It's nice to be here. I'm Chris Blakesley from UW-Madison, Wisconsin. This is from University of New Mexico, as was introduced. So we are excited to be here and talk about mobile media and a project that has been going for about four years now. And actually about three years ago, members of our team were here discussing this project as it was just beginning. And so it's nice to be here and kind of give an update of what's happened and challenges we're facing now. The tone, the angle we really decided to take was to discuss sustainability issues that we're facing. This has been, our expectations have been exceeded, so so far it's been a successful open source project. And, you know, as we look back at what's happened, we see some key open events that have happened that we think are worth sharing. So we want to share those with you and also share what issues we're facing now, and you know, hopefully that can be a fruitful discussion. So there are four main things we want to, we're going to talk about. We want to describe, well, we're going to talk about why mobile, why we chose this as an area of inquiry. And then we want to talk about, describe ARIS, this tool, and then kind of give some background story of ARIS in terms of its mobile development. And then discuss these sustainability issues that I would think are worth talking about. Okay, so before I get started, I know there's at least one iPhone in the audience. If you want to go to the App Store and download ARIS, ARIS, that would be a great thing to do while you're sitting there. And then if you don't have an iPhone, you just got a laptop there, you might want to go to ariscames.org. Those are kind of our two main public frontends, and we'll discuss how they came up within our project a little bit later on. So the first thing is just to situate why mobile and kind of where we are. So why is kind of obvious? Mobile is freaking huge.  Soon we'll have more mobile phones on the planet than people. Very soon. This is of June 2011, according to Wikipedia. But in schools and in prisons, the most popular take on mobile is to ban and confiscate. Despite all the research, otherwise, as to what might be good. This is sort of the biggest picture of what's going on out there. It's not effective, and it's not a good idea. So the idea is to actually make things for mobile. And this is probably the most common sort of thing that we encounter in terms of seeing other people take on mobile. We like apps like this. We use them to find out when the buses are coming. But it's not what we do. We do crazy stuff. Let's see. This is supposed to be a big mess, because it is. But it's a lot of fun. And the reason why we're all working together, the two of us who are here and the other people who aren't in the room and the people we bring in to other projects that we'll be talking about later on, is because we find that mobile is a very exciting place to be. And one of the central things that ends up being super exciting about it is it allows us to interact with local place in brand new ways. Sometimes we'll attach phones to bikes.  Sometimes I'll make a game for students within a particular class. Sometimes we'll record birds. Chris, what else is up there that's crazy with it? Well, sometimes we'll have students make their own projects. Like in the Netherlands, students draw and create things, but then we'll put them in locations for other people to go through a story. We'll create panoramic images so that that kind of true augmented reality can hold up a tablet or phone and see something overlaid in the actual space you're looking at and contextualizing those in meaningful experiences. So we're kind of a loosely affiliated group of people who think sort of similarly about mobile. One of the things that came up, thanks to Dave Gangon, who had this idea as a class project at one point was to create a software tool that would help us in these investigations, in these implementations to bring us together, although not intentionally, but to give us a tool with which to ask these questions. And that's where ARES comes from. So ARES is sort of first and foremost this thing you can download from Napstore. It's a game engine for creating these outdoor experiences on your cell phone. And rather than trying to explain something that's kind of abstract and really complicated, and usually we have two hour workshops to get people into, Chris is just going to walk you through one of the things that has been developed for ARES that might be a little bit faster to get up and running on it. It's a situated documentary called Dow Day, originally written by Jim Matthews. Yeah, so Dow Day, the term that's kind of developed around this is a situated documentary. So I'm just going to walk you through the experience. I hear your phone. You're at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. You're outside and you wonder, I wonder if anyone's made something here.  So you click on it and it tells you this. The day is October 18, 1967. Vietnam War is happening and protests are happening on campus because Dow Chemical Company is there recruiting students. It's a company that also creates a name home using the word.  And your goal, initially you see a little cut scene and it tells you you need to go and talk to the editor to get your assignment. And so you look on your map, click the little map icon and you see your editors over there so you walk over and when you get there the phone vibrates and you see you have a conversation ready.  Your goal is you need to go and interview all these different individuals that represent different perspectives on this issue. So you interview a protester, interview a faculty, maybe interview somebody from Dow Day. And so you go on it along the way you're collecting primary documents, actual letters that were used and transpired on campus. You continue to walk around and when we found one of the most memorable moments of this experience is when you get to a point on Baston Hill which you think might be the next slide. And you see a video of protesters marching by the actual spot that you're standing in. And that's just something that's really compelling and interesting and makes that space that much more compelling. So you go through, you interview these people and it all kind of comes to that climax and there's actually conflict between police and protesters. And so that's the situated documentary of Dow Day. Jim Matthews who created this originally had it as part of a larger class experience where students would come and do these things and then they'd have this experience to draw on as they in class analyze these documents and have discussions about this issue. So that's the app. And it air stands for augmented reality for interactive storytelling. And so the other end is not just sort of hearing the stories, being the position of playing Dow Day but trying to make it possible for pretty much anyone to be able to tell these stories as well. And so this is a screenshot of our online editor. It's a URL you go to. It's a flex environment. There's a map on there. It's drag and drop. There's some buttons to click. It's pretty easy to use. Like I said, hour or two, we'd have you up and running and you can make your own hidden historical tour no problem. The other, the piece that ties all these together is on the back end, there's just my SQL database. So there's tables and tables and tables and the editor writes to the tables and reads from the tables and so does the client software on the iPhone. So that's in a nutshell what ARIS is and then once we made it, it enabled us to carry out all these investigations using it for all our part of those. So like I teach classes where ARIS is used as a design tool to investigate the city. I create games to be played as part of the Spanish curriculum. I'll talk more about that in a minute. We host workshops for youth, for folklorists, for librarians. I don't know, all that messy stuff I was talking about before. ARIS becomes a tool that we can do those things with. And maybe one thing to interject on that is that the idea behind ARIS is that with all this messy, crazy things happening, that's really exciting to us because we don't see ARIS as an open source alternative to established software. For instance, you have open office to Microsoft Word. But as Chris mentioned earlier, mobile, we don't know what the affordances are yet. We don't, like, banning and keeping them contained is one thing to do, but it doesn't help us know what we can do with this for learning and education with this mobile technology. So it's more of a call for people to come and explore with us. So it's an enabling platform. And so now what we're going to do is describe ARIS. Now we'd like to give you a background of some key moments along the history of ARIS, and we hope it can be helpful to those of you who perhaps are involved in your own open source projects and are looking for some good ideas. Yeah, and just in general, again, so the idea being that we were doing this crazy stuff, a few of us together, and all along the way, at different moments in time, we found that the key to our success has been opening it up and bringing more people into the conversation from a variety of different areas. So this is sort of those moments. So there's four phases we'll walk through. So at the end of the beginning, it started as a class project. Visualite, who had the vision, was Dave Gagno. And there's a class professor, Kurt Squire, who also was key in helping this project have a vision and get off the ground. The initial idea was a game called Getting with Warhol, where the singer in a museum, and usually in an art class, I think what's typical is you might go there and you're supposed to look at a piece of art and know who read the plaque next to it and know who made it when they lived. We wanted to foster a more deep interaction with art, so we created an interactive story. We wanted players to come into a museum and we picked Andy Warhol exhibit, which was happening at the Milwaukee Museum at the time. And you became kind of a forest-gump character, where you were a fictionalized character in this social circle that Andy Warhol had around him. And as you went to each painting, different events would be triggered, and these characters, whoever made that painting would be a character you would interact with and discuss, and they might ask you to do things. For instance, Roy Lichtenstein asked you to deliver a Campbell Soup can to Andy Warhol. And later you might see that that became one of Andy Warhol's paintings. It's a fictional mode of making meaning around this that will make it more compelling than just seeing a static image and not really meaning anything to you. So in one semester, we, Dave Gagnon, created these spreadsheets and we constructed as we could this experiment. We learned a lot from it and decided there was something there to this project that could extend beyond the class. So then, Sean Dickers was another student who collaborated with Dave Gagnon and I to make a second experiment. We went to the Madison Capitol and we made a Da Vinci Code-like experience where we picked out different exhibits that people might not otherwise see and we created puzzles around them so that students would really have to delve deep into what they were and understand them to make progress into saving a fictional scientist called Dr. Hernandez. This was, in a way, happy to say this. It was a failure. It was a failure that we learned a lot from. We made it a huge narrative, very elaborate. There was time travel, but we learned that it just became, scope creep was huge. It was too much to manage and I think it's still yet to be played by anyone other than us. And so this really was helpful for us to shift our alignment to we just wanted to create small design experiments that people can play quickly and work from there before we make it this huge, elaborate experience that we just don't have the time or means to make. So at the end of this phase we put the open source code, we put the code of Eris out on the web. We wanted others to see it. We wanted to see what would happen if we had anything else to say about that. Just so you guys announced that at Open Education 2008. Right. That's what he has officially officially put out there. There's no turning back after announcing that anyone could take this. We adopted an MIT open source license so that anyone can still can take this code and do as they like to. So, like Chris said, put the code out there. It's legally available. One can download it, but who's going to download it? If no one even played his game other than his kids. So you have to have other people using your stuff before it can go anywhere.  