>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering upgrade 2020 The NTT Research Summit presented by NTT Research. >>Hi, I'm stupid, man. And this is the Cubes coverage of Upgrade 2020 the global research Summit for NTT and always happy when we get to talk about digital transformation. Happy to welcome to the program First time guests on the program. Eric Clark. He is the chief digital officer with NTT Data. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank >>you. Glad to be here. >>All right, so let's start, you know, CDOs. First of all, there there's lots of studios. We've done lots of events with the chief data officers, which I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about data. But the digital officers, of course, digital so important in general. And even more so in 2020. But let's understand your role is as chief digital officer. What's your charter where you sit in York? What you're responsible for? >>Yeah, definitely. And you know, it's a good question. I often start conversations with our customers by talking about exactly that, because Chief Digital officer means something different toe different companies. So for us, it's primarily market facing. Onda What that means is I spend most of my time looking at research, looking at R and D, looking at what our competitors are doing in the market and looking at where trends. We're going to make sure that we have the right offerings and capabilities to bring to our customers to make sure that they will remain competitive in their markets. >>That's great. You know, We've been talking for years about the, you know, the digital transformations that companies have been going through. One of our definitions have been. If you're not at the end of it, more data driven, you probably haven't done the right thing. But Eric, this year with 2020 you know, anecdotally we talked to a lot of customers, and obviously there's certain initiatives that get frozen or, you know, uh, we'll take a little bit longer. But those digital initiatives, which are supposed to rely on data and help us move fast and be more agile, seem to be at the top of the list and are accelerating because if I can't respond to you know, the daily and weekly changes that have been great in 2020 you know, I might have a tough time surviving. So what are you seeing? You know, how does that live in your world? >>Yeah, you're exactly right. And that's what we're seeing from our client base as well. So early on in the pandemic, there was a lot of freeze, you know, hold everything. Stop. Stop spending. And let's figure out where we are and where this is going. But very quickly that turn to we've got to react. We're gonna be living with this for a while and we can't. We can't afford to sit back and wait and see where it goes. We've got to react, and we've got to direct our our future. And very often the way that comes out is with digital. So you know, customers are looking for opportunities to leverage digital, to grow revenue, to improve customer engagement and to drive more of their revenue through digital channels. >>Interested in one thing I didn't here and there, but I'm sure is part of it. What about the employees themselves? One of the big things, of course, is that we've made this wonderful corporate environment. You've got the great great Internet there, and now wait. Everybody's at home and scrambling as to what they do. So so how about the kind of the the e x to go along with the C X? Yeah, >>exactly. And that was actually one of the first places that we focused as a company, because we do a lot of you know what we refer to as workplace services. So making sure that our customers employees have the tools they need to do their job successfully. Eso immediately. When when officers started closing and people started going home, our big challenge was Let's make sure that our customers can connect from anywhere from wherever they need to be working from and have access to the applications and the tools and the products that they need to perform their jobs remotely. And that's really turned into a significant business of its own of, you know, really addressing those needs not only for our customers but also for our employee base. You know, we have 50,000 people that we sent home more than 90% of overnight, and you know, many of these are our employees that are interacting with our customer based on a daily basis, So we had to make sure not only that they had connective, >>but >>he had to be secure. So it was a very big switch. And I think I personally was really impressed. Not only with what we did, but what we saw. The industry. Dutilleux make that transition very safely and seamlessly. >>Well, let's Eric, I love you to expand a little bit on that. You know which pieces of that that full solution, Uh, is NTT offering? And how do you and your partner's, uh, you know, help your customers through. You know, those rapid options that they need? >>Yeah, so So So we're a full suite provider. So we're focused on digital operations, which is, you know, digitizing your back office from your workplace services to your hybrid infrastructure network, etcetera, all the way through bringing. You know what? We refer to his journey to the cloud. So how do we help you identify what applications and what data you need in the cloud? Um uh, c X and E x. Very big focuses for us. In fact, we take a lot of pride in while we do go to market and sell c X specifically, we consider c x part of everything we do so if we're talking about workplace services or hybrid infrastructure or security. We want the employee experience to be solid, and we want the employee experience to be consistent across all of those things. So way think that our customers should not expect to have different interfaces and different portals and different user experiences when they do work with us across infrastructure and application and cloud etcetera. >>That's excellent, Eric. You know, we spent the last six months talking about how do we react to the pandemic? And now, at least, you know, here in the U. S. Uh, the Children are back in school. If they're back, though, it tends to be ah, hybrid model. And when we look at work, often we know we're gonna have this elongated kind of new abnormal, if you will. So, yes, you might be back in the office some, but chances are you will spend some time remote and therefore it's not work from home or back toe work. It's work from anywhere, is what I need to be able to do. So how are you preparing? How are you helping your customers through that? Because, you know, it's one thing if it was just, you know, a switch that says I'm either here or there, but it z changing and it's very fluid. >>Yeah, and you're exactly right. It is work from anywhere, but there are some of our customers that don't have the luxury of work from anywhere. So when you think about manufacturing facilities and different hospitality companies, um, there there are people that need to go into physical places. We do a lot in the healthcare space. We need doctors in the hospitals. So we've done a lot to help our customers figure out safe ways to return to the work. Recently, we've seen universities and, as you mentioned, you know, high schools and elementary schools all going back with varying degrees of success, right? Some of them have failed, and they've had to take a pause and and figure out how they're going to restart. We've also seen professional sports leagues and now college sports leagues. Andi, When we see them having issues, we see protocols adjusting and we see them looking for what can we do to make this safer, more effective and more successful for whether it's our sports team, our school or our business. So we've taken a very active approaching that, and we're leveraging technology and creating I P. That starts with pre arrival, you know, registering in advance and, you know, opting in for things like tracking social distancing and tracking the use of mask, then using cameras and facilities to monitor it, to make sure people that are are adhering to social distancing and adhering to wearing masks. Andi In the event that they aren't we can send instant notifications to their phone. If we have repeat violators, Weaken. Prohibit them from coming back to the office so we can have very strict controls and adherence to whatever the protocols. Maybe as the protocols change. And then the other thing that allows us to do is in the event someone would test positive with co vid, we will know exactly who they've been within 6 ft of without a mask over the past X number of days. All that is stored in the cloud for us to, you know, use for reference and use for audit purposes so that gives us the ability to then use are apt to direct all the people that the person that was positive was in contact with, let them go, get tested, come back with a negative test before they return to the office. So So, basically, what we've done is we've created all kinds of technology using automation and AI and facial recognition to bring MAWR safety and more security to the workplace. Whatever that work placement might be, whether again, school, university manufacturing facility or a hotel >>Really interesting topic. You know, tracking and tracing so critically important we've seen in many countries around the world. That's really help them get their arms around and control that. You know, we talked to the top of the interview about, you know, digital means leveraging the data. And if I don't have the data, I can't respond to what's happening there. Um, here in the US, I haven't heard as much about the tracking and tracing. Is this a company by company thing do they have is the expense all on them to do it? And of course, it raises the concerns about Well, I'm concerned about my privacy and that that balance between the public interest on my right to privacy, how do you help your customer sort through some of those issues >>Well, privacy is definitely a big issue. And, you know, you noticed that when I was explaining that I said in pre pre arrival, you opt in. So the way we've approached it is it is an opt in. So those that don't wanna opt into that kind of tracking and tracing, um won't won't be those that will be allowed to come back to the office. And that goes back to your other point of work from anywhere. Many of those people can still successfully work from anywhere but those that feel like they're more effective, more successful or have a need to be in an office or need to be physically again in a manufacturing facility or a hotel. We have a way to do that safely, >>right? Well, Eric, one of the things I love about research events like yours is a little peek in tow. What's coming on down the road? So any other things you'd like toe, you know, share about, You know, some of the things that are exciting. You some things we should be looking at a little bit further down the road. >>Well, I think you know for us, as you know, We spend a significant amount of money each year on research, and and we really get excited about thes thes opportunities in these showcases. So you'll see ah, lot of exciting information and a lot of what's coming in the future. Um, a lot of it right now, obviously, because of the times you'll see themes of safety and security. Um, but you're also going to see just ah, whole lot of really thought provoking forward thinking technology. >>Always take the opportunity. Even when there are crisis is out there. There's the opportunity for innovation and acceleration off. What's happening? Eric, Thanks so much pleasure talking with you and definitely looking forward to hearing more from from the event. >>Great. Thank you. Enjoyed it. >>Stay with us for more coverage from upgrade 2020 times to minimum. Thanks as always, for watching cute with

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering the UPGRADE 2020, the NTT Research Summit. Presented by NTT research. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of UPGRADE 2020. It's the NTT Research Labs Summit, and it's all about upgrading reality. Heavy duty basic research around a bunch of very smart topics. And we're really excited to have our next guest to kind of dive in. I promise you, it'll be the deepest conversation you have today, unless you watch a few more of these segments. So our first guest we're welcoming back Kazuhiro Gomi He's the president and CEO of NTT research, Kaza great to see you. >> Good to see you. And joining him is Yoshi Yamamoto. He is a fellow for NTT Research and also the director of the Physics and Informatics Lab. Yoshi, great to meet you as well. >> Nice to meet you. >> So I was teasing the crew earlier, Yoshi, when I was doing some background work on you and I pulled up your Wikipedia page and I was like, okay guys, read this thing and tell me what a, what Yoshi does. You that have been knee deep in quantum computing and all of the supporting things around quantum heavy duty kind of next gen computing. I wonder if you can kind of share a little bit, you know, your mission running this labs and really thinking so far in advance of what we, you know, kind of experience and what we work with today and this new kind of basic research. >> NTT started the research on quantum computing back in 1986 87. So it is already more than 30 years. So, the company invested in this field. We have accumulated a lot of sort of our ideas, knowledge, technology in this field. And probably, it is the right time to establish the connection, close connection to US academia. And in this way, we will jointly sort of advance our research capabilities towards the future. The goal is still, I think, a long way to go. But by collaborating with American universities, and students we can accelerate NTT effort in this area. >> So, you've been moving, you've been working on quantum for 30 years. I had no idea that that research has been going on for such a very long time. We hear about it in the news and we hear about it a place like IBM and iSensor has a neat little demo that they have in the new sales force period. What, what is, what makes quantum so exciting and the potential to work so hard for so long? And what is it going to eventually open up for us when we get it to commercial availability? >> The honest answer to that question is we don't know yet. Still, I think after 30 years I think of hard working on quantum Physics and Computing. Still we don't know clean applications are even, I think we feel that the current, all the current efforts, are not necessarily, I think, practical from the engineering viewpoint. So, it is still a long way to go. But the reason why NTT has been continuously working on the subject is basically the very, sort of bottom or fundamental side of the present day communication and the computing technology. There is always a quantum principle and it is very important for us to understand the quantum principles and quantum limit for communication and computing first of all. And if we are lucky, maybe we can make a breakthrough for the next generation communication and computing technology based on quantum principles. >> Right. >> But the second, is really I think just a guess, and hope, researcher's hope and nothing very solid yet. >> Right? Well, Kazu I want to go, go to you cause it really highlights the difference between, you know, kind of basic hardcore fundamental research versus building new applications or building new products or building new, you know, things that are going to be, you know, commercially viable and you can build an ROI and you can figure out what the customers are going to buy. It really reflects that this is very different. This is very, very basic with very, very long lead times and very difficult execution. So when, you know, for NTT to spend that money and invest that time and people for long, long periods of time with not necessarily a clean ROI at the end, that really, it's really an interesting statement in terms of this investment and thinking about something big like upgrading reality. >> Yeah, so that's what this, yeah, exactly that you talked about what the basic research is, and from NTT perspective, yeah, we feel like we, as Dr. Yamamoto, he just mentioned that we've been investing into 30 plus years of a time in this field and, you know, and we, well, I can talk about why this is important. And some of them is that, you know, that the current computer that everybody uses, we are certainly, well, there might be some more areas of improvement, but we will someday in, I don't know, four years, five years, 10 years down the road, there might be some big roadblock in terms of more capacity, more powers and stuff. We may run into some issues. So we need to be prepared for those kinds of things. So, yes we are in a way of fortunate that we are, we have a great team to, and a special and an expertise in this field. And, you know, we have, we can spend some resource towards that. So why not? We should just do that in preparation for that big, big wall so to speak. I guess we are expecting to kind of run into, five, 10 years down the road. So let's just looking into it, invest some resources into it. So that's where we are, we're here. And again, I I'm, from my perspective, we are very fortunate that we have all the resources that we can do. >> It's great. Right, as they give it to you. Dr. Yamamoto, I wonder if you can share what it's like in terms of the industry and academic working together. You look at the presentations that are happening here at the event. All the great academic institutions are very well represented, very deep papers. You at NTT, you spend some time at Stanford, talk about how it is working between this joint development with great academic institutions, as well as the great company. >> Traditionally in the United States, there has been always two complementary opportunities for training next generation scientists and engineers. One opportunity is junior faculty position or possible position in academia, where main emphasis is education. The other opportunity is junior researcher position in industrial lab where apparently the focus emphasis is research. And eventually we need two types of intellectual leaders from two different career paths. When they sort of work together, with a strong educational background and a strong research background, maybe we can make wonderful breakthrough I think. So it is very important to sort of connect between two institutions. However, in the recent past, particularly after Better Lab disappeared, basic research activity in industrial lab decreases substantially. And we hope MTT research can contribute to the building of fundamental science in industry side. And for that purpose cross collaboration with research Universities are very important. So the first task we have been working so far, is to build up this industry academia connection. >> Huge compliment NTT to continue to fund the basic research. Cause as you said, there's a lot of companies that were in it before and are not in it any more. And when you often read the history of, of, of computing and a lot of different things, you know, it goes back to a lot of times, some basic, some basic research. And just for everyone to know what we're talking about, I want to read a couple of, of sessions that you could attend and learn within Dr. Yamamoto space. So it's Coherent nonlinear dynamics combinatorial optimization. That's just one session. I love it. Physics successfully implements Lagrange multiplier optimization. I love it. Photonics accelerators for machine learning. I mean, it's so it's so interesting to read basic research titles because, you know, it's like a micro-focus of a subset. It's not quantum computing, it's all these little smaller pieces of the quantum computing stack. And then obviously very deep and rich. Deep dives into those, those topics. And so, again, Kazu, this is the first one that's going to run after the day, the first physics lab. But then you've got the crypto cryptography and information security lab, as well as the medical and health information lab. You started with physics and informatics. Is that the, is that the history? Is that the favorite child you can lead that day off on day two of the event. >> We did throw a straw and Dr. Yamamoto won it Just kidding (all laugh) >> (indistinct), right? It's always fair. >> But certainly this quantum, Well, all the topics certainly are focuses that the basic research, that's definitely a commonality. But I think the quantum physics is in a way kind of very symbolic to kind of show that the, what the basic research is. And