Okay. So, should we get started? Yeah. Okay, we are very happy to have Kumran. This is going to be his third talk during this week. So, we are really making him work, but as everybody knows, he's here for this workshop. He's from Harvard, but he's also now a distinguished staff associate in our high energy section. And we are very happy to have him to talk about new stringy perspectives. From what I gather, it's a talk, kind of anti-disseter talk, which should be provocative, and I expect a lot of questions from cosmologists. Okay. Okay. Thank you. I hope it's not too controversial, but so thanks for the invitation to give a talk here. It's a great pleasure. So, this is going to be based on two recent joint papers that was put out a couple of weeks ago, one with Obid, Oguri, Svodinaiko, and the other one with Agroval, Obid, and Steinhardt. And these are some, basically, a revisiting of issues having to do with cosmology in the context of string theory. So, the plan for my talk is this, first of all, I talk about general aspects of string landscape and the swamp plan, and what are some of the motivations for even considering such a notion. So, I review some basics of it. I won't be very thorough in this. I'll just give you some sample ideas, and for more thorough things, you could probably, if you wish, you can look at the review lecture I gave in Tassie last year. And then I talk about the reasons we believe in disseter. What is the motivation? Why, I would say, the by and large majority of string community and cosmologists believe we live in disseter. So, why do we believe that? What's the reason for that? So, I critically review this motivation for believing that we live in disseter. And then I talk about this, some new swamp land conditions, which is a lower bound on the gradient of V of the form that the gradient of a potential, gradient in the direction of the field direction, should be bounded by some positive constant times V. I motivate why this may not be such an unreasonable criteria. And I talked then about the cosmological implications of this criteria, as well as this criteria, that the field range of scalar fields cannot be bigger than plank or order one in plank units. So, these are the basic outline of what I want to cover. So, first of all, let me just review some basics of string landscape and swamp land. So, in string theory, we construct a vacuum by starting with something like in 10 or 11 or 12 dimensions. And we go to lower dimensions like in four dimensions by compactifying on some manifold. So, the choice of the manifold leads to a lower dimensional physics. So, you choose a manifold with some metric, with some fluxes and this and that. And that fixes for you the four dimensional or lower dimensional physics. But originally, people thought there's a unique such manifold which is consistent with non-partuitive physics or what not. Since we learned more about string non-partuitive aspects, we learned that was a false hope. There's a huge, in fact, in some sense, infinite number of possible choices of manifolds you can choose with metrics and so on. And so, therefore, you get a huge number of choices in the dimensional physics. In fact, this is so huge, this set, that people began to think, wait a second, why are we wasting our time constructing an M? We just start with the dimensional physics and hope somebody will construct us the manifold which gives us that. So, the idea was that you start with what you think is consistent physics. What is consistent physics?  You take things which you have learned about quantum field theories, which is required for consistency, anomaly free theories, and you say, I picked that as my theory. And somebody aboard string theorists will have to work hard to get it, but they will get something like this pretty soon anyhow. I don't waste my time. They did not, this did not get elaborated as clearly as I'm saying, but that became the philosophy of many string theorists. So, many string theorists began to take this viewpoint that we are wasting our time constructing string compactification. We should just take an effective field theory and there are so many of them, we might as well choose any one of them, any one you pick is going to be close to something we can get, so who cares? That was the kind of the attitude. So, this is roughly the attitude I think, the attitude was, this was the case around the early 2000s where basically there was disillusionment with what are we doing in string theory in terms of trying to find the theory, we know it's not unique. Now, worse than that, we know it's a huge number and why do we do this? We just started the answer, so to speak. And it's not predictive anymore because anything nearby you can get from somebody else, as long as it looks consistent. So, what is the predictive power of string theory? It looks like it has no prediction to make. However, we have learned that this is not a correct picture. That is, almost no consistent looking effective theory can be coupled to gravity. It's the exact opposite. You take a consistent looking quantum field theory and you ask, can I couple it to gravity? And the answer seems to be no. It's only very, very special ones that can be coupled to gravity, despite our intuition. Our intuition that says, you know, just take any effective field theory motivation should be put at G minu everywhere in your formula and make it covariant. What's the big deal? We have been misled by the fact that the classical, classically it's very easy to do that. And we just thought that this must be possible to make it quantum. And that's incorrect. So, in other words, a choice of M does not give you almost arbitrary quantum field theories, effective theories which are consistent, which would have been this picture. But actually, in the space of all effective field theories which look consistent, there are only very rare points for which you can get. Still, this rare point is many, many, in fact, infinite number of choices. I'm not saying that there are few of these. There are many. But compared to the allowed possibilities is measure zero. So, the number of consistent theories compared to the number of theories which would have been possible is measure zero. And that's an absolute sense we're sure about in string theory. I'll give you one example just to set the stage. Say you're interested in a seven-dimensional gauge theory. Well, we know how to get that. For example, if you're not interested in gravity in seven dimension, you can take M theory and put it on a space with singularities, AD singularities, and you get AD gates in between seven dimensions. And then you say, okay, great, I will not couple this to gravity. Put G minu and so on, that should couple to gravity, right? No. We know that if you try to do that, it cannot be part of a compact four-dimensional space. You cannot get to seven dimension with an arbitrary AD. The rank of AD is bounded by 20 something. So, therefore, what that means is that the allowed rank of AD you can get in string theory is finite, but the allowed list of field theories is infinite. That's it. So, that's a simple example that illustrates the point that if you take the ratio of allowed possibilities to the ones, it's in some sense measures zero. But what distinguishes the string landscape from what looks consistent, what looks like an effectively field theory which is consistent, but it's not, which we're going to call swampland. So, swampland are these effective field theories which look consistent, have every right to be good when you couple to gravity, but somehow they are not. So, how do you distinguish if I give you a garden variety field theory, how do you know whether it's consistent to couple to gravity in a quantum way? The answer to that is that we don't know. We do not know what is the universality classes of a consistent quantum theory coupled to gravity. So, the effective field theory, like the ones we have learned in the context of, let's say, condensed matter physics or quantum field theories is not adequate, but we don't have the adequate substitute. So, what do we do? Well, we look at examples that we know of in different m's that we get and see if we see any pattern and see if we can explain the pattern or make rational why there's this pattern. There should be some good reason, presumably, we're not getting everything. What is those, what are those reasons? Can we understand, can we kind of summarize these reasons? Once we understand these reasons, we can hope that this might be a principle, a universality condition for theory to be coupleable to gravity. For example, it emerged that from all the many examples that we have studied in the context of string theory, gravity ends up always being the weakest force. Well, in principle, you could have imagined that's not the case. Take a U1 gauge theory and take some charged states with charged q and put the masses of these gauge particles, let's say bigger than q. In that case, the force gravitational attraction would have been stronger than electric repulsion and gravity would have been a stronger force. This could be easily believable scenario in an effective field theory, but that is not the case in string theory. In string theory, we never get this kind of thing. We always get the mass is less than or equal to the charge for some elementary excitations. For example, electron, the mass of the electron in Planck units is much, much less than its charge. That's an example. So this is the equality sign is believed to be only possible when you have supersymmetry and VPS states, but for non supersymmetric cases, we, for example, believe the mass is always strictly less than charge. Let us first restrict to supersymmetric case. We know much more about the supersymmetric landscape because there are certain non-renewalization theorems that protect us to have a stable solution and have a control over our vacuum. So they allow solutions for non-compact space. What are the, I mean, the leftover space is only two types. Basically, if you have maximum symmetric ones, there is either Minkowski or ADS. So Minkowski and ADS means that the cosmological constant is zero or negative. Positive cosmological constant is not consistent with supersymmetry, and we don't have positive cosmological constant. So in other words, de Seter is not, no supersymmetric de Seter solutions are allowed. And we can construct a huge number of these guys which can argue they are stable and nice, and we have studied them mostly things like in the context of ADS-CFT or Calabiya compactifications and this and that. We have a huge number of these examples, so we have a kind of an intuition about what's a big set. Supersymmetric theories typically have moduli given by scalar fields with the vanishing potential. So there are some scalar fields which have no potential flat directions, and these scalar fields, their expectation value, parameterizes the space of possible solutions in that supersymmetric theory. It's called the moduli of that supersymmetric theory, and typically they correspond to the sizes of the manifold, internal manifold, some zero modes corresponding to how you can stretch or breathing modes of the internal manifold correspond to these scalar fields. One question is what is the geometry of these scalar fields? Can they be arbitrary? Well there is a geometry, namely there's a kinetic term involving these scalar fields in the action from which you can deduce a notion of a metric on this space. So this space comes with a metric which you can infer from the kinetic term of these scalar fields. So you might have imagined that it could be possible that these scalar fields are a compact space like a sphere or something like that. It turns out that's not the case. In all the examples we know of, this space is non-compact. It's infinitely large, and you can get to arbitrary large values, but it turns out that if you go too far in distance, you get typically a tower of light states. So in other words, it's not like you can just go arbitrarily far away. If you go one way far away, then you get light states. In other words, if you're interested in a given effective Lagrangian with a cutoff mass scale where you don't want to allow anything else lower than that scale coming in, then there's a finite