Thank you for joining. This is the open Gov contract and again once again excited to introduce these two gentlemen with a really Fascinating topic. So we have Jeffrey here from the IBM team as the WW program director And then we have Arno who is the senior technical staff member with IBM And they're going to walk us through navigating the open source and open standards for better cybersecurity. Thank you gentlemen Thank you and Welcome everyone and happy to be here and I like to start this session Just by mixing it up a little bit Both Arno and I have been very active in the open SSF, but this is more of a broader topic it's 2023 why is cyber security so hard and It's more than just the tech. It's if we can go to the next slide This is a study that I came across A little over a year ago now from the MIT management Sloan School and it talks about this concept of the fact that Cyber security and compliance and the regulatory aspects of it, you know, you feel that they're kind of like Peter Brutter and jelly that they go together really well but they really are driven by two different forces the In fact is that come appliances primarily driven by the enforcement risk So your organization doesn't want to end up in jail or doesn't want to be on the wrong side of the law But cyber security is driven really by the business risk. You don't want to get ripped off You don't want to have your brand image damaged by having a bad malware or ransomware attack and because of those two of Issues are driven by different factors stakeholders Are really there's a lot of them and they all have a different point of view as to what's really important whether it's the legal group the leadership team the security professionals and You can end up being compliant in other words You're on the right side of the law, but you're not going to be very secure or Alternatively, you can be really fairly well locked down But you're not compliant from a regulatory perspective, and so it can be very hard to find that right mix and You can result with the gears just aren't meshing. Well, you can end up with a lack of culture around how to get the right balance difficulty in developing and implementing the right set of regulations that are important to your industry and At the end of the day the cyber world is moving too fast to keep up So with that it's sort of a high-level entry point traditional cybersecurity needs to evolve and I feel a lot of pressure because I've got CROB here right in the front row to make sure I'm on target, but Cybersecurity 66% of security teams do not share their data and now I'm not talking so much on the Supply side is more on the analyst side of the equation 45% of security teams require security engineers to hardwire integrations and This is really challenging and this is part of the reason why cyber security professionals struggle so We need more cooperation and in this survey done by ESG research back in mid-22 84% believe that our products integration capabilities are important why is that because in this space there are a lot of point solutions and It can be very difficult for an analyst to assemble and adequately understand what's going on 83% believe future interoperability depends upon established Standards who's going to establish those So what we really need to move towards is a connected and open analyst experience One that helps with a better user interface one that shares data One that allows community led innovation Expertise starting to sound like open source. I think so open standards and improved operability so These are the four pillars of open security from a IBM and from others in the industry perspective open security standards Open-source code to allow innovation and quickly fix gaps in the IT ecosystem Whether it's commercial gaps or community gaps, etc intelligence and analytics and best practices and It's we're not there yet, but we're moving along this arc of an open security journey to a collective defense so if you can see on the Left side of the screen there improving risk reduction and a collective defense We'll move up this ladder of foundational standards operational standards and compliance threat intelligence sharing and collective defense So as much as we're in a challenging time from an open source software security perspective I think that the way we need to change as a community is Aligning well with the way cyber security experts need to evolve along with the commercial and other players in the industry so IBM is active in this open cyber security Alliance, it's a governed as a oasis open-source project and it's an opportunity for The industry to come together to support open cyber security Ecosystem where products freely exchange information insight analytics and orchestrated processes The challenge is again that Oasis comes at this from more of a standards organization perspective and if you think about what's changed in the industry Go back only about ten years Standards bodies really dominated the landscape and open source was a thing but it was really still all about standards and Standards are great, but they're largely driven by specifications. They largely take quite a bit of time and So what's happened over the last again seven eight plus years is that? There's been this rapid shift towards a dominance of the impact of open source software And I don't have to preach to the choir here. You all know why open-source software is much more frictionless and so In this new era The pendulum is going to need to swing back because right now we're kind of 80% open-source and yes Anders are still important But I'm not going to steal my partners thunder the last thing I want to touch on though is that This non-profit cyber alliance is also Dedicated to trying to help fix this and you can see that the open cyber security alliance is down there listed as one of the members of this oh wasp is also here and This is a larger umbrella initiative of not-for-profits that see a similar problem and want to see this effectively addressed So with that I'm going to step back and Have our know Take us through the next section So talking about government and standards and open source I mean it must have occurred to you that you know, there's more and more activities going on Essentially what we have right software is under attack and open source is part of it open source is used in every software now and You know bad actors have discovered that there is kind of a soft spot right now on open source because We haven't always used best practices and you know in all open source software Development and so what we are