Hello, I'm Sally Stockwell, Director of Conservation at Maine Audubon. Did you know that lead from lost or discarded fishing gear is a leading cause of death for adult loons? That's why lead tackle less than two and a half inches long or weighing less than one ounce is not allowed in Maine. Please help Maine's fish and loon populations thrive by using lead-free tackle. Visit fishleadfree.org for more information and to learn where you can turn in your old lead tackle. Thanks for doing your part to keep Maine's wildlife healthy.


When Oracle acquired Sun in 2009, it paid $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. Now I argued at the time that Oracle got one of the best deals in the history of enterprise tech. And I got a lot of grief for saying that because Sun had a declining business that was losing money and its revenue was under serious pressure as it tried to hang on for dear life. But Safra Katz understood that Oracle could pair Sun's lower profit and lagging businesses like its low index 86 product lines. And even if Sun's revenue was cut in half, because Oracle has such a high revenue multiple as a software company, it could almost instantly generate $25 to $30 billion in shareholder value on paper. In addition, it was a catalyst for Oracle to initiate its highly differentiated engineering systems business and was actually the precursor to Oracle's cloud. Oracle saw that it could capture high margin dollars that used to go to partners like HP, its original Exadata partner and get paid for the full stack across infrastructure, middleware, database and application software when it eventually got really serious about cloud. Now there was also a major technology angle to this story. Remember Sun's tagline, the network is the computer, they should have just called it cloud. Through the Sun acquisition, Oracle also got a couple of key technologies, Java, the number one programming language in the world and MySQL, a key ingredient of the LAMP stack. That's Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, Pearl or Python on which the internet is basically built and is used by many cloud services like Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Flickr, Amazon Aurora and many other examples, including by the way MariaDB, which is a fork of MySQL created by MySQL's creator basically in protest to Oracle's acquisition. The drama is Oscar worthy. It gets even better. In 2020, Oracle began introducing a new version of MySQL called MySQL Heatwave. And since late 2020 has been, it's been sort of in sort of a super cycle rolling out three new releases in less than a year and a half in an attempt to expand its TAM and compete in new markets. Now we covered the release of MySQL Autopilot which uses machine learning to automate management functions. And we also covered the bench marketing that Oracle produced against Snowflake, AWS, Azure and Google and Oracle's at it again with Heatwave adding machine learning into its database capabilities along with previously available integrations OLAP and OLTP. This of course is in line with Oracle's converged database philosophy which as we've reported is different from other database, cloud database providers, most notably Amazon which takes the right tool for the right job approach and chooses database specialization over a one size fits all strategy. Now we've asked Oracle to come on theCUBE and explain these moves. And I'm pleased to welcome back Nipan Agarwal who's the Senior Vice President for MySQL Database and Heatwave at Oracle and today in this video exclusive we'll discuss machine learning, other new capabilities around elasticity and compression and then any benchmark data that Nipan wants to share. Nipan's been a leading advocate of the Heatwave program. He's led engineering and that team for over 10 years and he has over 185 patents in database technologies. Welcome back to the show Nipan, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Thank you Dave, very happy to be back. Yeah, now for those who may not have kept up with the news maybe to kick things off you could give us an overview of what MySQL Heatwave actually is so that we're all on the same page. Sure Dave, MySQL Heatwave is a fully managed MySQL database service from Oracle and it has a built-in query accelerator called Heatwave and that's the part which is unique. So with MySQL Heatwave customers of MySQL get a single database which they can use for transaction processing for analytics and for mixed workloads because traditionally MySQL has been designed and optimized for transaction processing. So in the past when customers had to run analytics with the MySQL based service they would need to move the data out of MySQL into some other database for running analytics. So they would end up with two different databases and it would take some time to move the data out of MySQL into this other system. With MySQL Heatwave we have solved this problem and customers now have a single MySQL database for all their applications and they can get a good performance of analytics without any changes to their MySQL application. Now it's no secret that a lot of times queries are not most efficiently written and critics of MySQL Heatwave will claim that this product is very memory and cluster intensive it has a heavy footprint that adds to cost. How do you answer that Nippon? Right, so for offering any service any database service in the cloud there are two dimensions, performance and cost. And we have been very cognizant of both of them. So it is indeed the case that Heatwave is an in-memory query accelerator which is why we get very good performance but it is also the case that we have optimized Heatwave for commodity cloud services. So for instance we use the least expensive compute we use the least expensive storage. So what I would suggest is for the customers who kind of would like to know what is the price performance advantage of Heatwave compared to any database we have benchmark against Redshift, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse. Heatwave is significantly faster and significantly lower price on a multitude of workloads. So not only is it in-memory database and optimized for that but we have also optimized it for commodity cloud services which makes it much lower price than the competition. Well, at the end of the day it's customers that sort of decide what the truth is. So to date what's been the customer reaction? Are they moving from other clouds from on-prem environments? Both why, what are you seeing? Right, so we are definitely seeing a whole bunch of migrations of customers who are running MySQL on-premise to the cloud to MySQL Heatwave. That's definitely happening. What is also very interesting is we are seeing that a very large percentage of customers more than half the customers who are coming to MySQL Heatwave are migrating from other clouds. We have a lot of migrations coming from AWS Aurora, migrations from Redshift, migrations from RDS MySQL, Teredata, SAP HANA. So we are seeing migrations from a whole bunch of other databases and other cloud services to MySQL Heatwave. And the main reason we are told why customers are migrating from other databases to MySQL Heatwave are lower cost, better performance and no change to the application because many of these services like AWS Aurora are API compatible with MySQL. So when customers try MySQL Heatwave not only do they get better performance at a lower cost but they find that they can migrate the application without any changes. And that's a big incentive for them. Great, thank you Nipini. So can you give us some names? Are there some real world examples of these customers that have migrated to MySQL Heatwave that you can share? Oh absolutely, I'll give you a few names. Astuta.com, this is an educational SaaS provider raised out of Brazil. They were using Google BigQuery and when they migrated to MySQL Heatwave they found a 300X, 300 times improvement in performance and it lowered their cost by 85 times. Another example is New Era. They offer cybersecurity solutions and they were running their application on an on-premise version of MySQL. When they migrated to MySQL Heatwave their application improved in performance by 300 times and their cost reduced by 80%. So by going from on-premise to MySQL Heatwave they reduced the cost by 80% improved performance by 300 times. VR Glass, another customer base out of Brazil they were running on AWS EC2. And when they migrated with the novres they found that there was a significant improvement like an over 5X improvement in database performance and they were able to accommodate a very large virtual event which had more than a million visitors. Another example, Genius Sonority. They are a game designer and operator in Japan and when they moved to MySQL Heatwave they found a 90X improvement in performance and many, many more. Like a lot of migrations again from like, you know, Aurora they shipped many of the databases as well and consistently what we hear is getting much better performance at a much lower cost without any change to the application. Great, thank you. You know, when I ask that question a lot of times I get, well, I can't name the customer name but I got to give Oracle credit.  