Thank you very much Nathan. Many thanks to you as I understand the main organiser but also everybody else who contributed to the organisation. This first presentation can serve as a form of introduction and so I will try to place the Persephone tool in context as exemplifying the benefits of interdisciplinary dialogue between computer scientists and field workers. Linguistic fieldwork is probably very familiar to all of you but I'll still recapitulate briefly what it's about. This is the core mission of the research centre where I work, Langues et civilisations à tradition orale. So this lab was founded over 40 years ago to document and analyse under-documented languages and cultures. And the languages on which fieldwork has been done so far are indicated by pins on the map. So the pins in red are where PhD students are currently active. The pins in white are where people have been but have not archived any data yet. And in orange is where some data are available from our open archive. For instance my own fieldwork took place here. It has its little pin on the map. For people familiar with South-West China, here is a close-up map showing the position of Nasi. So the Nasi language you may have heard about it because it's famous for its pictographic script. And the pictographic script area is shown on the map with little red dragons for the corresponding places. Now, which is the language I'm doing most fieldwork on, is spoken at the border between the Chinese provinces of Yunnan on the south and Sichuan on the north. And you can see that Myanmar, you can't see it, but Myanmar is just across the black border and Tibet to the north, northwest. So since 2006 I have conducted nine field trips in this area, specifically in this village, transcribing and analysing materials and learning to speak the language. So this is what it looks like, the plain of Yongning. It's inhabitants in festivity costume. Here are some water buffalos which were introduced as a 21st century innovation for plowing. But now, less than two decades later, they have already been replaced by tractors. So this is at the same time a 21st century site and already a thing of the past. So things are changing quickly. Here are some mountain streams, villages, and here is my teacher. And this is what her voice sounds like. So this is a Sino-Tibetan language and when working on an unwritten language, one needs to work out the sound system in order to be able to transcribe. The knowledge of neighboring languages helps, although there are generally some discoveries to be made. This is where linguists come into play and we know the distributional analysis to work out what the vowels and consonants are, what the restrictions on the combinations are and so on. And as soon as possible we begin recording texts. We transcribe them with the help of the consultant and we annotate them. So this is a passage from a story where the multilevel annotation allows one to spot the mismatch between tones at the sentence level and the underlying tones of individual words. So this is near the beginning of a story. It's said that there were two siblings and you can see from looking up the word by word, that for instance the sister, younger sister, doesn't have the same tones in the sentence where it's nimi, halo, and in the word by word, glosses, where it starts with a mid-tone. And this is what I study as a linguist. We can also have any amount of lavish notes, translations into any languages we want. And now when we get to analyzing the combinatorial properties of tones, we can look for instance at, he went hunting the montiac, so we know the tone of the noun, the animal, the kind of animal, the verb to drive away, to chase, and how they combine into a tone. So this is the first step where the object and verb have a certain rule that tells you what the tones are going to be like when you combine the two. A bit like declensions in Latin or conjugations in languages that have it. In this case, when an object and a verb get combined, well, if you know the tones of both, you can know the tones of the output, but you have to know the paradigm. Then there is verb serialization, he went hunting, and some post-lexical processes. So this is what I did, doing the big tables, saying if you have an input verb that has high, mid, low, or mid-high tone, including the sum categories, and monosyllabic objects or disyllabic objects with this or that tonal pattern. This is what you get at what people say, how they combine, tonally. Now it's been a few years' work, more than 10 years, so all the resources are available online. It's open access, it's Creative Commons license, so everybody is welcome to use it for their own research or for some other purposes. And the excerpt that I showed you a moment ago is now shown in its online setting that anybody can look up without having to download any tool, it's all in the browser. Files can be downloaded, including the original audio and the full annotations in XML format. We have the metadata that you can also download in full. You have a reasonable sample laptop saying who's the speaker, who did the recording, the annotating, everything. And we have DOIs, that was a specific request by Nathan, who said the archive is good and it shall be usable when you have DOIs. So not really as a suggestion or a question about what you think about DOIs, and we didn't think very highly of them, but a request to implement them, and so we did it, an overlay of DOIs. And they do facilitate citation for people who want to refer to a specific sentence within the text. They can have a one-click link to that. And my book was proudly published in 2017, so that's dropped on, in a sense. But the problem here is now that we do have some of the files that are transcribed, those that have a little scroll as an icon to the left. And that's okay, most of them are, but as you scroll down the list, you get this whole list of stories that sound interesting about adopting pets, about dogs and cats, and how they're seen locally, and how long in living memory they have been around, and the fact that dogs are special friends, kind of totem animal, and lots of information, but you only have the audio and no transcription. And it's unlikely that I will ever do the hand transcription for all these recordings, because it takes so much time, maybe one hour for each minute of recording. So if the story about pets is nine minutes, that's nine hours, I can't do it completely on my own. I'd need to be with a consultant. And now, you know, like, aging people, I have to. I don't have to, but I chose to supervise PhD students and have other administrative responsibilities. And if I'm happily in the Himalayas transcribing all this and annotating it, somehow I'm not doing all the tasks I should be doing. So I could say, you know, posterity can manage. They've got the dictionary. They've got my book and my dictionaries. They should read my publications, linguists say that. And they can just do what I did, look at the gloss text and continue for themselves. But I see Mandana nodding her disapproval. And having limited access to these documents for now for my own research is a problem, because if I want to track the use of construction, that's not so common, but I do feel one can hear some instances. I would really like to navigate the whole corpus. Each time I recorded a story with kind of negotiation with the consultants, you know, if you've had all the stories I could tell and please. So then I couldn't have some stories again, a new version. And sometimes she would talk about an interesting topic and I said, ah, could you record this? And you say, okay, think about it, prepare it. Every time when it's in the box, it's something really very precious to me. And having access to those beyond just the way file is important. So for me and for other interested users. So when we think about this situation, maybe it's all because of digital technology. So if there were no digital technology, we wouldn't record so much materials. So this is text by Franz Boas, 1902. And this is the same method that we apply today. People will tell a story that they're confident narrating, be it about their own family or skills that they have, how they learn to make a crossbow, for instance, or traditional folk tales like this story. And the reason why he didn't record reams of text is because there were no audio recorders at the time. And so now we have these digital technologies and we can record basically as much as we want, even video because we've got big hard drives. So it's a digital problem. So maybe digital tools could also help us solve the problem that they've created by using natural language processing, you know, automatic glossing, automatic transcription, automatic translation. And somehow they owe it to us, you know, clean up the mess that they're creating. A difficulty is that our method, we're happy with it. It's tried and tested, it's more than one century old. And so as linguists, we don't want to give up what we already know, what we already have, for some fanciful alternative that may work, you know, 67%, but what does it mean if it works? 