From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. Enterprise tech practitioners, like most of us, they want to make their lives easier so they can focus on delivering more value to their businesses. And to do so, they want to tap best-of-breed services in the public cloud, but at the same time, connect their on-prem intellectual property to emerging applications, which drive top-line revenue and bottom-line profits. But creating a consistent experience across clouds and on-premise states has been an elusive capability for most organizations, forcing trade-offs and injecting friction into the system. The need to create seamless experiences is clear, and the technology industry is starting to respond with platforms, architectures, and visions of what we've called SuperCloud. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we give you a preview of SuperCloud 2, the second event of its kind that we've had on the topic. Yes, folks, that's right. SuperCloud 2 is here. As of this recording, it's just about four days away. 33 guests, 21 sessions, combining live discussions and fireside chats from the Cubes Palo Alto studio with prerecorded conversations on the future of cloud and data. You can register for free at supercloud.world. And we are super excited about the SuperCloud 2 lineup of guests. Whereas SuperCloud 22 in August was all about refining the definition of SuperCloud, testing its technical feasibility and understanding various deployment models, SuperCloud 2 features practitioners, technologists, and analysts discussing what customers need with real-world examples of SuperCloud. And we'll expose thinking around a new breed of cross-cloud apps, data apps, if you will, that change the way machines and humans interact with each other. Now, the example we'd use, if you think about applications today, say a CRM system, sales reps, what are they doing? They're entering data into opportunities, they're choosing products, they're importing contacts, et cetera. And sure, the machine can then take all that data and spit out a forecast by rep, by region, by product, et cetera. But today's applications are largely about filling in forms and or codifying processes. In the future, the SuperCloud community sees a new breed of applications emerging where data resides on different clouds, in different data stores, databases, lake houses, et cetera. And the machine uses AI to inspect the e-commerce system, the inventory data, supply chain information and other systems and puts together a plan without any human intervention whatsoever. Think about a system that orchestrates people, places and things like an Uber for business. So at SuperCloud 2, you'll hear about this vision along with some of today's challenges facing practitioners. Jamak Degani, the founder of DataMesh is a headliner. Kid Colbert also is headlining. He laid out at the first SuperCloud an initial architecture for what that's going to look like. That was last August. And he's going to present his most common thinking on the topic. Veronica Durgan of Sacks will be featured and talk about data sharing across clouds and what she needs in the future. One of the main highlights of SuperCloud 2 is a dive into Walmart's SuperCloud. Other featured practitioners include Western Union, Iona's Pharmaceuticals, WarnerMedia. We've got deep technology dives with folks like Bob Muglia, David Flynn, Tristan Handy of DBT Labs, Nir Zook, the founder of Palo Alto Networks, focused on security, Thomas Hazel, who's going to talk about a new type of database for SuperCloud. It's several analysts including Keith Townsend, Maribel Lopez, George Gilbert, Sanjeev Mohan. It's so many more guests, we don't have time to list them all. They're all up on supercloud.world with a full agenda so you can check that out. Now let's take a look at some of the things that we're exploring in more detail. Starting with the Walmart cloud native platform. They call it WCNP. We definitely see this as a SuperCloud and we dig into it with Jack Greenfield. He's the head of architecture at Walmart. Here's a quote from Jack. Quote, WCNP is an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. We've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source. By the way, they do the same thing with open stack. And we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything. And so what Walmart chose to do, they took a do-it-yourself approach to build a SuperCloud for a variety of reasons that Jack will explain. Along with Walmart's so-called triplet architecture connecting on-prem, Azure and GCP. No surprise, there's no Amazon at Walmart for obvious reasons. And what they do is they create a common experience for devs across clouds. Jack is going to talk about how Walmart is evolving its SuperCloud in the future. You don't want to miss that. Now, next let's take a look at how Veronica Durgan of Saks thinks about data sharing across clouds. Data sharing we think is a potential killer use case for SuperCloud. In fact, let's hear it in Veronica's own words. Please play the clip. How do we talk to each other? And more importantly, how do we data share? I work with data. This is what I do. So if I want to get data from a company that's using, say Google, how do we share it in a smooth way where it doesn't have to be this crazy, I don't know, SFTP file moving? So that's where I think SuperCloud comes to me in my mind is like practical applications. How do we create that mesh, that network and how we can easily share data with each other? Now, data mesh is a possible architectural approach that will enable more facile data sharing and the monetization of data products. You'll hear Jamak Degani live in studio talking about what standards are missing to make this vision a reality across the SuperCloud. Now, one of the other things that we're really excited about is digging deeper into the right approach for SuperCloud adoption. And we're going to share a preview of a debate that's going on right now in the community. Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake and Microsoft exec was kind enough to spend some time looking at the community SuperCloud definition. And he felt that it needed to be simplified. So in near real time, he came up with the following definition that we're showing here, I'll read it. A SuperCloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So not only did Bob simplify the initial definition, he stressed that the SuperCloud is a platform versus an architecture implying that the platform provider, e.g. Snowflake, VMware, Databricks, Cohesity, et cetera is responsible for determining the architecture. Now, interestingly, in the shared Google doc that the working group uses to collaborate on the SuperCloud definition, Dr. Nelu Mihai, who is actually building a SuperCloud, responded as follows to Bob's assertion. Quote, we need to avoid creating many SuperCloud platforms with their own architectures. If we do that, then we create other proprietary clouds on top of existing ones. We need to define an architecture of how SuperCloud interfaces with all other clouds. What is the information model? What is the execution model? And how users will interact with SuperCloud. What does this seemingly nuanced point tell us and why does it matter? Well, history suggests that de facto standards will emerge more quickly to resolve real world practitioner problems and catch on more quickly than consensus-based architectures and standards-based architectures. But in the long run, the latter may serve customers better. So we'll be exploring this topic in more detail at SuperCloud too. And of course, we'd love to hear what you