So you're not the only one but it's somewhat rare in this industry. So okay, so you got some good feedback from those customers that did migrate to MySQL Heatwave. What else did they tell you that they wanted? Did they kind of share a wish list and some of the white space that you guys should be working on? What did they tell you? Right. So as customers are moving more data into MySQL Heatwave as they're consolidating more data into MySQL Heatwave customers want to run other kinds of processing with this data. A very popular one is machine learning. So we have had multiple customers who told us that they wanted to run machine learning with data which is stored in MySQL Heatwave. And for that, they have to extract the data out of MySQL Heatwave. So that was the first feedback we got. Second thing is MySQL Heatwave is a highly scalable system. What that means is that as you add more nodes to a Heatwave cluster, the performance of the system improves almost linearly. But currently customers need to perform some manual steps to add nodes to a cluster or to reduce the cluster size. So that was other feedback we got that people wanted this thing to be automated. Third thing is that we have shown in the previous results that Heatwave is significantly faster and significantly lower price compared to competitive services. So we got feedback from customers that can be trade off some performance to get even lower cost. And that's what we have looked at. And then finally, we have some results on various data sizes with TPC ads. Customers wanted to see if we can offer some more data points as to how does Heatwave perform on other kinds of workloads? And that's what we've been working on for the last several months. Okay, again, we're going to get into some of that. But so how did you go about addressing these requirements? So the first thing is we are announcing support for in database machine learning, meaning that customers who have their data inside my SQL Heatwave can now run training, inference, and prediction all inside the database without the data or the model ever having to leave the database. So that's how we address the first one. Second thing is we are offering support for real-time elasticity, meaning that customers can scale up or scale down to any number of nodes This requires no manual intervention on part of the user. And for the entire duration of the resize operation, the system is fully available. The third in terms of the costs, we have double the amount of data that can be processed per node. So if you look at a Heatwave cluster, the size of the cluster determines the cost. So by doubling the amount of data that can be processed per node, we have effectively reduced the cluster size which is required for running a given workload to have, which means it reduces the cost of the customer by half. And finally, we have also run the TPCDS workload on Heatwave and compared it with other vendors. So now customers can have another data point in terms of the performance and the cost comparison of Heatwave with other services. All right, and I promise I'm going to ask about the benchmarks, but I want to come back and drill into these a bit. How is Heatwave ML different from competitive offerings? Take, for instance, Redshift ML, for example. Sure. Okay, so this is a good comparison. Let's start with, like, say, Redshift ML. There are some systems like Snowflake which don't even offer any processing of machine learning inside the database and they expect customers to write a whole bunch of code and say Python or Java to the machine learning. Redshift ML does have integration with SQL. That's a good start. However, when customers of Redshift need to run machine learning and they invoke Redshift ML, it makes a call to another service, SageMaker, right? So the data needs to be exported to a different service. The model is generated and the model is also outside Redshift. With Heatwave ML, the data resides always inside the MySQL database service. We are able to generate models. We're able to train the models, run inference, run explanations all inside the MySQL Heatwave service. So the data or the model never have to leave the database, which means that both the data and the models can now be secured by the same access control mechanisms as the rest of the data. So that's the first part, that there is no need for any ETL. The second aspect is the automation that for training, training is a very important part of machine learning, right? And it impacts the quality of the predictions and such. So traditionally, customers would employ data scientists to influence the training process so that it's done right. And even in the case of Redshift ML, the users are expected to provide a lot of parameters to the training process. So the second thing which we have worked on with Heatwave ML is that it is fully automated. There is absolutely no user intervention required for training. Third is in terms of performance. So one of the things we are very, very sensitive to is performance because performance determines the eventual cost to the customer. So again, in some benchmarks which we have published, and these are all available on GitHub, we are showing how Heatwave ML is 25 times faster than Redshift ML. And here's a kicker at 1% of the cost. So for benefits, the data also remains secure inside the database service. It's fully automated, much faster, much lower cost in the competition. All right, thank you, Nipin. Now, so there's a lot of talk these days about explainability and AI, you know, the system can very accurately tell you that it's a cat, you know, or for you Silicon Valley fans, it's a hot dog or not a hot dog, but they can't tell you how the system got there. So what is explainability and why should people care about it? Right, so when we were talking to customers about what they would like from a machine learning based solution, one of the feedbacks we got is that enterprises are a little slow or averse to uptaking machine learning because it seems to be, you know, like magic, right? And enterprises have the obligation to be able to explain or to provide an answer to their customers as to why did the database make a certain choice? With a rule-based solution, it's simple, it's a rule-based thing and you know what the logic was. So the reason explanations are important is because customers want to know that why did the system make a certain prediction? One of the important characteristics of HeatWave ML is that any model which is generated by HeatWave ML can be explained and we can do both global explanations or model explanations, as well as we can also do local explanations. So when the system makes a specific prediction using HeatWave ML, the user can find out why did the system make such a prediction? So for instance, if someone is being denied a loan, the user can figure out what were the attributes, what were the features which led to that decision. So this ensures like, you know, fairness and many of the times there is also like a need for regulatory compliance where users have a right to know. So we feel that explanations are very important for enterprise workload and that's why every model which is generated by HeatWave ML can be explained. Now I got to give Snowflake some props, you know, this whole idea of separating compute from storage, but also bringing the database to the cloud and driving elasticity. So that's been a key enabler and it's solved a lot of problems, particularly the snakes walling the basketball problem as I often say, but what about elasticity and elasticity in real time? How is your version? And there's a lot of companies chasing this. How is your approach to an elastic cloud database service different from what others are promoting these days? Right. So a couple of characteristics. One is that we have now fully automated the process of elasticity, meaning that if a user wants to scale up or scale down, the only thing they need to specify is the eventual size of the cluster in the system completely takes care of it transparently. But then there are a few characteristics which are very unique. So for instance, we can scale up or scale down to any number of nodes. Whereas in the case of Snowflake, the number of nodes, someone can scale up or scale down to other powers of two. So if a user needs 70 CPUs, well, their choice is either 64 or 128. So by providing this flexibility with HeatWave MySQL HeatWave, customers get a custom fit. So they can get a cluster of, which is optimized for their specific work. So that's the first flexibility of scaling up or down to any number of nodes. The second thing is that after the operation is completed, the system is fully balanced, meaning the data across the various nodes is fully balanced. That is not the case with many solutions. So for instance, in the case of Redshift, after the resize operation is done, the user is expected to manually balance the data, which can be very cumbersome. In the third aspect is that while the resize operation is going on, the HeatWave cluster is completely available for