I'm Evan Ross, and I'm running to represent District 4 on Amherst New Town Council. I'm a lecturer at UMass, a trained environmental scientist, and a democratic activist. I first came to Amherst seven years ago to pursue graduate school at UMass, where I researched the impacts of climate change on water resources. I stuck around, taking on a full-time faculty position at UMass, training science students how to talk about science to lay audiences. My goal is to produce scientists that can and do engage in the public discourse around science, especially about climate change. Before coming to Amherst, I worked in state government for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management. I worked on invasive species issues, and it was this experience that shaped my view of public service. I worked with stakeholders and communities to identify and solve problems. I built coalitions across nonprofits and citizen groups and universities to develop new monitoring and management plans and start new citizen science initiatives, because I knew that tackling environmental challenges required bringing people together and thinking and working collaboratively. I learned through this experience that if we focus on our challenges, think creatively and work together, we can solve them. And this is the mindset I want to bring to Amherst Town Council. Amherst is facing a number of challenges, and I want to be part of the solution. My priorities are affordable housing, high-quality services, better schools, and a sustainable community. I've been a renter since I first moved to Amherst, and I know the struggles facing both student and non-student renters. Vacancy rates in Amherst are low, and rents are high. It's difficult for renters to find available, affordable, and acceptable housing. I know this problem. I've experienced it personally, I've grappled with it, and I know too how it affects our broader community. I've talked to folks on North Whitney Street and on Gray Street who worry about the changing character of their neighborhoods as family homes are converted into rental units. And I've seen how it affects Amherst School Enrollment as fewer and fewer young families settle in Amherst. We need to fix our housing problems, and we can do so by building up the rental stock, by utilizing tools that we have to ensure that new housing meets the needs of our low and moderate income residents, and by pursuing new options such as form-based code so that new development in Amherst fits with the historic character of our town. We need to fix our schools. We have great staff and teachers working hard, and I support the innovative solutions that Amherst Schools have pursued to deal with the changing demographics of our student body, like our dual language program that's proposed. But as an educator, I know that the physical classroom environment affects student learning outcomes. And in that regard, the Wildwood and Fort River School buildings are failing our students. We need new school buildings that provide suitable classrooms for all of our students, especially our special needs students. We need high-quality services. We need solid infrastructure, including roads without potholes and sidewalks that are maintained. And we need up-to-date facilities, including our library system and our public works building. But these cost money, and Amherst is already one of the highest tax towns in the region. We lean heavily on our residential taxpayers, and we cannot continue to increase property taxes to pay for these things. We need to expand our commercial tax base by promoting smart growth in our village centers to generate revenue, pay for needed services, and relieve some of the burden on our residential taxpayers. And finally, we need Amherst to be a sustainable community. We need public transportation and transportation options. We need to pursue complete streets so that folks can get around Amherst by bus, by car, by bike and by foot with ease. We need to conserve open space, and we need to protect farmland. And we need to both tackle and prepare for climate change. We need to continue being a leader in clean energy. But as we face more frequent summer droughts and more intense storms, we also need to build up our green infrastructure so that we're prepared for the impacts of climate change. These are my priorities. These are the issues that have driven me into this race. We are facing many challenges, but I believe if we work together, think creatively, and pursue new and innovative solutions, that we can tackle them. My name is Evan Ross. I'm running for Council in District 4, and I'm asking for your vote in the September 4th preliminary election and the November 8th general election. And if you want to find out more about me, you can go to www.Evan4, the number 4, Amherst.com. Thank you.


Hi there. I'm Tech. This is my channel Boot Lossophy. Yes, Boot Lossophy, and I normally talk about boots, but this time I'm going to unbox a leather bag and give you my first impressions. Okay, so as you know, I normally talk about boots in this channel, but this time I'm going to talk about a leather bag from Indonesian bag makers, Kravah. Now, this is my third Kravah bag, and I really like the make. I got turned on to Kravah by review on the Stridewise channel by Nick and also Karl Morowski did a review on one of his bags. I reached out to Yoki after I had a look at his website. The owner is called Yoki, and I have to say he is one of the most articulate communicative men who has provided customer service in his own business. As a management consultant, I really feel happy when I meet people like that who run their own small business like hands-on and still are able to provide perfect customer service, great communications. Anyway, I'll leave the details of the website at the bottom and you can have a look at the bags in the description below. I'd like to say though that this is not sponsored, so full disclosure, I bought my bags from them. As I said, I've had all three. The first one I bought was called the FC 13 in sand. It's a beautiful color, and I use it as a kind of everyday briefcase to take to work. It puts in my MacBook 13 Pro perfectly and fits a few notebooks and sorts of other things. I liked it so much that this Christmas I bought for my wife a CO15 in espresso. Now, I bought this for my wife for her laptop bag, and she has filled it with her laptop and a spare screen and cables and whatever else, and I think she likes it very much as well. So this third bag, which you can see behind me in the box, is called the Rana 10. It's actually a camera bag, but let's get into it. This is the box that I've just picked up from my post office box. Yoki uses DHL to send from Indonesia. It takes about three days to get to Australia, three or four days. And because I address it to a post office box for security purposes, they hand it over to Australia Post. And unfortunately, Australia Post takes another three or four days to get to me. But coming from Indonesia within the week is not too bad. Kravah usually packs it in a simple cardboard box, properly addressed and everything, and is totally wrapped in the shrink wrap, which I think is quite amazing. So it's going to take me a while to get through the shrink wrap. Bear with me and we'll see what's underneath. So quite, quite secure. It's a simple cardboard box, flips open on its own. Plenty of bubble wrap comes with a cloth bag, plain, simple cloth bag. And here it is, the Rana 10 in Fox. The 10 signifies the dimensions. They also come as a Rana 11 with two of these straps, Rana 13 and 15. It's primarily a camera bag. The Rana 10 does not usually have this handle, but I like my bags with a handle because if you don't and you just have to strap when you're trying to reach across the car seat to pull it up from the passenger seat, you generally tend to have to grab the strap. So I like having a handle to go with it. So I asked Yoki if