who have come up with an innovative solution in the form of 100% biodegradable menstrual management products to create sustainable menstrual health. Dear friends, welcome to another edition of Changemakers. We all understand the importance of menstrual health for women and adults and girls, which includes access to water, sanitation, hygiene facilities and affordable menstrual hygiene products. While access to safe and affordable sanitary material is crucial for reducing the risk of infections, the disposal of sanitary pads has become an environmental concern due to their non-biodegradable plastic content. Today we have the privilege of introducing innovators who have developed sanitary solutions that address these challenges. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Paritosh and Chitranshi. Their innovative creations not only provide a safe and affordable options, but are also biodegradable, minimizing the environmental impact. Let us hear more about their remarkable work and impact on women's lives. Welcome Paritosh Anand and Chitranshi Baranwal. Please introduce yourself and tell us brief about your innovation. Hello everyone, I am Chitranshi Baranwal, co-founder of Genie Pads. I am also a microbiologist and an author of Applied Microbiology Book. It's a book mainly for BSE nursing students and taught in various government organizations. And I have also next book in lined up which will be published in December this year. It's about genetics and pathology. Moreover, I also have five years of experience with different marketing consentances. Hello everyone, my name is Paritosh Anand and I am the co-founder of Genie Pads. Here we create sustainable menstrual health through our biodegradable products and services and raising the unrest and educating and spreading the awareness to the tribals and underprivileged. Prior to this, I have ten years of work experience in different industries like agribusiness, inology and education. I am also the peace ambassador at World Peace Tracts today from India. Thank you. Yeah, it's very impressive. Both are knowledgeable and have experience in the product you are working on. What problem are you addressing through your innovation? Please elaborate on that. So we have started our primary research in 2020 and what we found that three major problems are there in this industry. The first one is affordability, second one is accessibility and third one is the awareness and about the pads, about the menstruation, about the periods and which kind of pads are available commercially in the market. So we are bringing in a solution which is not only affordable but also truly biodegradable. The products are and we are offering the service which is unique and we are trying to tap those markets. We are trying to help those people in the society who are actually on this right now. We are going to the tribals. We are going to the underprivileged and make them understand. We are going to the orphanages. We are going to the jails and make them understand about what sustainable menstrual health is all about. What was your source of motivation for making this product and where did it all start? Personally, I have been in contact with a lot of women who have no or very less idea about menstruation. For them period is just five days of menstruation like having cramps and bleeding that's it. For me menstruation is just not about bleeding. I believe that we have to take care of ourselves because menstruation also affects our mental health and physical health as well. And furthermore personally I have been gone through a lot of problems like rashes and infections and when I researched about it I got to know they are just because of the pads I have been using which was a plastic based and had toxins in it. So thoroughly I thought to create a biodegradable truly biodegradable sanitary napkins which will be made of any ingredient which is a procure from the nature and it will not only help for the environment but also helpful for my skin as well. Really it is like well spoken about the problem you have faced it. This question is specifically for Paritosh. How did you get an idea of working on something like this which is very women centric? Was it just a business idea for you or you have some story attached to it? I would like to extend the answer of Chitraansi when I was working with in agriculture I have seen three women of the same family using the same cloth not even cloth pad for their menstrual management and that was like a kick for me and that time I thought can I contribute in this segment in this industry why they have to do this and if even if you are using the cloth pad usable cloth pads are available in the market today so if you are using it it must have been truly sun dried after the use and in villages I have seen they are not even sun drying it they are drying under the cloths bigger clothes so again it is of no use so that was one incident which brought me in this industry because prior to this I had no idea about what scientific pad is I have not just a single scientific pad before that so it is not just the business idea of course we are now developing a different class different reach out plans how to affect the life how to impact the life of rural women and girls of course but that time it was not a business idea when we have started it we have started you know to help the society and we are doing it as of now yeah great Paritosh you are trying to upgrade the hygiene level for the rural and tribal area of people so now my next question is for Chitran Sri please tell us how has the response been so far from women who have used your product during our early phases we did try a lot of prototypes and we did receive a lot of negative feedbacks and criticisms but our team positively took it and we tried to focus on each feedback and tried to make every product better day by day our main concern is always to minimize the issues that a female is experiencing during her menstruation and I am happy to say that our genie pad is expanding and minimizing all the feedbacks with amazing feedbacks again and our products also allow our customers to experience the adoreless comfortable and rashes free infection free experience and it's a good news for us is that we have recently launched our 100% bamboo fiber pads and it's receiving good feedbacks and we got patent of it as well great Chitran Sri congratulations it's good to know that you have upgraded your product by negative feedback and you are encouraged by the positive feedback from users now congratulations and Parithosh can you tell me the challenges in this journey and how you overcame those challenges the first challenges in this journey being a man high phase personally getting a tag of perverted if you go and ask to a person that which pad you are using or are you a pad user or tampon user or computer people are not still ready to talk about it we are encouraging girls to talk about periods to their father to their brother so the first point we have we felt that communication is not synchronized end to end second challenge is the customers have accepted that rashes are the byproducts of the menstruation it is not we are here to break that myth that wide asses happens every customer we have met it every girl we have met it and discussed about periods and she told she has breast races so our question to her every time that why and she was not knowing so we tried to make them understand why it happens and how it can be controlled so communication second is a challenges second challenge we have faced that people are not ready to specifically in the rural area what we have seen people are not even try to try pads they are not giving it a try they are if they are happy with the clothes they are happy with the clothes so we are also breaking the mentality we are also bringing them on a scientifically scientific way of menstruation management not the traditional one so these are a few challenges we see first you have faced a lot of challenges and it good to know that you have overcome the challenge and you have released the product as well recently we have seen many similar innovations when it comes to menstrual hygiene so Pratosh I would like to know this from you that how is your innovation is unique from all the others true very true a lot of startups are coming in this industry but if you look at the statistics you will find right now around 355 million women and girls are menstruating in India right now when we are talking about it so and out of 355 million women only 42 percent have access to any kind of menstrual management products any kind state curbs disc tampons pads whatever we still have a full gap of 60 58 to 60 percent who have not access to this so if I can say if any 500 startups comes forward we are not able to suffice the demand and in 355 million women 42 percent who are using the pads they are out of that 99 percent women are using plastic pads so can you just imagine the mountain of the used pads we differentiate ourselves on many points first point is we we are not just saying that we are biodegradable we got patent for it so we are truly biodegradable degradable pads second we are affordable we are making biodegradable pads more cheaper than the plastic pads every pad you see right now in the market contains plastic equivalent to at least 4 to 5 plastic container that Trana Vallabhaya gives you consider the amount of dioxin you are using for a straight five days of 30 years of your life so we are differentiating on that part of course price point is need to be considered but I don't want to play on that but we are trying to keep it as low as possible and we are going extra mile how we are adopting villages we are adopting schools we go there with the with our gynecologist we counsel the girls who are in the monarch who are 13 14 or who are just will having the periods 10 to 12 14 years old age girls so we are trying to tap that market also we are not only in urban sector plus we are providing 100% customization like in five days of periods every day you need a different kind of pad depending upon the flow of the blood so what we are telling that go to our website make your own product of course with answer we'll talk about it more but just I'm giving you the hint and you can make your own menstrual kit and you you can then subscribe it so again it will be will be valid friendly like if you go to swap and say I need two pads of double XL they will not give you I am giving you and taking the charge of two pads only so we are giving you the full right that what you need make your own product with us great it's very sad to know that like 60% of the women do not have access to hygiene product and you have come up with the biodegradable solution and you are into awareness also creating awareness and it's good to know that genie pad is truly customizable and by this way it is unique and distinct from other innovations in the market Chitran she please tell us how do you ensure that your product meets quality standards um initially each batch of pad is gone through a rigorous testing of absorbency because what I feel if I would be a customer of genie pad I would expect the leakage issue should not be there so leakage is the main issue with which we test primarily apart from that the stickiness of the pad and then effects how it feels on the skin and the most important thing is microbial contamination should not be there so we thoroughly sterilize it moreover each ingredient of the product is nabial tested then our product is manufactured through cold sealing process so I know I'm