67% that's, we can't get students to graduate and we can't finish our grammars if it's just 67% accurate, right? And spending a lot of time wading through the errors and doing error analysis sounds like maybe we're not doing our job and we have lost track. So this is where the dialogue with natural language processing begins. And it is a pretty slow process. My own first attempt was in 2014. I was in Hanoi in an engineering centre. So that was easy. There are lots of toolkits for doing NLP, including speech recognition, automatic transcription, and so a colleague in the same room said, you know, let's try the automatic processing of Yongminna. We'll develop a light acoustic model, light because, you know, you have so little, so few data for this target language. And then we will also try to complement it with heavyweight models from five national languages. They had Khmer, English, you know, Chinese, German, French, something like this. And at the time it was interesting, but very far from practical usefulness. There were lots of errors, so you could think about, oh, isn't it curious that when there's a... in the microphone it gets transcribed as a uvula, ko, as if it were the syllable ko, but that was not practically very interesting. Now, when it did become interesting was when Oliver Adams, who is fortunately here with us today, did a PhD at the University of Melbourne and tried various things, including transcription by means of a neural network with connection is temporal classification, which is, you can date it from different periods, but mostly it's something from this decade, right? It's something that allowed for much progress in classification. So typically you have a sound and which phoneme is that. How do you want to classify it, given that you have a finite set of phonemes, and in language it has to be one of those. So the input to the tool was audio plus transcription aligned at the sentence level, and importantly the training was done from extant fieldwork data, so what I had collected that far. And that was data from just one speaker, about three hours of notice. And that was appealing, not having to work for the tool, saying you have to record different materials, red materials, I can't do that, the people don't read, or having a whole lexicon, I didn't have the lexicon ready at that stage. So it was just saying, given the output of your fieldwork, this can be fed as input to a tool for transcription. So this is the training set. What really matters is the audio and a sequence of target labels. So in this case just retaining the initials, the rhymes, so the consonants and vowels, because it's mostly a CV language, and the tones. And this was in 2017, late April, and Oliver had said I couldn't try something, but it won't have tone, and I thought that's a pity because my book is about tone in Yongning now, but anyway, you go ahead, you show me and I'll tell you if that's useful or not. And in the last few days he said I found a hack, and now there's going to be tone, and what is it like? And so this was the audio. And in the first line there was just one error, which was the tone on the copula nie, which should be a low tone, but when you come to think of it, the last three syllables, they are mid low low, but that's realized as gradually going down. So the low tone in the middle is phonetically more like a mid tone than a low tone. So because in that language, when you get a sequence like mid low low, you don't rush to say mm, mm, mm. You get mm, mm, mm. It goes down gradually, and the way people process it, which is language specific, they get the tones right without having to, you know, really stick to a three level scale with high mid and low. So that sounded very, very promising and really useful practically for the new transcription. So of course this is just phonemic transcription. It doesn't understand the words or chunk into words really. So you have to do that at the spelling, sorry, at the punctuation, at comments saying that B here is not to go, but it's the adversative morpheme. And then I would check some things, like is it this tone or that tone and make notes on those, I put those into comments, and then the translation I still do by hand. And then you can compare for a test set that was already transcribed and is not part of the training set, the output of the transcription with the linguists' transcription and see, you know, do the error analysis. And some colleagues said, you know, that's too good to be true. There must have been a mistake that if you have 85% accuracy or something which is on the order of, you know, 13, 14, 15% error rate, especially for an off the shelf model that hadn't been worked on very long, but just getting the thing to work and obtaining this result, it has to be something wrong, because when people speak, they don't give, there's not 100% of the phonemes as need segments in a string when they talk. Some words get gambled and for instance, you know, Mrs is from Mistress, but now it's went its own sweet way because in that context it was used as a title and not full noun. And some people today wouldn't know that Mrs, Mrs Smith is from Mistress Smith, and that's what languages are like. So the first part of our answer to, you know, it's too good to be true, it can't work is that we're doing what would today be called open science. It's documented. The code is available online. The data sets are available. And the results. So what we get is available online too. So there's GitHub repository, where this is available and it's open for anybody to look at those materials relating to Persephone. And that's the whole list of parallel text for the test set. It's called Storyfold Cross Validation. I learned some technical words, that was fun. It means you take out a story, retrain the acoustic model on all the rest of the materials except that, then apply it to that story. So it counts as, you know, the tool doesn't have the answer. And then you can check, compare it with the linguists transcription. So we have those sets here. It's too small to read, but this is the parallel text sentence by sentence of the reference Sometimes it's a bit generous because there are errors in my transcriptions that a word gets repeated. And I only wrote it once. And then the algorithm gets about mark for not being up to the gold standard, which is sometimes not so golden. But anyway, the materials are online and people can check. And the second part of the answer to, you know, is it too good to be true? Is it really working? Is that other people very soon worked with Persephone? Hilaria worked at the same time as there were tests with Na, there were tests on Chatino, so Hilaria also is present today. Chris Cox will present tomorrow, worked on Dine, which used to be called Athabascan. So in Na it's a language of Canada. And only yesterday evening I got a note from Emily Prudomo, who said that they were working on Cayuga, which is an Iroquoian language, and they were using the same tool. So probably it is replicable. It's more about exhaustive transcription. So as Nathan said, you need to have everything transcribed. If you correct the transcription because, you know, there's mistakes in it, then you should do it in such a way that the computer can still recover the spoken string. So if people want insist on additions, you can place them between square brackets, for instance, and then that can be disregarded for speech recognition purposes to train the corpus because these words are not spoken in the audio. And conversely, if they said things that they really want you to leave out because it was a stray sentence that they began and never finished, then you can use angled brackets or some other explicit encoding. And then, you know, for purposes of learning what the phoneme sounds like, they're perfectly fine. Even a word that is mispronounced would be OK. If you transcribe it phonemically, put it into the machine, probably it won't do any harm. OK, so there are some habits to adopt and that can make a difference for some people, but that's feasible, I think. Another thing is that multispeaker will be very hard to achieve, and that's things I've learned all of this from Oliver, so I'm doing the text-to-speech but here's the brain behind that. But that's common knowledge that if you want a tool that will work for men and women and young and old and different speaking styles, then you need to have very, very solid statistical basis, and sometimes it won't work because you can't expect somebody talking into the microphone at SOAS to have text that conforms to your expectations based on whatever happens to be in the English Wikipedia or something. So sometimes it can be good to have overfitting. So overfitting means that the computer doesn't generalise a lot, the statistics don't generalise a lot, they just recognise things that patterns they've already seen, and departures from that would really confuse them. But it's OK if you're transcribing most of my data is from one speaker because it's a very complicated language only, maybe a little like Chatino and other Ottoman languages. I don't have a replacement speaker, it sounds very awkward to say it because I'm describing an ideolect. But all the community members I worked with, apart from my main consultant, they differ subtly in their own patterns. So I mostly recorded data from one speaker. So if I can have a tool that helps me work the 75% of her recordings that I didn't get around to transcribing, that's good, that's an achievement in itself. So overfitting to that speaker is not necessarily a terrible evil. If I could just add in one thing, there's a distinction worth making between a multi-speaker system that can capture the speech of multiple speakers in one model and a model that can generalise to speakers that haven't seen it training. It's perfectly possible to have a system that recognises multiple different speakers well if it's seen those multiple speakers in training. To get a multi-speaker system that generalises to speakers not seen training can also be done, but that just requires a lot more data. So there's two different multi-speaker cases worth distinguishing between. But when you say a lot more data, what does that