many people has a many ideas associated with the term basic research. But I think that the quantum physics is certainly one of the strong candidates that many people may think of. So well, and I think this is definitely a good place to start for this session, from my perspective. >> Right. >> Well, and it almost feels like that's kind of the foundational even for the other sessions, right? So you talk about medical or you talk about cryptography in information, still at the end of the day, there's going to be compute happening to drive those processes. Whether it's looking at, at, at medical slides or trying to do diagnosis, or trying to run a bunch of analysis against huge data sets, which then goes back to, you know, ultimately algorithms and ultimately compute, and this opening up of this entirely different set of, of horsepower. But Dr. Yamamoto, I'm just curious, how did you get started down this path of, of this crazy 30 year journey on quantum computing. >> The first quantum algorithm was invented by David Deutsch back in 1985. These particular algorithm turned out later the complete failure, not useful at all. And he spent seven years, actually, to fix loophole and invented the first successful algorithm that was 1992. Even though the first algorithm was a complete failure, that paper actually created a lot of excitement among the young scientists at NTT Basic Research Lab, immediately after the paper appeared. And 1987 is actually, I think, one year later. So this paper appeared. And we, sort of agreed that maybe one of the interesting future direction is quantum information processing. And that's how it started. It's it's spontaneous sort of activity, I think among young scientists of late twenties and early thirties at the time. >> And what do you think Dr. Yamamoto that people should think about? If, if, if again, if we're at a, at a cocktail party, not with not with a bunch of, of people that, that intimately know the topic, how do you explain it to them? How, how should they think about this great opportunity around quantum that's kept you engaged for decades and decades and decades. >> The quantum is everywhere. Namely, I think this world I think is fundamentally based on and created from quantum substrate. At the very bottom of our, sort of world, consist of electrons and photons and atoms and those fundamental particles sort of behave according to quantum rule. And which is a very different from classical reality, namely the world where we are living every day. The relevant question which is also interesting is how our classical world or classical reality surfaces from the general or universal quantum substrate where our intuition never works. And that sort of a fundamental question actually opens the possibility I think by utilizing quantum principle or quantum classical sort of crossover principle, we can revolutionize the current limitation in communication and computation. That's basically the start point. We start from quantum substrate. Under classical world the surface is on top of quantum substrate exceptional case. And we build the, sort of communication and computing machine in these exceptional sort of world. But equally dig into quantum substrate, new opportunities is open for us. That's somewhat the fundamental question. >> That's great. >> Well, I'm not, yeah, we can't get too deep cause you'll lose me, you'll lose me long before, before you get to the bottom of the, of the story, but, you know, I really appreciate it. And of course back to you this is your guys' first event. It's a really bold statement, right? Upgrade reality. I just wonder if, when you look at the, at the registrant's and you look at the participation and what do you kind of anticipate, how much of the anticipation is, is kind of people in the business, you know, kind of celebrating and, and kind of catching up to the latest research and how much of it is going to be really inspirational for those next, you know, early 20 somethings who are looking to grab, you know, an exciting field to hitch their wagon to, and to come away after this, to say, wow, this is something that really hooked me and I want to get down and really kind of advance this technology a little bit, further advance this research a little bit further. >> So yeah, for, from my point of view for this event, I'm expecting, there are quite wide range of people. I'm, I'm hoping that are interested in to this event. Like you mentioned that those are the, you know, the business people who wants to know what NTT does, and then what, you know, the wider spectrum of NTT does. And then, and also, especially like today's events and onwards, very specific to each topic. And we go into very deep dive. And, and so to, to this session, especially in a lot of participants from the academia's world, for each, each subject, including students, and then some other, basically students and professors and teachers and all those people as well. So, so that's are my expectations. And then from that program arrangement perspective, that's always something in my mind that how do we address those different kind of segments of the people. And we all welcoming, by the way, for those people. So to me to, so yesterday was the general sessions where I'm kind of expecting more that the business, and then perhaps some other more and more general people who're just curious what NTT is doing. And so instead of going too much details, but just to give you the ideas that the what's that our vision is and also, you know, a little bit of fla flavor is a good word or not, but give you some ideas of what we are trying to do. And then the better from here for the next three days, obviously for the academic people, and then those who are the experts in each field, probably day one is not quite deep enough. Not quite addressing what they want to know. So day two, three, four are the days that designed for that kind of requirements and expectations. >> Right? And, and are most of the presentations built on academic research, that's been submitted to journals and other formal, you know, peer review and peer publication types of activities. So this is all very formal, very professional, and very, probably accessible to people that know where to find this information. >> Mmh. >> Yeah, it's great. >> Yeah. >> Well, I, I have learned a ton about NTT and a ton about this crazy basic research that you guys are doing, and a ton about the fact that I need to go back to school if I ever want to learn any of this stuff, because it's, it's a fascinating tale and it's it's great to know as we've seen these other basic research companies, not necessarily academic but companies kind of go away. We mentioned Xerox PARC and Bell Labs that you guys have really picked up that mantle. Not necessarily picked it up, you're already doing it yourselves. but really continuing to carry that mantle so that we can make these fundamental, basic building block breakthroughs to take us to the next generation. And as you say, upgrade the future. So again, congratulations. Thanks for sharing this story and good luck with all those presentations. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Alright, Yoshi, Kazu I'm Jeff, NTT UPGRADE 2020. We're going to upgrade the feature. Thanks for watching. See you next time. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering the Upgrade 2020, the NTT research summit, presented by NTT research. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBEs, coverage of Upgrade 2020. Of course, it's NTT's Global Research Summit. Really excited, we're going to be able to dig into healthcare, the health system of course, something that's been, top of mind for everyone around the globe this year, so happy to welcome you to the program. First time guest Mary Edwards. She is the president of provider at NTT DATA Services. Mary, welcome to the program, saying thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi, Stu. Glad to be here. >> All right. So why don't we start, as I tee it up. We're going to be talking about health care there, just a little bit of your background, your group inside of NTT DATA Services. >> Sure. So I've been at NTT DATA Services for a year, just about a year on the knows. Really glad to be here. I've been healthcare, all of my career over 30 years. At first in the Blues, in underwriting actuarial and strategy, then hop to consulting. I was a partner with Accenture for 20, well, yeah, I think 22 years, I was at Accenture. and then, I was leading a commercial markets portion of a platform as a service company for a couple of years, and then NTT called and I was really impressed with what I learned about NTT and delighted to join the firm as the president of provider. >> Well, Mary, I've got a little bit of background in some of the health I love, I go to innovation conferences, and they're like, "We have the opportunity to really transform markets, but it's so tough to make change." Well, you've been there for a year, and the last year, there's been a force in function to change the advent of telehealth and telemedicine. I've done plenty of interviews, and heck, me and my family have been to doctors, using those services, which, at the beginning of this year, I wouldn't have thought was possible. Some of these might be long term changes in impact on what's happening, but bring us inside, your customers, what are some of the pressing challenges they're facing? And it's been a little bit this, there obviously, are huge challenges, but there's also been an opportunity to make some rapid changes. >> Great question. Well, first of all, there's no place I'd rather be right now, than serving the health systems across the US, and certainly we have impact globally. It's dynamic time, lots of change, and as you say, with change comes opportunity. But also, it's a time of deep fragility, and a time when these clients really need help, not just from NTT, but from a variety of partners. And I know, I feel and my team feels, that it's a privilege to work in supporting them, through this very difficult time. And when I say difficult time, I mean, think about it, even before the pandemic, Chartists research was talking about the fact that likely 25% of rural hospitals would fail. Fast forward only a couple of months from that, research being published and across the industry, outpatient revenues are down 11% year over year, inpatient revenue down as well, labor expenses up by nearly 18%. And so there's a lot of pressures on the industry right now. And that's what I mean by just a very significant time to be in the industry and position to help. There's a huge recovery, that needs to happen from what our clients have experienced. First and foremost, top line. We've got to get the revenue back into the hospitals. The CARES Act funding doesn't last forever, and certainly, brings with it some obligations. So bringing in that top line growth, virtual health, which you mentioned, is a big part of that strategy. At the same time, they've got to deal with all the new delivery models or working models, work from anywhere is something that all businesses have to face, and incredibly, an incredible challenge for our health systems. Because of course, it's not just about how we do our individual work, but the interactions that they have to have in conducting the work that they do. So care from anywhere and work from anywhere, are huge concerns of our health system clients now. And you have to do that in industrialized ways, because you don't know where you're working day to day, you have to be able to have fast switching, right? Because we're not in control of where we work. Cities and states are telling us, what we have to do on a day in day out basis. There's a huge concept - >> Human. >> Oh, go ahead. Sure. >> Yeah, no, I just say, as you say, obviously, healthcare is rightly so a heavily regulated industry. So bring us inside a little bit, what are some of those opportunities, some of those innovations that providers are being able to take advantage? And have we opened the gates a little bit to help things move a little bit faster here in 2020, due to necessity? >> Yeah. Well, virtual care, you mentioned that earlier, has exploded. There's a lot of dialogue right now in the industry about whether that's forever. It will never go back to the low single digits that it was prior to the pandemic. I mean, prior to the pandemic health systems were happy if they could get to 10%. Overnight, virtual care went to 40%, 50%, increase overnight, and just continue to grow. CEOs across the industry prior to the pandemic, were really focused on digital front door strategies, the ability to enable consumers to enter the healthcare system, digitally and virtually. And so probably for the 18 months before the pandemic, most large system CEOs that I talked to, were working on those strategies. They're doubling down on those strategies, because the industry is reshaping around that digital future state. The cost pressures that we're seeing in health care, at the same time, require that they think about new operating and delivery models, certainly the industry will restructure, based on what we've gone through and continue to experience. And that will mean certainly changes in consolidation in the healthcare industry, right? As certainly certain systems will fail, right. Can't support what's happening around the economics of the industry. But also within our delivery and operations, there will be and we're already seeing a trend toward more pervasive outsourcing, moving offshore, taking particularly back office functions, whether it's IT or business processes, and looking for the help that can drive down the cost structure, better automate, and innovate on those processes and delivery models, and accelerate their journey to the digital future state of health. >> So Mary, help us understand NTT DATA Services, and NTT broader, what are the solutions? How are you helping your customers with everything we've discussed here? >> Sure, well, you can't enable those digital front door strategies unless you do things like get your applications to the cloud. You've got to be able to open up your environment to trade, if I say it that way, right? To exchange more broadly, even within your own ecosystem, within your own walls, the ability to connect doctors with doctors that before the pandemic didn't have a need to connect in the same way becomes important. So at NTT, we do everything, journey to the cloud. Certainly the security that's so important to those journey and also the digital future of health care. RPA, the introduction of bots and AI to workflows and operations in order to reduce cost. In my division in provider, we worked for nearly the last year on something we call, nucleus for healthcare, which is that digital front door enabled by digital foundation and which delivers through pre-selected capabilities scheduling, through virtual care visits to care coordination and payment, all integrated across the digital fabric, in order to accelerate the industry and certainly our health system partners achievement of that digital front door vision and the full digital future for healthcare. >> I love you talked about RPA automation, has been one of the top things we've been hearing this year. It's just a top sea level priority. We love coming to events like this, a lot of discussion of research looking a little bit forward down the road. What are some of the items here at Upgrade 2020, you want to make sure our audience get a little peek into? >> Yeah, well, you talk about automation, and I said a moment ago about offshore, we're thinking about no shore, right? So when you think about the application of automation and advanced analytics AI into business processes, it's not about moving business processes to a lower cost geography, it's about automating, and enabling through bots and whatnot, the ability to not have hands touch it, and really conserving your resources for the more complex things that have to happen. So I love that concept of no shoring, and really using technology to position humans for their best possible work, solving the harder problems that we face as an industry. I think about innovations in patient monitoring, and what we can take in terms of IoT, from other industries. And for instance, at NTT, we've been doing smart city with the city of Las Vegas, for a couple of years now. And we've got lots of AI around movement, heat, light, the physical context of things. You think about how you move that into healthcare. And it's certainly about patient observation, and creating safe spaces, where doctors and nurses don't have to travel in and out of rooms when there's a high contagion rate, but it's also about using AI, not just to watch the room, but to allow AI to alert when there's something very significant happening, what kind of movement in the bed, what does that infer in terms of what's happening in the patient's room, and alerting on that basis versus a visual monitor, if you will. There are other innovations. Oh, go ahead, Stu. >> Oh, no, so sorry, I thought you had said, please finish. >> Well, I was just about to say there are other innovations that we're working on, that are really about patient well being, patient companion. I think about the work we're doing at NTT disruption around something called Jibo, which is a robotics, very cool little guy who we've had some experience using it in our children's hospitals, right. It becomes like a really a companion of sorts. There are lots of applications for that kind of technology, especially in a pandemic time, when most of our patients are isolated and craving some human interaction and these capabilities can be like that, they can be companions, and they can provide the social interaction that really lead to health and well being. >> Well, so many important topics. Mary, thank you so much for joining us. Great to hear your automation, robotics in the people, at the center, of course, of what we look at in healthcare. Great to talk to you. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. Bye bye. >> Stay tuned for more coverage from Upgrade 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's theCUBE! Covering the Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit presented by NTT Research. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Upgrade 2020. It's the NTT Research Summit covering a lot of really deep topics around a lot of the basic core research that NTT is sponsoring. Kind of like the old days of Mobell or some of the other kind of core research. And we're excited to have our next guest to go. A little bit beyond the core research and actually talk about working with people today. So we'd like to welcome in Alex Bennett. He is the global senior vice president of the intelligent workplace for NTT. Alex, good morning? >> Good morning, Jeff. How are you doing. >> Terrific. So I think for a lot of people, you know, probably know the NTT name, certainly in the States, but are not familiar with, I think, you know, the degree of which you guys have this huge business around services and workplace collaboration, I wonder if you can give us kind of a high level summary of the services angle at NTT, you know, beyond just putting in communications infrastructure equipment. >> Yeah, definitely. I mean, the NTT, as you said, is it's a huge organization, Very well known in Japan and growing in last year that we brought together about 32 different brands under the entity limited brand and we have NTT data services as well. So our role is really to look at the client requirements, the business needs that they have and be able to provide end to end solutions and wrap them with our services to make sure they've got, you know, efficiency gains, but also improving employee experience and experience around, you know, improving how they connect to their customers as well. >> Right, right. So obviously COVID-19, what was, you know, kind of a light switch moment back in March has now turned into, you know, kind of an ongoing, a new normal here we are six months plus into this, into this thing, really no end in sight in the immediate term. So, you know, people were thrown into the situation where work from home, work from anywhere had to happen with no prep. You've been in the business for a long time working on solutions. So there's the obvious things like security and access, but what are some of the less obvious things that people should be thinking about when they think about supporting their employees that are not now coming into the office? >> Well, I mean, it's been interesting, right. I said I have been in the sector for a long time and a lot of the themes have been the same for the last 10, 15 years, you know, how do we improve employee experience? How do we start to look at things like wellbeing? You know, how does it have an impact on productivity? And how do you make sure that we make it simple for people to carry out their tasks? Now, something I get asked a lot is this idea of how do we make it frictionless? A lot of the time, people don't really care about the brand or the technology. They just want to be able to carry out their role from whatever industry sector they aren't doing it efficiently and do it well, but also to be able to interact. I think it's been really important. And this pandemic has brought about this view, that people haven't been able to socialize in the same way they have in the past and work is really about people, you know, the workplace is also about people and how you connect those people into customers and provide efficiencies in that area. So the conversations I've been having in the last, you know, six to seven months, it's been quite interesting that the programs they were taking 18 months, 24 months, 36 months over, have had to be accelerated and really deployed in about three months. And then that's brought about the lows of operation on policy concerns. So as you mentioned, as you start to have this new, what we're calling, you know, distributed workforce, especially those organizations which have been perhaps more enterprise specific, you know, which are going into carpeted office environments, they've been requested by governments to only work from home. And that's brought about a huge impact to how people work, but also socialize. So from a technology standpoint, you've asked people, right, you're going to work from home, actually, do you have network connectivity? Can you actually connect with a technology tool? Like, you know, collaboration to be able to speak to your customers, to speak to your GOPs. Now what device are you actually working on? So we saw this real drive around what is this sort of immediate business continuity requirement for a secure remote worker. >> Right. And that brought about other concerns as well. >> Right. So there's so many layers to this conversation. I'm psyched to dig into it. But one of the ones I want to dig in is kind of tools overload, you know, this idea of collaboration and, you know, trying to get your work done and trying to get bears removed. At the same time though, it just can't seems like we just keep getting more tools added to the palette that we have to interact with every day, whether it's lack or a sauna or Salesforce or box, or you know, the list goes on and on and on. And the other thing that just seems strange to me is that right, all of these things have a notification component. So it's almost like the noise is increasing. I don't hear a lot of people ripping out old tooling or ripping out old systems. So how do you help guide people to say, that there's all these great collaboration tools, there's all these great communication tools, but you can't have all of them firing all the time and expect people to actually have time to get work done. >> Yeah. And it's also, you know, some people are used to that, you might have a digital native who's used to using multiple tools, but you don't have others that actually haven't been taught or a learning program about how to use different tools for different applications. And that becomes that person becomes frustrated and their productivity levels can go down. I think that what we'd really try and do is understand what are the business requirements by the persona? And also if you think of that distributed worker, that's now having to work from home and go into the office for specific tasks that are allowed, are they a sales person? No. Are they actually working in HR? What do they need and what are the tasks they need? And that start to provide the right types of tools and technology specifically for them and make sure they have a learning path that's driven around how they actually enable that technology. But you're right though. I think one of the thing that COVID founder's that doesn't happen overnight, you know, that's an engagement process. COVID hit and everyone was at home straight away. So we did see this huge transition from what may have been a legacy on premise application to starting to use more cloud based applications. And almost everyone was thrown in at the deep pant. Right? Well, here you go, just get on and use it. And at the same time they had WeChat or they had no other types of applications like WhatsApp and there were all these channels were happening. And they always had an impact on things like compliance and security, because all of a sudden, you're not using a corporately approved platform and solution. And you're starting to talk about perhaps confidential information. That's not in a way that is actually retained inside of a corporate network for the compliance and regulatory components. Right. So it's been a really interesting time in the last few months. >> Right. Well, so let's just touch on security for a minute. 'Cause obviously security is a huge concern. As you said, there's a whole bunch of security. You get kind of new security issues. One is just, everybody's working from home, whether they've got to VPN or not, or they're on their... You know, whatever their cable provider. You don't know what devices they're on, right? There's so many different devices and too as these apps have proliferated all over all these devices, whether access Salesforce on my phone or on my laptop or on my computer at work. Right. All very different. So when you look at the kind of security challenge that has come from distributed workforce with this super acceleration, you know, how many customers are ready for it, it's just caused a complete, you know, kind of fire, a hair on fire reaction to get up to speed, or, you know, are a lot of the systems of the monitored system relatively well locked down. So it wasn't a giant, you know, kind of adjustment back in March. >> Really. It depends on the type of company culture it was before. You know, what we've actually seen from some research we've done very recently across 1500 different companies, those organizations that have really invested become more digital disruptors. Now that they've embedded an idea of agility, they've actually already got a distributed workforce. They've already started to move a lot of their platforms and applications to the cloud. They've started to think about these IT policies and security. Previously, they've been very successful in how they've been able to pivot and drive this business continuity. I think for others that have been, no have large installed base of employees, no have set policies in place it's been harder for them to transition. And what we've seen is that they're the organizations that have really tried to integrate some of the new technologies into the old and that that's quite difficult sometimes. So, you know, around security, out of those 1500 organizations, nearly 70% of them said that they have a higher level of risk and concern about this. You're already in compliance today than they had prior to the pandemic. >> Right. >> What also is brought about is this idea of moving from a sort of perimeter security now where you'd come into an office and you have this perimeter where the network's secure, the physical location, and security, containerize the applications. And you've got to empower employees more now because you know, people are going to be mobile. They're going to be using multiple devices in different locations, all around the world. So we're seeing this transition as people move to cloud based platform, security is starting to get embedded into the application and it goes back to that persona aspect. So you can start to initiate things like you know, data loss protection and rights management about the content an individual has based on their location or the confidentiality of that document or piece of information. So that's where we're seeing this move is sort of really accelerating to the group, take the stress away from the employee embedded into an actual system and an application. And that has the intelligence to work out the security and the compliance on behalf of the individual. >> Right. You know, where I was going to go is, you know, there's a lot of conversations now about certain companies announcing that people can just work from home for the foreseeable future, especially here in Silicon Valley. And you mentioned that, you know, for some people that were already kind of down at digital transformation path, they're in good shape. Other people, you know, weren't that far, and of course all the means on social media are, you know, what drove your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question. So I just want to get, you know, kind of a longterm perspective. You've been in this space for a long time. I think there's going to be, you know, a significantly increased percentage of people that are working from home. A significantly increased percentage of the time, if not a hundred percent of the time. How do you see this kind of, you know, extending out and how will it impact the way that people motivate? 'Cause at the end of the day, you've written a ton of blog posts on this, you know, motivation equals profitability. And a motivated engaged people do better work and do get better results on the bottom line. How do you see this as this as (indistinct) rules for six months, 12 months, 24 months, when there's some mishmash of combination of work from home and work from the office? >> I think probably the first thing to say is that from the research we've done, we think that's going to differ by different geographies. I mean, it's interesting when you look at areas like India and perhaps South Africa where the network connectivity home is actually not as good as in Northern Europe or North America, and actually it becomes quite hard to carry out your role and task at home. And it can become really frustrating. There's also sort of health and safety components to also working at home. Now we've had a lot of people, especially the younger generation who are in shared home, shared facilities. Now who's going to pay for the internet, the bundles, you know, and actually you only have your bedroom and is it healthy to work at your bedroom all day? So when you really sort of peel back the layers of this, this is a really complex environment, and it's also dependent on the industry sector you are. You're actually driving. But at a high level, one thing we're really seeing is most people still want to have a level of human interaction. That we as humans like to like to work together and engage together. And in fact, about 80% of the respondents of our report actually said, they want to come back to the office. Now this, this speaks to this idea of choice and flexibility. 'Cause it's not just about coming back for five days a week, eight to five, it's about going actually I've got a task to carry out. It'd be really helpful if I was with my team face to face. >> Right. >> And I can come in for four hours, book my time in that physical space, carry that out, and then I can go home and do that sort of really the research based work which I can do in the safety of my own environment. So that's what we're seeing across the industry whereas before. Now, I think everyone's trying to build these really nice big offices that looked fantastic, more huge and talked about your brand. Most organizations now are repurposing space 'cause they're not going to have as many people inside of those physical locations, but they're motivating for them to come in for creative work, you know, to be social, to think about how they do cross agile team development. >> Jeff: Right. >> And that's what we're starting to see today. >> Yeah. It's really interesting you think of some young engineer that just graduated from school, gets a job at Google and you know, you get all your food there and they'll do your dry cleaning and they'll change the oil in your car and they'll, you know, take care of everything. And, and so there's this little growth in these little micro houses. Well guess what, now you don't have any of that stuff anymore. The micro house with no kitchen or kitchen that does look so attractive. And I want to shift gears a little bit more detail on NTT. You know, we've talked to lots of people about new ways to work. IBM, Citrix, you know, VM-ware has a solution and you work with big company. So how does NTT fit in, you know, kind of a transformation process big and that on the big scale, but more kind of an employee engagement and a work from anywhere type of engagement. How do you guys fit within, you know, big system integrators, like a center that are driving organizational change and, you know, kind of all this other suite of technology that they might already have in place. >> Yeah. I mean, we sort of sit in that role of a service delivery organization as well as systems integrator. So our role is to actually go into those clients and sit down with them, which is now virtually, rather than in person a lot of the time. And really understand what are those business KPIs they have and help them shape that strategy. And to do that, you've got to understand what they have today, that view of the assets. And that goes across multiple components as you said, from, you know, desktop application, security, inclusive of culture, property assets, network. And what we do is really take a holistic view of those areas that go for you to reach that business goal, that KPI, you know, this is the project that you're going to have to do. And anything around employee engagement ultimately is fed also by how good your network is and how secure that network is to deliver those applications efficiently for that employee to carry out their task in that frictionless way. So we have a very holistic view about how we then deliver Upgrade. That the core infrastructure, we do that secure by design is our sort of policy and everything we do, you know, security is embedded into what we do, and then we deliver that outcome. But then we erupt things like adoption services. I think one thing in the past, you know, people say here's a technology, go on and do it. Especially nowadays, you've got quite complex platforms. You've got to really understand how do you give information to people to self serve them, that sort of nudge technology, so they can understand how to carry it out on that idea of adoption training. Change of management is becoming ever increasingly important for our clients. >> Right. So I wan shift gears again, Alex, and talk about the show Upgrade 2020. Lot of (laughs) a lot of really heavy science going on here in healthcare, in IT, in a whole bunch of areas. Pretty exciting stuff, you know, we've talked to some other guests about some of the real details and I'm definitely going to attend some sessions and have my brain exploded I'm sure. But I'm just curious of how it fits with what your doing, you know, you've been involved, as you said, not necessarily the NTT, but you've been involved in kind of workplace collaboration tools for a long, long time. You know, how do you see, you know, kind of basic research and some of this really fundamental research, you know, kind of helping you and your customers and your solutions, you know, as we kind of moved down the road. >> Alright, hold at that. The main conversation we're having with executives today is this idea of employee wellbeing and experience is fundamental to the success of their business. 'Cause it drives customer centricity productivity gains. You've got to think about how technology can underpin that and deliver insights to you. So, you know, the new currency is data. And what I find really interesting around and what we're talking about with Upgrade 2020 is this ideas of digital twins. So when you think of this concept of a digital twin, it all is based on this idea of extensibility. So all your decisions that you're making right to today, you know, these short term decisions you having to do for business continuity, you've got to think about the longterm impact of how you're going to be able to ingest that data from all those systems into a central area, to give you insight. Now, from that insight, you've then got the, you know, the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to actually say right, for this component how many of my employees really are? Then well, are they doing well in the productivity gains? And from my property estate, you know, how many of my properties are actually reducing the energy consumption? And are we adhering to our sustainability goals? Are they well? So the actual physical environment is safe for those employees. So all of those disparate platforms have to come together into that one area and give you insight. So that the marrying of physical space with the how humans interact all into a digital twin, I think is really interesting and something I'm speaking to clients about day in, day out. >> I love that, that is awesome. You know, we're first exposed to the digital twin concept years ago, doing some work with general electric, because they were doing a lot of digital twin work around, you know, engines on airplanes and, you know, simulate an airplane engine that's running on a plane in the Middle East, it's going to act very different than a plane that's running in Alaska. And then, you know, I love the concept of digital twin around the context of people in medicine, right. And modeling a heart or modeling a behavior system or cardiovascular system. How are you talking about digital twins? 'Cause it sounds like you're talking about kind of a combination between, you know, kind of individual people and how they're doing versus some group of people as a unit or organization. And then you even mentioned, you know, sustainability goals and buildings. So when you're talking about digital twin in this context, what are the boundaries? How are you organizing that thing that you can then do, you know, kind of tests and kind of predictive exercises to see how the real thing is going to do relative to what the digital twin did. >> Yeah. But it goes back to defining those business outcomes. And most of the discussions we're having is, yeah, obviously increased productivity, but it's also a reducing costs. A big one we've seen in my area is attraction retention of talent. You know, intellectual property is going to differentiate organizations in the future as technology sort of standardizes. But sustainability again from the research we've done is really high up on the executives agenda. You know, the idea that we, as NTT as well, we have a duty to society to actually start giving back a view of how technology can improve the sustainability goal. And in fact, we've just become the business Avenger for the UN sustainability goal, number 11, around the idea of communities and smart cities. So the clients that I'm speaking to when they're looking at those business objectives are no 10, 15% of my, my actual costs associated to my property. We've now got a new distributed workforce, but I've got a huge amount of energy going into those properties. Now we can actually connect now building management systems into now that digital twin. We can also start to look at the other platforms such as lifts, you know, also all the heating and air ventilation. And start to get the data that allows us to model and predict when certain issues may occur. So, you know, as less people start coming in, you'll have occupancy data. You'll be able to say, you're actually, this location has only been used 30% capacity. We could reduce the amount of space we have, or in fact, we don't need that space at all. And in that space, we know that we're running an HVAC system and air conditioning a hundred percent of the time. You start to actually reduce that and you can reduce energy consumption by 30%. Now goes back to this whole idea of extensibility on one building that can have a big impact, but across 500 buildings that we're NTT have, that's a significant amount of energy that we can change. >> Jeff: Right. >> And also you can then start to think about the idea of, you know, more different type of power purchasing agreement with sustainable energy going into those environments. >> So many, you know, kind of so many interesting twists and turns on this journey since, you know, that COVID hit. And it is going to be really fascinating to see kind of what sticks and, you know, and the longterm ramifications. 