throwing all the alien terms here so I'll explain what cold sealing process is it's a process that includes two types of dyes that helps in sealing and shaping the sanitary pad and it also helps to remove the sharp edges of the pad and make it more comfortable and hygienic for the skin moreover yeah this is we protocols are all followed to make it the high standards of the product and perfect to use it's good to know that you are all committed to maintaining the high quality standards uh Chitanshi please tell us how cost effective and readily available is your product to the end user uh so being a biodegradable pad uh genie pads are very affordable I got in comparison to the other products that are available in the market and claim to be biodegradable because we have to procure all the material from the environment and it does cost us so but you know the competitors that claim the per pad is of 23 rupees and what genie pads is providing it ranges from 10 to 15 rupees so it does reduce your cost and as Paritosh explained the concept of red kit we are introducing here customization is offered where you can take any number or any quantity of size of your pad like four pads of night pads then four of large pads that will be used for days and then two panty liners it depends on you what you want then uh genie pads also doing something different like goodies if you have a goodie section for the red kit where you can choose anything like disposable bags intimate wipes sanitizer which is a ph friendly for the vaginal area and as I said bleeding menstruation is just not about bleeding it affects your mental and physical health so uh cramps and mood swings all are catered by these uh chocolate dark chocolates we are offering then scented candles and biodegradable bookmarks whatever you need in it all the goodies are available here and whatever item you choose for yourself you have to just pay for them you don't have to pay for the whole packet of a pad that available in the market so and as the reachability how they can reach to us so we are available on the website or we have genie pads dot in that's our website we are available on all the e-commerce sites apart from that we have a community genie community we are available on instagram facebook linkedin also so uh they anyone can reach out to us they can DM us on the social networking sites or directly contact on the website as well so easily they can contact us it's interesting it is cost effective and also easily accessible for the end users and you have good marketing strategy to give out the other products as well uh paritosh have you received support from other sources as well uh financial or any other support can you please elaborate yes uh we are incubated at 3 3 university in odisha and under their mentorship we can say we have been able to raise funds from startup india we have been able to raise funds from nrc natural research and development corporation they are helping us out in terms of funding i'm telling you first and we are also in the talks with various angel investors for the funding part second is mentorship part so we have various mentors who are working on a state level or country level various mentors of us are international level work working there a few seniors from i am hudabad ceo of cc university they all are our mentors plus uh i have also went to i am hudabad so that one year helped me to understand myself on a better level to understand my startup my business on a better level the main point the main purpose going to i am hudabad was the challenges i was facing earlier would not be there and it is rightly fulfilled so i am thankful to everyone our mentors our funders our my i am professors for embarking me on on this journey for imparting their knowledge and providing the handhold support we needed it really impressed by the support received from various uh sources as well as the mentoring support you to sit from your faculty members and other others so if you have to give a one piece of advice to the youngsters who are thinking of starting a venture what would that be uh paritosh i would just give one piece of advice that focus on the product or services you are making is actually solving its purpose or not like in our industry if i will give you or even anyone anyone will give you a bad and tell you to use it and if it will leak will you use it another time no no matter who is giving you so solving the purpose is the main issue right now what happens in this startup ecosystem rather than focusing on creating a hike on social media and everything a light focusing on creating the best product will help any startup to get into the market and focusing on the right need of the customer is the key i guess creating the product which solves its purpose is the main thing so if anyone is coming into this industry or any any industry or making an app or doing anything is it solving the actual problem of the of the customers or not that's great paritosh you are saying that just don't create the product and create the product which solves customers problem very inspiring and wise advice for young entrepreneurs chitrin chi what plans do we have for future of the business as of now we are only focusing on the on creating sustainable menstrual health through which we are trying to reach the unreached woman which are the ruler woman and the youngsters young generation which have just started bleeding so you know they are the minnaks and they need guidance regarding their health and hygiene of course so we are trying to reach them guide them and educate them through our education and awareness campaigns because you know it's better to know about your body before and instead of believing on myths and having doubts so we are also trying to reach at least five million women in next five years and targeting and aiming for like 25 percent of women in next five years and great it's really excited to know about your future plan and you are focusing on creating the awareness first that's really interesting do you have a vision for the betterment of our country through this innovation of yours paritosh yes so just few days back I was reading a report of Morgana Stanley and it was the report on how India changes in past 10 years so time is changing we as a society is evolving every day we are becoming a smart as a society even as an individual even at genie pads we are working on a sensitive issue which is being generally ignored so we we focus on we envision an India where each of the woman takes care of her menstrual well health more diligently and talk about it more openly within your family friends and surroundings we envision a India a taboo free society and for that we are working towards it we are working to make it happen you both are sincerely appreciative for being a visionary and demonstrating and wavering dedication towards making a positive impact in the country we are also very thankful to the ICT you know which one cell we we met and a representative of the ICT you know which one cell at G20 and from there we got the mentorship and in their mentorship we also attended national technology week event under the ICT pavilion and we are very very much thankful to the ICT you know which one cell depends on which one cell everyone Shivani and the whole team the whole product contain you ma'am for giving us the chance to showcase our products our ideas to the people and to helping us to reach the objective we have in the mind so in behalf of Gini family I would like to thank you so much thank you Paritosh thank you everyone for bringing us till here and supporting us for this thank you the team thank you Chitranjee thank you both of you for joining with us so that's all we have in this edition but we will be back with some more insightful discussions and many such breakthrough innovations in the coming episodes till then keep watching for the space thank you


Thank you for staying around for what I'm sure is going to be a really interesting panel. It's my pleasure to introduce Professor Ed Delp who is the Charles William Harrison distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering Professor of biomedical engineering and professor of psychological sciences and Ed Is you know similar to Al Ed has had a long and distinguished career With a number of pioneering innovations in the image and video processing area In case you haven't noticed it's also quite outspoken Right, just in case you haven't noticed right which at times can be you know It can it can be quite intimidating but after 18 years of having the pleasure of being a colleague with him I know what a fantastic Only if you're an administrator In which I'm not so you know I've had the pleasure of I guess being on his good side and Enjoying the pleasure of many conversations with him. So I'm gonna Turn it over to Ed to introduce the other panelists and take it away from here Okay, thanks. Thank you very much for the kind introduction So the panelists today, of course we have dr. Bovik We also have Chee Guile Guile from he's an assistant professor of VCE wonder there. He is right next to me We have Maggie zoo who is an associate professor of VCE We have Greg buzzard who's professor of mathematics and we have Melba Crawford who is a distinguished professor in the civil engineering department I should point out Two of the people on this panel myself and Melba have known Al for a long time and if you were here when you began his talk Maybe I can tell you later about his drug dealer comment that he made About when we were in the jungle in police and it really was a drug dealer we ran into Okay, so the the main goal and the panelists are not gonna have any statements and the main goal Is of this panel is really to engage professor Bovik and ask some questions So maybe to start off Maybe Melba. I'll let you ask the first question. Okay. I should I should have told you that but I did I know but why don't you start off? Okay, so I'm not gonna ask his civil engineering microphone. Oh It's on it's on. Okay So we've known each other a very long time. Yes the first time that dr. Bovik came into my office at the University of Texas He bent over to come in And that was my introduction So one of the first so we've had Engagement professionally as well with the IEEE and many of you are probably in the IEEE and So in the imaging area where I was working more in applications and certainly not video But we were both going to the same big conference the big eye-cast conference with this is such a drag There's so many people there. You've got 10 12 parallel sessions What are we going to do in order to actually have a community that can engage in a meaningful way? So he said we'll start a conference and we'll have about 200 people there Yep, and so We got our friends together and we had this conference in Austin And we had a couple of parallel sessions and this conference has continued for how many years now 20 Well, that was 92 I guess so you know going on 30 years and it is 94 94 I guess And we said we're gonna make it totally 94 94 29 29 years. Yep, and we're gonna make it international Conference on image processing. It's still 200 people, right? Oh, that was where I was getting to So it was so popular that now it's got I don't know how many thousand people that typically attend and It's like going to CDPR where you have people standing up around the outside of the room. So how do we? Professionally engage, you know, because it's really important almost everybody here. I think as a student How do we engage students, you know being at a conference? That's the whole value of a conference is really the engagement And so what are your thoughts on that as we we move forward? Sure Well, you know COVID was very revealing in this regard, right? Because we all stopped going to conferences in Person and then we did this, you know, sort of online thing Where you know to be honest, you know, you probably attended very little of the conference Maybe you saw a talk or something which was pre-recorded Which is typically pre-recorded.  