mean? Maybe an order of magnitude more to get the same accuracy. So what you could, and this is all just very rough rules and they don't apply generally, but say what you could do with one hour in a single speaker case, you'd maybe need a few hours to do a multi-speak system and then maybe ten times that amount to do a multi-speak system generalise. So would you call that speaker independent by the time you don't need to bother whether they have training data for that person? It's a speaker independent ASR and multi-speaker ASR would be multiple people that you know and for whom you have data, right? Yes. It's a weird question, but why would you refer to your, why would you refer your event or the organisation, why is the organisation named after the Greek goddess of vegetation and the other world? Is there any reason for that? Yes, you can look it up on GitHub. It's open science. We have no dirty secrets or terrible hacks there. So the reason for choosing a Greek mythology is that this is where prestige is and the reason why we're happy to have this event at SOAS, which is a very prestigious institution, is that Nathan carries with him the prestige of ERC and many other wonderful achievements and we want prestige. So we wanted a Greek goddess. In Persephone and it sounds like, you know, phonetics and phonology and... We'd love to say it in French. Persephone. Which is probably much less truthful to the Greek. In fact, there's no, it has no relationship to that Greek root. It seems to be a goddess that was there before the Greeks moved in and they kind of preempted her into the local pantheon. So she would be goddess of nature and things like that. And so the phone is phony in there. It's not a real phone, but it did sound nice. And the real reason is that, you know, she got abducted into a very unpleasant place and so you have to think when you're doing error analysis, for instance, you're a linguist, you think you've been taken into a really dark place and you're committed to that because you somehow committed yourself to that at one point, but you're looking forward to the other half of the year when you will see the light of day and maybe computer scientists feel the same when they have to find out that materials which are theoretically conforming to a list of phonemes that the linguists provided. In fact, they get tons more and the linguists say, well, of course, there are Chinese can't you see?   So, but it's good and somehow you can survive spending half the year and you can do it until time eternal. So we also hope that dialogue will continue for a long time and that there shall be plenty as befits the goddess of, you know, growth and so that's the story. Okay. So let me see if I can be back on track. I won't dwell on this. This is the kind of benefit for researchers to say, why would we want to do that apart from practical benefits? We get other benefits, such as having a kind of signal shaped view on our own data, which is different from our brain shaped view, because as we know when we learn the language, when we do fieldwork we have to learn the language. We should learn the language and, of course, we adjust to many things that alphonic variation we learn to overlook it because we want to get the phonemes and more generally we adjust and we don't hear differences like, for instance, words of four syllables in this language. They are nightmare for Persephone for the tool. They are wrong every time. For instance, this is the main protagonist in the story, Achiduma. Achiduma. And not one time out of, you know, more than ten does the name come out correctly in the transcription, automatic transcription. And if you look at the spectrogram, it looks like Achiduma, Achiduma. So calling out to somebody and when there's four syllables, but you're saying them at one go, because it's one person's name, then, of course, they get shortened, some of them get lengthened, the R and R that follow get together, and there's a lotlization at the same time. So it's difficult to retrieve them from the signal. So this is something I wouldn't have paid attention to as a linguist that in this language every verb is monosyllabic. Most nouns are monosyllabic or dysyllabic. And the family names which come from Tibetan and the given names, they're all four syllables. So it can be four or six. And of course, when people say them quickly, they sound pretty different. And here we have a statistical view on that that's saying, yes, at some point, they're a subsystem. It's almost as if they were encoded differently, pronounced differently, and called for separate decoding. So this is something we presented among other publications we did. One was at the latest Congress of Phonetic Sciences. So with Oliver, also Chris Cox and Céphrine Guillaume, who's an engineer at La Citeau. Phonetic lessons from automatic phonemic transcription. Preliminary reflections on Na and Surinna. And that's interesting. So to summarize very briefly the finding that Chris made on Dine, he found that the orthography used to have how many is that? Three or four vowels. And there's one less they think in the current speech. So people disagree. And now we're still distinguish the R and R, and others will say, no, no, it's gone. Listen to the Amis speakers. So he has orthographic transcription for Surinna. And the orthography makes the difference. And then he sent this in with the audio to train an acoustic model. And then applied it to new data. He has an Elan plug-in, which has been online for a few weeks now. It's wonderful that you can look at a recording in Elan and press a button and out comes the transcription. And he found that the patterns for the two vowels that people said probably had merged, he thought they had merged. They were still coherent in his main consultant's speech. And they matched the lexicon. So it seems like probably the consultant is making a difference. It doesn't prove things, like artificial intelligence shows that. But it's one hint among others. And it's an encouraging finding for people who do orthography. So let's not just dump this vowel distinction, which goes back to Lee Fang Wei who did the first fieldwork and make it simpler for the younger people to learn. No, maybe they should, since the people who still speak the language probably make the distinction and just keep it going and see to what extent they can deal with that. So there's a kind of dialogue between the linguistic fieldwork and the work with the consultants about which Hilaria will say much more because she has a much stronger tie to the local community than I do despite my best efforts. Between that and the NLP tasks. So basically this is most of what I want to say, most of what we have got to do for now. But I wanted to emphasize that it's an interesting process. And I think there's a side benefit for us as citizens that we can get awareness of contemporary developments. So this is also things that I owe to Oliver, though it's on a personal note like sending me a link to a fun video. I think all of you should watch this wonderful video. It's a keynote speech by James Mickens from Harvard about you know the whole conference was about security, computer security. And he took some very creepy examples and said you know, if you are currently maybe overselling a little a new artificial intelligent device that will do this or that, think before deploying. And if you want even shorter advice, it's think first. And in one word it's don't. Whatever it was that you were intending to deploy, don't do it. Don't do it because we're kind of running headlong into a society where people get a yes or no on you know, mortgage loan or whether their kids can go to university or whether they should be allowed out of jail after some time in there.  And you can't easily call that into question because it's a black box essentially that's behind it. And people who know like several of his colleagues who know how things work, they know that of course, that they'll be biased. If I declare the wrong set of phonemes I'm not going to find the missing phoneme thanks to Persephone because what it will do is categorize all the sounds into what I say is the finite inventory. But maybe we could change the tool in ways that would allow it to point out the outliers, may find there's a pattern in the outliers and we could do lots of things and that's a way to think of those systems that we should know about those. I put the book by Edward Stodden that's kind of personal interest so I found it was a very impressive book as a piece of writing, not just you know the man did his thing and let's buy the book and support him or something, but because it's such an informative book for citizens in this day and age but unless we take classes in computer science I try to listen to online classes by Graeme Novig and they're really good and there's lots of things online but doing some work with those algorithms is extremely enlightening because then you think okay if it works for now then it knows something about the phonemes if it can recognize them so how can we open the black box and see where the boundaries fall, learn about the acoustics to do some explicit modelling of the languages acoustics based on these statistics and there's no easy way to do it now but because there has been progress then we can look forward to a future when other stages such as translating from and into newly documented languages could be a possibility and try to make those possible because technology will not just happen, well things like that as Edward Snowden revealed, things like that do get deployed but we don't get to learn lots about it but we can spend some time working with computer science people and get I think multiple benefits from those so yes for field linguists there is the usefulness we have some good prospects just from a couple of days ago to report that project on computational language documentation funded by the FG in Germany and INEI in France will be funded so we can now have a 15 month contract of a programmer who can complete a good front end for Persephone and hopefully many other back ends, multiple back ends we can continue the improvements to the back end and think of the links to other treatments, if you have a dictionary then if you have the phonemes look if you could match and make hypotheses about the words that are in that string of phonemes and et cetera so I guess I should yeah this is a small community we're trying to build of people interested in computational approaches for documenting and analyzing oral languages so the good news is that there are some computer scientists who have a long term commitment to this strand of research and some linguists and with a sufficient community growing at the intersection many things can get done and this is just final photographs and waiting for your questions