'Cause we're not going back to the way that it was. I think that's not even a question. Just the last thing on kind of the data, you know, we saw some really, I think not such great things early on in this thing where, you know, you get put us basically a sniffer on and you know, our people sitting in front of their computer all day. I saw some nasty thing on Twitter the other day. My boss wants me to be on Zoom calls all day long. I mean, do people get it that, you know, there's an opportunity to increase motivation, not decrease motivation by, you know, a responsible use and a good use of this data versus, you know, a potential perception of, well now they're just big brothering me to death. >> It's such a hot topic, right? I mean, even before COVID we had, you know, the GDPR compliance in Europe. But that ultimately is a global compliance and the West coast America also got a similar one now about what data you're actually keeping about me as an individual. And I should have access to that and I can not speak to my company about it. And is it big brother or actually using that data to help inform me as an individual ways of improving the way I work or working in a way that has a better balance for me as an individual. And we're having these conversations with our clients right now about how we do this, because they having to work with workers counselors in countries like Germany. Because track and trace does have that view of that sort of big brother. What, where are you? What are you doing? And how long have you been on your computer? I think it's down to the culture of your business and the purpose that you have and how you engage with your employees, that you show that data to be about all benefiting them as an individual. Now, I'm going back to that digital twin, that the view of ingesting data, then from perhaps platforms like, you know, Cisco WebEx or Office 365, and you can see how long they are actually in front of their screen. You can then start to predict and see where you may have burnout or in fact affect change where you say RHR policy should dictate, you shouldn't be working 14 hours a day. That's not good for you. It's not good for us. And actually nudge them and teach them about taking no time away from the desk and actually having a better work balance. And that's important because it all goes back to increases the productivity longterm, but it's great brand association and it's good for attraction and retention of talent. >> Right, Right. Well, I think the retention and attraction is a huge thing. You keep talking about productivity and obviously in your blog post talking about engagement, right. And engagement is such a direct tie to that. And then at the bottom line (giggles) it's kind of like diversity of opinion. It actually makes good business sense. And you actually put more money in the bank at the end of the day, when you do some of these more progressive, you know, kind of approaches to how you manage the people. 'Cause they're not machines, they're people. >> Yeah. And you should allow them to make decisions. You know, that again, distributed working, you've got to think of how to empower them with the tools that gives them the choice to make decisions. And you know, that that decision making is more democratized inside of organizations that are successful. But if you don't have the technology that allows them to do that, it goes back to a hierarchical decision making. And that takes time, it's slower to market, and then you know, you're not as successful as your competition. So we're really trying to prove that this idea of thinking about people first using the data that backs it up you know, with empirical data to show the benefits, is the way forward for organizations today. >> Yeah. Alex, great conversation. Certainly nothing but opportunity (laughs) I had for you and what you do in this really fast evolving and transformative space, which is so important. Which is how do people work? How do they feel good? How are they engaged? How are they productive and really contribute? And at the end of the day, it is good business. So exciting times, good luck on the show and some of this crazy research coming out of it on the digital twin, and we look forward to continuing to watch the story unfold. >> Thank you very much, Jeff. >> Alright. He's Alex. I'm Jeff. You're watching Upgrade 2020. The continuous coverage from theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering upgrade twenty twenty, The NTT Research Summit presented by NTT Research. >>Welcome back. I'm stupid a man. And this is the Cubes coverage of Upgrade twenty twenty. Of course, it's the NTT Research Summit and happy to welcome to the program someone that watch the Cube for a long time. But first time on the program. Simon Walsh. He is the new CEO of NTT America's Simon. Great to see you and thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks very much. Too good to be here. All right. See, >>A Zai mentioned your your previous companies that you've worked for are ones that the Cube and Cube audience are well aware of. Matter of fact, when I worked for some of those companies, NTT is one of the large global companies that I had the pleasure to interact with over the years. But if you could maybe let's start with just a little bit of your background. And as I said, it's only been a few months that you've been the CEO, so you know, what's it like coming into a role like this? You know, during the situation that we're all faced with in twenty twenty. >>Yeah, Thank you. I mean, my background is really in, You know, the platforms that enable the customers Thio run their technologies. Andi, Uh, you know, I spent some of my time in Europe and the media on then latterly the last five plus years in the Americas. I have to say I really enjoy It's a much better environment. If I think about it from a GDP and an economy perspective, it's, ah really dynamic place to work. I worked with companies headquartered from Europe running America's, and I've worked with companies that were headquartered in the Americas, running some of the European businesses. So I've crossed the continent's if you like. I recently joined NTT. I have to say, you know, it was a pretty lengthy process to explore, but that was partly, you know, interviews and due diligence because you want to make sure that, you know, you're you're buying into a company that, you know, number one, you can have ah, cultural compatibility with, but also somebody who you see really investing in technology that consult for, you know, the business agenda of the markets. So that's really a bit about my background and then, you know, joining. I mean, I literally joined last week of June, so my whole time has bean through, locked down in terms of employment. It's been very unique. Taking on a new post, exclusively remote. Andi I was a bit worried, you know, at a human level, just, you know, how do you connect with people? What I would comment is I've actually had the ability to really meet ah, lot more people in person because you can physically get to people's schedules a lot easier. So that's certainly helped, you know. And I've done my, uh, activities of meeting clients. Eso they've been very amenable to connecting talking to our business partners and spending, you know, considerable amount of time with my colleagues, uh, in the Americas and around the world. Andi, it's actually been very rewarding. I think, funnily enough, you probably physically closer because you're on a screen and you probably like twenty four inches away from each other. Whereas in a meeting room you'd be the other side of the table. So it's been unique, but so far so good. >>Well, yeah, absolutely. The the new abnormal is we. We have sometimes say what? We're all usedto looking in the screens all day talking to various people there. Uh, the impact on business, though, has been, uh, you know, obviously ah, lot of different things, depending on the company. But that discussion of digital transformation a few years ago it was like, Oh, I don't know if it's really is it a buzzword? But that the spotlight that's been shown here in twenty twenty is what Israel and what is not leveraging cloud services, giving people agility, being able to react fast because, boy in twenty twenty if we needed to react fast, so help bring us inside a little bit. And your time there, the discussion you're having with customers, that adoption moving along that journey for digital transformation, the impact that you're seeing and house NTT helping its customers as they need to accelerate and respond toe the realities that we see today. >>Yeah, so you're right into I mean, digital disruption has been ongoing for multiple years. Way used to call it technology and change, and now we call it digital disruption or digital transformation. So it's not necessarily new. I think the thing that's really accelerated in twenty twenty, You know, as a consequence of the pandemic is really the word distributed, uh, in that customers are undertaking their digital transformations understanding. You know what it is to modernize processes, you know, modernize the customer experience on Then they're finding that actually, they don't need in a board room and discuss, you know, the performance of the business so they now need to have distributed access to data on. I think the topics that we see very prevalent is the distributed nature off the workforce. Andi. Obviously there's always been a filled workforce, and we've had systems, crm systems and other systems that were built for a distributed workforce. But now we have toe think about our supply chain management systems and our HR systems, the P and L. And you know all of the activities that business undertakes with an entirely distributed workforce, and it's quite abnormal. And I think what we've learned is where is the data on how doe I amalgamate data from distributed systems. And so I see. And we're doing a lot of work with our clients relating to digital transformation, but really about how doe I join data from system a two system F in a distributed manner, most importantly, securely timely on in A in an interface that is usable on it sounds really easy is like Oh, great, yeah, it's just two different data points. Connect them together, make it secure, make it visible, create transparency. But we all know that the world is full of technical debt, legacy systems and platforms Very expensive and significant historical investments on those things Don't modernize themselves overnight. Quite often. The dollars to modernize them don't justify themselves. So we then end up layering on, you know, new technology. So you know what I'm seeing on in digital transformation is really about. How do we handle distributed data Distributed decision making on how we do that in a secure manner on through an interface that is, uh, user friendly? >>Yeah, way. Obviously know that there's had to be some prioritization. You know, the joke. I've had everybody came into twenty twenty with Okay, here. Here's what I'm gonna do for the first half of the year. Here's the objectives that I have, and we kind of throw those in the shredder rather early on Number one priority. I still hear it was probably that the number one priority coming into the year and it stays there, and you've mentioned it multiple times. Its security, you know, is absolutely front and center Still. How overall, though, How are your customers? You know, the c X So sweet. How are they adjusting their priorities? Are there certain projects that just go on hold? Are there certain ones that get front and center? Obviously, you know, that distributed work from anywhere. Telemedicine, uh, you know, teach and learn from anywhere have been top of mind. But any other key learnings you're finding or prioritization changes, some of which are gonna probably stay with us. Uh, you know, for the long term, >>Absolutely. We've definitely seems Thio customers re prioritizing. And I think there is obviously an inevitability to this, a za consequence of the pandemic. I mean, if you were undertaking a campus upgrade, you might just put that on pause for the moment. And we've absolutely seen that. But what we've really seen is a prioritization has been How do we get our information to our users? Whether the user is a customer or whether the user is an employee, you know, there's examples where there's lots of companies who are saying they've got, like, online detail, right. But now they've got to do curbside pickup because they've actually got inventory in the stores. But the stores couldn't open. So what you've seen is a re prioritization to say, Well, when we look out inventory management and the supply chain systems, are we factoring in that the inventory we have in a store could also be seen as inventory across the stores? And in fact, what we've really got now is a distributed warehouse. We've got inventory in the warehouse like wholesale, ready for distribution on. Then we've got inventory in a store retail ready for consumer consumption. What? We don't want that to be separate Infantry. We want that to be holistic on. Then how do we enable any any consumer anywhere to be able to arrange for curbside pickup, which we didn't used to do because we would come into the store or arrange for mail order? But the inventory may come from, you know, I may send something from San Francisco to somebody in Boston because it was in a storied inventory in San Francisco. Now, sure, it's got it's got some freight cost, but I've also got some other efficiency savings, and I'm reducing my working capital in my inventory expense. So we've seen prioritization for really how to take advantage of this. I come back to it. This word distributed is very simple in principle, but everything is now working on a new dynamic. So that's some of the prioritization we've seen. >>Um, you mentioned one of the things that might get put on hold is wait. If I was doing a corporate network update, that might not be the first thing. You know, we we Absolutely. We've gotten some great data on just the changing traffic patterns of the Internet, but the network is so critically important, everybody from home is, you know, dealing with Children doing their zoom classrooms while we're trying to dio video meetings. Um, NTT obviously has a strong, uh, you know, network component to what? Its businesses help us understand the services that are important there. What? What? You're working with customers. And how has this kind of transformed, uh, some of those activities? >>Yeah, Yeah, sure. Thank you. You're so right. I mean, I have to say I just like thio, pay my respects to colleagues and fellow workers around the world who are not just working from home but also home schooling in parallel. Uh, kids are fled the nest, you know, they're working for themselves now, so we don't have the extra activity of home schooling. But I can really have a lot of respect her colleagues who are trying to do both. It's a real fine art on. We've seen a lot of actually just talking of re prioritization. We've seen a lot of companies, including ourselves. You know, say to our colleagues, Look after your Children home, school them do everything you can to support your families on, then get to your work So that re prioritization. Justin behavior has been a key change that we've seen a lot of people do that flexibility to. You know, work is something you do not somewhere you go on. Therefore, as long as the work is done, we can flex around. You know your needs is a family, so that's one prioritization we've seen at, actually. But to your point on the network, it is quite amusing to me that we've been for years now talking about cloud on demand subscription services on Actually, the one asset that you need to really enable cloud is the network and its historically been the least cloudlike that you could possibly imagine Because you still need to specify a physical connection. You still need to specify a band with value you still need to specify. You know, the number of devices you get too attached to it. I think this is really a monstrous change that we're going to experience and really are experiencing the network as a service. I mean, we talk about I as has SAS. But what happened toe now, as I mean really, did we just think that everything was about computing software? The network is the underpin er on DSO. Really? We see a big change and this is where we've been very busy in the network as a service enabling customers tohave dynamic reallocation of resources on the network so that they can prioritize traffic, prioritize content, prioritize events, you know, a lot of customers are now doing activities such as hosting their own event, their own digital conference on. Do you want to prioritize what the user experience is when you host one of those events over perhaps a back office process that, quite frankly, wait a few days so we see a significant opportunity. This is where we've been very busy the last few months in really building out much more dynamic network of the service solutions. You know, the Cloud Network. And I think the whole software defined network agenda has materially accelerated. That's one major area on then. The other area has just been the phenomenal ship to I p voice on soft bone, actually almost the deletion of the phone in its entirety. Everybody using you know, teams or Skype or Google hangouts to really use as their collaboration mechanism on. Then you know, we're providing all the underlying transportation layer. But as I p voice, you know, that creates a much more integrated collaboration. Experience on git creates a cost saving because you're taking away classic voice services. >>Yeah, Simon Boy, I'm excited for that. I I remember when I got my first BlackBerry and they were trying to sell me some things. I'm like, Wait, this is an Internet endpoint. I can do all of these things there and of course you know it's taking taking it. The last dozen years. If If Ghana certain far, but and we always joke, it's like smartphones. We don't use them for phones anymore. We use them for all the messaging and all those services. So, uh, the the data and the network are so critically important, something I want to turn Thio, you know, upgrade twenty twenty. You know what? I'm excited about this. You know, we've talked about, you know, the major impacts of what's happened in twenty twenty, and we're looking at the here and now. But it's great in technology when we get to be able to look forward and look at some of the opportunities out there. So we'd love to hear from your standpoint, some of the areas. What's exciting? You what's exciting? That we can look forward to some of the areas and pockets of research that we see at the event. >>Yeah. Thank you. Strewn E. I think what I like about Aravind is the investment that we make to work with, You know, scientific community, academia, really invest in, you know, forward looking future proofing, how physics and different technologies might play a role in the future. And, you know, some of these investments and some of this research yields commercial products, and some of it doesn't. But it's still a very valuable opportunity for us to really look at you know where technology is going. I think the areas that particularly appealing to me on a personal level, just the whole thing of quantum computing. This is, uh, you know, I know we're already exploring the capabilities of quantum computing in, you know, some labs and Cem academia centers on really to understand, how can we take advantage of that? But I think if you then say and you take another area that we're exploring through the event Biosciences, if you then take the two together and you think Okay, how do we take quantum computing on? We take Biosciences on you think about health care, and then you think about the pandemic. You know? Are there things that we can do with simulations and technologies in the future that really would give us a greater comprehension and ability to accelerate understanding, understand, accelerate testing, and then really contribute to, you know, the health and welfare of society. Andi, I think that's really quite an exciting area for us. So that's a specific topic that I'm particularly interested in. I'm glad to see us doing a lot in that space quantum computing as well as you know, Biosciences. And I'd say, you know, one other area where I still think we're all trying to ascertain how it serves the business is really the area of Blockchain. I think this is, um, intriguing. I'm still mentally trying to master the subject. No amount of white papers has managed Thio overcome the topic of my brain yet, So I'm still working on it on. Then I think cryptography, I come back to the same subject security. I mean, we are dependent as citizens, businesses and nations on technology. Now, on our data is available how we secure it, How we make sure that it's encrypted is absolutely going to be critical. You see an increasing push nationally on globally to ensure that there is, you know, security of data on. I think the subject of cryptography and how we go forward with, you know, beyond one hundred and twenty eight bit is gonna be a very difficult and critical subjects. So these are the areas I'm very impressed with. >>Wonderful. Simon, I wanna give you the final word from update. Great. Twenty twenty. >>Yeah, thanks to you. Just thanks very much, Thio. Anybody that's attending what you'll find through various workshops. There's lots of insight from our strategic partners from research scientists from academia from ourselves. So thank you very much for participating. You know, we always value your feedback. So please tell us what we could do to improve the content to help you with your businesses. Onda, We look forward and hope that everybody stays safe. Thank you for connecting with us virtually >>well. Simon Walsh, Thank you so much. Great. Having a conversation and glad to have you in our cube alumni now, >>thank you very much to have a good day. >>Alright, Stay tuned. More coverage from upgrade twenty twenty. I'm still minimum. And thanks. As always, for watching the cube. Yeah,