he'd mind putting a handle on. He normally, because this is my third buy, would have given me a discount, but he said, look, don't use the discount. I'll put a handle on for free, we'll trade off. It's reinforced with an aluminium strip at the bottom, so it doesn't pull on the leather. So what's inside? Leather strap and I've come accustomed to getting little freebies. And in this case, I have a keychain and leather. And a matching card carry case, matching leather. Lovely. The strap is super thick. I'll put it on after the unboxing and I'll show you on my shoulder. The inside, as I said, this is a camera bag. The inside has these dividers attached with Velcro so that you can basically divide the insides anywhere you like with various flaps to carry your camera equipment. I'm probably going to use this as my everyday carry case. And as you can see, it's actually quite roomy for being quite a small one. Has an outside flap to protect it from rain. It has these little fold over leather flaps so that when you fold over the flap, it's not open to the elements. There's actually a protective leather layer there caused by that folding flap. The inside is lined with some Velcro pieces so that you can attach those pads to divide it up. There is this lovely red, I'm not sure what it is. Is it cotton, canvas, really nice lining material and a spacious front flap pocket. The strap goes all the way around and is one strap. And in fact, there are very minimal pieces of leather used in this. There is one piece of leather that forms the back and the flap. There is one piece of leather that forms the sides, including this waterproof water resistant flap. One piece of leather that goes all the way around the sides and the bottom.   And you have this strap, pass-through strap, so that you can put it on your rubber bags. OK, so what I might do is just take a few photos of this on my shoulder to show you the size and scale. By the way, this is actually quite stiff. The fastening is a sort of metal bolt that passes through the leather slits. And until you wear it in, it's actually quite hard to get in and out. But look, I don't mind that, it's just a little bit of extra security to me. OK, so we'll take a few photos on shoulder and then we'll wrap up.  Just being careful not to touch the microphone or the receiver and cut myself off from the camera. As you can see, it sits quite well on the shoulder when you're wearing it crosswise. There's nothing in it, so it's very light. But if it's heavier, I think it would sit quite well on the single shoulder at the moment because it's light, it slips off. But it would sit quite well there. Proportionately, I think it's really quite a great proportion for what I'm going to use it as an everyday carry bag to put in notebooks and pens and things, masks, sanitizers, that sort of thing, or to use it as a proper camera bag, which is what it was intended to do. Putting it crosswise is very comfortable across the chest. You can rest your your arm on there. It's safe from anybody tugging away or trying to get into the flap. I think the handle that I asked Yoki to put on is really useful. And I would consider it even if you have to pay a little extra. I'm going to put the details of the website where you can get this and how you can contact Yoki. I'm not sponsored. I just love this and I love his customer service. I'm quite happy to plug it. And I'll tell you how much I paid for it in the description below. The strap, as I said earlier, is not metal and metal. There's a buckle through it. So you can hear against the microphone. There is no clanking of metal, very silent little bag. I guess you could sneak up on someone with it. There you go. So there you have it. Let me know if you want reviews of the two other bags. I'd be happy to do them. You'll have to take the review of my wife's bag with a pinch of salt because I haven't used it. And let me know if you also want a long term review of this bag, the runner, and I'll be pleased to bring it to you. So do me a favor, click on like and subscribe below and keep watching this channel because I will talk about boots. And who knows, a few other leather products. See you soon.


As Dirk introduced, I am a researcher at Delft University of Technology here in the Netherlands. And in my research, I'm studying, surprisingly, public values in the context of smart grids. So I was super excited when Richard invited me to share some of my research findings during this webinar today. And as Dirk mentioned in my presentation, I will focus on a value that is of special importance for me and of special importance in the energy transition, I believe, that is justice or fairness. And the question, how can we integrate fairness into smart grids? To do so, I will share some practical experiences from some smart grid projects that I've studied here in the Netherlands. They are depicted on this slide. There are some local smart grid pilot projects, I would say. And I do think that the mindset shift that Fabian mentioned earlier, going from a planning mindset to an experimentation mindset is actually fairly strong here in the Netherlands. And that's why I thought also I will pick a few of these projects to talk about some really practical experiences. I will share later what these projects are in details for now. Just keep in mind, these are all local neighborhoods. So you can imagine approximately between 20 and 50 households. And they are a collaboration, typically, of the households themselves. Then you have energy suppliers, you have distribution system operators, you have an energy cooperative. In this case here, you have aggregators, software providers, hardware providers, consultants, universities. So really a large number of parties who are involved. And from a technical perspective, they all look more or less like this. So you have the community here and on the household level, households usually have solar panels. They have a battery to store excess electricity that is generated during the day. Some of the projects you have variable tariffs or variable prices to incentivize that the energy that is generated in the neighborhood or by the house is also used there. They all use smart metering, of course, and they also all have a control and monitoring system to optimize the smart grid, as well as a web portal or an app that households could use to get insights into electricity flows, for example, between the solar panels and the battery and the solar panels and the house. Now, let's go back to this question of values. What are values and what are values that are relevant for smart grids? So I think something that was highlighted by Fabian really nicely is that sustainability is the core value of what we strive for with smart grids. We design smart grids in order to integrate more renewable energy in our electricity grids. And also in most of these projects, the four projects that I mentioned, the aim is mostly to maximize the use of solar energy in the local neighborhood. But there are other values as well, values that need to be safeguarded. And I think energy justice is one of them and maybe one of the most important ones. We want more sustainable systems, but we want to do and we want to do this in a fair way, in an inclusive way, in a way that fosters citizen participation and empowerment. And I think energy justice is also one of the values that has really become more and more salient and important in the political and public debates in the recent years. What is energy justice, though, is often not all so clear. So if we look at the academic literature, energy justice is defined as the equitable access to energy, the fair distribution of costs and benefits, and the right to participate in choosing whether and how energy systems will change. So it is actually a concept that has three dimension. It's a very broad understanding that goes way beyond a conception of fairness that says, let's compensate losers of the