You didn't form new research Relationships or or anything like that. So to me that just first of all that in-person aspect is Absolutely unassailably perfect, you know, I think, you know during COVID also multiple of my graduate students who are Normal kids, you know would have been happy and so on we had to go through therapy and so on because they're feelings of Isolation during COVID, you know, I couldn't see them. They couldn't see each other They couldn't be in the lab or anything else and that's just sort of going the opposite direction And it's important that we are social creatures. We need to come together to learn to co-educate to to advance knowledge as One now the size of it, you know, that just reflects the importance of pictures and videos because they're everywhere It's in your pot. I mean just everything is pictures and videos today and we can't cancel that out. Okay I think some sort of, you know, combination of things is starting to happen because You know, there was also proliferation of conferences. So there's the gigantic, you know Conferences and but then there's suddenly 500 other image processing conferences, too I think that they're going to start to, you know, dwindle because of zoom and so on Maybe they'll go online and that sort of thing. I think we'll still have the eye cast We'll have ICIP, CVPR and a few others as well And they'll be big and we'll just have to learn how to accommodate because we need to send our students to those more than anything I mean, I like to go too, especially if it's a nice place I want to find Ed there and shoot the bull and talk about society matters and research and everything else But students I remember going to conferences as a student and I was instead of being like now old and, you know Walking around jaded, you know and just like howdy-tah. I was bullet interested in every one of those posters and talks I sat through the talks. I was interested. I asked questions, you know, and I really was really engaged And that I think is was so important for my own personal development that let's not give that up no matter what That's what I think and don't be intimidated when you go to a conference Don't ask, you know, because if I'm what they're giving to talk I mean, I just had, you know, about five or six students come talk to me for me That was the best part of the talk My ability to you know afterward somebody was interested about the first part was talking to me Second best second second best because we are educators first and foremost Okay, that was the best because somebody listened somebody understood something It's not the whole thing and somebody was interested And asked an intelligent question. So that for me was thrilling to ask after those questions So Do the students have any questions they'd like to ask Professor Bovic? I mean, we have some other ones we can continue to ask But does anybody have and don't hesitate if you just stand up and ask the question Anybody want to ask a question? Including you might want to ask a question about his career path And why did he end up at the University of Texas? If you're interested in that does anybody you have any okay, go ahead Back way back here go ahead Okay, there's a we'll get but there's another question over here So I don't know if you covered this in the Lecture, but why did you why did you receive two Emmys? Oh Well, you know to be honest You know, I was working on Of foveated vision that's where we account for the fact that your eye has You know more centers in the middle of you know the retina So when I'm looking at you you're in focus, but everybody else is blurry Okay, but in creating trying to do foveated compared we didn't have a quality model So I was searching for a quality model So myself and joe wong one of my greatest students We got together and we started talking about it and I proposed and he was saying this mean squared error isn't working And I said to him why don't you just make it local, you know measure it locally and normalize it Okay, and that became the structure term. He went home and came back the next day with the other two terms Okay, and so we had our model and it worked and we were puttering along and suddenly the television people started picking up on it because it actually Correlated much more highly with human judgments anything ever before And it kind of ran with itself But of course we became opportunistic as well and tried to engage companies A company called videoclarity started marketing it to the world We gave them all our code helped them send a student there to help them and so on But then it kind of took care of itself, you know, and at one point it was Just sim ss. I am I think a lot of people call it was you know controlling More than half of all the moving bits at some point, you know So if you go back to Amy's question, why did you choose to go to the University of Texas? Well, you know, I went to school in Champaign Urbana, okay, and uh Not to not to belittle your weather here No, just kidding. I did kind of get sick as a kid of the snow and slush and so and I wanted I liked hot weather But more importantly than that Austin at the time was perceived as you know, the hot spot of the future I didn't want to go to California to crowded and all that east coast to crowded I wanted to go someplace. It was hot sunny fun and a dynamic environment They had these initiatives called MCC and and what was the other one? I forget, you know, but anyway You know huge amounts of money pour in It's another one of these semiconductor things. Yeah. Yeah SMC yeah, SMC and so on and Semitec Semitec. Thank you. That's the one. Yeah Thank you, David. Yeah, so, you know and I went down there and you know, I love the town and so on So it was my number one target all along and I went there It's been great, you know, Steve Ray Vaughan And then outdoorsy place, you know, it's a lot of outdoor activities and warm. I liked hot, you know Now I'm not so hot on the hot because it's 105. I lost it all summer.  Otherwise, we'll we'll ask one of the panelists to ask a question Now I should mention that Thomas Wong said Al Osta has a great future I listen to him a lot Okay, you have a question David. Go ahead. I think it's on Okay, so when I was in graduate school, you hated the mean square error and I still think that you don't like it Do you dislike it as much as thin or more or less? I love the mean square error It's what you've meloded with age No, no, I it's just that I didn't like it being used for picture quality prediction because it's such a horrible predictor Okay, so I didn't you know make comparisons with because it's not worth it anymore But I mean literally the correlations are below the worst picture quality prediction algorithm by big margin It just doesn't have any perceptual aspect. It's just a pixel to pixel comparison Which doesn't account for perceptual principles like masking effects and so on So did you have david in the class? Uh, I don't think I classed. Yeah, you took image processing. Yes. Yeah, I used to see how was he was good Yeah, yeah, he said you like the man. I remember he said I like the math. Oh, okay. Turned out. He's right All right. Here's my phd advisor for like a semester. Yeah, just you know, I was sort of standing He was the bridge there with Okay, uh, any other questions from the audience Okay, otherwise You ask sure So my research is about jointly designing hardware and software for future cameras or visual sensors So I want to ask you from a perspective of hardware maker that's from The perspective of video quality preservation. Do you have any feedback or wish list for hardware makers to make their next generation cameras, for example If there are a aspect that you wish cameras to improve on for example, like higher resolution or higher dynamic range Or flexible frame rate as you have mentioned in the talk Or things like that Well, two things about camera technology one It's amazing at all the different camera technologies and their capabilities along every dimension Including the ones you all mentioned the spatial resolution temporal, you know bit depth Everything, okay, so that advanced tremendously. The other thing is that camera manufacturers are incredibly secretive Okay, so it's very hard to know what's going on inside a camera computation Okay, they because it's so competitive field, you know that In they're in addition, they're having to compete with the iphone So it's even more competitive. You certainly don't find about much like that unless you like ed, you know He does legal cases and you know sees the secrets Um, I do see he sees the secrets, you know, I've seen him too. So I know I can't tell him either But but but don't you I'm sorry, but don't you think some of this computation they're doing in the camera in some ways Great the quality Well, it can I mean what I can tell is the iphone does use quality models like this Okay, that much I know through I'm not going to reveal how I know But I wasn't through a patent case. Okay, so they're injecting, you know perceptual optimization Um, I think it's great that they're doing that because it's something to be done fast and efficient and be put in, you know Just hard wired, you know, just write hard wire code and that sort of thing As opposed to relying upon, you know, deep learning and that sort of thing I think they can coexist But it's a difficult problem to talk about how you can, you know, put in that neural processor, which they do Along with the, you know, sort of net, you know, standard type processors But how do they not only coexist, but how do they also Co-process The visual the visual information that, you know, I think is kind of a challenge Going forward just as it is conceptually, how do we combine, you know, machine learning? Which is just this big black box that can optimize anything with the right data with Science and truth. Today I talked about science and truth Okay, which ought to be able to make deep models better But how we I'd like to see how those things can, you know Coexist as far as all the improvement along all these various dimensions. Boy, they're on top of that, you know I mean, which makes makes my job interesting because then I can develop a model for well high frame rate or You know better colors or, you know, whatever new dimension comes along So, by the way, is there any questions because I'm just going to follow up on So, you know, there's this, I don't know what I'm Philosophical argument or what that You know, we take the picture and we look at the picture um, but That's really not telling us What effectively is out there in a sense you do you understand what I'm saying is number one the sensors we have Only sense in certain wavelengths And we know other animals maybe have other sensors. So maybe we're not perceiving The real scene we're perceiving some version of the scene and and And then on top of that, we got all this processing going on the side to camera is, you know Is that a good thing is well, what you just said is not only true of cameras is true of our own eyes Right, okay, because you know, we have a limited Range of, you know, bandwidths we see the brain is immediately compressing like I talked about throwing away Huge amounts of information because of that, you know, it's still we still see well But people think when you look at the world or you take a picture with a camera, okay that well, I got everything Okay, but there are Enormous number of visual illusions that just show you how little you're actually seeing when you're looking at the world I don't mean other bands like ir or you know x-rays or that sort of thing They are important absolutely, especially in remote sensing, you know, and by the way these models work for those Well, I that's my next question. Okay. Well, hold off on that. Okay.  