queries, for DMOs, for loading more data. That is again, not the case with Redshift. Redshift suppose the operation takes 10 to 15 minutes. During that, a window of time, the system is not available for rights. And for a big part of that chunk of time, the system is not even available for queries, which is very limiting. So the advantages we have are fully flexible. The system is in a balanced state and the system is completely available for the entire duration of the operation. Yeah, I guess you got that hyper granularity, which sometimes I say, well, t-shirt sizes are good enough, but I'm not thinking myself. I got some t-shirts fit me better than others. So, okay, you noted, I saw in the announcement that you have this lower price point for customers. How did you actually achieve this? Can you give us some details around that, please? Sure. So there are two things for announcing the service. It's lower the cost for the customers. The first thing is that we have doubled the amount of data that can be processed by the HeatWave node. So if you have doubled the amount of data, which can be processed by a node, the cluster size, which is required by customers reduces to half. And that's why the cost drops to half. The way we have managed to do this is by two things. One is support for bloom filters, which reduces the amount of intermediate memory. And second is we compress the base data. So these are the two techniques we have used to process more data per node. The second way by which we are lowering the cost for the customers is by supporting pause and resume of HeatWave. And many times, you find customers of like HeatWave and other electric services that they want to run some electric queries or some electric workloads for some duration of time, but then they don't need the cluster for a few hours. Now with the support for pause and resume, customers can pause the cluster and the HeatWave cluster instantaneously stops. And when they resume, not only do we fetch the data at a very like, you know, a quick pace from the object store, but we also preserve all the statistics which are used by autopilot. So both the data and the metadata are faced extremely fast from the object store. So with these two capabilities, we feel that it will drive down the cost to our customers even more. Got it. Thank you. Okay, I promised I was going to get to the benchmarks. Let's have it. How do you compare with others, specifically cloud databases? I mean, and how do we know these benchmarks are real? My friends at EMC, they were back in the day, they were brilliant at doing benchmarks. They would produce these beautiful PowerPoint charts, but it was kind of opaque, but what do you say to that? Right, so there are multiple things I would say. The first thing is that this time we have published two benchmarks. One is for machine learning and other is for SQL analytics. All the benchmark, including the scripts which we have used are available on GitHub. So we have full transparency and we invite and encourage customers or other service providers to download the scripts, to download the benchmarks and see if they get any different results. So whatever we are seeing, we have published it for other people to try and validate. That's the first part. Now for machine learning, there hasn't been a precedence for enterprise benchmarks. So we took about 18 open data sets and we have published benchmarks for those, right? So both for classification as well as for regression, we have run the training times and that's where we find that heat wave ML is 25 times faster than that shift ML at one person at a cost. So fully transparent available. For SQL analytics in the past, we have shown comparisons with TPCH. So we would show TPCH across various databases across various data sizes. This time we decided to use TPCDS. The advantage of TPCDS over TPCH is that it has more number of queries. The queries are more complex. The schema is more complex and there is a lot more data skew. So it represents a different class of workloads and which is very interesting. So these are queries derived from the TPCDS benchmark. So the numbers we have published this time are for 10 terabyte TPCDS and we are comparing with all the four major services, Redshift, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse. And in all the cases, heat wave is significantly faster and significantly lower price. Now, one of the things I want to point out is that when you're doing the cost comparison with other vendors, we are being overly feared. For instance, the cost of heat wave includes the cost of both the MySQL node as well as the heat wave node. And with this setup, customers can run transaction processing analytics as well as machine learning. So the price captures all of it. Whereas with the other vendors, the comparison is only for that analytic queries. So if customers wanted to run old data, you would need to add the cost of that database. Or if customers wanted to run machine learning, you would need to add the cost of that service. Furthermore, with the case of heat wave, we are coding pay as you go price. Whereas for other vendors like Redshift and like we're applicable, we are coding one year fully paid upfront cost. So it's like very fair comparison. So in terms of the numbers, so price performance for TPCDS, we are about 4.8 times better price performance compared to Redshift. We are 14.4 times better price performance compared to Snowflake, 13 times better than Google BigQuery and 15 times better than Synapse. So across the boat, we are significantly faster in significantly lower price. And as I said, all of these scripts are available in GitHub for people to try for themselves. Okay, all right, I get it. So I think what you're saying is you could have said, this is what it's gonna cost for you to do both analytics and transaction processing on a competitive platform versus what it takes to do that on Oracle MySQL heat wave.  So, okay. So you got this one database service in your cloud that supports transactions in analytics and machine learning. How much do you estimate your saving companies with this integrated approach versus the alternative of kind of what I called up front, the right tool for the right job and admittedly having to ETL tools. How can you quantify that? So, okay. The numbers I quoted, right? At the end of the day in a cloud service, price performance is the metric which gives a sense as to how much the customers are going to save. So for instance, for like a TPCDS workload, if we are 14 times better price performance than Snowflake, it means that our cost is going to be one 14th for what customers would pay for Snowflake. Now in addition, other costs in terms of migrating the data, having to manage two different databases, having to pay for another service for like, you know, machine learning, that's all extra. And that depends upon what tools customers are using or what other services they're using for transaction processing or for machine learning. But these numbers themselves, right? Like they're very, very compelling. If you are one fifth the cost of Redshift, right? Or one 14th of Snowflake, these numbers themselves very, very compelling. And that's the reason we are seeing so many of these migrations from these databases to MySQL Heatwave. Okay, great. Thank you. Last question in the Q3 earnings call for fiscal 22. Larry Ellison said that MySQL Heatwave is coming soon on AWS. And that caught a lot of people's attention. That's not like Oracle. I mean, people might say, maybe that's an indication that you're not having success moving customers to OCI. So you got to go to other clouds, which by the way I applaud, but any comments on that? Yeah, this is very much like Oracle. So if you look at one of the big reasons for success of the Oracle database and why Oracle database is the most popular database is because Oracle database runs on all the platform. And that has been the case from day one. So very akin to that, the idea is that there's a lot of value in MySQL Heatwave and we want to make sure that we can offer the same value to the customers of MySQL running on any cloud, whether it's OCI, whether it's the AWS or any of the cloud. So this shows how confident we are in our offering and we believe that in other clouds as well, customers will find significant advantage by having a single database, which is much faster and much lower price than what alternatives they currently have. So this shows how confident we are about our products and services. Well, that's Grammy. Obviously for you, you're in MySQL group. You love that, right? The more places you can run, the better it is for you, of course, and your customers. Okay, Nipin, we've got to leave it there. As always, it's great to have you on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on and sharing the new innovations. Congratulations on all the progress you're making here. You're doing a great job. Thank you, Dave, and thank you for the opportunity. All right, and thank you for watching this CUBE Conversation with Dave Vellante. For theCUBE, you're leader in enterprise tech coverage. We'll see you next time.