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering the Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit presented by NTT Research. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Palo Alto studio for our ongoing coverage of the Upgrade 2020, it's the NTT Research conference. It's our first year covering the event, it's actually the first year for the event inaugural, a year for the events, we're really, really excited to get into this. It's basic research that drives a whole lot of innovation, and we're really excited to have our next guest. He is Kazuhiro Gomi, he is the President and CEO of NTT Research. Kazu, great to see you. >> Hi, good to see you. >> Yeah, so let's jump into it. So this event, like many events was originally scheduled I think for March at Berkeley, clearly COVID came along and you guys had to make some changes. I wonder if you can just share a little bit about your thinking in terms of having this event, getting this great information out, but having to do it in a digital way and kind of rethinking the conference strategy. >> Sure, yeah. So NTT Research, we started our operations about a year ago, July, 2019. and I always wanted to show the world that to give a update of what we have done in the areas of basic and fundamental research. So we plan to do that in March, as you mentioned, however, that the rest of it to some extent history, we needed to cancel the event and then decided to do this time of the year through virtual. Something we learned, however, not everything is bad, by doing this virtual we can certainly reach out to so many peoples around the globe at the same time. So we're taking, I think, trying to get the best out of it. >> Right, right, so you've got a terrific lineup. So let's jump into a little bit. So first thing just about NTT Research, we're all familiar, if you've been around for a little while about Bell Labs, we're fortunate to have Xerox PARC up the street here in Palo Alto, these are kind of famous institutions doing basic research. People probably aren't as familiar at least in the states around NTT basic research. But when you think about real bottom line basic research and how it contributes ultimately, it gets into products, and solutions, and health care, and all kinds of places. How should people think about basic research and its role in ultimately coming to market in products, and services, and all different things. But you're getting way down into the weeds into the really, really basic hardcore technology. >> Sure, yeah, so let me just from my perspective, define the basic research versus some other research and development. For us that the basic research means that we don't necessarily have any like a product roadmap or commercialization roadmap, we just want to look at the fundamental core technology of all things. And from the timescale perspective obviously, not that we're not looking at something new, thing, next year, next six months, that kind of thing. We are looking at five years or sometimes longer than that, potentially 10 years down the road. But you mentioned about the Bell Lab and Xerox PARC. Yeah, well, they used to be such organizations in the United States, however, well, arguably those days have kind of gone, but so that's what's going on in the United States. In Japan, NTT has have done quite a bit of basic research over the years. And so we wanted to, I think because that a lot of the cases that we can talk about the end of the Moore's laws and then the, we are kind of scary time for that. The energy consumptions on ITs We need to make some huge, big, fundamental change has to happen to sustain our long-term development of the ideas and basically for the sake of human beings. >> Right, right. >> So NTT sees that and also we've been doing quite a bit of basic research in Japan. So we recognize this is a time that the let's expand this activities and then by doing, as a part of doing so is open up the research lab in Silicon Valley, where certainly we can really work better, work easier to with that the global talents in this field. So that's how we started this endeavor, like I said, last year. And so far, it's a tremendous progress that we have made, so that's where we are. >> That's great, so just a little bit more specific. So you guys are broken down into three labs as I understand, you've got the Physics, the PHI, which is Physics and Informatics, the CIS lab Cryptography and Information Security, and the MEI lab Medical and Health Informatics, and the conference has really laid out along those same tracks, really day one is a whole lot of stuff, or excuse me, they do to run the Physics and Informatics day. The next day is really Cryptography and Information Security, and then the Medical and Health Informatics. So those are super interesting but very diverse kind of buckets of fundamental research. And you guys are attacking all three of those pillars. >> Yup, so day one, general session, is that we cover the whole, all the topics. And but just that whole general topics. I think some people, those who want to understand what NTT research is all about, joining day one will be a great day to be, to understand more holistic what we are doing. However, given the type of research topic that we are tackling, we need the deep dive conversations, very specific to each topic by the specialist and the experts in each field. Therefore we have a day two, three, and four for a specific topics that we're going to talk about. So that's a configuration of this conference. >> Right, right, and I love. I just have to read a few of the session breakout titles 'cause I think they're just amazing and I always love learning new vocabulary words. Coherent nonlinear dynamics and combinatorial optimization language multipliers, indistinguishability obfuscation from well-founded assumptions, fully deniable communications and computation. I mean, a brief history of the quasi-adaptive NIZKs, which I don't even know what that stands for. (Gomi laughing) Really some interesting topics. But the other thing that jumps out when you go through the sessions is the representation of universities and really the topflight university. So you've got people coming from MIT, CalTech, Stanford, Notre Dame, Michigan, the list goes on and on. Talk to us about the role of academic institutions and how NTT works in conjunction with academic institutions, and how at this basic research level kind of the commercial academic interests align and come together, and work together to really move this basic research down the road. >> Sure, so the working with academic, especially at the top-notch universities are crucial for us. Obviously, that's where the experts in each field of the basic research doing their super activities and we definitely need to get connected, and then we need to accelerate our activities and together with the entities researchers. So that has been kind of one of the number one priority for us to jumpstart and get some going. So as you mentioned, Jeff, that we have a lineup of professors and researchers from each top-notch universities joining to this event and talking at a generous, looking at different sessions. So I'm sure that those who are listening in to those sessions, you will learn well what's going on from the NTT's mind or NTT researchers mind to tackle each problem. But at the same time you will get to hear that top level researchers and professors in each field. So I believe this is going to be a kind of unique, certainly session that to understand what's it's like in a research field of quantum computing, encryptions, and then medical informatics of the world. >> Right. >> So that's, I am sure it's going to be a pretty great lineups. >> Oh, absolutely, a lot of information exchange. And I'm not going to ask you to pick your favorite child 'cause that would be unfair, but what I am going to do is I noticed too that you also write for the Forbes Technology Council members. So you're publishing on Forbes, and one of the articles that you publish relatively recently was about biological digital twins. And this is a topic that I'm really interested in. We used to do a lot of stuff with GE and there was always a lot of conversation about digital twins, for turbines, and motors, and kind of all this big, heavy industrial equipment so that you could get ahead of the curve in terms of anticipating maintenance and basically kind of run simulations of its lifetime. Need concept, now, and that's applied to people in biology, whether that's your heart or maybe it's a bigger system, your cardiovascular system, or the person as a whole. I mean, that just opens up so much interesting opportunities in terms of modeling people and being able to run simulations. If they do things different, I would presume, eat different, walk a little bit more, exercise a little bit more. And you wrote about it, I wonder if you could share kind of your excitement about the potential for digital twins in the medical space. >> Sure, so I think that the benefit is very clear for a lot of people, I would hope that the ones, basically, the computer system can simulate or emulate your own body, not just a generic human body, it's the body for Kazu Gomi at the age of whatever. (Jeff laughing) And so if you get that precise simulation of your body you can do a lot of things. Oh, you, meaning I think a medical professional can do a lot of thing. You can predict what's going to happen to my body in the next year, six months, whatever. Or if I'm feeling sick or whatever the reasons and then the doctor wants to prescribe a few different medicines, but you can really test it out a different kind of medicines, not to you, but to the twin, medical twin then obviously is safer to do some kind of specific medicines or whatever. So anyway, those are the kind of visions that we have. And I have to admit that there's a lot of things, technically we have to overcome, and it will take a lot of years to get there. But I think it's a pretty good goal to define, so we said we did it and I talked with a couple of different experts and I am definitely more convinced that this is a very nice goal to set. However, well, just talking about the goal, just talking about those kinds of futuristic thing, you may just end up with a science fiction. So we need to be more specific, so we have the very researchers are breaking down into different pieces, how to get there, again, it's going to be a pretty long journey, but we're starting from that, they're try to get the digital twin for the cardiovascular system, so basically the create your own heart. Again, the important part is that this model of my heart is very similar to your heart, Jeff, but it's not identical it is somehow different. >> Right, right. >> So we are looking on it and there are certainly some, we're not the only one thinking something like this, there are definitely like-minded researchers in the world. So we are gathered together with those folks and then come up with the exchanging the ideas and coming up with that, the plans, and ideas, that's where we are. But like you said, this is really a exciting goal and exciting project. >> Right, and I like the fact that you consistently in all the background material that I picked up preparing for this today, this focus on tech for good and tech for helping the human species do better down the road. In another topic, in other blog post, you talked about and specifically what are 15 amazing technologies contributing to the greater good and you highlighted cryptography. So there's a lot of interesting conversations around encryption and depending kind of commercialization of quantum computing and how that can break all the existing kind of encryption. And there's going to be this whole renaissance in cryptography, why did you pick that amongst the entire pallet of technologies you can pick from, what's special about cryptography for helping people in the future? >> Okay, so encryption, I think most of the people, just when you hear the study of the encryption, you may think what the goal of these researchers or researches, you may think that you want to make your encryption more robust and more difficult to break. That you can probably imagine that's the type of research that we are doing. >> Jeff: Right. >> And yes, yes, we are doing that, but that's not the only direction that we are working on. Our researchers are working on different kinds of encryptions and basically encryptions controls that you can just reveal, say part of the data being encrypted, or depending upon that kind of attribute of whoever has the key, the information being revealed are slightly different. Those kinds of encryption, well, it's kind of hard to explain verbally, but functional encryption they call is becoming a reality. And I believe those inherit data itself has that protection mechanism, and also controlling who has access to the information is one of the keys to address the current status. Current status, what I mean by that is, that they're more connected world we are going to have, and more information are created through IOT and all that kind of stuff, more sensors out there, I think. So it is great on the one side that we can do a lot of things, but at the same time there's a tons of concerns from the perspective of privacy, and securities, and stuff, and then how to make those things happen together while addressing the concern and the leverage or the benefit you can create super complex accessing systems. But those things, I hate to say that there are some inherently bringing in some vulnerabilities and break at some point, which we don't want to see. >> Right. >> So I think having those securities and privacy mechanism in that the file itself is I think that one of the key to address those issues, again, get the benefit of that they're connected in this, and then while maintaining the privacy and security for the future. >> Right. >> So and then that's, in the end will be the better for everyone and a better society. So I couldn't pick other (Gomi and Jeff laughing) technology but I felt like this is easier for me to explain to a lot of people. So that's mainly the reasons that I went back launching. >> Well, you keep publishing, so I'm sure you'll work your way through most of the technologies over a period of time, but it's really good to hear there's a lot of talk about security not enough about privacy. There's usually the regs and the compliance laws lag, what's kind of happening in the marketplace. So it's good to hear that's really a piece of the conversation because without the privacy the other stuff is not as attractive. And we're seeing all types of issues that are coming up and the regs are catching up. So privacy is a super important piece. But the other thing that is so neat is to be exposed not being an academic, not being in this basic research every day, but have the opportunity to really hear at this level of detail, the amount of work that's being done by big brain smart people to move these basic technologies along, we deal often in kind of higher level applications versus the stuff that's really going on under the cover. So really a great opportunity to learn more and hear from, and probably understand some, understand not all about some of these great, kind of baseline technologies, really good stuff. >> Yup. >> Yeah, so thank-you for inviting us for the first one. And we'll be excited to sit in on some sessions and I'm going to learn. What's that one phrase that I got to learn? The N-I-K-Z-T. NIZKs. (laughs) >> NIZKs. (laughs) >> Yeah, NIZKs, the brief history of quasi-adaptive NI. >> Oh, all right, yeah, yeah. (Gomi and Jeff laughing) >> All right, Kazuhiro, I give you the final word- >> You will find out, yeah. >> You've been working on this thing for over a year, I'm sure you're excited to finally kind of let it out to the world, I wonder if you have any final thoughts you want to share before we send people back off to their sessions. >> Well, let's see, I'm sure if you're watching this video, you are almost there for that actual summit. It's about to start and so hope you enjoy the summit and in a physical, well, I mentioned about the benefit of this virtual, we can reach out to many people, but obviously there's also a flip side of the coin as well. With a physical, we can get more spontaneous conversations and more in-depth discussion, certainly we can do it, perhaps not today. It's more difficult to do it, but yeah, I encourage you to, I think I encouraged my researchers NTT side as well to basic communicate with all of you potentially and hopefully then to have more in-depth, meaningful conversations just starting from here. So just feel comfortable, perhaps just feel comfortable to reach out to me and then all the other NTT folks. And then now, also that the researchers from other organizations, I'm sure they're looking for this type of interactions moving forward as well, yeah. >> Terrific, well, thank-you for that open invitation and you heard it everybody, reach out, and touch base, and communicate, and engage. And it's not quite the same as being physical in the halls, but that you can talk to a whole lot more people. So Kazu, again, thanks for inviting us. Congratulations on the event and really glad to be here covering it. >> Yeah, thank-you very much, Jeff, appreciate it. >> All right, thank-you. He's Kazu, I'm Jeff, we are at the Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, its theCUBE, covering the UPGRADE 2020, the NTT Research Summit presented by NTT research. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of UPGRADE 2020. Of course, it's the NTT Research Summit and happy to welcome to the program, someone that's watched theCUBE for a long time, but first time on the program, Simon Walsh, he is the new CEO of NTT Americas. Simon, great to see you, and thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks very much Stu, good to be here, nice to see you. >> As I mentioned, your previous companies that you've worked for are that theCUBE and theCUBE audience are well aware of. As a matter of fact, when I worked for some of those companies, NTT is one of the large global companies that I had the pleasure to interact with over the years. But if you could, maybe, let's start with just a bit of your background. And as I said, it's only been a few months that you've been the CEO. So, what's it like coming into a role like this, during the the situation that we're all faced with in 2020? >> Yeah. Thank you. My background is really in the platforms that enable the customers to run their technologies. And, I've spent some of my time in Europe and India and then lastly the last five plus years in the Americas, I have to say, I really enjoy it. It's a much better environment. And if I think about it from a GDP and an economy perspective, it's a really dynamic place to work. I've worked with companies, headquartered from Europe, running in Americas. And I've worked with companies that were headquartered in the Americas, running some of the European businesses. So, I've crossed the continents if you like. And I recently joined NTT and I have to say, it was a pretty lengthy process to explore, but that was partly, interviews and due diligence. Cause you want to make sure that, you're buying into a company that, number one, you can have a cultural compatibility with, but also somebody who you see really investing in technology that consult for the business agenda of the markets. So, that's really a bit about my background and then joining. I mean, I literally joined the last week of June, so, my whole time has been through lockdown in terms of employment. It's been very unique taking on a new post, exclusively remote, and I was a bit worried, at a human level, just, how do you connect with people? But what I would comment is I've actually had the ability to really meet a lot more people in person cause you can physically get to people's schedules a lot easier. So, that's certainly helped. And I've done my activities of meeting up clients. So, they've been very amenable to connecting, talking to our business partners and spending considerable amount of time with my colleagues in the Americas and around the world. And it's actually been very rewarding. I think, funnily enough, you probably physically closer because you're on a screen, and you're probably like 24 inches away from each other. Whereas in a meeting room you'd be the other side of a table. So, it's been unique, but so far so good. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. The new abnormal, as we've sometimes say we're all used to looking in the screens all day, talking to various people there. The impact on business though has been, obviously a lot of different things depending on the company, but that discussion of digital transformation a few years ago, it was like, "Oh, I don't know if it's real, is it a buzz word?" But that the spotlight that's been shown here in 2020 is what is real and what is not? Leveraging cloud services, giving people agility, being able to react fast because buoyant 2020th, we needed to react fast. So, help bring us inside a bit, and your time there, the discussions you're having with customers that adoption, moving along that journey for digital transformation, the impact that you're seeing and how's NTT helping its customers as they need to accelerate and respond to the realities that we see today. >> Yeah. So you're right Stu. I mean, digital disruption has been on varying for multiple years and we used to call it, technology and change and now we call it digital disruption or digital transformation. So, it's not necessarily new. I think the thing that's really accelerated in 2020, as a consequence of the pandemic is really the word distributed in that customers are undertaking their digital transformations, understanding what it is to modernize processes, modernize the customer experience. And then they're finding that actually they don't meet in a boardroom and discuss, the performance of the business. So, they now need to have distributed access to data. And I think that the topics that we see very prevalent is the distributed nature of the workforce. And obviously there's always been a field workforce and we've had systems. CRM systems and other systems that were built for a distributed workforce. But now we have to think about how supply chain management systems and our HR systems, the PNL, and, all of the activities that our business undertakes with an entirely distributed workforce. And it's quite abnormal. What I think what we've learned is where is the data and how do I amalgamate data from distributed systems? And so I see, we're doing a lot of work with our clients relating to digital transformation, but really about how do I join data from system A to System F in a distributed manner? And most importantly, securely, timely and in an interface that is usable. And it sounds really easy. It's like, Oh great. Yeah, it's just two different data points, connect them together, make it secure, make it visible, create transparency. But we all know that the world is full of technical debt, legacy systems and platforms, very expensive and significant historical investments. And those things don't modernize themselves overnight. And quite often the dollars to modernize them don't justify themselves. So, we then end up layering on new technology. So, what I'm seeing in digital transformation is really about how do we handle distributed data, distributed decision making, and how do we do that in a secure manner and through an interface that is user friendly. >> Yeah, we obviously know that there's had to be some prioritization. The joke I've had, everybody came into 2020 with, "Okay, here's what I'm going to do for the first half of the year. Here's the objectives that I have." And we kind of throw those in the shredder rather early on. Number one priority I still hear it was probably that the number one priority coming into the year and it stays there and you've mentioned it multiple times, it's security, it is absolutely front and center still. How overall though, how are your customers, the CXO suite, how are they adjusting their priorities? Are there certain projects that just go on hold? Are there certain ones that get front and center, obviously, you know, that distributed work from anywhere telemedicine, teach and learn from anywhere, have been top of mind. But any other key learnings you're finding or prioritization changes, some of which are going to probably stay with us, for the longterm. >> Absolutely. We've definitely seen customers reprioritizing. And I think there is obviously an inevitability to this as a consequence of the pandemic. I mean, if you were undertaking a campus upgrade, you might just put that on pause for the moment. And we've absolutely seen that. But what we've really seen as a prioritization has been, how do we get our information to our users, whether the user is a customer or whether the user is an employee? There's examples where there's lots of companies who say they've got like online e-tail, right? But now they've got to do curbside pickup because they've actually got inventory in the stores, but the stores couldn't open. So, what you've seen is a re-prioritization to say, well when we look at inventory management and the supply chain systems, are we factoring in the inventory we have in a store could also be seen as inventory across the stores? And in fact, what we've really got now is a distributed warehouse. We've got inventory in the warehouse like wholesale ready for distribution. And then we've got inventory in a store, retail ready for consumer consumption. What don't want that to be separate inventory. We want that to be holistic. And then how do we enable any consumer anywhere to be able to arrange for curbside pickup, which we didn't use to do because we would come into the store or arrange for mail order. But the inventory may come from you know, I may send something from San Francisco to somebody in Boston because it was in a store inventory in San Francisco. Now, sure, it's got some freight cost, but I've also got some other efficiency savings and I'm reducing my working capital or my inventory expense. So, we've seen prioritization for really how to take advantage of this. I come back to it, this word distributed is very simple in principal, but everything is now working on a new dynamic. So, that's some of the prioritization we've seen. >> You mentioned one of the things that might get put on hold is, wait if I was doing a corporate network update, that might not be the first thing, we absolutely, we've gotten some great data on just the changing traffic patterns of the internet, but the network is so critically important. Everybody from home is dealing with, you know, children doing their Zoom classrooms while we're trying to do video meetings. NTT obviously has a strong network component to what its business is. So, help us understand the services that are important there, what you're working with customers and how has this kind of transformed some of those activities? >> Yeah. Yeah, sure. Thank you. You're so right. I mean and I have to say, I just like to pay my respects to colleagues and fellow workers around the world who are not just working from home, but also homeschooling in parallel. Our kids fled the nest, either they're working for themselves now, so, we don't have the extra activity of homeschooling, but I can really have a lot of respect for colleagues who are trying to do both, it's a real fine art. And we've seen a lot of actually just talking of re-prioritization. We've seen a lot of companies including ourselves, say to our colleagues, look after your children, homeschool them, do everything you can to support your families and then get to your work. So, that re-prioritization just in behavior has been a key change that we've seen a lot of people do. That flexibility to, you know, work is something you do, not somewhere you go. And therefore, as long as the work is done, we can flex around, you know your needs as a family. So, that's one prioritization we've seen active actually. But to your point on the network, it's quite amusing to me that we've been for years now talking about cloud, on-demand subscription services. And actually the one asset that you need to really enable cloud is the network. And it's historically been the least cloud-like that you could possibly imagine because you still need to specify a physical connection. You still need to specify a bandwidth value. You still need to specify, the number of devices you've got to attach to it. I think this is really a monstrous change that we're going to experience and really are experiencing, the network as a service. I mean, we talk about IAS, PAS SAS, but what happened to NAS? I mean, really did we just think that everything was about computer and software? The networker is the underpinner. And so really we see a big change and this is where we've been very busy in the network as a service enabling customers to have, dynamic reallocation of resources on the network so that they can prioritize traffic, prioritize content, prioritize events. A lot of customers and are doing activities such as hosting their own event, their own digital conference. And you want to prioritize what the user experience is when you host one of those events over perhaps back office process that can quite frankly wait a few days. So, we see a significant opportunity. This is where we've been very busy the last few months in really building out much more dynamic network as a service solutions, the cloud network. And I think the whole software defined network agenda has materially accelerated. That's one major area. And then the other area has just been the phenomenal shift to IP voice and software and actually almost the deletion of the phone in its entirety. Everybody using, Teams or Skype or Google Hangouts to really use as their collaboration mechanism. And then, we're providing all the underlying transportation layer, but as IP voices, that creates a much more integrated collaboration experience, and it creates a cost saving cause you're taking away the classic voice services. >> Yeah. So Simon boy, I'm excited for that. I tell you, I remember when I got my first Blackberry and they were trying to sell me some things, I'm like, "Wait, this is an internet endpoint. I can do all of these things there." And of course, you know, it's taken me the last dozen years. If gone a certain far, but, and we always joke. It's like smartphones, we don't use them for phones anymore. We use them for all the messaging and all those services. So, the data and the network are so critically important. Simon, I want to turn to UPGRADE 2020, you know what I'm excited about this, we've talked about the major impacts of what's happened in 2020. And we're looking at the here and now, but it's great in technology when we get to be able to look forward and look at some of the opportunities out there. So, would love to hear from your standpoint, some of the areas, what's exciting you, what's exciting that we can look forward to some of the areas and pockets of research that we see at the event. >> Yeah, I think he's Stu. I think what I like about our event is the investment that we make to work with the scientific community, academia, and really invest in, forward-looking, future-proofing, how physics and different technologies might play a role in the future. And, some of these investments and some of this research yields, commercial products and some of it doesn't, but it's still a very valuable opportunity for us to really look at where technology is going. I think the areas that are particularly appealing to me on a personal level, just the whole thing of Quantum computing. This is, I know we're already exploring the capabilities of Quantum computing in some labs, and some academia centers and really to understanding how can we take advantage of that. But I think if you then say, and you take another area that we're exploring through the event, Biosciences. If you then take the two together and you think, okay, how do we take Quantum computing, and we take Biosciences and you think about healthcare, and then you think about the pandemic, are there things that we can do with simulations and technologies in the future that really would give us greater comprehension and ability to accelerate, understanding, accelerate testing, and then really contribute to the health and welfare of society. And I think that's really quite an exciting area for us. So, that's a specific topic that I'm particularly interested in. I'm glad to see us doing a lot in that space, Quantum computing, as well as the Biosciences. And I'd say one other area where I still think we're all trying to ascertain, how it serves the business is really the area of blockchain. I think this is intriguing. I'm still mentally trying to master the subject. No amount of white papers has managed to overcome the topic in my brain yet. So I'm still working on it. And then I think cryptography, I come back to the same subject security. I mean, we are dependent as citizens, businesses and nations on technology now, and our data is available how we secure it, how we make sure that it's encrypted is absolutely going to be critical. You see an increasing push nationally and globally to ensure that there is security of data. And I think the subject of cryptography, and how we go forward with, beyond 128 bit is going to be a very difficult and critical subject. So these are the areas I'm very impressed with. >> Wonderful. Simon, I want to give you the final word from UPGRADE 2020. >> Yeah. Thanks, Stu Just thanks very much to anybody that's attending. What you'll find through various workshops is lots of insight, from our strategic partners, from research scientists, from academia, from ourselves. So thank you very much for participating. We always value your feedback. So, please tell us what we could do to improve the content, to help you with your businesses. And we look forward and hope that everybody stays safe. Thank you for connecting with us virtually. >> Well, Simon Walsh. Thank you so much. Great having a conversation and glad to have you in our Cube alumni now. >> Thank you very much Stu. Have a good day. >> All right. And stay tuned more coverage from UPGRADE 2020 I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks as always for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's the Cube covering the Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit presented by NTT Research. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the Cube's coverage of Upgrade 2020 the Global Research Summit for NTT and always happy when we get to talk about digital transformation. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest on the program, Eric Clark. He is the Chief Digital Officer with NTT data. Eric, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> All right so Eric, let's start, you know, CDOs, first of all, there's lots of CDOs. We've done lots of events with the Chief Data Officers, which I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about data, but the digital officers, of course digital so important in general and even more so in 2020. But let's understand your role as Chief Digital Officer. What's your charter? Where you sit in the work? What are you responsible for? >> Yeah, definitely, and you know, it's a good question. I often start conversations with our customers by talking about exactly that, because Chief Digital Officer means something different to different companies. So for us, it's primarily my market facing. And what that means is I spend most of my time looking at research, looking at R&D, looking at what our competitors are doing in the market and looking at where trends are going to make sure that we have the right offerings and capabilities to bring to our customers, to make sure that they will remain competitive in their markets. >> That's great, you know, we've been talking for years about the digital transformations that companies have been going through. One of our definitions has been, if you're not at the end of it, more data-driven, you probably haven't done the right thing. But Eric, this year with 2020, you know, anecdotally, we talked to a lot of customers and obviously there's certain initiatives that get frozen or will take a little bit longer, but those digital initiatives, which are supposed to rely on data and help us move fast and be more agile, seem to be at the top of the list and are accelerating because if I can't respond to the daily and weekly changes that have been great in 2020, I might have a tough time surviving. So, what are you seeing? How does that live in your world? >> Yeah, you're exactly right. And that's what we're seeing from our client base as well. So early on in the pandemic, there was a lot of freeze. You know, hold everything, stop, stop spending, and let's figure out where we are and where this is going. But very quickly that turned to, we've got to react. We're going to be living with this for awhile. And we can't afford to sit back and wait and see where it goes. We've got to react and we've got to direct our future. And very often the way that comes out is with digital. So, customers are looking for opportunities to leverage digital, to grow revenue, to improve customer engagement and to drive more of their revenue through digital channels. >> Interesting, but one thing I didn't here in there, but I'm sure is part if it, what about the employees themselves? One of the big things of course, is that we've made this wonderful corporate environment, you've got the great internet there and now way everybody's at home and scrambling as to what they do. So how about the kind of the EX to go along with the CX? >> Yeah, exactly, and that was actually one of the first places that we focused as a company, because we do a lot of what we refer to as workplace services. So making sure that our customers, employees have the tools they need to do their job successfully. So immediately when offices started closing and people started going home, our big challenge was let's make sure that our customers can connect from anywhere, from wherever they need to be working from and have access to the applications and the tools and the products that they need to perform their jobs remotely. And that's really turned into a significant business of its own, really addressing those needs, not only for our customers, but also for our employee base. We have 50,000 people that we sent home, more than 90% of overnight. And many of these are our employees that are interacting with our customer base on a daily basis. So we had to make sure not only that they had connected but they had to be secure. So it was a very big switch and I think I personally was really impressed not only with what we did, but what we saw the industry do, to make that transition very safely and seamlessly. >> Eric I'd love you to expand a little bit on that, You know, which pieces of that full solution that is NTT offering and how do you and your partners help your customers through those rapid adoptions that they need? >> Yeah, so we're a full suite provider. So, we're focused on digital operations, which is digitizing your back office from your