It's trying to figure out. How does this fit into the real world? And that makes, you know, these special designs that makes wrong answers All right, any other questions from the audience? For the students any type of question? Okay All right, if not professor zoo Hi Hi. So I want to ask a question Kind of related to quality and compression because I do, you know, some research in that area Particularly with compression So I think in your talk, you know, we also talk about your collaboration with these companies They're always trying to push the boundaries of how much we can compress the data, right? But still having the best quality, right? So there's always this tradeoff between, you know, what we call the rate and distortion or rate and quality Right, um, but I think you have covered a lot about From the human perception point of view, right and how we view this as to Whether it's giving us the good quality we like to consume I think there's also a lot of emerging trends where this massive amount of visual data is that we have acquired Our processed machines Right, which do not Mimic our human vision So my question is do you think quality In that sense For data that are processed by machines still plays a role. And then what might that role be? Oh, sure. I mean, uh There are definitely studies and we've conducted one not long ago that show that, you know, machine vision tasks Number one are affected by picture quality Okay, so it doesn't matter, you know, how big a deep network you have and so on if the picture's coming in or of lower quality Then it's going to have a harder time doing recognition and that sort of thing Um, another study we did was Just in face detection, okay Suppose you take a powerful face detector doesn't have to be a big huge deep thing something like what's in your camera Viola Jones type face detector if you also supply that algorithm with some quality features Okay, that are, you know, like why I just talked about today Then it can do a better job at detecting faces because it can learn to account simultaneously for detecting faces as well as Accounting somehow for the quality of the picture and how that might affect the detectability of faces Okay, so very much so you can include that now with that said, you know, if you have gigantic databases like image Net is full of distorted pictures So to some degree if you're, you know, if you when you're training on image net to do image recognition It is learning not only to do image recognition or classification. I should say but doing it on distorted pictures So it has to learn Structural things like the models I talked about Okay, the underlying deep models The early layers of deep models look very much like the same band pass filters I've been talking about Okay, they learn the same things that your visual brain does and does that But also further in and I don't have proof of this because it's further into the network where nobody understands anything You know explainability, but certainly if it's learning Distortion, I mean to at least to the extent of being able to classify in the presence of distortion It's learning that the natural that these statistics are modified In some way, you know how it's learning it may be not explicit and very implicit somehow You know somewhere in the embedding, which is my favorite word in machine learning is embedding Okay, you know, well, what's at the seventh layer? Well, it's the embedding. Okay. What does that mean? I thought it was the feature Well, that's the embedding now. It's a much cooler word. They've come up with. Okay. I got a future map is an embedding Yeah, so I think the deep models can learn it along with their task But if you can inject this information this basic truth in there then it can learn it faster converge better You know smaller models that sort of thing very definitely, you know You know jitendra malik, you know, he's kidding with me one time He said well, all this stuff you do is cool.  I don't know. I hope not You know, I'll be retired by then and won't care in the same way Following following up on that So how about if you take the attitude The hell with it. I don't need the camera. I'll just generate And I could even I could even Send you the parameters over the internet so you could generate the movie Then then I'm not going to have any quality issues. Yeah, well, I'm going to say two things just about forget the quality. Okay number one And I would my kids went through the teen years during the marvel era at the peak And I am just so sick of that. Okay I didn't take them to every single marvel. I've seen 23 more whatever it is now at this point, you know marvel movies Okay, and there's so much generative stuff there and it's such a relief to go see real people Acting and talking and you know and emphasizing quality of acting second thing is You can't watch the news that's been generated videos news videos. That's coming news videos can't be generated That's coming. I mean they might be generative with generated with evil my dear friend. That's coming Well with malintent perhaps. Yes generated with malintent. It's definitely coming, but the real news the honest news Can't be generated. Okay, so I mean these are just two examples. I mean, but certainly cinema you can generate Maybe the actors will all disappear, you know Do we believe That you know a machine learning system anytime in the near future can convey the sensitivity Of a meryl streep and representing some sort of you know personal expression attributes nervousness You know that sort of thing. I think we're far away from it No one Well, we are we are but but I agree with you more than I don't but I think The the problem is there's a lot of people that are sort of taking this attitude That you know, we're going to have all this generated content and I maintain all this generated content It's not good for our society either Beyond the image processing implications. I think it's not good for our society. Yeah I mean you could probably have a generative model that could learn jack Nicholson Yes, okay with his peccadillos and strange behavior. I mean just the way he is wonderful actor But it can't create the next jack Nicholson with that Actors incredible, you know peccadillos and strange attributes and mannerisms and things and so on that would make That actor great and unique and so on, you know, they can't create marlon brand They'll can't create meryl streep can't create, you know betty, you know, whatever. Let's see what happens You know, I'm not impressed so far neither am I but I'm just gonna say let's see what happens Is there any questions? Invasion with the audience Go ahead, please. Hi I'm sorry. It might have been mentioned in the first part of the talk but Uh As a visual scientist, what would you say the top Features of the human perception that is currently missing in the machine perception And what are the possible directions that you know that research should go to incorporate that? Well, my viewpoint is You know, I'm constantly reading the visual science literature and also doing research in just visual neuroscience at times I mean I spent a good part of my career just publishing in vision science journals and that sort of thing Trying to see What new discoveries are forthcoming that I can bring Into video engineering whenever I find one that I might think might be useful like you know, major things have been like foveation Natural scene statistic models, you know things like that adaptive gain control all these kind of things when I find them I try to bring them into some kind of algorithm. Okay, I mean Why do why is you know the word have this why let me give you this example And this is going the other direction your question. I think it's just too interesting. So I never answered the question to the audience of Why does the visual system of the human brain extract do the same processing that extracts that Gaussian noise? Why? Okay, the answer in my mind is so that it can perceive distortion So for example, you know the crystalline lens Of your eye adapts to bring things into focus Okay, and it does it using process visual cortex here So When you change the degree of focus it's changing the statistics of what is being perceived back here And adapting till you just get that right focus at that point in your depth of field Okay, I think it's using this Gaussian noise to control it basically. Okay. I know that was in kind of the opposite direction What about serving energy too?  I'm sorry. I mean conserving energy in the sense that of you know, the you know The band pass processing and everything becomes efficient and that sort of thing because you know, it's not it's it's you know Let me put it this way If we didn't have just foveation Then we'd have to carry our brains in a wheelbarrow Okay, if our whole field of view is the same resolution. Okay If we mount upon that if we didn't have this upfront reduction of excess information By encoding then, you know, we'd have to you know, use a very very large wheelbarrow the card our brains are out So okay, so just remind all that and processing all the information of course is you know expensive Sure consumes heat and all that kind of stuff remind people what you mean by foveation Well, foveation again is you know, when you're reading Here, you know, I can see the word compression here, but I can't read any of the words around it when I One of my eyes pointed there That's because if you take your retina and if you laid it flat Then right in the middle there's a very high resolution of The percent, you know the right the cone cells primarily the photoreceptors Okay, and then when you move away from the center the fovea it gets falls out very fast So it's much sparser sampling. Okay, so it's what you're seeing out here in what's called the visual periphery Is subsample Okay, and it's really amazing because what do the eyes do? I mean everything's blurry except you How do I see Amy? I move my eyes So we have this Fabulous fabulous feedback control system of visual attention moving around quickly Sometimes pointedly to what I need to see and allocate all my visual resources Towards what I want to look at whether it's charlie or whether it's amy or someplace else when i'm driving constantly You're cicating your your point of gaze around the visual field Super efficient to do that But your perception is you got a very high quality high resolution seen in front of you Even though it's really only what you're effectively looking at what I would say is you have a high resolution In an area about the width of yourself. Yeah, okay one degree of visual angle same size as the moon But you have the rest with you know declining resolution all that context is important So you want to you're driving and then if you turn right soon you see a fuzzy building in your periphery But you know you're you know, there's a street sign There's a road there you and then you point your gaze towards it, you know exactly how to turn Okay, so it's all important you need the peripheral information as well as that little area of high resolution It's absolutely amazing the way we develop that. Yeah As microphone It's coming I know it's not Okay, oh, yeah, uh, so I have a thought I mean we had a distinguished lecturer I think last year was bill freeman. You know bill freeman Yeah, and um, he gives a talk where he talks about wings versus feathers. Maybe you've seen this No, okay. It's it's an interesting concept. So the idea is that A wing is intrinsic the flight But feathers are an adaptation that like, you know birds have that work. Okay, that's That's true. And then that would be an example. So in other words, some things are useful but not necessary Whereas other things must be there and for vision You know, uh, the question the question's he's raising or which things do we think are are wings and which are feathers So so my question is are it's foveation wings or feathers? Do you think it's something that's really impressive that humans develop because of their limitations And or because we're not really using foveation that much in real vision systems. I maybe i'm wrong Okay, uh, but you know or is it you just collect all the data and don't worry about it Just have a computer the size of a building Well, keep in mind, you know, there's a computational advantage of electronics over our brain Okay, so I mean what we have is massive parallelism.  