And back in 2009 that was me.  We went with a professor in Spanish and Portuguese, Dr. Julie Sykes. And we say, let's make a game that takes place in a local neighborhood. That's going to be great. What are we going to use? I looked back at the platforms I used to use as a grad student to create this kind of content and downloads were no longer available. When I came up, the grad cycles were over. There wasn't stuff out there. And found an Eris. I almost used Google sites as my game engine for going about that short. But it didn't render properly on mobile devices at the time. So I ended up using Eris and we created it in Tira. So put this game together in the spring, had a first pilot run in the summer of 2009. Ran it with a 202 class at the University of New Mexico in fall of 2009. Ran it with two classes in 2010. Right now, we're running it with all six sections of Spanish 202 as part of that curriculum. It's a murder mystery. It takes place in a nearby neighborhood. It's kind of like where in the world is Carmen San Diego, a choose your own adventure kind of story. And students actually traveled and we were going to play a game. It's been a lot of fun to work on a project. And moreover, working on that project, working on this tool and do things with it that it really wasn't ready to do. And then maybe no one else is ready to try. Push the tool forward. Push the group back in Madison forward thinking that this might actually go somewhere. It pushed me into the group. I became a member of the co-design team within about eight months of picking this thing up. Did you have a burning question? So for this game to work, do you have to go to the different places like the Madison game where this is where I can tap to say a little bit of both. And that was actually part of the ways in which I was pushing on it real hard is we wanted to give you students iPods for about a month. So we wanted to play part of the game as homework but then go to the neighborhood for part of the game. And it wasn't really meant to do that at the time. Now a year and a half later, it's great at. And that's been one of the really interesting effects of how the platform has evolved in concert with people using it. And I'm sort of the first example of that. This is the first place where we have someone sort of accessing the tool. You need to have access in order to in order to get it to go anywhere. But there's some other things that came up starting in the summer of 2010. In June 2010, there were some other developments and errors that were real important for pushing it out there. What is this editor, the shot I showed you before? This way of creating errors games didn't exist before. Before you were manually editing tables or islands. And no one else was willing to do that and could keep it straight. But putting this out in June 2010 was a big moment for us. This is usable by other people. There's also the app. Putting something out on the app store is a whole new level of access over putting something on a Google Code repository. It has lots of implications. And the app store and developing for iOS is nowhere near as closed as I imagined it was before I got into it. And even to this day people don't realize that you can release something without going through the app store. All you need is an enterprise license. So we've released it too this way at certain times. But having errors on the app store so you all can download it right now and start playing with it is a real big boom. And then the other thing is you don't want to get involved. I had a quick question. So you said for Mentira you produced it now? Oh. Currently if you want to play Mentira it's in Eris. Download Eris, search for Mentira and it'll auto correct you to mentor. You mentioned something else about enterprise. Yeah, I can talk to you later about it. It's probably a little off topic at this point. But it is more open than I imagined and easy to do. That was sort of our second phase. Putting things out there in a way that people might actually start using them. And what we experienced after that is this period of massive growth. Right. What we... So with that foundation set to help people have access to this tool we wanted. And seeing the fruits that came from this relationship with Chris and how this tool could be informed and asking for features and us able to create those features prioritize them we wanted more of that to happen. And so we thought one thing that became I think central early on as a kind of conventional wisdom that we bought into was that this all needs to be around the tool. People don't want to just go to a website or at least the project won't grow if it's just information we're putting out there. People can use and take and apply to what they're doing and that's what will keep people coming. And so how can we promote that? Up to this point we had adopted an agile programming development cycle where a lot of times we hold internal game jams where we as a team would block out a day, two days three days and just work on a feature, try making a game push the edges of this tool to make it better. We did not do this we heard of game design jams so we decided to hold a global game jam with Aris and this was one that we held we're going to have the dates on this April 18th through 20th this year huge watershed money for us. We wanted 50 games and 50 hours so we set aside three days wherever you are and we had students from K-12 schools come in and researchers and here in Madison was kind of the home base but we had 10 to 20 other bases around the country and around the world. Essentially we invited everyone we could get a hold of through our website, through our personal networks just everyone anyone who wants to come make games for three days and we wanted everyone to feel that kind of buzz and excitement of an event like this so we used Adobe Connect to have people video conference in we had people from the Netherlands a team from Spain that were also early partners and asking for features and using the tool even a 12 year old boy in Columbia who we know and said he just wanted to make some cool games he joined as well so it was a success there were I think 114 games were made total 20 of them were really showcased and playable that everyone the authors talked about at the end of the event so this graph shows represents hints to the erisgames.org website and it's interesting to see with these three events that were held around designing using the tool to see that interest just kind of grow even though it's dipping some it's gradually rising. If people can't read that line that we're just barely peaking above at the global game is 1,000 hits in a week so a pretty big growth for us in this last year in terms of number of people trying to figure out what this is about getting involved and it all seems to be organized around these public events that we know some other aspects of how we're trying to encourage community participation this is light house I don't know if anyone's used that for bug tracking or feature tracking we use that as a front end for people who are not coding on the project but want to give feedback as to what needs to be fixed and what could be better so we've been using that for the last several months internally we use Pivotal Tracker to keep track of all the things that need to get done and to prioritize features and stuff like that those have both been really good tools to talk to each other really well that we made use of another thing that's happened in this last year is we've been partnering with fairly large organizations museums that want us to design a co-design and experience with them other museums who want to run youth design and want us to help with that other people who are interested in trying to figure out how to do something with both mobile media and local place let's say in terms of sustainability financially has been effective so far is that these organizations have access to the tool so they could in theory take it and just run with it but what they wanted is expertise around the tool and so they've said we will give you this block of money for we're hoping to get these features and we'd also love you to come out for a few days and maybe help us run a workshop help us all get on board and understand the process of designing and and we'll go from there and who knows maybe your relationship will happen after that or maybe we'll just say that's great and go on our separate ways but yeah so just a quick view back in at GLS 2011 we did a snapshot of how many games players and editors that were last night we did the same thing and those figures have roughly doubled in the last four months we've seen huge uptake in the amount of people in this platform these are the last these are the heirs games that have been played last month we have six games that have had 50 unique people play them in the last month and here of course being used in a classroom it's way at the top of the list there's a 12 games over 25 players so this classic sort of long tail picture 302 games have been played by two or more people in the last month we couldn't have imagined this many people actually sort of engaging with the platform a year ago so pretty amazing for us we're entering into a new period where there's a lot of excitement we're having a lot of fun doing this kind of stuff and it's getting big and it's getting complicated and this is where we're maybe looking for advice from anyone around here is how do we put together some sort of formal structure that makes things like legal stuff like paying for t-shirts like you know just all that crap easy and doable without ruining all the fun that we're having so we don't know if it's a nonprofit we don't know if it's LLC we don't know how to manage those things also with sort of trying to keep in mind the idea of very loose ownership that we have around both this product and these ideas right now we really like to maintain those some other things we want to try and we know development programmers making these features is a bottleneck often and there are now more features than we have programmers to handle so how do we hire enough developers to work on these things what kind of a structure has worked to some extent within our university structure but it's starting to get so big that it doesn't really quite fit within university so how do we get enough programmer house where it's not necessarily you pay for a feature and we give it to you it's a larger community that is flexible so I definitely encourage you all to both give us free advice and to join our community start making games, start talking to us about what you would like to make anything else Chris? well let's open up for questions so like I'm trying to see like how's the sustainability like this is an awesome free service like I'm really excited to try to make my own game I might be even more excited if I could take my own game and then put it on the app store you can release ari5 with the exact same code based on the app store tomorrow under the MIT license interesting so I could re-change this like material part 2 I could release in the app store I love that that doesn't worry you you're not concerned as long as you're not as long as you're not piercing that would just make it hurt in my soul nothing against piercing but it doesn't feel fair competing with the little guys interesting why have you chosen not to take some of your why have you not been done with material or other games? oh because so material was sort of released just not through the app store as its own app without a game picker as a sort of a forked version of ari5 and there have been a couple other examples of those kinds of things basically it's just that eras got a whole bunch of new features that I wanted to use and I don't have the money or time to worry about how to shoot out that little bit of code to the app store and actually a good example of that it could happen let me see if I can skip that these were extra slides that we might and we might not get to these are all the crazy things we're going to try this year we know we're going to make apps go off when you complete your games we're going to connect to web apps anyway yeah and just to to finish this point on how you could create your own app WeBird is an app that was created using eras software but it's actually an app that a professor is making and is going to be independent where you can collect you're outside you can record a bird call and with 99.9% accuracy it'll show you the bird you're listening to that can feed into science databases to inform so it's a form of civic engagement or citizen science rather so we're done having to talk to people later though are you doing a poster thing this afternoon we're not we'll be there though congratulations congratulations for the presentation


