusual setting where social distancing, which required required mhm and people have a fear of infection. So they are afraid to take a public transportacion and visit >>the doctor the same thing supplied to doctor and the chart. Here is a number of total visit cranes by service type after stay at home order was issued across the U. S. By Ali April patient physical visits to doctor's offices or clinics declined by ALAN 70%. On the other hand, that share, or telehealth, accounted for 25% of the total total. Doctor's >>visit in April, while many states studied to re opening face to face visit is gradually recovering. And overall Tele Health Service did not offset the crime. Physician Physical doctor's visit and telehealth John never fully replace in person care. However, Telehealth has established a new way to provide affordable care, especially to vulnerable people, and I don't explain each player's today. But as an example, the chart shows the significant growth of >>the tell a dog who is one of the largest badger care and tell his provider, I believe there are three factors off paradox. Success under the pandemic. First, obviously tell Doc could reach >>the job between those patients and doctors. Majority of the patients who needed to see doctors who are those who have underlying health conditions and are high risk for Kelowna, Bilis and Secondary. They showed their business model is highly scalable. In the first quarter of this year, they moved quickly to expand their physical physicians network to increase their capacity and catch up growing demand. To some extent, they also contributed to create flexible job for the doctors who suffered from Lydia's appointment and surgery. They utilized. There are legalism to maximize the efficiency for doctors and doing so, uh, they have university maintained high quality care at affordable applies Yeah, and at the same time, the government recognize the body of about your care and de regulated traditional rules to sum up she m s temporary automated to pay a wide range of tell Her services, including hospital visit and HHS temporarily waived hip hop minorities for telehealth cases and they're changed allowed provider to use communication tools such as facetime and the messenger. During their appointment on August start, the government issued a new executive order to expand tell his services beyond the pandemic. So the government is also moving to support about your health care. So it was a quick review of the health care challenges and somewhat advancement in the pandemic. But as you understand, since those challenges are not caused by the pandemic, problems will stay remain and events off this year will continuously catalyze the transformation. So how was his cherished reshaped and where will we go? The topic from here can be also applied to Japan market. Okay, I believe democratization and decentralization healthcare more important than ever. So what does A. The traditional healthcare was defined in a framework over patient and a doctor. But in the new normal, the range of beneficiaries will be expanded from patient to all citizens, including the country uninsured people. Thanks to the technology evolution, as you can download health management off for free on iTunes stores while the range of the digital health services unable everyone to participate in new health system system. And in this slide, I put three essential element to fully realize democratization and decentralization off health care, health, literacy, data sharing and security, privacy and safety in addition, taken. In addition, technology is put at the bottom as a foundation off three point first. Health stimulus is obviously important because if people don't understand how the system works, what options are available to them or what are the pros and cons of each options? They can not navigate themselves and utilize the service. It can even cause a different disparity. Issue and secondary data must be technically flee to transfer. While it keeps interoperability ease. More options are becoming available to patient. But if data cannot be shared among stakeholders, including patient hospitals in strollers and budget your providers, patient data will be fragmented and people cannot yet continue to care which they benefited under current centralized care system. And this is most challenging part. But the last one is that the security aspect more players will involving decentralized health care outside of conventional healthcare system. So obviously, both the number of healthcare channels and our frequency of data sharing will increase more. It's create ah, higher data about no beauty, and so, under the new health care framework, we needed to ensure patient privacy and safety and also re examine a Scott write lines for sharing patient data and off course. Corbett Wasa Stone Catalyst off this you saved. But what folly. Our drivers in Macro and Micro Perspective from Mark Lowe. The challenges in healthcare system have been widely recognized for decades, and now he's a big pain. The pandemic reminded us all the key values. Misha, our current pain point as I left the church shores. Those are increasing the population, health sustainability for doctors and other social system and value based care for better and more affordable care. And all the elements are co dependent on each other. The light chart explained that providing preventive care and Alan Dimension is the best way threes to meet the key values here. Similarly, the direction of community based care and about your care is in line with thes three values, and they are acting to maximize the number of beneficiaries form. A micro uh, initiative by nonconventional players is a big driver, and both CBS and Walmart are being actively engaged in healthcare healthcare businesses for many years. And CBS has the largest walking clinic called MinuteClinic, Ottawa 1100 locations, and Walmart also has 20 primary clinics. I didn't talk to them. But the most interesting things off their recent innovation, I believe, is that they are adjusted and expanded their focus, from primary care to community health Center to out less to every every customer's needs. And CBS Front to provide affordable preventive health and chronic health monitoring services at 1500 CBS Health have, which they are now setting up and along a similar line would Mark is deploying Walmart Health Center, where, utilizing tech driven solutions, they provide affordable one stop service for core healthcare. They got less, uh, insurance status. For example, more than 40% of the people in U. S visit will not every big, so liberating the huge customer base and physical locations. Both companies being reading decentralization off health care and consumer device company such as Apple and Fitbit also have helped in transform forming healthcare in two ways. First, they are growing the boundaries between traditional healthcare and consumer product after their long development airport available, getting healthcare device and secondary. They acted as the best healthcare educators to consumers and increase people's healthcare awareness because they're taking an important role in the enhancement, health, literacy and healthcare democratization. And based on the story so far, I'd like to touch to business concept which can be applied to both Japan and the US and one expected change. It will be the emergence of data integration plot home while the telehealth. While the healthcare data data volume has increased 15 times for the last seven years and will continuously increase, we have a chance to improve the health care by harnessing the data. So meaning the new system, which unify the each patient data from multiple data sources and create 360 degrees longitudinal view each individual and then it sensitized the unified data to gain additional insights seen from structure data and unable to provide personal lives care. Finally, it's aggregate each individual data and reanalyzed to provide inside for population health. This is one specific model I envision. And, uh, health care will be provided slew online or offline and at the hospital or detail store. In order to amplify the impact of health care. The law off the mediator between health care between hospital and citizen will become more important. They can be a pharmacy toe health stand out about your care providers. They provide wide range of fundamental care and medication instruction and management. They also help individuals to manage their health care data. I will not explain the details today, but Japan has similar challenges in health care, such as increasing healthcare expenditure and lack of doctors and care givers. For example, they people in Japan have physical physician visit more than 20 times a year on average, while those in the U. S. On the do full times it sounds a joke, but people say because the artery are healthy, say visit hospitals to see friends. So we need to utilize thes mediators to reduce cost while they maintained social place for citizens in Japan, the government has promoted, uh, usual family, pharmacist and primary doctors and views the community based medical system as a policy. There was division of dispensing fees in Japan this year to ship the core load or pharmacist to the new role as a health management service providers. And so I believe we will see the change in those spaces not only in the U. S, but also in Japan, and we went through so unprecedented times. But I believe it's been resulting accelerating our healthcare transformation and creating a new business innovation. And this brings me to the end of my presentation. Thank you for your attention and hope you could find something somehow useful for your business. And if you have any questions >>or comments, please for you feel free to contact me. Thank you.