we've got Jack and Christopher and Peter Klossy on the same panel. I mean, what does Kelly always say? Boom. This is the last panel of our sixth annual Clean Tech and Technology Metal Summit. And if you ask me, ask me, what is the next big thing? I'm going to tell you Cobalt, okay? So while I love, don't get upset with me, Greg. I love Rare Earths and Ian, I love Rare Earths, but I love Lithium and Graphite, but I think we have a bull run here. So let's start with Peter Klossy, because we've been branding you as the Cobalt King. Cobalt King, go first, please. Thanks, Trace. I was speaking on this yesterday. The reason why Cobalt is likely the next big thing is simple economics. Increased demand, falling supply, rising prices. Cobalt is, there's about a 50,000 ton consumption a year in the industrial area. Super alloys, paints, pigments, medicine, nuclear. The demand is being driven by the cathode of the electric batteries for electric vehicles, for your laptop, for the tools you use in your backyard for your electric toothbrush. They all need Cobalt demand to skyrocket. And Jack, weren't you supposed to talk today? What? Weren't you going to talk about recycling? Well, actually, you know, yes, it's about Cobalt at the moment. Interesting thing is that North America has about the same percentage use of Cobalt as it does abroad. It's about 10% of the world's supply. And we already recycled, of the 10,000 tons of Cobalt used in the U.S. each year, 2,000 tons are recycled. The alloyed people really recycle it because they can't get, they can't be sure of a supply of new Cobalt. So when you refine Cobalt ores, the refining is not very efficient. In the world, there's about 150,000 tons a year of Cobalt, as Cobalt in order brought up, and maybe 120,000 tons of Cobalt in the market because a lot of it's just left behind. First of all, it's not the primary product in the mining. That's nickel and copper normally, silver. So there's a whole lot of Cobalt lying around that's ready to be brought back into the market by, well, recycling is already underway. Do you include waste rock and surface rock in recycling? Absolutely. But I don't want to call it recycling. Let's say that it's looking for value in residues, tailings, and scrap. And I have a friend who's in the Cobalt market trader, and he sent me an email this morning. He said, do you want the flora sweets? Yeah, I do. And so this is a market that's about to take off, and even the, let's say the reclamation and recycling of low grades of Cobalt. Think about something. If any of you still has a gold object on you, a tooth or a pen or something, you realize that some of the gold that probably was used by Cleopatra to buy sparkling water or whatever she did. And we never throw gold away, do we? Never. It's been a human, it's just the way we think. Nobody's ever thrown any gold away. They might bury it with a ferrule for a while, but it comes back out. We trust that gold is going to be worth something. Christopher, is this what you meant with downstream being the next big thing? The recycling of Cobalt, for instance? Is this what you were talking about? The processing in North America of, say, recycling facilities.  Not really, because you actually can avoid the mine altogether, because effectively it's Cobalt that's come out of the ground, and it doesn't need a miner to recycle it. What you would be mining is the drawers and cupboards and closets around your house. If we take a good example, my house, I have a wife and two children, and in our house there are probably around 15 redundant cell phones. They're not used anymore. We keep them for some emotional reason. There are also several laptops that have died. There are batteries sitting around the house. Now all of those batteries are then replicated in everybody's house. I'm sure everybody here has multiple cell phone batteries that are dead sitting around the house. Now if you were to take all those, and then you were to recycle all of those, and of course in yesterday's discussion throw the graphite away, but take the lithium out, take the graphite out, and then if you want to fiddle around, take the copper and the manganese out as well. You could actually then have an amount of cobalt that is six times the current need for batteries for new cell phones. So you can actually deal with all that cell phone. That's 60 seconds. How do you encourage people to do that? We were talking earlier about the brown bag process. It took 20 years. Even now with your green bin, a lot of people don't do it.  How do we change our society to do that? No one was paying you for the brown bag. Who's paying me for my battery? Okay, do you want to pay someone for the battery? And then people will be rummaging around. Where's that cell phone I saw last year? Well, it sounds to me like you have a business model here. We should talk later, Christopher. Okay, so let's go back to the mining of cobalt. And we have Mark here.  You've got cobalt too. Can you just give us a bit of an overview? Yeah, sorry. It wasn't trendy. We picked it up like five or six years ago. We've been nurturing it, waiting for the price to get good on some of the, compared to some of the grades. I think one of the things talking about waste stock piles and stuff to remember is a lot of cobalt metallurgy is not that. It can be simple, but it often isn't. Of course, the word cobalt comes from the German word for goblin because it was very difficult to separate back in. Can you say that slower? I didn't get that. Oh, sorry. Cobalt originally is goblin in the Saxon. It was around Freiberg in the late 1700s, when they managed to isolate it because cobalt is often in a sulfide form. That is, well, the primary deposit of sulfides, and it's hard to separate. So how much do you have? I mean, this is exciting. It's kind of like finance. We have gold bikes back here. And you may not know, for instance, that alkane, in addition to being, you know, zirconium and hafnium, it's probably in a revenue of gold a year. Okay, those are the little surprises. Now we're finding out, Mark, you've got this cobalt. How much do you have? Well, we've got a deposit that's currently got 105 drill holes in it over about a kilometer long, and a whole bunch of new things that are popping up all over the joint. His agreement last month, what, moved your stock up 66%. Okay, so Monti here is representing e-cobalt, which is one of the big performers of the year, and is a cobalt producer. That's right. Or we will be. We're not a producer yet. We expect to be in production by mid-2019. So we're only two years out. We're just finishing our feasibility study. We expect it fairly soon. And once we get that, then we'll recommence construction, and then it'll be very quick. You know, we've already got all our groundwork done, so we just need to get the money together to get underground. So we do expect to be in production by mid-2019. Okay. Hi, Peter. You want to give us a bit of an overview of CDLT? Can I pick up on what Jack was saying? Absolutely. In fact, I recommend we have a good group of power talkers on this panel. I recommend people just lean in. Just keep your answers short, please. The cobalt embainment in Northern Ontario is one of the richest cobalt slash silver deposits in the world. It was mined out in about 1908 to 1915. Then it was remined in the 30s and remined in the 60s. The explorers went in, they pulled the ore off surface. They called the silver sidewalk, because it literally was a sidewalk of solid silver through the middle of town. The old rite of Wayne Line is right downtown cobalt before the fire. The mining methodologies in those days were very different from what we have today, and there was no value in the cobalt, so it was dumped. It's in the bush, it's in the lakes, it's in the rivers, it's under the roads. There have been several turns of companies going into Northern Ontario, draining lakes, taking the silver cobalt. So there are estimates all over the map of how much cobalt is quote on surface, but if you're going to include that in recycling, Chris, I'd be willing to bet there's more up there than there are in all of the closets and drawers with the batteries. You haven't seen Christopher's home. Isn't this what you meant by upcycling? A more comprehensive? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. In the old days they used to mine everything, right? There's nothing left under surface. So they came up and was dumped at surface, whereas now we leave them in the tunnels. He says in the old days and looks at Jack, you should push back. Well actually it's even before my time, imagine how long ago that is. And you're right. I mean there's cobalt everywhere and people are looking like this, where is it? Well they're standing on it. Okay, but it's technology. I think Chris was saying this earlier today. I would frankly just rather open the drawer and take it out of the drawer than actually have to lift a couple of roads in Northern Ontario to get it. Yeah, but I can pull millions of pounds out of the row. How much do you have in your drawer? Well we need to mobilise the capital to do that. A much smaller amount of capital is used to get the batteries and then dissolve them and take the constituent parts out. That's the easy picking. Because what I'm saying here is not that we've got a solution to the cobalt crisis. What we have is a source of cobalt to deal with all the laptop batteries and all the cell phone batteries that you're going to need for the next 10, 15 years. Because once you set up the recycling process when you've got a global population of 7 billion people with 7 billion cell phones at that point all those cell phones after two years and most people only have a two year contract on their phone will recycle it and you won't need to mine any more cobalt for that sector. Now as for the electronic vehicles, electronic vehicles that's a totally different equation. And we have to ask you about Musk. Elon Musk and that's your favourite topic. Who does he have a deal with for all his cobalt? Can someone bring me up to speed? Who's Musk taking a deal with? They're buying the batteries from Panasonic. So where are they getting their cobalt? Through Panasonic is that correct? Well they're buying the batteries so it's wherever Panasonic is sourcing from. Well they claim of course to want to be encouraging sustainability but they need a new resolution to be nicer and not interrupt people. Look how that's going. I don't think that's any secret say most of us have met Tesla and various battery manufacturers so I don't think I'm talking out of school but last time I caught up with Tesla when David Dink was still there no interesting cobalt whatsoever. Yeah it wasn't plastic. They just needed that they had no interest in it. Actually they have put out reports that they don't need it. Have you seen that? Discounted the issue of supply and demand. Christopher I am absolutely certain that we communicated that with Jack in an e-mail. Do you recall? Yeah in the ostrich berries it's hitting the sand. Okay all right. In its SEC filings Tesla has said that it has secured a supply chain for all of its critical metals including it goes on to list many metals including cobalt and goes on to say that that supply chain has been sourced domestically. I bet Monty has an opinion. Monty tell us what you know because I suspect you know more. Yeah look at his eyes twinkling. There's no way that they can source it domestically because there is no domestic source period right now. The only other source is really 98% of it is byproduct. 60% comes out of the Congo. The only primary deposit is in Morocco and that's only 2% so they're going to have a hard time. All the cathode makers there's not a single cathode maker in North America that I'm aware of. All the cathode makers are in Asia right now in China. Panasonic purchases their cathode you know also from other people so they're purchasing from a middleman to be able to build the batteries then they send the batteries to Tesla to build their battery packs. So it's a long chain you know so it'll be interesting to see what they do but it's not going to be they're not going to be able to secure a supply domestically it just simply doesn't exist. Okay so do we have a bull market right now starting or is it just beginning from the perspective that the education is just warming up out there. Peter what do you think about this? I think the general populace hasn't yet caught on to the shortage of cobalt. The average investor and person in this room is aware of it but perhaps isn't as profoundly aware as those of us in cobalt are. If the cobalt market were a year long we're probably in the third week of January. Okay that's a great metaphor in Christopher. Well if the batteries that we're talking about cobalt iron batteries people would be worried about the cobalt. It's all in the name. Okay and I want to ask Mark because Mark you've just you've got you're working with multi-billion dollar companies. Now you must be privy to some confidential information that you might want to share with friends. Tell us one thing we're not supposed to know. Well look I'll tell you a slightly different opinion I obviously can't talk about some of those things but we would have seen what parlor or some of the ex parlor guys are doing. What I saw happen I think about 12 months ago with the lithium with the lithium price boom coming back again was a load of funds around the world a lot of institutions that want to play the battery market and graphite pricing drives them crazy it's totally opaque and they don't really like any of that. Everyone wants to know what's the price what's the market and of the main battery minerals you know it's not really transparent but it doesn't matter if you're an analyst and you're just trying to get some numbers down on paper to prove you know to support the paperwork. So I think what we've seen is a really dare I say it an analyst or almost a marketing type drive that's hit it and the guys said great we're going to rush all these contracts on the LME and that's smashed the price up. But where is the other price I mean I'd love to know where other people use non LME prices you know and the oxides trade somewhere between 15 to 30 percent above LME. So everyone's basing their price projections and working on stuff all based around an LME price that can be so easily stacked essentially has gone from what 15 to 55 thousand in 12 months on a volume of contract which doesn't really reflect anything in the real market. I forget by ton mark but by the pound it was nine dollars and eighty five cents in February so Jack you speak with you know high level politicians all the time I want to know about the Department of Defense and their interest in cobalt. I put you on the spot. It's a big secret I guess because I don't think less any more than about 7 billion people know this but the US Defense Logistics Agency which is the stockpile has received notice that it will be purchasing cobalt for the US stockpile as of the beginning of their fiscal year which is October 1st. Now this may not sound like much you but they haven't been doing this. So the first thing they did they said where do we do that okay they're now in that phase of where do we get this stuff. I don't know how much they're supposed to buy but they're they're in the market right now. So Monty you know about how much cobalt there is out there is cobalt like some of the metals where you just have to find where a meteorite has hit the planet and you get lucky where do we find how much cobalt is there. Well there's actually a lot of it out there but most of it's a byproduct of copper and nickel so you know it's not one of those things that you can just ramp up your cobalt because cobalt's doing well you're going to end up driving down your copper price so if that's your primary asset then that's not going to work very well for you. Although I do know that for companies like Glencore cobalt has made a much more significant impact on their bottom line with the move that cobalt's made. So it'll be fairly interesting there's obviously going to be a lot more people in the cobalt's worth of cobalt in it if cobalt was to double the $50 which it went to in about 2009 I believe it was 2008 the price of the car would only increase by a thousand bucks and when you look at the price of a cell phone the small amount that's in it it's just not going to have an impact so cobalt does have a long way to move. We have one analyst in Johannesburg she has one dog her dog is named cobalt a month ago many of you here know Mark Kristoff from Traxxas and I asked him what his favorite technology metal was and he said cobalt. Now Jack does this surprise you? No you know a Tesla battery has 16 kilo of cobalt. Yeah so that works out to about 35 pounds right? Gentlemen we can't hear you could you lean back in there because I think people will be interested in how much cobalt is 16 kilos so that works out to about 35 pounds a little more than that at 25 dollar cobalt you're looking at doing you know 875, 900 dollars worth of cobalt Okay so then take that math further Tesla said they're making half a million model 3's at 15 kilograms of car that's 7.5 million kilograms of cobalt are 8,400 tons or 8% of the current supply for one model of one car. Please note that would be the entire manufacturing industry in North America uses all by itself so they would double the uses of cobalt in the United States Even Chris's house isn't that big Just when my phone rang earlier it was Electraveia trying to get in on the panel on the battery materials So Christopher tell us a little bit more about where you think cobalt is headed this year I mean people come to this conference to find out about things they don't understand but it's something you can give us for us new investors in cobalt on how we should select a cobalt stock because it looks like we have a bunch of new plays coming out and it doesn't sound like any of them know what they're doing Not all of them I won't address these companies but what I will say is that the point that was made about investors getting in on it is a valid one I used to be a hedge fund manager at the time and