seeing is there is clearly a movement across the board Around the world right with different governments stepping up and saying okay industry This is enough and I mean there is good reason for it right? It's costing a lot of money first of all it's impacting economies around the world more and more We have this you know cyber security issues that come up But in fact it even leads to public safety issues, right? We have critical infrastructure that are being you know put in danger when you think about you know security You don't necessarily think public safety per se But in fact when you think about you know your house has more and more Devices that are plugged into software which you know we hear these stories of like baby monitors for instance where people are hacking This becomes a public safety issue So it's not surprised that governments are saying okay enough. We need to get this under control So in the US we have seen Several executive orders being published now that are trying to push You know the industry to act and of course they have a huge leverage because essentially they are going to say These are the requirements that industry must meet for us to buy your products you buy your offerings And this is going to lead the whole industry to follow suit because you know all our customers going to say well If it's good for the government, it's good for me as well. I want the same kind of guarantees regarding security So the first one the executive order from 2021 You know tries to push the envelope in in setting some requirements about cloud offering specifically But also get into as bombs saying well, you know one major problem We have we don't even know what's in those software that you're selling us So that's you know what we want to know now what's in it and that will be the first step towards Understanding what the security vulnerabilities might impact the software we use and so there's a series of those Regulations coming up in Europe, especially we we see that now there is the CRA It's been you know is being currently Discussed quite broadly because there is definitely some impact that could even touch the open source World and and it's true. This is just this is not exhaustive right this list it ends with the Japan But we you see similar activities all around the world Is there anyone in the audience who doesn't know what an S-bomb is yet? You get a sticker from of all people Crab for sure. So as the Arno continues keep your start to formulate some of your questions questions get stickers Incentives goodies no But so I think everybody kind of knows what an S-bomb is at this point, right? It's the bill of material It's a concept that exists in other industries the IT industry just never got to do this and now I mean we see it, you know, I think every company every time there is some you know As a CVE that gets published the first problem is well, where does that impact us? Right because often vendors. I don't think out, you know I'm divulging very big secrets there even vendors often don't know what they are using we have all developers that are using all sorts of open source software and We don't necessarily have a full understanding of what ends up in our products And so S-bomb is a way to try to address this problem by clearly listing all the content of The software and so there are different activities in this space. There are different formats being pop being developed Cyclone DX and SP DX are the main ones. There are others actually but What? Yeah, that's yesterday's news. Come on. Oops. Sorry. So for those who are online Crab said sweet and that's why I said I wanted to acknowledge their orders But clearly, you know, these are the most dominant ones or the leading ones Cyclone DX and SP DX and and this is very, you know quickly evolving because they started with this idea of, you know, basically listing the components that are in a piece of software and Typically, you know in case of SP DX there was a focus on licenses for instance what kind of licenses were into this products and and is quickly evolving with all the dependencies and now they are also trying to capture what, you know, the build environment that was involved in generating the code or the actual artifact and so on So open SSF you probably have heard of it Open SSF is a you know part of the Linux foundation I don't know if some of you may have attended the open SSF day yesterday that was fully focused on this As Jeff was saying earlier, he and I both active in open SSF Open SSF started actually quite a while ago in 2020 at the time though We were in the COVID time when company was a bit shy. We're a bit shy about spending a lot of money We didn't know how much, you know, it was going to impact the economy And so there was very little resources put towards this project Even though there was a recognition that there was a need for the industry This is bigger than any single company, right? So we have to have a movement at the industry level to try to have a chance to address this problem And so this open SSF was created with basically the mission of looking into this problem and Collaboratively trying to address it facilitate, you know addressing the issue Increasing the security posture of all open source software, which is of course a big task And just as you transition to the next slide, I just want to make the point for the audience online It's not that we're saying open source software is more or less secure than proprietary software Open source is not the problem. It's part of the solution But open source has become so massive in its use in the software supply chain That it's become an attractive attack surface and that is why this is the right time to begin to address this So open SSF went through some what of a reboot in in December 2021 Where we basically the company said okay now we are ready to invest more broadly and so the activity became fully funded that's when I personally got involved in it just probably at the same time around and So we've been involved in this instead from a regular to report of you going back to what I was talking about So the EU is you know has been leading the charge in many ways on that front There's been several acts that we you know been produced by the European Union over the years. They started several years ago in 2016 they had the first cyber security Act for critical infrastructure and they have been going on On that path since then with the cyber cybersecurity act and then more recently You know, we've heard of this CRA. I will talk a little bit more about that But they also had one regarding wireless