>> Announcer: Live from Stanford University. It's theCUBE, covering Stanford Women in Data Science 2020, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (upbeat music) >> Hi, and welcome to theCUBE. I'm your host, Sonia Tagare. And we're live at Stanford University covering the fifth annual WiDS Women in Data Science Conference. Joining us today is Lucy Bernholz, who is the Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University. Lucy, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So you've led the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford for the past 11 years. So tell us more about that. >> Sure, so the Digital Civil Society Lab actually exists because we don't think digital civil society exists. So let me take that apart for you. Civil society is that weird third space outside of markets and outside of government. So it's where we associate together, it's where we as people get together and do things that help other people could be the nonprofit sector, it might be political action, it might be the eight of us just getting together and cleaning up a park or protesting something we don't like. So that's civil society. But what's happened over the last 30 years really is that everything we use to do that work has become dependent on digital systems and those digital systems, some tier, I'm talking gadgets, from our phones, to the infrastructure over which data is exchanged. That entire digital system is built by companies and surveilled by governments. So where do we as people get to go digitally? Where we could have a private conversation to say, "Hey, let's go meet downtown and protest x and y, or let's get together and create an alternative educational opportunity 'cause we feel our kids are being overlooked, whatever." All of that information that get exchanged, all of that associating that we might do in the digital world, it's all being watched. It's all being captured (laughs). And that's a problem because both history and political science, history and democracy theory show us that when there's no space for people to get together voluntarily, take collective action, and do that kind of thinking and planning and communicating it just between the people they want involved in that when that space no longer exists, democracies fall. So the lab exists to try to recreate that space. And in order to do that, we have to first of all recognize that it's being closed in. Secondly, we have to make real technological process, we need a whole set of different kind of different digital devices and norms. We need different kinds of organizations, and we need different laws. So that's what the lab does. >> And how does ethics play into that. >> It's all about ethics. And it's a word I try to avoid actually, because especially in the tech industry, I'll be completely blunt here. It's an empty term. It means nothing the companies are using it to avoid being regulated. People are trying to talk about ethics, but they don't want to talk about values. But you can't do that. Ethics is a code of practice built on a set of articulated values. And if you don't want to talk about values, you don't really having conversation about ethics, you're not having a conversation about the choices you're going to make in a difficult situation. You're not having a conversation over whether one life is worth 5000 lives or everybody's lives are equal. Or if you should shift the playing field to account for the millennia of systemic and structural biases that have been built into our system. There's no conversation about ethics, if you're not talking about that thing and those things. As long as we're just talking about ethics, we're not talking about anything. >> And you were actually on the ethics panel just now. So tell us a little bit about what you guys talked about and what were some highlights. >> So I think one of the key things about the ethics panel here at WiDS this morning was that first of all started the day, which is a good sign. It shouldn't be a separate topic of discussion. We need this conversation about values about what we're trying to build for, who we're trying to protect, how we're trying to recognize individual human agency that has to be built in throughout data science. So it's a good start to have a panel about it, the beginning of the conference, but I'm hopeful that the rest of the conversation will not leave it behind. We talked about the fact that just as civil society is now dependent on these digital systems that it doesn't control. Data scientists are building data sets and algorithmic forms of analysis, that are both of those two things are just coated sets of values. And if you try to have a conversation about that, at just the math level, you're going to miss the social level, you're going to miss the fact that that's humanity you're talking about. So it needs to really be integrated throughout the process. Talking about the values of what you're manipulating, and the values of the world that you're releasing these tools into. >> And what are some key issues today regarding ethics and data science? And what are some solutions? >> So I mean, this is the Women and Data Science Conference that happens because five years ago or whenever it was, the organizers realize, "Hey, women are really underrepresented in data science and maybe we should do something about that." That's true across the board. It's great to see hundreds of women here and around the world participating in the live stream, right? But as women, we need to make sure that as you're thinking about, again, the data and the algorithm, the data and the analysis that we're thinking about all of the people, all of the different kinds of people, all of the different kinds of languages, all of the different abilities, all of the different races, languages, ages, you name it that are represented in that data set and understand those people in context. In your data set, they may look like they're just two different points of data. But in the world writ large, we know perfectly well that women of color face a different environment than white men, right? They don't work, walk through the world in the same way. And it's ridiculous to assume that your shopping algorithm isn't going to affect that difference that they experience to the real world that isn't going to affect that in some way. It's fantasy, to imagine that is not going to work that way. So we need different kinds of people involved in creating the algorithms, different kinds of people in power in the companies who can say we shouldn't build that, we shouldn't use it. We need a different set of teaching mechanisms where people are actually trained to consider from the beginning, what's the intended positive, what's the intended negative, and what is some likely negatives, and then decide how far they go down that path? >> Right and we actually had on Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, from Accenture. And she's really big in data ethics. And she brought up the idea that just because we can doesn't mean that we should. So can you elaborate more on that? >> Yeah well, just because we can analyze massive datasets and possibly make some kind of mathematical model that based on a set of value statements might say, this person is more likely to get this disease or this person is more likely to excel in school in this dynamic or this person's more likely to commit a crime. Those are human experiences. And while analyzing large data sets, that in the best scenario might actually take into account the societal creation that those actual people are living in. Trying to extract that kind of analysis from that social setting, first of all is absurd. Second of all, it's going to accelerate the existing systemic problems. So you've got to use that kind of calculation over just because we could maybe do some things faster or with larger numbers, are the externalities that are going to be caused by doing it that way, the actual harm to living human beings? Or should those just be ignored, just so you can meet your shipping deadline? Because if we expanded our time horizon a little bit, if you expand your time horizon and look at some of the big companies out there now, they're now facing those externalities, and they're doing everything they possibly can to pretend that they didn't create them. And that loop needs to be shortened, so that you can actually sit down at some way through the process before you release some of these things and say, in the short term, it might look like we'd make x profit, but spread out that time horizon I don't know two x. And you face an election and the world's largest, longest lasting, stable democracy that people are losing faith in. Set up the right price to pay for a single company to meet its quarterly profit goals? I don't think so. So we need to reconnect those externalities back to the processes and the organizations that are causing those larger problems. >> Because essentially, having externalities just means that your data is biased. >> Data are biased, data about people are biased because people collect the data. There's this idea that there's some magic debias data set is science fiction. It doesn't exist. It certainly doesn't exist for more than two purposes, right? If we could, and I don't think we can debias a data set to then create an algorithm to do A, that same data set is not going to be debiased for creating algorithm B. Humans are biased. Let's get past this idea that we can strip that bias out of human created tools. What we're doing is we're embedding them in systems that accelerate them and expand them, they make them worse (laughs) right? They make them worse. So I'd spend a whole lot of time figuring out how to improve the systems and structures that we've already encoded with those biases. And using that then to try to inform the data science we're going about, in my opinion, we're going about this backwards. We're building the biases into the data science, and then exporting those tools into bias systems. And guess what problems are getting worse. That so let's stop doing that (laughs). >> Thank you so much for your insight Lucy. Thank you for being on theCUBE. >> Oh, thanks for having me. >> I'm Sonia Tagare, thanks for watching theCUBE. Stay tuned for more. (upbeat music)

>>live from Washington, D. C. It's the Cube covering Bumi World 19. >>Do you buy movie? >>Welcome to the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin at Bumi World 2019 in Washington, D. C. Been here all day. Had some great conversations. One of my favorite things about movie is how impactful they are making their customers. And I'm very pleased to welcome the CEO off American Cancer Society. Kenny Ocular Kenny, Welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you. Happy to be here. >>Really? Enjoyed your keynote this morning on stage with Chris McNab. You know, the American Cancer Society is one of those organizations. I think that that impacts every single person on this planet in some way or another. We've all been touched by cancer, and it's so it's so interesting to look at it as how is technology fueling the American Cancer Society? Your CEO talk to us a little bit about what you guys are doing with booming. How Bhumi is really helping you guys two integrate all these different systems so that an agency is old and historic as a C s is is really transforming to be a modern kind of cloud driven organization. >>Yeah, I think all organizations now are becoming I t organizations. It's their heart, and it's important for us to the American Cancer Society to interact with. Our constituents are volunteers. Our patients are staff right in a digital way. So it is critically important that we are right there with everybody else, uh, interacting with them. And so, whether they're on the go and doing it on their mobile phone or, you know, at the doctor's office talking with their doctor about treatment options that were there to help them get them what they need, an information for their best chance to beat the beat the disease. >>So talk to me first about the business transformation that the American Cancer Society winter before your time there. But first it was. We have all these different organizations different leadership, different I t infrastructure, different financial operations model. Talk to us about first powdered it transform from a business like process perspective and then start looking at digital transformation. >>So some of it happened at the same time the organization made the decision back in about 2012 to consolidate other organizations. We were we kind of run ran regionally at the time and each independent, different region. There were 13 different regions kind of ran independently with their own I T systems. There were some shared technologies that we had of the organization, starting in about 2012 decided that no, we wanted to centralize our model and come together. We thought it was