range. So effectively, whenever you write an effective Lagrangian coupled to gravity, the scalars are effectively bounded by something of order plank length in 4D language. So in other words, we cannot say that scalar fields take arbitrary value for a given effective Lagrangian. If you want to take all modes like infinity modes like KK modes and so on, yes, you can go infinitely far away. But that means you have to have infinitely many modes in that field theory. So any finite truncation leaving you with a finite number of states will necessarily be bounded in the range of the field space. This in some sense is the meaning of string dualities. Namely, if you are starting with any point in the marginalized space of this field theory, if you go far enough, you get a tower of light states, and typically that turns out to be corresponding to a weakly coupled physics. So each some different directions might give you different towers of light states, and you get different effective theories. And so you get these corners far away from the middle of the marginalized space, which are these different duality frames of string theory. So the existence of duality and string theory is signified by the fact that there are different directions you can get light states. But in the bulk of it, you have a finite range where they all kind of come together. Okay, so much for the supersymmetric case. We don't live in a supersymmetric world. We live in a non-super symmetric world. What about the non-super symmetric situation? Well, no known perturbatively stable solution is known in the non-super symmetric case. This is why in string theory we believe we are not going to be in an absolutely stable situation. We will at best be metastable, but perhaps even not that. So we don't have any single example of a stable one. Is that the proof? No, it's not the proof. We don't know if it is, but it is fair to say that after all these constructions people have tried over many years, we have not managed to find a single stable non-super symmetric system coupled to quantum gravity. In fact, in one case, there's a kind of an argument we can understand. If you take the weak gravity conjecture, which says that the masses of non-super symmetric particles which are charged is less than their charge. There is a brain version of that. And the brain version of it means that tension, tension of the brain is less than the charge per unit area or volume. And basically it means that if you have two parallel brains, their tension is not strong enough to bind them compared to their electric repulsion. So parallel brains will repel each other. So you cannot do what we usually do in ADS CFD. In ADS CFD, we usually take parallel brains. And in that case, it's a supersymmetric case. The mass and charge are exactly equal. They balance. We bring them all together and they take the near horizon geometry and it gives you an ADS geometry. If you try to do the same by pushing these guys next to each other in the non-super symmetric case, you can manage to do it, but it's not going to be stable. The brains one by one will come off because of this repulsion effect. So there is no stability. So the weak gravity conjecture is consistent with the statement that the holography in the context of non-super symmetric ones is not going to work the same way because of instability of ADS in the non-super symmetric case. This is a point that many people take for granted where they talk about non-super symmetric ADS and construct models of holography. However, this is when you have finite number of modes as we do in string theory. There are examples like SYK where you have an infinite tower of light states where you can have ADS non-super symmetric situation. So the statement here we are making is in the context that you are more familiar in the context of finite number of fields in the context of string theory. Am I going too fast? Yes. Okay. So I talked about the ADS. I said the ADS doesn't make sense for the non-super symmetric one. It's not stable. How about non-super symmetric disorder? Well, non-super symmetric disorder is something we believe we live in. So it should better be there in some form, we say.  Who cares? It could tunnel, but we could be in a metal stable vacuum. And this is a picture that more than 90% or so of string theory believe in as a picture that we live in this kind of universe that this is the cosmological constant. And that seems like a reasonable possibility. Why not? In fact, if you take a random potential, why would it not have any critical points? Take a random potential. So an effective field theorist would say, come on, just take your random function. Take your random potential. You're telling me that the random function will never have a critical point. Give me a break, okay? So the effective field theorist's argument is based on the intuition which may not be correct for gravity, but I'm just trying to lay out the reason that the effective field theorist would say a random function could have or should have random critical points. What's so bizarre about that? And that's the motivation. Many string theorists think this is perfectly normal. It's a random function. Maybe you have a huge number of compactification. Rakes super symmetry find a random point there, which is critical. It's a metal stable big deal. There are 10 to the 600 or more such vacuums. It explains why the cosmological constant is small using the anthropic principle. We are done. There's nothing else we need to do in physics and string theory. Well, so let me now evaluate whether we should believe in this reasoning. So for example, why aren't we not in a case where we have a low rolling scalar potential? A situation that you're not at the minimum. Why not this? This situation without, what's called quintessence picture of the dark energy. Why aren't we not rolling? Well, there are various reasons why people don't like this picture and I will try to say what they are. If there is a rolling situation, the field phi changes. Now, if phi couples with something like our matter sectors, it will change something that we could have measured. So if this phi has been rolling, it would have been some consequence of some measurable quantity changing over time. For example, the fine structure constant or some coupling, some masses, something would have changed. But there are strong bounds on the variations of fine structure constant. For example, from the Z equals to 1 when the universe was half the size till now, the percentage change of the fine structure constant is less than 10 to the minus 6. That sounds like this is not very reasonable. Is that a good reason? Well, it's true that in string theory, every field couples to some field. It cannot be a couple to nothing, but it doesn't have to be every field couples to every field. In fact, if it was the case like this, we would not have explained the dark matter. Dark matter is a sector of our universe and we believe it interacts very weakly with us. It better because that's a measurable situation. And we realize that in the context of string theory, let me just say this way. Before I do that, let me just say this one. Okay. Before I say that, so the existence of this extra scalar field in our sector would have introduced an extra thing, which is called the fifth force. If it couples to our sector, there's exchange of this scalar field, which is essentially massless. It will have caused the new force. And therefore, if you measure the force between the astrophysical objects, it is not just proportional to the masses. It will be proportional to this five charge. And therefore, equivalence principle will be apparently violated. And this apparent violation of the equivalence principle, which is called the fifth force, would have been detectable. Again, there are strong bounds on the fifth force. Neither of these arguments are a good argument. In fact, as I just explained, the dark matter sector is an example in string theory, which we better accommodate because that's part of the observed universe. It interacts weakly with us. What is wrong with saying that this scalar field belongs to the dark matter sector? Not a bizarre statement. If you believe there's a dark matter sector, it better be that you can have lots of things, for example, a scalar field. So the picture could be like this. You could have, for example, the manifold, compactification manifold. The standard model could arise from a certain region, localized region in the compact space. And so from some other region, there's dark matter. That's why they interact weakly. They're localized in different places, for example. And delta five could be, for example, corresponding to the breathing mode of the dark matter sector, for instance. Why not? So this picture will tell us that in string theory, it's perfectly okay. And moreover, cosmologically, it's okay to view the source of the dark energy, which is this field phi, as unified with the dark matter sector. The idea that the dark matter and dark energy are unified into this context is very natural. So that is a possibility that string theory says it's also very natural. You just think about it as a part of the compactification, which don't interact with our sector strongly. So the argument of the fifth force or the variation of the constant is a weak argument. And the very discovery of dark matter shows that that's not a good argument. Experimentally, actually. But there is another feature, which is strange. The other feature is that the dark energies tend to the minus 122 in the plank units. But not only that, observationally, the slope should also be less than about 10 to the minus 122 for it not to have violated observations. So there's an observational bound that if there were the potential, it could not have a big slope. It should have been a very small slope. Anotherly, fine-tuned number. So Fizz is looking at this and saying, wait a second, okay, Anthropic explains this, what about that? Okay, it sounds double fine-tuning. This would sound like a double fine-tuning unless there's some interesting limit, like grad V and V are proportional, it's some bound. If there's some natural bound, it's not fine-tuning. Indeed, quite remarkably, experimental bound, as I will explain, gives you exactly the same exponents here. That is, it could have been that grad V is less than 10 to the minus 140. Not so. The bound is right now, grad V is less than a border 10 to the minus 122. Therefore, if there is a reason from string theory side that grad V is a border V, this is very natural if there's a bound like this. Unlike ADS, constructing the sitter vacuum string theory seems to be very difficult. Now, this is not to say that we haven't had amazing work by brilliant physicists doing heroic job like KKLT, Eva Silverstein and company and other people who've tried to construct the sitter and they have given arguments why their sitter is reasonable. On the other hand, there have been many criticisms also leveled against these constructions. For example, the uplifting in KKLT has been subject of many, many debates and people are not convinced that that's necessarily the end of it. In fact, KKLT is a scenario of a construction, not a particular construction. It's a scenario of how it may go. And some people studying the super critical dimensions, like talking about string theory 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 10,000 dimensions, it's somewhat unconventional and I wouldn't know, for example, what does type 2 be in 10.5 dimension means? Let alone whether there's a self 2 or 5 form or not in 11 dimensions. So it's a bit crazy from the viewpoint of conventional string theory. So the notion that we do not have a conventional string theory, which is completely under control, it seems to be the case. Now, why is this going to be difficult? Why are these heroic efforts? Because it's a difficult task. And I really sympathize with this because no matter what you do, you will always typically choose a finite number of modes and you stabilize it. That's all we do. But that's not good enough in the non supersymmetric case because you might have missed some modes. The modes that you pick selectively might be good in certain regime of parameters, which is near supersymmetric point. But if you go away, you