transitions just by paying them some money. And these three dimensions of energy justice are visualized here as well. We're talking about energy justice as a distribution, and that's in essence what we want to reach. We want to reach a fair distribution of benefits and harms. In the context of smart grids, that is, of course, there is profit cost distribution, but beyond that there are broader benefits and harms that have to be distributed. Fabian also mentioned to what extent the systems rely on the sharing and collection and use of detailed household energy data. So we might even consider data as something that we used to pay for these services. And when we talk about these local projects, they are often funded by public sources and the extent to which knowledge is shared for learning, in order to learn for the future, it could also be considered as a benefit. The perspective of procedural justice talks about how decisions are made and by whom, and it's especially about how households participate in decision making in the energy transition and also in smart grid projects. Another aspect is the extent to which households can control processes that happen in the smart grid versus the extent to how much is automated when we talk about algorithms, for example. And finally, there is a dimension of justice as recognition, which asks the question how inclusive the system is to diverse groups in society. And one of the most important points here is, for example, how accessible are smart grids to homeowners, but also to tenants, to low income households. And I've highlighted a few of these aspects of values here, and I would like to use the experience from the pilot projects that I mentioned earlier to say a bit more about these four aspects, or you could also say call them four values. I'll start at the right side with something that I think is one of the most important values for smart grids, which is the accessibility to diverse group of people in society, the accessibility for all. And if we look at accessibility, the question is how do we make smart grids inclusive? How do we make them accessible for all? They need investment and they need space, especially for solar panels and for batteries. Of course, you need a roof that is suitable, you need space in your house to put the battery. And that makes smart grids on average more accessible for higher income groups and house owners. Especially in dense urban areas, the question is even more important, how to make it accessible for tenants, for lower income groups and for households who simply don't have the space or the physical characteristics in their house to install solar panels or a battery. And I think the examples from these projects are interesting because on the one hand you had two projects which are both, one is here in the east of the Netherlands, one is more in the south. And they are both these local neighborhoods with home owners, okay, but interestingly, not all of them had solar panels and batteries. And even the houses who didn't have solar panels and who didn't have a battery could participate in the smart grid.  And we give financial incentives to the households to use energy when the sun is shining. And also the batteries, of course, were optimized and automatically steered to store as much solar energy as possible. Another example is the project up here, the community battery in Reisenhout, which is actually a social housing neighborhood. And that is quite rare that smart grid projects are done with a with a social housing neighborhood in this particular neighborhood. All of the houses had solar panels and the local municipal energy supplier developed rental mechanism together with the housing corporation and to provide the social housing community with solar panels. In addition, they used a community battery, just a shared battery that was standing in a shipping container actually on the corner of the street. And they had the advantage that no space was needed in the houses to in the homes to install a home battery. And in total, there was also less cost involved than if all households had to have a separate home battery. So these are all good examples how to how to make smart grids more accessible. I think that should be taken into account in future projects. Let me go to the to the next value and from this perspective of as justice as recognition to the justice as a distribution and how to design for privacy, or I would rephrase maybe how to design for fair collection and use of household data. And in in all projects here, the experience that I made was that detailed smart metering data was used for system optimization. And so for example, in the virtual power plant in Amsterdam, you had 50 about 50 home batteries, they were aggregated into a virtual power plant into a common capacity and this capacity was then used by an energy supplier and an aggregator to treat on the wholesale market. And to do so they needed the detailed battery charge status the detailed solar generation data detailed energy use data to optimize the system. And what I found actually across all four projects. And what was surprising for me is that in all project is this detailed data collection was seen as acceptable and okay from the perspective of the households. Despite being very privacy sensitive information and despite the household saying oh yes privacy is very important for us. And I think I found two conditions under which the data sharing and data use was acceptable that was a of course, if it was GDPR conform and be it was provided that this is taking place in the scope of this research projects or these energy projects. And here I really noticed that the smart grids by the households were not seen as data driven projects. They were seen as energy projects. And they had a high level of trust in the public organizations in the universities who were involved. There was a close collaboration and contact between the households and project partners. But when you dug a bit deeper. It was actually clear that most of the households didn't fully understand how their data was being used at all. So I would, I would still recommend to be aware that once smart grids might be seen as more data driven in nature. And once they are offered at a larger scale as a market service outside of the small scope of a project or a neighborhood where everybody knows each other, the privacy might be much more relevant again. And I think this would indicate this indicates also here that actually services that are offered by a cooperative to its members might be actually more trusted. In general, designed for privacy, always what I would say is strive for informed consent and real informed consent, not the seeming informed consent that we have when we click I agree in a smartphone app. And focus thereby on comprehension that users really need to understand how their personal data is used. Otherwise, since this is so trust dependent also, there is a certain risk that if users lose trust, they start to move out of the system such as the experienced I think in one of the projects where certain participants just unplug the battery because they didn't trust what the battery was doing anymore. They didn't, they didn't have full transparency and insight and understanding was what's happened, what was happening with their information. And let me go to the, to the next value that I highlighted earlier from the perspective of procedural justice how to arrange household participation in decision making processes. Actually, I think these are the experiences from these two projects are interesting again because both of them had a quite participatory approach. They had household representatives that were involved in the decision making prior to project consortium. What worked well here additionally is there was there was really clear communication channels between the one person who was the household representative and the remaining groups of the