if you look at the issue that came up for a hedge fund manager sitting in his midtown Manhattan office mid last year he wanted to get in on the battery scene does he buy a thousand tons of lithium or does he buy the equivalent amount of cobalt and if you bought the equivalent amount of cobalt for the same money value he'd end up with a lot less to store and storage is a big issue if you're going to start hoarding and these hedge funds want to hoard and so it was more sensible by the cobalt now as Jack's just revealed the strategic reserve or whatever it's called has suddenly woken up the light bulb has come on and they've decided now we've got a panic buy in the cobalt market so you've got a variety of idiots with a lot of money running in and pushing it up but there are people who professional people in the trading community who think actually that the spike may just there'll be a certain amount of profit taken by the hedge funds but it may not actually result in a slump because if I was the Chinese if hedge funds started selling I would move in and I'd start buying because the Chinese do not have a cobalt source of substance of their own they're desperate to buy anything that the DRC will sell them and so you've got one smart buyer and you've got a collection of dumb buyers and they're all going after the same thing which means higher prices I heard you were suggesting that China actually does have a supply it's called Kongo it's called the Philippines it's called Indonesia I mean they have already been doing what the Japanese metal agency but yeah I totally agree on the price outlook as far as I'm concerned it's still part of a mega trend actually the price in real terms is not stupid compared to some so yeah and I think if you look at the products and how far away recycling is to some degree although that's really accelerating obviously through Jack's good work but also just the sheer size of it that needs to be done for the EV market but yeah I hear that China within their borders don't have a heck of a lot which is a good thing just to get back on the strategic buy side so in Europe Cobalt is on the critical minerals list which so in the EU that means that if you've got a project involving Cobalt you can get preferred status on development so there is some upside to it and Cobalt's one of them oh I'm staring at Peter Cobalt is different from the rare earths we heard earlier that the magic and the rare earths is in the processing and the end product that you create for a buyer that needs that product Cobalt comes out of the ground people need it in its raw form or in its oxide form Cobalt is more like gold or nickel or copper than the rare earths the demand is there we don't have to go create it okay just so I'm going to warn oh Ian wants to follow up so yeah my view is that what we saw on the rare earths so if Cobalt goes to $50 a pound all those smart dudes in China and Japan are going to get out and say we need to take Cobalt out of the battery system we need to take it out we're going to find something else now that takes a year or two but what's to say that isn't going to happen and isn't going to happen very quickly it'll take a lot longer than a year or two just the development of it to try and develop a new battery there's several people that are trying to work on it now it's all in the laboratory and it'll take a long, long time before it's developed before they can get it to be commercially into production when you've got all these car companies they're already looking at the NMC and the NCA batteries that have Cobalt in them they're not going to just switch gears in an instant and move on to something else in another year like the commercial production that can compete with the Cobalt battery alright perhaps a bit of a naive question but if Cobalt is on a return cycle back to $50 a pound where it was at its peak what was the mechanism that knocked it off of that $50 a pound point and is whatever happened the last time a mechanism that's sitting there waiting to happen again now what happened last time was there was a civil war in the DRC 60% of Cobalt comes out of the DRC so when they went to war it basically shut down the supply coming out of the Congo the price shot up to $50 then as soon as they resolved that and they got back to work in the mines there then of course the Cobalt started to flood the market again and then it collapsed down to about $9 the difference this time around is that the push up in the Cobalt is demand driven as opposed to a problem with supply but keep in mind that the Congo is a powder keg now I mean they're on the verge of a civil war as it is they've got a problem with Ebola I mean they have every problem that you can imagine not to mention the child labour and everything else so it's a problem and that's where 60% of the Cobalt comes from so at any day we could have a big issue that could drive Cobalt even higher hopefully that won't happen that's not based on demand rather than a supply issue so we just have two questions left Dr. Flint Troy Grant tells me you're the smartest person in the entire universe so we expect a really good question no pressure Troy has misinformed there's lots of smarter people in the room the Democratic or sorry the undemocratic Republic of Congo looks like it's going to probably explode I was wondering if anyone on the panel could give me a comment on what you think that would have on the impact of Cobalt price and availability I'll just do the ethical supply chain that Amnesty International has been agitating for which is part of that political corruption process our call which we made yesterday and we made publicly is if the ethical supply chain is imposed it will knock roughly 18% of the global supply of Cobalt offline and prices will approach 100% and it will cost a bigger dollars my thoughts on that subject would be that the Chinese will pay some local warlord to make sure that they get whatever's going as per usual so between the question and your answer let's assume you're right but that then brings in further geopolitical intrigue how will the United States respond how will the UK respond how will Russia respond and just your answer adds itself to the conflict that's going on in there that's the reality of the supply chain let's ask Wilbur Ross if he even knows what Cobalt is to get a blank look I'm sure Andre Gautier, a man of it would like to ask a question if you remind me when the bubble of the river the price increased dramatically and at that time I'm looking at the mini store you don't miss any computer etc etc that's for the river if you have the most of the cobalt would be in the battery the iron and if it's for the electric and the hybrid car etc mostly electric but you have the other car what is the impact if I remember for a normal car it's 4,000 pieces or parts the price of the parts is very important the price of the car the certain segment of the market it's very important if we think that the electric car needs less parts etc what is the margin that the car manufacturer asks if the cobalt go to 30 or 50 dollars a pound you had it earlier for the battery I don't know how much cobalt is in the rest of the vehicle there's probably a little bit in analloy somewhere it would be about a thousand bucks per vehicle right now at 25 dollar cobalt so if you double the price of cobalt to 50 dollars you're looking at an extra thousand dollars per car so it's not really that much it's absolutely it's very small for a cell phone computers or anything like that is there any in the alloys? yeah there is I mean it's a very small amount and that's why I rounded it up if you take 25 dollars about 35 pounds get 875 and then maybe you've got a little bit more cobalt so double price of cobalt if you're looking at an extra grand that's about it for an electric car so it's not that significant really if you're looking at a 40-50 thousand dollar car so on this note I'd like to take it to Amanda and Paul who just keep making more and more money and are looking for creative ideas cobalt? I just would say that seems to me to be a lot of money for a car that's where you're talking about it maybe being four kilos right and so therefore a heavy railroad's car you might have been talking about increasing it during the crisis by 150 or 200 dollars that was enough to send automotive manufacturers into a tailspin and going to look for functional equivalents right and the reason why is because they don't afford they don't have the option of changing the price point of the car during the car's life cycle so if they launch it at 24,999 three years down the track on that model they can't put the price up to 25,999 so I think this is a big problem no you're right about that it's not insignificant amount and I didn't mean to put it that way but the other thing that's happening too is the range is getting to be bigger and the batteries batteries are getting to be more efficient and at that point they will be able to reduce the amount of cobalt to a certain degree like if you look at a NMC it's about 15% cobalt and NCA which Tesla uses is about 9% so through efficiencies over the next several years they will be able to decrease the amount of cobalt that goes into those batteries to a certain amount so I'm talking about the cost of it today based on the batteries today but the technology is improving it's true that the key metric there might be the dollars per kilowatt hour rather than looking at the vehicle as a unit so if it's a dollar per kilowatt hour and you're also getting performance gains then that can remediate basically some of that price increase but at the end of the day demand is still exceeding supply but there