think. Platform, architecture, both? Now, one of the real technical gurus that we'll have in studio at SuperCloud too is David Flynn. He's one of the people behind the movement that enabled enterprise flash adoption, that craze. And he did that with Fusion IO. And he's now working on a system to enable read-write data access to any user and any application in any data center or on any cloud, anywhere. So think of his company as a SuperCloud enabler. Allow me to share an excerpt from a conversation David Floria and I had with David Flynn last year. He as well gave a lot of thought to the SuperCloud definition and was really helpful with an opinionated point of view. He said something to us that was, we thought relevant, quote, what is the operating system for a decentralized cloud? The main two functions of an operating system or an operating environment are one, the process scheduler and two, the file system. The strongest argument for SuperCloud is made when you go down to the platform layer and talk about it as an operating environment on which you can run all forms of applications. So a couple of implications here that we'll be exploring with David Flynn in studio. First, we're inferring from his comment that he's in the platform camp where the platform owner is responsible for the architecture. And there are obviously trade-offs there and benefits, but we'll have to clarify that with him.  So the further you move up the stack, the weaker the SuperCloud argument becomes because it's just becoming sass. And this is something we're going to explore to better understand his thinking on this, but also whether the existing notion of sass is changing and whether or not a new breed of SuperCloud apps will emerge, which brings us to this really interesting fellow that George Gilbert and I rift with ahead of SuperCloud too, Tristan Handys, the founder and CEO of DBT Labs. And he has a highly opinionated and technical mind. Here's what he said, quote, one of the things that we still don't know how to API-ify is concepts that live inside of your data warehouse, inside of your data lake. These are core concepts that the business should be able to create applications around very easily. In fact, that's not the case because it involves a lot of data engineering pipeline and other work to make these available. So if you really want to make it easy to create these data experiences for users, you need to have an ability to describe these metrics and then to turn them into APIs to make them accessible to application developers who have literally no idea how they're calculated behind the scenes and they don't need to. A lot of implications to the statement that we'll explore in SuperCloud too. First, Jamak Dagoni's data mesh comes into play here with her critique of hyper-specialized data pipeline experts with little or no domain knowledge. Also the need for simplified self-service infrastructure which Kit Colbert is likely going to touch upon. Veronica Durgan of Sax and her ideal state for data sharing along with Harveer Singh of Western Union, they got to deal with 200 locations around the world and data privacy issues, data sovereignty, how do you share data safely? Same with Nick Taylor of Ionis Pharmaceutical and not to blow your mind, but Thomas Hazel and Bob Mugley are posited to make data apps reality across the SuperCloud. You have to rethink everything. You can't just let in-memory databases and caching architectures take care of everything in a brute force manner. Rather, you have to get down to really detailed levels, even things like how data is laid out on disk, i.e. flash, and think about rewriting applications for the SuperCloud and the ML AI era. All of this and more at SuperCloud too, which wouldn't be complete without some data. So we pinged our friends from ETR, Eric Bradley and Darren Brabham to see if they had any data on SuperCloud that we could tap. And so we're going to be analyzing a number of the players as well at SuperCloud too. Now, many of you are familiar with this graphic. Here we show some of the players involved in delivering or enabling SuperCloud-like capabilities on the y-axis is spending momentum and on the horizontal axis is market presence or pervasiveness in the data. So net score versus what they call overlap or end in the data. And the table insert shows how the dots are plotted. Now, not to steal ETR's thunder, but the first point is you really can't have SuperCloud without the hyperscale cloud platforms, which is shown on this graphic. But the exciting aspect of SuperCloud is the opportunity to build value on top of that hyperscale infrastructure. Snowflake here continues to show strong spending velocity as those Databricks, Hashi, Rubrik, VMware, Tensu, which we all put under the magnifying glass after the Broadcom announcements is also showing momentum. Unfortunately, due to a scheduling conflict, we weren't able to get Red Hat on the program, but they're clearly a player here and we've put Cohesity and Veeam on the chart as well because backup is a likely use case across clouds and on-premises. And now one other callout that we drill down on at SuperCloud too is Cloudflare, which actually uses the term SuperCloud maybe in a different way. They look at SuperCloud really as serverless on steroids. And so the data brains at ETR will have more to say on this topic at SuperCloud too, along with many others. Okay, so why should you attend SuperCloud too? What's in it for me kind of thing?  If you're a technologist, you're trying to figure out various ways to solve problems around data, data sharing, cross-cloud service deployment. There's going to be a number of deep technology experts that are going to share how they're doing it. We're also going to drill down with Walmart into a practical example of SuperCloud with some other examples of how practitioners are dealing with cross-cloud complexity. Some of them by the way are kind of throwing up their hands and saying, hey, we're going monocloud and we'll talk about the potential implications and dangers and risks of doing that and also some of the benefits. You know there's a question, right? Is SuperCloud the same wine, new bottle, or is it truly something different that can drive substantive business value? So look, go to supercloud.world. It's January 17th at 9 a.m. Pacific. You can register for free and participate directly in the program. Okay, that's a wrap. I want to give a shout out to the SuperCloud support as VMware has been a great partner as our anchor sponsor, Chaos Search, Prosimo, and Alcira as well for contributing to the effort. I want to thank Alex Meyerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman is his supporting cast as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight to help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters and Rob Hoef as our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE, thank you all. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen, we really appreciate the support that you're giving. We just saw some stats from Buzzsprout who hit the top 25%. We're almost at 400,000 downloads last year so really appreciate your participation. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis Podcasts and you'll find those I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com or if you want to get in the hold of me you can email me directly at david.volante at siliconangle.com or DM me at dvolante or comment on our LinkedIn post. I want you to check out etr.ai they've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante with the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at SuperCloud 2 or next time on Breaking Analysis.


