(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Women in Data Science, WiDS 2022, coming to live from Stanford University. I'm Lisa Martin. My next guest is here. Nandi Leslie, Doctor Nandi Leslie, Senior Engineering Fellow at Raytheon Technologies. Nandi, it's great to have you on the program. >> Oh it's my pleasure, thank you. >> This is your first WiDS you were saying before we went live. >> That's right. >> What's your take so far? >> I'm absolutely loving it. I love the comradery and the community of women in data science. You know, what more can you say? It's amazing. >> It is. It's amazing what they built since 2015, that this is now reaching 100,000 people 200 online event. It's a hybrid event. Of course, here we are in person, and the online event going on, but it's always an inspiring, energy-filled experience in my experience of WiDS. >> I'm thoroughly impressed at what the organizers have been able to accomplish. And it's amazing, that you know, you've been involved from the beginning. >> Yeah, yeah. Talk to me, so you're Senior Engineering Fellow at Raytheon. Talk to me a little bit about your role there and what you're doing. >> Well, my role is really to think about our customer's most challenging problems, primarily at the intersection of data science, and you know, the intersectional fields of applied mathematics, machine learning, cybersecurity. And then we have a plethora of government clients and commercial clients. And so what their needs are beyond those sub-fields as well, I address. >> And your background is mathematics. >> Yes. >> Have you always been a math fan? >> I have, I actually have loved math for many, many years. My dad is a mathematician, and he introduced me to, you know mathematical research and the sciences at a very early age. And so, yeah, I went on, I studied in a math degree at Howard undergrad, and then I went on to do my PhD at Princeton in applied math. And later did a postdoc in the math department at University of Maryland. >> And how long have you been with Raytheon? >> I've been with Raytheon about six years. Yeah, and before Raytheon, I worked at a small to midsize defense company, defense contracting company in the DC area, systems planning and analysis. And then prior to that, I taught in a math department where I also did my postdoc, at University of Maryland College Park. >> You have a really interesting background. I was doing some reading on you, and you have worked with the Navy. You've worked with very interesting organizations. Talk to the audience a little bit about your diverse background. >> Awesome yeah, I've worked with the Navy on submarine force security, and submarine tracking, and localization, sensor performance. Also with the Army and the Army Research Laboratory during research at the intersection of machine learning and cyber security. Also looking at game theoretic and graph theoretic approaches to understand network resilience and robustness. I've also supported Department of Homeland Security, and other government agencies, other governments, NATO. Yeah, so I've really been excited by the diverse problems that our various customers have you know, brought to us. >> Well, you get such great experience when you are able to work in different industries and different fields. And that really just really probably helps you have such a much diverse kind of diversity of thought with what you're doing even now with Raytheon. >> Yeah, it definitely does help me build like a portfolio of topics that I can address. And then when new problems emerge, then I can pull from a toolbox of capabilities. And, you know, the solutions that have previously been developed to address those wide array of problems, but then also innovate new solutions based on those experiences. So I've been really blessed to have those experiences. >> Talk to me about one of the things I heard this morning in the session I was able to attend before we came to set was about mentors and sponsors. And, you know, I actually didn't know the difference between that until a few years ago. But it's so important. Talk to me about some of the mentors you've had along the way that really helped you find your voice in research and development. >> Definitely, I mean, beyond just the mentorship of my my family and my parents, I've had amazing opportunities to meet with wonderful people, who've helped me navigate my career. One in particular, I can think of as and I'll name a number of folks, but Dr. Carlos Castillo-Chavez was one of my earlier mentors. I was an undergrad at Howard University. He encouraged me to apply to his summer research program in mathematical and theoretical biology, which was then at Cornell. And, you know, he just really developed an enthusiasm with me for applied mathematics. And for how it can be, mathematics that is, can be applied to epidemiological and theoretical immunological problems. And then I had an amazing mentor in my PhD advisor, Dr. Simon Levin at Princeton, who just continued to inspire me, in how to leverage mathematical approaches and computational thinking for ecological conservation problems. And then since then, I've had amazing mentors, you know through just a variety of people that I've met, through customers, who've inspired me to write these papers that you mentioned in the beginning. >> Yeah, you've written 55 different publications so far. 55 and counting I'm sure, right? >> Well, I hope so. I hope to continue to contribute to the conversation and the community, you know, within research, and specifically research that is computationally driven. That really is applicable to problems that we face, whether it's cyber security, or machine learning problems, or others in data science. >> What are some of the things, you're giving a a tech vision talk this afternoon. Talk to me a little bit about that, and maybe the top three takeaways you want the audience to leave with. >> Yeah, so my talk is entitled "Unsupervised Learning for Network Security, or Network Intrusion Detection" I believe. And essentially