So here's the AMD 64-bit part 96 boards enterprise edition and it's coming soon so who you hi I'm Michael delwiler from AMD my server division a business development manager. Here's the 96 boards Specification from Lenaro codename Husky board Coming soon for a low-cost development option for 64-bit arm computing This is a enterprise is a PCI express right here. There's a whole bunch of Sata and lots of different stuff going on there and Yep, we got USB Ethernet port on the side Cool, so this is awesome, and let's let's look around what you would do other stuff you showing here So here we have a system a development system that's based on the AMD opt-ron a11 series platform It is meant for enterprise class development evaluation software development It's actually currently shipping today from soft iron, so you can go on the website place an order And get that get that system today from development purposes, so this is special right this is the first People can just go and buy anybody can go and buy this is yeah This is the first product that's been available from a third party outside of AMD We've been shipping development platforms to certain customers for the past year But this is more of a more of a general available Development platform from our And it's a it's a server it is a server. Yeah, it's a one-you half-depth You've got you know a little bit higher capability than the 96 boards. It's got eight cores Processor, it's got some process. Yeah, it's got standard DDR3 memory It's got a lot more side of ports So this is more enterprise class for heavy evaluation heavy development So here the arm take on you doing lots of stuff with the arm part arm so sees you yeah We're showing off what we're doing on the server and the networking side as well We have an NFVs demo on the networking side as well. All right, so let's check out the NFV So over here we can hi, so who are you? Ah, my name is a song Kim I'm a system architect at AMD and then I'm specifically in a embedded networking business unit So you're showing a networking. Yeah, this is actually a network function virtualization application demo What we are demonstrating here is an actual network application running on commodity platform like the high volume servers like this. This is the AMD the Fiora 5 Oh Can we open? Yeah, this is the same as that for So this is the 878 4 of them and then I come with the pending interface and then it also has a security processor and then a 5 Security related application that can be run on that the specific combination of the a5 and then the ccp like a secure boot So the octa core a 55 a 57 64-bit is great for networking. Sure. So if you can run the hypervisor as well as open virtual switch and then open stack controller as well as Agent on it with the number of virtual machine with the application together That's the the target of this specific demo file Are you how much more work is needed before this is can be massive deployment? Oh, no, this one is actually close to our production as of now as you can see on the this chart This is a cosmos DPI application engine is a commercial software that All right, that that that means the network systems will use less power Sure and that agility is the key Yes, you can have service deployed in a short period of time with a single click of a button So you can launch different services Combination of different applications in a single click of a button. That's the old goal the target of the NFE Virtual application. This is a kind of like an app store for networking or something exactly But the benefit is you can launch different services You can meet the agility and then you can come up with the new services in a short period of time So that's the benefit of the NFE and then that's what is demonstrating our AMB on platform


One of the issues that I just want to maybe raise now for the three of you to consider when we come back is you've talked a lot about establishing a framework, a sort of civic vision of what the cities that you've talked about might be like. You haven't talked very much because of time, I'm sure, about how the main actors who actually act in the city, private developers, relate to that. And I think that's an important issue to be discussed because it's that negotiation, that mediation which can either go very right, or as we've often seen, very wrong, just thinking again at Alejandro Zairopolo's previous images in the previous session. Now to discuss and to contribute to enlarging the debate, we have four, I think, extremely interesting speakers, very diverse commentators, and Karen and I will bring them in at different points. Anthony Williams, as you gather, has been the mayor of Washington at a crucial time, is now, in fact, interestingly at the Kennedy School of Government, running a course on how to run cities, effectively, which I think is intriguing and an important occurrence. Can I ask Tony to comment? Thank you. Yes, I thought all the presentations, as usual, were very, very good. And I think just the overall presentation in Istanbul here has been just remarkable. So I salute all the presenters and I'll just spend three minutes so we will have time for discussion. Enough time for me to earn my way here, but not so much as to suppress discussion. When I became mayor, I think what I face is actually typical of what I think most city leaders face around the world, one where the authority was really not to be taken for granted, where there was really a kind of lack of self-determination for your city, as your authority was blurred, to say the least, without of the national government. My citizens of my city didn't even have the right to vote, right, for voting representation. For voting representation in the national legislature, we were a divided city, as Bruce Katz would tell you, representative of so many cities in the United States and so many cities around the world, as we've heard. And last but certainly not least, we were a dysfunctional city. Nothing really worked. I'm talking about nothing. All the social service agencies were under a court order. So that's pretty much what I inherited. So got into the job and I was, one, impressed by the city and the kind of reason for being for the city. I saw all the histories of the city and came upon the acquaintance of Andrew, who schooled me in the building blocks of a city. Great streets, as we've heard from Enrique Pinalosa, are hard in blood of your city, or arteries of your city, or downtown, the core of your city. Your neighborhoods, as we've heard from Richard Rogers, you know, and how these neighborhoods are the building blocks of a great city. And lastly, a waterfront. But how do you make this happen? How do you actually take a vision and make it a reality? I would give you three dimensions. One is the dimension of authority and recognize that your authority is not only over your government, but over what I would call and what we've heard from Richard's Senate, the public realm. It includes the government, but it's not limited to the government. It is a government and a non-governmental. It is the private and the collective are under your realm, but you have to use your authority sparingly. It's kind of like a nozzle. You have to build up your pressure so that you can focus that authority and deploy it wisely and crudently. And one, understand that there is no distinction between a vision and management. I hate it when people say, well, he's a great, or he or she's a great leader, but they can't manage anything, or he or she's a great, say this about me. Tony was a great manager, but he wasn't a leader. No, you have to do both, right? I tell my students the difference between good management and bad management is like American Samoa, $50 million for a tsunami warning. They didn't put the tsunami warning in place. They didn't have good management, which we don't care about, and people died. Billions of dollars stolen from your country because you didn't have good management. Zillions of dreams didn't become reality because you didn't have good management. Sorry to preach, but important. Number two, build consensus with your people. Not build consensus with your people. We had these citizen summits of 4,000 people, not so I just slavishly listened to all the people, but recognized that prudently using your authority over this public realm, is to say that I'm going to follow the 60, 40, or 70, 30 rule. I will listen and smart solidly to my people 60 or 70% of the time, and 30% of the time in a transparent way, I will let my people know that they elected me to make the final decision, right? Now, I'm not final because I'm infallible, but I am infallible because I'm final, if you know what I mean. And then lastly, focus on three things. If you try to lead with 40 things, it's not going to get anywhere, but focus on three things, and so me, it was basically restoring the government services of the district. To me, that was part of your authority because it was essentially punching the mill ticket. If you can't answer the phones, no one will listen to you about anything else. Restore respect for the city. And number three, the Anacostia River. So in terms of taking a vision for your city and making it reality, if you build your authority and build your apparatus to execute it, and focus on that thing relentlessly over and over again until you are sick of hearing it, it's probably penetrating your constituency. And then number two, on the programmatic, this notion of integration of the physical and social could not be more true. You know, I hate it when people say, well, the physical is important or the social important, both are important. And I'll leave enough said on that. I think we all agree with that. And then lastly, I would focus on the issue of time and understand that when you're talking about a vision for your city, think of the time dimension. So for example, in Washington, D.C., in the short-term dimension, Andrew worked on these short-term action plans for the neighborhoods. This is kind of like punching the mill ticket. The neighborhoods now are bought into our broader vision for the city because we're taking care of basic things that go to making quality of life in the neighborhoods better. And then in the medium term, I would put things like the Anacostia River as a medium-term project. And then in the longer term, and no one ever talks about this, and I'm happy they didn't, because it was the most important, I think, in the long term, we put in a new comprehensive plan for the city. So if you look at many beautiful cities around