a more efficient manner and allowed us, in essence, to doom or for our mission, which is the ultimate goal. So there was a lot of consolidation around people on organization. Some of the processes I will say, God, God consolidated. Some are still going through some of that transformation. So after we kind of keep brought the organization's together and some of the people together, we kind of looked at Where are we with our technology and how do we move forward into the 21st century and do that effectively? And so at the time, we did kind of an analysis of our current state. As I mentioned in the keynote, we had a lot of technologies >>that were just older, had kind of run their course for >>end of life or just become that, you know, over change over a decade of changes and just being a monstrous the e meth or systems. That way, we're really struggling to keep up right both in terms of change and enhancement and delivering those capabilities back to our constituents. So we decided that no, it's time for us to move to a new and technology modernization effort, and we really wanted to be on the cloud first strategy. So we were looking at our cloud vendors and everything else. And one of the big selections was, as we chose Salesforce's R C R M platform we chose. Net Suite is our financially rp platform that we we could consolidate all those. And then as a part of that, we were looking at all of the leftover processes that weren't standardized, that we were still doing differently, that we could simplify. So taking stuff from 21 steps down to six steps if we could, you know, et cetera, and bringing that along with the transformation just to create more efficiencies for us and then, at the end of the day, driving a better end user experience with your volunteer, your staff, your patient, et cetera, >>it's a tremendous amount of data just in a serum like cells fours and Oracle Net Sweet. What was the thought and the opportunity to actually put an integration platform to enable that data to be shared between the applications and enabled whether it's providers or as you said volunteers, and we'll talk about that? And second, to be ableto have an experience that allows them to get whatever is that they're looking for. Talk to us about integration and sort of that driving kind of hub centralized hub aspect. >>Yeah. I mean, with any business data is key. And historically, we had our data was was >>spread out across multiple systems but then didn't always sync up. So you'd have you know you'd pull a report out of one system and say something different than when you looked at another system. So one of the key foundational tenets with the transformation was is we wanted our data to be in sync. We >>wanted to be able to see the same things no matter where you were looking. At that way, we we were all looking at the same information and basically a single source of truth. Yes, and boom. He was a critical component of that, right? With their integration platform, they were going to be our integration hub that is going >>to keep everything in sync. So we knew we had over, Um well, we had 100 and 20 applications that ultimately were a part of it. There were probably 20 major ones that had most of our data in there. And then boom. He is integrating all of those. So when information's coming across, whether it's coming in from, ah, donation made or an event participants or a patient referral form, all of that data comes in, comes in through Bumi, and it's propagated, orchestrated across the systems as it needs to be to make sure that it has all of the right information in it, that the data is as clean as we can make it, and it's all in sync. At the end of the day, >>that's critical. Having the data is great, but if you actually can't utilize an extract values from that, it's I don't want a worthless, but it's clearly the value, and they're you know, >>it's a lot harder to make good business decisions without good data, >>right? And when we're talking about something like patients dealing with with very, very scary situations, being able to Matt, whether it's matching a volunteer with ah mentor with a patient is going through something similar that could be game changing in lives and really kind of propagate. Talk to me about this service match that you guys have built with Bhumi. I think it's such a great service that you guys are delivering. Tell us about that. What it's enabling. >>So service matches an application that is part of our road to recovery program, where we provide rides for cancer patients to and from cancer treatment So often when you're getting chemo therapy, driving after chemotherapy is not an option. And ah, lot of a patient's have trouble with caregivers and family, always helping them. So the American Cancer Society provides this program to provide those rides free of charge for cancer patients. And the service match application is about connecting those patients to volunteers for the rides. So if if a patient calls in, they say, I need a ride, this is what time I'm going etcetera. They can do that now online as well, and we can connect them with a volunteer. So then that goes out to our volunteer community and somebody can say I can do that. I can help this person out, connects them up so that they can get to their treatments on time. >>That's so fantastic. And such a impact that you guys could make isn't something where you guys were integrating on the background with, like, a rideshare service or these just folks like Hey, I've got a car that seats five I want to help is it is available. It is. It is available to anybody. Anybody can >>volunteer, and most of the rides are handled volunteers If we cannot find a volunteer, we have a lot of great partners that worked with the American Cancer Society. They can provide those rideshare opportunities, so we'll make it happen and and get the patient to their treatment >>to talk to me about the ability to do that. That's a one great application of what you guys are doing with Bhumi. What was the actual building? That application? How long did it take to be able to say, Hey, we had this idea? We can connect these systems. We can facilitate something that's critical in the care of the patients. What was that kind of build an implementation like because when we talked a lot about time to value. And we've talked about that a lot today. So talk to me about it through that lens >>eso for us. We started on we're all on spreadsheets, right and paper. And yeah, it was it was about a 12 months process actually build some of the the service match application itself. The bony implementation came in as part of our transformation to make sure that all of the systems were integrated with that. So as people are requesting rides or whether that's through the call center or going through the website, that that information is there, that they can help patients with it. So if they need to change the schedule or do something different, that those all take place and that everybody has the latest information, it also enables us has were as changes are happening or even the rides are taking place. Notifications air going back out and back and forth so that everybody is up to date on all of the activity that's taking place. >>And to date, you guys have helped with service match alone Nearly 30,000 patients. >>Yeah, we we service. I think It's 30,000 patients a year. >>Wow. >>On the on the platform, we, uh, over 500,000 rides have been delivered since its inception. >>And And when was that inception? >>I'd have to look at the date. I don't >>know. A couple years ago were in the last. >>It's been It's probably been in over a decade now. >>Okay, that's awesome. So another thing. I'm curious. Four volunteers who want to do to raise funds to support the American Cancer Society is integration kind of essential component. You're smiling. So I think the answer is I think I know the answer. Talk to us about how, um, Bhumi is helping a CS to deliver, you know, a more seamless, a better fundraising experience for anybody that wants to actually go out and do that. >>Yeah. So we have a lot of donation processing systems that that that we leverage As for the American Cancer Society, because part of what we want to do is make it easy for people to raise money and raise it in their way. Right? So we have multiple systems, both from all the events that we do, whether it's the relay for life, for the making strides against breast cancer, which are two of our major event platforms. But we also have raised your way platforms. So if you want to do it yourself and you want to host a wine front razer with your friends and raise some money, we can absolutely help you do that as well. And what we do is we take all that information from all of that that from those events, and then bring that into the system so that we know what happened when who you were, so we can properly thank you. You can also get your tax credits and and all of the other things that go along with it. So >>that's awesome. So I want to ask you from a CEO's perspective, Bumi being a A single instance multi tenant cloud application delivered as a service to you and your previous role before you came to the American Cancer Society was insurance. Talk to me about that as a differentiator. What is that as a. C s continues to scale on, offer more programs and have more data to integrate roomies architecture and your perspective is that something that gives the A. C. S really a leg up to be able to do more, more. >>Absolutely. I think boonies, low code development strategy is is a differentiated for anybody that's using the platform it. We have been able to deliver Maur integrations in a shorter amount of time with our transformation than I've done in the past with other integration platforms or just developing it. I'll say the old fashioned way with Java or C sharp. So I think I think it's an integration platform. It's it's It's a real game changer in terms of what enterprises can do in terms of delivering, uh, faster and with Maur stability and performance than in the past, >>which is critical for many businesses that obviously yours included. They also take a look back at your previous role in a different industry. How is the role of the CEO changing in your perspective as things are moving to the cloud? But there's the explosion of edge and this consume arised implementation, right or influence because as consumers, we have access to everything and we want to be able to transact anything, whether it's signing up to be a volunteer or an actual patient needing to have access to records or a ride? How How is that consumers ation effect changing the role of the CEO, opening up more opportunities? >>Yeah, that's a big question. >>Sorry. It's >>okay. Um, yeah, I think the role of C I. O. Is changing significantly in terms of they are required to be more of a business leader are as much as a business leader as as any of the other C suite executives. And it is justice critical for them to understand the business where it's going be a part of the strategy with it and helped drive. From that perspective, The consumer ization component is actually in some ways, I think, making the c i o in the i t. Job a little bit harder. There's, um there's a lot that goes into making sure that what we're doing is secure on, performs well and sometimes just the overall consumer ization of technology. It looks so easy sometimes, and sometimes it's easy to underestimate some of the the complex nature of what we're doing and the level of security that needs to be applied to make sure that were protecting our constituents and making sure that their data is safe and secure. >>How does Boonmee help facilitate doctors? You right? We talk about security all the time. In any industry. How is what you're doing with Louis giving you maybe that peace of mind or or the confidence that what's being moved around as data and applications migrate, that you've got a secure, safe environment? That data? >>Yeah, I think Bumi does several things. First off, they've got a lot of security certifications is a part of their program. They make it relatively easy to to leverage that they allow us to deploy the the atoms where we need to. So whether that's on Prem or in our own tenants, behind our firewalls, all of those things will allow us to deploy it in whatever method we feel is most secure based on the data that we're trying to move >>except Well, Kenny, it's been a pleasure having you on the Cube just really quickly. Where can we go if we want to become a volunteered to help patients >>san sir dot org's >>cancer dot org's Awesome Kenny has been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank congratulations on the massive impact that A C S is making not just with Bhumi, but in the lives of many, many people. We appreciate your time. >>We're very excited and happy. We can help. >>All right. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Bhumi World 2019. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering Boomi World '19 brought to you by Boomi. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Boomi World 2019 from D.C. I'm Lisa Martin. John Furrier is my co-host for the next couple of days. And we're very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE the Boomi CEO, Chris McNabb. Chris, welcome back! >> Lisa, it's great to be here. It's always fun. >> The energy that you guys kicked off everything with this morning, the keynote, it was awesome, it was electric. I love the numbers that you started with. Boomi World '18 was about 11 months ago and we were talking, I was watching those videos back the other day, you had about 7500 customers then. You now have over 9000 customers in 80 plus countries, over 1500 endpoints integrated, 580 partners, I could go on and on, 97% renewal rate. (laughs) >> Keep selling! >> It's amazing, though, the momentum that you guys have carried into D.C. in just a short time period. Tell us about that. >> Lisa, it's really been the result of not only hard work by our team, we continue to innovate for our product and bring new things to market. But it's our customers that drive adoption and we use customer references to gain new customers and it's their stories that resonate with the new prospects that come onboard. It's our 580 partners making sure that when our customers and prospects buy into the Boomi platform that they get implemented and they shorten the timeframe and they bring intelligence and smarts and it's our community. It's the 65,000 people that are already there solving problems, that are helping our newer customers get onboarded and get success early. So it's those four legs of the stool. It's the entire ecosystem that continues to go, all of us are going along for the ride. >> Last year we asked you what you were investing in, your team as well. And the theme was pretty consistent across the board. Product first and foremost. 'Cause the product is continuing to grow and enabling platform, some great stuff there go to market, and then the customer success equation, not customer success organization, although you have a lot there, the equation... Where are you guys this year on those three points? >> Yeah, so tremendous investment in the product. You're going to hear tons of announcements. My announcements are the tip of the iceberg. We've got huge announcements in API management and the things that we're doing there. There's event-driven architecture announcements, there's the conversational AI; we're adding voice to integration platform service, with the help of Accenture. So you can now talk to your platform and interact with your enterprise applications. That's just the tip of the iceberg on the product side. We've got data hub things and so on. When we look at the other parts, John, particularly around customer success, we're doing really well there. Our customer success rate, our retention rate is now 95-96%. Our customer satisfaction was around 97%. And it's our customer success organization that helps make sure our services are being implemented, our partners are doing the right thing, success and outcomes are being delivered, and we engage to make sure that happens. If you need a little bit of Boomi help, Boomi help comes. And we partner over the success of that, and I think when you look at the key KPIs around churn and retention, as well as customer SaaS, I think we're doing a really nice job there. >> On the follow-up on that, one of the things we've been observing and reporting on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE is the successful companies are the ones that have, that was a great product, but in the cloud era, data's a big part of it. You guys have unified data platform. We talked about this last year, how you have anonymous data, you mentioned on your keynote that you get insights. So this is again, Coupa software does this, a lot of the successful profitable companies have a nice business model, by leveraging the data. How does that fit into the equation for customer success? I want you to explain the equation specifically. I mean, you guys have great format for customer focus, I get that, but what is the equation now that you have this unique modern value proposition? >> Yeah I think the equation for us is quite simple. So we do leverage all the metadata. Every single process that's ever been run, we know how long it took, did it have an error? We know how people build connections, we have that meta, we leverage that for our customers. When we look at our customers, we have a life cycle that we walk them through. When you're talking about the equation, we have a framework, a life cycle. How do we engage in sales to make sure sales is not overselling it? How do we get them to close so they look at us as a partner? How do we make sure the implementation goes well? Will they view it alone, with a partner, or with us? Get them to success. Get them through a renewal, and then how can we help them land and expand and do more things in their enterprise to continue the winning success that they established initially. >> You talked this morning revealing Boomi's competitive, unfair competitive advantage in customers, one of the things that we talk about, Chris, at every show and you probably talk about this all the time, too, is data. It's the new oil. It's gold. It's the lifeblood of a business. Yes! If an organization, whether it is an incumbent established business that might have brittle technology and disparate systems, if that type of company can't actually see all the data, have the visibility, and ensure that all of the endpoints are sharing from a single source of truth, that data value is capped, right? You guys leveraging that. I think it's over 30 Terabytes of anonymized metadata? >> Chris: It is. >> Is a great example of unlocking the power of the data that you have to make your customers better, to make them more successful and keep them, which you've obviously done. >> Yeah, it's a part of the ecosystem play that I continuously talk about. As customers use our platform, they instill it with their knowledge, experience, and their expertise. What we do, as a pure cloud provider, because I store how they map this field to that field, how long this process took, and all of these kind of things to make up that repository, I can now, as a cloud platform lever that up. And I can increase the productivity for everybody in the ecosystem. So as customers put a little bit in themselves, they get a 10x return or a massive return out, in terms of productivity and leverage that our platform's able to provide, but it takes both of us together to do that. >> Chris, I want to talk about the hard news this morning. You guys announced with Accenture, a big partnership around conversational AI. Accenture was on stage, their brand, their expertise, coming together with you guys, in a joint partnership. Could you explain, for a minute, what that is about? Just take a minute to explain the partnership and the solution specifically. >> Yeah, so when you look at conversational AI, it's the use of natural language, right? To work with technology, and you can't preprogram it, you have to understand the variations of things, you have to understand voice as identity, so when I say my pipeline report, it knows it's me, it's my authorization, it gets my data. Accenture brings the conversational AI experience, technology, and solutions to the table. And we're now linking and partnering that into our integration capabilities and connective capabilities. So as a net result, people can talk to their phone and interact with their workflows, and interact with their datastores to get data, approve workflows, etc, in a very natural way, >> What is Boomi do and what does Accenture do? 'Cause they're involved with you. You guys have a team, you're teamed up. What's the relationship? Take a minute to explain the relationship. Who's doing what? >> So, Accenture brings much of the voice capabilities. So when we mentioned this morning that language isn't a barrier, I'd like to offer up this service in Spanish and French and English, etc. Accenture does all of that work. So they're the natural language processing there, the language independent part of that, and we're all the connectivity part. We are the workflows, we are the integration. Accenture feeds us something, whether it comes, it can come in multiple languages over WhatsApp, chat, voice, it doesn't matter, comes to me, and then we do the natural unlocking of the data. >> That's their converse piece, that converse and Boomi, working together? >> Yeah, so B in the Boomiverse, you mean? >> John: Yeah. >> So, Boomiverse and B, the introduction of our astronaut B, who going to lead you on a mission through our community and be your bot. It's a working bot and we're going to leverage that kind of capability through that as well. >> One of the interesting things about the conversational AI is that we all as consumers have interacted probably pretty recently with a call center for something. And I love how Leticia, who's going to be on from Accenture later today with John and me, was talking about, we've all been there going, "Agent, agent, agent." And a few months ago, while working for theCUBE, I realized, oh actually, as frustrating as it is sometimes, we have the opportunity to help train the models. But I'd love to get your perspective on what Boomi and Accenture are seeing in organizations, executive suites about the perception of conversational AI and the impact. They see the impact possibilities that Accenture and Boomi can bring, and are they ready for that? >> I think there's going to be a bit of an educational process with leaders in the business, but if you look at Leticia's, I think, second slide, where she says, "Seven million dollars being spent "on password resets with humans." When voice is your identity, you don't need that anymore. You don't have to remember passwords. You don't have to reset things. The immense benefit for organizations is huge. 25% reduction in Op-Ecs. That's going to get people's attention. They're going to have to work our way through it, and we're going to work through the process with them. Okay, let's do a small thing, let's try it out, let's get it working, let's scale it, and let's get it to enterprise. >> It speaks to integration opportunity. I mean, voice, video, other mediums, it's an integration game. That's what you guys are doing. And that's the whole benefit of Boomi. I'd love to get your thoughts on your success formula and how you guys are going to ride this wave going forward, 'cause you have a modern infrastructure, modern solution, you get projects off the ground quickly for customers, you get the value quickly. This is a mega trend. People, they don't want projects back at them, they want to get them done quick. You guys are solving that big problem. What's next? Where are you investing? What's your thoughts on the business? What do you do? >> Well in terms of what's next, so we really did go after the entire transformation problem. Integration's not just data to us. It's people. It's devices, it's your processes, right? So we look at it holistically, we've done that. We brought intelligence in so now we're providing insights, data privacy insights that we talked about in the keynotes, conversational AI and that's the start. But we've got to do a better job of dashboards, other insights, what is the return on investment of a Boomi purchase and how much is it helping? To what degree is transform making a bottom line impact in your business? Having the analytics to support that is going to be big. >> Lisa and I were talking on the intro round, you can't hide success anymore. You can't hide the ball. 