three key areas I want to convey are the following. That unsupervised learning, that is the mathematical and statistical approach, which tries to derive patterns from unlabeled data is a powerful one. And one can still innovate new algorithms in this area. Secondly, that network security, and specifically, anomaly detection, and anomaly-based methods can be really useful to discerning and ensuring, that there is information confidentiality, availability, and integrity in our data >> A CIA triad. >> There you go, you know. And so in addition to that, you know there is this wealth of data that's out there. It's coming at us quickly. You know, there are millions of packets to represent communications. And that data has, it's mixed, in terms of there's categorical or qualitative data, text data, along with numerical data. And it is streaming, right. And so we need methods that are efficient, and that are capable of being deployed real time, in order to detect these anomalies, which we hope are representative of malicious activities, and so that we can therefore alert on them and thwart them. >> It's so interesting that, you know, the amount of data that's being generated and collected is growing exponentially. There's also, you know, some concerning challenges, not just with respect to data that's reinforcing social biases, but also with cyber warfare. I mean, that's a huge challenge right now. We've seen from a cybersecurity perspective in the last couple of years during the pandemic, a massive explosion in anomalies, and in social engineering. And companies in every industry have to be super vigilant, and help the people understand how to interact with it, right. There's a human component. >> Oh, for sure. There's a huge human component. You know, there are these phishing attacks that are really a huge source of the vulnerability that corporations, governments, and universities face. And so to be able to close that gap and the understanding that each individual plays in the vulnerability of a network is key. And then also seeing the link between the network activities or the cyber realm, and physical systems, right. And so, you know, especially in cyber warfare as a remote cyber attack, unauthorized network activities can have real implications for physical systems. They can, you know, stop a vehicle from running properly in an autonomous vehicle. They can impact a SCADA system that's, you know there to provide HVAC for example. And much more grievous implications. And so, you know, definitely there's the human component. >> Yes, and humans being so vulnerable to those social engineering that goes on in those phishing attacks. And we've seen them get more and more personal, which is challenging. You talking about, you know, sensitive data, personally identifiable data, using that against someone in cyber warfare is a huge challenge. >> Oh yeah, certainly. And it's one that computational thinking and mathematics can be leveraged to better understand and to predict those patterns. And that's a very rich area for innovation. >> What would you say is the power of computational thinking in the industry? >> In industry at-large? >> At large. >> Yes, I think that it is such a benefit to, you know, a burgeoning scientist, if they want to get into industry. There's so many opportunities, because computational thinking is needed. We need to be more objective, and it provides that objectivity, and it's so needed right now. Especially with the emergence of data, and you know, across industries. So there are so many opportunities for data scientists, whether it's in aerospace and defense, like Raytheon or in the health industry. And we saw with the pandemic, the utility of mathematical modeling. There are just so many opportunities. >> Yeah, there's a lot of opportunities, and that's one of the themes I think, of WiDS, is just the opportunities, not just in data science, and for women. And there's obviously even high school girls that are here, which is so nice to see those young, fresh faces, but opportunities to build your own network and your own personal board of directors, your mentors, your sponsors. There's tremendous opportunity in data science, and it's really all encompassing, at least from my seat. >> Oh yeah, no I completely agree with that. >> What are some of the things that you've heard at this WiDS event that inspire you going, we're going in the right direction. If we think about International Women's Day tomorrow, "Breaking the Bias" is the theme, do you think we're on our way to breaking that bias? >> Definitely, you know, there was a panel today talking about the bias in data, and in a variety of fields, and how we are, you know discovering that bias, and creating solutions to address it. So there was that panel. There was another talk by a speaker from Pinterest, who had presented some solutions that her, and her team had derived to address bias there, in you know, image recognition and search. And so I think that we've realized this bias, and, you know, in AI ethics, not only in these topics that I've mentioned, but also in the implications for like getting a loan, so economic implications, as well. And so we're realizing those issues and bias now in AI, and we're addressing them. So I definitely am optimistic. I feel encouraged by the talks today at WiDS that you know, not only are we recognizing the issues, but we're creating solutions >> Right taking steps to remediate those, so that ultimately going forward. You know, we know it's not possible to have unbiased data. That's not humanly possible, or probably mathematically possible. But the steps that they're taking, they're going in the right direction. And a lot of it starts with awareness. >> Exactly. >> Of understanding there is bias in this data, regardless. All the people that are interacting with it, and touching it, and transforming it, and cleaning it, for example, that's all influencing the veracity of it. >> Oh, for sure. Exactly, you know, and I think that there are for sure solutions are being discussed here, papers written by some of the speakers here, that are driving the solutions to the mitigation of this bias and data problem. So I agree a hundred percent with you, that awareness is you know, half the battle, if not more. And then, you know, that drives creation of solutions >> And that's what we need the creation of solutions. Nandi, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure talking with you about what you're doing with Raytheon, what you've done and your path with mathematics, and what excites you about data science going forward. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. It was my pleasure. >> Good, for Nandi Leslie, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Women in Data Science 2022. Stick around, I'll be right back with my next guest. (upbeat flowing music)