don't have an argument you are not missing any modes. It's very difficult to argue you're not missing any modes. So you can think that in a subspace of parameter space you have found the critical point, but maybe you haven't. So it's not an easy task and to argue that you have found, I don't even know how you actually can find a strong argument that you actually has no other direction that you could go. So it is difficult. But because we thought we live in the setter space, I think people put a huge amount of effort to try to explain it. But in fact, there are no go theorems. One of the well-known ones is the Maldesina Nunes no-go theorem, which says that if you take M theory supergravity and compactify it on some manifold, in the limit that you trust supergravity, which means if you don't have singularities in your space or if you forget about strong curvature, there are no deciters. No-go theorem. In M theory, with smooth manifolds, there's no decitter. But does that prove there's no decitter? No, because you can have singularities. You can have this and that. So this doesn't prove it, but it's bizarre. In string theory, we want our harmonic oscillator. There is no harmonic oscillator for the sitter. This is why as a physicist, we begin to doubt that there's a decitter. If there was a decitter, why can't we get it in any way? Simply. Well, some people say, well, it's because it's complicated. That's not a good answer, because I'm not asking for four dimensional of the sitter vacuum with small lambda, with standard model matter and all that. No. No decitter in any dimension, no matter what lambda is, has not been constructed. In fact, this is a no-go theorem for the smooth ones. So a typical view of a string theorist, a normal physicist would say, oh, well, this means that there's something wrong with that. We don't want to get the sitter for some reason. String theory doesn't like it. Now, it could be that we are getting fooled here. It's possible. We cannot be sure that this smooth empty could be fooling us. But the intuition of a physicist is that we trust examples, and this is a very wide class of examples. No matter what seven manifold you pick, there's no decitter. Even though seven manifolds are not easily classifiable, it doesn't matter. There's a no-go theorem. So let us dare to ask, what if there are no critical points of V with positive value? What if there's no, what is there's no critical point like the sitter? So it could be, for example, the gradient is always bounded by universal constant if V is positive. Well, this cannot be true. Why can't this be true? For example, take, compactify the theory on a Kalabia threefold. Super symmetric. We know everything about this nice and so on. There are massive states in that, like BPS states, which we are sure about also. Just give a tiny V to one of those fields. Well, the gradient of V is proportional to phi, and you can make the arbitrary small. So this cannot be true. So it's not true that the gradient of V is bounded away from zero by a simple counter example. We have a huge number of these counter examples. So this cannot be right. What if, what can be true? Well, it could be that the gradient of V is bounded by some function of V, and a natural choice would be some constant times V itself. Some positive constant times V. So in other words, we contemplate a relation like gradient of V, the norm of it is bigger than or equal to some positive constant times V. Could this be true? Let's check it. Well, first of all, it's trivially satisfied when V is negative. Thanks God, I'm not against ADS. ADS is allowed. V negative allows grad V being zero, and that's what we have, solutions, stable solutions, supersymmetric ones. V equal to zero is also allowed, because I have equality side allowed also. So V equal to zero or negative is no problem. V being positive will rule out critical points. But how do we get to V positive? Well, one way of doing it is start exactly like what I was saying for Calabiya, start with a supersymmetric one, which we know that exists. V is zero. And then deform it by going away from, break supersymmetry by going away from supersymmetry. How do we do it? Well, we typically give VF to fields. If VF to a field, you can parametrize all the deformations in terms of some scalar fields. And so near the vanishing points, there will be some fields like this. If you give VF to them, you break supersymmetry. If you compute grad V over V as phi goes to zero, you get a form two over phi. So as phi approaches zero, that goes to infinity. So there's no problem with saying this is beginning on order one. Indeed, near the origin is very big. It can get infinitely big. But indeed, you might say, what about if I make phi big? If you make phi big, this is not a trustable part of the Lagrangian. So if phi is the order one, remember I told you about the range of the field space. When you get the range of the field space of order of the planck length, you don't trust the effective field theories that you start with. So there must be other terms you're ignoring, which could be more other gradient directions that you're ignoring. So what this is telling us is that when this is trustable in the regime of small phi, indeed, there's no problem with grad V over V bigger than order one. We can consider M theory as a supergravity limit. This is the kind of thing that Maldesina and Nunes studied. They considered it for arbitrary seven manifolds with arbitrary thoughts and they showed there's no critical point of V. Despite the fact that the effective field theories would have told us just right at random V, there's somewhere some effective critical point. No problem. They showed no, there's no such thing here. But they showed it, Maldesina and Nunes. Now take this V. Can you get arbitrary close to gradient vanishing or not? Can you make gradient of V are really small for this class? By picking a nice five, seven manifold of some kind. The answer is no. The Maldesina-Nunes-Nogoth theorem can be strengthened. Not only grad V cannot become zero, but grad V over V is bounded below by a universal constant. You can actually show this. This is not a hard thing to prove. How do you prove this such an amazing statement? Trivial. Volume rescaling. It's a trivial argument. You just say to take any manifold, just rescale it and dictate the terms in your action, computer effect. You get this result. Very simple. No work. Okay? So I don't have to do anything exotic like you find the classification of all seven manifolds and this and that. There's a trivial statement I'm making here. Of course, I'm assuming supergravity is valid in M-theory, which is not necessarily true if we have singular geometries, but at least for smooth geometries, this is certainly the bound. Well, remember that V depends on many scalar fields. So the gradient of field is a vector in the field space. This is the ally of V. So you have to choose a norm. And the norm you use is the norm dictated by the metric in the field there, in the kinetic thermal phi. Yes. Interesting question. Gravity is very special in 2D, of course. In fact, that's a very good question. So let me explain it better.  Right? If you decouple gravity, if M-plan goes to infinity, you should get back the field theory space. So when I say grad V is bigger than or equal to V, I'm writing everything in Planck units so that this C is a universal number. But if you want to restore the Planck units in four dimension, for example, you have to put V over M-plan here. Notice that if M-plan goes to infinity, this goes to zero, and you get the usual no bound. So in the limit you decouple gravity, this condition goes away. So it's good. It's a condition should only exist because of gravity. So M-plan should feature in any criteria like this. However, if you do two dimensions, the scalar phi's in two dimensions are, oops, the scalar phi's in two dimensions are dimensionless. So therefore, you would not have this condition that I'm writing here. So this would be crazy for two dimensions. So the two dimension is not what we're talking about. And in that context, the notion of the gravity in two dimensions is also strange. So this is interesting that this already picks higher than two dimension, especially. So I'm talking about dimensions bigger than two. I should say that from the beginning. In fact, this bound is realized, namely take ADS four times a seven. And we know there's the ADS minimum. If you look at the radius of this seven sphere as a function of the flux, but as you go closer and closer to the origin, the very small and smaller radius, you compute the gradient of V over V, you find that this is bounded given by exactly 1.6. So you can realize this bound. This is a good bound. It's saturated in this example. And you cannot do any better. There's universal bound if you have smooth M theory. Now, you can talk about other compactification. Suppose you consider the strong energy condition. Now, strong energy condition is violated in string theory. So it's not a, it's not a sacred principle. But if you take strong energy condition or at least the vac here, compactifications which respect the strong energy condition, using that, you can get other bounds like this. If you start from capital D dimension and go to small D dimension, you get a bound for grad V over V bigger than this universal number. And always the two dimension will always be strange, as you can see here. Or you can say, what about the non-energy condition? Well, if you take, assume that your compactifications respect the non-energy condition, you get different bound. You get this kind of bound. For example, for non-energy condition, if the compactifications which preserve non-energy condition, the bound you get is 1.2. Now, of course, non-energy condition is also violated by certain oriental folds in string theory. So it's nothing sacred. But it shows you that order one number and such a relation is not crazy. It is not crazy to believe there is such universal bounds. There are other examples. Take heterotic strings for younger string theorists who, I'm sorry, you may not have heard about the O16 cross O16 string. This is, it made its fame by being the only non-supersymmetric theory of quantum gravity in 10 dimension with no tachyons. Yeah, there are such things. There's no tachyon and it's not supersymmetric. It has an interesting gauge group, SO16 times O16. And it's not supersymmetric. You compute the V for it at weak coupling, which you can do. At weak coupling, you get one loop contribution, computable actually. You can compute the cosmological constant contributions by one loop string computation you find that it goes like this. So in that context, you get for weak coupling, grad V over V is bounded by 5 over root 2 where this direction is the dilaton direction. Also, you can extend an argument by these two groups to give a no-go theorem for type 2a or b compactification to four dimensions with arbitrary even oriental faults I'm allowing, oriental planes with even negative tension and d-brains of the same charge. If you take oriental cubed planes and d cubed brains with these values of q's, you can get a bound for this constant, the square of time denoting here of this type. These other ones actually have been even, so there are two cases where the average curvature is positive or negative in internal manifold that you can study, but, and these two cases have also some other people have argued some things against these as well, have been bounded. So this shows that at least for a large class of examples, there is grad V over V is bounded below. Now, this is not the most general class of compactifications because I'm restricting oq and dq of a fixed q. You can take all the q's of all different dimensions and all charges then there's no bound like this that haven't anybody has shown yet. So this does not prove, this does not prove that there's a universal bound, but what it does show is that having compactification was grad V over V bounded below of order one is natural. So regardless of whether we believe grad V over V is always bounded below, it certainly is normal to consider compactifications for which it saturates that bound. That's the point here I want to emphasize. Regardless of whether we believe that there's an overall