are options there's some politics behind some of the chemistry used in the batteries as well that can drive some manufacturing centres to go in different directions and I agree that it's very hard to shift batteries overall but there have already been investments made in this area that are sort of heading off but to get back to Ian's point about why won't it just crash again I think because it is part of the demand drivers so by hook or by crook as the years go by I think it's why lithium, lithium crashed down again right but then it's up again and then it's down but I think if you look back over ten years I think it's up in nine out of ten years but you only just noticed it recently and I think we'll be the same that way One other thing too something I haven't heard anyone mention at all in the last two days is power walls like the Tesla power wall Chrysler in Germany also makes power walls the same very similar actually but as that market is waiting in the wings and will also take off so you've got another massive market that's right in behind all of this is just getting ready to ramp up now so as we see the power walls ramp up I mean that's going to also cause an increase in demand And there's about seven kilograms of cobalt in a Tesla power wall I finally have one question I don't know much about lithium batteries because as you know there is no rears inside so those products are not interesting to me but this morning we heard that lithium demand was high on supply or will be a high on supply and now it's cobalt sorry I missed most of the presentation cobalt as well and I feel like there is little brain spent on recycling batteries which is amazing to me because batteries are easy to collect and then it's just a matter of brain work and try to recycle as much as possible from those Well the problem here I'm a great advocate for the recycling but if you look at the size of cell phones how many cell phone batteries would you have to recycle you can make the equivalent of the same amount of cell phones with those with each battery but how many each of those if you take them out of circulation do you need to make one Tesla battery and you probably took about hundreds so it's a hundreds to one ratio that's good but I work on the lighting and recycling back in 2006 and the major difficulty was that the recycling was not organized so if it had been organized 10 years earlier you would have a code bar and inch lamp telling you what kind of material it was so that you could adjust very easily the chemical process recycling has to be organized long in advance to test back eyes but it will change over time so you better organize the recycling now, not in 10 years time but recycling is a product of price if the price had stayed at $9 we wouldn't be talking about recycling cobalt batteries and what would have happened if it started recycling cobalt batteries 10 years ago the price would have gone to $4 because there would have been far too much cobalt around now you've got a situation of what was a relatively balanced demand just being totally blown up by an extra tsunami of demand potentially coming along the other problem too the big expense with recycling it's not a problem getting the cobalt out of the cathode but it's a problem getting the cathode out of the battery that's where the big expense is with recycling batteries right now it's been described to me as like trying to take the omelet and putting it back inside the eggshell which is something you can use Jack and I were talking about graphite after these batteries have got electrons go through them the actual individual atoms can reposition themselves and their properties will change so it doesn't mean once you've made it it can come back again so there's a lot of work to be done and a lot of these big OEMs are going to have to do it once forward and all the major manufacturers do bigger and bigger EVs they probably can't even do them without having a recycling program set up so the duracell batteries right but are those actually economically efficient to recycle or is that government do-gooding at work I think it's mostly marketing I'm in the amounts I've seen you guys might have seen something different but I'm seeing about 5% max content I happen to know the guy who does that and he told me he sends back alloy sorry what does he do recycles so he owns the company that actually does the recycle but he does he sends the metal back to the battery maker and they advertise using green recycled materials it's a maximum of 2% of the new battery but they don't mention that they say this battery has been made from recycled materials what are the efficiencies then none it's all friends this makes me misty eyed this is why I love investor intel we are a platform for debate and dialogue for intelligent investors to ask questions so that we can understand what we're investing in so on that note we're going to take this up into the wine and cheese reception and I'd like to thank everybody


Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Good morning, welcome to theCUBE's second day of coverage of Cisco Live 2019 from San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is Stu Miniman and Stu and I have a couple of guests from Cisco's data center networking group with us. To my right, Thomas Scheiba, VP of product management. And to his right, Ranga Rao, Senior Director of Product Management. Guys, welcome to the queue, welcome back Ranga. Thank you very much. Thomas, great to have you. Happy to be here, yeah. So here we are in the DevNet zone. This is, Ranga, you were saying this is, this is probably one of the busiest locations within all of Cisco Live. It's been jammed since this morning. You have the ACI takeover going on right now. It is. Yes, yes. So with that said, Thomas, with ACI application-centric infrastructure, all these changes to the network, what's going on on day two? It's fun. It's actually, yeah, as you say, that's a lot of busier. We have a good set of news coming this week and yeah, you're going to hear more about, let me give a little bit of a hint here. So what we're doing, we talked about how do we extend ACI into the cloud with ACI Anywhere. We did this two or three months ago with AWS. We're following up with the same for Azure as well of having extension into the IBM cloud. So that's really, really exciting. Opens up a lot of capabilities not just for the networking teams, how to extend into the cloud. We also have some interesting things around how do we actually can start with ACI AnyCloud first for the app developers and then come back if you want to deploy either in the cloud or on-prem. So really an extension of what is doable for the networking team as well as actually for the app teams. So any ACI, any platform, any location, any workload? Any hypervisor, any container platform you want? Yeah, flexibility. That's what this is about. Ranga, I spoke with you earlier this year with one of your partner shows talking about all the latest AI, cognitive learning and all of those pieces there.  Thomas was given a little talk about some of the cloud provider. What more can you share about what's happening with how your product integrates with a vast ecosystem? Absolutely. When we built ACI, we sort of anticipated this momentum and this crowd in the definite area that we are seeing. Like from people shifting from a very CLI focused approach to a developer focused and a solution focused approach. So we built ACI as an open platform. We have 65 plus partners and with new integrations coming on like every so often, just this at Cisco Live, we are launching an integration with F5. F5 has built an app for the Cisco ACI App Center and a whole number of tools and integrations for developers. We have essentially built integrations with Ansible, Terraform and new Python modules. So these are all exciting new things coming at Cisco Live. So when you guys talk with customers, being in product management, I know you talk to customers all the time. There's presumably a very bi-directional symbiotic relationship. When you're talking with customers, Thomas, what are some of the values that they're looking for ACI to help them deliver? Especially as it relates to being able to get more value out of the data that they've got. Right. So there are a couple of things that are probably standing out. One is the, if you're talking to the networking team, it's all around network automation and segmentation. These are the two big things everybody's after. Particularly if you look as the data is more distributed, it's become harder and harder to do this all manually. You want to automate your day, one activity, as well as you want to make sure you can enforce segmentation of the data lifts in the cloud and on-prem all over the place. So these are the two big ones that really every network operation team is after. And then the second piece that we see obviously more and more is, what about day two? Give me better visibility, particularly as I said, if the data is so distributed, give me better visibility. What is going on? And then be able to tie this back to the user, which is the application team. Is there an impact on the application or not? And so there are a lot of interesting tools that we have and we're going to demo this all here. That is available for the networking team. The other piece really you asked for the values, as I said, the app team, right? What is today if an app team is developing, they're typically then handed over in production. This is where this friction happens. How long does it take to go from year to year? If I can shorten that one and just take the pluprons out of the app development process and map it