'Cause your instrument, the outcomes, and the outcomes are either you're getting paid for value, or you're achieving a mission, whether it's the veterans or the American Cancer Institute, usage of an app, you can't hide the ball anymore! It's either success or not. You guys are very customer centric. Hundreds of use cases, best practices. This is your focus. The people part of success has been a missing link in the digital transmission: process, technology, people, culture. You guys are breaking through. Is that because the winds people are getting? Is that the energy? Is that the people? What's the people equation on your end? You've been so successful with, you guys are having success there. >> The Boomi culture, when we talk internally, who are we and what do we value? One of the first things we talk about is, we are customer-first. What that means to us is outcomes matter. It's not about buying our technology. It's not about getting data; it's about an outcome. And we talked a lot about outcomes today. In fact, at this show, throughout all the presentations, there will be roughly 100 different customer outcome stories that are shared globally. So when we talk about breaking through, because we want to partner with them and join them in their goal, and whatever it takes to do that, that starts to resonate. It's taken a while to resonate, but now it really is, and when you feel the energy on the floor, I hope you guys feel the same thing, it's just enormous and it's really starting to grow and we couldn't be happier. >> One of the cool things that I heard yesterday, Chris, I have had the opportunity to talk to a number of your customers in the last week who said, I always say, "Tell me about the differentiators, "the technical differentiators." The cloud native always comes up, the low-code. We talked yesterday about CFOs becoming citizen developers, and I thought, Wow, really? Do they know that? But on the business side, resoundingly, customers are saying cultural alignment. "Boomi understands our business." And so what you guys are enabling on the transformation of people side, as John mentioned, you're delivering that because it was one of the things that customers have said that was one of the deciding factors in going with Boomi, and they'll say, "We evaluated A, B, and C." And this cultural alignment. Yeah, I mean, Boomi has fans and it sounds kind of cliche to say, it's true! >> I appreciate that, and that is really great to hear! I stood up on stage last year and this year, and repeated the phrase, "I don't want to be their software vendor." I don't think of it that way. Nobody on my team thinks about it that way. We're building. I want to be your transformation partner. I want to be a part of, a piece of, how you're moving your business forward. Whatever it takes to do that: workflows, mobile applications, data integration, warehouse problems, insights. We can get engaged in all of that. We can go end to end in your enterprise, to open it up for you, and then provide access for your customers in ways you never dreamed of. And being a part of that is just an awesome thing for us. >> Chris, I want to get your reaction to some comment Michael Dell made, two comments Michael Dell made to me on theCUBE. 2014, I asked him, besides VMWare, the crown jewel of Dell technologies, what are you excited about? He said "Pivitol." He was fixated on Pivitol at that time. Okay, Pivitol goes public. They get bought back into the fold, it's all going on. Last year at this event, I asked him, What are you focused on this year? Now what's getting your focus? He goes, "Boomi." What's your reaction to that? Because you know Michael, when he gets fixated on something, things happen. What's your reaction to that? >> My reaction is "Thank you, Michael, "for the brand awareness." I certainly appreciate that. Certainly when he focuses on 'em, it gets attention. We have, the Boomi business as it gets capitalized by Dell has had 100% executive support everything we've ever asked for as a leadership team, we've gotten and then some. Could not be a better situation for this business, the Boomi business, and then what Michael does for it, and as we push that forward, I believe and he believes that data is the fuel of AI in the future. It's going to be all about data, and Boomi sits right in the middle of that. >> And he likes to look under the hood, too. He's not just a business guy; he's a techie. So he's looking under the hood, he likes what he sees (laughs). Of course! >> When he talks to me about it, he's been pleased with the results to date, I'll say that. >> Excellent. Well, we have this, great, as we wrap things up, a story that is near and dear to, not just my heart, but many hearts. Talk to us about what this is. What Boomi is doing with the American Cancer Society, which I think is just phenomenal. >> Lisa, I really appreciate it. So, this morning, and I'll just kind of hold this up for a moment, but, this morning we had the American Cancer Society as one of our reference customers, how they completed nine projects in 14 months, one of which impacted 30,000 patients achieving 500,000, half a million rides, and integrated together 150 partners to make sure people could get to their life saving treatments and back, and it's a volunteer network. We're happy to be a part of that. So we undertook a cause. We're going to have a pass the baton for the American Cancer Society here at Boomi World. And every time we pass the baton, $2, $1 from us, being matched by Dell Technologies makes it $2, and we're going to pass the baton here, hoping to crush it and get to a $20,000 donation. So if I could pass the baton to each of you-- >> Lisa: Absolutely! >> That's $2, >> That's four. >> John, if you'd keep doing it, I want to ring the bell, I want to crush this for the American Cancer Society. >> That's awesome! >> Pass it to the team. >> Exactly, throw it over there! >> Chris: Pass it around to everybody, let's keep this thing hopping. >> Don't throw it! >> Well Chris, that is-- >> We'll pass it around. >> Such an outstanding story. There are so many, as you said. There's going to be a 100 different customers talked about here over the next probably, started yesterday with Partner Summit today and tomorrow. That's a lot! We are happy to have a whole bunch of them on the program today and hear how many different use cases Boomi is facilitating. You guys have taken I-Pass way beyond connecting cloud to on-prem. It's edge, it's any data, any device, low-code. I know I'm speaking your language. >> I love it! >> But we're hearing that, we're feeling that, we're excited to be able to share that through theCUBE this week. >> Lisa, well listen, thank you for being here at Boomi World, it's always great to have you. It's great to talk to you. >> Lisa: Likewise. >> And I'm looking forward to a great show! >> John: Thank you for coming on. >> Well, thank you. >> Lisa: All right, our pleasure. >> Appreciate it. >> For Chris McNabb, and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Boomi World 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

live from Washington DC it's the cube covering booby world 19 to you by booby welcome to the cubes coverage of boomy world 2019 I'm Lisa Martin with John Fourier John it's great to be back hosting gloomy world with you in DC this year last year in Vegas this year in DC a lot of government business a lot of public sector a lot of tech for good going on in the keynotes we will be continuing to take their culture expanding this cloud mindset and service model low code data integration unified platforms boomy verts a new introduction a lot of great announcements a great company I like I'm like I like gloomy I do too the energy here is great you know Lumi world 2018 was only 11 months ago John you mentioned we were in Vegas and they have added another 1500 plus new customers now there are over nine thousand customers in 80 countries 580 partners and customers are crossing every industry I had a great opportunity to speak with about a dozen boomy customers in the last week and their Bhoomi fandom it sounds kind of silly but it's really true what they have enabled their customers to achieve like this morning we heard from American Cancer Society for example Gilead leading hotels of the world is really enabling businesses to transform yeah you know day Volante and i we started covering the big data world in 2010 when we first started the cube you know one of the things that they observe and the research was that the value was going to be created and captured by practitioners not so much the vendor selling product at that point but it was cloud computing you know the theme of Bumi is business outcomes accelerated and the big trend that's driving it is that practitioners who are launching projects of either aanchal in the cloud or on-premise premises they're the ones who are getting the value out of it so what's happening is you're seeing with the ability to start projects quickly small projects and the number of projects a company has in their digital transformation is increasing this is the mega trend and from those projects whether it's a mobile app or a SAS solution or anything it's thrown off data so what's happening is you have this trend trend of more projects with the need to get them up and running fast getting to value and that is where Bumi's kind of hit their sweet spot because they got a platform that allows people to launch projects fast small medium or large projects and get them done quickly and that's throwing off value but from the value not only is the doubling down on those projects it's the data so the unification of the data and integrating it in it really kind of is Nirvana for a business owner a developer or an application because the platform allows that to happen and that's where this new world of Cloud 2.0 is kind of hitting its stride right now and that's why companies are getting the profitability and the old model of you know get growth at all costs and losses like we see on the public markets we work in other unicorns they're just investing to take territory and the profits aren't there because they're not enabling those kinds of outcomes so I think Bumi's in a nice spot I think is a nice portfolio for Dell to have this company I think this is gonna be the next pivotal I think what pivotal did with JAL technologies was a big part of their growth I think that and they were very successful in public then they ended up getting bought back by VMware and Dell technologies I think Bumi's the next rising star in the Dell technologies portfolio they won't say that publicly they won't say it on the record they won't even admit it privately but that's kind of what's going on well when we were at Dell technology's world Jon covering the cube with two sets for three days Michael talked about Michael Dell talked about Bumi as the number one cloud integration platform and as the iPad market has evolved in the last ten years you know it's gone from needing to connect cloud to on-prem unprimed edge and Bumi's uniquely positioned as this single instance multi-tenant cloud application delivered as a service and as Chris McNab CEO of Bhumi says who will be on momentarily with us our unfair advantage is our customers and the customers are all leveraging the platforms we just talked about the outcomes with the projects but here's the other advantage that bloomie has they have a anonymized data model where they get the benefit of the collective customer base so the collective data can give them better insights and companies that are successful that have gone public recently coppa software and others these guys are using the data create more advantage for their customers again this is one of those again nuance points but that's where the value is the value is in the day to date is the new software and this is where the advantage is interesting Michael Dell is interested in Bhumi I asked him around 2014 you know outside of VMware the crown jewel of Dell I said what are you interested in and he said pivotal and he was geeking out on pivotal because he saw the value of pivotal last year I asked Michael Dell what do you want sitting down and he said Bhumi I think he sees Bhumi as a key element in that bringing the glue together for the overall dealt with technology platform well there's a great story how when Dell was acquiring many companies not too long ago Gumi was really the center of that universe for facilitating these integrations you talk about data we talk about it John at every show customers do as well whether you're calling it the new oil gold the lifeblood currency of an organization if it is siloed in hundreds of applications and a business cannot trust where's my single source of truth its value cannot be harnessed and one of the things Bhoomi does really well with master data hub is to allow I think they said there they can connect now with over 1500 endpoints like Salesforce NetSuite for example allowing customers to synchronize data between applications dramatically transforming everything from customer our employee onboarding to a call center experience yeah I mean I think the digital transformation is a topic that's been talking about ad nauseam it's been kicked around become a cliche but we look at digital transformation it's people process and technologies and the process and technology side people have good visibility and what the options are out they get cloud you've got on-premise got a lot of software software-defined stuff but the people equation is interesting we were just at Red Hat's ansible Fest last week and in the automation space on the DevOps side the people are actually getting the outcomes that they need and that value piece and we were talking about that's the third leg of the stool of digital transformation so Dell tech Gee's has boomy which hits that spot directly the people here are achieving their outcomes that they want in their projects they're getting that value that energizes the people component and helps the cultural shift on digital transformation so I think the people aspect of what boom he's doing is super critical that is the the final chapter of