you're watching play things of alien forces news clicks weekly sports news roundup update with myself to the Antani and news click sports editor Leslie Xavier. What's up Leslie? How are you doing? Yeah, it's been good. Just figuring out stuff with the sports scene happening. I mean, Nadal's victory. I was really impressed. At our age also, we can probably try something. So yeah, I watched that match and otherwise it's been like a normal sports weekend. A lot of action happening. AFC women's nation cup, for instance. And I was just following all these things over the weekend and figuring out. Yeah, yeah. So like you said, it's been it's been a busy week on sports grounds, sports fields, I think, all over with tennis courts or football pitches. We started actually last week with some pretty bad news from the AFC women's Asian Cup. In terms of host India's exit from that tournament, not because of what happened on the pitch, but because the COVID bio bubble, the bio secure bubble in which the tournament was being played was somehow breached. And almost all it turned out members of the playing staff and many members of the support staff contacted or were infected by the virus. And therefore India did not have enough available players to field a team in the schedule game against Chinese Taipei and had to withdraw from the tournament as per the rules that was put forth by the AFC before the tournament actually began. This was it was one of our biggest fears that the tournament will be hit by COVID-19. And I don't know, all of the preparations, all of the time spent, all of the effort that these players and the coaches and all of their staff have put in to preparing for it, especially for India, appearing at this stage after for the first time since 2003. So a long gap there. But all of that came unfortunately, the worst possible scenario is exactly what played out. And let's see in response to that, we have to have done a couple of shows on our other channel for 20 grams, where we concentrate on what's happening in Indian football, talking about whether or not the leaders or the leadership of the All India Football Federation, the people who were tasked with making sure that these women were kept safe and allowed to put their best foot forward, feet forward, in this sense, quite literally. What was their reaction to what happened, Leslie? What did we make of that? I mean, it's firstly, the thing is, I don't know the All India Football Federation, for instance, how they have looked at it, how the possible actions that need to be taken and how they have been silent about it. I would like to believe that they are doing so that they can wait out for the tournament to get over and then probably leading to the inquiry that is required. And it has to be a pretty much high level inquiry where outside some agency should be brought in. I hope that the sports ministry steps in, the government steps in and conduct a thorough investigation into what exactly happened. Yeah, I will say that we have discussed this in our shows and it's not about finding out where the players got infected, etc., but finding out how such a lapse could happen when it was very clear what is at stake. It's so seen set with the Federation officials, including Prabhu Patel, the president, coming out with weird statements like, don't point fingers. Of course, it's a time to point fingers and it's a time to point fingers with the right intent in mind to take this forward, not just to find the guilty party, but also to take Indian football forward. And that's at stake here. That was always at stake with the women playing the Asian Cup. So that gravity of the situation seems to have missed among the governing body of officials, the governing body itself. And at the same time, the women's football team coaches' statement, I mean, it's illogical to the core, right? He has come out blaming the AFC for lax protocols in the hotel that the Indian team was seeing. Apparently, statements that there were a few positive cases in the hotel staff and that was not conveyed to the team management. And also, hotel staff was not retested in the frequency that it was supposed to be tested. But again, we had this discussion in 420 grams, saying that presenting the case, the right fact that it was not in AFC's control in any case. AFC's overseeing body and the local organizing committee, which comes under the All India Football Federation, that was directly in charge in ensuring the bioburbalists kept intact. So all fingers actually point towards the Federation and how they conducted that random system. And it's unfortunate beyond words. And still, we are yet to get clarity on how the players have taken it fully. We are trying to, I mean, in that sense, there was a gag on them to remain silent about this till possibly. And I'm still hopeful that that investigation will bring out shed more life into it. And also, we would like to hear what the players are going to, I mean, what they went through in the past one week.  So the tournament has moved on, semi-final lineup is out. And just now it's, it's, it hits further when, aside like Thailand, for instance, played the quarterfinals and they are at stake for the World Cup spot also, qualifying spot also. So aside like Thailand is, we would like to believe that India had a fair chance of giving a fight. So, so that's, that's the point. So now it's, it's harder where we were, before the start of the tournament, we were talking about them leaving the group stage, managing to leave the group stage and also having a say in, in World Cup qualifying. And they just didn't get a chance to fight at all. And that's so unfair. And why, I mean, the degree of unfairness is, is, is astronomical when, when, when it's, it's evident that it's because of laxity on the part of authority. So that's, that's the thing. So one week down the road, I myself am still sad. So you can imagine what, what the stakeholders, the real stakeholders were, Indian women's football, what the players or the youngsters who were looking up to, up to these women to lead, lead the path, bring out Indian women's football onto the continental stage. They never got a chance.  