restriction on grad V bigger than or equal to constant times V, even though now we are accumulating evidence that this is true, even if it weren't true, we have already shown that there are many classes of string compactifications which do have such bounds. And therefore quintessence models are natural in string theory. To say that the grad V is of order V is not exotic in string theory. KKLT has other, not just these have other ingredients, more brains than just OQ. So this does not rule out KKLT, this argument does not rule out. So therefore we have a situation where we see that V prime of order V is certainly natural. Okay, now I come to the main gist of my talk, namely this is what I wanted to say really. So what are the cosmological implications of these two conditions? Let us assume that there is a universal bound, grad V is bigger than or equal to a positive constant times V. And let's assume that the range of a scalar field is bounded below by some order one number of order one in plank units for a given effective field theory to make sense, otherwise you get light states. So in other words, we have two parameters here, C and delta, which are should be something of order one in plank, which we don't know what they are. And we can see what happens if we have such a bound in the context of physics, of cosmology of the universe, past, present and future. So I want to review the past, present and future in view of these two conditions, that the field range is bounded and the gradient of the potential is bigger than V. So we go to past. So early universe, inflation is by far the most popular and most believed in theory for early universe. In those contexts, in particular, there is a slow roll parameter, what's called epsilon, which is related to the C I'm talking about here by one half C squared. It's one half grad V over V squared. Now current observational bounds on the B modes for the textbook models in inflation, like five squared or five to some power, leads to the bound that epsilon is less than 0.0044, or in other words, C is less than 0.09. But these textbook models have been ruled out already because of the, if you combine with spectral tilt, they are not allowed. So the textbook models of inflation are ruled out already. But there are other models that are not ruled out. For example, the plateau models are some of the more favored models of inflation still not ruled out. For plateau models, for example, you find the bound that if you want this to be consistent with observation and inflation, this constant C is better be less than 0.02. Now this is a bit tight. Now you can't say 0.02 is of order one. Could be, I don't know. You saw examples of, you saw examples that I was getting. In no example in string theory I've gotten less than one. So it's very difficult to get less than one, let alone 0.02. So this is non-trivial. This is non-trivial. And then there's the other one is the number of e-folding. You know, the 60 e-fold business that we need requires in these plateau models for the range of this field to be bigger than five in plank units. You have to have a nice flat potential for five units, for five units of plank length and trust that that's possible and typical. That for sure is fine-tuning to me. Even if you believe in inflation, you have to accept that's fine-tuning. So if inflation is solving a problem, if it's introducing another problem, that's fine-tuning. That's certainly fine-tuned to have a situation of such a long flat plateau. So I think inflation is in trouble one way or the other. Either it's not the correct model or if it's true, it's fine-tuned. So if it's trying to explain a problem of no fine-tuning of our universe, it's not doing a good job. This is badly fine-tuned. So let's go to present. If we believe the grade in the V is bigger than a constant times V, then this error is ruled out and therefore the only possibility is quantitence models. Quite remarkably, it can be shown that the observational bounds are compatible with quantitence models. If you take a potential, for example, like V naught times e to the minus c phi, you find that for this to be observationally consistent, you need the following situation. So let me explain this is one of the few things that we have in physics of experimental things in a string theory talk. This is actually a plot from the data, namely based on the supernova observations, you can find a range for allowed values of W. W gives you the equation of the state for the dark energy sector. So if you take p over rho, you can call it W, W is equal to minus 1 if it was a cosmological constant. So this line here down here, this straight line down here, would be the case if we are talking about dark energy of the form of a cosmological constant, which is not changing. But the experimental bound is that it depends on the value of Z. So Z equal to 0 is the current universe. Z equals to 1 is the universe is twice small and so forth.  So this under this black curve is what is allowed. If you take the value of C, 1, that is ruled out. 0.8 is ruled out. 0.7 is not. 0.6 is not ruled out. So anything less than 0.6 is certainly consistent with the experiment. And look, that means grad V over V, 0.5 for example, is perfectly fine with observation. I was showing you the examples from M31, 0.2 and so forth. Experiment is giving numbers not like 10 to the minus 100 or something. It's 0.5, so close. This is tantalizingly close and potentially extremely exciting for string theory. That is, we might have a window to actually observation if indeed there is this bound. If indeed the bound we are proposing is correct, unlike the desetter which is unpredictive, this will have predictive consequences. Extremely exciting for string theory if it's true. So people felt that when we are trying to rule out this theory, we are trying to rule out string theory. To the contrary, we are hoping to find the first experimental evidence for string theory if we can understand better what this bound on C is. But at any rate, this shows that we can have a situation of the bounds like 0.6, 0.5 and so on. This could be done. And exciting thing is that cosmologists, observational cosmologists are today measuring or hoping to measure more accurately the values of W and they're hoping to narrow this down to minus 0.99 in the next round of experiments. So we will see what happens to these values of allowed values of C. So this could be very exciting coming up. In fact, you can show that with this bound, if you take, so not only this is allowed, you can find that this is the best bound that's allowed, namely, 1 plus W, the W today is away from minus 1 at least by 0.15 times C squared. That C is the same C that is in the conjecture of that bound where C is that order 1 number. So if you take it like 0.5, for example, right now, it's consistent with the experiment. It could be smaller or not. But if this conjecture is true, C is of order 1 gives you a bound which is not unreasonable for being observed. How about the future? If we lived in the center space, the lifetime of the universe before there's phase transition can be are pretty large. You could be in a situation like this and you will tunnel away, but this height could be the barrier could be as long as long as you want. We don't have any idea what it is. So you could be long lived, very long lived thanks to this barrier height. And so you should be happy even if this metastable we have no problem. But this raises a puzzle is the following. It's called the coincidence problem. Why is it that the current lifetime of the universe is 1 over H, the Hubble constant? Why is that related to 1 over square root of the dark energy now? Why are they of the same order? People say, well, you know, it's there because, well, we happen to ask it today if you've evaluated 10 trillion, whatever number of years in the future, this wouldn't be true and therefore it's a useless question. It's just a coincidence problem. That is assuming the universe expands or extends to that far away in the future. If we can argue that the universe has a lifetime of order Hubble, the lifetime would be very natural. There's no coincidence problem. A sampling of a point in that universe would have given the Hubble time of order 1 over root energy. No problem. So is it true? Is it true that the age of the universe, the future of the universe is bounded by something of order 1 times the Hubble time? Well, what is going on now? Well, if you are in the quintessence situation, we are rolling down and what can happen to this potential? Well, for sure it could go negative. That's one possibility or it could continue rolling like this. In either case, if it goes on, for example, all like slowly going this way for a long time, it cannot go too long. Why? Well, because if it goes off the order of a plank length in field space, we know there are light states coming down, thanks to this finite range in field space. So this cannot go at the infinitum without getting light states. So we should be getting light states. That means there's going to be some kind of phase transition. Either a new dimension opens up or some other light states go up. Something happens if we are in this situation. If we are in this situation, it's much more dramatic. It kind of takes over.  You have a different story. So at any rate, either of these two scenarios will lead to a phase transition. What is the longest time we have for this to happen? Let's call that the age of our universe. In other words, what is the time before there is a phase transition? You can easily compute it using these ideas and you find that the number of Hubble times that you have left over is related to the ratio of these two constants and these two conductors. Delta over C times 3 over 2 times omega of 5, which means that the fraction of the energy in the dark energy, which is 0.7 here. So 3 over 2 times 0.7 times order 1 numbers. So we learned that in order 1 in Hubble time, we would have either going to a crunching situation or light modes would appear. So this would solve the coincidence problem. So if this conjecture is correct, we have solved the coincidence problem just by this conjecture. You can actually trace the argument. It's very straightforward, simple math. It's very boring, simple math. I won't bother going through it. What about the cosmological constant? Well, it is going to be a very different solution now because previously in the landscape picture of this cosmological constant, you were looking for minimum of this center. And so you just said that if you have a huge number of these small enough dark energy, you can get them as close as possible to 0 and using the anthropic principle. But that's not the case anymore. If the potential is rolling, the question is not what is the minimum value but where you are today or how it's evolving. So it's a completely different question. So how does that relate to solving the cosmological constant problem? Well, let us assume the following just to give you a feeling for it. Suppose we take a potential which is positive. You can take it of the form e to the minus a function of phi with no loss of generality. And I put a coefficient one here to say at some point where this vanishes these of order one in Planck units. Okay, so suppose we start life by energies which are not fine tuned, order one in Planck units and then evolve. Well, how much has log v changed since Planck time? Well, v is now 10 to the minus 122. So it went from 0 to minus 122 in powers of 10. Or in other words, the change in the log of v is about minus 280. Well, in other words, the integral of d of log of v over the course of the universe till now, which is v prime over v times d phi, which is the same thing as lambda. This is that the ratio of v prime over that constant that is varying. Now this lambda depends on phi and it's bounded below by this constant c times d phi. And this is the same thing as the average of lambda times the range of the field space. So what we are saying is that this should be minus 280. That means the range of the field space times the average value of lambda should be minus 280. We said that lambda today in the past from z equals to 1 to 0 should be less than 0.5. But this doesn't mean it's always 0.5. That was where it's been very recently. But