workplace services to your hybrid infrastructure network, et cetera. All the way through bringing what we refer to as journey to the cloud. So how do we help you identify what applications and what data you need in the cloud. CX and EX very big focuses for us. In fact, we take a lot of pride in, while we do go to market and sell CX specifically, we consider CX part of everything we do. So if we're talking about workplace services or hybrid infrastructure or security, we want the employee experience to be solid, and we want the employee experience to be consistent across all of those things. So, we think that our customers should not expect to have different interfaces and different portals and different user experiences when they do work with us across infrastructure, application and cloud, et cetera. >> That's excellent Eric. You know we spent the last six months talking about how did we react to the pandemic, and now at least here in the US, the children are back in school. If they're back though, it tends to be a hybrid model. And when we look at work, often we know we're going to have this long gated, kind of new abnormal if you will. So, yes you might be back in the office some, but chances are you will spend some time remote and therefore it's not work from home or back to work, it's work from anywhere, is what I need to be able to do. So, how are you preparing? How are you helping your customers through that? Because it's one thing if it was just a switch that says, I'm either here or there, but it's changing and it's very fluid. >> Yeah, and you're exactly right, it is work from anywhere. But there are some of our customers that don't have the luxury of work from anywhere. So when you think about manufacturing facilities and different hospitality companies, there are people that need to go into physical places. We do a lot in the healthcare space. We need doctors in the hospitals. So we've done a lot to help our customers figure out safe ways to return to work. Recently, we've seen universities, and as you mentioned, high schools and elementary schools all going back with varying degrees of success, right? Some of them have failed and they've had to take a pause and figure out how they're going to restart. We've also seen professional sports leagues and now college sports leagues. And when we see them having issues, we see protocols adjusting and we see them looking for what can we do to make this safer, more effective and more successful for whether it's our sports team, our school or our business. So we've taken a very active approach in that. And we're leveraging technology and creating IP that starts with pre-arrival, registering in advance and opting in for things like tracking social distancing and tracking the use of masks. Then using cameras and facilities to monitor it, to make sure people that are adhering to social distancing and adhering to wearing mask. And in the event that they aren't, we can send instant notifications to their phone. If we have repeat violators, we can prohibit them from coming back to the office. So we can have very strict controls and adherence to whatever the protocols may be as the protocols change. And then the other thing that allows us to do is in the event, someone would test positive with COVID, we will know exactly who they've been within six feet of without a mask over the past X number of days. All of that is stored in the cloud for us to use for reference and use for audit purposes. So that gives us the ability to then use our app to direct all the people that the person that was positive was in contact with, let them go get tested, come back with a negative test before they returned to the office. So basically what we've done is we've created all kinds of technology using automation and AI and facial recognition to bring more safety and more security to the workplace, whatever that workplace might be. Whether again, school, university, manufacturing facility, or a hotel. >> Really interesting topic. Tracking and tracing, so critically important. We've seen in many countries around the world, that's really helped them get their arms around and control that. We talked at the top of the interview about digital means leveraging the data. And if I don't have the data, I can't respond to what's happening there. Here in the US, I haven't heard as much about the tracking and tracing. Is this a company by company thing? Do they have the expense all on them to do it? And of course it raises the concerns about, well, I'm concerned about my privacy and that balance between the public interest and my right to privacy. How do you help your customers sort through some of those issues? >> Well, privacy is definitely a big issue. And you notice that when I was explaining that I said in pre-arrival, you opt in. So the way we've approached it is, it is an opt in. So those that don't want to opt in to that kind of tracking and tracing, won't be those that will be allowed to come back to the office. And that goes back to your other point, I've worked from anywhere. Many of those people can still successfully work from anywhere. But those that feel like they're more effective, more successful or have a need to be in an office, or a need to be physically again in a manufacturing facility or a hotel, we have a way to do that safely. >> All right, well, Eric one of the things I love about research events lately like yours, is a little peek into what's coming on down the road. So, any other things you'd like to share about? You know, some of the things that are exciting you, some things we should be looking at a little bit further down the road? >> Well, I think, you know, for us as you know, we spend a significant amount of money each year on research, and we really get excited about these opportunities and these showcases. So you'll see a lot of exciting information and a lot of what's coming in the future. (indistinct) out of it right now obviously because of the time you'll see themes of safety and security, but you're also going to see just a whole lot of really thought provoking, forward thinking technology. >> You always take the opportunity, even when they're crisis out there. There's the opportunity for innovation and acceleration of what's happening. >> Yes. Eric, thanks so much, a pleasure talking with you and definitely looking forward to hearing more from the event. >> Great, thank you, enjoyed it. >> And stick with us for more coverage from Upgrade 2020, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks as always for watching the Cube. (upbeat music)

>>Hello. My name is Isaac twang and I am on the faculty at MIT in electrical engineering and computer science and in physics. And it is a pleasure for me to be presenting at today's NTT research symposium of 2020 to share a little bit with you about programmable quantum simulators theory and practice the simulation of physical systems as described by their Hamiltonian. It's a fundamental problem which Richard Fineman identified early on as one of the most promising applications of a hypothetical quantum computer. The real world around us, especially at the molecular level is described by Hamiltonians, which captured the interaction of electrons and nuclei. What we desire to understand from Hamiltonian simulation is properties of complex molecules, such as this iron molded to them. Cofactor an important catalyst. We desire there are ground States, reaction rates, reaction dynamics, and other chemical properties, among many things for a molecule of N Adams, a classical simulation must scale exponentially within, but for a quantum simulation, there is a potential for this simulation to scale polynomials instead. >>And this would be a significant advantage if realizable. So where are we today in realizing such a quantum advantage today? I would like to share with you a story about two things in this quest first, a theoretical optimal quantum simulation, awkward them, which achieves the best possible runtime for generic Hamiltonian. Second, let me share with you experimental results from a quantum simulation implemented using available quantum computing hardware today with a hardware efficient model that goes beyond what is utilized by today's algorithms. I will begin with the theoretically optimal quantum simulation uncle rhythm in principle. The goal of quantum simulation is to take a time independent Hamiltonian age and solve Schrodinger's equation has given here. This problem is as hard as the hardest quantum computation. It is known as being BQ P complete a simplification, which is physically reasonable and important in practice is to assume that the Hamiltonian is a sum over terms which are local. >>For example, due to allow to structure these local terms, typically do not commute, but their locality means that each term is reasonably small, therefore, as was first shown by Seth Lloyd in 1996, one way to compute the time evolution that is the exponentiation of H with time is to use the lead product formula, which involves a successive approximation by repetitive small time steps. The cost of this charterization procedure is a number of elementary steps, which scales quadratically with the time desired and inverse with the error desired for the simulation output here then is the number of local terms in the Hamiltonian. And T is the desired simulation time where Epsilon is the desired simulation error. Today. We know that for special systems and higher or expansions of this formula, a better result can be obtained such as scaling as N squared, but as synthetically linear in time, this however is for a special case, the latest Hamiltonians and it would be desirable to scale generally with time T for a order T time simulation. >>So how could such an optimal quantum simulation be constructed? An important ingredient is to transform the quantum simulation into a quantum walk. This was done over 12 years ago, Andrew trials showing that for sparse Hamiltonians with around de non-zero entries per row, such as shown in this graphic here, one can do a quantum walk very much like a classical walk, but in a superposition of right and left shown here in this quantum circuit, where the H stands for a hazard market in this particular circuit, the head Mar turns the zero into a superposition of zero and one, which then activate the left. And the right walk in superposition to graph of the walk is defined by the Hamiltonian age. And in doing so Childs and collaborators were able to show the walk, produces a unitary transform, which goes as E to the minus arc co-sign of H times time. >>So this comes close, but it still has this transcendental function of age, instead of just simply age. This can be fixed with some effort, which results in an algorithm, which scales approximately as towel log one over Epsilon with how is proportional to the sparsity of the Hamiltonian and the simulation time. But again, the scaling here is a multiplicative product rather than an additive one, an interesting insight into the dynamics of a cubit. The simplest component of a quantum computer provides a way to improve upon this single cubits evolve as rotations in a sphere. For example, here is shown a rotation operator, which rotates around the axis fi in the X, Y plane by angle theta. If one, the result of this rotation as a projection along the Z axis, the result is a co-sign squared function. That is well-known as a Ravi oscillation. On the other hand, if a cubit is rotated around multiple angles in the X Y plane, say around the fee equals zero fee equals 1.5 and fee equals zero access again, then the resulting response function looks like a flat top. >>And in fact, generalizing this to five or more pulses gives not just flattered hops, but in fact, arbitrary functions such as the Chevy chef polynomial shown here, which gets transplants like bullying or, and majority functions remarkably. If one does rotations by angle theta about D different angles in the X Y plane, the result is a response function, which is a polynomial of order T in co-sign furthermore, as captured by this theorem, given a nearly arbitrary degree polynomial there exists angles fi such that one can achieve the desired polynomial. This is the result that derives from the Remez exchange algorithm used in classical discreet time signal processing. So how does this relate to quantum simulation? Well recall that a quantum walk essentially embeds a Hamiltonian insight, the unitary transform of a quantum circuit, this embedding generalize might be called and it involves the use of a cubit acting as a projector to control the application of H if we generalize the quantum walk to include a rotation about access fee in the X Y plane, it turns out that one obtains a polynomial transform of H itself. >>And this it's the same as the polynomial in the quantum signal processing theorem. This is a remarkable result known as the quantum synchrony value transformed theorem from contrast Julian and Nathan weep published last year. This provides a quantum simulation auger them using quantum signal processing. For example, can start with the quantum walk result and then apply quantum signal processing to undo the arc co-sign transformation and therefore obtain the ideal expected Hamiltonian evolution E to the minus I H T the resulting algorithm costs a number of elementary steps, which scales as just the sum of the evolution time and the log of one over the error desired this saturates, the known lower bound, and thus is the optimal quantum simulation algorithm. This table from a recent review article summarizes a comparison of the query complexities of the known major quantum simulation algorithms showing that the cubitus station and quantum sequel processing algorithm is indeed optimal. >>Of course, this optimality is a theoretical result. What does one do in practice? Let me now share with you the story of a hardware efficient realization of a quantum simulation on actual hardware. The promise of quantum computation traditionally rests on a circuit model, such as the one we just used with quantum circuits, acting on cubits in contrast, consider a real physical problem from quantum chemistry, finding the structure of a molecule. The starting point is the point Oppenheimer separation of the electronic and vibrational States. For example, to connect it, nuclei, share a vibrational mode, the potential energy of this nonlinear spring, maybe model as a harmonic oscillator since the spring's energy is determined by the electronic structure. When the molecule becomes electronically excited, this vibrational mode changes one obtains, a different frequency and different equilibrium positions for the nuclei. This corresponds to a change in the spring, constant as well as a displacement of the nuclear positions. >>And we may write down a full Hamiltonian for this system. The interesting quantum chemistry question is known as the Frank Condon problem. What is the probability of transition between the original ground state and a given vibrational state in the excited state spectrum of the molecule, the Frank content factor, which gives this transition probability is foundational to quantum chemistry and a very hard and generic question to answer, which may be amiable to solution on a quantum computer in particular and natural quantum computer to use might be one which already has harmonic oscillators rather than one, which has just cubits. This has provided any Sonic quantum processors, such as the superconducting cubits system shown here. This processor has both cubits as embodied by the Joseph's injunctions shown here, and a harmonic oscillator as embodied by the resonant mode of the transmission cavity. Given here more over the output of this planar superconducting circuit can be connected to three dimensional cavities instead of using cubit Gates. >>One may perform direct transformations on the bull's Arctic state using for example, beam splitters, phase shifters, displacement, and squeezing operators, and the harmonic oscillator, and may be initialized and manipulated directly. The availability of the cubit allows photon number resolve counting for simulating a tri atomic two mode, Frank Condon factor problem. This superconducting cubits system with 3d cavities was to resonators cavity a and cavity B represent the breathing and wiggling modes of a Triumeq molecule. As depicted here. The coupling of these moles was mediated by a superconducting cubit and read out was accomplished by two additional superconducting cubits, coupled to each one of the cavities due to the superconducting resonators used each one of the cavities had a, a long coherence time while resonator States could be prepared and measured using these strong coupling of cubits to the cavity. And Posana quantum operations could be realized by modulating the coupling cubit in between the two cavities, the cavities are holes drilled into pure aluminum, kept superconducting by millikelvin scale. >>Temperatures microfiber, KT chips with superconducting cubits are inserted into ports to couple via a antenna to the microwave cavities. Each of the cavities has a quality factor so high that the coherence times can reach milliseconds. A coupling cubit chip is inserted into the port in between the cavities and the readout and preparation cubit chips are inserted into ports on the sides. For sake of brevity, I will skip the experimental details and present just the results shown here is the fibrotic spectrum obtained for a water molecule using the Pulsonix superconducting processor. This is a typical Frank content spectrum giving the intensity of lions versus frequency in wave number where the solid line depicts the theoretically expected result and the purple and red dots show two sets of experimental data. One taken quickly and another taken with exhaustive statistics. In both cases, the experimental results have good agreement with the theoretical expectations. >>The programmability of this system is demonstrated by showing how it can easily calculate the Frank Condon spectrum for a wide variety of molecules. Here's another one, the ozone and ion. Again, we see that the experimental data shown in points agrees well with the theoretical expectation shown as a solid line. Let me emphasize that this quantum simulation result was obtained not by using a quantum computer with cubits, but rather one with resonators, one resonator representing each one of the modes of vibration in this trial, atomic molecule. This approach represents a far more efficient utilization of hardware resources compared with the standard cubit model because of the natural match of the resonators with the physical system being simulated in comparison, if cubit Gates had been utilized to perform the same simulation on the order of a thousand cubit Gates would have been required compared with the order of 10 operations, which were performed for this post Sonic realization. >>As in topically, the Cupid motto would have required significantly more operations because of the need to retire each one of the harmonic oscillators into some max Hilbert space size compared with the optimal quantum simulation auger rhythms shown in the first half of this talk, we see that there is a significant gap between available quantum computing hardware can perform and what optimal quantum simulations demand in terms of the number of Gates required for a simulation. Nevertheless, many of the techniques that are used for optimal quantum simulation algorithms may become useful, especially if they are adapted to available hardware, moving for the future, holds some interesting challenges for this field. Real physical systems are not cubits, rather they are composed from bolt-ons and from yawns and from yawns need global anti-Semitism nation. This is a huge challenge for electronic structure calculation in molecules, real physical systems also have symmetries, but current quantum simulation algorithms are largely governed by a theorem, which says that the number of times steps required is proportional to the simulation time. Desired. Finally, real physical systems are not purely quantum or purely classical, but rather have many messy quantum classical boundaries. In fact, perhaps the most important systems to simulate are really open quantum systems. And these dynamics are described by a mixture of quantum and classical evolution and the desired results are often thermal and statistical properties. >>I hope this presentation of the theory and practice of quantum simulation has been interesting and worthwhile. Thank you.