>>Yeah. Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS public sector summit here in Washington D. C. We're live on the ground for two days. Face to face conference and expo hall and everything here but keith brooks who is the director and head of technical business development for a dress government Govcloud selling brains 10th birthday. Congratulations. Welcome to the cube. Thank you john happy to be E. C. 2 15 S three is 9.5 or no, that maybe they're 10 because that's the same day as sqs So Govcloud. 10 years, 20 years. What time >>flies? 10 years? >>Big milestone. Congratulations. A lot of history involved in Govcloud. Yes. Take us through what's the current situation? >>Yeah. So um let's start with what it is just for the viewers that may not be familiar. So AWS Govcloud is isolated. AWS cloud infrastructure and services that were purposely built for our U. S. Government customers that had highly sensitive data or highly regulated data or applications and workloads that they wanted to move to the cloud. So we gave customers the ability to do that with AWS Govcloud. It is subject to the fed ramp I and D O D S R G I L four L five baselines. It gives customers the ability to address ITAR requirements as well as Seaga's N'est ce MMC and Phipps requirements and gives customers a multi region architecture that allows them to also designed for disaster recovery and high availability in terms of why we built it. It starts with our customers. It was pretty clear from the government that they needed a highly secure and highly compliant cloud infrastructure to innovate ahead of demand and that's what we delivered. So back in august of 2011 we launched AWS GovCloud which gave customers the best of breed in terms of high technology, high security, high compliance in the cloud to allow them to innovate for their mission critical workloads. Who >>was some of the early customers when you guys launched after the C. I. A deal intelligence community is a big one but some of the early customers. >>So the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense were all early users of AWS GovCloud. But one of our earliest lighthouse customers was the Nasa jet propulsion laboratory and Nasa Jpl used AWS GovCloud to procure Procure resources ahead of demand which allowed them to save money and also take advantage of being efficient and only paying for what they needed. But they went beyond just I. T. Operations. They also looked at how do they use the cloud and specifically GovCloud for their mission programs. So if you think back to all the way to 2012 with the mars curiosity rover, Nasa Jpl actually streamed and processed and stored that data from the curiosity rover on AWS Govcloud They actually streamed over 150 terabytes of data responded to over 80,000 requests per second and took it beyond just imagery. They actually did high performance compute and data analytics on the data as well. That led to additional efficiencies for future. Over there >>were entire kicking they were actually >>hard core missing into it. Mission critical workloads that also adhere to itar compliance which is why they used AWS GovCloud. >>All these compliance. So there's also these levels. I remember when I was working on the jetty uh stories that were out there was always like level for those different classifications. What does all that mean like? And then this highly available data and highly high availability all these words mean something in these top secret clouds. Can you take us through kind of meetings >>of those? Yeah absolutely. So it starts with the federal compliance program and the two most popular programs are Fed ramp and Dodi srg fed ramp is more general for federal government agencies. There are three levels low moderate and high in the short and skinny of those levels is how they align to the fisma requirements of the government. So there's fisma low fisma moderate fisma high depending on the sensitivity of the government data you will have to align to those levels of Fed ramp to use workloads and store data in the cloud. Similar story for D. O. D. With srg impact levels to 45 and six uh impacts levels to four and five are all for unclassified data. Level two is for less sensitive public defense data levels. Four and five cover more sensitive defense data to include mission critical national security systems and impact level six is for classified information. So those form the basis of security and compliance, luckily with AWS GovCloud celebrating our 10th anniversary, we address Fed ramp high for our customers that require that and D. O. D impact levels to four and five for a sensitive defense guy. >>And that was a real nuanced point and a lot of the competition can't do that. That's real people don't understand, you know, this company, which is that company and all the lobbying and all the mudslinging that goes on. We've seen that in the industry. It's unfortunate, but it happens. Um, I do want to ask you about the Fed ramp because what I'm seeing on the commercial side in the cloud ecosystem, a lot of companies that aren't quote targeting public sector are coming in on the Fed ramp. So there's some good traction there. You guys have done a lot of work to accelerate that. Any