Welcome back, day two, session two of Open Networking and Edge Executive Forum, ONIF as we call it. We really appreciate you all joining and this is a very exciting section today. We have some great speakers and representing pretty much the top companies that we can think of. And what I would like to highlight again for those of you who may have just joined, you can ask question and answers. These are live sessions, not pre-recorded. There's a Q&A button on the top. Just send them the question. If you have been with us in the morning, as you know, I was able to at least get 15, 20 questions quickly into the speakers. So, you know, they will answer it in real time. And we really appreciate you all joining. So, let's begin the second section with a company that also needs no introduction by do. And we have the chief architect of IoT, letting Lee, who has been a very active contributor to several projects in open source in the Linux Foundation Edge as well as other umbrellas.  So without any further delay, please welcome Lede. Hello, everyone. I'm very glad to be able to participate in this exclusive forum today. I'm Lede Lee, the chief architect of Baidu Cloud IoT. As a member of the Arab Edge Technologies Steering Committee, I'm very fortunate to be able to participate in the technological innovation of global edge computing. Edge computing has grown rapidly in the past few years, from the early as a data agent service for the IoT to a general-purpose computing service covering various applications, granaries, and facilities. We can see that with the population of various new computing resources, such as the mobile edge computing, the new kind of content-delivering network, the boundary between the Edge and the Cloud is consistently blurred. By moving towards an era where computing is ubiquitous and workloads from the Edge are going fusion with the Cloud. We can see in many real cases, companies collect data in the Cloud and the train models and then use these models to perform a real-time data processing at the Edge. This means that the Edge is becoming combined with the Cloud to become a single integrated service. What I want to share with you today is how the Beetle product of the LF Edge connects the Edge and the Cloud together. Next page, please. First, let me briefly introduce the Beetle product. Beetle, organized from the in-challenge Edge product, incubated by Baidu in 2017. And then in the next year, we decided to open-sort it and successfully joined the LF Edge community in 2019. Today, Beetle has grown into an open and a vendor-neutral product. As one of the earliest open-sort products in exploring Edge computing, Beetle has already got a bunch of features. Beetle can now provide a microservice orchestration in various IoT environments and can simply extend the Cloud applications and data to users' private networks and private network equipment and provide a continuous application operating environment for all type of equipment. You can visit the project homepage, beetle.io for more technical information. And next page, please. The Beetle project has set three core development goals for its value, corresponding to the applications, the management, and the developers. In terms of applications, Beetle's goal is to bring a standard and open-cloud native environment for all Edge screeners so that applications can be freely deployed and run according to the actual needs without adoption and modification. The next goal is to allow equipment to operate automatically and in unattended conditions through real-time and through the remote management and configuration. And even can be able to make independent decisions and collaborate with each other when the environment and the data change. The final goal is to provide developers with end-to-end application development tools and services to promote the further innovation development of Edge computing. And next page, please. In the past years, Beetle has made great progress. We have released an important 2.0 version, which enables us to move further towards Beetle's ultimate goal. In Beetle 2.0, we have introduced a standard Kubernetes environment for Edge devices. Applications can be defined in the form of resources such as pause, service, and deployment, just like what you do in the cloud. Beetle will accept these definitions from the cloud, save it to the local storage, and manipulate local Kubernetes in the local cluster. In fact, all services, including the Beetle system itself, are cloud-native. Beetle runs as a Kubernetes service, and we have implemented the self-aggrading with the Kubernetes way in Beetle 2.1. At a state time, we continue to support the Docker and the non-container bare process models, this for the low-end commits and introduce an experimental windows environment support. Beetle is working hard to continuously expand the range of device support and provide developers with more different choices. Another important feature is that we released the Beetle cloud. This is a completely open-source remote management system. You can use Beetle Cloud's open API to realize the configuration, software upgrade, application deployment, and data collection and synchronization for various edge devices. Beetle Cloud can directly connect with your Kubernetes control plane to obtain resource definitions and send them to Beetle with a secure network channel. With the cooperation between Beetle and Beetle Cloud, the edge and the cloud are connected together. Next page, please. So here is the architecture of Beetle. Beetle Cloud is located in the upper part. You can find that the whole Beetle Cloud itself runs as a service in Kubernetes and the Beetle Cloud connect to the Kubernetes API server. So by this design, the Beetle Cloud can receive all your Kubernetes configurations and try to synchronize it to your local edge instances. And the Beetle itself is located in the lower part of the picture. And Beetle and Beetle maintaining the connection with both the Beetle Cloud and its own Kubernetes cluster. So in logical, the local Kubernetes cluster and the cloud Kubernetes cluster can be configured as one. They are integrated by the operation between Beetle and Beetle Cloud. And then in this picture, we found that all the original Beetle services are moving inside the Kubernetes environment. In the previous version, the 1.0 of Beetle, we run Beetle as an independent separated process out of the container system. This process will operate with the Docker system and run all the applications as the container in Docker. But the Beetle itself is controlled out of the container system. So the administrators need to lock into your local console and update Beetle itself manually. We found that this is the first step to support the edge system, but this is not our ultimate goal. We want to make this component unattended. So in the 2.0, we move all the Beetle systems inside the Kubernetes. We define all the Beetle services as pods, as services, and we give the privilege to connect with the local Kubernetes API server with the standard Kubernetes way. And finally, we can upgrade and manipulate all your workloads, both the system services and user applications in the same way. So this is what we do in Beetle 2.0. And we consider this is our most important move to our goals. So next page, please. And next, please. Maybe it's a later. Yes, this way. Thank you. So to achieve the integration of the local Kubernetes cluster and the remote cloud Kubernetes cluster, there is still an issue to solve. The most critical issue is how to maintain data consistency between the cloud and the edge and unstable network conditions. Because most of your edge equipment is deployed around the world. There won't be a very stable and high quality cable network connected to a data center. We use the unreliable network, maybe the 4G or even the more lower bandwidth network connections. So there will be data consistency issues. When you're configuring your cloud, the data is not synchronized to the edge side successfully. So they will run in different view of your configurations. That will make data correction. So we have to solve this issue. This is the shadow CRD technology proposed by Beetle. In this technology, we combine the user-defined resource of Kubernetes with the digital twin of IoT together. The former one, the CRD guarantees the integration with Kubernetes environment. So all your operations will go to the Kubernetes way and the later one will get the exactly once QoS requirement through the MQTT protocol and the desire and the report semantics. So let me show how this works. In the picture on the right, there's a typical edge cloud synchronization process. First, the Beetle cloud connects to the Kubernetes API server and the cloud, obtains the deployment resource, and the pack them into a shadow object. We call that a desire object. And then sends the desired shadow object to the edge through the MQTT protocol. The MQTT protocol itself includes the capabilities such as the error checking and the network retransmissions and fulfills the quality of service. By using the MQTT protocol, the desire shadow object will successfully be transmitted to the edge side. The edge side, by receiving the shadow object at the edge side, the Beetle will unpack it and send the original CRD definitions to the local Kubernetes cluster for the deployment. After the deployment is achieved, the new state which reflects all your configurations of your applications and the data will be collected by Beetle from the local Kubernetes API server and the packed again as a shadow object we call this shadow object as the report. And we send this report shadow object by the MQTT protocol again to the cloud. And in the cloud, the Beetle cloud system will unpack the report shadow object and reflect all the changes from the edge to the cloud. This will solve the data consistency issue through an unstable network. This is the shadow CRD technology of Beetle. And next page, please. So finally, let me introduce the Beetle's roadmap in 2021. The first and most important is we will continue to work hard to achieve a deeper integration of edge and the cloud together. And ultimately, we'll use a single control plan to manipulate all your workloads. Our image, our think, finally, in the future, all your workloads can be controlled and be declared, controlled, and observated in a single Kubernetes dashboard. So this is our final goal. And we will make it better in 2021. And how to make this happen? The first important step is to strengthen the observation and the measurement of edge status. We will send the edge health data and application runtime metrics data to the cloud to provide a better capability for the operations. In addition, we will work with the agrino community to explore how to use the mobile edge computing by 5G network to implement a better low latency services for new kind of applications like the other driving or the VRs or all the cloud gaming. And we will try to research how to serve a moving application by your mobile phone or by other mobile devices that will move across different base stations of 5G networks. The application should go to keep low latency with the applications. So this means the application maybe will be roaming between base stations or roaming with the MEC data centers of 5G networks. This may be, I think, these are very interesting things. And we will try to explore how to achieve this in this year. At the same time, we'll strengthen the construction of documents and to attract more contributors, interesting beta products. And we are going to collaborate with more chipset providers and more infrastructure providers to support not only the X68 chipset, the arms chipset, maybe the RISC-5 chipset in the future. And we are going to collaborate with more Arab-edged communities such as address foundry and agrino to make more cooperation. Next page, please. This route will be reflected in our specific detail works. The most important thing is the cooperation with communities while working with the AgX foundry to bring an open source IoT solution to beta. So users can define your IoT system in the cloud and test it and deploy it to all your Edge devices. And by trying to work with the Flash community to introduce more industry screeners to accept more industry protocols and the data to the Edge system and connect them with the new technology like the data processing or the artificial intelligence. I believe that with the joint efforts of the community, Edge computing will play a more and more important role in the future. So this is what I want to share today. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you, Leading. Thank you. Yeah. And really, we have seen a lot of great progress in just one year since the time we chatted. And I think the Beetle has not only gotten a great roadmap but a lot of collaboration with LF Edge. LF Edge, in general, has a lot of momentum going into from a unification of frameworks perspective. So thank you very much for your leadership. And thank you for communicating today. Thank you. Thank you, Arbit. All right. So we're going to move to the next presentation from the director of open source we who at ZTE. Again, company needs no introduction, obviously. And I'm just going to hand it over and hear what you have to say. Take it on. Hello, everyone. I'm Jeff from LTE. And in this time, I want to try to introduce my companies working on the open world. Please move to the next slide. In this picture, I want to try to demonstrate our footprint in the open world, not only the open source community but also the open standard. As you know, ZTE is a networking equipment provider. Our customer is the main network operator and also consumers. And now we expand our business to a lot of vertical industry like the manufacturer and also to cooperate with our partners and working with partners to expand our business. In this picture, we can see ZTE mainly working on 3GPP, ITU, ATC, and IEEE. It seems like that in the open standard organizations. And also from the 10 years before, ZTE began to move into the open source areas like OpenStack and also Linux Foundation Networking and also Linux Foundation AI and also a lot of others. Next slide, please. First, I want to introduce. We have worked and contributed a lot of open source area communities like OpenStack. Since 2013, ZTE began to contribute to the world of cloud in the first structure. In the OpenStack, we continue working until now. And in the train release, we ranked the seventh in the world and also we have eight project leaders and ranked second place in the election of the OpenStack Victoria Release project leaders. And we have 13 core members working in the communities. Next slide. Since 2014, we worked from the ACI NFV standard and began to cooperate with the carriers. On the OP NFV, we began to the 19 members and also working contributed on several key projects like Qtube, DayC, Farrows, FungTest, and Relent. And also we have a board member, TSC member, and two cores. And we get the OVP certifications like the infrastructure and also open labs. We continue to cooperate with the OP NFV in the CNTT last year and we try to work on the advocate in the future. Next slide. In the SDM field, we are the member of the pending member of the Urban Daylight. We ranked fourth in the history. I think the Urban Daylight is more stable now. And we have six PTAs and 21 core members, one TSC member in the communities. We have initiated six new projects like Bias, OFF Configure, P4 Plugin, Telemetry, and Datanet, and Outer Datestores with our partners in the ODL communities. Next slide. Begin with 2016, we joined with China Mobile to initiate the network automation project, OPEN-O, and also be a team member after OPEN-O joined with ECAMP. We ranked third place by 7.3% contribution ratio. And also we have two PTAs on micro service bus and home bus. We have 21 core members and TSC members. And also we worked with operators on VEPC and VIMS, which is verified in China Mobile's lab and also with China Telecom Lab on VCP. Next slide, please. Since 1907, we also contribute to the cloud-native world. In Kubernetes, we ranked first on the world and also second in the China area and also cooperated with Docker and also in the computer-cognitive. We worked on the container D and ranked second place in China. We are the CNCF Gold member and also we have several key members in Kubernetes. Also we get the Kubernetes certification for our product, OPEN-Palates. Next slide, please. Also we focused on the massive storage areas in CERF project. Now CERF became a CERF Confoundation. We are the founding planning member in CERF Foundation and we have one TSC member and three core developers in CERF project. And in the release K2M, we ranked third in the world and the first place in China. We also published some two books on CERF to promote the CERF technology in China. Next slide. Also we initiated a project on AI in the AI plus data project, plus data foundations. Adelaide is an end-to-end optimizing framework for deep learning. It is accelerating deep learning inference process for both cloud and embedded environments. The main components of the Adelaide is a model compiler which can use different model types. And also we have the inference engine which can increase the speed of the inference process. And also we have a branch mark test module to branch mark help the application developer to test their module. Also we cooperate with ITU on AI and ML in 5G challenge in 2020s. Next slide please. So what did you focus on? I think in the open world we will still continue contributing on the 5G-related specifications and also in the open world we work on contributing on the general efficient flexible platform and frameworks. And also in 2020 we have joined the RISC 5 and also we support China Mobile to initiate the XGVILA project. Which we think is very important to our customer and the end user. In addition we will continue support and try to get the batch to certify our products in the next year. Please go to the next page. In this page I want to introduce our product on the one stop 5G private network which can enable in all industries. We have two or three different kinds of configurations from left to right is first one is to do like high configuration. It consists of two cabinets, one for the network, one for the cloud. In the cloud cabinet we provide data middleware and AI middleware and also video and age. It is suitable for big enterprise and headquarter of the end users. In the middle is an integrated cabinet which integrate the cloud with the network. It's more efficient and it's suitable for the enterprise branch and some campus. And also we provide the simple configuration which is a single shelf and it's the most cost less. All of this configuration provide you cloud and network convention and also the fixed and mobile network. And with full access to different kinds of connections. And also we support multiple computing conventions with different type of computing. Next slide. In this slide we show in ZTE common age for Synology Mac which provide you the Mac talents with self servicing provisioning. And provided the operator the ability to unify cloud management. This is a one-stop deployment and we use the embedded Mac, pre-integrated Mac and also Codifirm for Mac. And also this one solutions has got the layer one, two, three award in last year. At the end, please go to the next slide. At the end, I think we can discuss some challenges and opportunities like before us. Since we know most vertical industries has recognized the power of ICT especially on 5G, H, cloud and AI. This can help them increase their productivity and efficiency. At the same time, they also fill the trade for the industry disruptions. This can be a challenge and also opportunities. And also for the COVID-19 pandemic, we think it's already changed our life and work, maybe forever. Working from home has been verified, both in our company and also in most other industries. And also traveling has been limited until vaccines were used worldwide. I think this will take a long time. I'm looking forward that we can meet in person in the future, in a very near future. But in my own works, I found a lot of product people don't think an open source could make much profit for them. How do you deal with them on this? How do you persuade them to trust open source and make them believe the open source? Thank you. Excellent. Very good. First of all, I have to congratulate you that all the various projects and various umbrellas that you have been participating, collaborating and leading in a lot of instances with your team of technical people and yourself. So thank you very much for doing that. I think the overall business model on open source is fairly mature now. I think you heard from Rakuten and others, as well as you can see from the partnership that the carriers have provided in terms of going through the vendors versus just doing it themselves, right? So I think that the things have settled down quite well. So very good. Thank you very much. Thank you for doing this. Thank you, Rakuten. Very good. Excellent. Then now for the final presentation, a very important one, because I do believe that what China Mobile says, the world has to listen, it's the largest carrier, lots of research going on, lots of very, very smart people and we have one of them to speak to us today. And so without any further delay, you know, I do want to welcome Dr. Fang, you know, Chief Scientist and General Manager of China Mobile Research, and I would, you know, we will love to understand where things are, where you see things going, what we should all be looking for. So Dr. Fang, take it away. Hello. This will be interesting. I don't see you, but you can see me. We'll see how this will work. I was very happy and to see our bit, to know we have about over a thousand engineers and the practitioners join us. Today I will not only talk about China Mobile, I just have one slide. So pretty much is how I see how we see the entire industry, how that goes. So move on to, so continue to talk about the topic here is network intelligence, and I see not China Mobile, probably across the entire industry, not just our industry, other industries are increasing their investment intelligence, how to intelligent by the internal management's internal operation across various industry. So today I will cover a few aspects so I'll leave it myself to 15 minutes. What is the motivation talk about what what are the main drivers, what are typical approaches companies are taking to making the business making the operation intelligence. Second is how our observation. And then I will move on to share a survey run conducted by UAG in the community in this community, see how the community says about the stage of their network intelligence, and I will give a few suggestions. Next. So, this one is the motivation. Since they have lots of small funds, so open up for my own version. So there's a couple motivators I'm thinking are driving us to transform towards intelligent network. And the, and the lower layer is the network itself. It's before we have the wireless so we have the core and the transmission network. Now this the whole structure is changed. You have a basic infrastructure and that layer. You have the VNF, you have CNF, then you have the operation layer, then we have the business and service