the average value is minus 280. What does it mean to be times divide by delta phi? The range of the field space, we don't know what it is. Something presumably of order one in Planck units, we don't know. But if you remember that the phi has a dimension of the mass units in four dimensions. So you have v is equal to minus phi over m. So there's a mass scale associated with the phi. So you can think of this potential as something like phi over a mass scale. What this is telling you is that this mass scale, which is the inverse of the lambda, goes like the inverse of this, goes like delta phi over 280. So the mass scale associated to phi should be delta phi over 280. If you put in the units in, it is four times 10 to the minus 16 GeV times delta phi over m Planck. This sounds tantalizingly close to the God's scale. So what are we saying? We're saying that if the m associated with the phi is anything near the God's scale, this gives you a natural solution to the cosmological constants problem. That means, what does that mean? That means imagine the universe has a dark sector and our sector and the dark sector starts life of the same order as the size of the dark matter sector. So they are the same size. God's scale is set by the size of the compactification regions where it gives you those matter fields. So saying that the phi field has a scale of order of the God's scale means that the same matter sector that we get our standard model is of the same size as the sector that phi is associated with. In other words, the dark sector has similar scale, had at least generally, similar scale to our sector, except it wasn't stabilized and it was rolling. So on the average, it has the same scale as ours, but it was rolling. In other words, we get the picture like cosmological constant is e to the minus m Planck over m phi, or in other words, lambda is e to the minus m Planck over m Gut. If you take m phi of order m Gut, which doesn't sound that strange. m Gut, you know, 100 or 1000 less than m Planck give you a very simple exponential solution to the cosmological constant problem. It's not that exotic. So this at least gives you a new perspective of possible solution to the cosmological constant problem also. So observational consequences, well, more accurate measurements of w would be very exciting is one plus w significantly different from zero as we predict. And also, we know that phi, if we are right, phi should couple to something, it should couple to dark matter. Therefore, the coupling constants on the dark matter are changing. The analog of the alpha of the dark matter sector is changing. So therefore, presumably, there could be some consequences. There should be also the analog of the fifth force in the dark matter sector because of the exchange of the scalar field phi and therefore apparent violations of equivalence principle for the dark matter should be a consequence. The cosmological observations cosmologists who are looking at these observations for dark matter have begun actually putting bounds on violations of the apparent violations of the equivalence principle also in the dark sector. So that's another venue where you could make some predictions or make some possible observations supporting these conjectures. So let me conclude. It seems not unreasonable to believe that the center is not realizable in a column theory of gravity. This motivates a new swamp land criterion putting a bound on the slope of v in terms of v. And this together with the other swamp swamp land condition, which is bound in the range of the fields, leads to some tension with inflation. At the very least, inflation seems artificially fine-tuned or perhaps ruled out. And the present epoch must be based on a quintessence model. And the universe is about to undergo a phase transition of order of one and a half of time. And either a towel of light states appear or we have cosmic acceleration stops. Thank you.


Welcome to the session. I am Mr Praveen Yalapa Kumbar. Today we want to see lossless compression algorithm. The learning outcome of this topic is at the end of the session student will be able to explain the concept of Shannon-Fano algorithm in multimedia communication techniques. The contents of this topics are introduction, basics of information theory, variable length encoding, Shannon-Fano algorithm, compression ratio and entropy. First introduction. This is the basic diagram of general data compression scheme. In this diagram, there are mainly three parts. The first one is encoder, second one is storage or network, and third one is decoder. Here first input data is provided to the encoder. This encoder is also called as a compression. Here the compression of data will be done and after that one input will be provided to the network which will be stored. After that it will send to the decoder. Decoder is also called as a decompression. Here the decompression takes place and we get the output data. From this diagram we can conclude there are two types. One is a lossless data compression and second one is lossy data compression. Now data compression is also known as source coding. Data compression is the process of encoding data in a such a way that it consumes less memory space. Data compression reduces the number of resources required to store and transmit the data. It can be done in two ways that is lossless compression and lossy compression. Compression means the process of coding that will effectively reduce the total number of bits needed to represent certain information. Lossless compression is a class of data compression algorithm that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data. Therefore here the chance of the data reduction is less as compared to the next one is lossy compression. If the compression and decompression process induce some information loss then the compression scheme is called as lossy compression. Therefore here the most of the large amount of data will be reduced in compare with the lossless compression. Now we see compression ratio. The compression ratio is defined as ratio of the B0 by B1 that is represented by the equation number 1 where B0 is the number of bits before the compression and B1 represents the number of bits after the compression. Therefore the compression ratio defined as ratio of the number of bits before compression to the number of bits after the compression. Now basics of information theory. Now before going to the this information basic information theory we want to go for what is the means of entropy. Entropy n of an information source with alphabet yes there has a different sample space here we take as a n sample space that is S1, S2, S3 up to SN and from this sample space we can derive the formula for entropy n is equal to summation of i is equal to 1 is to n Pi log to the base 2 1 by Pi that is equation number 2. Now this 1 by Pi goes to the numerator when it will goes to the numerator then it will become as a minus therefore this equation to become as minus summation i is equal to 1 is to n Pi log to the base 2 Pi that is equation number 3 this is a formula for the entropy. Where Pi is the probability that symbol si in S will occur. The next term that is log base 2 1 by Pi indicates the amount of information contained in Si which corresponds to the number of bits needed to encode Si. Now we see variable length coding. The entropy indicates the information contained in an information source that is S. It leads to a family of coding methods commonly known as entropy coding methods. Variable length coding is one of the best known such methods. Now we want to see Shannon-Fano algorithm. The Shannon-Fano algorithm was implemented developed by Shannon at the Bell Labs and Robert Fano at MIT therefore the name indicates Shannon-Fano. The encoding steps of the Shannon-Fano algorithm can be presented in the following top-down manner. There are basically two steps from first step is sort the symbol according to the frequency count of S. Second one is recursively divide the symbols into two parts each with approximately the same number of counts until all parts contain only one symbol. Now we want to see a natural way of implementing the above procedure is to build a binary tree. As a convention let's assign bit 0 to the left branch bit 1 to the right branch. It's a method of constructing perfect score based on a set of symbols and their probabilities estimated or measured. The techniques was proposed in Shannon's mathematical theory of communication his 1948 article introducing the field of information theory. In the field of data compression Shannon-Fano coding named after cloudy Shannon and Robert Fano. Now you want to see the example. Symbols to be coded are the characters in the word is a speaker and first of all we want to calculate the frequency count of the symbol is here for the S how many times it will comes if you observe S is comes to 1 therefore you write here S is 1 P comes 1 here E comes two times in the here and here therefore we write here E is 2 A occurs one time K occurs one R occurs one therefore if you made summation of this one we get total number is 7. Now everyone pause the video here and recall the first step of the Shannon-Fano algorithm. Okay now the first step is sort the symbol according to the frequency count of their occurs therefore the previous table become as largest number the count of symbol become first and after that one it will arrange in this way descending order therefore the previous table become now this one. Now steps to recursively divide the symbols into two parts each with approximately the same number of counts until all parts contains only one symbol. Now if you observe here I want to divide into two main parts nearly equal therefore I want to divide left hand side I will get E S that is a total number of count is 2 plus 1 is a 3 therefore I am writing here 3 and if you observe remaining part PAKR that total becomes 4 that's I will take is the right hand side it will PAKR and left hand side indicates 0 and right hand side indicates 1 again in the next step I want to divide this this part again I want to divide this part until that not contains only one part therefore now the next becomes this E S is divided into two parts that is E that is 2 that is a count of symbol is 2 again as I divide 1 again if I divide this is a nearly equal parts that is PA2 KR2 again I want to divide these parts because it does not contains a single symbol it contains double that's why again I want to divide this one here I am not required to divide these parts therefore the next part become as PA2 is divided into 1 and A is a 1 KR is divided into K1 and R1 in this way I will divide up to the this contains the single now next if you observe this part I made up on a table that is a first column indicates symbol after that one count and code now if you observe this table is calculated from this diagram now if you observe here these are the symbols and these are the counts which I have done in the previous slide now if this code becomes as if you observe E from this one E comes from 0 0 that's why here I will write 0 0 S comes if you observe S comes 0 1 that I want to write 0 1 in this way I will write all this code for this different symbols now I want to calculate the number of bits used number of bits is used calculated with the help of code into count code here these are the two and these two two into two four in this way you have to count the number of bits used if you observe here here code is two and here count is one these two how it will comes 0 and 1 there are two symbols that's why you have to take as a 2 2 into 1 that is a 2 and in this way I will use the number of bits used now I want to calculate the probability how we calculate the probability I will calculate the probability by count divided by the number of count that is 2 by 7 I will get 0.29 in this way I will count for the different symbols now here the total number of a bits is is the summation of this all this total number of bits that is here 18 bits now I want to go for compression ratio if the total number of bits required to represent the data before compression is B0 the total number of bits required to represent the data after the compression is B1 therefore compression ratio is B0 by B1 here for B0 is equal to 8 into 7 is equal to 56 symbols here there are 7 characters and for each character I will take as a 8 bits B1 is a total 18 bits that we calculate in the previous slide therefore the compression ratio becomes 3.11 therefore average number of bits used by 7 symbols is 2.57 now entropy now entropy I will calculate it from this table as the formulas 0.29 into log to the base 2 1 by 0.29 plus 0.14 that's remaining all this part contains the same that's why I will multiplied by the 5 because 1 2 3 4 5 that's why I will write the 5 after this following these steps we get the value is 2.52 this suggests that minimum average number of bits to code each character in the world speaker would be at least 2.52 the Shannon phenol algorithm delivers satisfactory coding results for data compression the references for this topic is thank you