households. That didn't work here so well. And on the other hand, this project also experienced something that is very common for smart grids technical problems appear. The technological complexity of smart grids is still relatively high these are still relatively new technologies. And it is mostly research projects so technical challenges are bound to happen at some point along the line. And it is often challenging for these projects that this means a drop in household engagement because it means often less communication with the households. So I would what I would always recommend is have to have a dedicated approach to household engagement, of course, to also have one project partner who is responsible for setting this up. And also not to shield households from technical issues households can often understand more than the project developers might think. And yes, there is some effort needed to translate complex technical problems into relatively easy language. But it's always better to communicate than to remain silent and thus cause a drop really in community engagement. And finally, I wanted to highlight the fourth value that I talked about earlier, which is this control versus automation of a system. The question here is really what should users be able to control through the rap and what is automated. And I'm talking here for example about batteries and the shifting of the use of household appliances. And I also think here that the experience of the virtual power plant in Amsterdam was quite interesting. I said earlier already that they had a bunch of home batteries that were aggregated and the aggregated capacity was used to trade on the wholesale market. This was all fully automated. You needed this for system optimization. The batteries were fully externally steered and controlled by an aggregator. That had the advantage that it was very easy to use for the households. They didn't have to do a lot about it. But on the other side, they had no control whatsoever, and they had no insight into what the battery was doing, which was considered as quite problematic for them because they could see the battery. It was a physical presence in their home. The batteries were heating up, the batteries were blinking, and they didn't know why. So you could see a bit of a trade-off here actually between the level of control that you can give a household and the extent to which system is easy to use. And one way to solve this tension is to design for meaningful control. Users should be able to control automation parameters. For example, if we're talking about this virtual power plant here, users should be able, for example, to decide how much battery capacity do I want to keep for myself and use it for my self-consumption. How much do I give for the virtual power plant and for steering by an external partner? And on top of that, you need transparency. Automation is acceptable, but it is acceptable only if users have insight into system steering and can understand what the automation is doing. And that means you need to visualize electricity flows from solar panels to the batteries to the appliances. You need to visualize in addition what consequences that has for electricity costs. And if that is the case, it should also give recommendations what can be done to save energy or to shift energy to times where renewable energy is abundant. For example, I think the traffic light example that Fabian mentioned earlier, having a traffic light in the living room, a similar system was used in one of the other projects to visualize expensive, medium expensive and cheap times to use electricity in the app that the users were using. And this is just a very transparent yet simple way to kind of give a recommendation what to do, but also visualize consequences of the smart grid for electricity costs. So I've talked a bit in fairly detail about the four values that I've highlighted here. There are more aspects of justice that I think need to be designed for. If you're interested in these, you can also reach out to me and to wrap this up at the end, going back to this perspective of how to integrate public values in smart grids. I would like to say or I would say that the energy transition and development of smart grids, it is value driven. We want more sustainable energy systems. So sustainability is really the core value that we strive for. Albeit it is often reduced to a technocratic understanding of we have to reduce local greenhouse gas emissions. So we need another perspective as well to integrate public values or social values. We want sustainability without harming privacy. We want to do the energy transition in an inclusive way. We want to have control over algorithms. And I do think that this concept of energy justice is a good lens to talk about more specifically what public values need to be safeguarded. Because from this distributive perspective, it allows talking about what matters, what benefits and harms need to be distributed beyond monetary profits and costs. It also asks for how decisions are made and demands that or kind of puts attention to to the to that fear procedures demand participation and transparency and principles of democracy. And it asks who is affected and therefore also draws our attention to the energy transition being a collective endeavor. So in the end, I think if we want smart grids, but also if we want the energy transition in general to be successful, we need to discuss how to shape and develop it in such a way that we reach sustainability goals. But at the same time, we take cost, we take justice into account with that. Thank you very much.


There's a massive shift in the way that we think about our applications and the way that we deploy them today. I'd say there's a massive transformation in everything that we do and I think the biggest transformation comes to the way we think about our data and the way that we think about our applications. As I look out on the horizon I see the future of hybrid and multi-cloud to truly be hosted services no matter where you do business. And does this land in a serverless world where you know we're just writing against APIs for our data or APIs against our service I think that's ultimately where we land. There's a lot of work to be done in solving the hybrid and multi-cloud channels first and we're really really really proud about partnering with the Red Hat OpenShift team to solve these things today. Right now there are a number of Fortune 500 companies that are still reliant on large expensive data centers that they manage themselves for these applications. You know there are no shortcuts to become cloud native. There are no shortcuts to distributed systems and to distributed thinking. However there's a lot of tools in the marketplace and there's a lot of kind of information and knowledge that's been built up over the time that's been built into certain products that are cloud native that are kind of future-proofing the way that people think about their next generation of applications. Kubernetes and by extension OpenShift because OpenShift is the distribution of Kubernetes has become the de facto operating system of the cloud. So by using OpenShift as our platform of choice for Cockroach DB for cloud native installations we've been able to drastically simplify the deployment problems that a lot of customers run into when trying to manually run large distributed applications cloud. There's an additional aspect of the relationship between IBM Red Hat and Cockroach Labs in that both of us are dedicated to open source. Both of us are dedicated to building and managing and fostering open source communities around all of the technology that goes into building the products and the solutions that we go to market and help our customers with. If it's part of Kubernetes, if it's part of Cockroach DB itself, we're gonna be there, we're gonna be engaged in those communities and we're really proud to be a part of them.