layer. For for us, and how we see the industry I'm thinking that operation intelligence now is the core. If you, if we read all the reports from the agencies and a couple SDOs, we can see this trend where the and this current stage where the intelligence efforts goes to, it's a pretty much focuses on the middle layer, the operation layer. So it's the promotes the transformation to further improve the efficiency and the lower the cost. And also, you know, we have to, they scale up the network, and the data volume network is increasing dramatically how we can in, you know, operate that network and the same time maintain lower costs. And why now we here we see the trend is taking that layer as the core based on layer, then synchronize the efforts with the lower layer they the network itself become more intelligent to also the, the service and then business layer. So where we see a trend is for the typical applications of a 5G people are proposing are, are deploying, and also the typical applications of 5G, the AI and larger scale, over 85% are overlap. So basically, before we plan, we build, we optimize our network for, for voice of IP for data for talking over phone. Now it's the, I'm thinking in the applications with intelligence as a key feature are the, the probably one of the biggest services we have to support well. So, as a key feature of intelligent applications they have to be flexible has to be close loop maintenance. So that will require network to have the same feature. So our current network is not as flexible as the applications hope we are. So that's the, the service layer so we can hope one day we can users give their intent, we can, we can control our network to serve that intent to improve the customer experience for the second of the operation layer. I can see the trend in the standard organizations in open source our open source community and the other open source community and also in the research literature. Lots of great work are coming out on this layer. How we can further control their costs and prove the efficiency. And in terms of network the lower layer. There are a couple of things one is for the network elements, each network element has their key functions. And some of those functions have been changed because of the intelligence technologies that we have as of today. And then the other one is the interface between the network elements, since we have this technology, the way they interfaces between the network elements are changing. So next slide. So this one probably looks quite complicated on the left side is the, the campus forum, they show how we need a few close loop in order to keep our operation intelligent. So, so here you see their three loops that we need to have once we have a business intent, then translate to a service intent and transition network intent and transition to resource intent and the data. And then come back, we need to keep promise so we can provide that service so it's the high quality that's the KPI, and, and, and this SLA feedback, and then the customer experience assurance. So that's the big loop. And in, in this whole circle. You see there is a horizontal circle, which is the business automatic close loop and the service automatic close loop and the resource to control close loop. So that's pretty much that I want the key feature of artificial intelligence applications is you cannot have a product and without touch it for long. So it has to be in a loop, and then the model has to be upgraded. And the data has to be continually processed. So it's, I call it's something itself has it's a life being versus a, a product, the traditional products which you buy a cup, the couple stays on the table. So on the right side, just open up how different parts are connected. So now we can see for the SDOs. They have laid up lots of efforts, almost every single are standard organization has put in lots of work in various forms to push the network to be intelligent. So in this graph you see you have the pink one is the local AI. So for the while, while assuming the run transmission network and the core network, each domain, there is specific efforts in that domain. But we here I show is that's a local AI. Well, I'm proposing here is the if we hope we can provide the service which as intelligent as the business hope we can support. Now we need also a general and intelligence layer that's the right side. Which can cross this from the top all the way to the bottom so we need to have that view. So in order to have the overall optimization optimization targets versus we optimize in each specific domain. And about, we don't have the overall picture that's will make the whole network fall into a local optimum versus a end to end intelligence operation. So next slide. So one please. This next slide. Just talk about. Oh, did I go back to go back to the open source. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. So this is a quite you can see the pictures are quite similar to the one before just showing where our community that the software the projects that we're putting where we see them on the overall picture. So you can see the on up is it's especially just take on up example. It's a very key components for to assure that business intelligence and the service intelligence layer. So we have acumen so have on up we have the NDA, I hope we can increase that efforts in that layer, because the operation I'm thinking at current stage will be the driver for the top layer and the lower their intelligence. And so we see now I trained is on up also closely work with the open run. Work with the Rick to help configure and orchestrate intelligently in that specific domain. So the infrastructure layer. We see there are a couple of standards come out for fed AI, which is quite hot. It's a, I think it's a standard was passed in 1912. I, I, I last year 2019 to basically redefine how machine learning can learn a model without the risk of data security. This is next to one. Go to the survey. EU AG. Next slides please. Okay. Sorry, I have a cold today. So this is a initiated proposed by China mobile was conducted by our FN UAG. So so far we got 65 feedbacks from 20 telecom operators and more than 10 digital service providers and over 30 vendors. And then quickly go through the data. So overall, looks like we're asking that questions where you see we are in terms of intelligence level. We can see the most companies think they're at our lines out or our two. So it's a level one or level two so so we are at the preliminary stage. And to see where the applications and in the research. So that's also after the pilot stage, which is the work has to hand. So see that topic as network intelligence has become quite hot topic now in the research community, but I'm thinking as the industry we're still we're starting doing that. So R&D can see how, how the intelligence, the a development and the deployment, how who should be the one to do in the work, how they, the operators to see this picture. So we can, for the proof of concept and pilots, we can see the percentile for the on the right side, and the first picture, and the second pie graph, it shows the percentage of self development and rely on partners rely on bigger partners and the small partners. So here, I have a couple in conclusions. And for now, from the survey so some more than 50 operators think they are doing the entitles of platform on their own to the South developed, and the more than two, two, three, two thirds of the operators to think they are also doing their own applications to just to see where well this data we have run the analysis. I'm thinking some of the conclusions in line with our observations some are not. So we will continue to have a new ways to know where overall we are in terms of the whole industry. So I'm going to start almost I use up all my 50 minutes I will quickly go through the suggestions. So I suggest for the three slides. The first one is, we hope we can carry out a top level design for platform function and the manager architect. And build the overall in the general overall general intelligence across the layers on the right side, and build an intelligence and the open industry cooperation platform. We also need to work closely with SDOs, and also other cross organizations also work with the AI companies, and for LFM work well inside our community, we hope we can take operation intelligence as the core, and then we take it as as a driver to have the intelligence transformation and the service layer and also the, the, the network element layer. So we draw those two graphs, and then one is the service intelligence and the other ones the lower layer. Hopefully, that's our just suggestion, maybe, maybe it's right maybe it's not to see the path. The next one is, I'm thinking is in order to make our network intelligent it has to be flexible to be flexible it's not enough. We have a certain amount of network operation knowledge. We have a certain set of data, we also need an environment, an environment which can, which can be a resembled or experimental place in developers and algorithm researchers they all can put in their model see how that work. A simulation environment I'm thinking is pretty hard for me the intelligence to come from what the intelligence of computer come from three resources, one is data, one is knowledge, and the other one is the environment. So the model, the AI algorithm and the model, the product has to explore the real environment, and to improve the self over the on the fly, and to truly get intelligent versus we have the offline intelligence. But once we put in the real network, it's always a bigger question mark. So they are free of put that into network and make it a larger scale. So that's, I will finish my slides orbit. All right. Excellent. Thank you, Dr. Fang. So first of all, you know, I was just so engrossed in what you were saying that I just didn't realize that, you know, we're there. A couple of observations and there's obviously a couple of questions that I want to I want you to address first so the one of the questions is saying China Mobile was largely responsible for the CRAN technology which triggered the entire 5G movement. What are we going to do and how is China Mobile, you know, thinking about once again taking a leadership position and continuing in the future. Yeah. Thank you for the question. Well, CRAN basically is, it's a great invention, it changes the overall architecture of the grant. So I'm thinking for now probably for talking about the intelligence there will continue our overall efforts in CRAN. I'm thinking is that we want, we hope with in China Mobile is invest a lot in the networking intelligence and the same thing further for the grant. So we hope that the CRAN give us more opportunities so we can put the intelligence in. For example, you have to use your separate to DU and CU and between the DU and CU and the AAU. So how we can match the resources. So you need something in the middle, which is the intelligence enough, we can sense the network, sense the dynamic and automatically intelligently adjusted in mapping. So that's the CRAN truly give the architecture, give a way we can put in patches in. Okay. Excellent. I think in general the, your overview of how standards and open source and network intelligence and all the layers couple, they all look very cool and I think with your leadership and with your entire company behind the open source and standards. I really appreciate the support that you all have given. I also want to publicly thank you for being the chair of the governing board of LF Networking, all of last year. And, you know, we're looking forward to some even more cool things from China Mobile and your influence globally. So really appreciate you taking the time. And thank you very much. I'm so happy to work with the community. We have to work together, change the world, make it better. There you go. Thank you. Excellent. This ends our second day of ONIF. We will see you tomorrow morning at 7am Pacific. It'll be a little late in Asia, but do join in. We have very exciting presenters on the EU front and, you know, look forward to all the recordings that come out. But thank you again for joining. Good night. Good morning. Good afternoon.