They just stomp on, you know, whatever But whatever, you know, whatever is in that one field of view that's horizontal All the way across the field of view is their fovea and where they're the region of interest, you know And there's other shaped foveas too. Amazing. Yeah There's a question Oh, I'm sorry right here All right, why don't particularly you go first and then we'll have the gentleman in the back Hi, Dr. Bovic. Hello So because Gaussian distribution came up and also in your lecture you mentioned that If the image is poor quality, it's far from the Gaussian point and if it's good, it's near the Gaussian point So does that mean that the underlying distribution of images or videos the spatiotemporal distribution is Gaussian? And if not, then why do we Relate it to the Gaussian point the Gaussian distribution point. Yeah, so again, you know, if you look at an image and Calculate its distributions very non-Gaussian generally right because you're going to have any shape histogram basically It's only after you do this reduction By a band-pass process, okay Remove the extraneous information Separate it may not be useless used for something else. Okay that you end up with this Gaussian residual Okay, why is that true of pictures and videos of the world? That is a mystery still It is not because of something like the central limit theorem It's not an additive effect that creates that underlying Gaussianity of the world So it's a bit of a mystery. It's another one of the magical things about, you know, the Gaussian Gaussianity of the world, but what I can say is so we don't know why it's true. It's wonderful that it's true But you know, again The vision system whatever the distribution of the world would be A neural network. What does a neural network do? Okay, statisticians will tell you or they'll say well, basically It learns distributions, especially a generative model. Okay, it's just Learning to create images having a distribution of whatever signal. Okay, so it's learning distribution. So this neural network The same thing it'll learn the distribution of the natural world Okay, which has this underlying Gaussianity the neurons and the various brain centers that I pointed out They learn to extract that Gaussianity and separate it from the signal structure Which can be used for recognition classification navigation and that so the brain separates those while also Achieving high efficiencies and through encoding and it does it by the same processing Which is kind of miraculous in itself. Okay that by doing efficient encoding you separate Into this noise signal. Well, nobody One nobody knew what to do with the noise signal My thought is well for algorithms Let's do quality prediction and I think the brain does that too So so my speculation and then we come over here about why we do this I think it goes back to efficiency and survivability And survivability survivability in other words, you know, you need that level of vision that can give you that That resolution when you need it and you can focus it So you won't get eaten by something. Absolutely true, you know, just like our you know, our color responses We see more strongly in the green yellow range because we have the yellow sun and we a lot of things you can eat that are green Okay, and red is important. Well, oh bleeding, you know, and our red berries are irritable and that sort of thing and You know, our blue sensitivity is much reduced because it's not as important for survivability occasional blueberry And laying back in your grass and looking at the blue sky. Okay and relaxing So, you know, same, you know, we the neural system adapts for survivability. Of course. Yeah, definitely Okay, we have a student back there. Go ahead. Thank you for the great talk So we have been talking about video quality and especially with video streaming like quality is very important But there comes the latency aspect as well, right? We might want to optimize for quality, but the latency might affect the human Perception. So what are your thoughts about that? So when you say latency, are you saying like if you're watching a show on television and somehow it's delayed? Uh In terms of television but more in terms of internet streaming Let's say the chunks don't arrive in time and there's rebuff ring. Oh, yeah, so You know video quality prediction is you can view it as part of a broader area of research called quality of experience A quality of experience if you you can include a lot of things such as, you know, audio Um, you know, even haptics But also, you know, temporal effects that are not Distortions in the same sense Such as you're watching netflix Suddenly because the bandwidth gets so low the buffer in your television empties out And it freezes and you get the darn spinny in the middle. Okay, and you're like, oh, you know, and then you're going to change the channel Okay, so we've done a lot of human studies on that Modeling that is totally different We don't have a model for You know, if if a video freezes, you know, what is the brain? Because in nature You didn't encounter this, you know, you're out in the jungle doesn't freeze. Oh, I see they're spinning wheels all the time So there's not a brain model instead. It becomes a behavioral model How annoyed are you by, you know, the length of a freeze or the duration of a freeze or how often they occur And so that's what our human studies have focused on and we've created predictive models. They're very accurate Um, it's a bit harder because you know, you know, they happen over long movies as opposed to short, you know Things you have to take time in the long time spans to do these human studies So no brain models natural scene models like I just talked about, you know The statistical models don't really apply the same way if at all It's more of a behavioral thing and so you do need machine learning for that in the end Because you know, we don't have a good model. We can model a freeze. Okay, it's frozen. So that didn't tell you much Okay, thank you brain responses like well, it's frozen. Okay Any other any other questions?  All right. So there's a lot of interest in the tactile internet You know conveying tactile information which could be converted to an image in in some sense Do you have any feeling if some of these tools could be used for for assessing quality of a tactile signal? So tell me a little bit more about okay. I'm a user of the tactile internet. What am I experiencing? So you put on gloves and it's the sensation of pressure for example, or maybe something. Yeah, so it's like it's for immersive environment It's it's haptics. Yeah, so it's haptics. Yeah, okay So, I mean golly, I mean after all this is a neurophysiological responses that we're experiencing Okay, you'd like those to be faithfully conveyed so you can first of all in this context of what we're talking about today Certainly, there is a quality of the accuracy of that. So, I mean is my tactile experience accurate Does it feel like I'm actually picking up a vase? Okay, or something like that when I'm engaging in this immersive environment So realism, I think it's more of a realism thing But it could also be distortion because you're trying to transmit it over long distances Maybe that as well. So I think there are kind of be similar Not identical, but similar kinds of issues that said the entire I talked about how this There's this band pass processing and divisive normalization where you basically, you know, divide by the variance signal Okay, neighboring neurons. This isn't just a vision thing. It happens at audition hearing Happens in half in touch. It happens throughout your neurosensory system Uh neurons generally are normalized For that same reason of compactifying and also efficiency Okay, so we'll use some sort of analogous models in that context as well. I think for similar issues. Sure Okay, maybe we would maybe we'll go back to the panel and let's get the view of a mathematician Great, uh, so earlier Ed trash neural networks, uh, and just a couple sentences But I wondered if you might offer a more nuanced view of like What things have gone wrong? What kind of engineering or mathematical or software principles might Benefit the whole neural network field and its application to video and images and so forth What was the first part of the question? Um, so how might mathematics benefit machine learning more mathematics and engineering principles? I mean, it seems like there's kind of this gold rush and like Like people just keep throwing stuff against the fan and seeing what happens So like what kind of principles sort of more engineering principles or mathematical or software design principles So, you know a friend of mine is david donahoe the great statistician Okay, and you know last time I saw me, you know, we were talking about machine learning and he goes, you know, Al You know signal processing is dead And then and then I said really I mean, I mean I think that people do creative things and he goes Nah, and you know what Al and he's a statistician. He said, you know what statistics is dead And of course he's joking right because I mean what he's I mean What he's saying is that you know So many of the tasks that we've been doing with clever You know hand crafting and thinking and design and engineering work and so on Is just being replaced by these big optimization boxes Statistic signal processing so many other places But once again, how much creativity has been there? Well, there's been a lot I would say, you know And they certainly get a lot of citations, but today it's still three basic architectures and it was invented back in the 1980s Most of it, okay So I think that injecting, you know principles of science into these things So if you're operating medicine, yeah, these things can find, you know Lesions and mammograms probably better than your average radiologist at this point, okay But if you could under, you know, uncover the underlying, you know Physiological mechanisms of tumor formation and how they spread and they form state-late lesions and so on Then you could probably augment this learning system with that. Okay, you can't expect A machine learning system even with a billion parameters to learn all truth About any problem Okay, so if you know truth give it the truth.  