new, any new information to share their. >>Yes. So we've been committed to supporting the federal government compliance requirements effectively since the launch of GovCloud. And we've demonstrated our commitment to Fed ramp over the last number of years and GovCloud specifically, we've taken dozens of services through Fed ramp high and we're 100% committed to it because we have great relationships with the Fed ramp, Jabor the joint authorization board. We work with individual government agencies to secure agency A. T. O. S. And in fact we actually have more agency A. T. O. S. With AWS GovCloud than any other cloud provider. And the short and skinny is that represents the baseline for cloud security to address sensitive government workloads and sensitive government data. And what we're seeing from industry and specifically highly regulated industries is the standard that the U. S. Government set means that they have the assurance to run control and classified information or other levels of highly sensitive data on the cloud as well. So Fed ramp set that standard. It's interesting >>that the cloud, this is the ecosystem within an ecosystem again within crossover section. So for instance um the impact of not getting Fed ramp certified is basically money. Right. If you're a supplier vendor uh software developer or whatever used to being a miracle, no one no one would know right bed ramp. I'm gonna have to hire a whole department right now. You guys have a really easy, this is a key value proposition, isn't it? >>Correct. And you see it with a number of I. S. V. S. And software as the service providers. If you visit the federal marketplace website, you'll see dozens of providers that have Fed ramp authorized third party SAAS products running on GovCloud industry leading SAAS companies like Salesforce dot com driven technology Splunk essay PNS to effectively they're bringing their best of breed capabilities, building on top of AWS GovCloud and offering those highly compliant fed ramp, moderate fed ramp high capabilities to customers both in government and private industry that need that level of compliance. >>Just as an aside, I saw they've got a nice tweet from Teresa Carlson now it's plunk Govcloud yesterday. That was a nice little positive gesture uh, for you guys at GovCloud, what other areas are you guys moving the needle on because architecturally this is a big deal. What are some areas that you're moving the needle on for the GovCloud? >>Well, when I look back across the last 10 years, there were some pretty important developments that stand out. The first is us launching the second Govcloud infrastructure region in 2018 And that gave customers that use GovCloud specifically customers that have highly sensitive data and high levels of compliance. The ability to build fault tolerant, highly available and mission critical workloads in the cloud in a region that also gives them an additional three availability zones. So the launch of GovCloud East, which is named AWS GovCloud Us East gave customers to regions a total of six availability zones that allowed them accelerate and build more scalable solutions in the cloud. More recently, there is an emergence of another D O D program called the cybersecurity maturity model, C M M C and C M M C is something where we looked around the corner and said we need to Innovate to help our customers, particularly defense customers and the defense industrial based customers address see MMC requirements in the cloud. So with Govcloud back in December of 2020, we actually launched the AWS compliant framework for federal defense workloads, which gives customers a turnkey capability and tooling and resources to spin up environments that are configured to meet see MMC controls and D. O. D. Srg control. So those things represent some of the >>evolution keith. I'm interested also in your thoughts on how you see the progression of Govcloud outside the United States. Tactical Edge get wavelength coming on board. How does how do you guys look at that? Obviously us is global, it's not just the jet, I think it's more of in general. Edge deployments, sovereignty is also going to be world's flat, Right? I mean, so how does that >>work? So it starts back with customer requirements and I tie it back to the first question effectively we built Govcloud to respond to our U. S. Government customers and are highly regulated industry customers that had highly sensitive data and a high bar to meet in terms of regulatory compliance and that's the foundation of it. So as we look to other customers to include those outside of the US. It starts with those requirements. You mentioned things like edge and hybrid and a good example of how we marry the two is when we launched a W. S. Outpost in Govcloud last year. So outpost brings the power of the AWS cloud to on premises environments of our customers, whether it's their data centers or Coehlo environments by bringing AWS services, a. P. I. S and service and points to the customer's on premises facilities >>even outside the United States. >>Well, for Govcloud is focused on us right now. Outside of the U. S. Customers also have availability to use outpost. It's just for us customers, it's focused on outpost availability, geography >>right now us. Right. But other governments gonna want their Govcloud too. Right, Right, that's what you're getting at, >>Right? And it starts with the data. Right? So we we we spent a lot of time working with government agencies across the globe to understand their regulations and their requirements and we use that to drive our decisions. And again, just like we started with govcloud 10 years ago, it starts with our customer requirements and we innovate from there. Well, >>I've been, I love the D. O. D. S vision on this. I know jet I didn't come through and kind of went scuttled, got thrown under the bus or whatever however you want to call it. But that whole idea of a tactical edge, it was pretty brilliant idea. Um so I'm looking forward to seeing more of that. That's where I was