>> Hello, welcome to the final day of the NTT Research Summit Upgrade 2020. My name is Joe Alexander and I belong to the Medical and Health Informatics lab, so-called MEI lab, and I lead the development of the bio digital twin. I'd like to give you a high level overview of what we mean by bio digital twin, what some of our immediate research targets are, and a description of our overall approach. You will note that my title is not simply bio digital twin, but more specifically a cardiovascular bio digital twin and you'll soon understand why. What do we mean by digital twin? For our project, we're taking the definition on approach used in commercial aviation, mostly for predictive maintenance of jet engines. A digital twin is an up-to-date virtual representation, an electronic replica if you will. Now, if anything which gives you real-time insight into the status of the real-world asset to enable better management and to inform decision-making. It aims to merge the real and the virtual world. It enables one to design, simulate, and verify products digitally, including mechanics and multi-physics. It allows integration of complex systems. It allows for predictive maintenance through direct real-time monitoring of the health and structure of the plane parts, mitigating danger. It enables monitoring of all machines anywhere at all times. This allows feeding back insights to continuously optimize the digital twin of the product, which in turn leads to continuous improvement of the product in the real world. A robust platform is needed for digital twins to live, learn and run. Because we aim to apply these concepts to biological systems for predictive maintenance of health, we use the term bio digital twin. We're aiming for a precision medicine and predictive health maintenance. And while ultimately we intend to represent multiple organ systems and the diseases affecting them, we will start with the cardiovascular system. When we revisit concepts from the last slide, there's the one-to-one mapping as you can see on this slide. A cardiovascular bio digital twin is an up-to-date virtual representation as well, but of a cardiovascular system, which gives you real-time insight into the status of the cardiovascular system of a real world patient to enable better care management and to inform clinical decision-making. It does so by merging the real and virtual world. It enables one to design, simulate, and verify drug and device treatments digitally, including cardiovascular mechanics and multi-physics. It allows integration of complex organ systems. It allows for predictive maintenance of health care through direct real-time monitoring of the health and functional integration, or excuse me, functional integrity of body parts, mitigating danger. It enables monitoring of all patients anywhere at all times. This allows feedback to continuously optimize the digital twins of subjects, which in turn leads to continuous improvements to the health of subjects in the real world. Also a robust platform is needed for digital twins to live, learn, and run. One platform under evaluation for us is called embodied bio-sciences. And it is a cloud-based platform leveraging AWS distributed computing database and cuing solutions. There are many cardiovascular diseases that might be targeted by cardiovascular bio digital twin. We have chosen to focus on the two most common forms of heart failure, and those are ischemic heart failure and hypertensive heart failure. Ischemic heart failure is usually due to coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart failure usually is secondary to high blood pressure. By targeting heart failure, number one, it forces us to automatically incorporate biological mechanisms, common to many other cardiovascular diseases. And two, heart failure is an area of significant unmet medical need, especially given the world's aging population. The prevalence of heart failure is estimated to be one to one and a half. I'm sorry, one to 5% in the general population. Heart failure is a common cause of hospitalization. The risk of heart failure increases with age. About a third to a half of the total number of patients diagnosed with heart failure, have a normal ejection fraction. Ischemic heart failure occurs in the setting of an insult to the coronary arteries causing atherosclerosis. The key physiologic mechanisms of ischemic heart failure are increased myocardial oxygen demand in the face of a limited myocardial oxygen supply. And hypertensive heart failure is usually characterized by complex myocardial alterations resulting from the response to stress imposed by the left ventricle by a chronic increase in blood pressure. In order to achieve precision medicine or optimized and individualized therapies for heart failure, we will develop three computational platforms over a five-year period. A neuro-hormonal regulation platform, a mechanical adaptation platform and an energetics platform. The neuro-hormonal platform is critical for characterizing a fundamental feature of chronic heart failure, which is neuro-humoral activation and alterations in regulatory control by the autonomic nervous system. We will also develop a mechanical adaptation and remodeling platform. Progressive changes in the mechanical structure of the heart, such as thickening or thinning a bit muscular walls in response to changes in workloads are directly related to future deterioration in cardiac performance and heart failure. And we'll develop an energetics platform, which includes the model of the coronary circulation, that is the blood vessels that supply the heart organ itself. And will thus provide a mechanism for characterizing the imbalances between the oxygen and metabolic requirements of cardiac tissues and their lack of availability due to neuro-hormonal activation and heart failure progression. We consider it the landscape of other organizations pursuing innovative solutions that may be considered as cardiovascular bio digital twins, according to a similar definition or conceptualization as ours. Some are companies like the UT Heart, Siemens Healthineers, Computational Life. Some are academic institutions like the Johns Hopkins Institute for Computational Medicine, the Washington University Cardiac Bio Electricity and Arrhythmia Center. And then some are consortia such as echos, which stands for enhanced cardiac care through extensive sensing. And that's a consortium of academic and industrial partners. These other organizations have different aims of course, but most are focused on cardiac electrophysiology and disorders of cardiac rhythm. Most use both physiologically based and data driven methods, such as artificial intelligence and deep learning. Most are focused on the heart itself without robust representations of the vascular load, and none implement neuro hormonal regulation or mechanical adaptation and remodeling, nor aim for the ultimate realization of close loop therapeutics. By autonomous closed loop therapeutics, I mean, using the cardiovascular bio digital twin, not only to predict cardiovascular events and determine optimal therapeutic interventions for maintenance of health or for disease management, but also to actually deliver those therapeutic interventions. This means not only the need for smart sensors, but also for smart actuators, smart robotics, and various nanotechnology devices. Going back to my earlier comparisons to commercial aviation, autonomous closed loop therapeutics means not only maintenance of the plane and its parts, but also the actual flying of the plane in autopilot. In the beginning, we'll include the physician pilots in the loop, but the ultimate goal is an autonomous bio digital twin system for the cardiovascular system. The goal of realizing autonomous closed loop therapeutics in humans is obviously a more longterm goal. We're expecting to demonstrate that first in animal models. And our initial thinking was that this demonstration would be possible by the year 2030, that is 10 years. As of this month, we were planning ways of reaching this target even sooner. Finally, I would also like to add that by setting our aims at such a high ambition target, we drive the quality and accuracy of old milestones along the way. Thank you. This concludes my presentation. I appreciate your interest and attention. Please enjoy the remaining sessions, thank you.

>>Hi, Maya. Mr England. And I am an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at M I T. It's been fantastic to be part of this team that Professor Yamamoto put together, uh, for the entity Fire program. It's a great pleasure to report to you are update from the first year I will talk to you today about our recent work in photonic accelerators for machine intelligence. You can already get a flavor of the kind of work that I'll be presenting from the photonic integrated circuit that services a platonic matrix processor that we are developing to try toe break some of the bottle next that we encounter in inference, machine learning tasks in particular tasks like vision, games control or language processing. This work is jointly led with Dr Ryan heavily, uh, scientists at NTT Research, and he will have a poster that you should check out. Uh, in this conference should also say that there are postdoc positions available. Um, just take a look at announcements on Q P lab at m i t dot eu. So if you look at these machine learning applications, look under the hood. You see that a common feature is that they used these artificial neural networks or a and ends where you have an input layer of, let's say, and neurons and values that is connected to the first layer of, let's Say, also and neurons and connecting the first to the second layer would, if you represented it biomatrix requiring and biomatrix that has of order and squared free parameters. >>Okay, now, in traditional machine learning inference, you would have to grab these n squared values from memory. And every time you do that, it costs quite a lot of energy. Maybe you can match, but it's still quite costly in energy, and moreover, each of the input values >>has to be multiplied by that matrix. And if you multiply an end by one vector by an end square matrix, you have to do a border and squared multiplication. Okay, now, on a digital computer, you therefore have to do a voter in secret operations and memory access, which could be quite costly. But the proposition is that on a photonic integrated circuits, perhaps we could do that matrix vector multiplication directly on the P. I C itself by encoding optical fields on sending them through a programmed program into parameter and the output them would be a product of the matrix multiplied by the input vector. And that is actually the experiment. We did, uh, demonstrating that That this is, you know, in principle, possible back in 2017 and a collaboration with Professor Marine Soldier Judge. Now, if we look a little bit more closely at the device is shown here, this consists of a silicon layer that is pattern into wave guides. We do this with foundry. This was fabricated with the opposite foundry, and many thanks to our collaborators who helped make that possible. And and this thing guides light, uh, on about of these wave guides to make these two by two transformations Maxine and the kilometers, as they called >>input to input wave guides coming in to input to output wave guides going out. And by having to phase settings here data and five, we can control any arbitrary, uh, s U two rotation. Now, if I wanna have any modes coming in and modes coming out that could be represented by an S u N unitary transformation, and that's what this kind of trip allows you to dio and That's the key ingredient that really launched us in in my group. I should at this point, acknowledge the people who have made this possible and in particular point out Leon Bernstein and Alex lots as well as, uh, Ryan heavily once more. Also, these other collaborators problems important immigrant soldier dish and, of course, to a funding in particular now three entity research funding. So why optics optics has failed many times before in building computers. But why is this different? And I think the difference is that we now you know, we're not trying to build an entirely new computer out of optics were selective in how we apply optics. We should use optics for what it's good at. And that's probably not so much from non linearity, unnecessarily I mean, not memory, um, communication and fan out great in optics. And as we just said, linear algebra, you can do in optics. Fantastic. Okay, so you should make use of these things and then combine it judiciously with electronic processing to see if you can get an advantage in the entire system out of it, okay. And eso before I move on. Actually, based on the 2017 paper, uh, to startups were created, like intelligence and like, matter and the two students from my group, Nick Harris. And they responded, uh, co started this this this jointly founded by matter. And just after, you know, after, like, about two years, they've been able to create their first, uh, device >>the first metrics. Large scale processor. This is this device has called Mars has 64 input mode. 64 Promodes and the full program ability under the hood. Okay. So because they're integrating wave guides directly with Seamus Electron ICS, they were able to get all the wiring complexity, dealt with all the feedback and so forth. And this device is now able to just process a 64 or 64 unitary majors on the sly. Okay, parameters are three wants total power consumption. Um, it has ah, late and see how long it takes for a matrix to be multiplied by a factor of less than a nanosecond. And because this device works well over a pretty large 20 gigahertz, you could put many channels that are individually at one big hurts, so you can have tens of S U two s u 65 or 64 rotations simultaneously that you could do the sort of back in the envelope. Physics gives you that per multiply accumulate. You have just tens of Tempted jewels. Attn. A moment. So that's very, very competitive. That's that's awesome. Okay, so you see, plan and potentially the breakthroughs that are enabled by photonics here And actually, more recently, they actually one thing that made it possible is very cool Eyes thes My face shifters actually have no hold power, whereas our face shifters studios double modulation. These use, uh, nano scale mechanical modulators that have no hold power. So once you program a unitary, you could just hold it there. No energy consumption added over >>time. So photonics really is on the rise in computing on demand. But once again, you have to be. You have to be careful in how you compare against a chance to find where is the game to be had. So what I've talked so far about is wait stationary photonic processing. Okay, up until here. Now what tronics has that also, but it doesn't have the benefits of the coherence of optical fields transitioning through this, uh, to this to this matrix nor the bandwidth. Okay, Eso So that's Ah, that is, I think a really exciting direction. And these companies are off and they're they're building these trips and we'll see the next couple of months how well this works. Uh, on the A different direction is to have an output stationary matrix vector multiplication. And for this I want to point to this paper we wrote with Ryan, Emily and the other team members that projects the activation functions together with the weight terms onto a detector array and by the interference of the activation function and the weight term by Hamad and >>Affection. It's possible if you think about Hamad and affection that it actually automatically produces the multiplication interference turn between two optical fields gives you the multiplication between them. And so that's what that is making use of. I wanna talk a little bit more about that approach. So we actually did a careful analysis in the P R X paper that was cited in the last >>page and that analysis of the energy consumption show that this device and principal, uh, can compute at at an energy poor multiply accumulate that is below what you could theoretically dio at room temperature using irreversible computer like like our digital computers that we use in everyday life. Um, so I want to illustrate that you can see that from this plot here, but this is showing. It's the number of neurons that you have per layer. And on the vertical axis is the energy per multiply accumulate in terms of jewels. And when we make use of the massive fan out together with this photo electric multiplication by career detection, we estimate that >>we're on this curve here. So the more right. So since our energy consumption scales us and whereas for a for a digital computer it skills and squared, we, um we gain mawr as you go to a larger matrices. So for largest matrices like matrices of >>scale 1,005,000, even with present day technology, we estimate that we would hit and energy per multiply accumulate of about a center draw. Okay, But if we look at if we imagine a photonic device that >>uses a photonic system that uses devices that have already been demonstrated individually but not packaged in large system, you know, individually in research papers, we would be on this curve here where you would very quickly dip underneath the lander, a limit which corresponds to the thermodynamic limit for doing as many bit operations that you would have to do to do the same depth of neural network as we do here. And I should say that all of these numbers were computed for this simulated >>optical neural network, um, for having the equivalent, our rate that a fully digital computer that a digital computer would have and eso equivalent in the error rate. So it's limited in the error by the model itself rather than the imperfections of the devices. Okay. And we benchmark that on the amnesty data set. So that was a theoretical work that looked at the scaling limits and show that there's great, great hope to to really gain tremendously in the energy per bit, but also in the overall latency and throughput. But you shouldn't celebrate too early. You have to really do a careful system level study comparing, uh, electronic approaches, which oftentimes happened analogous approach to the optical approaches. And we did that in the first major step in this digital optical neural network. Uh, study here, which was done together with the PNG who is an electron ICS designer who actually works on, uh, tronics based on c'mon specifically made for machine on an acceleration. And Professor Joel, member of M I t. Who is also a fellow at video And what we studied there in particular, is what if we just replaced on Lee the communication part with optics, Okay. And we looked at, you know, getting the same equivalent error rates that you would have with electronic computer. And that showed that that way should have a benefit for large neural networks, because large neural networks will require lots of communication that eventually do not fit on a single Elektronik trip anymore. At that point, you have to go longer distances, and that's where the optical connections start to win out. So for details, I would like to point to that system level study. But we're now applying more sophisticated studies like this, uh, like that simulate full system simulation to our other optical networks to really see where the benefits that we might have, where we can exploit thes now. Lastly, I want to just say What if we had known nominee Garrity's that >>were actually reversible. There were quantum coherent, in fact, and we looked at that. So supposed to have the same architectural layout. But rather than having like a sexual absorption absorption or photo detection and the electronic non linearity, which is what we've done so far, you have all optical non linearity, okay? Based, for example, on a curve medium. So suppose that we had, like, a strong enough current medium so that the output from one of these transformations can pass through it, get an intensity dependent face shift and then passes into the next layer. Okay, What we did in this case is we said okay. Suppose that you have this. You have multiple layers of these, Uh um accent of the parameter measures. Okay. These air, just like the ones that we had before. >>Um, and you want to train this to do something? So suppose that training is, for example, quantum optical state compression. Okay, you have an optical quantum optical state you'd like to see How much can I compress that to have the same quantum information in it? Okay. And we trained that to discover a efficient algorithm for that. We also trained it for reinforcement, learning for black box, quantum simulation and what? You know what is particularly interesting? Perhaps in new term for one way corner repeaters. So we said if we have a communication network that has these quantum optical neural networks stationed some distance away, you come in with an optical encoded pulse that encodes an optical cubit into many individual photons. How do I repair that multi foot on state to send them the corrected optical state out the other side? This is a one way error correcting scheme. We didn't know how to build it, but we put it as a challenge to the neural network. And we trained in, you know, in simulation we trained the neural network. How toe apply the >>weights in the Matrix transformations to perform that Andi answering actually a challenge in the field of optical quantum networks. So that gives us motivation to try to build these kinds of nonlinear narratives. And we've done a fair amount of work. Uh, in this you can see references five through seven. Here I've talked about thes programmable photonics already for the the benchmark analysis and some of the other related work. Please see Ryan's poster we have? Where? As I mentioned we where we have ongoing work in benchmarking >>optical computing assed part of the NTT program with our collaborators. Um And I think that's the main thing that I want to stay here, you know, at the end is that the exciting thing, really is that the physics tells us that there are many orders of magnitude of efficiency gains, uh, that are to be had, Uh, if we you know, if we can develop the technology to realize it. I was being conservative here with three orders of magnitude. This could be six >>orders of magnitude for larger neural networks that we may have to use and that we may want to use in the future. So the physics tells us there are there is, like, a tremendous amount of gap between where we are and where we could be and that, I think, makes this tremendously exciting >>and makes the NTT five projects so very timely. So with that, you know, thank you for your attention and I'll be happy. Thio talk about any of these topics