Okay It's good to have, you know, learn to be a data scientist one who can collect data Who understands the science Of whatever their problem is and so you can learn how to collect data so that you can then Shovel it into the deep model. Okay, that's sort of thing. I think that's an exquisite science You know, we find that to be so in doing psychophysical studies. Okay, they're very carefully designed experimental protocols So that at the outcome after we don't want to waste all those Dozens hundreds or even thousands of people's times we want it to be a successful outcome that will actually affect future algorithms So, you know, it's mathematics, you know, mathematics, there, you know, obviously There's a lot of branches of mathematics have nothing to do with deep learning and they're all going to be active But things that are affected by it and you know, like signal processing a very mathematical kind of thing One wonders, you know, to what degree a mathematician in that area is going to survive Well, you see people trying you say like donno Recently had a result on a structure that always seems to appear in the final layer of a deep net Okay, it's has a certain lattice structure or something like that. Okay I think slowly but surely these kinds of thinkers will begin to dissect Deep models of every variety and we'll begin to understand slowly but surely over time perhaps with the assistance of our artificial friends You know, what's actually happening in here. Okay, to explain ability explain ability. Okay, just like we only understand We understand brain centers and we understand coarsely what goes on where but only in certain places do we understand You know enough about the brain to use it in mathematical models at this point Maybe we'll learn more about that any other questions from the yes, somebody's got their hand up There we go In terms of the future of video quality, do you think about um Like creating more ipad kids and like getting children addicted and the implications of like improving this technology and just like Well, yeah, okay, if you're worried about kids what I worry most about is, you know Augmented extended reality VR that kind of thing, you know ipads pretty innocuous, you know, I mean still You know, I think kids who sit in front of a flat screen All for many many hours a day. I think they will tend to have Less proprioceptive capability to interact with the real world. Maybe there'll be less athletic less agile less coordinated less whatever Than kids who are outdoors playing and where the brains are adapting to you know Flying footballs or you know hanging on branches and that and that sort of thing So I worry about you know extent, you know And I talk I tell this to people at meta and at youtube the places that are creating these kinds of devices and so on And they've started to listen they put warnings and that so on But I still worry about that six-year-old kid who puts on a vr helmet for six hours a day Where the content has not been perceptually corrected geometrically Statistically to agree with our real world, you know anime. That's not real Okay, so their brains are adapting to that content. And what does it do to them? I don't know But it can't be positive.  Yeah, okay. Okay. I got it. Um Okay, any other any yes, uh, thanks, professor bovic for your talk. So In visual quality, we want to correlate with human right human visual system So if we see some of the metrics the correlation is close to let's say 0.9, which is really good Do we think the 1% or 0.1 change that is due to subjectivity of human system or human how Because some of the human observer will be subjective or there is still something missing in that truth That can be done Well, one thing that's nice about my field that helps us create our models successfully Is that when it comes to picture distortions and quality humans generally are in high agreement So if I if we create a large data set, you know, we show You know hundreds of people, you know thousands of distorted pictures And we divide them into two groups and then we correlate their opinion scores Yeah, we get very high correlations on normal pictures and videos and maybe 0.95 0.96 or something like that You can view that as kind of an upper bound on performance of any predictive model Any model that goes beyond that is overfitting Okay, because you cannot do better than the actual humans Okay, predicting themselves So it doesn't make sense now depending on the modality of those correlations can fall Okay, so when you start getting into the synthesized content and so on Or if it's immersive where there's many more variables like there's so many different places You can be looking and that sort of thing then, you know, these correlations can fall, but you're right You know the you know the the level of correlation depends on The situation the content and that sort of thing and it's sort of an upper bound Did I get your question? I'm wondering if I got the tail end of the other part of the question is like Is there something still missing in that road probably?  Okay, it's just natural and that's what we call aesthetics So that's a content effect and we need to understand more about that and that will help our models We're doing that a little bit. We have algorithms. There's one called rap peak our api qe It's for blind situation where it's got two channels One is using a lot of these statistical things and it's just purely distortion sensitive The other is a semantic channel It's just basically a pre-trained network for whatever tasks were involved in could be just image net trained And then we feed them both to a shallow learner performance leaps Goes up because we learn about content too So that thanks thanks still wide open though. Okay. I think we're going to begin to wrap this up So maybe one more question. Does any anybody Have any one more question they'd like to ask professor bovik Charlie you have a question This is honest we'd make up something well microphone You here great here. Greg. You're straining it. Yeah, what do you think the future is? Particularly for young people in the room like where is the field all of these fields are going to go Where do you think the most important directions are and it could even be well? Maybe you should at least be science engineering math But but but definitely, you know, it doesn't have to be restricted to your particular area of research Oh, well, you know It's always an Trying to attack areas where we don't understand things. I'm going to go back to the math question Okay, how can we ever understand deep networks? Okay. I believe that we have to invent A new kind of mathematics Really, I mean it's easy to say. Oh, it's just interpolating we can use interpolation mathematics Or we can talk about it statistical inferencing And all that kind of thing but really as these models become more and more abstract Okay, and start to represent, you know Concepts ideas metaphysics. Who knows what okay, then we need some sort of symbolic mathematics that we don't currently have And so somebody who is and I know this is about as vague an answer is like even That's what I was looking for vague, you know You know, then I think I think that's a fascinating direction to go for mathematics to try to Dispense with its current tools and try to invent new tools for this new Thing which is called these this massive network, you know, maybe we'll help us understand the brain better as well So that's an off-the-wall kind of answer.  So half of them are going to be fired soon You know try to be have a science Application in mind and try to become a person who can collect data. I know I said that before But you know my students right now are all going to be in hot demand because they're all conducting human studies They're they become world leaders in that experience In being a data collection they become a unique Scientist at that point, you know, so you can do human studies and computer vision too We're doing a study now of you know, how do you convert from a portrait mode to a landscape mode? Okay, well, let's have humans pick the best portrait from a landscape picture If you have a lot of data like that and we will then the iphone will do it just right like a human would like right instead of some You know algorithm Okay, well, thank you. I want to thank the audience I want to thank the panel members and most importantly want to thank professor bovik for coming here to visit us And I hope everybody enjoyed it. Thank you very much. Al. It's always good to see you So all right fun. All right, thank you for all the great questions fantastic I Not I can see why Purdue is such a one of the greatest schools ever, you know, thank you great people


Welcome folks, we have the Dow Industrial finished down 245, Nasdaq off 22, S&Ps off 19.5, Gold, Gold contract down $23 trading at $19.48 an ounce, we had Silver down 90 cents, $23.43 an ounce, LightSweet crude off $1.28, $70.50 a barrel, notes and bonds, a 10-year note, up 9 ticks, trading $1.1310, the 30-year up 21 ticks at $1.2801, a King dollar, $King dollar up 51 ticks, trading $102.570, the Euro is at $109, the Yen is at $141, the British Pounds at $127 to $1.00 USD. Well you know if we take a look at the spy folks, bottom line is you get a pullback, really light volume, that's saying there's not a settles out here, you know, we'll see how this shakes out, 69 million shares, we did finish the ABC structure on the way up, so after you finish the ABC structure on the way up, you can expect a pullback, a consolidation all of the above, and you know the way that we've gone higher, I mean we went nonstop from, well you can say in the last six minutes you went nonstop from 378 up to 443, so bottom line, you know a pullback is not going to be the end of the world, particularly if it's on light volume. Add the cues, with the added cues, the cues did make that swing point that we've been talking about, bottom line hit the swing point, and we hit the swing point on the weekly with expanded volume, so that's saying that you're going to be right back to the swing point, the swing point we're talking about is at 37183, you're at 366, hit the swing point on Friday on the weekly 323 million versus 315, so you went into the swing, you had higher volume going into the swing, you're pulling back today, and I suspect you'll probably get a couple of days of pullback, we got Powell talking in the next couple of days, bottom line, you can see this though, you pull back today, you pull back with 45 million shares, you're going into 73, there's still no sellers out here, there's a huge amount of support, because there's a huge amount of volume at the next plateau, the next plateau is laying out like at about 357, notes and bonds won a higher price, this is where it's going to get really intriguing in general, because we're at 3.7 on the 10th year, have a great night folks, have a safe night, come back and visit Tommy tomorrow morning, kicks us off at 9am, great show folks, we'll get him folks.


It is a full gym right now, so we're going to go around and see what people think of the new flavors. We just pulled the biggest guy at the gym, so I'm going to see what he thinks. Okay, this is actually pretty solid. He's trying the proton plasma flavor. Whoever invented this flavor went crazy. Honest opinions? Yes. I like this. I give it a 10 out of 10. 10 out of 10. That's amazing.  Can we drink it before I work out? All the time. Yeah.