digital transformation people process technology processes are up being automated the technology's there it's the people equation and they're doing it you're right they are doing it and that's hard a number of customers have Bumi's that I spoke with yesterday I talked about one of the main I always say to customers what were the business differentiators what were the technical differentiators and a lot of them will talk about Bumi's cultural alignment with their own culture as really standing out considerably against their peers you and I were talking before we went live about just the atmosphere in the keynote sort of some of the the tongue-in-cheek they are really people helping other people and you get that feeling but customers are talking as well about dramatic transformations to their productivity that they actually didn't even expect to get when they said we need to integrate a sales force with a transport management system for example and whoa suddenly we are saving whatever it's X number of clicks that really starts to snowball in terms of hours saved per person per month per year yeah I think what's interesting from the keynote today is there it builds on last year's boomy where we asked Chris port the CE OS variety and the CEO as well what their what their strategy was what they're investing in they said we're investing in the product and they continue to invest in the product and now with AI and The Voice integration voice enabled our voice accessible data sets you're starting to see that integration piece go another level I think that's interesting that sets the table for the AI stuff that they're doing and I think that's gonna be again leveraging that unified data set that to me is a big deal I think that's the top story here is that you starting to see a product focus using the data having those data integration points with voice and other mediums and if they can get that right then that's a nice automation layer that's gonna be where the next level of value for bloom he's gonna be created you know and their challenge is their small team they hired 750 people in q2 of this year they're hiring more people so can they kind of keep the rocket ship going on the customer growth and again it's a SAS business model it's a unified data set so I like this I like their their fundamentals so you talk about AI and one of the big announcements came out this morning that Chris McNabb CEO talked about with Accenture is what they're doing to partner together to enable conversational AI and one of the women from eccentric who was on stage will be joining us later today and I loved how she and Chris we're talking about you know we all interact with AI whether we're calling an ISP or some sort of call center and you're screaming agent into the phone because it's really starting to frustrate you one of the things that I had a mind shift on earlier this year while covering a show for the cube was hey that's actually our opportunity as regular folks on the street to help the models learn and train and what they showed today on that fun demo was how they're actually talking to be the boom I bought about looking at you know for example employee onboarding what percent complete is that what needs to be done and how can I actually use voice recognition to get other processes within the organization across business units done I do though think what about somebody like Meryl Streep who can do all these different accents when conversational AI comes up and it's gonna recognize your voices the footprint that was one thing I thought about these people that you know that have great ability to mimic accents gonna do well and they're as big as Amazon they can get the celebrities Amazon just kept Alexa as now the voices from celebrities I think it's pretty cool I think one of the things that I think is important to talk about in this keynote was the key my key takeaway was they hit the core themes unified data set which is their value multi-cloud global customers ecosystem partners low code developer environments are changing and developing fast and data integration this is the key areas of topics and what they announced here on stage was the voice accessible data services that secure and scalable more low code conversations projects are being deployed faster and this transformation journey and I think if I look at blew me outside of those strengths I just mentioned I think they're challenged lisa is going to be can they foster the ecosystem can they build those blocking and tackling things that they need to get done in the marketplace on the go to market how see the customer growth is there can they develop that ecosystem once that ecosystem is developed then you're gonna see more more action there but it's still small then they got to do some more work I think the momentum is there and we should definitely point out that we are in DC which is symbolic for a be me just a few weeks ago in August they announced FedRAMP authorization they are one of not the first but one of the first iPad vendors in the a in the FedRAMP marketplace but something that that Chris McNabb and look at my notes here said this morning was they were the first iPads vendor to get certified in five months and their competitor I have a feeling I know who it is took 18 months so they're proud of that that really but he also said in something that we can unpack with Chris McNabb a little bit later today is that the federal certification the availability in the marketplace opens up even more opportunities not just for federal from a security from a privacy perspective yeah this is a big this is a big story I think this is gonna be a subtext because they're well they're another announcements but that FedRAMP certification in record time as you pointed out it's significant for a couple of reasons we've been following the government transformation since the CIA deal of AWS and the recent jedi contract which we've been talking a lot about really points to the modernization of the government and the procurement and the government is going through its own transformation and the ones that are being successful the ones that have all the attributes that boom he has cloud-based unified data sets security built in these are the fast track to the modern infrastructure that's what the government's doing so I'm expecting a lot of DC business I think it's kind of not a flu that they're in DC here for a reason they're here to do some business they're doing work with the veterans they're doing work with American Cancer Society other things but the government I think they're gonna do a lot of government business because once they get that certification that's going to open up a ton of business and we've seen the government is leaning towards modern architectures not the old-school Oracle's of the world so you know that is definitely changing and I think they're in a good position you brought up American Cancer Society and veterans two things that we're nearing dear to my heart and it was great see one how boomy is working with American Cancer Society their CIO was on stage he will be joining you and I this afternoon about how they are leveraging Bhumi for I think they call it service match to match cancer patients with uber and lyft drivers to get people to their treatment in back and how that was enabled by Bhumi I just thought was was the story that will resonate with every single person regardless of where you live what industry that you're in that's transformative and that's such a service that is so critical well that's that points to the validation of the trend we were just talking about that at the beginning was the trend about getting projects off the ground isn't about some IT department it could come from someone who sees an opportunity to solve a problem in the business or their mission in this case your example this is huge because the time to value is faster so it's not an IT lead thing it's a business or mission driven outcome so throwing an app together and and mashing up you know GPS and other things to provide value that's where the action is that's why there's so much action in cloud that's why boom he's doing so well because they're hitting that mark right there doesn't it's not hard to do you know time to value can be one of those as a marketer how do you actually measure that but we're seeing roles exactly it works seeing that in so many different use cases of themI in so many different industries whether it's American Cancer Society or Sky powering Internet and services for customers elisa listen this is this is a big thing that people always whitewash and they try to hide the ball on and we're now living in a transparent era of a modern infrastructure and these applications you cannot hide the ball on success it's either has value or a dozen as valuating throwing off revenue because people pay for value and if it's being used from a mission standpoint that's undeniable so what's happening now is that the new kpi's our success can be defined and you you haven't helped KPIs and dashboards and say hey are people paying for it boom top-line revenue bottom line profit usage on apps so there's no more you know people fudging the numbers or trying to hide the ball on whether a project was successful that this is a gonna change the landscape significantly it is and we're gonna unpack all of that today John we've got a whole bunch of the booming on today some partners and some customers as well so guys stick with us John and I have a grateful day packed Lisa Martin with John Fourier you're watching the cube from booming world 19

>> Narrator: From Seattle, Washington it's the CUBE covering AWS Imagine non-profit. Brought to you by Amazon web services. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. We're on the waterfront in Seattle, it's an absolutely gorgeous couple of days here at the AWS Imagine Nonprofit Conference. We went to the AWS Imagine Education Conference, this is really all about nonprofits and we're hearing all kinds of interesting stories about how these people are using AWS to help conquer really big problems. We're going to shift gears a little bit from the two footed problems to the four footed problems and that's animals and everybody likes animals but nobody likes animal shelters and nobody likes the ultimate solution that many animal shelters used to use to take care of problems. But thank you to our next guest, that is not quite the case so much anymore. So we're really happy to have Angie Embree on. She is the CIO of Best Friends Animal Society, Angie great to see you. >> It's great to see you as well and thank you for having me. >> Oh absolutely! So before we got on I just heard this crazy, crazy statistic that when your organization started in 1984 approximately 17 million animals were killed in US shelters per year. That number is now down to 700 thousand, that is a giant, giant reduction. And yet you, with big audacious goals really are looking to get that to zero. So, that's a giant goal, give us a little bit of background on the organization and how you decided to go after a goal like that and some of the ways you are actually going to achieve it. >> Well, the organization started in 1984 and it started with a group of friends in Southern Utah who decided that, you know the killing in America's shelters just had to go. So really the Best Friends founders started the no-kill movement along with a gentleman in San Francisco by the name of Rich Avanzino. And as you said, they took you know the killing down from 17 million in 1984 to approximately 733 thousand now. The organization started as just the sanctuary, we have the largest no-kill companion animal sanctuary in the country where we hold about 17 hundred animals every day. And we also have, you know, knowing that we needed to help out the rest of the country we have built life saving centers in Houston, Texas. Or we're working on Houston, Texas but Los Angels, California, New York City, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Georgia, it seems like I've left somebody out but, >> Probably, but that's okay. >> We have life saving centers all over the country. So it was really, you know, when they realized what was going on in America's shelters it was really the idea that we should not be killing animals for space. So, just recently in fact, I will say recently but in the last few years, Julie Castle our CEO put kind of, did our moon shot, put that stake in the ground and said we're going to take this country no-kill by the year 2025. >> Right. >> So it's super exciting. >> So it's really interesting because you guys are trying to execute your vision, and it's easy to execute your own vision, but it's a whole different thing when you're trying to execute your vision through this huge infrastructure of shelters that have been around forever. So, I wonder if you can explain kind of what's your relationship with shelters that you don't own. I guess, I think you