Hi, my name is Leon Rowe, Covency Trader and Trading Coach at Trading180.com and welcome to this week's Supply and Demand Forex Fundamental and Technical Analysis. If you're new or warm welcome to you and if you're returning an equally warm welcome back and if you find my analysis useful every week, please don't forget to like, subscribe and share with your fellow colleagues, especially liking the content as well. Just that like button as it helps the YouTube algorithm and really gets the quality content out to the universe, really. So just a little bit, just in case you're new about Trading180, we combine fundamental and technical analysis. A lot of traders will, especially on YouTube, will just say one or the other, but we combine both to really have a consistent edge within the markets and there are edges beyond just looking at a price chart that you really need to be or should be aware of things like interest-based inflation, central bank monetary policy, etc. and understanding value and why you should be buying a currency and why a currency is likely to be devalued by central bank policy and just quickly how we do that is Trading180 anyway is we have a fundamental analysis spreadsheet which we identify all major currency pair fundamental convergence and divergence trades to establish really price reversals or trend continuations and also once we've done that, use supply and demand zone strategies, capture pain relief strategies and stop hunt manipulation technical strategies to really enter our trades and identify the best risk reward trades and if you want to find out a bit more about that, you can go to Trading180.com. So first things first as we always do every week is get on to the fundamental and risk sentiment analysis. So starting off in the US and inflation is rippling through the markets and it's just what the feds want to see now why is inflation important is because central banks have a mandate to reach a 2% inflation target. So at the moment they're a bit below that and the more the higher inflation gets to that target then they'll achieve the target. The problem is though is that you want rising inflation when your economy is doing well. At the moment the US economy isn't doing so well especially with the viruses well really no economies are doing great to be fair but you don't want high inflation or rising inflation and your economy isn't doing well that's what's known I think is stagflation where you still have high unemployment and the economy isn't growing but you have rising inflation and especially inflation that might overshoot the 2% target now the Federal Reserve have employed I guess a monetary policy called the F-A-I-T which is the federal average inflation target so even if inflation reaches 2% in maybe one quarter what they're looking at is they won't raise rates or look to raise rates unless the average maybe over I think is about a year or so the average inflation is at 2% rather than just that single figure and if you have no idea what I'm talking about an inflation and interest rates kind of confuse you what you can do is have a look at my YouTube channel type in fundamental in the search and then I have a ton of free videos that really goes over interest rates inflation and GDP the relationship between them and yeah we've got hours and hours of videos on the YouTube channel and if you really want to take your fundamental analysis to the next level you can join the mentoring group at Trading180.com so the US at the moment with inflation are doing okay but economy wise they're not doing so great with neither is anyone and moving over to the to Europe and the European Central Bank ECB keep stimulus steady as economy grapples with longer curbs so again with Europe they have kept their monetary support for the coronavirus stricken economy unchanged betting that recently scaled up stimulus package is powerful enough to soften the impact of extended lockdown so stimulus is obviously designed to support the economy they don't want to necessarily still weaken the currency or add even more stimulus they're going to apply I guess a wait and see approach and hopefully they don't have to devalue their the euro too much and they try to avoid that so let's they're in a kind of wait and see approach the euro is suffering from deflation which is really an expensive currency or an appreciating currency and in a recession you really don't want to have an appreciating currency in fact central banks want a devalued currency they actually aim with interest rate cuts and stimulus they actually the aim of that is to actually devalue their currency because the cheap currency makes them more competitive on the world stage and the guard against signals new recession even as easy behold stimulus so you know everyone is kind of worried about this double-dip recession especially in Europe and again if the if Europe were the only country to kind of really maybe experience this double-dip recession I would probably say that you know the euro should be really a sell but in the I guess the coronavirus environment that we're in it's basically judging who is the best of the worst yeah who is the dog with the least fleas that's always once told to me by my mentor Mark Chapman who is the dog with the least fleas the dog with the least fleas wins so Europe aren't doing too badly not as badly as some other countries so I think Europe are still okay a bit middle of the road to be fair when it comes to buying euros but moving over to the UK and UK inflation subdued during a brief respite from lockdown so again talking about inflation so Britain's inflation rate picked up in December after shoppers were allowed back into the stores between lockdowns but held well below the Bank of England's target and again the target is 2% so again why is that important exactly the same reason why it's it's important for the for the Federal Reserve right it's because rising inflation forces central banks to hike rates and if they're hiking rates they're basically what they're saying is that they're making their currency more attractive and increasing demand for that currency basically making it more expensive and they don't want to make it expensive not at the moment anyway not with you know double-dip recessions and and the like so there was a rumor that came out last week that the Bank of England may want to start to cut rates but at the moment that has been dashed by the central bank governor so the pound climbs as market pushes back on negative rate speculation so the pound is rallied as traders push back on expectations for when the Bank of England might cut borrowing costs to the end of the year after governor Andrew Bailey said there was lots of issues with negative rates so although the central bank is looking at inflation as a guidance as to what they should do with interest rates and stimulus they also look at the economy but for now I think the pound is again another middle of the road type currency and a bit difficult between the majors to be fair at the moment it's not really clear-cut my preference at the moment and the guys in the group really been taking advantage of the the commodity currencies like the Australian dollar the Canadian dollar as well as the New Zealand dollar buys and really selling safe haven currencies like the Japanese yen and the Swiss francs so those are really the currency pairs you've been looking at so far as well as you know bits of the your binary euro against other currencies like the yen etc moving on as well to some more UK news as well so the UK recession risk eases as GDP declines less than forecast so that's actually quite positive for the UK right so again that came out last week so again more positive news coming out for the UK and an interesting article from Bloomberg Business Week was forecasts for economists surveyed by Bloomberg and 2021 growth forecasts and what you'll see at the bottom I don't know if you can see it right here but you've got 0 5 10 15 percent that is the annual GDP growth and what you'll see is you've got the range forecast for the UK in fact is the only economy that actually has a forecast range I guess some economists expect negative GDP growth for 2021 up to around just above the five maybe six percent growth the median forecasts and the Bloomberg economists forecasts you know you can pretty much see where you know the growth may be and in fact it looks like India you know the emerging markets China are you know projected to grow the most in the world and you've got some some interesting ones like Canada for example US Australia forecasted that's quite surprising Japan not doing so well when it comes to growth and forecast so again these create divergences between growing and shrinking economies the economy that grows the most is should have a stronger currency as is more going to be more demand for that currency because obviously businesses are growing investment etc and the country that has the the weakest growth is the one that you should probably look to sell so looking towards now the week ahead and this week the week ahead in the US it will be a very busy week with economic data including fresh GDP growth figures Fed and monetary policy decision and corporate earnings with reports from Apple Microsoft Facebook and Tesla investors will continue to focus on the pandemic especially with new and more contagious strains of sorry strains and will carefully monitor President Biden's legislative agenda in a divided Congress elsewhere IMF is set to release the world economic outlook and growth figures from Germany Mexico and Hong Kong will be also in this spot like so very busy week GDP is definitely going to be the because this would be the I guess the fourth quarter growth figures and again if they come out as expected better or worse is really going to determine where you know traders expectations for the valuation of that currency will be so the US is is up first I guess for fourth quarter growth so lots to watch this week now moving on to the technicals and starting off as we do every single week on the Dow Jones dollar index and the dollar index is just a measure of dollar strength overall against the basket of currencies like the euro the the pound the yen the Australian dollar and others and basically how we use this is just to gain some sort of confluence of overall dollar strength and we can use supply and demand zones as as confluence on dollar crosses so if you're seeing if you want to be a buyer of the dollar right now in a demand zone of the dollar index then you'd look you look for buy trades on the dollar yen dollar CAD dollar Swiss for example and that's really how we look at it so fundamentally you need to decide which one you want to be a buyer or a seller of I think me short term I think the dollar does have room to go to the upside I think if it's not now then it will be you know it will