My name is Eishi Kera. I'm a lecturer of Japanese at UCLA. I've been teaching Japanese for a little over 10 years now including other institutions. I've taught all kinds of Japanese classes during the past 10 years and one of the hardest and most challenging aspects of teaching and learning Japanese is reading. Part of the reason is because Japanese is written in a mixture of three types of writing symbols. Two of them called Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic scripts that represent sounds just like the English alphabet. And the third kind is called Kanji, Chinese characters, which was adopted from the Chinese language and it's been incorporated into the Japanese language and actively used and recognized as a Japan's official writing system since the 5th century. There are 46 Hiragana and Katakana scripts respectively. And Kanji, Chinese characters such as these ones, not known exactly how many of them exist in total, but around 50,000 individual Kanji characters can be found in a good dictionary. Once these phonetic symbols, Hiragana and Katakana are memorized, they are not that troublesome at all. But Kanji, Chinese characters is the one that actually causes problems to the Japanese learners and that becomes rather a troublesome element to learn. Ever since Kanji was introduced from China to Japan, in Hiragana and Katakana were invented in Japan, we use all these three writing symbols altogether in text. Take a look at this one. Kanji, Hiragana, Kanji and Katakana. All mixed. So, because of this complexity of this Japanese writing system, reading is one of the most challenging aspects of teaching learning Japanese. Also, what reading in Japanese makes difficult is that our version of the Chinese characters has not only just single pronunciation assigned to each character, but each character has multiple readings, pronunciations, and those pronunciations change according to how it is used as a certain word. Take a look at this one. Japanese language, Nihongo, Sunday, Nichi-you-bi. The second of the month, Futsu-ka. Pay attention to this Kanji, right here, right here, right here, and right here. All these three words share the same Kanji in each word, but each pronunciation for the same Kanji is different. So, we must know how to read words in context. Due to the nature of this complicated pronunciation system, it takes a tremendous amount of time for many students to be able to satisfactorily read and write Japanese texts. So, one way to compromise this difficulty of reading, especially reading Japanese Kanji, a phonetic reading guide in Hiragana, which is called Furigana, is placed next to each Kanji character so that people can read some difficult words, or especially for children who still need to learn a lot of words in Kanji. Look at this one. This is a Furigana, phonetic guide in Hiragana characters right next to the Kanji characters. But having the phonetic guide is actually rare, and it's unconventional in normal reading materials of what most adult Japanese people are exposed to and read about every day. Look at this one. This is a book I read. As you can see, there is no phonetic guide at all. It's all texts. Also, as you can see, Japanese texts do not separate each word like English does. In books for children, such as this one for first graders, each morphological boundary may be separated. But third graders books not separated at all, just like the adult people is reading. So Kanji is actually plays an important role in a sentence as word boundary elements. The use of Kanji in text makes reading so much easier because it clearly separates content words from such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives usually written in Kanji from some grammatical elements written in Hiragana phonetic symbols in a sentence. Now, you all know how much different and difficult when it comes to reading Japanese, right? So next, how we do in a classroom situation. Of course, we always do some kind of reading activities from our textbooks, which every chapter has some kind of a reading passage with some exercises to help students practice reading and understand the content. But depending on an instructor, time constraints, curriculum, and most of all, in elementary level textbooks grammar is considered more important and emphasized. So the portion of the reading section in textbooks is often very small. Look at this one. Reading section starts from this page, but all the previous pages are devoted to grammar exercises. This is one, this sample reading from one chapter, and this book ends right here. So only this much is devoted for reading practice. This is not an exception actually. Most commercially available textbooks are usually designed this way. Therefore, reading is not often prioritized compared to other activities, such as grammar and speaking. For most European languages, which already share the ABC alphabet writing system, being able to read the writing symbols will not really become so much of concern. Their students can still somehow say each word as long as they know how to read at the ABC alphabet, right? But a language like Japanese is completely a different story. Our students must first know how to pronounce the non phonetic characters, that is kanji, to be able to actually read the text. Otherwise, most of them in fact cannot even read on the spot when being asked to read text in class. This makes it so much difficult for us, the teachers, to even carry out this in class. Another fact is that many of our students who learn Japanese as a foreign language here in the United States normally don't get to use Japanese very often outside class. Some of them actively use it on a daily basis, taking advantage of this multicultural environment of Los Angeles, but that is only speaking. And in fact, when it comes to reading, unfortunately very few students actually read outside class for pleasure or for fun in the same way that they do enjoy speaking. I've done questionnaires and interviews personally about reading and almost zero hours devoted to reading for pleasure outside class. That is because I personally think that the primary purpose of learning a foreign language for most of them is to be able to speak the language, but not to be able to read the language. So for many Japanese learners, they consider that reading isn't that attractive part of learning. And sadly, reading becomes an insignificant part of their language learning goal. A majority of our students may have an attitude that they're just getting by with the reading just for the class or vocab quizzes or kanji quizzes, and neither of them want to improve their reading skills nor build vocabulary for reading fluency. Because of these tendencies, they're likely to have lack of motivation to read and reading in Japanese becomes a want to avoid part of learning. This clearly indicates that students' awareness and motivation about reading are very limited. Therefore, we always urge to feel that we needed to somehow raise the students' awareness about reading so that they will be more motivated to read and, most of all, find reading enjoyable. And at the same time, they can improve their reading skills while classroom reading is a meaningful, worthwhile, valuable part of language learning activity to all. Then I think about, so what drives us to read? And what is it that reading really means? My answers to these questions are very simple. Reading must be fun and reading must come from one's true intrinsic motivation. When we read something, it's because we want to read a certain book, online articles or magazines that catch our attention when we're looking at the titles or headlines. Also, reading must be something that satisfies our curiosity and interest. In other words, curiosity and interest are the driving force when we read something. So, at first, I truly think that these reading materials in textbooks are not sufficient at all, even though in books for second and third year levels. Plus, most of them are not interesting enough and won't catch our students' attention. Students know that they have to do reading because the class asks them to do. And as a result, reading becomes kind of a nuisance for many learners because of not only uninteresting reading materials in textbooks, but also kanji being as an extra burden and a hindrance to their reading. So, this kind of students' negative attitude towards reading and course material for reading needs to be improved. So, in order to overcome these issues, I have come across one of the interesting teaching approaches called extensive reading, or you may call it free reading. Students can read freely at their own pace and for their own interest and curiosity. Students can read something that can match their personal reading skills. Let me show you some of the books. Most of these books are written specifically for either Japanese elementary school children grades one through six, middle school kids, or Japanese language learners, so the language is adjusted accordingly. And as you can see, we have a variety of reading collections from many different genres, ranging from children's picture books, manga books, Miyazaki Hayao's movie collection, science books, random facts and knowledge books, history books, famous literature pieces, and you name it. Students can pick up a book that catches their attention by the title and that makes them want to read. But what about the kanji problem that I was making a big deal about? Some of these books have the phonetic reading guide on every kanji word, and some have the guide only for certain kanji words so that students can comfortably read them without looking up unfamiliar kanji words in a dictionary. And ultimately, by reading these types of books can help them get used to pronouncing and recognizing some kanji words that they have had difficulty before. Also, these books particularly are written according to each elementary school year. So first graders books have few kanji words. And for second graders, they have a little more kanji and so on. More kanji are used according to the grade level, so my students can build up vocabulary incidentally in a natural reading situation. I'll show you some. This is this book is for the first graders. This book is for the third graders. And this book is for the sixth graders. So our students can pick up a book that is comfortable enough for them to begin reading. And as they read more and more books, they have they can move on to more difficult ones and see if they can be comfortable enough to read a book that is one level higher. So with this way, there are some benefits of this extensive reading approach. One, students can continue reading books for fun, for pleasure to meet their curiosity and interest, which can create lifelong independent readers. Two, they are the ones who choose which books to read so autonomous learning environment can be created. Three, extensive reading collection can help them overcome the fear, hatred and hesitation in reading Japanese, because most books have the phonetic reading guide, and the language in the books has been adjusted. So students at any language level can enjoy reading, which can support a differentiated language learning environment. And ultimately, students can choose a book that can match their reading skills, so they can test their reading skills on their own by reading some books between the different levels of difficulty. Because all of these books are properly categorized by difficulty from level zero, which has no word or only a word or phrase per page, level one has a few words or very short sentences per page, levels two and 2.5, a few sentences or short paragraphs, levels three and 3.5, much longer paragraphs, levels four, 4.5 and five, the entire book is only texts. Now, let me explain what I do in my class. I have my students pick and choose any book on their own and have them read it. But before reading, there are rules for extensive reading that students must follow. Rule number one, no dictionary use. They are not supposed to use a dictionary to look up words. Rule number two, if they come across any unfamiliar words, skip them and continue to read. Rule number three, if they feel that the book is too difficult for them, or there's so many unfamiliar words per page, then stop reading and grab a different one. After students have read some, they need to write a book report in Japanese and aggregate them. In the book reports, I asked them to write about the summary of what they read in feedback and response to the book's content and their reading progress of how much they think their reading skills have improved. The students repeat the same process five times throughout the quarter. Here are some feedback from my students about extensive reading activity. I have started liking reading in Japanese so much. My reading speed improved. Since there's a variety of genres of books, it's so much fun choosing books that I want to read for the class. Furigana, the phonetic reading guide in the books makes it so much easier and enjoyable to read because I can actually enjoy reading. Since all the books are categorized by difficulty, that makes my reading so much easier and fun to choose my level of books and see my improvement. Excessive reading has helped improve my reading vocabulary written in Kanji, and now I am more comfortable to read books with much less Furigana. I have learned a lot of vocabulary incidentally as they appear in the books. I now realize that depending on Furigana, the phonetic reading guide, so much doesn't help me improve my reading. I have started to be able to read so many Kanji words without depending on a dictionary because many words appear repeatedly in different books. I have gained confidence in reading Japanese now. In conclusion, I strongly believe that these books for extensive reading approach can help students improve reading skills in a way that they read. We read books every day, just like in the natural and normal setting. And most of all, the books can help them overcome the fear of Kanji, which is one of the most hated and least successful learning elements for many students when it comes to reading in Japanese. And finally, the books for the reading, extensive reading collection can help help my students start enjoying reading in Japanese and continue to be independent readers of Japanese outside class. This will conclude my presentation. Thank you all for listening.