Yeah, absolutely. I'm gutted. I'm, I'm absolutely certain of that. I think the good bit of news from the India team perspective is that at least we know that most of the players and staff that did get the virus are doing well. Many have recovered since then. So no, no serious, serious cases from that point of view. So at least that some little bit of good news, not that it takes away in any sense from the disappointment that you were very rightly pointing out. And it's not, it's not, I think just the disappointment of what happened from the point of view of one tournament. But that, unfortunately, this is kind of just the way things are with women's sport and with women's football in particular is kind of half, half baked treatment that, that is given out. When on the one hand, we're going all out saying we want to host major tournaments and all of those things. But on the other hand, when, when it comes down to it and like you've rightly pointed out, I think the ministry needs to take note of this because I think some amount of public resources have also gone into ensuring that the team gets the little bit of exposure. We've talked earlier of how they went to Brazil and Sweden and other parts of Europe and to at least try and get some kind of competitive football because the other fact is that Indian football, women's football has been largely ignored by the Federation. The women's league hasn't happened in a couple of years. So no club level competition either. Fortunately, the senior nationals were conducted. And I'm very pleased to see actually on some of these new channels that have also come up that are focusing on covering what's happening in the women's game, women's football, women's football India and some other channels. And some of the players coming out and saying how well organized it was, good facilities, good training pitches, good, good sort of playing facilities and how pleased they were to be out there and, and, and you know, competing with women from around the country, at least all those states that managed to send in teams. Kerala was playing host to that tournament. But, but moving on a little bit, Leslie, like you said, the tournament has moved on. We're looking forward to some exciting semi-final action, at least four of the best teams. I guess from our pre-tournament assessment of it, there were always going to be five teams in the running for a semi-final spot. And predictably the quarterfinals between South Korea and Australia was very close, just the one goal in it, South Korea knocking out the Australians, which in a sense could be considered an upset, although, although Korea has a strong team as well, they've been, I think, in, in the last four finals, never having won it. But, but a strong performance from them. And of course, China and Japan both doing extremely well. So, so, you know, the, I guess, at this point, the, the, the kind of outsiders in, in this final four are the Philippines team who've done exceptionally, exceptionally well to reach the stage. And I think they'll be delighted. If I'm not wrong, Leslie, this means they've already qualified for the next FIFA World Cup. Yeah, they have qualified for the FIFA World Cup. And also, I just, I'm lucky that Japan and China are playing, playing the semi-finals, one of those sides, both sides deserve to be in the finals. But yeah, so South Korea, that way, I think, have a easier road, but not discounting Philippines' quality. That way, they are through the tone of, and they have showed that they belong there. That's why they are there in the semi-finals as well. And let's see how it progresses, because that's the beauty of being neutral, that way, that we can just enjoy the football. And I'm sure high-quality football will be the world-class football, because these teams have played at the World Cup multiple locations, and it's going to be fun in that sense. Yeah, really will be. Hopefully, once again, we don't want to get too much into it, because we still have this very real specter of Omicron around us. Yeah, so let's hope that those semi-finals and the final of the tournament, as well as the playoffs, because of that still matters in terms of World Cup qualification. Those things can hopefully proceed. Thursday, I think, is when the semi-finals are being held. Like we said earlier, we have a show where we talk about all the football stuff happening in India for 20 grams. We will be doing a post-match, well, after both the games, a show on for 20 grams. Hopefully, we're trying to get in some guests, including Bala Devi, who of course went off to Glasgow Rangers and spent a season, season and a half. Unfortunately, a COVID hit season as well, but still she spent some time there and unfortunately missed out on even that one match in the Asian Cup that India did play, the draw against Iran, because of injury. But she's very much a member of the senior women's national team, and one of the top talents in the country. So hopefully, we can get her on, and it will be, I think, great to hear from her. She would have, no doubt, spoken to some of the other players, her teammates, her clubmates, some of them. So she can give us a sense of that as well. So do join in for that show on Thursday evening around 9.30pm when the game is done. But Leslie, from here, now we'll put this topic to rest for the moment. Another sort of bizarre series of events in terms of football leadership unfolded when the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, he was addressing the Council of Europe and essentially presenting FIFA's proposal for hosting the World Cup every two years, as opposed to every four years the way it's currently held or has been since 1930. Now FIFA are looking at this, Leslie, because the World Cup is the men's World Cup, is really the only event, and I think the women's World Cup is now catching up on that front. But the men's World Cup is really the main event, it's FIFA's money spinner, Golden Goose, whatever you want to call it. So if you look at their kind of profit and loss books, you'll find that in World Cup years FIFA makes a profit and in other years it doesn't. So they want to have it more often, clearly include more teams in that process, making it a 48 team tournament as opposed to a 36 team tournament as it is now, if I'm 32 teams, sorry. So that expansion is actually already is happening, has happened. So the 2026 World Cup that will be co-hosted by the US and Mexico will have 48 teams. UEFA and the South American countries, traditionally the powerhouse is both one in terms of because they have some of the best players and end up winning the World Cup quite often, and Europe because it not only has some of the top teams in world football but also all the money. So they are both opposed to it because FIFA's revenues going up means their revenues going down and Infantino has gone on and said in a quite bizarre use of language that somehow hosting the World Cup every two years would give Africans hope and reduce the numbers of them trying to migrate to European shores. Leslie, your comments please on this. Bazaar is the word, maybe it's a bit of an understatement as far as word is concerned because I was going through it multiple times, the video as well as trying to make sense what this man is trying to achieve by saying this. It's very clear that he's trying to push for the two-year cycle for World Cup, but making this kind of a connection with African countries and African migration and which is a raging issue in itself but completely disconnected to football because as far as migration of football talent is concerned. So initially I tried to correlate whether this guy is talking about footballers traveling to Europe and whether for some reason, some odd reason a two-year World Cup would boost African football, club football, so much so that African