That concludes the First Minister's statement on Covid-19 update, and we will move to the next item of business, which is a debate on motion 2926, in the name of Nicola Sturgeon, on appointment of Scottish junior minister. I shall invite the First Minister to move the motion, and I then intend to invite each party to make a short contribution, and I would invite members who wish to speak in the debate to press their request to speak buttons, or enter R in the chat function. I call on the First Minister to speak to and move the motion. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I rise to move the motion in my name that Neil Gray be appointed as a Scottish junior minister. Let me first of all, though, pay tribute to the minister departing the Scottish Government. During his four years as a member of my Government, Graham Day has performed excellently in very demanding roles. In a period of minority government, he built trust and constructive relationships with parties across the chamber. He worked with Parliament to adapt to the early demands of the pandemic and ensure that members could continue to scrutinise and hold government to account. His skills also helped to ensure that, as a minority government, we were able to deliver on key legislation for the country. Graham also served as veterans minister, and I know how much that meant to him, and I am sure that he will continue to be a strong advocate for our veterans from the backbenches in Parliament. As transport minister, Graham's significant achievements will leave a lasting legacy. Not only has he set out strong plans to reduce car use to help meet climate targets, he has also delivered concessionary bus travel for under-22s and laid the groundwork for Scotland's publicly-owned railway company. Graham leaves Government with many achievements to be proud of. He also leaves with my very best wishes, and I am sure that I have the best wishes of everyone across the chamber. I have asked Jenny Gowruth to take on the role of transport minister. As minister for culture, Europe and international development, Jenny has worked hard and well to preserve close links with her friends in Europe during the Brexit transition period. She has also worked to maintain our international development programmes and to support the culture sector during the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic. In her new role, Jenny will play a critical part in our national efforts to become net zero by 2045. Of course, as the MSP for Mid-Fife and Glenrothes, which sits in between the Forth and the Tay bridges, Jenny understands very well the vital importance of our national transport infrastructure. Indeed, she played a key part in securing the leave-and-mouth rail link for her constituents, a service that she is very much looking forward to using herself. Those changes have left a vacancy in the ministerial team. I am therefore delighted to nominate Neil Gray to replace Jenny Gowruth as minister for culture, Europe and international development. Neil served as an MP at Westminster for a number of years before being elected as a member of the Scottish Parliament in last May's Scottish election. In both roles, he has been a long-standing supporter of Scotland's relationship with Malawi. More recently, as deputy convener of the SNP's social justice and fairness commission and then as convener of the Scottish Parliament's social justice and social security committee, Neil has proven his ability to navigate complex and often very sensitive issues, ensuring that competing points of view are listened to carefully and helping to bring people together to build a consensus. Those are all skills that will serve Neil very well in government. In my estimation, Neil is highly able, and I have no doubt that he will be a strong asset to my Government. Neil, I know that I cannot wait to get formally started as a minister, and as he does so, I know that the whole chamber will wish him the very best of luck. With those comments, it gives me great pleasure to move the motion in my name. I now call on Jackson Carlaw. I begin by thanking Graham Day, on behalf of the Scottish Conservatives, for his service in government. He brings a rather rare quality, I thought, to government, and that is a general bonnet on me and a sense of humour. He never unknowingly did not promote assiduously the cause of his party, but he was a widely performer, demonstrated in a very recent debate that I was engaged in with him on the East Kilbride railway line, where he was very quick to suggest that I write to him about a potential extension to that line through my constituency. I realised that he knew that he would be away before the letter arrived. Jenny Gilruth, I congratulate on her subsequent appointments. I do not think that anyone could pay more effusive tribute to Jenny Gilruth than her partner, Kezia Dugdale, on Twitter, so I would simply direct the chamber to her comments and happily endorse them and wish her well with her new responsibilities. I met Neil Gray for the first time in the House of Commons when I was attending a mesh event with Alex Neil, his predecessor. In fact, I had a very convivial supper with him and his colleagues, Mary Black and Chris Law, which I think caused some consternation on the Conservative whips at the time. Alex Neil was quick to tell me that he was a talent that was one to watch. As I recall, Mr Gray agreed and told me that he expected to be fast-tracked to ministerial office fairly quickly. Clearly, a man who is as good as his word. He is, I think, bright and able from the conversations that I had with him, but I only caution him not just always to rush in. 48 hours before the First Minister made a speech at the start of the year on how Scotland would have to learn to live with the virus, Mr Gray tweeted, learning to live with the virus is still code for being willing to let many of your fellow citizens suffer hospitalisation or death. That is quite a challenge to the First Minister's integrity and common sense, but I am sure that it will be overlooked and my only advice to him in future would be possibly to be slightly less brave. However, I do wish him well in his new responsibilities and can assure him that that letter that was going to Mr D will now be coming to him. Whether it will get a more favourable response, I have no idea, but we happily support the nominations made by the First Minister. I now call on Neil Bibby. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Firstly, can I pass on the best wishes of the Scottish Labour Party to Graham Day, who has resigned as Minister for Transport and recognises service in that role? As Minister for Parliamentary Business, we hope that he has a speedy recovery. I would like to welcome Neil Gray at his appointment as junior minister for Minister for Culture, Europe and International Development. Mr Gray brings experience in both his time as an MP and an MSP. I recognise the courage of his convictions to resign his seat at the House of Commons to be elected here, which shows character and principle that will stand him in good stead for his new role. I understand that he also worked for Alex Neil when I think I speak for all opposition members when I say that we really hope that some of Alex's rebellious tendencies have rubbed off on Mr Gray. On that note, he has been appointed as minister for Europe. It would be interesting to know whether he voted in the same way as Mr Neil in the Brexit referendum. We wish him well in his new role. The culture sector, our venues, staff, artists and musicians have been under huge pressure as a result of the pandemic, and they need our support now. Scottish Labour also commits to working with the minister to ensure that the Covid vaccine is rolled out in the developing world, not only is there a moral imperative to do so. We are not safe until everyone is safe. I also congratulate Jenny Gilruth on her appointment as minister for transport and wish her well in her new role. I recognise the leadership in her leadership in the leave-and-move rail campaign. This is an opportunity for a change of approach on transport. A new transport minister, we hope, will bring a new way of thinking in a fresh perspective, which is badly needed. There is a big job ahead for Ms Gilruth and big questions to answer. For example, will the new transport minister stop the ScotRail cuts to services and booking offices? How will the ferries that we ask will be fixed? What will be done to support the creation of locally-run bus services? When will we finally see the delivery on the First Minister's promise for a national smart ticketing card? Scottish Labour looks forward to working with the new transport minister on all of those issues. Presiding Officer, we have raised concerns previously about the number of ministers in government and the associated costs to the taxpayers. Those concerns still stand, but let me be clear that they are not a personal reflection on the ministers being appointed today. Those are serious issues and serious times for the country. Whoever takes on the responsibility of government, we wish them well. We, therefore, wish Neil Gray and Jenny Gilruth the very best and every success in their new roles. I start by echoing the sentiments that express Graham Day. Graham has that rare quality in the chamber of being able to reach out across the aisle to all corners of the chamber. He is always greeting people with a warmth and decency that is all too uncommon in Scottish politics. I salute his difficult decision to step down. I think that self-care and staying well are all too often things that play second fiddle to the way that we do in this place and in the halls of government. I recognise the immense contribution that he has made in his time in government. I thank him for his work and look forward to what is next for him. Jenny Gilruth, who, according to her mum, has far more affection for Willie Rennie than her boss evidently does, given the tenor of the last statement, moved to the transport brief, which can be the graveyard of careers, as we know, but it can also be the springboard to Cabinet Office. I highly expect that it will be the latter for Jenny. We both went to Madras College. That is something that people do not know about, as we are both alumni of that Augustine Andrews institution. Sadly, she is far more successful than I am, so she still keeps being invited back. I wish them well for me next time that you are there, Jenny. I congratulate Neil Gray, who today Liberal Democrats will claim as one of those, given that he was actually born in Orkney. We welcome him to his ministerial office. I have heard about Neil long before I met him, which means that his meteoric rise to office is also unsurprising. I wish him well. That has actually become a difficult brief, not least given the impact of the pandemic on the cultural sector. There is a lot of pain and hurt out there that I hope he will bring south, too, but also in respect of this country's commitments to Malawi, not least since the Conservative Government cut the international aid budget that the plight of that nation and nations like it have become all the more difficult. I wish them all well and congratulate them today. Thank you. The question is that motion 2926, in the name of Nicola Sturgeon, on appointment of junior Scottish minister, be agreed. Are we all agreed? The motion is therefore agreed. There will be a brief pause before we move to the next item of business.