the world, it's not because they have just one or two beautiful buildings, it's because they have put in place a regime that is actually beautified and burnished the public space, this public realm year after year, decade after decade, and we were able to do that. So think of that. Think of that time dimension. Think of that notion of integrating the social and the physical, and by all means think of how you properly exercise, well, accumulate exercise and deploy your authority limited as it is. Tony, let me just ask you one question. Do you then believe in the notion that civic leaders such as yourself should back a very long-term plan for a city or because of the pace of change and the reality of what we see in most cities is that actually nothing really gets done in the same, in the way that the plan is intended? I think you should try to build long-term plans, but I think the route toward that long-term plan is to build credibility with a short term, apply it to the median term, and then if you're lucky, begin working on the long term. But many people start on the long term without any foundation, I believe. Sorry, on this important point of timing, you didn't have time to talk about this, but what are the first things that you would like to see implemented? Because many of the things you showed are very, very long-term, long structural change, massive investment. Very, very briefly, what are the short-term things that you think could change and deal with the quality of life issue, which is, I think, Tony. I think the couple of things, the first thing is, of course, we have transportation difficulties and there's a need, lots of railway system constructions to be done in Istanbul and then that takes lots of money and the time, but I'm sure that sometime in the future we will be solving that. But secondly, one of the very important issues is that I don't know how much the side of this number you've seen, but we have lots of collapsed areas, too. So these areas need to be redesigned and lots of renovation or regeneration projects should be carried out there. But again, here we have a different mentally tentative western situation. Here our people sometimes believe in fortune and then they just leave with their fortune and they don't want any progress to come out. So these are our difficulties. I think there needs a lot of propaganda to be done about that. Please, headphones. I will speak in Turkish. Now we've come to a very important point. We need to touch on this point about the current political role of the city directors. Now, the central direction of the administration is towards the political role. The city directors are generally in a second place. They are doing more technical work, they are doing more technocratic work. What are they doing? They are making a transition plan. What are they doing? They are improving the local areas. They are doing it again. So the place that is known to them, the place that is known to the local directors, is actually a kind of chube. It is a technocratic job that doesn't have a lot of role as a political person. The role that the local directors have known for the past 20 years. How will this role be? Today, the city director and a more integrated management model will be able to produce politics. Because this technocratic model actually looks like it doesn't have a political identity, but there is something that has been produced. It is a model that has been carrying the reality of the 19th century to the 21st century. In this case, the area of museum is at its highest level. Only powerful actors in this area of museum can have a voice, and the cities of people cannot make their voices out of this. The cities are in a form of passive actors in the middle of this museum. They have entered under a dimension. Now there is Erdogan Yıldız among our discussions. He is also here as a representative of this museum initiative in Gülensu and Gülsu. But at the same time, I promise to myself that one of the directors of this museum is one of the directors of the city. Thank you. It is really exciting to be in such an environment among such influential guests. I actually want to start with a word of Shakespeare. What is a city? If you close your eyes, if living in a city does not make people happy, it is not easy for people to be happy if they do not take the situation in the city as a promise. I was born here, I was born in Istanbul. I have a daughter and a son, they are also from Istanbul. In the neighborhoods where we live, there is a lack of visibility and lack of city integrity. They look at us as workers or people who do not fit in here. And this is very serious in the vision of the city and its plans in the future. In the 50s and 60s, this city was a city of art. Our fathers and grandmothers came from the villages to work here. We were here, we created a culture here. These neighborhoods were our neighborhoods, our city was our city. But today, outside of the city of art, Istanbul has begun to be a financial center. Istanbul has begun to be the city of the service-earning sectors. And here, there is no need for cheap jobs like us. We are living in a gentrified state. In other words, it is a process of service to the upper-class of the city. Now, if I want to summarize the process briefly, in Maltepe, there are large-scale construction processes in the waterfront. In front of the water tower, the Roman neighborhood in front of my eyes was recorded outside of the city. Many of the neighborhoods of Sarıyer were trying to get stuck in the blocks outside of the city. Many of the neighborhoods of Sarıyer were in a risky situation. And the people sitting here do not know the decision-making in the new vision of this city. While the plans are being made, the people here look at the city with their eyes, not with a neighborhood. As if the plans were just the works of the experts, city planners and visitors. As Ibrahim Bey mentioned earlier, the city is very technical and pragmatic. A technocrat looks at the city with his eyes, and the people here see the city as a nest in the plan. They see the city as a piece of the plan. And as I said, there are very serious obstacles in this process. In our neighborhoods and in our knowledge, this city is made like this. For example, when you go to a neighborhood or a neighborhood to plan, the residents of the neighborhood try to sell their own token on the value of this value. In other words, these people are not going to be able to live a happier and happier neighborhood. They are going to be able to get rid of these people and move on to other places, to the community. They are going to be forced to live in these places. This is something that cannot be accepted in our neighborhoods. Despite being the owners of this city, we have a serious problem and uncertainty in the vision and mission of the city. As you hear from the room, you put your finger on it. I visited Erdogan's community a few months ago. And while, of course, we understand the strength of feeling, there was also a lot of optimism in some of the ideas and the way you were able in your community to actually mobilize support. And I was encouraged that, in fact, you were at that point about to work with one of the universities and one of the schools of architecture to try and improve the environment around you for you and the local community that you represent so strongly. I guess this is the only sort of situation that an outsider, not an insider, can perhaps in a non-controversial and absolutely non-provocative way is to ask Ibrahim whether you feel that the plan as it now stands, the master plan, is able to deal with these issues. And this is not to defend but to say, is it something that in the process that you are given within which you work, you're able to deal with these issues or is this the next stage? Well, probably not the area, the gentleman's living, but some of the areas, we pointed out them in our master plan as a special project areas. I think there is one, I think, a conflict question. That is, in one side Istanbul is waiting one of the very big earthquakes to come. On the other side there are houses which inside the humans are living in and then they are not in very good conditions. Probably without the earthquake they may collapse immediately. We have a situation, I mean the choice between... Isn't that around 70% of the city? Isn't that situation? Well, it could be, it could be. So here there are a couple of questions in fact we have to ask ourselves. In any kind of regeneration projects we have a number of situations like this. First, we have kind of people, they still prefer to live in rural life conditions, although right in the center of the metropolitan city they are living in. So this is one of the choices. And secondly, if you ask people, would you like to prefer better quality life or the same quantity of the life? They will give the answer the quantity. So that is another difficulty. I mean, again, all people are waiting without spending any money. They want to get the same amount of the area and the conditions they are having at the moment for the future. So I don't know how it's going to be sorted out. Thank you for that. Could I bring in Albert Speer at this point? Albert runs a practice in Germany which in many ways is grappling with parts of this discussion. But very much in the new emerging worlds of new towns in China and elsewhere. Where in some case there is not even a dialogue, a political dialogue simply because of the political system. Can you say something about, commenting on what you've heard, on what you think perhaps is the right process to achieve the sorts of environments that work at multi-levels and just at the level of making someone very rich? Yeah, I think first we have to see the role urban planners have in the world. It's not the most important role. In my thinking, we are a consultant to society and the role we are playing is minor. The influences of politics, economics and the society are very, very large. And if you count this in sectors, I always say the sector we are responsible for are perhaps 5% of all decisions which lead to the development of Istanbul or Washington. Second, I would like to say that the developments in Africa or Asia, China, they are completely different from the approach from the origin than what we are facing in Europe or in an old city like Istanbul or I am now working a lot in Cairo. We are in China guests, we are working in a culture we don't really understand. And I think we have to behave also as guests, but they are listening to us. And it's not that the decisions in China are only made from top down. There are a lot of decisions taken on the city level and bottom up. So the system is another system as our democratic system, but it's not an absolute regime of few persons. And commenting what I have seen here, I think it is most important that all parts of society are involved from the beginning. And this means that urban planning has to be intelligent, effective and sensitive. In many cases, architects and planners are not sensitive at all. They have some utopia ideas and put it on an area without relations to the neighborhood, to the people, to the landscape, to the culture, to the environment and all the other things. I think that for cities like Istanbul or cities like London, it is most important that decentralization is going on. That not everything is concentrated in one place, but in many places. But this means, and this is done in London, that you have to have the opportunity of upgrading an area like East London. And their world events are most helpful. And I am also in this business of bidding for world events from Qatar to Munich. And even if the city is losing, it's gaining a lot because this brings the opportunity also in politics to think in new ideas and to bring new ideas in which otherwise politically couldn't get through from the beginning. I think politics are most important and long term thinking is most important, but at the same time, simultaneously you have to do things for the people now.  