(gentle upbeat music) >> Hey, friends of theCUBE. It's Lisa Martin live at Stanford University covering the Eighth Annual Women In Data Science. But you've been a Cube fan for a long time. So you know that we've been here since the beginning of WiDS, which is 2015. We always loved to come and cover this event. We learned great things about data science, about women leaders, underrepresented minorities. And this year we have a special component. We've got two grad students from Stanford's Master's program and Data Journalism joining. One of my them is here with me, Hannah Freitag, my co-host. Great to have you. And we are pleased to welcome from Intuit for the first time, Shir Meir Lador Group Manager at Data Science. Shir, it's great to have you. Thank you for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> And I was just secrets girl talking with my boss of theCUBE who informed me that you're in great company. Intuit's Chief Technology Officer, Marianna Tessel is an alumni of theCUBE. She was on at our Supercloud event in January. So welcome back into it. >> Thank you very much. We're happy to be with you. >> Tell us a little bit about what you're doing. You're a data science group manager as I mentioned, but also you've had you've done some cool things I want to share with the audience. You're the co-founder of the PyData Tel Aviv Meetups the co-host of the unsupervised podcast about data science in Israel. You give talks, about machine learning, about data science. Tell us a little bit about your background. Were you always interested in STEM studies from the time you were small? >> So I was always interested in mathematics when I was small, I went to this special program for youth going to university. So I did my test in mathematics earlier and studied in university some courses. And that's when I understood I want to do something in that field. And then when I got to go to university, I went to electrical engineering when I found out about algorithms and how interested it is to be able to find solutions to problems, to difficult problems with math. And this is how I found my way into machine learning. >> Very cool. There's so much, we love talking about machine learning and AI on theCUBE. There's so much potential. Of course, we have to have data. One of the things that I love about WiDS and Hannah and I and our co-host Tracy, have been talking about this all day is the impact of data in everyone's life. If you break it down, I was at Mobile World Congress last week, all about connectivity telecom, and of course we have these expectation that we're going to be connected 24/7 from wherever we are in the world and we can do whatever we want. I can do an Uber transaction, I can watch Netflix, I can do a bank transaction. It all is powered by data. And data science is, some of the great applications of it is what it's being applied to. Things like climate change or police violence or health inequities. Talk about some of the data science projects that you're working on at Intuit. I'm an intuit user myself, but talk to me about some of those things. Give the audience really a feel for what you're doing. >> So if you are a Intuit product user, you probably use TurboTax. >> I do >> In the past. So for those who are not familiar, TurboTax help customers submit their taxes. Basically my group is in charge of getting all the information automatically from your documents, the documents that you upload to TurboTax. We extract that information to accelerate your tax submission to make it less work for our customers. So- >> Thank you. >> Yeah, and this is why I'm so proud to be working at this team because our focus is really to help our customers to simplify all the you know, financial heavy lifting with taxes and also with small businesses. We also do a lot of work in extracting information from small business documents like bill, receipts, different bank statements. Yeah, so this is really exciting for me, the opportunity to work to apply data science and machine learning to solution that actually help people. Yeah >> Yeah, in the past years there have been more and more digital products emerging that needs some sort of data security. And how did your team, or has your team developed in the past years with more and more products or companies offering digital services? >> Yeah, so can you clarify the question again? Sorry. >> Yeah, have you seen that you have more customers? Like has your team expanded in the past years with more digital companies starting that need kind of data security? >> Well, definitely. I think, you know, since I joined Intuit, I joined like five and a half years ago back when I was in Tel Aviv. I recently moved to the Bay Area. So when I joined, there were like a dozens of data scientists and machine learning engineers on Intuit. And now there are a few hundreds. So we've definitely grown with the year and there are so many new places we can apply machine learning to help our customers. So this is amazing, so much we can do with machine learning to get more money in the pocket of our customers and make them do less work. >> I like both of those. More money in my pocket and less work. That's awesome. >> Exactly. >> So keep going Intuit. But one of the things that is so cool is just the the abstraction of the complexity that Intuit's doing. I upload documents or it scans my receipts. I was just in Barcelona last week all these receipts and conversion euros to dollars and it takes that complexity away from the end user who doesn't know all that's going on in the background, but you're making people's lives simpler. Unfortunately, we all have to pay taxes, most of us should. And of course we're in tax season right now. And so it's really cool what you're doing with ML and data science to make fundamental processes to people's lives easier and just a little bit less complicated. >> Definitely. And I think that's what's also really amazing about Intuit it, is how it combines human in the loop as well as AI. Because in some of the tax situation it's very complicated maybe to do it yourself. And then there's an option to work with an expert online that goes on a video with you and helps you do your taxes. And the expert's work is also accelerated by AI because we build tools for those experts to do the work more efficiently. >> And that's what it's all about is you know, using data to be more efficient, to be faster, to be smarter, but also to make complicated processes in our daily lives, in our business lives just a little bit easier. One of the things I've been geeking out about recently is ChatGPT. I was using it yesterday. I was telling everyone I was asking it what's hot in data science and I didn't know would it know what hot is and it did, it gave me trends. But one of the things that I was so, and Hannah knows I've been telling this all day, I was so excited to learn over the weekend that the the CTO of OpenAI is a female. I didn't know that. And I thought why are we not putting her on a pedestal? Because people are likening ChatGPT to like the launch of the iPhone. I mean revolutionary. And here we have what I think is exciting for all of us females, whether you're in tech or not, is another role model. Because really ultimately what WiDS is great at doing is showcasing women in technical roles. Because I always say you can't be what you can't see. We need to be able to see more role models, female role role models, underrepresented minorities of course men, because a lot of my sponsors and mentors are men, but we need more women that we can look up to and see ah, she's doing this, why can't I? Talk to me about how you stay the course in data science. What excites you about the potential, the opportunities based on what you've already accomplished what inspires you to continue and be one of those females that we say oh my God, I could be like Shir. >> I think that what inspires me the most is the endless opportunities that we have. I think we haven't even started tapping into everything that we can do with generative AI, for example. There's so much that can be done to further help you know, people make more money and do less work because there's still so much work that we do that we don't need to. You know, this is with Intuit, but also there are so many other use cases like I heard today you know, with the talk about the police. So that was really exciting how you can apply machine learning and data to actually help people, to help people that been through wrongful things. So I was really moved by that. And I'm also really excited about all the medical applications that we can have with data. >> Yeah, yeah. It's true that data science is so diverse in terms of what fields it can cover but it's equally important to have diverse teams and have like equity and inclusion in your teams. Where is Intuit at promoting women, non-binary minorities in your teams to progress data science? >> Yeah, so I have so much to say on this. >> Good. >> But in my work in Tel Aviv, I had the opportunity to start with Intuit women in data science branch in Tel Aviv. So that's why I'm super excited to be here today for that because basically this is the original conference, but as you know, there are branches all over the world and I got the opportunity to lead the Tel Aviv branch with Israel since 2018. And we've been through already this year it's going to be it's next week, it's going to be the sixth conference. And every year our number of submission to make talk in the conference doubled itself. >> Nice. >> We started with 20 submission, then 50, then 100. This year we have over 200 submissions of females to give talk at the conference. >> Ah, that's fantastic. >> And beyond the fact that there's so much traction, I also feel the great impact it has on the community in Israel because one of the reason we started WiDS was that when I was going to conferences I was seeing so little women on stage in all the technical conferences. You know, kind of the reason why I guess you know, Margaret and team started the WiDS conference. So I saw the same thing in Israel and I was always frustrated. I was organizing PyData Meetups as you mentioned and I was always having such a hard time to get female speakers to talk. I was trying to role model, but that's not enough, you know. We need more. So once we started WiDS and people saw you know, so many examples on the stage and also you know females got opportunity to talk in a place for that. Then it also started spreading and you can see more and more female speakers across other conferences, which are not women in data science. So I think just the fact that Intuits started this conference back in Israel and also in Bangalore and also the support Intuit does for WiDS in Stanford here, it shows how much WiDS values are aligned with our values. Yeah, and I think that to chauffeur that I think we have over 35% females in the data science and machine learning engineering roles, which is pretty amazing I think compared to the industry. >> Way above average. Yeah, absolutely. I was just, we've been talking about some of the AnitaB.org stats from 2022 showing that 'cause usually if we look at the industry to you point, over the last, I don't know, probably five, 10 years we're seeing the number of female technologists around like a quarter, 25% or so. 2022 data from AnitaB.org showed that that number is now 27.6%. So it's very slowly- >> It's very slowly increasing. >> Going in the right direction. >> Too slow. >> And that representation of women technologists increase at every level, except intern, which I thought was really interesting. And I wonder is there a covid relation there? >> I don't know. >> What do we need to do to start opening up the the top of the pipeline, the funnel to go downstream to find kids like you when you were younger and always interested in engineering and things like that. But the good news is that the hiring we've seen improvements, but it sounds like Intuit is way ahead of the curve there with 35% women in data science or technical roles. And what's always nice and refreshing that we've talked, Hannah about this too is seeing companies actually put action into initiatives. It's one thing for a company to say we're going to have you know, 50% females in our organization by 2030. It's a whole other ball game to actually create a strategy, execute on it, and share progress. So kudos to Intuit for what it's doing because that is more companies need to adopt that same sort of philosophy. And that's really cultural. >> Yeah. >> At an organization and culture can be hard to change, but it sounds like you guys kind of have it dialed in. >> I think we definitely do. That's why I really like working and Intuit. And I think that a lot of it is with the role modeling, diversity and inclusion, and by having women leaders. When you see a woman in leadership position, as a woman it makes you want to come work at this place. And as an evidence, when I build the team I started in Israel at Intuit, I have over 50% women in my team. >> Nice. >> Yeah, because when you have a woman in the interviewers panel, it's much easier, it's more inclusive. That's why we always try to have at least you know, one woman and also other minorities represented in our interviews panel. Yeah, and I think that in general it's very important as a leader to kind of know your own biases and trying to have defined standard and rubrics in how you evaluate people to avoid for those biases. So all of that inclusiveness and leadership really helps to get more diversity in your teams. >> It's critical. That thought diversity is so critical, especially if we talk about AI and we're almost out of time, I just wanted to bring up, you brought up a great point about the diversity and equity. With respect to data science and AI, we know in AI there's biases in data. We need to have more inclusivity, more representation to help start shifting that so the biases start to be dialed down and I think a conference like WiDS and it sounds like someone like you and what you've already done so far in the work that you're doing having so many females raise their hands to want to do talks at events is a good situation. It's a good scenario and hopefully it will continue to move the needle on the percentage of females in technical roles. So we thank you Shir for your time sharing with us your story, what you're doing, how Intuit and WiDS are working together. It sounds like there's great alignment there and I think we're at the tip of the iceberg with what we can do with data science and inclusion and equity. So we appreciate all of your insights and your time. >> Thank you very much. >> All right. >> I enjoyed very, very much >> Good. We hope, we aim to please. Thank you for our guests and for Hannah Freitag. This is Lisa Martin coming to you live from Stanford University. This is our coverage of the eighth Annual Women in Data Science Conference. Stick around, next guest will be here in just a minute.