So I will give you a brief introduction of OpenAir Connect, OpenAir and what is this service that we are testing together with you. And then our colleague Argyro from Athena Research Center will show you the user interface and will explain a bit. Because I know that many of you were already involved in the first phases of the testing, but a lot of things has changed. So OpenAir, you may already know that OpenAir is the European infrastructure for open science, but in fact we have collaboration all around the world. And we support the implementation and the take of open science principles in research. And we do this from two sides. So we have the networking infrastructure. So we have one national open access desk in each European country, which advocates and support implementation of open access and open science in general. We have task forces that work for the fairness of data on for the global alignment and interoperability established. Let's say common understanding and best best practices all around the world in support of open science. And we also have a technical infrastructure that provides services for for many stakeholders so we have services for funders for institutional repositories for content providers for research communities. And also for researchers. So if you go to the OpenAir portal, you can see these connect, provide, explore, develop a monitor and these are the labels for for the services that we offer. So today we're you're going to see you're going to participate to the test of the research community dashboard, which is a service that OpenAir created in order to be able to build community gateways to open science. So what does it mean? It means that you can have a discipline specific gateway, a portal where you can find everything that you need to implement and monitor open science in your own research communities. And why, because we think that researchers still have to face a lot of barriers in order to adopt open science publishing practices. It's very difficult because it's very difficult to find and to reuse the research outputs that are relevant for you as a researcher. So there is this literature and data deluge. And the there is a need of a place where you can find everything that is related to your discipline to your search topic. And we also need ways to allow you to help grow and create the space so that also other researchers of your community will find a complete set of products that are easier to reuse and open science publishing tools. So what does it mean for a researcher to publish? How can I publish all types of research outputs? How can I publish the packages of research outputs? So I don't, for example, as a researcher, you may want, you may have a scientific article, you may have a data sets, you may have software and all this together from a sort of package that actually represents everything that you have done during a research activity. And this must be published because this supports omnicomprehensive evaluation and allows you to be rewarded for everything that you have done, so not only for the article. And finally, there is the need to keep all the information about the research outputs up to date. Because the data that you have published can be reused by other, so new relationship to your product, new links to your product can be created over time. And this is something that we must keep track of it. So here we have the motivation about monitoring, because maybe you want to know which are the open science publishing practices in your research community. You want to know who is actually publishing packages of artifacts, for example, who is publishing data sets in open access and who is not. So we can offer, let's say some graphs that explain you the trend of the uptake of open science publishing practices in your community. And we offer all this functionality via what we call a community gateway, so a community gateway for open science. And this is done thanks to one of the main service that OpenAir offers, which is the OpenAir research graph. So OpenAir collects from institutional repositories, thematic repositories, founder databases, and many, many, many other types of data sources, content providers. We collect metadata about the publications, research data, software, other types of research products, and these can be protocols, methods, workflows, for example. So we collect this metadata. We link it to projects, to research communities, to organizations, and we enrich this graph. By the duplicating, because we can collect metadata records about the same products from different sources. So we merge together the duplicates, and we also apply full text mining algorithm to the open access publications in order to enrich the graph with additional information that we can extract from the full text itself. So for example, subjects, sorry, the list of projects, the relevance for research infrastructure or research community, affiliation information, these kind of things. Then we need a way not to offer you a view of this graph that is relevant for you and for your community. So each gateway, so each gateway has a set of managers that basically configure the gateway by providing a list of relevant projects, acknowledgement statements, data sources that are relevant for your community. This is another communities where, you know, researchers used to publish their data sets and workflows and so on. A list of subjects, keywords that are relevant for the community. And this is the way how we start to populate what you can see in your, in your gateway. And of course, you can contribute to it. And you can do this by manually adding the research products that are missing. And we have a dedicated functionality for it. And you can use it to manually add one single item. So for example, one publication. You can add it, let's say in bulk batch. So you can upload a list of your eyes and all the publications and data sets with those the eyes will be added to the gateway, or you can provide an orchid ID. And, and then you can select all the research products related with that orchid ID in order to add them to the dash. So this was the introduction I wanted to make. And we have a new version of a beta connect dot open air dot you and all the gateways that we, we have already deployed for different communities. So if you have any questions or otherwise, I will leave the floor to Argyro who can proceed with the showcase of the new functionality. I guess I can start. Do you see my screen? Do you see my screen? Yes, yes. Okay, good. This is the beta connect open air you that Alessia told you about. This is the, the foreshadow is the site that you can reach to find information about the open air connect project. To see what gateways we have already created and are part of this project. We have the list of the, of the gateways that we have is in here, you can see a community about our cultural and food sciences about the humanities and cultural heritage about marine science. And if you click on browser, there is a page where you can search for these communities. If you click, okay, this is a community that I would, I chose to, to showcase the, the gateway. By taking it, it will take you to the, to the gateway of this community. In this page, you can subscribe using this pattern to this community. So, in this way, you, you become part of this community, and you are able to make the, to use the linking functionality that Alessia mentioned before. This is a quick link from the home page of the, of the connect portal. So now I am logged in. I am subscribed to the following. Community so I can click here and visit them all. Or I can see the whole list of the communities that I am subscribed to. I'm going back again to the new informatics gateway. You can see that now I'm subscribed here. In the home page of this gateway, you can see the information related to the community to know what this, what this community is about. You see statistics, the numbers, what are, what is this communities in numbers, regarding the research results related to this community. At the bottom of the page, you can see who are the managers, who are the curators of this, of this gateway. In this case, for the new informatics community, we have community as a curator. You can click on this and see and view more details about this curator. And there is a dedicated page where you can also see a short biography for this curator. And also you can see the list of organizations that are related to this community. There is also a dedicated page for, for this, for, for information about the organizations regarding the research design. Here you see an overview with the most recent results for each type, publications, research data, software and other products. And for each of these products, there is a graph analysis. You can see the numbers of open access, closed access applications that are related to this community and have an overview with the graphs. By clicking here, you can go to see all publications related to this community. And you are able to, to use search and browse functionality to find results that you want. You can use keyword search or you can use filters. The main filters that we have is funders, projects, publication date, access modes, type, language and so on. A new feature that we have is the Orchid ID. We have connected the authors with their Orchid ID. So by clicking, if an Orchid ID is available for an author, you can see here with this icon. And by clicking on this, you can see the Orchid ID of the author and you can search for publication, for results that are related to this specific author. You search with his Orchid ID. All the information that you see here is configured from the monitor. So some of those functionalities are new. So maybe your community doesn't have, doesn't so get the related organization or the information about the creators. But now the monitor are able to fill this information and make the gateway presentation to have a quick review, to have a quick overview of what this community gateway is about. And the results that you see here are here because the creators, the monitors of the community have configured this gateway to include those results. You are researchers, you can use the linking functionality to add more information in this community. And now I will proceed with the linking functionality. Until now, do you have any questions before I start saying this? Okay, so I continue. I click start linking, so this page appeared. In this page you can search for research results using keywords. I will use an author name right now to make a search. You can see that the results are from open mail. But we have also results from Crossref, Datasite, or Orchid. For those results you can use the pages and the pages similar to the search page I saw earlier. And if you find the results that you want to link, you can click the class button and add it to your basket and it appears on the right. If you don't want it, you can remove it from the basket at one, at another one. Also, you can use Crossref results instead if something is not available yet in open mail, as you know it is available through Crossref. You can search for it in Orchid and add it in your basket. Also, you can use the Datasite or Orchid. For Orchid you can search with the author name like I did here. Or you can use the Orchid ID and find the results of this specific author and add it in your basket. This is the manual way to add results by searching in those sources and add them in your basket. If you don't want to do it manually, I will clear my basket here to show you what else you can do. If you don't want to do it manually, you can use a CSV file that contains a list of DOIs. I have here a file. I will show you what it contains. It has a list with the DOIs, so instead of searching one by one in Crossref, I add them in a CSV file and upload them in the LinkedIn functionality. All those DOIs are fed from Crossref or Datasite and they are immediately added in your basket. Now that I have added those results, I will continue to the next step to find out what I can link them to. In this step, you can link the results that you have already selected with projects, research results or communities. I will choose to link them with the NI community, so I will choose communities from here. The neuroinformatics community is already selected because I am in the neuroinformatics community, but I can remove it or add