No. But surely what you design has enormous impact in terms of the potential for engagement. But only if all the other fields are integrated. It's not an artistic design. It's a design of, as you showed it, of integration of the whole society. And this is our responsibility, I think, to think interdisciplinary and not as aesthetic people seeing only this part of the world. I'm sure we'll come back to that with Enrique Norton in the next session. But let me bring in Tony Travers before returning to Koran. Tony is a key commentator in London on all things. Politico is a colleague of mine at the London School of Economics and perhaps in what you say, Tony, you might even address the issue of how the multi-layered complexities. Let's not forget Peter Bishop's plan, the circles in white on a black background. Those are all the people in London at the moment who need to get involved in a project. How one negotiates that. I'm going to write the book London Governing the Ungovernable City. So how do you deal with it, Tony? I realised after the publisher had suggested that strap line that John Lindsay had used it for a title of his before. But never mind. Listening to the discussion, I was struck by one of Peter's early charts which showed an earlier version of what planners in London thought planning was all about. And that, of course, was at a time when planning was a matter of experts and granities and elite telling people what the city should be like. That's what planners thought they were trying to do. I'm not saying all of that was implemented in that way, but that was the way it was done. I think what we've heard this afternoon is that planning and guidelines for growth have become about many, many more things. I mean, they're not just about conventional land use and zoning, the location of transport and roads but they're about a huge list of other things as well. Regenerating a declined industrial land in the case of Istanbul, moving the city from being an industrial or away from a predominantly industrial city towards a financial centre and a post-industrial city and diversifying the economy. But planning is also about aesthetics. Should there be tall buildings or no tall buildings and where the adornment of buildings we've heard earlier about today, density versus sprawl, how to fight people who don't want to change things for good reasons and some who want not to change things for bad reasons and indeed to cope with social change more generally. And the whole idea of a guideline for growth or planning now embraces all of these things. This is a much, much wider notion of planning than it ever would have been in the past. And I think it's such a wide list of the long list that it actually begs the question of when it would be too much. I mean, when it's trying to do all of them, distracts from each individual part of it. But the only other thing I think I'd like to say is that I'm absolutely struck by the fact that Anthony Williams, Henry K. Penelos and of course one close who was here earlier, people who have successfully run major cities have come back one way or another, come to the same conclusion and that is how do city leaders harness the developers, architects, community, city planners, all of the interests that were represented by Peter Bishop's many circles in London but any city could have drawn something a bit like that to create a civic coalition or what I think in Barcelona they call complicity. They're bringing people together so that they share an idea. So I think that how that is done, the coordinating and leading role by the articulate and the effective politician to deliver a plan is absolutely essential. And that finally leads us back to the point that Anthony certainly made and I think others have made and that is that comes down to the authority and the, in fact, the elegant authority of the individual who has the mandate to deliver it. It's without politicians and we have two here who've done it, but not all politicians are that good. But Tony, you must address though, I mean, I think we take that for granted. Without good politicians we don't get good cities, fine. You've heard a moment ago, a very clear comment saying that perhaps there's a democratic deficit in a city like this one, as in many others. This is a very live debate in London. There are a lot of people still feel excluded. Can you say a little bit about how you think the London planning process, which Peter and Andy are now very much involved in, deals with that. Let me put in a cue. One of the views is that East London is being regenerated for the first time ever after 30, 40 years because all other attempts have failed and the only way to do that is to take it out of the democratic process and unfortunately Andy is the chief executive of that machine which has no democratic accountability really for the moment, right? Is that a problem? It's such an obvious provocation. The question is, it's not really taken out of all democratic accountability. You set up, I think part of the issue of what Peter's chart shows in a way is who at the end is the interest because there are so many. Even let's take the company that's been set up to run the Olympics post the Olympics after the Games is a creature of the mayor, the government, will have representation from the boroughs. It'll have a lot of formal representation on its, that's formal representation on its board let alone trying to get things done requires you to go through an enormous amount of the informal because of the influences of the boroughs. I don't think it escapes that. It's a very interesting question of large scale projects of how much representation. I mean, Jennifer raised this the other day of public authorities which is, you know, people criticized in one hand canary wharf on the other hand it couldn't have gotten done probably without having in a sense been outside of normal democratic processes and established London as in a financial center and argue whether that's good for bad. I think it's striking a right balance but I would go back to one point of it which is maybe a very simple point which has to do with the vision of what you're trying to accomplish because of that vision of what you're trying to accomplish and how that's articulated by the government and agreed and understood among people in the city what you're trying to do. I think that's very important from the foundation and we can often get lost in all the different mechanisms and go back to what are you trying to accomplish and how and whose city is this? Tony and then Goran. Tony on this one point. I mean, the question of how to mediate local interests will of course vary from issue to issue. I mean, Enrique Penelosa this morning weighed an impassioned plea in effect occasionally to override powerful interests not necessarily local neighborhood ones but there are times when to run a city properly you have to use authority to push things through. So use of roads or clean air these are both issues where occasionally governments will have to take action which tramples on people's toes. Whereas to clear the Olympic site requires the use of what is elegantly known as eminent domain. I mean actually sweeping people neighborhoods off the site because otherwise nothing would have happened. I mean the games couldn't have taken place and is that good? Well, it's good for the city. It's not particularly good for the people who are swept off the site and you know if there is an earthquake coming along I can see there is a literally an insoluble political issue which at some level as they always come back to the point I made only politics can decide. Now in London one of the ways we do it is by having powerful lower tier units of government. Gerald Frug would undoubtedly have a lot to say on this if you were on the panel. I mean ways of allowing articulation of views from a neighborhood level that has the consequence that the city-wide level of government is weaker thus one of those charts that Peter Bishop put up. So in a sense I still come back to the point only politics and politicians can maneuver because they have the magic ingredient of electoral legitimacy. To whatever level of government they're at they have to do it. Now, okay but how is this going to be? So we brought one together, we brought representatives together. Organisation is okay, but if the institutions in the application are staying in their own technocratic things, then the promise has come that there is a different institution to reduce the risks of earthquake, a different institution for my achievement, a different institution for the protection of water sources, a different institution for the energy. If this section is going on for the 20th century, then you can't do this in the application. As much as you want from the coordination, take steps towards integration. The size of integration's material resources has not been realized. All of your dreams are similar to this. Like the 19th century, how do all the design ideas of the 19th century go into fragmentation today? How do closed areas be created