>>Bye from San Francisco. It's the cube covering RSA conference, 2020 San Francisco brought to you by Silicon angle media. >>Hey, welcome back. Everyone's keeps coverage here in San Francisco at the Moscone center for RSA conference 2020 I'm John, your host, as cybersecurity goes to the next generation as the new cloud scale, cyber threats are out there, the real impact a company's business and society will be determined by the industry. This technology and the people that a cube alumni here, caramel Jaffer, SVP, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development for iron net. Welcome back. Thanks to Shawn. Good to be here. Thanks for having so iron net FC general Keith Alexander and you got to know new CEO of there. Phil Welsh scaler and duo knows how to scale up a company. He's right. Iron is doing really well. The iron dome, the vision of collaboration and signaling. Congratulations on your success. What's a quick update? >> Well look, I mean, you know, we have now built the capability to share information across multiple companies, multiple industries with the government in real time at machine speed. >>Really bringing people together, not just creating collected security or clip to defense, but also collaborating real time to defend one another. So you're able to divide and conquer Goliath, the enemy the same way they come after you and beat them at their own game. >> So this is the classic case of offense defense. Most corporations are playing defense, whack-a-mole, redundant, not a lot of efficiencies, a lot of burnout. Exactly. Not a lot of collaboration, but everyone's talking about the who the attackers are and collaborating like a team. Right? And you guys talk about this mission. Exactly. This is really the new way to do it. It has, the only way it works, >> it is. And you know, you see kids doing it out there when they're playing Fortnite, right? They're collaborating in real time across networks, uh, to, you know, to play a game, right? You can imagine that same construct when it comes to cyber defense, right? >>There's no reason why one big company, a second big company in a small company can't work together to identify all the threats, see that common threat landscape, and then take action on it. Trusting one another to take down the pieces they have folk to focus on and ultimately winning the battle. There's no other way a single company is gonna be able defend itself against a huge decency that has virtually unlimited resources and virtually unlimited human capital. And you've got to come together, defend across multiple industries, uh, collectively and collaboratively. >> Do you mean, we talked about this last time and I want to revisit this and I think it's super important. I think it's the most important story that's not really being talked about in the industry. And that is that we were talking last time about the government protects businesses. If someone dropped troops on the ground in your neighborhood, the government would protect you digitally. >>That's not happening. So there's really no protection for businesses. Do they build their own militia? Do they build their own army? Who was going to, who's going to be their heat shield? So this is a big conversation and a big, it brings a question. The role of the government. We're going to need a digital air force. We're going to need a digital army, Navy, Navy seals. We need to have that force, and this has to be a policy issue, but in the short term, businesses and individuals are sitting out there being attacked by sophisticated mission-based teams of hackers and nation States, right? Either camouflaging or hiding, but attacking still. This is a huge issue. What's going on? Are people talking about this in D C well, >> John, look not enough. People are talking about it, right? And forget DC. We need to be talking about here, out here in the Silicon Valley with all these companies here at the RSA floor and bring up the things you're bringing up because this is a real problem we're facing as a nation. >>The Russians aren't coming after one company, one state. They're coming after our entire election infrastructure. They're coming after us as a nation. The Chinese maybe come after one company at a time, but their goal is to take our electoral properties, a nation, repurpose it back home. And when the economic game, right, the Iranians, the North Koreans, they're not focused on individual actors, but they are coming after individual actors. We can't defend against those things. One man, one woman, one company on an Island, one, one agency, one state. We've got to come together collectively, right? Work state with other States, right? If we can defend against the Russians, California might be really good at it. Rhode Island, small States can be real hard, defends against the Russians, but if California, Rhode Island come together, here's the threats. I see. Here's what it's. You see share information, that's great. Then we collaborate on the defense and work together. >>You take these threats, I'll take those threats and now we're working as a team, like you said earlier, like those kids do when they're playing fortnight and now we're changing the game. Now we're really fighting the real fight. >> You know, when I hear general Keith Alexander talking about his vision with iron net and what you guys are doing, I'm inspired because it's simply put, we have a mission to protect our nation, our people, and a good businesses, and he puts it into kind of military, military terms, but in reality, it's a simple concept. Yeah, we're being attacked, defend and attack back. Just basic stuff. But to make it work as the sharing. So I got to ask you, I'm first of all, I love the, I love what he has, his vision. I love what you guys are doing. How real are we? What's the progression? >>Where are we on the progress bar of that vision? Well, you know, a lot's changed to the last year and a half alone, right? The threats gotten a lot, a lot more real to everybody, right? Used to be the industry would say to us, yeah, we want to share with the government, but we want something back for, right. We want them to show us some signal to today. Industry is like, look, the Chinese are crushing us out there, right? We can beat them at a, at some level, but we really need the governor to go do its job too. So we'll give you the information we have on, on an anonymized basis. You do your thing. We're going to keep defending ourselves and if you can give us something back, that's great. So we've now stood up in real time of DHS. We're sharing with them huge amounts of data about what we're seeing across six of the top 10 energy companies, some of the biggest banks, some of the biggest healthcare companies in the country. >>Right? In real time with DHS and more to come on that more to come with other government agencies and more to come with some our partners across the globe, right? Partners like those in Japan, Singapore, Eastern Europe, right? Our allies in the middle East, they're all the four lenses threat. We can bring their better capability. They can help us see what's coming at us in the future because as those enemies out there testing the weapons in those local areas. I want to get your thoughts on the capital markets because obviously financing is critical and you're seeing successful venture capital formulas like forge point really specialized funds on cyber but not classic industry formation sectors. Like it's not just security industry are taking a much more broader view because there's a policy implication is that organizational behavior, this technology up and down the stack. So it's a much broad investment thesis. >>What's your view of that? Because as you do, you see that as a formula and if so, what is this new aperture or this new lens of investing to be successful in funding? Companies will look, it's really important what companies like forge point are doing. Venture capital funds, right? Don Dixon, Alberta Pez will land. They're really innovating here. They've created a largest cybersecurity focused fund. They just closed the recently in the world, right? And so they really focus on this industry. Partners like, Kleiner Perkins, Ted Schlein, Andrea are doing really great work in this area. Also really important capital formation, right? And let's not forget other funds. Ron Gula, right? The founder of tenable started his own fund out there in DC, in the DMV area. There's a lot of innovation happening this country and the funding on it's critical. Now look, the reality is the easy money's not going to be here forever, right? >>It's the question is what comes when that inevitable step back. We don't. Nobody likes to talk about it. I said the guy who who bets on the other side of the craps game in Vegas, right? You don't wanna be that guy, but let's be real. I mean that day will eventually come. And the question is how do you bring some of these things together, right? Bring these various pieces together to really create long term strategies, right? And that's I think what's really innovative about what Don and Alberto are doing is they're building portfolio companies across a range of areas to create sort of an end to end capability, right? Andrea is doing things like that. Ted's doing stuff like that. It's a, that's really innovation. The VC market, right? And we're seeing increased collaboration VC to PE. It's looking a lot more similar, right? And now we're seeing innovative vehicles like stacks that are taking some of these public sort of the reverse manner, right? >>There's a lot of interests. I've had to be there with Hank Thomas, the guys chief cyber wrenches. So a lot of really cool stuff going on in the financing world. Opportunities for young, smart entrepreneurs to really move out in this field and to do it now. And money's still silver. All that hasn't come as innovation on the capital market side, which is awesome. Let's talk about the ecosystem in every single market sector that I've been over, my 30 year career has been about a successful entrepreneurship check, capital two formation of partnerships. Okay. You're on the iron net, front lines here. As part of that ecosystem, how do you see the ecosystem formula developing? Is it the same kind of model? Is it a little bit different? What's your vision of the ecosystem? Look, I mean partnerships channel, it's critical to every cyber security company. You can't scale on your own. >>You've got to do it through others, right? I was at a CrowdStrike event the other day. 91% of the revenue comes from the channel. That's an amazing number. You think about that, right? It's you look at who we're trying to talk about partnering with. We're talking about some of the big cloud players. Amazon, Microsoft, right? Google, right on the, on the vendor side. Pardon me? Splunk crashes, so these big players, right? We want to build with them, right? We want to work with them because there's a story to tell here, right? When we were together, the AECOS through self is defendant stronger. There's no, there's no anonymity here, right? It's all we bring a specialty, you bring specialty, you work together, you run out and go get the go get the business and make companies safer. At the end of the day, it's all about protecting the ecosystem. What about the big cloud player? >>Cause he goes two big mega trends. Obviously cloud computing and scale, right? Multi-cloud on the horizon, hybrids, kind of the bridge between single public cloud and multi-cloud and then AI you've got the biggies are generally will be multiple generations of innovation and value creation. What's your vision on the impact of the big waves that are coming? Well, look, I mean cloud computing is a rate change the world right? Today you can deploy capability and have a supercomputer in your fingertips in in minutes, right? You can also secure that in minutes because you can update it in real time. As the machine is functioning, you have a problem, take it down, throw up a new virtual machine. These are amazing innovations that are creating more and more capability out there in industry. It's game changing. We're happy, we're glad to be part of that and we ought to be helping defend that new amazing ecosystem. >>Partnering with companies like Microsoft. They didn't AWS did, you know, you know, I'm really impressed with your technical acumen. You've got a good grasp of the industry, but also, uh, you have really strong on the societal impact policy formulation side of government and business. So I want to get your thoughts for the young kids out there that are going to school, trying to make sense of the chaos that's going on in the world, whether it's DC political theater or the tech theater, big tech and in general, all of the things with coronavirus, all this stuff going on. It's a, it's a pretty crazy time, but a lot of work has to start getting done that are new problems. Yeah. What is your advice as someone who's been through the multiple waves to the young kids who have to figure out what half fatigue, what problems are out there, what things can people get their arms around to work on, to specialize in? >>What's your, what's your thoughts and expertise on that? Well, John, thanks for the question. What I really like about that question is is we're talking about what the future looks like and here's what I think the future looks like. It's all about taking risks. Tell a lot of these young kids out there today, they're worried about how the world looks right? Will America still be strong? Can we, can we get through this hard time we're going through in DC with the world challenges and what I can say is this country has never been stronger. We may have our own troubles internally, but we are risk takers and we always win. No matter how hard it gets them out of how bad it gets, right? Risk taking a study that's building the American blood. It's our founders came here taking a risk, leaving Eagle to come here and we've succeeded the last 200 years. >>There is no question in my mind that trend will continue. So the young people out there, I don't know what the future has to hold. I don't know if the new tape I was going to be, but you're going to invent it. And if you don't take the risks, we're not succeed as a nation. And that's what I think is key. You know, most people worry that if they take too many risks, they might not succeed. Right? But the reality is most people you see around at this convention, they all took risks to be here. And even when they had trouble, they got up, they dust themselves off and they won. And I believe that everybody in this country, that's what's amazing about the station is we have this opportunity to, to try, if we fail to get up again and succeed. So fail fast, fail often, and crush it. >>You know, some of the best innovations have come from times where you had the cold war, you had, um, you had times where, you know, the hippie revolution spawn the computer. So you, so you have the culture of America, which is not about regulation and stunting growth. You had risk-taking, you had entrepreneurship, but yet enough freedom for business to operate, to solve new challenges, accurate. And to me the biggest imperative in my mind is this next generation has to solve a lot of those new questions. What side of the street is the self driving cars go on? I see bike lanes in San Francisco, more congestion, more more cry. All this stuff's going on. AI could be a great enabler for that. Cyber security, a direct threat to our country and global geopolitical landscape. These are big problems. State and local governments, they're not really tech savvy. They don't really have a lot ID. >>So what do they do? How do they serve their, their constituents? You know, look John, these are really important and hard questions, but we know what has made technology so successful in America? What's made it large, successful is the governor state out of the way, right? Industry and innovators have had a chance to work together and do stuff and change the world, right? You look at California, you know, one of the reasons California is so successful and Silicon Valley is so dynamic. You can move between jobs and we don't enforce non-compete agreements, right? Because you can switch jobs and you can go to that next higher value target, right? That shows the value of, you know, innovation, creating innovation. Now there's a real tendency to say, when we're faced with challenges, well, the government has to step in and solve that problem, right? The Silicon Valley and what California's done, what technology's done is a story about the government stayed out and let innovators innovate, and that's a real opportunity for this nation. >>We've got to keep on down that path, even when it seemed like the easier answer is, come on in DC, come on in Sacramento, fix this problem for us. We have demonstrated as a country that Americans and individual are good at solve these problems. We should allow them to do that and innovate. Yeah. One of my passions is to kind of use technology and media to end communities to get to the truth faster. A lot of, um, access to smart minds out there, but young minds, young minds, uh, old minds, young minds though. It's all there. You gotta get the data out and that's going to be a big thing. That's the, one of the things that's changing is the dark arts of smear campaigns. The story of Bloomberg today, Oracle reveals funding for dark money, group biting, big tech internet accountability projects. Um, and so the classic astroturfing get the Jedi contract, Google WASU with Java. >>So articles in the middle of all this, but using them as an illustrative point. The lawyers seem to be running the kingdom right now. I know you're an attorney, so I'm recovering, recovering. I don't want to be offensive, but entrepreneurship cannot be stifled by regulation. Sarbanes Oxley slowed down a lot of the IPO shifts to the latest stage capital. So regulation, nest and every good thing. But also there's some of these little tactics out in the shadows are going to be revealed. What's the new way to get this straightened out in your mind? We'll look, in my view, the best solution for problematic speech or pragmatic people is more speech, right? Let's shine a light on it, right? If there are people doing shady stuff, let's talk about it's an outfit. Let's have it out in the open. Let's fight it out. At the end of the day, what America's really about is smart ideas. >>Winning. It's a, let's get the ideas out there. You know, we spent a lot of time, right now we're under attack by the Russians when it comes to our elections, right? We spent a lot of time harping at one another, one party versus another party. The president versus that person. This person who tells committee for zap person who tells committee. It's crazy when the real threat is from the outside. We need to get past all that noise, right? And really get to the next thing which is we're fighting a foreign entity on this front. We need to face that enemy down and stop killing each other with this nonsense and turn the lights on. I'm a big believer of if something can be exposed, you can talk about it. Why is it happening exactly right. This consequences with that reputation, et cetera. You got it. >>Thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate your insight. Um, I want to just ask you one final question cause you look at, look at the industry right now. What is the most important story that people are talking about and what is the most important story that people should be talking about? Yeah. Well look, I think the one story that's out there a lot, right, is what's going on in our politics, what's going on in our elections. Um, you know, Chris Krebs at DHS has been out here this week talking a lot about the threat that our elections face and the importance about States working with one another and States working with the federal government to defend the nation when it comes to these elections in November. Right? We need to get ahead of that. Right? The reality is it's been four years since 2016 we need to do more. That's a key issue going forward. What are the Iranians North Koreans think about next? They haven't hit us recently. We know what's coming. We got to get ahead of that. I'm going to come again at a nation, depending on staff threat to your meal. Great to have you on the QSO is great insight. Thanks for coming on sharing your perspective. I'm John furrier here at RSA in San Francisco for the cube coverage. Thanks for watching.