another community, for example, a GIMP file. The community is added on the basket on the right. I will add again neuroinformatics and remove a GIMP file from here. One more thing is that there are communities that have some additional paths. For example, EDI community has subcategories, has specifications. For example, you can not only add EDI, link your results with EDI, but link them with a specific country of EDI. For example, LinkedIn with freeze or link it with a classification scheme. This additional path depends on the community. For example, a neuroinformatics community doesn't have a different path. So it is enough just to link it with the base community with a neuroinformatics doesn't need additional path. So now I continue to the last step. So in the last step, I have an overview of what I have already selected. Here you can see the results that I uploaded with the CSV file. For each result, it's pre-selected that the type of the result is a publication and the access mode is open access. But if you know that, for example, the first result is not a publication, but it's a dataset, you can change it in this step. There is an option that you can apply the change that you did for the first one for all the list. But now I don't want to do that, so I will click no. And for the access mode, you can change them to closed and barcode and so on. If you think that one of the results, you don't want to link one of these results, you can always remove them even from this step. So we have here the list with the result. I will close it to better solve this. And the first, the list with the result, I want to link them with the communities. From this step, again, I can remove any community that I may be at by mistake. And then when I am happy with what I have selected in public, what I can do is click confirm linking and finish and create those links in open-end. When I click here, you will find that some of the links are not immediately published in open-end, but they will be published. So you have to confirm that those links are valid, it's not done by mistake or for testing. Do you have any questions? For the results that I selected to link, I wanted to link them with the neuroinformatics community. So when the link is published to open-end, the results that I selected to link will be available in this page. For example, I was leaving if I search, in search publication page. As soon as they are published to open-end, they will be available in this page and visible for all the research. In the user manual, there is a link, there is a page, my links, where you can see the full list of the links that you have created and see the status of them if they are published to open-end or not. And you have the option to delete a link if you think it's not correct, it's not valid. I think that this is all I have to show you, so you can have any questions. Or Alessia and Andrea, do you have to add something? Yes, we have a question on the chat. So do you plan to embed Viper, the visual project explorer within the Connect portal? So we are not planning to integrate it in the OpenAir Connect portal. I think we are starting a conversation to include it in the OpenAir Explorer somehow. In fact, Viper is a service of open-knowledge maps, so you are able to have a nice way to browse and to search for publications in a visual way, not only as a list of publications that we currently do. The idea, yes, is that we are going to do an integration of this tool in our portals. And this is under, let's say, in our to-do list, yes. Of course we can think about integrating this also in the Connect portal, but this will come, I think, at a second step, at a second stage. So if there are no other questions, I can ask you a question. And basically so we have created a survey, a questionnaire for you, for you to fill in and give us your feedback on the usability of the gateways and on its functionality. Because as you can see, all the gateways are under beta.openair.connect.u. And we would like instead to promote this service into production, so in order also to involve more researchers. So having your feedback by filling the questionnaire that Andrea just sent on the chat, it would be very helpful for us to complete the deployment of the service and to make it available to a wider audience, not only to invited researchers like you. Okay, so we have another question. Does OpenAir have any impact on the peer review and the journal publication? Not sure that I understand the question. Because you, okay, you should consider OpenAir as an overlay on what is available out there. So you never deposit something in OpenAir. You deposit something in a repository, for example, Zenodo, or you publish something on a journal. For example, an open access journal that is registered in the DOAJ, which is the directory of open access journals. The metadata about your publication or datasets will end up in OpenAir. We are not providing services for peer review, not even post-publication peer review. And so what we can do is to give you support in finding the right repository, the right journal where you can publish and be compliant to the open science, open access mandates of the founders. So I don't know if this, if this replies to the question. So who can open a community portal? Okay, so you can request a community portal going to beta.connect.openair.tu. What we request is that there should be, it should be somehow representative for your research community. So if you come and you ask to have a gateway for your research project, for example, this is not really, this is not really a community in this sense. But if you instead are in a research association working on, I don't know, bioinformatics, then we can of course provide a gateway for you. And you can find all the information about this in the BetaConnect portal. If you go to their own page, you can click on, learn how to build the gateway and you will find all the information you need. Why? Next question, sorry. Why did you choose Crossref? Instead, for instance core or base collections, we didn't choose Crossref in favor of core or base. In fact, OpenAir collects from core and currently collects a subset of base, but we are going to have everything that is in base also in OpenAir. And the thing that we have in this linking functionality Crossref data site in our kid is because we are not collecting everything from these three sources. So it could be the case that you cannot find the publication in OpenAir, but you can find it in Crossref. So this is why we are using the Crossref APIs in this in this linking functionality. The last question asks, are there any databases included that have journals with high impact? Okay, so we collect from, as I said in my presentation, we collect from a lot of data sources. We have institutional repositories that are registered on OpenDoor. We have all the journals that are registered in the directory of Open Access Journals. We have part of Springer, the Open Access part of Springer, and we have also other publisher, for example PLOS. So we don't have in our research graph information about the impact because this is commonly used as a metric to evaluate researchers, which shouldn't be the case. So we're not keeping information about the impact of journals. We are instead, we have instead information about the Open Access policies and copyrights of the journals when they come from, sorry, when they are available on the Sherpa Romeo service. So Sherpa Romeo service is a service managed by Gisk and they keep an up-to-date database of the Open Access policies and copyright options of all the journals. So when this information is available on this Sherpa Romeo service, we link to it so that you can better understand which are the policies that apply to the journal and to the publications that have been published in it. Yes, I really hope that Dora will change this. Yes, I agree. Andrea, Jiro, do you want to add anything? For me, it's all. I would like to say only to the researchers that we are here to help them in any issue. I have, when using these community gateways, any questions or any doubts, we are here available to help. And I would like to highlight again the importance to answer the questioner, which is very important for us and thank you all to attend this webinar. And Argyro, do you want to say something? No, I'm okay. Thank you all for participating. So I think we can finish this webinar. Many thanks to Argyro and Alessia who attend this webinar. I will send the presentation and the recording to you. Yeah, so if you want to see again and to share with your colleagues, you are free to do it and the link to the questioner. Okay. Thank you very much. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.


The British Library is one of the most important research libraries in the world. It contains a vast number of manuscripts and printed materials as well as philatelic maps and other formats. We also have one of the most important Hebrew collection of manuscripts among the world libraries. The collection was amassed over several centuries and currently includes over 3,000 manuscripts. The manuscripts represent all the areas of Jewish knowledge and are divided into religious texts and secular texts. And here I have to stop and say that not only do we have manuscripts in book format codices, but we also have over 80 scrolls, charters as well and single sheets. I have many favourites. This manuscript is from Italy. It was in the Harley Collection. At some point it was ordered to be censored and to be checked by the church authorities, hence the signatures of the expurgators. We do have some manuscripts that haven't been at all corrected or deleted in any way or form. They may have been signed by the censors, but they are complete and integral. The text has not been tampered with. Among these favourites that are of great interest, not only to me but to scholars in general, are the Jewish charters. These are legal documents showing transactions between Jews and Gentiles in the period preceding the expulsion of the Jews from this country in 1290. Our mission is to promote knowledge and attract as many users and as many researchers to the British Library. So one way of actually making accessible our material, including the Hebrew manuscript, is to digitize the material that we have here. As part of our digitization project, we have various stages of what we call work packages. Firstly, the manuscripts had to be selected. The second stage was the pre-assessment done by the conservation studio. All the manuscripts were checked by the conservators before they were actually sent for imaging. I think that generally speaking, the manuscripts selected for this phase of the manuscript digitization project were in fair condition. They didn't have a lot of issues. However, we had issues with some of the scrolls and also with the mantles that were covering some of the scrolls. They needed a lot more attention. Likewise, we had some issues with manuscripts that had text in the gutter and they became problematic when imaging had to film them. So these were some of the challenges our conservation studio had to face. The third stage of the project was the imaging of the manuscripts. Now, when we came to the scrolls, that particular section of the collection presented a challenge for us and they had to be handled very carefully. It required two photographers. They had to make sure that the images had enough overlap so that they can be digitally stitched for online presentation. After digitization, the manuscripts and the scrolls are taken back and reassessed by the conservator. Following that, all the images are checked by the support officer quality assessment of all the images before they are uploaded on the digitized manuscript site. Of course, they have to be cataloged so that is yet another stage in the whole process and the cataloger provides records in text encoding initiative format. The library is engaging many different projects of digitization but the Hebrew project is exceptionally important because so far, people had to come to the library in order to consult and research the manuscripts. So nowadays, by digitizing them, we make them available not only to scholars, users, academics, but to a very wide audience. So you don't have to come to the library anymore. You can see it in Australia, New York or Johannesburg and look at the Hebrew manuscripts and enjoy them.