today? Actually, you don't see a different kind of planning. I think it must be fun for the effort to change this. Even with a city-wide cooperation in the management status, it will not be very clear. I mean, they love us very much, they say to the people who know a lot about the teacher, they say that the teachers are always valuable, but at the same time, this is what it means. You don't know how to work. You teachers, you know how to talk, you know how to draw, but when you do work, we know better the technocrats. That's why you're actually a bit far away. From this model, how can we manage the culture, how can we manage the citizens themselves? We need a very strategic tool here. This is just ridiculous. Strategic tools, instruments are used. Countries that enter all these types of experiments. I think we should take lessons from this. There are a number of experiments that the cities use today. They cannot be said that they are perfect. But if there is no such thing, they can be put in the direction of integration. We, as part of the Culture President Programme, have the freedom to do this in Istanbul. That is, the freedom of the cultural centers, the old industrial facilities, the old industrial facilities that cannot be used. In order to turn this culture into a culture, this tool of the President Programme, this strategic tool, to think about the future of the city and to make it work, we have tried to develop an tool. Just like you did in London. Now, I think that this integration, participation, the representation of the groups representing the different cultural environments, we have to draw the gold that only intellectual production and professionals here will not be only a request, but also a role that will create these cross-seaters. How can this be a cross-seater? With a relationship model, the communication needs to be established between different information. We have to break the information ourselves. We will be renewed in your homes. Not by saying, we have to look at the relationship. We have to look at the future. We have to look at the future. We have to look at education. We have to work between disciplines. The second is the majority.  I cannot say that there is no other model. There may be another idea. Your idea is very valuable, but there may be another better project for the water tower. People should know that this type of competition needs to be in the middle of competition. I only want to say that that, sorry, that in this case events like the cultural capital of Europe is helping a lot because with these ideal thinking you can get the people to follow you. This is the same in London, without the Olympic Games all your projects wouldn't come into the politics and into investment and that's why I think these things are most important. Final comment, Peter Bishop. Obviously, we're working in a very complex society where the democratic consensus has been largely fractured. And leading to the drawing the circles, the complexity and I think that when showing that, I possibly should have said that this is not necessarily a bad thing and whether the developer of the King's Cross scheme would agree with me I think the six years we negotiated the scheme was a very rich negotiation. He might have preferred two years. But during that we used the complexities of the various stakeholders to come to I think a very interesting understanding of the problem and in many ways it's a bit like solving a very complex set of mathematical equations that you sketch out your stakeholders, you work out what their agendas are then either side of the line you can cancel you can reduce because in many ways, if you agree a set of very simple objectives and visions then you'll find that 90% of the agendas will probably align and you can cancel those. The 10% you can then negotiate and you can negotiate those out and finally you'll have some pretty tough decisions at the end of it, but you can reduce. I think the process within the kind of cities we're trying to design is complex, but in many ways if we understand, if we know how to use it I think it can produce far richer solutions than some of the processes we've used in the past. I think we should conclude this session by just thinking together about the fact that as it happens the next city we're going to visit is Chicago and this year is the centenary of one of the greatest in the global north anyway one of the greatest urban planners of all Daniel Burnham who in 1909 came up with this statement which not many of us would like around the table or some of us would which is make no little plans but the only way you're going to actually get anything done is come up with a fantastically strong and powerful three-dimensional visionary idea which sort of pulls the city forward and in that case there was no doubt that Chicago was transformed as a result of what he came up with these extraordinary drawings which got the business community and the political community behind him I think of that, but I also think of the Spanish architect who had factored the master plan for the Olympic Games in 1992 with the mayor of Barcelona who was here and he in fact comes at it exactly the opposite way that's why I was asking both of you which is don't make any master plans they don't work by the time it's been approved it's going to take ten years the world has changed the economy has changed, society has changed we've just seen what's happened in the last six to nine months and master plans can be very inflexible so he fact says master planning should be done not with master plans but with what he calls progetti puntuali punctual projects, petit projet that sort of let many million flowers bloom that sort of approach now clearly that can't work without us of overall framework but I think I would like to conclude with Karan Gumus and I to think of this debate in terms of these two parameters make no little plans or do lots of petit projet but whatever you do plan and involve the whole cross section of community can you join me in thanking these very very strong speakers and commenters thank you


Forests give life. The value of growing forests to our economy, our climate and our culture is priceless. Today, the International Day of Forests gives us an opportunity to reflect on the importance of the world's forests and to reaffirm how much forests contribute to sustainable development. Forests give income, food and medicine, as well as ecosystem services like biodiversity and safe drinking water. They are also one of the most powerful forces in our battle against climate change. How can we value forests for the many contributions they make? It is one of the most pressing questions of our time. Luckily, there are two global processes underway that could mark a turning point in history for forests. The first is the inclusion of forests in the next Global Development Framework, the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. The SDGs are being designed to set milestones for advancing development goals like poverty reduction, health and education in a socially and environmentally sustainable manner. Forests will have a major role in this regard. Secondly, between now and 2015, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change will seek agreement on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the main international pact on climate change. The role of forests in mitigating and adapting to climate change will loom large in these negotiations. As we celebrate International Day of Forests, we see many challenges but also opportunities for forests. There is incoming inequality, uneven access to financial and natural resources, unclear tenure, poverty and unsustainable food production. These are not improving fast enough to meet the needs and expectations of 9 billion people in 2050. Many will be in the rising middle class in countries like China, Brazil, India and Indonesia. Many will migrate to cities and take part in the growing economies. Or will want a better life on a healthy planet. Forests can contribute to solving each of these challenges, but we need to think outside the box. That's why here at the Centre for International Forestry Research, we are seeking to redefine forestry. No longer should forests be thought of as the wasteland or a resource to be exploited. They are vital parts of the greater landscape and they feed into natural, political and economic processes across the landscape. In the next two years, as SDGs and a new climate agreement take shape, it will be crucial to integrate forestry as a big part of the solution.


Wagner Group continues to recruit mercenaries in Russia, despite Prigoshin's statements. Wagner Private Military Company continues to recruit mercenaries in Russia, despite the statement of its leader Yevgeny Prigoshin about the termination of recruitment, with Africa being the main destination for the trained militants. Important stories a Russian media outlet reported it. The journalists found messages in the chat rooms saying that Wagner Group would resume recruiting mercenaries in August. One former mercenary, who has already fought in Africa and Ukraine, told the media outlet that recruitment has resumed through the orthodox sports club Desantnik in Omsk and one of the private military company points in Novosibirsk. When the correspondent tried to get into the new wave of recruitment under the guise of a mercenary, the Omsk Desantnik refused him, but the Novosibirsk veteran organization Power Unity of Siberia, which is the official representative of the private military company, said that the new recruitment takes place on Fridays. The journalist was also offered to come to the office in sneakers and a sports uniform and pass a physical fitness test. In addition, representatives of the Wagner Group warned him that the candidate should not have a criminal record, chronic diseases and arrears on the federal bailiff's service. In addition, a potential Wagner mercenary must have a military speciality and a foreign passport, since the main direction of recruitment is African countries. Another mercenary, with whom the correspondent spoke, said that recruitment centres determine the work directions of militants after the selection. During the conversation with the recruiter, the correspondent was offered to go to the special military operation zone without signing a contract with the Russian Defense Ministry from the reddit private military company associated with Gazprom. On the 31st of July, 2023, Yevgeny Prigodin stated that the company had stopped recruiting new mercenaries.