said before we turned on the cameras there are affiliates, so how does that relationship work? How do you help them achieve your goal which is no-kill. >> Yeah, so we have over 27 hundred network partners around the country. And what we do is we help to educate them on, you know we understand their problems, we have creative programs to solve those problems. So we help to educate them on, you know, how they can implement these programs within their shelters. We provide them grant funding, we have an annual conference every year where they can come and learn. But they're really our partners and you know we know we can't do it alone. It's going to take us, it's going to take them and it's going to take everybody in every community to really step up and help solve the problem. >> Right, and what was the biggest thing that changed in terms of kind of attitude in terms of the way they operate the shelter because I think you said before that a lot of the killing was done to make room. >> Right, killing is done usually for space. >> So what do they do know? Clearly the space demands probably haven't changed so what are they doing alternatively where before they would put the animal down? >> Well alternatively we're doing transport programs. So there are areas in the country that actually have a demand for animals. So instead of killing the animals, we put them on some sort of transport vehicle and we take them to the areas that are in demand. We also do what's called a trap-neuter-return program. So one of the biggest problems across the country are community cats so those, a lot of people call them feral cats but they're community cats and usually have a caretaker. But what we do is we trap those cats, we take them into the shelter, we neuter them and vaccinate them and then return them to their home. That keeps them from making a lot of other little cats. >> Making babies (laughs) >> So yeah, cat's are one of the biggest problems in shelters today because of the community cats, they're feral cats and they're not adoptable. So if we can, we don't have to kill them. We can, you know, we can keep them from reproducing as I said and then we can put them back in their habitat where they live a long healthy life, happy life. >> Right, so you said you've joined the organization 5 years ago, 5 and 1/2 years ago and you're the CIO, first ever CIO. >> I am (laughs) >> What brought you here and then now that you're here with kind of a CIO hat, what are some of the new perspective that you can bring to the organization that didn't necessarily, that they had had before from kind of a technical perspective? >> Well, what brought me here was, I never expected to be here, if you would have told me I would be the CIO at Best Friends Animal Society you know 10 years ago I would have said you're kidding because I didn't really realize that there were professional positions in organizations like Best Friends. But I, you know, my journey begins the same as, began the same as a lot of peoples did. I was that little kid always bringing home animals and you know my mother hated it. You know it was always something showing up at our doorstep with me, you know. And I just loved animals all my life and as I went through college and got my degree and started my professional career, then I thought well I'm going to of course have animals because I can have as many as I want now, right! (laughs) So I started adopting, and I didn't even realize until I was in my 30s that they were killing in shelters and I learned that in Houston, Texas when I lived there. I was working for IBM at the time, and one day a lady came on the television and she said they were doing a new segment and she said we're a no-kill shelter and I thought oh my god if there are no-kill shelters then there are kill shelters, right? >> There must be the other. >> Yeah so, to make a long story short then I started not working in animal welfare but doing more to support the movement and donating. Adopting from shelters and fostering animals and then one day I had been to Best Friends as a visitor vacationing in this beautiful part of Utah. But I saw the CIO ... >> Position. >> position open and I said I'm going for it. >> Good for you. >> Yeah. >> Good for you, so now you're there so what are some of the things you've implemented from kind of a techy, you know kind of data perspective that they didn't have before? >> Well, they didn't have a lot. >> They probably didn't have a lot, besides email and the obvious things. >> Being the first CIO I don't know that I knew what I was walking into at the time because I got to Kanab, and Kanab Utah where the sanctuary is, is the headquarters. And Kanab is very infrastructure challenged. >> (laughs) Infrastructure challenged, I like that. >> There is one ISP in Kanab and there is no redundancy in networks so we really don't have, you know, you come from the city and you think, you take these things for granted and you find out oh my god, what am I going to do? And Kanab is you know the hub of our network, so if Kanab goes down, you know the whole organization is down so one of the first decisions I made was that we were going to the cloud. >> Right, right. >> Because we had to get Kanab out of that position and that was one of our, one of the first major decisions I made and we chose AWS as our partner to do that so that was very very exciting. We knew that they had infrastructure we couldn't dream of providing. >> Right, right. >> And, you know we could really make our whole network more robust, our applications would be available and we could really do some great things. >> You're not worried about the one ISP provider in Kanab because of an accident that knocks a phone pole down. >> Yeah, yeah. >> All right but then you're talking about some new things that you're working on and a new thing you talked about before we turned the cameras on community lifesaving dashboards, what is that all about? >> Okay, so a couple of years ago the community lifesaving dashboard is the culmination of two years of work. From all across the Best Friends organization not just the IT department, in fact it was the brainchild of our Chief Mission Officer Holly Sizemore. But it's really, in animal welfare there's never been a national picture of what the problem really is regarding killing animals in shelters. So we did this big. >> Because they're all regional right? They're all regional shelters, very local. >> They're all local community shelters, yes. And transparency isn't forced, so you know some states force transparency, they reinforce in the report numbers but a lot of states don't. >> At the state level. >> Yeah, a lot of states don't, so. You know when you're killing animals in shelters you really don't want people to know that. >> Yeah, yeah it's not something you want to advertise. >> Because the American public doesn't believe in it. So anyway we worked really hard to collect all this data from across the country and we put it all into this dashboard and it is now a tool where anybody in the public, it's on our website, can look at it and they can see that where we're at from a national level. They can see where they're at from a state level, they can drill down into their community and they can drill down to an individual shelter. >> Wow. >> And the idea behind the dashboard is to really, is to get communities behind helping their shelters. Because as I said earlier, it's going to take us all. >> Right. >> And not only Best Friends and our partners but the public plays a big part of this. >> Right, and so when did that roll out? Do you have any kind of feedback, how's it working? >> It's working wonderfully, we rolled it out at our conference in July. >> So recently, so it's a pretty new initiative. >> Yeah it's just a few weeks old. >> Okay. >> We rolled it out at our national conference and we were all a bit nervous about it, you know especially from a technology perspective. >> Right, right. >> We knew that being the first of it's kind ever in animal welfare that you know it was going to get a lot of publicity both inside and outside the movement. >> (laughs) How you want to say both pro and con. >> Yeah, and it's sitting on our website, well really pro and con. >> Right, right. >> But it's sitting on our website and we're like okay, we don't know what kind of traffic we're going to get, you know what are we going to do about this? So we spent a lot of time with Amazon prior to the launch, you know having them look at our environment and getting advice, discussing it with them. >> Not going to bring down that ISP in Utah. >> No, thank god! (laughs) >> (laughs) >> No it wasn't, thank god we were in the cloud. So Amazon really helped us prepare and then the day of the launch, we knew the time of the launch. So we actually had a war room set up, a virtual war room and we had Amazon employees participating in our war room. We watched the traffic and we did get huge spikes in traffic at all times through the day when certain things were happening. And I'm happy to say from a technology perspective it was a non-event because we did not crash we stayed up, we handled all the traffic, we scaled when we needed to, and we did it you know, virtually at the press of a button. >> Awesome. >> Or the flick of a switch, whatever you want to say. >> That's what you want right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> You just don't want anyone to know, I was like give a good ref, nobody's talking about you you probably did a good job. >> Yeah, exactly yeah. >> Good, so before I let you go so what are some of your initiatives now looking forward. You've got this great partner in AWS, you have basically as much horsepower as you need to get done what you need to get done. What are some of the things that you see, you know kind of next for your roadmap? >> Well, we have a lot. >> Don't give me the whole list (laughs) >> No I'm just going to hit on a few key points. I think, you know we used Amazon initially as our cloud infrastructure but I think the biggest thing we're looking at is platform as a service. There is so much capability out there with predictive analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, ARVR, you name it facial recognitions, so we're really investigating those technologies because we think they have you know they could have a huge impact on our movement and really help us achieve life saving. >> Right, right. >> And, I think that, you know we're starting we have our fledgling data science program. We're using the Amazon data lake technology, Athena, Glue, they were just telling me about data lake formation which I just a few minutes ago emailed my data guy and said start looking at data lake formation. >> Right, right. >> So, I mean we're really investing in the platform as a service. The other thing I see is that we're, animal welfare is sort of broken from a technology perspective and a data perspective. In that we have no interoperability and you know we don't have the data available. So lets say you want to adopt a 5-year old animal. Well, you go to a shelter you can't get 5 years of history on a 5 year old animal. So it's really starting to fix the foundation for the movement as a whole, not just Best Friends. So, making sure that you know the veterinary data is there, all the data from the pet ecosystem is there. So we're investigating with AWS they're actually coming to our sanctuary in a couple of months, we're going to do a workshop to figure out how we do this, how we really fix it so that we have interoperability between every shelter when an animal moves from shelter to rescue or whatever so that their data follows them wherever they go. So adopters are fully informed when adopting an animal. >> Because you're in a pretty interesting position, because you're not with any one particular shelter you kind of cross many many boundaries. So you're in a good position to be that aggregator of that data. >> Yeah, I don't know that we want to be the aggregator but we want to lead the movement towards doing that. Just getting the technology players, the shelter management systems, the other people who play a role in technology for animal welfare, getting them in a room and talking and figuring out this problem is huge. >> Right. >> And with a partner like Amazon we feel it can be solved. >> Right. Well Angie thank you for taking a few minutes and sharing your story, really really enjoyed hearing it. >> All right thank you so much. >> All right, she's Angie, I'm Jeff you're watching the CUBE we're at AWS Imagine in Seattle, thanks for watching we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From Cambridge Massachusetts, it's The Cube covering MIT Chief Data Officer, and Information Quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to MIT in Cambridge, Massachusets everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante I'm here with Paul Gillin. Day two of the of the MIT Chief Data Officer