talent can remain in Africa and make a decent living, make a great living. So I was trying to wonder whether he's mentioning that, then I realized no because he's talking about general immigration and completely out of his league, he was blabbering, he was clearly blabbering and as far as the two-year World Cup push is concerned FIFA should realize that they are going to mess it up because we have discussed this previously about how sport economy works these days, big sport organizing and how hostilities are not exactly in a great state of health after an event is hosted and in the case of FIFA World Cup, it's the country that hosts the World Cup and ultimately balance sheets, books, everything FIFA earns out of it, FIFA uses that for the larger good of football for sure but the country which hosts it, they're not necessarily earn a profit or get a rise in stature on par with what FIFA is gaining out of it. So if for instance a two-year World Cup is being staged after 10, 20 years, two decades, after 10 cycles, maybe they won't be any takers for the tournament. But expanding the tournament to 48 teams is great in the sense that it is in a sense more inclusive, more countries get a chance to play, definitely there'll be more representation from the Asian continent as well as Africa and I think the proposal for a two-year World Cup is largely being supported by some many of these countries who will benefit directly from that opportunity to play in the World Cup because of course it does also make money for some of the smaller nations in order to fund their football programs sometimes to the extent where an entire year's budget or more can come in as a windfall from various things like sponsorship money, television rights and other grants that FIFA gives out to countries that are participating in the World Cup year. But 48 teams means 48 teams being based in your nation for a month, you are playing host to these 48 teams that means you require each team has a base, a training base. So in addition to the stadiums that you need to conduct matches, you also need 48 bases which means hotel facilities, press facilities, training facilities, all in one location or close enough by the teams can access them, use them on a regular basis. Not too many nations have that kind of infrastructure available to even think about kind of hosting it. So I think if it happens at all, there will have to be some kind of a model where countries will share hosting rights, it will become more of a regional tournament, maybe like five European countries or five or multiple countries in South America or Africa wherever it happens where things are at least contiguous or maybe even not. I'm not sure how they envision the execution of this massive tournament. Let's just discount Africa and South America from it because I don't think they'll be coming forward because they are very unhappy about it because they have their own elite tournament, the Continental Tournament which is which has a global following for America. Every two years. Every two years and so huge following for that and you see it's a matter of revenue generation then FIFA and UFR should probably join hands together and ensure that the global bodies and the Continental bodies stay relevant because the real push and challenge is coming from I mean in a purely business sense it's coming from the club establishment. So we have had this discussion when World Cup happened 2018 World Cup when you were in Russia also I mean the doubt whether at some point the relevancy of World Cup is it valid at all because for neutral fans following a country being fan of a country and enjoying the World Cup a month tournament great but how far will it happen because as far as neutral fans are concerned the infiltration has come from European clubs now I mean all us I'm talking specifically about India or South Asia or countries which don't have a stake at the World Cup I mean which which would world do they follow which world they want to follow it's it's it's always blood football so FIFA should understand that look at look back at the history that is happening in Fentino and and the officials who are pushing for this it's the tournament how it started how relevant was it in for instance in in the mid mid 20th century when there were many countries including India who would look at the Olympic football championship as the holy grail as and the World Cup World Cup was still small in the 1950s World Cup was still small and it it took a few years it took so many decades for FIFA to reach where it is I hope that they understand that and I hope that they don't ruin the business model ruin the working model that is that is working so far I mean good for them and two years is a disruption two years not going to add or take football forward it is going to create fissures within the ecosystem within sporting governing bodies and it would be a mad fight of who's who wants to come on top and so it's it's as far as now is concerned it's a point like a pointers exercise because again the world of football is reeling and recovering football not just football any sport for that matter the sporting organizers the organizers are having trouble figuring out means including money to host tournaments and when these all these things are happening you throw in the standard into the world so let's let's let's just hope I mean if they are I think if the point is to expand or take football forward and that is the focus of these kind of moves then maybe what they should be talking about is having the women's World Cup every two years and the men's World Cup keeping it as it is because exactly I exactly that's that's a that's a I mean the best thing to go forward because then it also lifts stature of the women's game and also at the same time it's opening up an avenue for FIFA to explore a new revenue stream it's not it's a win-win situation for the game as well as for the body. All right okay we'll leave it there Leslie for this part finally Rafa Nadal your favorite player I see I mean like we talked before I think on this subject but the pandemic really has made us very much aware of who our friends are and who are who are not and you know while I have tons of respect for Novak Djokovic and his tennis playing abilities and for a long time he was a guy because you know he's a bit of an upstart and all that and challenging the greatness of Roger Federer and Raphael Nadal in a generation of I think men's tennis that was quite special I mean to to live through to witness to watch see these guys in action in in in the flesh against one another I mean it's been spectacular Nadal yesterday though taking it to to another level in in some ways and he was two sets down people were writing him off and I think they forgot who who's in the game Nadal of course you can you can never discount him but of course you look at his age 25 and he's playing 25 year old Medvedev who is considered one of the best hardcore surface players at present and in his prime