Kia ora koutou. Ko kālahau kā mā hau no Ngāti Purao Ngātahu Ngāti Kahuninu and I'm the Associate Dean for Māori and Pacific Development here at the Business School. It's a huge honour for us to host the Māori Business Leaders Awards every year but it is equally a huge honour for us to be able to provide an environment where we're nurturing young Māori Business Leaders of the future and I'm proud to be able to introduce you to some of them. A Māori Business Leader to me is someone who can walk comfortably in both te ao Māori and te ao Pākia because in Aotearoa it's really important that we can share our knowledge and inspire everyone. To me a Māori Business Leader is someone who has integrity for those values that they corrupt with. Being a Māori Business Leader means giving back to the community and inspiring young rangatahi to be the best they can be. Being a Māori Business Leader is not about the individual but the collective. It's about who you bring along with you because good leaders make more leaders. A Māori Business Leader to me is someone who is driven to give back to their people, a person who has mana and a person who has humility. Being a Māori Business Leader means that you take your true self to work.  Being a Māori Business Leader also means that you are a role model for rangatahi, for our youth that are coming through. You are showing them the way and showing them that they can in fact enter the business world and they too can be themselves and do good things for their communities and for their whānau. So to me a Māori Business Leader looks like someone who is comfortable i te ao Māori me te ao Pākeha. A Māori Business Leader is someone who shapes the pathway for us to follow. For me a Māori Business Leader is someone who understands where they come from and why they are here today and uses that to achieve success not only for themselves but for Māori as a whole. Someone once told me a leader is someone who can lead but someone who can also serve. So for me a Māori Business Leader is someone who can peel kumitas but also stand up at the next or pair and present on the pipeway but also someone that can represent our people.


Do you ever feel uncertain about the path you're on because you're not where you want to be? Or maybe you're second-guessing your own potential and feel as if you're not smart, original, or talented enough. It's normal to feel this way. So even if you've been feeling like your fears are spiraling out of control and they've taken the best out of you, rest assured that you will find the strength to keep going for what you want. Here are seven strange signs you will be successful. 1. You know what you want, even though you don't know how to get it yet. Whether you've always known you wanted to become a dancer, an astronaut, or a vet, knowing what you want is a start, and that's what counts. 2. You're easily bored and love challenges. Being a novelty seeker doesn't always mean you're prone to gambling, drug abuse, or ADHD. Dr. Robert Klomminger, a psychiatrist who developed personality tests for measuring this trait, states, to succeed, you want to be able to regulate your impulses while also having the imagination to see what the future would be like if you tried something new. So don't see boredom as a bad sign. Use it as a way to find new experiences and expand your creativity. Be a risk-taker, like Tai Kwong, the co-founder and CEO of Psych2Go, because without that, this site wouldn't exist. 3. You don't maintain a work-life balance. You rather focus on life. This is an art. It means you're able to set up healthy boundaries when it comes to work, but you also enjoy life for what it is. Being successful in both life and work means doing what's best for your mental health, family, friends, and co-workers. It's not cut in stone and will vary from person to person. 4. You practice empathy, look out for your teammates, and celebrate the happiness of others. Success is better when it's shared. If you have great people skills, often look out for your teammates and empathize with others, then you're already on a great path. Competition can and should be healthy, because we can all learn from each other. The more supportive we are of each other, the better it'll be for everyone. 5. You practice humility again and again. You realize that your achievements are not to prove a point to others, but rather to help you improve for yourself.  6. You're not motivated by money as a reward, but rather see it as a resource. Money isn't everything and you're aware of this fact. Money is a means to an end, helping you to survive on a daily basis.  After all, experiences are more valuable than money in the bank. 7. You don't believe in dream jobs, but rather you believe in hard work. It's all about persistence.  Rather, you actively work towards building your dreams, knowing that sacrifice, hard work, and failures are all essential parts of the road to success. It's what makes it all the more worthwhile. Success feels so much better when you earn it and it's handed to you on a silver platter. But success is just a tip of the iceberg. How you respect and love yourself and others is even more than just success by itself. What are your dreams? Do you experience these signs? Share your thoughts with us below. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to see more content from Psych2Go. Thanks for watching!


Hello and welcome to the session. I am Deepika here. Let's discuss a question which says match the next with appropriate solids Now this is solid A and net I part B and net second Now this is solid C and connect third and this is solid B and net four Now we know that a net is a skeleton of a line of a solid That can be folded to make the solid the same solid can have several types of nets Now we know that the three-dimensional shapes can be visualized on a two-dimensional surface by making nets So keeping this in mind, let's start the solution Now we will first find out the number of faces in the given solid Now in part A the given solid is a Q and the number of faces in Q R6 in part B the given solid is Cylinder and it has two circular faces Now in part C the given figure is a cone cone has one circular face and In part D the given solid is a pyramid Pyramid has four triangular faces and one square face Finding the number of faces of the given solids. We observe that Q matches with net two and Cylinder matches with net three Cone matches with net four and pyramid matches with net one Hence the answer for this question is that solid A matches with net two solid B matches with net three Solid C matches with net four and Solid B matches with net one I hope the solution is clear to you and you have enjoyed the session. Bye and have a nice day


Hi, I'm Felder. I'm from Hong Kong. I'm studying from the Hong Kong U-Space. I choose Greenwich University because it's a world-class and very famous university in UK. And I'm looking for a course that is related to project management, and I can't really find it in Hong Kong, so that's why I choose Greenwich University. The teachers are professional, and the students are also international. They come from around the world, and I really enjoy the program. It's a little bit challenging, but I really enjoyed it. I'm happy that I was chosen to join this program because I can meet the students around the world. Yeah, and I can get a chance to know more about the British culture. I love everything around here. I love the location of Greenwich. I will definitely recommend this course to others because you'll get a chance in studying in a famous university. I think this course will equip myself to be a successful manager in future. And giving me a lot of real-life experiences is a famous university, and I'm proud to be part of it. Currently, I'm working as a document controller in a construction company. I choose to study project management. I hope that I feel that it will support me and advance my career to the next level.


The 2023 general elections has come and gone, but reactions have followed the outcome, especially the 25 February presidential election which produced the president-elect Bolatino-Bull as Nigerian-ness leader. To this end, stakeholder democratic network, SDN, Independent National Electric Commission, INEC, and civil society in river states organized a roundtable discussion to review the outcome of the election exercise in the state. Participants at the SDN election review meeting said despite the efforts of stakeholders to ensure a credible election, widespread reports indicate that the election process had extensive challenges and irregularities. A number of those voters on the register are dead and we are still counting as our total number of registered voters. A number of them are not in Nigeria as we speak and of course I'm one of those that interrogate the level of voter turnout. I think it is supposed to be a function of the number of voters. It is important for us to understand that as leaders and as citizens in our society we must subject ourselves to scrutiny because if we fail to subject ourselves to such scrutiny then democracy will always have its own issues. The one idea behind scrutinizing processes and ways we do things actually brings out the best of our society. So we talk about why people are so frustrated about the last election. Two things, this is not the first failure. The failure has been and we're at a point in Nigeria where we cannot get it wrong anymore but at that point where we need a breakthrough and that is why the frustration now is higher more than ever and when it comes to and it's not done right we have another four years to go through what we have been going through. We're literally crawling at every opportunity to find air to breathe at this point. I'll be dependent on the INEC to help us find that little hole to get a little air to breathe as Nigerians. We didn't get that. Public affairs office of independent national electoral commission in river state Geraldine Ekeluma said election in the country is multi stakeholders event and is needed for every sector to be petrotic to have successful elections in the country. Geraldine while highlighting some of the lessons learned during the elections urged Nigerians to hold elected political office holders accountable for full legislative implementation of electronic voting system in future elections. We have taken note of the places where we made our mistake but there were issues of network down time that it is not INEC that controls that. There are issues of violence and violence, snatching and all that and security issues. It is not INEC also that are directly involved with that. We got out of staff from institution where the identity are not endowed and all to participate and also found that most of them compromise the system. Electronic voting is a legislative matter. So that's why I said hold the people who are representing you now accountable. Let them sponsor this bill but also ask yourself is Nigeria ready for electronic voting just to upload results without the challenges. What is also the guarantee that on that day there is a thought are created for you to vote and you're trying to log in with your phone in your house and something goes wrong. So are we ready? The people who controls the network providers are we ready? And don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.