Information Quality Conference. One of the things we like to do, at these shows, we love to profile Boston area start-ups that are focused on data, and in particular we love to focus on start-ups that are founded by women. Julie Johnson is here, She's the Co-founder and CEO of Armored Things. Julie, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you. >> So why did you start Armored Things? >> You know, Armored Things was created around a mission to keep people safe. Early in the time where were looking at starting this company, incidents like Las Vegas happened, Parkland happened, and we realized that the world of security and operations was really stuck in the past right? It's a manual solutions generally driven by a human instinct, anecdotal evidence, and tools like Walkie-Talkies and video cameras. We knew there had to be a better way right? In the world of Data that we live in today, I would ask if either of you got in your car this morning without turning on Google Maps to see where you were going, and the best route with traffic. We want to help universities, ball parks, corporate campuses do that for people. How do we keep our people safe? By understanding how they live. >> Yeah, and stay away from Lambert Street in Cambridge by the way. >> (laughing) >> Okay so, you know in people, when they think about security they think about cyber, they think about virtual security, et cetera et cetera, but there's also the physical security aspect. Can you talk about the balance of those two? >> Yeah, and I think both are very important. We actually tend to mimic some of the revolutions that have happened on the cyber security side over the last 10 years with what we're trying to do in the world of physical security. So, folks watching this who are familiar with cyber security might understand concepts like anomaly detection, SIEM and SOAR for orchestrated response. We very much believe that similar concepts can be applied to the physical world, but the unique thing about the physical world, is that it has defined boundaries, right? People behave in accordance with their environment. So, how do we take the lessons learned in cyber security over 10 to 15 years, and apply them to that physical world? I also believe that physical and cyber security are converging. So, are there things that we know in the physical world because of how we approach the problem? That can be a leading indicator of a threat in either the physical world or the digital world. What many people don't understand is that for some of these cyber security hacks, the first weak link is physical access to your network, to your data, to your systems. How do we actually help you get an eye on that, so you already have some context when you notice it in the digital realm. >> So, go back to the two examples you sited earlier, the two shooting examples. Could those have been prevented or mitigated in some way using the type of technology you're building? >> Yeah, I hate to say that you could ever prevent an incident like that. Everyone wants us to do better. Our goal is to get a better sense predicatively of the leading indicators that tell you you have a problem. So, because we're fundamentally looking at patterns of people and flow, I want to know when a normal random environment starts to disperse in a certain way, or if I have a bottle neck in my environment. Because if then I have that type of incident occur, I already know where my hotspots are, where my pockets of risk are. So, I can address it that much more efficiently from a response perspective. >> So if people are moving quickly away from a venue, it might be and indication that there's something wrong- >> It could be, Yeah. That demands attention. >> Yeah, when you go to a baseball game, or when you go to work I would imagine that you generally have a certain pattern of behavior. People know conceptually what those patterns are. But, we're the first effort to bring them data to prove what those patterns are so that they can actually use that data to consistently re-examine their operations, re-examine their security from a staffing perspective, from a management perspective, to make sure that they're using all the data that's at their disposal. >> Seems like there would be many other applications beyond security of this type of analysis. Are you committed to the security space, or do you have broader ambitions? >> Are we committed to the security space is a hundred percent. I would say the number one reason why people join our team, and the number one reason why people call us to be customers is for security. There's a better way to do things. We fundamentally believe that every ball park, every university, every corporate campus, needs a better way. I think what we've seen though is exactly what you're saying. As we built our software, for security in these venues, and started with an understanding of people and flow, there's a lot that falls out of that right? How do I open gates that are more effective based on patterns of entry and exit. How do I make sure that my staffing's appropriate for the number of people I have in my environment. There's lots of other contextual information that can ultimately drive a bottom line or top line revenue. So, you take a pro sports venue for example. If we know that on a 10 degree colder day people tend to eagres more early in the game, how do we adjust our food and beverage strategy to save money on hourly workers, so that we're not over staffing in a period of time that doesn't need those resources. >> She's talking about the physical and the logical security worlds coming together, and security of course has always been about data, but 10 years ago it was staring at logs increasing the machines are helping us do that, and software is helping us do that. So can you add some color to at least the trends in the market generally, and then maybe specifically what you're doing bringing machine intelligence to the data to make us more secure. >> Sure, and I hate to break it to you, but logs are still a pretty big part of what people are watching on a daily basis, as are video cameras. We've seen a lot of great technology evolve in the video management system realm. Very advanced technology great at object recognition and detecting certain behaviors with a video only solution, right? How do we help pinpoint certain behaviors on a specific frame or specific camera. The only problem with that is, if you have people watching those cameras, you're still relying on humans in the loop to catch a malicious behavior, to respond in the event that they're notified about something unusual. That still becomes a manual process. What we do, is we use data to watch not only cameras, but we are watching your cameras, your Wi-Fi, access control. Contextual data from public transit, or weather. How do we get this greater understanding of your environment that helps us watch everything so that we can surface the things that you want the humans in the loop to pay attention to, right? So, we're not trying to remove the human, we're trying to help them focus their time and make decisions that are backed by data in the most efficient way possible. >> How about the concerns about The Surveillance Society? In some countries, it's just taken for granted now that you're on camera all the time. In the US that's a little bit more controversial. Is what your doing, do you have to be sensitive to that in designing the tools you're building? >> Yeah, and I think to Dave's question, there are solutions like facial recognition which are very much working on identifying the individual. We have a philosophy as a company, that security doesn't necessarily start with the individual, it starts with the aggregate. How do we understand at an aggregate macro level, the patterns in an environment. Which means I don't have to identify Paul, or I don't have to identify Dave. I want to look for what's usual and unusual, and use that as the basis of my response. There's certain instances where you want to know who people are. Do I want to know who my security personnel are so I can dispatch them more efficiently? Absolutely. Let's opt those people in and allow them to share the information they need to share to be better resources for our environment. But, that's the exception not the norm. If we make the norm privacy first, I think we'll be really successful in this emerging GDPR data centric world. >> But I could see somebody down the road saying hey can you help us find this bad guy? And my kids at camp this week, This is his 7th year of camp, and this year was the first year my wife, she was able to sign up for a facial recognition thing. So, we used to have to scroll through hundreds and hundreds of pictures to see oh, there he is! And so Deb signs up for this thing, and then it pings you when your son has a picture taken. >> Yeah. And I was like, That's awesome. Oh. (laughing) >> That's great until you think about it. >> But there aren't really any clear privacy laws today. And so you guys are saying, look it, we're looking at the big picture. >> That's right. >> But that day is coming isn't it? >> There's certain environments that care more than others. If you think about universities, which is where we first started building our technology, they cared greatly about the privacy of their students. Health care is a great example. We want to make sure that we're protecting peoples personal data at a different level. Not only because that's the right thing to do, but also from a regulatory perspective. So, how do we give them the same security without compromising the privacy. >> Talk about Bottom line. You mentioned to us earlier that you just signed a contract with a sports franchise, you're actually going to help them, help save them money by deploying their resources more efficiently. How does your technology help the bottom line? >> Sure, you're average sporting venue, is getting great information at the point a ticket is scanned or a ticket is purchased, they have very little visibility beyond that into the customer journey during an event at their venue. So, if you think about again, patterns of people and flow from a security perspective, at our core we're helping them staff the right gates, or figure out where people need to be based on hot spots in their environment. But, what that also results in is an ability to drive other operational benefits. Do we have a zone that's very low utilization that we could use as maybe even a benefit to our avid fans. Send them to that area, get traffic in that area, and now give them a better concession experience because of it, right? Where they're going to end up spending more money because they're not waiting in line in the different zone. So, how do we give them a dashboard in real time, but also alerts or reports that they can use on an ongoing basis to change their decision making going forward. >> So, give us the company overview. Where are you guys at with funding, head count, all that good stuff. >> So, we raised a seed round with some great Boston and Silicon Valley investors a year ago. So, that was Glasswing is a Boston AI focused fund, has been a great partner for us, and Inovia which is Canada's largest VC fund recently opened a Silicon Valley office. We just started raising a series A about a week ago. I'm excited to say those conversation have been going really well so far. We have some potential strategic partners who we're excited about who know data better then anyone else that we think would help us accelerate our business. We also have a few folks who are very familiar with the large venue space. You know, the distributed campuses, the sporting and entertainment venues. So, we're out looking for the right partner to lead our series A round, and take our business to the next level, but where we are today with five really great branded customers, I think we'll have 20 by the end of next year, and we won't stop fighting 'till we're at every ball park, every football stadium, every convention center, school. >> The big question, at some point will you be able to eliminate security lines? (laughing) >> I don't think that's my core mission. (laughing) But, optimistically I'd love to help you. Right, I think there's some very talented people working on that challenge, so I'll defer that one to them. >> And rough head count today? >> We have 23 people. >> You're 23 people so- >> Yeah, I headquartered in Boston Post Office Square. >> Awesome, great location. So, and you say you've got five customers, so you're generating revenue? >> Yes >> Okay, good. Well, thank you for coming in The Cube >> Yeah, thank you. >> And best of luck with the series A- >> I appreciate it and going forward >> Yeah, great. >> All right, and thank you for watching. Paul Gillin and I will be back right after this short break. This is The Cube from MIT Chief Data Officer Information Quality Conference in Cambridge. We'll be right back. (electronic music)