world number two and yeah and in the absence of the top player of the world you expect the world number two to win it and then you get a hold right in front of you but Nadal's game so physically demanding and he has not changed at all and it's it's just I mean when I when I saw him play yesterday and make that come back and I was still the fifth set till the end of the fifth set towards the end of the sixth set you still know that Medvedev is winning I mean I have I mean if you look at the three great players you mentioned I consider Federer to be a noticeable all the other two just for his artistry and I tend to admire artistry more than anything else but Nadal's work ethic Nadal's kind of grit and fight that he brings onto the game as it's for a person who has come to fight sport that is one value that that you you just can't ignore you just I mean whatever the artistry whatever the other part of it and you just can't be without respecting that and then you bought it out you bought it out he is fighting pain he's fighting injuries he's making that come back self doubt whatever that is happening because it's very clear at certify you can't play at that level how we how is he managing to play we just understand it is in the mind and this is going to be a Nadal's here because imagine the next match now is old play and so I'm expecting him to extend the record a couple of this thing and also I'm a couple of trophies but also I'm expecting Novak Djokovic to actually catch up with Nadal and overtake him because Djokovic as a player is is he's still got a few more years and is is capable of winning a few more championships getting back to Nadal what is what makes him special is probably I mean beyond the game he has he has decently talented with this with his back end with his forearm with his top spins whatever but he also improvised yesterday against Medvedev brought out all his experience but also a clear strategy was trying to vary the length he was trying to upset the length with which he was returning to medvedev so that he gets and slowly he got into the game if you look at the first set it was it was one sided in a way and second set Nadal could have won it it was tight Medvedev I mean being the player is you can't discount him he keeps coming back at you coming back at you Nadal almost healed him then he broke back and that baker of course Nadal was leading again same thing and he came back and he won that but for a Nadal fan that probably would have been the moment they would realize see there is something special that is going to happen now because he was he had really he had measured him he had gotten him measured he had really third set again it it could have gone the other way because he was down by a break by four three break points and then from there the turnaround happened and when that was happening the only thing that you do when Nadal marathon comebacks happen marathon matches happen it's just to see enjoy enjoy what's out there and I'm just glad with with with by for being a sports journalist in this era where we have seen the greatest ever generation of tennis players and I I'm not even saying arguably here this is the greatest ever tennis generation as far as longevity is concerned as far as quality is concerned as far as records are concerned beyond power we we are just lucky that we were able to be tested and Nadal personally I've seen him in action in 10 years once and also in the Davis Cup in Delhi a few years back and just simply simply medical but yeah I was I was just saying that I absolutely agree with you man when when Nadal is on a roll like that all you do is sit down and you get yourself a you know refill of whatever it is that you're drinking and you watch till till the end of the ride because that's what it is and and I think he's someone who is inspired also fans across the world for the tennis he's and also the kind of off court stuff the kind of person he has shown himself to be or at least appeared to be so yeah congratulations to Rafael Nadal and and to us for being alive in this time to be witness to some of this greatness absolutely right between between you know Serena Williams and and Federer Nadal Djokovic it's been a special I think couple of decades for the game of tennis on that note I think we'll also put an end to this episode of play things thanks very much Leslie for sharing some of your thoughts on some of these I think quite interesting talking points from the world of sport that went by last week and even beyond that like we said lots more to look forward to particularly the AFC Asian women's cup semifinals and final coming up later on this week the final of that tournament is on the sixth of Feb being held in Mumbai if I'm not wrong so we'll be covering those matches on our sister channel for 20 grams so do join in


Hi, I'm Richard Hines, and welcome to the dynamic and amazing world of touchpad training. So touchpad training has been around in animal training for hundreds of years. Starting with dancing bears on the street corner, you know, when somebody played a violin, they would dance on the street corner for money. Zoos use it, zoos use it, circuses for all animals, TV, movies, it is almost impossible to teach high level things for all entertainment performing animals without touchpad training. It is a critical skill for higher level learning, but touchpad training absolutely has a huge function in everyday life and for specialty things. And for zoos and aquariums, it's a big deal. Touchpad training is critical to their everyday life, not just for tricks, because that's what they use it for as well, but to take care of the animals, to have them go on an object to be examined, weighed, their nails done, their ear cleaned, medicine, right? It is a critical skill that all zoos and aquariums use to maintain their animals. I use touchpads for so many things, so here let me just give you a rundown quick of many ways and forms that I personally use touchpad training to create. We will start with service dog skills. Touching handicap buttons, lights on and off, shutting doors, good girl, and here you see this dog touch a water plate, but we also use it to touch an emergency button, 911 to call 911 for an owner if they have an emergency. So that water touch plate could just be replaced, like with this puppy here, with a 911 emergency button. Same thing, interchangeable, so the skill of going to touch that water plate, we just flip it to a 911 emergency button that's on the floor that the dog will hit and it's the same thing, so since they understand the skill to go touch the water plate, piece of cake to go touch the 911 button on command. Also use it for tightening up healing, for protection work, guard the object. So with touchpad training, the possibilities are endless what you can teach your dog. Again, you be creative, use your imagination, and you can create amazing things, whether it's real life scenarios, service dog things, protection things, high level tricks, whatever it is.