Before I hand it over to you, Sanat, it's great to have you joining us. Sanat Tadapatiye, who's been a fantastic supporter of the USAIC. Sanat is the president of a very powerful group at Merck, the Merck Manufacturing Group. Sanat will be moderating a panel on innovation in India. And I will say that in our theme of end-to-one to end-to-a-billion that we've used in the past, we focus on innovation and access, and the two are truly inseparable. If you look across the globe and you look at countries that are strong in access, these are always countries that have strong innovation foundations. So with that said, Sanat, I'll hand it over to you in the panel. Thank you, Andy. So good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everybody. Before I go into the panel, let me remind everyone that please, please do not forget to participate in our online polling. Below the video window, you will scroll down to find the right panel, which gives you the polling question and submit your answers there. The polling will open for one minute and will announce the results before the next panel. And thank you for doing that. So let me first start with thanking the USAIC for hosting this summit. And indeed, it's my distinct proud privilege to be moderating this panel discussion on India innovation landscape among four very established leaders in India. So the context of the panel is that we know that India is aiming to become a $5 trillion economy by 2025. And that means the India pharmaceuticals market, which is already the third largest in terms of volume and 13th largest in terms of value, is also expected to grow to $100 billion by 2025. We also know that India is the largest provider of the generic medicines and that to globally. Indian pharmaceutical sector already supplies over 50% of the global demand for various vaccines. 40% of the generic demand in the US and 25% of all medicines in UK. And that's a tremendous accomplishment. If you look at our anti-retroviral drugs, 80% of them are used globally to combat AIDS and they're supplied by Indian pharmaceutical companies. And that's been a tremendous progress that has happened over many years. And therefore India is rightly called the global pharmacy of the war. However, while India's pharmaceutical industry growth has been impressive, to further propel India towards the next stage of economic development, what we need is the industry to be generating much more value through innovation. And in particular address those roadblocks that are holding back the biotech innovation in the shape of, you know, and when I say biotech innovation, that's also supposed to meet the increasing demands brought on by a growing middle class population and a faster than expected aging population, which will continue to add pressure to the India's healthcare system. So let's try to get the thoughts of this distinguished panel to understand how true innovation in the shape of end-to-end drug delivery and development infrastructure or how boosting technological innovation in pharma, biotech and healthcare startups or how the innovation focus can shift from development to research while helping India realize its vision of growing to $100 billion market in 2025. So that's the context. And let me start with Amitabh. Amitabh, Pharma Vision 2020 was a great government commitment and initiative to make India a global leader, not just in the production of low-cost generic medicines, but also to, you know, lead in the area of end-to-end discovery and development. And the objective and ambition was to make India one of the top five pharmaceutical innovation hubs, and that means launching one out of every five or ten novel drugs globally. We also know that the country's relatively liberal regulatory regime also makes it a very promising location for stem cell research, for cell engineering, for cell-based therapeutic R&D, all of that. And it also has very well-established strengths in IT, you know, meaning that it can emerge as a leader in the area of computer science, statistics, mathematics, and all of that will go well to analyze and interpret biological data crucial for modern biotech research. So as the CEO of Neeti Iyog, Amitabh, what do you think is the vision and plan of the government of India to meet, you know, the aspirations of the future? So, Sanat, let me first thank the U.S. India Chamber of Commerce for inviting me to this very fascinating discussion on innovation landscape in India. Coming to your question, Pharma Vision 2020 envisages to make India a global leader in drug discovery, innovation, end-to-end drug manufacturing, and we in government of India are fully committed towards this. We've taken very far-reaching reforms to streamline the clinical trial and regulatory approval processes to facilitate innovative drug discovery in very close partnership with the private sector. And all the pharmaceutical manufacturing companies and all of us are working in collaboration to drive the ease of doing business. We've set up bio incubators for nurturing entrepreneurship and for scaling technologies. We are developing world-class clinical trial infrastructure to increase the number of beds per thousand population. We recently launched, the Prime Minister recently launched the National Digital Health Commission on our Independence Day, 15th August. Electronic health records will be created for individuals which will be valuable, enormously valuable for research purposes. And if you look at our states, a state such as Maharashtra, Karnataka, Delhi, Tamil Nadu have a very, very strong innovation landscape and are contributing to the bio economy. We've jumped up in the ranks of being one of the most innovative nations in the global innovation index just this week. And in the last decade, India has seen the largest number of approved biosimilars which are serving the needs of patients globally. Evidence suggests that clusters provide a very conducive environment for innovation. And the Department of Pharmaceuticals has just launched a production-linked incentive scheme. That is, if you invest and you produce beyond your base level and you keep producing higher and higher, we keep providing you incentive. And this is a unique scheme for enhancing size and scale of manufacturing in India. We've also pushed for a new scheme for promotion of bulk drug park scheme to boost production of active pharmaceutical ingredients. You know, we were greatly dependent on the Chinese supply chain. We're planning to do this complete manufacturing in India. And we are also pushing for key starting materials and giving impetus to the innovation ecosystem in India. We've also established centers of excellence in the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research. And we are working towards a very robust innovation landscape through various innovators such as human capital investment in R&B, safety, legal environment, regulatory environment to provide a world-class, truly world-class bioparma research output. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Amitabh. That was a very good kaleidoscope of how India is setting itself to advance innovation. So Vijay, can I build on Amitabh and ask you that if you look at the Indian performance in the last couple of years, it's been tremendous when it comes to making incremental innovations. You know, if you look at the way the Indian companies have made the control release delivery system using microspheres, they have gone for alternative cell forms, be it CIPLA, be it, you know, Dr. Reddy is all of them. And some of them have developed the ones daily formulations for CIPLA, and all those antibacterials. And I have to say that many of them have received a priority rating from FDA, which basically means that all these drugs demonstrated significant improvement over existing drugs. And that's fantastic. But the reality is that the discovery of novel molecules requires a very different approach. And if you look at R&D expenses to GDP for India, it's still below 1%. Whereas China, which was below 1%, is already a 2%, and it's aiming to be 5%. So is there a way we can think of India needing an ecosystem building on the foundations of its distinctive capabilities, which it already has in the area of value chain, like manufacturing, like product development, like process innovation, which has been so good in India for