supposed to come in, get snowball, snowmobile, little snow snow products as well, how are they doing? And because they're all part of the family to, >>they are and they're available in Govcloud and they're also authorized that fed ramp and Gov srg levels and it's really, it's really fascinating to see D. O. D innovate with the cloud. Right. So you mentioned tactical edge. So whether it's snowball devices or using outposts in the future, I think the D. O. D. And our defense customers are going to continue to innovate. And quite frankly for us, it represents our commitment to the space we want to make sure our defense customers and the defense industrial base defense contractors have access to the best debris capabilities like those edge devices and edge capable. I >>think about the impact of certification, which is good because I just thought of a clean crows. We've got aerospace coming in now you've got D O. D, a little bit of a cross colonization if you will. So nice to have that flexibility. I got to ask you about just how you view just in general, the intelligence community a lot of uptake since the CIA deal with amazon Just overall good health for eight of his gum cloud. >>Absolutely. And again, it starts with our commitment to our customers. We want to make sure that our national security customers are defense customers and all of the customers and the federal government that have a responsibility for securing the country have access to the best of breed capability. So whether it's the intelligence community, the Department of Defense are the federal agencies and quite frankly we see them innovating and driving things forward to include with their sensitive workloads that run in Govcloud, >>what's your strategy for partnerships as you work on the ecosystem? You do a lot with strategy. Go to market partnerships. Um, it's got its public sector pretty much people all know each other. Our new firms popping up new brands. What's the, what's the ecosystem looks like? >>Yeah, it's pretty diverse. So for Govcloud specifically, if you look at partners in the defense community, we work with aerospace companies like Lockheed martin and Raytheon Technologies to help them build I tar compliant E. R. P. Application, software development environments etcetera. We work with software companies I mentioned salesforce dot com. Splunk and S. A. P. And S. To uh and then even at the state and local government level, there's a company called Pay It that actually worked with the state of Kansas to develop the Icann app, which is pretty fascinating. It's a app that is the official app of the state of Kansas that allow citizens to interact with citizens services. That's all through a partner. So we continue to work with our partner uh broad the AWS partner network to bring those type of people >>You got a lot of MST is that are doing good work here. I saw someone out here uh 10 years. Congratulations. What's the coolest thing uh you've done or seen. >>Oh wow, it's hard to name anything in particular. I just think for us it's just seeing the customers and the federal government innovate right? And, and tie that innovation to mission critical workloads that are highly important. Again, it reflects our commitment to give these government customers and the government contractors the best of breed capabilities and some of the innovation we just see coming from the federal government leveraging the count now. It's just super cool. So hard to pinpoint one specific thing. But I love the innovation and it's hard to pick a favorite >>Child that we always say. It's kind of a trick question I do have to ask you about just in general, the just in 10 years. Just look at the agility. Yeah, I mean if you told me 10 years ago the government would be moving at any, any agile anything. They were a glacier in terms of change, right? Procure Man, you name it. It's just like, it's a racket. It's a racket. So, so, but they weren't, they were slow and money now. Pandemic hits this year. Last year, everything's up for grabs. The script has been flipped >>exactly. And you know what, what's interesting is there were actually a few federal government agencies that really paved the way for what you're seeing today. I'll give you some examples. So the Department of Veterans Affairs, they were an early Govcloud user and way back in 2015 they launched vets dot gov on gov cloud, which is an online platform that gave veterans the ability to apply for manage and track their benefits. Those type of initiatives paved the way for what you're seeing today, even as soon as last year with the U. S. Census, right? They brought the decennial count online for the first time in history last year, during 2020 during the pandemic and the Census Bureau was able to use Govcloud to launch and run 2020 census dot gov in the cloud at scale to secure that data. So those are examples of federal agencies that really kind of paved the way and leading to what you're saying is it's kind >>of an awakening. It is and I think one of the things that no one's reporting is kind of a cultural revolution is the talent underneath that way, the younger people like finally like and so it's cooler. It is when you go fast and you can make things change, skeptics turned into naysayers turned into like out of a job or they don't transform so like that whole blocker mentality gets exposed just like shelf where software you don't know what it does until the cloud is not performing, its not good. Right, right. >>Right. Into that point. That's why we spend a lot of time focused on education programs and up skilling the workforce to, because we want to ensure that as our customers mature and as they innovate, we're providing the right training and resources to help them along their journey, >>keith brooks great conversation, great insight and historian to taking us to the early days of Govcloud. Thanks for coming on the cube. Thanks thanks for having me cubes coverage here and address public sector summit. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Mhm. Mhm mm.