Thanks for that introduction. I'm very excited to be here from Uber's data visualization and urban computing team, talk about how we are using urban computing and how we're really embracing open source to do that. Let me start really briefly by giving an overview of what, at a high level, urban computing is. So from an urban aspect, urban computing is about tackling challenges that cities have across a broad area of safety, road infrastructure, equitable access to transportation, energy consumption, traffic congestion, tons of applications of how we see urban computing can be used. In terms of how we approach that, urban computing really starts from data across a wide variety of heterogeneous sources. So that can be data from sensors. It could be data that's collected from incidents or government agencies. We combine that data together. We use data science to analyze it, aggregate it, process it. We use data visualization techniques to provide insights into that data, again, so that we can tackle challenges that cities may have across a variety of different areas. So that's at a high level what urban computing is to help that sink in. I wanna just walk through a really brief example of how we're thinking about urban computing in the context of transportation. So for context, this graph right here shows over the last decade, traffic fatalities. We can see that it was declining since 2007 and then in 2015 and 16, there was an increase in traffic fatalities, about 5% year over year. And transportation decision makers, policy makers, they had some information about this, but they didn't have a lot of detailed granular insight into what was leading to this. Even more specifically, there was an incident on December 27th, 2017. Traffic fatality killed a 17 year old passenger in New York City at the corner of Canal and Bowery Street, this is a tragic incident. And I bring this up because from this specific example here, we can start to, using urban computing, glean some important insights and use those insights more broadly to understand potentially what's leading to these traffic increase in traffic fatalities. So the US Department of Transportation knows that of the 40,000 traffic fatalities a year, over 10,000 of those are caused by speeding and speeding is the primary factor in this. So this visualization up here is showing Manhattan, New York City, where Uber operates. And it's also illustrating how we're using urban computing to really provide insights into how people are moving about a city. So you can see that there's road segments colored here and scatter plots of data points. So this is bringing that heterogeneous collection of data from different sources and combining it together into a single visualization. The red dots here are traffic fatalities from the US Department of Transportation. There's yellow dots that are also bringing in data from the New York City Police Department. And then the blue road segments, blue, yellow and red is data that Uber has processed from GPS sensors, GPS signals from our drivers moving around the city, combined that together, processed it, anonymized it, aggregated it to be able to provide information about average vehicle speeds down to a high degree of granularity in both space and time. So this is zooming in on the site of that accident canal on Bowery Street, where we're seeing two sources of data here. And we see that certain road segments here are, we can see that it's data combined over down to road segment granularity and also hour by hour. And we can see that there's particular road segments here where we have significant speed above the speed limit, all hours of the day. We can start to use that information to see that there's other similar, provide insights into where there's other similar parts of the city that may be having, we're seeing the same type of vehicle speed behavior. Maybe they don't have the same type of traffic fatalities or the other sources of data there, but transportation decision makers and policy makers can really use this data to not only get retrospective insight, but also start to use the visualization tools, start to explore how they can use this to find other areas where they can impact meaningful change. So again, that's just one example of how we're exploring using data acquisition, data science, visualization, simulation, combining those together into this theme of urban computing. Uber's thinking about urban computing more than just safety, but also congestion, pollution, increasing and providing more equitable access to transportation. So I really wanna talk a little bit more about how we're doing that and how we're doing that with open source. So the previous visualizations were all created using Kepler GL for cities. So this is an open source web-based visualization tool that we've created at Uber. It's open, it's free, it's fast, it's easy to use, it's web-based, it actually doesn't require any programming to use, so it's the customers for our days as scientists, engineers, urban planners, researchers, civic hackers. Basically, you can drag and drop data into this web-based tool, free and open-source web-based tool, and powering it is high-performance, computer graphics-based WebGL code that's basically able to render millions of data points in a really high-performance way in the web browser. So that's Kepler GL for cities, and this is what the previous visualizations were created with. Underlying Kepler GL is a whole set of visualization frameworks that are powering it. So it's kind of the foundation of Uber's urban computing platform. These frameworks are suited for a variety of applications. They're largely web-based, and they're largely around just being able to display data, millions of data points really performantly in the web browser, and there's a lot of geospatial visualization use cases for this. But you can also see that they're powerful enough to be applied to some related areas that are potentially related to urban computing and transportation, like self-driving car visualization. We've just recently open-sourced our autonomous visualization system, which is a set of components and a visualization standard for autonomous vehicle systems. The other aspect of this I want to touch on is data, and how Uber is trying to provide anonymized data for over two billion trips to really help our urban planners around the world. So we're doing that through our investments in what we call the Uber movement platform. So this is an open platform where we're providing data for regulators, policymakers, researchers, civic hackers, and we're doing this in a way that is very privacy-minded. So we anonymize and aggregate that data in a way so that the regulators and policymakers can glean useful insights for it and use it for their urban computing needs. So that's a broad overview of some of the specific technologies and specific open-source software frameworks that we're building, software frameworks and tools. As we've built this technology, we're starting to see that we're getting like a groundswell or attention from like a community of developers who are noticing this and starting to use it in their applications. So we're seeing that through people actively contributing, participating in the conversation, contributing code on our open-source GitHub repos, which is really exciting to see. We're really starting to focus on fostering this and creating an uproar ecosystem around this through really improving our documentation, making these things more accessible and spreading awareness of them. We're also teaching courses in data visualization at universities and engaging with researchers and academic institutions, civic hackers. So that's where we are right now. I think we are, we can see a lot of potential in what urban computing is and we know that open-source is at the core of this. So we have partnerships with governments, external companies, researchers, the open-source community, but we really want to, we see the future, a lot of potential in terms of accelerating and expanding an ecosystem around these tools. So we're exploring creating like a neutral foundation to accelerate this using the opening governance models and support and guidance and help from the Linux Foundation. And the real goal of this is to create a framework for the long-term growth, sustainability, stewardship and technical improvement of these tools and frameworks for urban computing. And so we can't do it alone. So we're here to talk about this, start to spread awareness of this and also ask for interest about it. So if you're interested in helping with this, we can't do it alone. Please come and talk to us. You can drop us a line at the Linux Foundation slash project slash urban computing. And I think that there's a lot of potential to really help cities and citizens improve the lives of everybody in our cities through really building this sustainable growing ecosystem around urban computing in the future. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you. We'll get to it, pull on one second. You know, one of the things I love about this project is you've got an open source set of projects, but you also have a data sharing project which I think is really, really interesting. And I think we're gonna see a lot more of this in the future, but you're like an early sort of vanguard for taking data, anonymizing it, sharing it. So it's sort of open source, but applied to data. So awesome stuff. We look forward to working with you. Thank you very much. All right. So again, I think if you look at it, open source, open data, open data is gonna be a new big trend that we're gonna see more and more of.