be there's no definite synom in trading but this area would be really good confluence I think for a buy trade at the lows of the range in the short term but I think in the medium to long term the dollar is still really a sell so we're actually within a decent range so if you take that as the expensive area and that as a bargain area yeah so this would be an expensive area and this is a bargain why is this a bargain area because prices went higher right there was definitely demand for the for the dollar at this 89 20 area so if price does come back down to here that would be the first bargain area that you want wanted to look for at the moment we're actually at fair value because between an expensive area at the moment that's an expensive area and that's a bargain area there is fair value that's all 50% is fair value so if you think the dollar is actually fair value and you want to be a buyer and you start to see bullish price action right there then look for buy trades on the dollar any of the dollar crosses and again I think short term wise I think the maybe the next month or two the dollars probably going to you know may look to strengthen again it just depends on you know fundamentally what's going on with you know Joe Biden inflation and and really GDP this week I think if GDP outperforms this week then the dollar I think it will be a really really decent buy trade so let's see if it disappoints then then again regardless of what inflation is doing I think the dollar will continue to be a sell so let's see what happens with the dollar index and games use that as confluence moving on to the dollar yen and the dollar yen last couple of weeks we did have you know set off from this supply zone right here we do have lower highs and lower lows being made so we do have another supply zone there and again understanding which one you want to be a buyer of I think with the dollar yen in a risk of more on sentiment because of global growth and the vaccine I think if any pullbacks to this demand zone with some potential dollar strength I think it's really a decent trade I think right now you'd have to kind of wait for if you're a buyer of this currency but you'd have to wait for price to kind of go above that zone or into that supply zone pull back to a demand zone and then look for some long trades if you're looking to get short on the dollar and buy the Japanese yen then this zone here is okay I think the I think the higher zone is probably the better area and even fresher zone right at the top here is probably the most desirable the 105 I think is is a really nice area to look for potential short trades and again you'd be buying the Japanese yen in a risk off environment or risk off sentiment so that's the analysis dollar Swiss dollar Swiss so again we're contained between you know this high which is going to be 0.895 and 0.87 so I think again if I'm long going to be long dollar I actually do like this area here and especially like this area here I think the Swiss Frank will devalue especially against the dollar I don't think the dollar is really going to go down that much against if it does go down not really that further against the against the Swiss Frank so again understanding where we are in a ranging market environment taking the high to the low so an expensive area to a bargain area we are at fair value so I think that is probably the first chance we probably have of getting long if you want to get long there if you're waiting for a bit more of a bargain then if prices do come down here personally I do like that for a buy trade of the dollar but again it really just depends on you know what GDP does this week you think GDP is going to be better than expected then that is definitely a buy trade from now and I'm going to draw the supply zone from there moving on to the dollar CAD again dollar CAD from last week we've got we're in again a bit of a range at the moment in fact what I'll do is move that and that moves to there that's where supply is not the strongest area of supply even though we've made lower lows there but now you have to again understand zooming out bigger picture where are we do you really want to get short at you know market lows or do you want to wait for a bit more of a bargain I think this 128 to 129 12850 to 129 is a really good zone to look for any kind of short trades if prices can get up here I'm not really too keen on this zone here the level's been touched once twice is okay but I think fresher areas of supply or demand are really where we should be looking I think the Canadian dollars probably due a bit of a pullback I think overall long-term forecasts do say a lower Canadian dollar sorry a lower dollar against the Canadian dollar exchange rate but I think I would really want to be a buyer of the or buy of the CAD and shorter of the dollar around these areas here or start looking anyway so that's that if we are looking for any kind of demand zones and a buy trade I would probably say this lower zone is decent for a potential buy not the best really want again prices to approve that there is strong demand here and then wait for a pullback and then look for any kind of long trades for now intraday wise I guess it's okay but I wouldn't I'm not really convinced that there is really strong demand right now for the dollar against the Canadian dollar New Zealand dollar US dollar so again there was a nice trade around here prices came in again when you see something like this just when you see prices come into the daily zone just go down to the lower time frames look for an entry whether it's a pin bar an engulfing candle whatever your entry is you know to look for and then that's where you get the best you know risk reward type trades so we use daily zones but we actually go down into the intraday charts to to look for entries so nice entry there moved up about 100 or so pips so that was there about 120 pips that was nice this week if you managed to get involved in that now again we're kind of middle of the road where do you want to be a buyer or a seller personally you'd have to really believe that the dollar is going to get stronger the US dollar if you do believe this week and there is positive news and that is actually a really nice trade if not I think the highs are really really nice for a potential sell I do like this if you want to be a continuation trader I guess a trained trader and looking for buy trades again whatever prices are really kind of pulled back into probably a fresher area of demand or the top area of this demand and then look for any kind of buy trades in a risk on environment commodity currencies tend to do well but again it depends on what happens with the dollar this week when it comes to GDP moving on to pound dollar pound dollar not greatest chart in the world massive demand zones here in the way that we draw them but if you do have large demand zones then what you want to do is break them up with support and resistance zones within these within these areas so that's where you would look for the best areas of support and resistance within areas of demand if you want to be a buyer of the of the pound against the dollar to me this pair I don't really like this pair fundamentally so I'm kind of staying out of this but if you do want to be a buyer of the pound then it's literally again pull backs into a demand zone probably down into this one three five round number you can also go down into a lower time frame and look for get some more accuracy so you can I can see actually where you've got a nice area of support there so you've got support support support resistance support so there's going to be confluence of support and demand within this overall higher time frame demand zone so that's pretty much one way that we kind of break down these zones we've got lots of other confluences that we use this is pretty much you know the just the basics of understanding where the strongest areas of supply and demand are and we just use one of the confluences we use our horizontal support so going back to the daily I still do think that we are buying in quite a high area I would really probably look for if I was looking for a range I'd probably say if it can come down to this one three four area you know that fair value zone that would be actually quite nice for a potential buy so then we've also got another area to look for fair value because really the move started this move to a higher high on a higher time frame started from here and we're here at the moment so if you get a decent pullback into fair value that's quite nice as well so decent areas to look for pullbacks buying at highs isn't really advisable but um but yeah let's see what happens and again if you're looking to sell the dollar also actually buy the dollar and sell the the pound there's really no major areas of supply and if there are it's back in 2018 so I don't really like looking at those zones from you know back in the day I would probably wait for price to prove that there is supply here and then wait for a pullback into a supply zone and then that would be the the play really so at the moment no supply zones or major supply zones for the for the to buy the US dollar moving on to the euro dollar euro dollar did get involved in this earlier this week um so trades worked out uh quite nicely um so nice fresh area of demand prices came back down into this zone um we had an extreme trade um in in the group so uh and a signal so um and I ended up getting involved in this trade and making a little bit so far and seeing what's happening um on the lower time frame but uh if you do want to get involved in the uh in this trade uh from a buying perspective then we do have higher highs and higher lows being made so I can probably drag that to there and there now and if you want put a pullback not the strongest area of demand to be fair but it's a decent zone especially maybe on an intraday if you looked at the intraday one hour you can see pretty much where you know the 1.206 would be and 1.208 would be probably the area to look for any kind of long trades um from a selling perspective I think this zone is actually quite decent looking at where the high to the low is coming up to fair value so if there is again some positive news around US GDP um then this actually would be quite a nice sell that should be a very nice sell um so uh decent because then the US dollar would probably be more on the front foot to be fair um and it depending again I think we'd have to really wait for then the european GDP to come out in order to kind of stem maybe the to continue downtrend if that comes out positive then obviously you probably will not get more of a downtrend but um again in the short term I really do like this this zone this one two nine area around here so this could actually be if prices do come down to this zone here I think this is really nice for a potential buy