(uptempo music) >> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California it's The Cube! Covering Nutanix dot Next 2019 brought to you by Nutanix >> Welcome back everyone to The Cube's live coverage of Nutanix dot Next here in Anaheim California, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost John Furrier. We are joined by Dr. Ayanna Howard, she's the professor and chair of the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Welcome Dr. Howard to The Cube! Thank you, thank you. I'm excited about this conversation. >> Yeah so you, you're a fascinating person, when you were a little girl, watching Bionic Woman you said "I wanna be a scientist," you started your career at NASA. >> Ayanna: Correct. >> You are an entrepreneur, a researcher. Tell us what you're doing today. >> So what I'm doing today, and what I'm really excited about is bringing robots into the home of children with special needs. So one of the things about kids and those that may have a developmental disability is that there's not enough contact hours with human clinicians. And so, how do you augment that in the home environment? How do you bring technology into the home to do therapy with them, to do even education? And so that's what I focus on. >> So, we want to hear so much more about that, but what are you gonna be talking about at this conference? It's the future of AI, and robots. >> Yes, I'm gonna talk about the things that make my robots work. And so, the future of AI and robotics and where it leads, it's a combination of things like wearables. So if you think about all the data around us, we have wearables with our phones, and our smart watches, all that data that's being collected about us, allows our machines to do very interesting personalized things with us and for us. The other thing is that if you think about collaborative AI, collaborative machines, we're going to the place where the workforce and how you do your work, you're going to have an AI as a companion, a robot as an assistant, so you might not be sitting next to a human, you might be sitting next to a robot. And so, what does that look like? And then, of course, emotional AI, and so, yes, machines do have emotions, which is, counts kind of weird, but in order for us to work with others, we typically have a bond, so why not have a bond with our machines? >> What's the software look like? I'm rifting in my mind here, I'm just thinking about, I'm gonna write some software that might be dynamic, a neural network, these kinds of words have been kicked around in the industry. How do you make software have emotion in AI? Because it has to be random, but yet not, it has to be programmable. >> It does. But think about it. Emotions are not necessarily random. Emotions are pretty repetitive, i.e., if you're hurt, what do you do? If you're young you cry, if you're older you hide the cry, right? I mean, it's very repetitive, if you're happy there's a certain emotion, what makes you happy? There are certain things that we can all say if I suddenly woke up and I won a prize, I'd be happy. Emotions are actually very predictable, they're not that hard to model. >> And the data sources could be coming off my Fit Bit, facial recognition, you know the morning... >> Well facial recognition, you can see it in the face, in fact your pulse, and you sweat a little bit when your emotions change. Remember the mood rings back in the day? (laughter) >> Sure! >> OK those were fake, but still, their concept about them was that your body gives a response based on the emotions inside. >> Yeah, that's so cool. So what's the state of the art, you look at bleeding edge and state of the art kind of mainstream, where are people with software, machine learning, AI, what's some of the things that are notable to you that are important to highlight? >> Yes, so I think that the two areas that are the furthest ahead, one is facial recognition and emotion detection, and it's because the application are out there. As an example, airports are putting in these systems, and so imagine, I mean, the positive is, is that you don't have to book or print out your ticket, right? You just walk into the airport, you walk though security, you don't get padded down, and you walk to your gate and get on the plane. I mean, just imagine that. You're like How would you do that? Well, if I know who you look like, and I can model you, and I grab your wearable, and your data, I know who you are! So, I don't have to make sure that you are who you are, I know. I mean, so that's kind of a benefit. Of course, there's some negatives, which we won't talk about, but that's one area, this facial recognition aspect. The other I think it's in healthcare, I think it's in the fact that our data, and about us, about our health, it's so much there, and as we mine it we just get better. There's, for example, some research that shows stress can be detected and I can then have a, think about it, I can have an AI that if I know you're stressed like, I'm not going to send you that email, I'm going to halt a little bit, until I realize that your stress level is a little bit better, and then I will give you the bad news. Right? Like, because we don't want to be stressed. >> I need that, I need that app. >> Rebeca: But that's a manager with really good intentions, I mean, you can really see the perils of this going... >> No, that's, that's the negative. That's the aspect of, all these things are, really have good return on investment, good quality, but the negatives are is that if you have nefarious manager or an organization like I just wanna make money, money, money, you can sway that, and I think, though, that most organizations are thinking about this. I think there's this push now to do things like regulations, to basically protect us, but still insure that we have a positive relationship with AI and robotics. >> What's the coolest thing you've seen or built recently that could tie into the robotics? >> So, I will personally say it's one of our machines, that has, it emotionally responds to you based on what you're doing, and so what does this mean? It means I have robots that are just looking so cute, right? You look at them, and anyone looks at them, and it's just , it's like, it's real, it's intelligent, it like understands me. Of course, it's programmed based on modeling but it's just as fascinating, and I watch people interact with robots, and it's like oh, my gosh, this person, this individual, is really engaged with my robotic creation. >> And you mean, in conversation or just in feeling the comradery? >> In conversation, in interaction, and the robots, they have a limited script, but people will adapt to that, right? And they will, it's just like when you talk to your phone, have you noticed that when your phone doesn't understand you, what do you do? You speak a little slower. You might choose different words, right? I see that with the robots, you change your behavior based on the limitations. >> Speaking with someone who doesn't speak lour language natively. >> Correct. Same thing with robots. >> So describe what you see... Returning to the beginning of our conversation talking in particularly with kids with special needs. >> Ayanna: Yes. >> Describe what you see, the changes in the child, who is developing a relationship, a bond with a robot. >> Yes, so what we've actually shown, not just seen and observed, is that when we have a child interacting with a robot their, and what we call, whatever milestone we're doing, so maybe it's movement therapy, which means I want them to say, move a little faster than their normal space of moving, what I see is with the robot there is a partner encouraging, guiding, providing them input on how well they're doing, or in terms of correcting, the child improves their behavior, and so between day zero and day n, the child has gotten better. We see that. We have the data that shows that. >> Incredible. I wanna also ask about women in technology, and this is, this is really a theme at every single tech conference you go to because it's such a problem, it's such an issue that is finally getting the attention it deserves. We know about the dearth of women leaders, the dearth of underrepresented minorities, particularly in management leadership positions, what do you see as you role in tackling this problem, as the head of an important department in technology and also as a woman of color? >> Yeah, so I think there's always been kind of two dilemmas, one is what they call the pipeline, which is now the pathway, like how do you get women to come into stem? And the data has shown that is not that girls are not interested in stem, it's that they lose interest because of their society, right? So that's one thing. It's like make sure that where they are in the society is encouraging. The other is that when you get older, you look up, you're like, okay there's no one there. Obviously, I'm not supposed to be here, or when things get tough, it's like, okay, I need to move out. And so the other is, how do you do mentorship and sponsorship, so that women are pushed forward as managers and supervisors. So those are kind of the two things. And so, as a, and I consider myself a leader in this space, I actually feel it's my duty to be up front, and be a mentor, and be a lead, and actually be vocal, and make others realize like, if I'm in a room, and we're deciding on, you know, a student or a candidate, and there's no representation, you know, I'm comfortable enough to say, hey, I should not be the one that says this, right? And eventually what you see is that people start looking and thinking about this, at every instance of time. >> Do you feel like it's getting better? >> I do. It's getting better. And it's not perfect but it's getting better. Like, if I look in the classrooms, I look in the computer science curriculums, I see more female students coming in, and lasting, and then going into corporate America and continue on to grad school. I see it being better, of course it's not on parity, but is is better. >> That's awesome. And the technology has shifted the definition. It's not programming, or electrical engineering, the surface area for tech is gaming to analytics, data science, it's huge. >> Human-centered interaction. >> There's new artistry around us, so I think it's a great surface area. >> It is, and I think one of the reasons why it's so important is that the world is diverse, I mean, in terms of all the different aspects. An so, if you're gonna create products for a diverse world, you should have individuals that are also diverse, creating them for everyone so that there's some equality in the process. >> As the analog world connects with the digital world, fascinating we talked before we came on camera around the technology in digital. So the human experience for me, whether having robots, detecting emotions, and having some sort of new notifications, like hey, you know, cheer up, or do something clever... >> Right >> Is that you can now immerse, so augmented reality has been the first killer app before virtual reality, but gaming is an indicator of what's happening onscreen, so, the onscreen digital realm is intersecting with our lives. >> Ayanna: It is. >> What's your view on this? Because this is an area that's new, it's cutting edge, it's a first generation problem, an opportunity. >> Opportunity. I think this, this blending of the, I would say, even, I would say the blending of the digital and physical and the gamefication aspects, is really gonna enhance two areas. One is education, and the retraining, and so what does that mean? It means that, instead of me having to, not to say go to college for four years, but instead of me trying to study everything in this one-semester course, it's like, I just need some basic knowledge and I can then work in the field, and I have my augment reality and so I see things and there's some scaffolding, there's some indication of here's step one, here's step two, ahh, you did that step two a little bit wrong, let's revise it. So you learn with real-time training and that's with doctors, well except for live patients, but you know, with doctors or residents, factory workers, or even teachers, teachers who are teaching say, calculus, that may have an English background. That's where it is. >> The progressions are not linear like they used to be. >> Ayanna: No! >> They are different, and now you have dated instrumentation with on-demand digital robots... >> Robots, agents... >> John: Agents, assistants... >> Adaptation, taking things from other places, so if I, for example, learn the best way to provide information to this human and this factory, well guess what, I can take that information, connect to the cloud, connect to the data centers, and apply that information to another worker in a different factory, but very similar characteristics, and so you have this transfer of knowledge as well. >> So education was one. What's the other one? Healthcare? >> Of course it's healthcare! (laughter) Of course. >> As someone who is immersed in it and a believer in technology, what do you do to disconnect? Well, first of all, do you disconnect? Do you worry about our over reliance on these little devices in our pockets, and what do you do to sort of leave the digital world behind for a while? >> Yeah, so I do worry about our over reliance because we've shown, and other researchers have shown, that there's actually an over trust factor. We will use devices, and of course these devices they have errors, right, even if it's you know 1% of the time, and that 1% of the time when they have errors we find that a lot of individuals will trust those errors, because they're over relying, they kind of go in zone mode, they're like, it worked all this time, so that 1%, they just don't question it. >> It must be real news! (laughter) >> But it's scary! >> Yeah, it is. >> It's scary. I do worry about that. And we're thinking about ways to try to mitigate that, 'cause that does worry me. How do I disconnect? I think that with anything mind, body and soul, so I love listening to music, although that's not disconnecting from technology 'cause I'm using technology to listen, but it's this zone period. Exercise, I think most of us think about exercise I'm fairly religious, even when I'm traveling, like okay, I'm going to find the gym and at least walk on the treadmill because we do have to have that combination, in order to be healthy ourselves. >> Finally, for that little girl, the little girl you, who's watching Bionic Woman I think that's the thing, we need more shows like that, to get, to get >> Click us interested >> Well exactly, what would be your advice to the smaller you, who says I want to be a scientist someday? >> So I would, and this is like some advice that people told me as I was growing up, and I didn't realize I had really good mentors, is one is, don't listen to the naysayers, i.e., believe in yourself, right? And I think that's the one thing we sometimes forget to do, like believe in that dream, even if others say that it's not possible, and it's like, no, everything is possible if you believe in yourself. >> Words to live by. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> Rebeca: This was great conversation. >> Awesome! >> I'm Rebeca Knight for John Furrier. We will be back here tomorrow with more from Nutanix dot Next. We hope to see you then. (electronic music)