vast plans of station and money is typed around Mars sample return. This is Tomorrow Space News. Jed McCaleb, CEO of Vast Space, is grateful as am I for their newly announced agreement with SpaceX to launch their haven one commercial orbital habitat. If they are successful, they may launch as early as August of 2025. Tom Ochinero, Senior Vice President of Commercial Business at SpaceX, said the SpaceX team couldn't be more excited to launch fasts haven one and support their follow on human spaceflight missions to the orbiting commercial space station. They plan a dragon flight with four crew for the inaugural mission. These crew will undergo the same qualification and training for emergencies and contingencies as other dragon crew. Vast Space is a young company with an impressive bench of talent having acquired Launcher, a 2017 founded company with some significant flight heritage. Their first station is small enough to fit in a Falcon 9 fairing so is smaller than what we are used to with the ISS and that's just what I would expect for the first the proper minimum viable station without the requirements of a continuously crewed highly capable national laboratory. Their first missions are closer to Skylab in duration, practical quarters and workspace in the sky suitable for four for a month seems nice. If they can launch their station on one launch and the crew with return capabilities on one more launch they could demonstrate that we can live and work in space when we want rather than a decade long project to assemble enough heavy launches. If this finds a commercial market the sky is the limit. Next I talk to you about money and Mars sample return but first I am personally and community grateful for our members that support this show. The ground support suborbital orbital escape velocity and plaid pro plus citizens get access to exclusive discord channels the members only live streams and much more to see if anything takes your fancy head to the join button below. Mars sample return is a big expensive project it's right at the edge of what we know how to do a lot is writing on this so when NASA management sees that they have to pour another quarter billion to keep their chances of success high enough they have to pull that money from somewhere unless of course congress but we'll get back to that. Allen Stern the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission that I talked about last week said we have a very ambitious planetary program but there's a point at which it becomes overly ambitious to the extent that it's brittle. It's not resilient to any failures. It seems Allen thinks that the reduced risk for the sample return mission might be at the expense of risk to other missions. Budget pressure from Mars sample return may have contributed to Psyche missing its launch window last fall and the Veritas Venus probes three year delay. Casey Dreyer space policy nerd at the planetary society says dare mighty things and also that the easiest mission to delay is the one that hasn't started yet referring to Veritas. Thanks for letting me and the team share our interest in space. you


Awesome, awesome. Let's just jump into it then. We're going to be talking about doing some machine learning models with EHR data using the Forester package. So a little reintroduction to Forester, for some of you might have already heard before. This package came out about two years ago, but unfortunately because of other responsibilities and in some cases new opportunities, the authors weren't able to maintain the package and it kind of fell away. But fear not, because it's back, new and improved. The original organizer Anna got some new people, Hubert, Adriana, Patrick, they came back, they overtook the project, they built the whole thing back up from scratch, they learn from their predecessors, they learn from mistakes, they learn what else was out in the ecosystem. And I think it's a really cool thing that you should reinvestigate if you haven't already. So what is the Forester package? The Forester is an auto ML tool for R, for tabular data and regression and binary classification tasks. It wraps all of that kind of stuff up into one nice pretty little function, the train function. This function gives you a data check, it goes through that pre-processing for you, it gives you enough of the initial data set to see if the models can be trained. It trains five tree-based models, you got your decision trees, your random forest, your XGBoost, your cat boost, your light GBMs, what else could you want? You got random search involved, you got Bayesian optimization and at the very end of this bad boy, it spits out a nice evaluated look at them all gives you a ranked list of how they performed against each other and which one you should move forward with. So that's the what, how about the why? Well, it's really great for beginners who want to just train their first models who want to get in there and just start playing around with it. It's great for researchers who just already are doing lots of analysis, want to add some machine learning in. And if you're already a machine learning expert, it's pretty cool. And the concept that you can just sort of quickly create new models really fast and explore random data sets without all the code required for pre-analysis. There's a lot of tree models, you might be thinking, hey, what's with all the tree models? Well, good question, I say to you, imaginary person. And that is tree models can be very versatile. In some ways, they can address the overly smooth solutions and come out of deep learning models. And while they do have their own issues like overfitting, most of this stuff can be addressed with bagging and boosting. Also, tree models are really easy to understand. You don't have to have a machine learning background to kind of understand how they work. That's why they're really common in medicine. Doctors are already using them, they already get them. So when you're pitching it, you're not trying to explain to some like physician on a clinical trial team how like your deep learning TensorFlow model works. And you can just move on with the results of the model. You know, these have been benchmarked against other things. Leo has a great paper. I don't have time to get into it here, but I'll definitely sort of leave that for you guys to kind of read if you're interested in how these things benchmark. And where, where can you get it? You can get right here, you can get on GitHub, you can go to GitHub, and you can install this bad boy and get started right away. So let's do that. So let's get started with some EHR data, our style. There's lots of packages to talk to your EHRs, manipulate EHR data. I've never actually been able to get the EHR package to work. If anyone else has, Congrats to you guys. Let's just use DXPR because it's alphabetical, it's at the top of the list. So we want to pull in our DXPR, we're going to take a look at some core mobility data from an EHR data set, not going to go into too much data detail on how to do that, because this is not a DXPR tutorial. But when you're done with your kind of you're getting your data that you want, it just has to be tabular. It doesn't matter what data set it is, you can have this could be EHR data, I'm going to give an example here, but it could be transcriptome data, it could be any kind of data that's just in a table, this package is going to work. So with after these functions, I'm left with this nice little table, great, fantastic, time to go to Forester, let's go.  