many years. So both the public and private organizations in the life sciences sector in India perhaps need to invest in the development of skills, in the development of infrastructure and culture to be able to transform the country into a life sciences innovation, how of the world. And because you have been so closely involved in these areas for a long time and as the principal scientific advisor to the government of India, what are your thoughts on how to foster the innovation system or how and what interventions will be needed for that. And once you answer that, maybe you may also like to talk about the question that you're raising with Ken as to what role the regulatory framework can play in helping India in the future given the learning out of COVID-19. Thank you, Sanat. There's a lot to unpack over there. Let me begin by saying that the challenge of getting returns on investment through innovation is a global one. Big industry, big pharma, putting in a huge amount of resources also faces a challenge having grabbed all the relatively obvious innovative parts now to get new ones in a manner which has impact on lives in a positive way is very tough. So the question is, are resources alone enough? No question resources are necessary and I'll come to that. Now, keep in mind that resources are necessary, but how does one use them? Keep also in mind a dramatically changing situation globally in a manner which favors Indian context hugely. And that changing context is something which has been talked about for a while but now is being implemented and that is personalized medicine. A personalized medicine was seen still recently as a fancy way of having individual oriented medication made available. Today in India, because of the rather dramatic scaling up of telemedicine and a variety of ways of teleconsulting, you're going to see a situation where personalized medicine at the grassroot level in a population of more than a billion is going to be feasible. This opens up a very critical aspect for innovation which is feedback. Feedback from people about what effects Medicaid has on their lives on such a scale will drive innovation enormously. In addition, innovation today will also be driven not just by investment of resources but by the sheer volume of quality efforts in that field. So India can bring in two aspects. One, this feedback process and increase the volume of talented people, increase the number of talented people looking at innovation, then low probability events can happen at a higher frequency because of the sheer number of talented people doing that. That would require international collaborations on scale that is eminently feasible. Now last point about resources. Absolutely right. Our GDP investment in R&D needs to go up, particularly industry investment in industry R&D. Right now 70% of the resources in our R&D comes from government and that should be inverted 30% should come from industry and that's happening. Now the big problem which industry has in India is it is not capital shy, it has got capital but it is short on risk capital. Now the question therefore is when industry invests, how do you mitigate risk? There are Indian institutions. Our R&D institutions, our universities, our Indian Institute of Technology can mitigate risk because of talented people, extraordinary infrastructure and massive space to build collaborative setups. So both Indian industry on scale as well as international industry coming in for investment can mitigate risk and take on adventurous projects which look at personalized medicine in a very, very new way. So I think that given the strong IT anchor of many of this, Amitabh here has pioneered many of those kinds of outreach in multiple sectors. We're going to see actually a mechanism by which low probability heavy investment research is transformed into higher probability broader based research of quality yielding more results for both India and the world. Thank you Vijay. You really developed it very well on the foundation that was built by Amitabh. So Naresh, in tune with what I heard now from Amitabh and Vijay, the Indian industry has made attempts at new drug discovery and development. And as we heard from Ken Frazier a little while ago, the successful launch of a new drug is a very, very long process. And we went in more through a process where there are five years where there was a complete drought in discovery of drugs. So we do go through that process in the industry. But given the fact that the Indian efforts in this area of new drug discovery still falls below the industry averages, is there a way we can do things differently knowing that expecting success in this particular domain is going to be very challenging? And I would particularly call out the area of innovation by the Indian industry which was briefly touched by both Amitabh and Vijay. And what is the scope in future of the Indian academic research? The industry-academia collaboration is perhaps the need of the hour. And this could happen only when the academia focuses on quality research aligned with the needs of the market. It's not just a quantity, it's also about the quality. And we know that India has a very well-developed scientific base with a large number of highly skilled researchers and scientists. We also know that India is one of the sixth most biodiverse countries with an 8,000-kilometer coastline. It has an enormous wealth of marine organisms that could provide fertility for drug research. So my question is that you have been yourself a very renowned cardiovascular surgeon. You have a tremendous passion for integrated healthcare and that's why you created the Medanta and the Med City and we saw that advertisement a little while ago. What do you think India can enable an R&D ecosystem of change, innovation and growth to help India transition into truly an innovation company? So first of all, let me thank USAIC for this opportunity to share our part. I represent the last mile, the clinical mile. And as we all have talked about, the collaboration and in this whole ecosystem is now ready in India as Amitabh and Pragavan has already established the will of the government to actually promote the innovations as we move forward. You may all be aware that for four years there was a hiatus when India took a pause to look at the regulatory mechanism and make it robust and bring it to international standards so that we would then be able to conduct our trials according to the world-class acceptance and also that credibility would increase of data coming out of India. So we on the one hand have established a 60-bed proof-of-concept unit at Medanta. We have done participated in many developments right now and it's welcome that the regulatory that came into effect in 1718 has really helped us to get up and running again and I think as you would know the strengths of India, like you said, there is a very robust way of the pharmacy to the world. We have a very diverse gene pool in India from the north to the south. There is a whole multitude because like I said earlier at one occasion that Alexander moved in from Europe and they were very generous with their sperm so there was a lot of fertilization in India, North India. Then Jangees Khan came from the northeast and that again provided another mixture of gene pool. The true Dravidians were actually now from more to the south. So we have all the material that is needed for innovation and progressively taking the new molecules to market. Yes, this whole system has actually come together recently. We have done some work with Bharat Biotech on vaccines for developing vaccines for Jigandh Muniya and Dengi. We have already done some work now, COVID related with the StoC and we are doing a lot of this work right now as we speak in Medanta. So from phase one to phase three, we have the entire ecosystem available. Our partnerships with the pharmaceutical industry is actually developing at a very rapid pace. The recognition that the regulatory is in place so that the data and the conclusions are internationally accepted. We will move and I have favoritly said that India has been a master copycat and as we always say biosimilars and genetic drugs but India is moving by will and action towards innovation and discovery of new molecules has already happened. But the regulatory was such that many of our bio companies went