>> live from Anaheim, California. It's the queue covering nutanix dot next twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of nutanix dot Next here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Furrier. We have two guests for this next segment. We have Stephanie Scare Aldi. She is the director of operations and support for Electra. Thank you so much for coming on the cues. And we have James Ellery, director innovation and governance at Electra. Thank you, James. >> Thanks for having us. >> So I want to start with you, James. Tell our viewers a little bit about electorates. Ontario, based for our viewers who are not familiar. What do what do you do? What do you about? >> So we are a energy solutions provider in Ontario, Canada. Basically, we are an ldc a local distribution company, but we're trying to transition from the poles and wires into really energy solutions provider. We We're about a million customers are approaching a million customers right now and wear actually four utility companies that came together to form Electra. And we just recently emerged with a fifth now, so We're rapidly growing in the in Ontario, and we have very much more growth to come. >> It's all those mergers. How does I t all fit together? Different systems, all kind of legacy. Mishmash. What's what's What's the environment like? >> So the environment Right now there is a tremendous amount of data center Stephanie's actually leading our data center consolidation project. There are tremendous amount of data centers across a fast geographical location, and we're using NUTANIX actually to consolidate everything onto a single platform right now. So there's a lot of work to be done. Definitely a lot of integration to be done, but we're confident that we'LL get it all done and we want to move to new tanks by phone. >> So right now we have about, I think, eleven data centers and we've been mandated to get down to two. So we're use up utilizing technology like nutanix too kind of, you know, get down and scale ability. So wait >> here for a lot of customs from nutanix around, how it's been a great system for manageability and also getting rid of some older gear, whether it's old GMC Cem Dale stuff. So we're seeing a lot of, you know, go from twenty four racks to six. This is kind of the ratios pushing stuff from eight weeks. Tow two hours, new operational benefits. How close are you guys up to that now? Because you get all this stuff you consolidating down the merger's makes a lot of sense. What's some of the operational benefits you seeing with nutanix That you could share, >> I think, is a per example that you just gave. We're working on a front office consolidation project and we're moving. We're doubling our VD i environment, and we actually just got three new nodes in a few weeks ago and it took a matter of two hours to get everything spun up and ready. So traditionally, it would take us weeks of planning and getting someone in and specialized technicians and now make a phone call a few hours and it's done. So you see, like already the benefits of you know growing are our infrastructure, and it's enabling us to merge faster with different utilities. >> I want to actually back up now and talk about the journey to Nutanix and talk about life before nutanix and now life after it. What was that what were sort of the problems that you were trying to solve? And why was Nutanix the answer >> So I could speak to that way back in twenty fifteen? We're looking at video, and we're implementing it across organization. And we're running its issues on three tier architecture where whenever there was a performance issue, we would talk to the sand guy and we'LL talk to the server guy and we talked to the networking guy. And although everyone's trying to help everyone sort of looking at each other, saying, Okay, where is this problem? Really, really land? And the issue with that is, as you guys know what VD I I mean, user performance and user experience is key, right? That's King. So you know, when you're trying to take away someone's physical desktop and give him a virtual desktop, they want the same or better performance. And anytime we had an issue, we had to resolve it rapidly. So when we look at everything we said, Okay, this is okay, but it's not sustainable for the scale, ability in the growth that we had, especially because with, you know, ah media environment, its scales very rapidly and If the application scares wrapped scales rapidly, you need the infrastructure to scale as rapidly as your application and perform just as good. So what happened was we looked at nutanix. We said, You know what? If we can look at a single pane of glass to figure out where any performance issues lie, that makes operations much more operations, that management administration much easier for us. And that's really where we started our journey with nutanix. We went from a three note cluster to start and we're up to fourteen nodes now, just in our VD I cluster alone. >> And what about about the future? What? What is the future hold in terms of this partnership, >> I think for us were really hoping to go to fully H V in the next six or twelve months. Uh, I know, James. We're really pushing it and trying to get that in because, you know, way want to simplify our technologies. And I think by moving to a Chevy, I think, you know, we'LL save some money. >> So what we're looking to do with Nutanix isn't you know, there's been a lot of wins for us moving to NUTANIX, especially with regards to support Support's been fantastic. I mean, you know, although we don't like to call support because I mean something's probably wrong way love calling you guys because every time we call support, it's, you know, everyone's always there to help. And I'm not only the support from the support team, but also through our venders or a vendor are counts, you know, I've or who we love way love the whole team because they're there for you to help me. We run into some pretty significant issues. One of the things that happened to us was we had some changing workloads in our media environment. Through no fault of nutanix is you know when when we introduce some additional workloads, we didn't anticipate some of the challenges that would come along with introducing those workloads. And what happened was we filled up our hot storage rather rapidly. Nutanix came in right away because we call them up and said, You know, we're having big performance issues. We need some help and they brought in P E O. C notes to help us get over the hump. They were there for us. I mean, within a week, they got us right back up and running and fully operational and even better performance than we had before. So until we could get our own notes procured and in house, which was fantastic, I've never seen that levels from another organization. So we love the support from Nutanix on DH. Since then, we've grown. So we've actually looked at nutanix for General server computer platform as well. And we're doing Christ Cross hyper visor Support across high provides a replication Sorry from production to D. R. So we're actually running Acropolis. Indy are running GM. Where in production. But has Stephanie alluded to? We're trying to get off of'Em were completely, you know, everyone talks about the attacks. We don't like the V attacks with Phil on a baby anywhere for something that's commodity. And we're looking to repurpose that money so we can look at other things such as you ten exciting way very much. Want to move to the cloud for D R. And that's sort of our direction. >> OK, so you guys have the m we're now, not you Not yet off the anywhere, but you plan to be >> playing to be Yes. >> Okay, So what's it going to look like How long is that gonna take or what is that? We're >> really hoping at the next six to twelve months. So I think we're really gonna push hard at. We've been talking to some people and it seems like it's gonna be a pretty smooth transition, So looking forward to it. And I think our team is really looking for true as well. That's >> one of the challenges right. That the team is really is one of the challenges because we've merged and there's a lot of change going on organization. It's difficult to throw more change at people, right? There's a whole human component, Teo everything that we do. So you know Well, that's why we moved GHB into d. R. To start because we said, You know what, give the operations folks time to look at it, timeto play with it, time to get familiar with it. And then we'LL make the change in production. But like we said, you know, moving over age, he's going to save us a ton of money like a ton of money that we can repurpose elsewhere to really start moving the business forward >> about operations for second. Because one of the things you told earlier is that consolidation? You're leading the project at the VD. I think we're new workloads. There's always gonna be problems. Always speed bumps and hot spots, as they say. But what has changed with the advent of software and Dev ops and automation starts to come into it. How do you see that playing out? Because you tell this is a software company. So you guys knew them when they were five years ago Now, But this is the trend in I t. Operations have clean program ability for the infrastructure. What's your view on that? What's your reaction to that? And you guys getting theirs at the goal >> that is >> like part of our road map. And we're gonna be working with our NUTANIX partners t build a roll map, actually, the next coming few weeks. So because we are emerging all these utilities, we'd love to get automation and orchestration, and we actually have another budget in three years. So it is on our road map. We want to get there right, because we want to have her staff work on business strategy. We don't want their fingers to keyboards. We want them actually working with the business and solution ing and not, you know, changing tapes or working on supporting a system when we don't have to do that anymore. Because now there's so it's so much simpler running any tennis environment. I know James is saying a lot of change for employees. There used to be M where Nutanix is new to a lot of them. I think they're quickly seeing the benefit of managing it because now they get to do things that are a little bit more fun than just managing an environment. >> And this is point cost to repurpose what you're paying for a commodity for free. And if you can repurpose and automata way the manual labor that's boring and repetitive, moving people to a higher value activity. >> Exactly. And we love the message we heard today about being invisible. >> Yeah, I love that >> way, Lovett. I mean, that's essentially we wanted. The business doesn't really care what you're doing behind the scenes, right? They just want their applications to work. They want everything to work seamlessly. So that's what we want to get, too. We want to get to that invisibility where we're moving the business, Ford. We're enabling them through technology, but they don't need to worry about the back end of what's actually going on. >> Stephanie, I want to ask you about both a personal and professional passion of yours, and that is about bringing more women into technology. You are a senior woman in technology, and we know we know the numbers. There is a dearth of female leaders. There is a dearth of underrepresented minorities, particularly in in high level management roles. So I want to hear from you both from a personal standpoint in terms of what your thoughts are on this problem and why, why we have this problem and then also what you, an elector are doing to remedy it. >> Yeah, I think you know, I'm really lucky to work at Electra because we actually have a diversion inclusion committee that I'm part of with a lot of stem organizations. But I think you know, there's all these great programs going on, and but I still don't see enough women in this in this industry, and I think a lot of it stems from you walk into a room, and if you're the only one of you it's really intimidating. So I think we really need to work on making people feel more welcome. You know, getting more women in cedar senior leadership positions and kind of bring them to events like this, gaming them on the Internet. Going to the university is going to the schools and talking to education and talking to, you know, CEOs and seals that don't have sea level women executives and saying, You know, there's a business benefit toe having diversity of all kinds in an organization, you know, you know, strength lies in differences, not in similarities. And I think we can really grow businesses and have that value if we have different types of opinions. And I think there's, you know, statistic shows when you have more diversity, your business is more successful. So I think senior leaders should pay attention and, you know, purposely try to hire more a more diverse workforce >> and what do you have anything to add to that? I mean, I know that it that it's maybe tougher for a man to weigh in on this issue, but at the same time it is one that affects all of us. >> Absolutely. And I think seventy, said it best right when you bring in, you know, multiple bill from different ethnicities from different genders. I mean, it's it's that wealth of knowledge and everyone brings from the different experiences they have in life, and I think that's what you need. You don't want to know the collective all thinking the same way you want the collective that bring the diversity into your organization. And I think you know, when I was in school, we had one woman in my entire computer engineering class, and you know that you wanted to see that change, right? I love to see more of that disease. More women being in the work force, especially within technology. >> I >> think that's Ah, it's fantastic for technology. >> Stephanie, What's your advice for young girls out there? Maybe in high school college, who are having gravitating towards either it's computer science or some sort of stem related field that might be intimidated? >> I think the one important thing you can do is like really rely on your family and friends for encouragement, cause I think sometimes it is gonna be intimidating, you know, For me I'd walk into a course and I was the only female my computer networking class. But I had, like my father, always encouraged me to push me to say, like, Don't ever be intimately. Don't ever be scared and you need a little bit of a fix. Came because for a little bit it is going to be just you in a room. But I think the more you speak up and the more you just kind of push yourself, I think it is going to get better. And I think it's almost kind of cool when you're the only female. Because you feel that pride. I want to do better. I want to do better for all of us to say like we can be. Not just a good, even better. >> Great. So great advice. Yeah. Stephanie James. Thank you both. So much for coming on. Thanks for having us. Pleasure talking, Teo. Thanks. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have so much more of nutanix dot Next coming up in just a little bit