trade um I think I did a video on this or maybe it's in the private members group but um I might post it in on YouTube for the public it depends um yeah so I think this zone is okay for now again if you do get positive news for the US dollar then I think you will get a definitely a reversal around here best area though I think for a short trade is going to be up at the highs I do like that area there for a short trade moving on to the euro yen and the euro yen um we have a really nice trade that occurred it was a it was a cpr zone it wasn't anything to do with necessarily daily demands but um really nice cpr level here which actually worked out for the group um so that means a good couple of maybe about 150 pips or so so um we're back up to this area here and again I think if you really want to be a buyer of the yen then that's a very nice short trade technically um but again fundamentals and risk sentiment really the reasons why prices will move so um if you're looking at buying the yen you have to really kind of understand that you're buying a risk off currency overall I think the the the euro should appreciate against the yen so any kind of pull backs into these zones will be decent buying opportunities but this is your first selling opportunity and I think the high is really a nice technical selling opportunity if you're looking to buy the Japanese yen so again if prices come up here and then you get more risk off sentiment then that would be actually a decent uh self trade moving on to the Australian dollar US dollar and the Australian dollars US dollars we can see has been in this massive uptrend risk on sentiment growth etc I think now is probably a time where we're entering into a bit of a ranging market and this could again start to reverse and pull back deeper we need a deep pull back because you really can't have prices have these shallow pull backs yeah and not have a deeper retracement so we are at the highs don't really want to be buying at the highs overall this level's been touched once twice already so I think if the dollar does start to strengthen I think that level's probably going to go and then we're down into maybe the 75 76 is 75 for a potential buy trade and I do like the lower end this 75 area for a potential buy I do like that so but if you do want to be a again a buyer of the US dollar and in anticipation of a potential good number for GDP and some positive news then I think now is probably the time to look for short trades and you'd have to have your stop if you're having a wider stop above there if you're entering intraday you know so in the lower time frame let's say the four hour then you just have to be prepared to enter a couple of times maybe potentially have your stop loss around here potentially if you get stopped out there then just enter a few times because if you've got enough downside potential let's say for example you've got a nice you know eight to one nine to one type trade yeah if you lose a couple of trades but your potential downside if you're right about it it doesn't matter if you lose a couple of times you know because you've made up for it on your risk reward so decent risk reward here we are we are at the highs of the of the daily time frame chart as well so lots of downside potential to be fair I do like that from a risk reward perspective but overall my long-term bias medium to long-term biases to buy the Australian dollar so you have to make a decision of whether you want to be a buyer of the dollar and then buy me of the US dollar and then be a buyer of the Australian dollar me personally it's it's just a lot more easier and simpler to just pick a direction pick a a currency fundamentally understanding its overall strength from a medium to long-term perspective and then wait for pullbacks into those zones rather than trying to you know take every single trade and every single every single supply or demand zone moving on to the Australian dollar Japanese yen and again a measure of risk sentiment you can see that we've been in really a risk some risk on sentiment and you can see the Australian dollar the commodity currency is the one to buy prices didn't quite come down into this into this demand zone here unfortunately if it does come down into that and you into that zone at 9 79 47 and beyond then that's a decent area to look for any kind of buy trades I would say probably the better area would be where you've got some support and resistance confluence so just around there if it gets a deeper pullback that's quite nice and again just be aware that you are buying at market so as long as the upside potential is worth it then it's worth a trade but a deeper pullback is probably more preferable if you are looking to buy the Japanese yen based off of some sort of risk off sentiment that may be coming into the market and as well I would probably say you really need to see if you want to buy the Japanese yen and really confirm risk off sentiment you want to see the stock market really falling as well so not just a pullback you want to see the narrative of why the stock market you know is you know is is kind of crashing and don't like to use extreme language like crashing but if the if the negative sentiment around the stock market bubble pop in etc then money would tend to flow into safe haven assets like the Japanese yen after the stock market that's so we have to also watch so what the stock market is doing in order to really trade the the Japanese yen or the Australian dollar and finally moving on to gold and gold this week traders were thinking a bit got a bit stop hunted here and I say I've got a bit they did get stop hunted here I did a video in the private members group there was a nice stop hunt which we couldn't really take advantage of because the time that happened in the evening was was I think it was like 10 o'clock I think if I go down to the lower time frame yeah so that was there was the stop hunt right there that was it 11 o'clock in the evening so you know loads of trades would have had desktops below that level there so that we could have taken advantage of that but it's just the time at evening that it happened couldn't take advantage of that but that does create us I guess present another trading opportunity for us in order to get long which again I share with my private members group with prices come down here and as the traders know this creates something called a capture pain belief zone so if prices do come down here this would be really nice for a buy trade not financial advice of course none of this is financial advice gold for me is still a buy there are I guess what they would call headwinds because of potential dollar strength if the dollar starts to grow and I say dollars also grow GDP starts to grow then again there's probably going to be some short-term negative sentiment around the around gold but you have to also understand that if inflation is rising yeah which basically inflation is is devaluation or depreciation of a currency and it starts to get out of hand then gold will benefit from that so if it starts to overshoot that 2 percent or that 3 percent etc then gold is still a buy and remember that there has been trillions of dollars of money you know currency printing money printing devaluation going on and that is going to feed its way into the market at some point fundamentally so you know you've just had Joe Biden's you know I think he said something 1.9 trillion dollar stimulus or something like that so it's it's crazy we're going into the trillions now before when I remember when the billion was like wow a billion now it's like a billion is is is nothing it's like a trillion dollars you know I mean it's crazy the amount of money that's being flooded into the market and gold benefits either way right from inflation or a I guess uncertainty around you know the economy so gold again maybe short-term potential pullbacks but just look at this as long-term buyers if you can get a nice buy there especially down into this 70 I'm sorry 1786 really really nice buying opportunity around there from a selling opportunity I don't think there's anything right now until prices really come down prove that there's supply here and then a pullback into that zone that would be where you'd look for any kind of short trades other than that you're looking for probably a sell around the 1942 1965 area all right guys so that's it for this week don't forget to like subscribe please like definitely subscribe as well share with your fellow colleagues leave a comment thank you as well to all of the the comments the constructive criticisms even the you know the haters out there that don't like the way that I I trade is so good you know I mean everyone has their own opinions and you know peace and blessings to you all take care have a great week and please stay safe and take care


I am David Cantor with the Law Offices of David Michael Cantor and welcome to my blog. Today's topic has to do with the media circus known as the Casey Anthony trial. I cannot believe that CNN is running this thing day and night on not only headline news but also on the regular network. I'm not sure why they're doing this other than they're trying to cash in from 15 years ago when the OJ trial occurred. The case is just not that interesting. It's not deserving of locking down CNN as if the Gulf War has just been launched. Now they have Nancy Grace down by the courthouse. Well this isn't a popularity contest. This is a trial with real ramifications so I'm not sure why CNN is doing this other than trying to boost its ratings. I'm actually hoping that they're losing viewership because they need to leave this with true TV which used to be court TV and let them handle the all day long broadcasts of trials. I guess they must have gotten bored with the Sweat Lodge trial because now they're on Casey Anthony and Sweat Lodge trial isn't even over yet but that's what I think. Tell me what you think.


Abu Hurairah narrates this hadith. He says one, Imam Hassan and Hussain were wrestling. Astara'a al-Hassanu wa al-Hussain. They were playing wrestling with each other. So the Prophet, he started to encourage Imam Al-Hassan. He told him eehan Hassan, eehan Hassan. Meaning he's rallying him, he's cheering him. Fatima A.S. she basically told him, ya Rasoolallah, Hassan is older. If you want to encourage one of them, encourage Hussain, he's younger. So he needs more cheering. Why are you encouraging the older over the younger? The Prophet says, oh Fatima, the reason why I'm saying, Hassan, I'm cheering you, go for it, is because I saw Jibrail on the other side.  So I wanted to bring some balance. Jibrail, who has a billion things to do, he's the guard of God's message. Imam Hassan and Hussain are playing, he comes and he becomes a cheerleader, basically. What is that state? And this is in Sunni Hadid. What does that tell you about this family?