So this is great check data function that's built right into Forester. If you've done any machine learning before, you know that typically you start with an exhausting exploratory data analysis, you know, your writing scripts, looking for correlations, removing things that overfit, you know, it takes a long time. Forester's got this built in, which is actually kind of pretty fantastic. So this function, whoops, that's all right, jumped ahead a little bit trying to use my mouse wheel. Don't use your mouse wheel on PowerPoint, guys. So anyway, the check feature here in this case is going to look at static columns, it's going to look at duplicate columns, it's going to interpret how to do missing fields, it's going to do a dimensionality check, it's going to look at correlated features using Kramer's V and Spearman rank coefficients, it's going to look at outliers, target balance, to make sure like you have different, each thing you're trying to classify has the exact same or similar enough amount of features and outcomes within your data set. Again, things that normally take so much time to do, already done. All right, so we kind of got that part of done. So let's just jump to, you know, the prepros, so the train function. So we have this train function that we talked about earlier, everything's wrapped up in this train function. It's going to do the data quality checking stuff again for you, but prechecking I think is always a good idea. And it's going to remove static columns here, going to have the binarization into classes, missing values are handled through the mice algorithm. Many of you might have used mice as an R package by itself. It's going to remove highly correlated features in the data set, it's going to do removal of ID columns, it's going to feature selection with the border of package algorithm, that's a different package you might have used already with your other pipelines. And then it's going to save all the stuff and keep all things you don't need deleted. So it's going to be really good. And in this case, you know, if you want to do something really quick, in this case, they're just taking the cancer kind of channel of this data set. You can add Bayesian alliteration and random evals, of course, but you may not want to do that first because Bayesian alliteration that takes time that's the most expensive component to like most of these kind of models is the time it takes with Bayesian. So let's take a quick look, we'll run this, we'll see what we get, we get some models.  But you get the idea with your data set, it won't be highly correlated. And you can look at this really fast, really quick and kind of just look at it, get an idea of what's there. And then you can play with tuning all those little hyper parameters, right, you can add Bayesian alliteration, you can add random intervals, get different versions of those models based on those fine tuning, and kind of hopefully improve your modeling output. And this gives you a rank, it gives you an idea of which models have worked best, it gives you an idea of where to go, you can start implementing it. But that's obviously not where you guys want to stop, you want to know, hey, how was my model deciding stuff? What's going on with my model? How do I explain to somebody in medicine which features are being used? Two ways to do this, one is with the Daleks package. It's really useful for multiple types of modeling, not just the Forrester package, it works with other modeling packages. A couple lines of code can give you some really nice sexy plots that helps you explore both the model comparison and the features used by different models. So you can take a look at what's being used in your Ranger models, driving it, what's being used in your XGBoosted model.  It will generate a report that contains the rank list of the best models, group plots comparing the best models, the data check report we did at the beginning that gets thrown in there too. It could be really quick way to kind of explore your data and explore your models and try to figure out, hey, what's the jam here? What's going on? Ultimately, that's kind of just how easy it is to use. There's other machine learning auto ML model packages out there for R. I know a lot of people in the community probably might even use Python a lot for machine learning. I know I do a lot of my machine learning in Python, but with my groups and with stuff, I teach a lot of R, so I do think it's a really robust, easy way to do this in R. And what makes it better and not better is a strong word. What makes it something I promote more than the other packages out there for auto ML is this sort of data check pre-processing steps at the beginning. Because when I teach my students, my PhD students, postdocs that I'm training, the biggest barrier to entry for them is sort of this pre-processing and data checking. They can learn machine learning algorithms. They can learn TensorFlow. They can learn vector machines. They can learn random force. They can get their head around that pretty easily with a little bit of reading and some example code. But then when they get down into it, the thing that stops them is that pre-processing. And this really kind of helps them get like around that really quickly and jump right into the modeling. So I really like it for that reason. And I think it'll just quickly end on a little plug. So for those who know me, I'm involved in the bioconductor community. I'm one of the organizers for the bioconductor conference coming up in August. It's not too late to sign up for that. It's a hybrid format, so you can join us like in this nice little Zoomy space we're in right now, or you can come and join us in Boston. And we'll have to hang out. We've got our workshops, package demos, all that good jazz. You can follow me on Twitter. If you want to bug me, ask me any kind of questions about this kind of stuff. And I also live stream on Twitch by Informatics work. It's mostly transcriptome stuff, spatial, site seek. It may not be of interest to everybody here, but if you want to learn how to do that, you can come and join me over there as well. And I spent through that pretty good, but for 10 minutes, not bad. Awesome. That was very efficient, Wes. Thank you so much for your talk. And we have a couple of requests just to get a link to your slides whenever you get a chance. And then we have a question from, let's see, David. Do the evaluation metrics include the Matthews correlation coefficient? They do not. Out of the box, they do not. All right. And any other questions? We have about another minute before our break. How do you compare with tidy models? I find this easier to use in tidy models. Tidy models actually use some of the same back in our packages to do some of the modeling. So from that perspective, the outputs of the models tend to be very similar, especially with the hyper parameter changing. That being said, I like the pre-processing better on this. Excellent. Okay. Well, this concludes this first part of the day here for our medicine, this final day. So we'll go ahead and take a break now. Wes, thank you so much again. Excellent presentation. And we are coming back at 36 after the hour for our first panel. So 36 after the hour, we'll be back here.