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's the Cube covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here at the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Aysegul Gunduz, she is a professor at the University of Florida-College of Engineering. Thanks so much for joining us. >> No, thank you for having me. >> So, congratulations are in order, because you are a ABIE Award winner, which is awards given out by the Anita Borg Institute, and you have been given the Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award. So, tell us a little about, about your award. >> Well, thank you for asking. We've heard a lot about Grace Hopper and Anita Borg throughout the conference, but Denice Denton, she was actually very close friends with Anita. And she was a leader in her field, her field was development of polymers, and she worked on the first development of RAM. But she was actually the first ever dean of a college of engineering at a major university... >> Rebecca: First ever woman. >> First woman dean, yes, so she became dean at the University of Washington, and then she actually became chancellor at University of California, but just beyond her research she really promoted and lifted the people around her, so she was a big proponent of minority issues. So, she supported females, she supported international students, and she was openly gay, so she really had a big influence on the LGBTQ community, so I just wanted to, you know, just recognize her and say that how honored I am to have my name mentioned alongside hers. This award is given to a junior faculty member that has done significant research and also has had an impact on diversity as well. >> So, let's start talking... >> Denice is a great inspiration. >> Yes! The award given an homage to Denice, so your research is about detecting neurological disorders. So, tell our viewers a little bit more about what you're doing. >> Sure, I'm an electrical engineer by training, who does brain research for a living, so this confuses a lot of people, but I basically tell them that our brains have bioelectric fields that generate biopotential signals that we can record and we're really trying to decipher what these signals are trying to tell us. So, we are really trying to understand and treat neurological disorders as well as psychiatric disorders, so I work with a lot of neurosurgical patient populations that receive electrode implants as part of their therapy, and we are trying to now improve these technologies so that we can record these brain signals and decode them in real time, so that we can adapt things like deep brain stimulation for the current pathology that these patients are having. So, deep brain stimulation, currently, is working like, think of an AC and it's working on fan mode so its current, you know, constantly blowing cold air into the room, even though the room might be just the perfect temperature, so we are basically trying to listen to the brain signals and only deliver electricity when the patient is having a pathology, so this way we are basically turning the AC onto the auto mode, so that once they are actually not having symptoms, unnecessary electrical, it is not delivered into their brains, so pace makers, when they invented were functioning that way, so people realized they could stimulate the heart, and the person would not have a cardiac arrest, but now we know that we can detect the heart pulse very easily, so someone thought about 'OK, so when we don't detect the pulse, heartbeat, let's only stimulate the pace maker then,' so that's what we're trying to adapt to the neuro-technologies. >> And what is the patient response? I mean I imagine that's incredible. So, these are people who suffer from things like Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome, I mean, it's a small patient population that you're working with now, but what are you finding? >> So, first of all, our patients are very gracious to volunteer for our studies, we find that, for instance, in Tourette's syndrome we can actually detect when people are having tics, involuntary tics, that is characteristic of Tourette's syndrome. We find that we can differentiate that from voluntary movements, so we can really deliver the stimulation when they are having these symptoms, so this is a paroxysmal disorder, they really don't need continuous stimulation. So, that's one thing that we're developing. We find that in essential tremor, again, when people aren't having tremor we can detect that and stop the stimulation and only deliver it when necessary. We're working on a symptom called freezing of gaits in Parkinson's disease so people define this as the, having the will to walk, but they feel like their feet are glued to the floor so this can cause a lot of falls, and at that, really, age this can be very, very dangerous. So, we can actually tell from the brain when people are walking and then we turn the stimulation in this particular area only during that time so as to prevent any falls that might happen. >> So, it's really changing their life and how they are coping with this disease. >> Yes, true, and it really makes going to work in the morning (laughs) very, very exciting for us. >> So, another element of the ABIE Award is that you are helping improve diversity in your field and in Denice Denton, in the spirit of Denice Denton, helping young women and minorities rise in engineering. >> Yes, so, I'm going to talk about this in my keynote session tomorrow, but I really just realized that all my confidence throughout engineering school was due to the fact that I actually had a female undergraduate advisor, and once I came to that realization, I joined Association for Academic Women at the University of Florida, which was established in 1974, because these pioneering women fought for equal pay for male and female faculty on campus, and this is still honored today, so I'm very honored to be serving the Association as its president today. All of our membership dues go to dissertation awards for female doctoral students that are, you know, emerging scholars in their fields, and I also approached the National Science Foundation and they supported the funding for me to generate a new emerging STEM award for female students in the STEM fields. So, you know, that is my contribution. >> So, you're passing it on... >> I hope so. >> the help and the mentoring that you received as young faculty member. >> I truly hope so. >> I mean, (stammers) right now we're so focused on the technology companies but on campuses, on the undergraduate and graduate school campuses, how big a problem is this, would you say? >> So, I'm a faculty in biomedical engineering, so, in our field we actually have some of the highest female to male ratios compared to other engineering fields. People attribute this to the fact that females like to contribute to the society, so, they like to work on problems, they like to work on problems that have a societal impact and I think working with, basically, you know, disorders in any branch of medicine, it really fires, fires up female students, but yes, when we go to other departments such as electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, the ratio is really, really small. And it still is a problem and therefore we are really trying to mobilize, you know, all female faculty, just to be present, just the fact that you're there, that you're a successful female in this field... >> Rebecca: The role models. >> Yeah, really makes an impact, you know, I think, the most repeated quote at this meeting is that 'You can't be what you can't see." So, we're really trying to support female faculty. So, we're tying to retain female faculty, so that, you know, the younger generation of females can see that they can and the will do it as well. >> You can't be what you can see, I love that. Those are words to live by. >> Right. >> Yeah. Well, thank you so much Aysegul, this is a pleasure, pleasure meeting you, pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you so much, pleasure's mine. >> We'll be back with more from Grace Hopper just after this.

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Morgan Berman. She is the founder and CEO of MilkCrate, a platform that measures and grows social and environmental impact. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I want to, start off by telling us a little bit about MilkCrate. >> Sure. So we're a tech company. We got our start about four years ago. We've grown and changed a lot in that time, but what we really focus on doing is helping big organizations either for- or non-profit, engage people in social and environmental impact in a game app. And we build custom versions of this app based on the goals of each client. So whether it's a big company that wants to engage employees in volunteering and riding a bike to work, or a nonprofit that has kids that they're trying to get to go to art museums, and encourage them to go more often, we can gamify both of those behaviors in unique apps and then those clients have their own engagement experience for hitting those goals. >> Well, that's a really neat idea. Tell me how you came up with it. >> Well, like I said, it's changed and grown over time. Originally it was my own personal desire to grow my impact in the world. I grew up in this kind of crunchy, kind of wonderful bubble, I guess, where my mom would only buy food from the farmer's market, she was actually a farm-to-table chef, one of the first female chefs in Philly. She wrote books rating and reviewing thrift shopping, so I grew up with like fresh local food, thrift shopping, there was a community garden behind us. >> She was a hipster before her time. >> Exactly, my mom's like the original hipster. And my dad was also an entrepreneur. So when I moved to West Philadelphia, which is like the crunchiest part of the city by far, I was trying to figure out how to ride a bike in the city for the first time, and how do you compost with worms when you live in an apartment and you don't have a backyard. Where's my nearest food co-op so I can start feeding myself this way? And my interest grew and grew as I started learning about things like climate change. And I went to a Bill McKibben talk about fossil fuel divestment, and there were these children in Haiti holding a sign that said Connect The Dots Your Actions Affect Me. And it really hit home how my privilege as this western world person with this degree and all of these things that most people don't have that every choice I made about my life was having a direct impact on someone on the other side of the world, or often not even that far from me. And so I wanted to figure out how to live my life in a way that my values weren't conflicting with my actions. So I applied for graduate school in sustainable design to originally, the idea was to help design sustainable buildings but I quickly learned that even though I had this degree, architects weren't going to take me seriously. And so I pivoted and took all my extra-curriculars in Industrial Design and Interactive Media. And I had the head of the department for Interactive Media actually helping me with the first mock-ups of MilkCrate, which was all about designing an app to help people live their values, particularly around sustainability. And then, after a few years of learning and growing, we actually, Forbes picked us to be one of the five companies on the Forbes Under 30 stage and that catapulted us onto this path of suddenly going from a school project to a startup company that needed to raise money and have a business model. And I was like, what's a business model? So after about two years of learning and growing, we realized that there's this opportunity with big corporations to engage employees in sustainability and that there was a pain point on this enterprise level that we could solve, and yeah. >> And what was this pain point? I mean, I think that's the thing is we can all say it's great for companies to get their employees to ride more bikes and to start a recycling program-- >> But why do they care? >> Yeah! >> And that's what investors would always ask, and I'd be like, ugh! And I had to learn the answer! And the answer is 75% of the S&P 500 issues a CSR Sustainability Report every year, and that has grown exponentially over the last few years. And the reason they do that is because employees want to work for a company that's making a difference. 45% of millennials would take a 15% cut or more in their salary to work for a company that makes a difference in the world. The reason that B Corps are growing exponentially around the world, all of these things, of business is a force for good in the world, it's the norm now. Whether you realize it or not, that's what's driving people to work for a company, to stay for a company, for customers to buy a product from a company. That's how people are starting to make their important life choices. And so now companies invest in having a Corporate Social Responsibility, not only a director, but a whole department. And they're, what we learned when we were researching how to figure out this whole business model was that CSR directors, their top three pain points are engaging employees, tracking and analytics, and having a scalable, cost-effective program across the whole company. So we realized our product could do all three of those things, and I was like, oh, I think that's a business model, when you solve the major pain points for an important corporate role in the world. So that's how we started moving in that direction and we started getting validation, and then we realized we also could work with nonprofits when they started reaching out. And so now we're kind of filling both of those needs that are a little bit different. >> So you're gamifying, making it into a game, making it fun for employees, or clients or customers or whoever the target audience is. So what kind of rewards are they getting for this? How do you light up their bulbs? >> I'm actually giving a lecture on this at Warden on Monday, so it's top of mind. You've got intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, right? There are the things that you do because they make you feel like you're being your authentic self, where you're expressing your values and that lights up your brain in a way that nothing else ever will. Then you have your external, extrinsic motivations, things like prizes, but also social acknowledgement. Seeing that you are functioning the way your peers are, that sense of I am not alone, or I am normal, that's a really important validation as a human. So seeing that you're in the top 10 or that you're above average, that feels good. So we have things like your rank and how you're doing on your team and how your team's doing in comparison to other teams in your MilkCrate community. And then there's the actual rewards. So university clients of ours have given tickets to sporting events, or credit to the bookstore. Corporate clients, gift certificates to local, sustainable restaurants and coffee shops near the headquarters. We're actually now partnering with an amazing B Corp company, United By Blue, that has ethically made and environmentally thoughtful products like mugs and candles and things like that. So, it depends on the client what their goals are, what their budget is, what motivates those people. But it really, the beginning part, when you first download the app, the first couple of challenges are things like answer this question about how important is to you to live your values? So you get them thinking in that mindset about why they're using this app. >> Priming them to-- >> Priming them, exactly! Getting them in that headspace. That's the most important thing you can do in the beginning is just to help them understand why they're using this, and then the rewards are almost, they're a distant second. >> Okay, okay. So you've also, you are a B Corp, and are there many other B Corps here at Grace Hopper? I mean, what's your experience there? As you said, it is now the norm that the business is functioning this way. But B Corps are still a minority, relatively speaking. >> Right, there's a lot of room for growth there, yeah. I think having the CSR report is the norm, but doing everything you possibly can, there's still a lot of room in that department. One thing I saw that I loved was that instead of giving out swag, Facebook was actually donating money to nonprofits that help women code. I was like, that's great! So I haven't seen any B Corps here that I've, yeah, I don't think I've seen other than ROAR For Good-- >> Which we had on the show earlier. >> Yes, so Yasmine and I are definitely two Philly B Corps. I would love to see more tech companies go in that direction but yeah, there's a lot more growth that needs to happen. There are about, I think, I actually just got to meet one of the other founders of B Lab that does B Corp certification. He gave a great presentation answering in more detail why do companies do this? It was amazing how many stats he had. It was like yes! But 