overseas to do their trials. That is not necessary anymore because the regulations in India are very very robust, liberal and also recognizing the strength of our own clinical trial like all the three phases that it's there and we can utilize them now more and more and it's happening already as we speak and I think it's a great opportunity for all international collaborators also to pick these opportunities in India and helping not only the Indian companies but international companies taking them from a bench to market. So I think what you just said and what the previous speakers have said that chain is now complete to go to the next step. Thank you, Naresh. Thank you and we'll dive a little deeper into some of these thoughts after we speak with Hari. Hari, let me change the tack a little bit. I said that and all of you know that India has been so successful, right? We have around 147 FDA formulation sites in India. China has only 45 of them. We have 38% of the ANDAs that come from India and the U.S. About $180 billion worth of generic drugs come to the U.S. So many successful plans and therefore it's a very natural kind of a thought that India is so uniquely placed to enhance the supply chain capabilities through the largest provider of generic drugs, not just to U.S. but globally for a long time. And the same holds good for vaccines, right? But it is also a fact that 63% of the Indian pharmaceutical imports are API and intermediates and it's also a fact that 70% of those imports come from China. So having run this sprawling jubilant pharma and you've seen how globally you run the business, do you think from an Indian perspective, from a macro perspective, is it time for India to diversify its sourcing and develop the domestic capacity so that it remains kind of self-reliant while being the global pharmacy of the world for the future in a sustainable manner? Thank you Sanat and thank you USAIC for organizing this very important panel with very important people like all of you. I'll come to this supply chain issue. But I'm dying to say something on the innovation because it's very close to my heart and I would just like to add to some of the comments made here. You know, if I study the U.S. system of innovation and the culture, one thing which Amitabh highlighted is the cluster approach, the cluster and the innovation ecosystem that U.S. offers. It's really a mecca for innovation and that's why we invested a lot in U.S. to learn that. In terms of the collaboration that we see between academia and the venture capital, the small, medium to large pharma companies, the seeding of early stage research by the government, and the vendors, all the vendors associated with it, top class human resource. And if I compare this innovation ecosystem with India, I find we have all the elements. We have all the elements. We have great human resource. In terms of contract research, we have been doing drug discovery in India for the last 20 years. Many of the biotechs which have gone into human trials, many of the drugs which big pharma have probably been invented here. So India's innovation ecosystem has been working. But what lacked was the ability to take risk and that risk capital which Amitabh also pointed out and Vijay also pointed out. And I think that situation is changing very fast. I think there is a newfound confidence that we see in the last four, five years in Indian companies to take risk. The prices of drugs because we start importing innovative drugs into India, patients are paying high prices. So today an Indian company can go into an innovative drug even for an Indian market because we could produce that drug at a much affordable price. And of course, if you can take that drug to the US market, then of course you get much higher prices and get reward for the initial high amount of risk that you take. As you know, if to launch a drug in the US market, you need a billion dollar or probably more in these cases. So I can assure you that in Indian innovation ecosystem is working and is working in a manner that we will see more and more drugs coming out of India. Presently our own company is doing, taking two drugs to human trial in US and we are going to take one drug in India, especially to bring a very affordable, we want to bring an affordable in cancer, immunology, a drug in India. So I think like us, there are many companies that you see coming to the supply chain. I must say that India was the leader in API. We are home for the best chemistry for last 50 years. We lost that advantage at some point because the Chinese company built huge capacity at one point of time. I remember 15 years back going to China, visiting a company they were operating at 10%. I said, why have you built such a large capacity? They said, no, we have been supported by the government to build large capacity. And we are going to take a large share of the global market. So what Indian companies faced is really a situation where prices were used to supply either intermediates or in some cases, final APIs. I think the Indian companies in the last 10 years have become bigger in scale. They are increasing their size and starting to build a parallel supply chain in India. I can tell you in two years will be completely free from any requirement to import from China. I can assure you that and like us, there are many companies who are doing it. Because A, even if we have to pay a little bit higher initially in India, companies have realized to build a reliable supply chain, you need to build capability in India itself. Actually, the capability exists is just that when we compete sometimes, we compete with companies which are so subsidized by the state that it is difficult. So that was one of the core reasons. So I think India will be a great supplier to US market and will be vertically integrated as Amita pointed out. Government has come out with now some very good schemes to build high capacity API plants and also key starting raw materials. So I think all that will play start playing in the next few years. Thank you, Harry. Thank you for sharing not just about the supply chain innovation that should take place, but also on the innovation that is taking place and what should take place. Now, we also have right now Chris B. Walker, who has joined us. So Chris, would you like to ask us a question? I don't know what you can hear me. Okay. Just committed the major zoom error. I was trying to speak while muted. Thanks very much. I chair the Research and Development and Manufacturing Investment Committee of the COVAX facility that is trying to develop two billion doses and get that produced by the end of 2021. One of the things that we're looking at quite often are where can we find more manufacturing capacity. And one of the things that I'm certainly seeing is that the level of investments that we're putting into both research and development and manufacturing not only can provide an opportunity to get vaccines for countries around the globe, but also offer an opportunity for companies to really accelerate their ability to do R&D and development of vaccines. And do you see this? It's hard to talk about an opportunity within COVID, but this opportunity where there's additional funding and the acceleration of vaccine, do you see this as an opportunity to increase R&D spending in India and build a particular capability in vaccines? Is this... Go ahead. Anybody can answer. Vijay, do you want to talk? Please go ahead. Chris, I think yes. The answer would be yes. I'll just give you an example. When COVID happened, there were five companies including ours. We signed a licensing agreement for Remdesivir and between the time it licensed it, in two months the product was launched, not only for India, but it is being now exported for 127 countries. So this is one small example, but definitely there are many new opportunities on vaccines that are coming up. India has large vaccine capacity. Some of the companies are known to be the supplier to the world actually. So they are partnering with many of the vaccine companies in US and other parts of the world to really participate in that supply chain. On the research side, there are two or three Indian companies who are working on... Now the clinical trials are going on. Hopefully they will be successful and many more such initiatives will happen. I'll just stop here and maybe