directly to the automation capability of ACI, I can shorten the cycle to deploy. And so that's a tremendous value that we do see from customers. Great, lots of discussion in the keynote about the ever-changing architectures that are happening here. Give us the update. We've been down this path for ACI for a few years now. Where are your customers at? What are the new things that are causing them challenges and opportunities, Thomas? Yeah, I probably would use instead of ever-changing, I would say ever-expanding, but you're absolutely right. Because what we saw when we started this office roll-around, how do I automate my data center? How do I get a cloud experience in my data center? What we see changing, and what kind of thing is driven by this whole app refactoring process, that customers want to deploy apps maybe in the cloud, maybe develop in the cloud, and so they need an extension to the automated data center into the cloud. And so really what you see from us is an expansion of that ACI concept to Ranga's point. We actually really didn't change. We're just extending it to container development platforms to different cloud environments, but it's the same way here. How do I automate the end-to-end network reach, as well as the segmentation? Yeah, Ranga, maybe can you expand on some of that automated piece of it? Even, you know, I look at one of the things that jumped out at me this week is there's some changes to the CCIE program. It's not just, okay, I've done it, and I do my test. It's, well, we understand that things are changing year to year, and therefore how I get my certification, how I keep up on these is going to change. Where does automation play in our policies? Absolutely. I mean, when you think about automation, there are two key parts to it. One is the automation that happens within the fabric that the controller manages. And there's a lot of that to extend on like what Thomas was saying, right? In terms of how quickly the fabric can be brought up, how quickly applications can be deployed on the fabric, and so on. Beyond that, there's automation that we have built, leveraging the modern DevOps and CICD tools that are very popular among the developer community. Like I said, we have built integrations with Ansible, Puppet, Terraform, and so on, but we have also made rich APIs available across our platform. Every piece of information that the controller or the switches have is very much accessible for developers. That's really a path-breaking approach to networking, where developers have access to everything and can program to the network. So I think that's where the world is going, and that's what we plan to support with automation. Let me comment on this, because there's an interesting piece of what we did. We have this fabric controller called DAPEG. It's actually an app-hosting platform as well. And so what we're actually taking advantage of that, everything is code and ACI, and you can write as a partner customer apps right on top. And so like the F5 integration that we have done is literally an F5 written app residing there, right? And so it's really, really, really flexible to build workflows around what you want to do in the infrastructure for customers themselves or any partner themselves. Yeah, it's an interesting piece, because I think back in my career, how much of the network architect think about the applications, like, oh, okay, how much throughput, and sure, I needed to go from North South to East West, or oh wait, this thing needed some extra buffer credits, but usually the business owner, application owner, and the network people, they were throwing things over the wall between each other and tweaking some dials here. Now when I look around the show, we're talking about building applications at the core of it, and it's happening together. Can you speak a little bit to some of the activities going around and that trend? No, absolutely, it's actually exciting. I actually, because of my background as a, I did programming long, long time back, and it's actually- That's when you called it programming, not coding. Correct. You called it programming. It is actually exciting to see, and I can tell you over the last four or five years, when we run these sectorials, we ask, is like, architecture and programming, how many people are interested in programming? And it used to be, I don't know, 10%, now it's literally as 60 to 7% of the people in the room are saying, we're using automation frameworks like Ansible, and they actually see what we're doing and the value and they want to learn more. So there's a significant shift in terms of what people expect, what they want to do with the network infrastructure, versus what it was in the past. It's just a reflection on, as I said, the agility that is needed out of the infrastructure and how to react to what the developers, the users want to do that put the apps on. So- In the spirit of Cisco's bridge to possible, which was the Barcelona theme, is this a bridge to IT and business working better together? Absolutely. I mean the way, I don't know what I can say much better. It's absolutely, how do I bridge, we call it initially, how do I bridge between what you call out the networking and application team? It's the bridge to possible.  We can do it together or these two teams can do it together, absolutely. That's actually a very good reference. To add to that, like one by one in 2012, thinking about what should ACIB, everyone in the industry was somehow thinking that all the network engineers will magically become programmers, right? So programmability is a big part of what the network needs, but also being aware of the application and being able to respond to the right needs of the application at the right moment is a pretty big thing. And that's what we have built with ACI with the first class support for programmability. And the programmability that we're seeing and hearing about, Ranga, how was that a differentiator for Cisco? So I think first of all, like the network we have always believed is the nervous system of the enterprise. So a lot of really interesting information goes through the network. So unlocking the value of the network for these different use cases is what's made possible with the programmability approaches that we have taken, right? The only reason why we have 65 plus partners programming to our platform is because we have these open APIs. We have a ton of channel partners using the open APIs to build apps and to like support various different use cases for our customers with ad hoc automation or even using some of the automation frameworks. So it has really evolved the network from being CLI centric to being solution and programmability centric. Maybe one point to make since you set open APIs and I can't overemphasize this, we're truly open APIs, right? Because sometimes there's in this, not naming names, but people saying, oh, you have to be a certification to use these APIs. That is not the case for Cisco APIs on ACI. They are open, everybody, customers, partners, quite frankly, even competitors could use those to program. We're standing behind our APIs, they can be used as is. Yeah. So it is quite a big change.  Here, we've watched the ascendancy of the DevNet group and hundreds of thousands of people now helping to build code. It's the API economy. So, very much it's not the Cisco I thought about a generation ago. Thank you. We take this as a compliment. We're actually really excited to see how much development is possible by opening this platform up with APIs. And I think there's somebody else that is, so it's not on mine, but you're more APIs to have, you have, easier it is to integrate, the faster we jointly develop and actually achieve what we want. So that's the bridge. And the beautiful thing about APIs is, customers and other developers build things that we even haven't envisioned. We are seeing a lot of that. So that's another way of unlocking innovation for our customers and we are seeing a lot of that. So when we talk with any customer, any business, we always talk about speed scales, speed to innovation. With the wave of connectivity, the expansion of 5G, Wi-Fi 6, the proliferation of mobile data that's going to be traversing the networks the next few years. It's going to be video. How is an application-centric infrastructure going to allow customers to take advantage of the demands on the network, but that need for speed, so that your customers can be as competitive as they need to be? Let me try to kind of tune down to the essence there. What really is going on, you have all these different applications, as you pointed out, all of these are users and endpoints. And what you want to do is, you want to have an ability to correlate between what the user wants to run on the infrastructure and how the infrastructure has to behave. And then also, you want to be correlate back of the infrastructure issues who is impacted. And really what ACI was about is, not rebuilding application, it was about to provide this glue, this bridge between what's going on in the infrastructure to what the user experiences. And if I can do this, it becomes so much more efficient and it's so much easier to roll out all these new applications on an ACI infrastructure. Exciting stuff, guys. Thomas Ronga, thank you for joining Stu and me on theCUBE today. Lots of exciting stuff. We'll be listening for those announcements that you said are coming out later today. Okay, you will see them. Excellent, thanks guys, we appreciate your time. Thanks, same here, appreciate it. Our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from our second day of coverage of Cisco Live from San Diego. Thanks for watching. Yeah.