2,300 for B Corps and I think something like 16,000 benefit corporations. So they're slightly different things, but it's a growing movement for sure. >> So talk a little bit about your experience at this Grace Hopper Conference. It's day one, we're near the end of day one. How would you describe the energy, the atmosphere, what's your feeling about being here in Orlando? >> So I've heard over and over again people saying it's just so good to be in a room full of women who are all doing awesome things. And it keeps reminding me of when I went and saw Wonder Woman with my parents. And I remember sitting in the theater and going like this and being like oh, my cheeks are wet. Oh, I think I'm crying. Oh, I think I'm having feelings. I think it's because I've literally never seen on a screen several dozen, or hundreds of women just being powerful, physical beings with like, aggression and skill, and it having nothing to do with sexuality or being attractive. And it was just the first time I'd seen that in my 32 years of existence. And to just, there's something so powerful about having that icon, that image reflected back at you to see, oh, if you can do that, I can do that. And actually, over the last 13 months, I've been training in Brazilian jujitsu and competing, and to see women being physical, strong warriors, and only women, and it not being sexualized, it was like oh, that's the feeling I get when I compete, and when I'm with my teammates, my female teammates. Anyways, I think that's kind of what's happening here is that sense of like, these are my people, and we are doing amazing things, and to just see each other when historically, you never got to see a room like this. I think it's an unfortunately necessary experience to be reminded that we are out there, we are doing this, and it's growing. >> And there is a sisterhood and the belonging that we talked about earlier, too. >> I mean, you see men who don't seem particularly uncomfortable here. They can kind of, they're like okay with this. And they get to kind of know what it's like to be in the minority. And I kind of want to ask them, how are you feeling? What's this like for you? But like, to see everyone flipping the ratio and we're all good, so that means if we could get somewhere more like parity I think that could be pretty magical. >> So as a female founder, a female technologist, what is your advice for the younger versions of you who maybe are just graduating from college, or maybe even younger than that and sort of wondering, can I even do that? Can I aspire to be that? >> You absolutely can. And I gave some advice at the end of my session earlier. And my two bits of advice were detach yourself from any negative association with the word Failure. Try and come up with a new word for yourself if you need to because learning and growing is what you're going to do your whole life, and so taking risks, that's what you need to be doing every single day. And so pushing against those things that scare you. And the second thing was to find a mentor, because no one piece of advice I can give is ever going to fill the role that having a mentor can give you over the course of a career, or even just for a few years. The amount that I've grown in just the last four years of building my company with some of my mentors, it's incredible. So, find someone who reminds you of who you want to be, and then latch on to them and get them to help kind of carry you along. >> Great. Well, Morgan, it's been so fun talking to you. >> Thank you, this has been great. >> Thanks for joining us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we'll have more from the Grace Hopper Conference in Orlando just after this. (rippling music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (upbeat music) >> Woman: (clears throat) Here today. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Josie Gillan and Laurel McLay. They have just launched a new collaboration, Twinovate. Tell our viewers about Twinovate. You are identical twins, I first of all should say his. >> Yes, we are. So Twinovate one in, what it is is Laurel and I are actually mirror twins and I'm left brain, I'm right-handed. Laurel's right brain and she's left-handed. So what I am is, I'm in my previous background is engineering leadership. I've worked at companies like Salesforce, Atlassian, Cloudera. But Laurel and I saw an opportunity with our diverse viewpoints to start a collaboration together. So I'm the left brain twin. I'm logical, I'm problem-solving, and I love nothing more than to get that code compiled. >> And I'm the right brain twin, so I'm creative, language, any of that messy human emotional stuff. I'm a career coach back in New Zealand. And so I love nothing more that helping people with their identity, their uniqueness, and looking at some of the behavioral challenges which might be holding them back. So we looked at the two of us together and we thought, wow, we've got some great stuff and what are we truly passionate about? We're truly passionate about women, particularly in STEM, being able to contribute themselves fully in a way that works for them. To not only their own legacy, but the legacy of who they're collaborating with. >> Now you are here at Grace Hopper, you're running a workshop, and before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about an apology epidemic. Explain what you mean by that. >> Well, if you think about an epidemic, it's something that spreads, and often it spreads without people even realizing it, before it's too late. And so what we realized was that women, and particularly when you're using language like just, I'm sorry, it's only me. If someone gives us a compliment we say, oh, I bought this, this old thing, I got it on sale. And what we realized was the message of that was saying was I don't count, I'm invisible, please put yourself before me. And the challenge about this epidemic is a lot of people don't realize they're saying it. >> Yeah, and some great examples. This is really resonating with people. So I'm actually on a moms in tech Facebook group, and I asked for some stories. And one woman talked about softball practice. And she practices at the same field where men practice. And what she noticed is every time the women dropped a ball or missed a pitch they would say sorry, sorry, and she turned around and looked at the males and the males never, never did that. So why are we apologizing? >> And we have created this cool little sheet we call Apology Bingo that's available on our Facebook page, and it helps people to look at the many times that they might say these words. One of the words that I have realized I say all the time is actually. And even though actually may not sound apologetic in itself, it's absolutely. >> It's a qualifier, it's, right. >> It's qualifier, exactly. And so what we're talking about apologizing, over-explaining and qualifying. >> And that makes you appear a lot less confident, and really can have career-limiting impact. >> Well, I want to talk about the career-limiting impact, but I also just want to ask you about so it's one thing to understand and acknowledge and become aware that you are using this kind of language. How do you eradicate it from your vocabulary? >> So what we talk about in the workshop is little shifts and big calls. So the little shifts are those small things that you can do to catch yourself. And that's at the language level. So for example, there's a Gmail app called Just Not Sorry. >> It's a Chrome plugin. >> And so what you do is, you add that to your Gmail and it will show and underline some of the language in each email which is apologetic. But then I call it the big calls. And that's really two things. The first thing is do you want to start a revolution? Because let's face it, when you turn up previously apologetic and maybe not too troublesome, let's just say, and you start kicking out your unapologetic language, there are going to be potentially some people around there who don't take kindly to that. And they may call you angry or uppity. >> Or even worse (laughs). >> Or even worse, exactly. So I feel it's about people learning and doing some personal development work on themselves to get the courage to that. Not saying that everyone needs to start a revolution, but for those who feel inspired to do it. And for everyone I believe it is a symptom of the I'm not good enough self-worth and we have an interesting take on self-value, don't we, Josie? >> We do. Being an identical twin is very interesting because what we've found is I might get really quite snippy at Laurel and she said to me, well, why are you so snippy at me? And it was like, well, I see things in you that I don't like in myself. And so we have decided let's turn it around. I want to acknowledge in Laurel things I do like in myself and accept the things that, the bad with the good. >> Right, right and we could all learn from that. I mean, it's just a lesson in humanity. >> And one other point I want to make though, with the people might not appreciate this. We're not dropping manners here. Clearly we are not suggesting that you're no longer courteous. What we want to say is save sorry for when it really counts. >> Rebecca: For when you need to apologize. >> Right. >> Absolutely. >> So in terms of the career-limiting factors that we were talking about, what are sort of the unintended consequences of this apologetic behavior? >> Well, I can talk to that. In some of my roles in the past as an engineering leader, I've really focused on maybe more building up my team, collaboration, and sometimes my management may not agree with the way that I'm doing it, right? Now, rather than having a healthy dialogue about why I'm doing it this way and maybe coming to some kind of general agreement, I have in the past tended to say I must be wrong, he or she must be right. And the ironic thing is, with my experience, I meant to bring that in. I meant to bring my experience in. I've heard in reviews that you don't have enough of an opinion. So really I think that was certainly career-limiting for me and something I'm learning how to do much better. >> So at Twinovate you are empowering women in STEM, you are making sure that they feel included, making sure that they feel like they have a voice at the table, making sure that they are, as you said, not apologizing for being women in the workforce. Do you go in and do you work with individuals? Do you work with companies who say we need to help our workforce deal with these issues? >> Absolutely. So in this workshop we just had an hour and it was a packed audience, it was fantastic. So something that I'm really clear about is it's such a privilege being in front of a room, so we want to make sure that it's just not the talking heads, that people look at their own situation, and we give them examples, both professional and personal, because let's face it, that's a big part of it, isn't it? When people are apologetic in their own worlds. And so they all work together at the table to be able to come up and discuss, and we share that as a room. And the workshop capacity is something that we will deal with people one-on-one because that's when I've done this the whole. I think that one of the reasons I am good at uniqueness and identity is because I'm an identical twin. And so I can work with people and nail their specific challenge in a heartbeat. So for me it's about sharing that power of group but also giving the individual attention so people can walk away knowing the stuff that's particularly relevant to them. >> Okay, alright. So how, I mean I think one of the other questions I would have for you is that you're based in Silicon Valley, you're based in Auckland. Is the tech industry similar? How would you describe the different tech industries in your respective countries? >> Look, it's been so interesting, because I do quite a lot of work in New Zealand and Australia, and not just in technology, but also in engineering, which is the other part of STEM, of course. And it's more flipped the other way because I understand the challenges in new Zealand and Australia, I've been having wonderful conversations on the floor here in the last couple of days, and saying, is it true that when you turn up or someone turns up to your offices that they immediately assume you're the receptionist? And they just go, oh my goodness, absolutely. You know, is it true that you have sometimes direct reports who don't like what you say and they'll literally say it's because you're a woman? And they'll go, yes. So I feel that this is a global epidemic. >> It's a challenge, >> It's a challenge, yes. >> They're facing it everywhere. So what is next for Twinovate? Where do you go from here? I mean you're here at Grace Hopper, which is obviously a receptive audience, a vast audience for the message, but what's next for your collaboration? >> Well, as Josie said, we were really quite surprised about how strongly it resonated here today, and we've got some great feedback. We're both got children, but we're both lucky enough to have fathers of those children that are very, very supportive, and so, hey, we've got this great opportunity to see more of each other. I'm coming back in March, we're coming back next year for Grace Hopper, so I'll be coming to the states twice a year and Josie's coming down to New Zealand and Australia at least once a year. And we're just having very limited partnerships with people who want to work with us and we'll look at some public stuff too. >> And maybe a book in the works? >> So I've already written a book. >> Okay. >> But I wrote it about, I was being unapologetic at the time, and this is what I'm really passionate about. So by the time I come back in March, my unapologetic book, which is literally about unapologetic careers and lifestyles will be in our hot little hands. And Josie's contributing to that with a particular Twinovate chapter that we've been working on. >> Excellent, well, Josie, Laurel, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. And Josie, you're a Cube alum I should have said, too. >> There you go, yes, exactly. >> Great to see you again, Rebecca. >> Well, best of luck to you both. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> We will have more from the Grace Hopper Conference just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here at theCUBE. We're at Node Summit 2017 in Downtown San Francisco. 