Vijay can add more on that. Yeah. Thank you, Chris. You know what's taking off from what Hari said. It is true that Indian generics manufacturers and vaccine manufacturers have made a huge impact. Two out of three vaccines given to children all over the world come from India. But what is amazing as a consequence of this horrible pandemic is the way these big companies, smaller companies, our entrepreneurs and our academia have all gone into vaccine development, drug development in a very audacious, ambitious manner. In other words, the daring to be truly imitative and not being merely emulator has happened. And having tasted these new directions, I don't think we're going to see that stopping. As Ken said earlier in a previous panel, you need different kinds of vaccines, different roles for different kinds of vaccines. And therefore, this innovative ability in the vaccine front, in the drug discovery front, in devices and other technologies are going to see a daring to capture need of different populations and serve them. So I think this is a new direction, which is a genuine one. Thank you. Amitabh Narish, do you like to talk? Give your viewpoints, please. Well, I think, you know, if large scale supplies for vaccines for vast millions of people across the world have to be made, they will be eventually made from India because India is the vaccine capital of the world. And that's 65 to 70% of the vaccine capacity lies in India. And we have some outstanding organizations. But more than that, they've collaborated with the world. You know, some of the leading us right now who are doing all the innovation today. And therefore, I see that my personal perspective is that India will play a very key role in this exercise. But more than that, I think the COVID-19 pandemic has really given impetus to a lot of innovation in India. Actually, we were all importers of PPE or ventilators. You know, none of them were being made in India. And today we have over 500 companies which are doing manufacturing of PPE. We are a leading exporter. And in ventilators, I think all our automobile companies, we are a center for compact manufacturing. All of them became great ventilator manufacturers. So India really builds a supply chain for that. But more than that, huge innovation for, you know, as far as sample collection at home, mobile lab, diagnostic solutions, all of them. And then huge innovation in terms of telemedicine guideline and innovation of new phenomenal app on telemedicine where all the private sectors collaborated with us. And therefore, we are now doing tele-consultations. We are doing a lot of tele-monitoring in remote areas. Huge amount of innovation has taken place in India during the COVID-19 period. And my personal belief is that we see India will really, because we're not pushing for, the Prime Minister has really pushed for the National Digital Health Mission. And India will become a leading technological leapfrogging. And this will ensure equitable health services delivery in India in the future. And every individual Indian will have a unique health ID which will provide access to electronic health records. And this will be quite phenomenal. And this will really see a technological massive level leapfrogging by India. Thank you, Amitabh. Our time is up. So, Nareesh, I would not request you to add any more and let me conclude by saying that thank you very much. Nareesh, Vijay, Amitabh and Hari, it was very good to get your viewpoints, your perspectives. Thank you, Chris, for being able to join us and ask the question. And before I end, let me just remind the audience that you please participate in our online polling below the video window. You can scroll down to find the panel polling question and you can submit your answers there. The polling will be open for one minute and will announce the results before the next panel. So, thank you once again, the panelists, Chris, and thank you audience.


Welcome to the Graham Miller show presented by Buffalo Wildlings. I'm Sam Murray joined now with Stevenson men's soccer head coach Graham Miller and coach what a year it was 12 9 and 1 advanced to the max semifinals where you fall Just one nothing to top ranked messiah advanced to the ECAC second round talk about the season as a whole Yeah, well we you know we exceeded our goals from where we wanted to be and and it's all about you know Small steps when you're building a program and and you know, it's not a major achievement what we did this year But it's an achievement You know making the Mac playoffs for the first time in the seven years that we've been in the conference is huge for this program It helps us with recruiting it shows that we're you know competing with the best and when you're competing with one of the best teams In the country and messiah and the Defender national champs It was it was you know rewarding to see that you know We didn't just make the playoffs, but we also gave you know the number one seed of a scare You know and you know took them twice to two one-goal losses Yeah, you talk about goals for the year You 12 wins is the most since 2010 Last year you scored 10 goals this year you put 42 in the back of the net talk about even shots You put you total 200 more shots from a year ago Just talk about those those small goals that you and that was it and we talked about it back at the start with the Preview to the season, you know one of our goals was to you know, and we did it Through statistics we talked to the guys about okay We need to average close to two goals a game, you know for us And you know scoring and then we need to you know obviously allow You know less than one and we did that and that's that was the turnaround from the year before And it was great to see that you know, we just didn't have one goal scorer You know, we had multiple different people that stepped up and scored We get defender scoring goals at big moments We had the forwards like Tarik and Jay put the ball in the back of the net when they needed to So it was very pleasing for us as a team that you know We turned those stats in our favor and we you know, we got the we got the victories that we needed to get 12 wins Yeah, you had four players named to all conference. That's also the most since 2005 And I think turning the page everyone's back, you know, you get you get all these key players back terrifically Jay Smith up top DR Medtart in midfield Matt Stelitano stepped up big in net Just talk about how you know the benefit of that. Yeah, well, we're excited. So now they have the experience So we were able to give these freshman and sophomores that have worked hard for this program over the last two years since I took over You know some good experience. They got to see some postseason play They got to you know play against some of the best teams in the country And now the goal is loftier now the goal for next year Will be to finish in the top three because we are returning everybody So they can't rest nor laurels We've been having our individual meetings and the big thing for me is we have to now work harder You know now everybody knows that we're kind of on the map a little bit now And we need to work hard in the offseason with all the returning players to be ready to go again next year And you know turn those I think it was yeah It was nine one goal losses into one goal wins and we'll give ourselves a chance to to have a major achievement and reach The NCAAs for the first time in men's soccer history. Yeah, and before we let you go another major achievement off the field You had two players named academic all district Terrigli and DR Medtart. Yeah, and that's you know, we've got a set of Stevenson soccer standards that we You know want the guys to live up to on and off the field and and obviously one of the main ones and the reason Why we're here, you know, they're student athletes is the academic piece and you know really impressed with those two And there's a lot of others that are you know, you know really doing well in class, but really happy for DR and Tarek They've deserved the work they put in in the classroom and on the field. Well coach Thanks for taking the time these couple times that we sat down and chatted and good luck in the in the offseason and spring practice Thanks, Sam. I appreciate it for head coach Graham Miller. I'm Sam Murray and this has been the Graham Miller show