800 people hanging out at the Mission Bay Conference Center talking about development and really monumental growth curve. One of the earlier presenters have one project last year. I think 15 this year, 22 in development and another 75 toy projects. The development curve is really steep. IBM's here, Microsoft, Google, all the big players so there is a lot of enterprise momentum as well and we're happy to have our next guest. Who's really started this show and one of the main sponsors of the show He's Charles Beeler. He's a general partner at Rally Ventures. Charles great to see you. >> Good to be back. Good to see you. >> Yeah, absolutely. Just kind of general impression. You've been doing this for a number of years I think when we talked earlier. Ryan Dawles interview from I don't even know what year it is I'd have to look. >> 2012, January 2012. >> 2012. It's still one of our most popular interviews of all the thousands we've done on the theCUBE, and now I kind of get it. >> Right place, right time but it was initially a lot. In 2011, we were talking about nodes. Seemed like a really interesting project. No one was really using it in a meaningful way. Bryan Cantrell from Joint. I know you all have talked before, walked me through the Hello World example on our board in my office, and we decided let's go for it. Let's see if we can get a bunch of enterprises to come and start talking about what they're doing. So January 2012, there were almost none who were actually doing it, but they were talking about why it made sense. And you fast forward to 2017, so Home Away was the company that actually had no apps. Now 15, 22 in development like you were mentioning and right now on stage you got Twitter talking about Twitter light. The breath and it's not just internet companies when you look at Capital One. You look at some of the other big banks and true enterprise companies who are using this. It's been fun to watch and for us. We do enterprise investing so it fits well but selfishly this community is just a fun group of people to be around. So as much as this helps for our rally and things. We've always been in awe of what the folks around the node community have meant to try to do, and it did start with Ryan and kind of went from there. It's fun to be back and see it again for the fifth annual installment. >> It's interesting some of the conversations on stage were also too about community development and community maturation and people doing bad behavior and they're technically strong. We've seen some of these kind of growing pains in some other open source communities. The one that jumps out is Open Stack as we've watched that one kind of grow and morph over time. So these are good. There's bad problems and good problems. These are good growing pain problems. >> And that's an interesting one because you read the latest press about the venture industry and the issues are there, and people talk more generally about the tech industry. And it is a problem. It's a challenge and it starts with encouraging a broad diverse group of people who would be interested in this business. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And getting into it and so the node community to me is always been and I think almost any other out source community could benefit at looking at not just how they've done it, but who the people are and what they've driven. For us, one of the things we've always tried to do is bring a diverse set of speakers to come and get engaged. And it's really hard to go and find enough people who have the time and willingness to come up on stage and it's so rewarding when you start to really expose the breath of who's out there engaged and doing great stuff. Last year, we had Stacy Kirk, who she runs a company down in L.A. Her entire team pretty much is based in Jamaica brought the whole team out. >> Jeff: Really? >> It was so much fun to have whole new group people. The community just didn't know, get to know it and be in awe of what they're building. I thought the electron conversation. They were talking about community, that was Jacob from GitHub. It's an early community though. They're trying to figure it out. On the Open Stack side, it's very corporate driven. It's harder to have those conversations. In the node community, it's still more community driven and as a result they're able to have more of the conversation around how do we build a very inclusive group of people who can frankly do a more effective job of changing development. >> Jeff: Right, well kudos to you. I mean you open up the conference in your opening remarks talking about the code of conduct and it's kind of like good news bad news. Like really we have to talk about what should basically be. It's common sense but you have to do it and that's part of the program. It was Woman Attack Wednesday today so we've got a boat load of cards going out today with a lot of the women and it's been proven time and time again. That the diversity of opinions tackling any problem is going to lead to a better solution and hopefully this is not new news to anybody either. >> No and we have a few scholarship folks from Women who code over here. We've done that with them for the last few years but there are so many organizations that anyone who actually wants to spend a little time figuring out how can I be apart of the, I don't know if I'd call it solution but help with a challenge that we have to face. It's Women who code. It's Girls who code. It's Black girls code and it's not just women. There's a broad diverse set of people we need to engage. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> We have a group here, Operation Code who's working with Veterans who would like to find a career, and are starting to become developers and we have three or four sponsored folks from Operation Code too. And again, it's just rewarding to watch people who are some of the key folks who helped really make node happen. Walking up to some stranger who's sort of staring around. Hasn't met anybody. Introduce himself say, "Hey, what are you interested in "and how can I help?" And it's one of the things that frankly brings us back to do this year after year. It's rewarding. >> Well it's kind of interesting piece of what node is. Again we keep hearing time and time again. It's an easy language. Use the same language for the front end or the back end. >> Yep. >> Use a bunch of pre-configured model. I think Monica from Intel, she said that a lot of the codes they see is 2% is your code and everything you're leveraging from other people. And we see in all these tech conferences that the way to have innovation is to label more people to contribute. That have the tools and the data and that's really kind of part of what this whole ethos is here. >> And making it. Just generally the ethos around making it easier to develop and deploy. And so when we first started, Google was nowhere to be found and Microsoft was actually already here. IBM wasn't here yet and now you look at those folks. The number of submissions we saw for talk proposals. The depth of engagement within those organizations. Obviously Google's got their go and a bunch of it but node is a key part of what they're doing. Node and I think for both IBM and also for Google is the most deployed language or the most deployed stack in terms of what they're seeing on their Cloud, Which is why they're here. And they're seeing just continued growth, so yeah it drives that view of how can we make software easier to work with, easier to put together, create and deploy and it's fun to watch. Erstwhile competitors sitting comparing notes and ideas and someone said to me. One of the Google folks, Miles Boran had said. Mostly I love coming to this because the hallway chatter here is just always so fascinating. So you go hear these great talks and you walk out and the speakers are there. You get to talk to them and really learn from them. >> I want to shift gears a little. I always great to get a venture capitalist on it. Everybody wants to hear your thoughts and you see a lot of stuff come across your desk. As you just look at the constant crashing of waves of innovation that we keep going through here and I know that's apart of why you live here and why I do too. And Cloud clearly is probably past the peak of the wave but we're just coming into IoT and internet of things and 5G which is going to be start to hit in the near future. As you look at it from an enterprise perspective. What's getting you excited? What are some of the things that maybe people aren't thinking about that are less obvious and really the adoption of enterprises of these cutting edge technologies. Of getting involved in open source is really phenomenal thing of environment for start ups. >> Yeah and what you're seeing as the companies, the original enterprises that were interested in nodes. You decided to start deploying. The next question is alright this worked, what else can we be doing? And this is where you're seeing the advent of first Cloud but now how people are thinking about deployment. There's a lot of conversation here this week about ServerList. >> Jeff: Right, right. We were talking about containers. Micro services and next thing you know people are saying oh okay what else can we be doing to push the boundaries around this? So from our perspective, what we think about when we think about when we think of enterprise and infrastructure and Dev Ops et cetera is it is an ever changing thing. So Cloud as we know it today is sort, it's done but it's not close to being finished when you think about how people are making car-wny apps and deploying them. How that keeps changing, questions they keep asking but also now to your point when you look at 5G. When you look at IoT, the deployment methodology. They're going to have to change. The development languages are going to change and that will once again result in further change across the entire infrastructure. How am I going to go to place so I would say that we have not stopped seeing innovative stuff in any of those categories. You asked about where do we see kind of future things that we like. Like NEVC, if I don't say AI and ML and what are the other ones I'm suppose to say? Virtual reality, augmented reality, drones obviously are huge. >> It's anti drones. Drone detection. >> We look at those as enabling technology. We're more interested from a rally perspective and applied use of those technologies so there's some folks from GrowBio here today. And I'm sure you know Grail, right they raise a billion dollars. The first question I asked the VP who is here. I said, did you cure cancer yet? 'Cause it's been like a year and a half. They haven't yet, sorry. But what's real interesting is when you talk to them about what are they doing. So first they're using node but the approach they're taking to try to make their software get smarter and smarter and smarter by the stuff they see how they're changing. It's just fundamentally different than things people were thinking about a few years ago. So for us, the applied piece is we want to see companies like a Grail come in and say, here's what we're doing. Here's why and here's how we're going to leverage all of these enabling technologies to go accomplish something that no one has ever been able to do before. >> Jeff: Right, right. And that's what gets us excited. The idea of artificial intelligence. It's cool, it's great. I love talking about it. Walk me through how you're going to go do something compelling with that. Block chain is an area that we're spending, have been but continue to spend a lot of time looking right now not so much from a currency perspective. Just very compelling technology and the breath of our capability there is incredible. We've met in the last week. I met four entrepreneurs. There are three of them who are here talking about just really novel ways to take advantage of a technology that is still just kind of early stages, from our perspective of getting to a point where people can really deploy within large enterprise. And then I'd say the final piece for us and it's not a new space. But kind of sitting over all of this is security. And as these things change constantly. The security needs are going to change right. The foot print in terms of what the attack surface looks like. It gets bigger and bigger. It gets more complex and the unfortunate reality of simplifying the development process is you also sometimes sort of move out the security thought process from a developer perspective. From a deployment perspective, you assume I've heard companies say well we don't need to worry about security because we keep our stuff on Amazon. As a security investor, I love hearing that. As a user of some of those solutions it's scares me to death and so we see this constant evolution there. And what's interesting you have, today I think we have five security companies who are sponsoring this conference. The first few years, no one even wanted to talk about security. And now you have five different companies who are here really talking about why it matters if you're building out apps and deploying in the Cloud. What you should be thinking about from a security perspective. >> Security is so interesting because to me, it's kind of like insurance. How much is enough? And ultimate you can just shut everything down and close it off but that's not the solution. So where's the happy medium and the other thing that we hear over and over is it's got to be baked in all the layers of the cake. It can't just be the castle and moat methodology anymore. >> Charles: Absolutely. >> How much do you have? Where do you put it in? But where do you stop? 'cause ultimately it's like a insurance. You can just keep buying more and more. >> And recognize the irony of sitting here in San Francisco while Black Hat's taking place. We should both be out there talking about it too. (laughing) >> Well no 'cause you can't go there with your phone, your laptop. No, you're just suppose to bring your car anymore. >> This is the first year in four years that my son won't be at DEF CON. He just turned seven so he set the record at four, five and six as the youngest DEF CON attendee. A little bitter we're not going this year and shout out because he was first place in the kid's capture the flag last year. >> Jeff: Oh very good. >> Until he decided to leave and go play video games. So the way we think about the question you just asked on security, and this is actually, I give a lot of credit to Art Covella. He's one of our venture partners. He was the CEO at our safe for a number of years. Ran it post DMC acquisition as well is it's not so much of a okay, I've got this issue. It could be pay it ransom or whatever it is. People come in and say we solve that. You might solve the problem today but you don't solve the problem for the future typically. The question is what is it that you do in my environment that covers a few things. One, how does it reduce the time and energy my team needs to spend on solving these issues so that I can use them? Because the people problem in security is huge. >> Right. >> And if you can reduce the amount of time people are doing automated. What could be automated task, manual task and instead get them focused on hired or bit sub, you get to cover more. So how does it reduce the stress level for my team? What do I get to take out? I don't have unlimited budget. That could be buying point solutions. What is it that you will allow me to replace so that the net cost to me to add your solution is actually neutral or negative, so that I can simplify my environment. Again going back to making these work for the people, and then what is it that you do beyond claiming that you're going to solve a problem I have today. Walk me through how this fits into the future. They're not a lot of the thousands of-- >> Jeff: Those are not easy questions. >> They're not easy questions and so when you ask that and apply that to every company who's at Black Hat today. Every company at RSA, there's not very many of that companies who can really answer that in a concise way. And you talk to seesos, those are the questions they're starting to ask. Great, I love what you're doing. It's not a question of whether I have you in my budget this year or next. What do I get to do in my environment differently that makes my life easier or my organization's life easier, and ultimately nets it out at a lower cost? It's a theme we invest in. About 25% of our investments have been in the securities space and I feel like so far every one of those deals fits in some way in that category. We'll see how they play out but so far so good. >> Well very good so before we let you go. Just a shout out, I think we've talked before. You sold out sponsorship so people that want to get involved in node 2018. They better step up pretty soon. >> 2018 will happen. It's the earliest we've ever confirmed and announced next year's conference. It usually takes me five months before >> Jeff: To recover. >> I'm willing to think about it again. It will happen. It will probably happen within the same one week timeframe, two week timeframe. I actually, someone put a ticket tier up for next year or if you buy tickets during the conference the next two days. You can buy a ticket $395 for today. They're a $1000 bucks. It's a good deal if people want to go but the nice thing is we've never had a team that out reaches the sponsors. It's always been inbound interest. People who want to be involved and it's made the entire thing just a lot of fun to be apart of. We'll do it next year and it will be really fascinating to see how much additional growth we see between now and then. Because based on some of the enterprises we're seeing here. I mean true Fortune 500, nothing to do with technology from a revenue perspective. They just used it internally. You're seeing some really cool development taking place and we're going to get some of that on stage next year. >> Good, well congrats on a great event. >> Thanks. And thanks for being here. It's always fun to have you guys. >> He's Charles Beeler. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE, Node Summit 2017. Thanks for watching. (uptempo techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Palo Alto. It's theCUBE, covering Women Transforming Technology 2017. Brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Woman Transforming Technology conference held at VMware here in beautiful Palo Alto, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I am joined by Nicola Acutt, she is the vice president of sustainability strategy here at VMware. Nicola, thanks so much for joining us. >> My pleasure, Rebecca, it's great to be with you. >> So I want to start out by talking to you about how VMware is thinking differently about sustainability and devising its strategy. >> Yeah, great. Well, you know, sustainability is something that's not really new at VMware. We've been doing sustainability for many many years, but what is new is we've rethought our strategy and we've rethought how we frame and think about it. And that starts with the business and what we actually do in the world. This is what's really exciting to me, you know. We've done a lot of very responsible things, from the design of the campus here in Palo Alto, which you've seen, our LEED certified buildings and the work that we do in philanthropy and community. And now what we're doing is pulling it all together under this concept of collective impact, and for us, that's about the sum of the parts, and really about ultimately how we leave a legacy and impact as a business, but starting with what we do. >> And I think that that's... What you're saying is so important in this sense of, for corporate social responsibility, that has to start with a business case of why you're doing this, but then there's also this legacy part to it too. So talk a little bit about what you're thinking there. >> Yeah, well, glad you asked, it's a large part of why we have, as we rethought sustainability, we put this role in our office of the CTO. And for that exact reason, because it's about, you know, what is the legacy we create? Not just in our industry, but for the world. So we talk about, you know, my role, in the office of the CTO, it's very much about helping to inspire engineering for impact, so that we, you know, our mission is about creating not just the most innovative software in the world, but for the world. So we think about the impact, the legacy impact VMware has had in the data center, which is one thing I can talk about, you know, the environmental impact of that. But then also looking forward at how we enable access to technology, the platforms really to change the world, whether it's providing solutions for farmers in rural parts of India of Africa or down the street. It's this view of how does VMware's technology help create a better place, a better world. >> Well, just the fact that you were in the office of the CTO is such a dramatic change from so many companies. I mean, when you think about the bad rap that sustainability gets, corporate green washing and things like that, but to put it at the core of VMware's business, that is a very dramatic difference. What was the impetus for that? >> That's a great question. You know, I think before we were talking about, I've been at VMware for several years, and been on a journey myself and what we do, and started working in the foundation. And I've moved into this role in the CTO office. And part of that was about how we came to this perspective of what is the impact that we want to create, and how do we want to go beyond sustainability to collective impact, and that was about this idea of net positive. How do we create a legacy where the sum of the parts are greater than the pieces. And I'll tell you a little story, you know, when I first joined VMware, I remember people describing the impact from an efficiency point of view in the data center, and I was always fascinated by that question. And finally last year we did a piece of work together with IDC to actually quantify that impact, and so for the first time, we were able to get the data and look at the legacy impact that we've had, and the numbers are astounding. When you look at what VMware and our customers have done over the last 13 years, it's the equivalent of avoiding 340 million metric tons of CO2 going into the atmosphere. That's a pretty astounding number, right? So what does that mean? It's the equivalent, we worked it out, it's the equivalent of powering 43 million homes, which is about 43% of US households for a year. >> Rebecca: A year? >> For a year. Isn't that incredible? >> Yes. >> And it was that, so that piece of work was really what helped shift this perspective and our collective realization that, yes, we can do all these great things, from social responsibility, environmental responsibility, in terms of how we run our business and how we treat our people in communities, but probably the most important and powerful impact that we can have is how we use our technology, and the impact that we have on the lives that we change as a result through our technology. >> You are in a panel here at the Women Transforming Technology conference that's all about design thinking. And it's about design thinking in terms of leadership, and your approach to management. But also, your approach to your job and devising, in your case, a sustainability strategy. Talk about design thinking and how it's changed the way you go about things. >> Right, I'm personally a big fan of design thinking, and it's one of those methodologies or experiences, where when you experience it, you really see the power of it. And when we were working in the foundation, the beginning of this work, we pulled in some design thinking experts to help us just frame a problem that we were trying to solve. And that experience really resonated with me, and it stuck with me, and these ideas of how you go from brainstorm big picture thinking to actually impact and outcome. >> So just break it down for our viewers, design thinking, elevator pitch, what is it? >> Sure. So it starts with sort of four key principles. It's about empathy, starting with empathy. Thinking about the problem that you're trying to solve. Thirdly, implementing, so rapid prototyping and then testing again, so lots of testing, before you come to the impact and the outcome. And it's this iterative process, kind of building something, testing it, going back and building it again. But I think the biggest takeaway for me and what I learned about it that I applied to leadership is this idea of empathy. And I think we often think of empathy as feeling sorry for, but it's not, it's really to me, empathy is radical questioning and radically asking yourself, challenging your assumptions and trying to see what others see, and I think it's that, that shift of mindset that's so powerful, and for me, applying that to my work shows up all the time, whether I'm in a meeting, whether I am running a team, whether we were doing the strategy for sustainability, it's constantly asking the questions, asking why. I think that for me is the thing that I really appreciate about design thinking and I try to bring it to everything that I do. >> From a product standpoint, the empathy is for the end user, for the customer, the person who is going to be using the product. But when it comes to creating a sustainability strategy, who are you empathizing with? >> Yeah, that's a... So, you know, again, that this word empathy, I think, is-- >> Rebecca: It trips people up! >> Yeah, because we think it means feeling sorry for, right? But no, it's about seeing the other. Because what we were doing is taking this much wider angle view on sustainability, in other words, it's not about the real estate organization or about turning off the lights in our operations, it's about the whole business. So for me, empathy is about trying to step into other people's shoes, and working with stakeholders across the business, so not just in our real estate operations, but in the business, in HR, in legal, across all of the functions. And asking questions and listening to stakeholders, and really trying to understand their point of view on the business so that I can connect what they care about to, ultimately, the sustainability strategy. >> Talk about design thinking in an approach to leadership. Particularly in light of why we're here, Women Transforming Technology. How does it work when you're on a team? >> Yeah. >> You know, I think it starts with that individual, it starts with empathy always, and the why, and really trying to understand others, the people that you're working with. When I say empathy, I think about trying to see others. And part of seeing others is knowing what their strengths are and knowing what they're uniquely placed to do. So in working with the team, I think that is a great leadership skill, is to really know and understand your team, to build a team that functions really well together. That skill, I think, is irreplaceable in leadership. >> And what about for the person who's being led? So the person who's not quite the manager yet, maybe earlier in her career. How can she use design thinking and empathize both with her colleagues and her customers, but also perhaps her manager too, in terms of not only moving the product forward, but also moving her career forward? >> Yeah, you know, the speaker in the panel we just listened to, Lynn Christensen, talked about the importance of understanding the needs of others and how powerful that can be when you're trying to get work done and have an influence. So she gave an example which I loved about, often where we're trying to prove ourselves, right, especially as young women in the workforce. And there is an important element of confidence and all of those good things that we're talking about here, but I think the other element of what she was getting at is understanding when you're giving a presentation or you're talking about a product or an idea, to think about who you're talking to. And to make sure that, when you think about your message and your presentation, to be designing your talk, to use design thinking, designing your talk with that person in mind, and that can be a really powerful way to have yourself seen as a potential or as a future leader. >> In terms of how you are thinking about VMware sustainability strategy and the way other companies are, what, and I don't want this to turn into a school where other companies should follow VMware's lead, but at the same time, what would your advice be to other companies that are seeing what you're doing and, for example, putting sustainability in the office of the CTO? What other differences in terms of how you approach sustainability could other companies mimic, for the good of all of us? >> For the good of all, absolutely. I think that's a really important question because, you know, I think there's a role for corporate social responsibility and philanthropy and sustainability, and I think every company is unique, depending on their market and their industry, but ultimately, when we think about trying to create a positive impact on the world, and frankly, to address some of the world's most pressing challenges, it really does require the combination of what I talk about, this collective impact, and the skills and competencies a business can bring to that really are in what they offer to the world, and often that isn't necessarily just philanthropy, it could be a combination of those things. My perspective on this is really thinking about where your unique competencies as a company and a business overlap with the world's great needs? And finding that sweet spot is where I believe companies can have the biggest impact. >> One of the other elements of sustainability strategy is making sure that companies are committed to diversity and inclusion, and is there a way that you're working on that here at VMware as part of the sustainability strategy, or is that more of an HR function? I mean, how does it all work together? >> Yeah, you know, the work that we're doing at VMware on diversity and inclusion is very much part of this ethos of collective impact, because it's really pulling and connecting these elements of the work that we're doing inside the company, in different departments, into this legacy of what I call net positive, the net positive impact. So diversity and inclusion is part of that in a really important way, and this is what this conference today is really all about, bringing a community of women together who are passionate and committed to making an impact in technology, and leaving that positive legacy. And so for me personally, today's really quite poignant, actually. I'm a mom, and I'm also the daughter of a farmer, and I'm going to get choked up. (laughter) And a school teacher. >> And you're going to meet Gloria Steinem later today, Nicola. I don't know if I can pile on, but-- >> Well, this is what's so poignant for me, is I grew up in the shadow of apartheid, and I think, and a very patriarchal society by my mom, was very influenced by Gloria Steinem. And her fierceness about education for girls was really ultimately, I think, had an impact on me not only finishing high school, but going on to get a four year degree and a PhD, and ultimately, you know, South African woman finding herself in Silicon Valley today. >> Right. >> Is a testament to Gloria and to my mom, and all the women who have forged this path for us. And so today is an opportunity, I think, in some ways to say thank you, me personally to say thank you to Gloria and those women who have forged the path, but I think today's also important in the recognition that there is this community that is growing, a community of women who are having an impact in technology. But I think the other element is that we realize that our work is not done. And that's what today is all about, is this community of women who are carrying the torch because our work isn't done. >> So yes, I mean, there is that balance. There's this gratitude, on one hand, of our forebears and what they've sacrificed for us to be where we are. But then at the other hand, particularly as you said, you grew up in the shadow of apartheid, and now you have Donald Trump as president, and we're hearing a lot of... (laughs) Of scary notions coming from the White House right now. So there is also this other side to it, which is feeling anger and a real mobilization to rise up. >> Yeah, Kara was really eloquent about that this morning, and I think it's complex, right? This is multiple facets and multiple forces at play. But at the end of the day, I think it is really really important to be clear about our values, and to be clear about the impact that we want to leave in the world, and finding a community of people around which to focus our energies. >> Perfect words to end on. Nicola Acutt, thank you so much for joining us. >> My pleasure! >> I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, we'll return with theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology here at VMware. (upbeat music) (ominous music)