devices and communication in general You have to understand a little bit how EU functions, right? There is a legislative framework that I was put in place where essentially it functions in two different levels There is at a first level from a legislative point of view the parliament is going to issue an act that define some kind of requirements Things that they feel need to be met to ensure the security Then at the lower level the European Commission once the act has been enacted by the parliament They will actually ask the Commission to implement it and the way the Commission implements it is by turning to Standards bodies to define standards that will implement the you know define how the requirements are actually going to be met practically speaking So it's a multi-level process and typically We they will end up with some European standards that there are three main Organizations recognized by the European. It's sense and elect and Etsy sense and elect Initially two different organization, but actually you'll have you will never hear basically one or the other independently They always come together sense and elect. So it sounds like they are only two organization Those organization function as part of you know the whole spectrum of the jury organization These are like formal organization along with ISO, IC and ITU which are the international level In the process they will consider adopting international standards that will help them meet those standards But if it doesn't work they may issues European specific standards Of course vendors like IBM and others that have a global market have an interest in trying to minimize things that are regional specific So we engage to make sure that as much as possible the standards that are being adopted as international as possible There's also you know many different organizations that are not dangerous standards like there were three COAs and others We've actually been working with the European you know commission to get them to acknowledge the existence of those standards organization And not necessarily require every one of those standards to go through the ISO process to make it you know usable at the European level If you look at the CRA in particular because it's a big topic right now What's going on again is these two layers that I was referring to We for now we are still in the legislative process where they are defining the CRA It's actually fairly late in the phase now of development where they have defined already all the requirements And they are in the very final phase but in fact this is only the beginning of the process Because once the legislative process ends and the parliament issues the act They will then again turn to the European Commission to kick off the technical process Which will be this process of how do we actually go at implementing this And there will be another you know possibly of negotiating here in practice You know it's supposed to implement the requirements There is some leeway in how this gets done because you know it's like the first part the first layer is done by a politician The second is by technical people and so then there is you know some room for appreciation as to how the two you know match So looking at IBM more specifically what do we actually do in that space right So first I mean we actually have a policy blog on supply chain security and open source You have a QR code there you can scan to get directly to it We you know from an IBM point of view you recognize it So we actually support open source community security initiatives This is something we do across the board not just in open SSF we're involved in different organization You know we support the the bill of material software bill of material you can learn about it And we are we are supporting improving security execution right And contributing to open source project overall And I just want to add to that point that from an SBOM perspective right now what we feel that everyone should be doing is getting their hands dirty Metaphorically speaking right now is not the time to just be generating SBOMs and because I heard I had to do it I went and bought a point product and now I can and now I'm going to pass them around like trading cards Not a recommended approach right You need to be using and developing your skill as a and let's face it we're all software development companies to varying degrees today Right in this age of digitalization you've got to have strong skills in this space So right now you should be developing those skills internally and using that learning to understand where the problems are in your own software supply chain And the other point I want to emphasize that are no touched on is that if you are a smaller business or a midsize organization and you don't feel you can support the open source projects that you're consuming At least think of sourcing that code from a vendor who does like a MongoDB or a SLEZ or a Red Hat right That's another way you can help to ensure that the ecosystem is going to improve So again you know we are very much involved in open SSF and you know this is a way to show some of you know it's kind of bragging rights To show the level of involvement we have we actually have how many people do we have involved in open SSF total This is just a short segment of how many people we have I think you said bragging rights I think you mispronounced proud leadership We have Jamie Thomas who's a general manager within IBM who is a very busy person but is dedicating significant portion of her time to serve on the governing board And she's proud to be there with a lot of other leading firms like Y-Pro and AWS, Microsoft, Google there's a whole list you can check it out on the website I myself am chair of the governance committee we're trying to help ensure that there's proper structure without becoming bureaucratic And Arno he's being modest but he was just elected along with CROB, CROB is the chair of the TAC and Arno is the vice chair So we're excited to help So we don't just participate in the governance and helping open SSF be successful I mean this is essentially what we're trying to do is since we're invested in this we want the organization to be as successful as possible But we actually also contribute to some of the activities and this is actual code contribution that we have made in that space We've made contribution of a licensed scanner to OWASP This is something that actually we used internally so we can actually scan code and recognize different licenses And we contributed that to OWASP and we have also an SBOM utility Of course a lot of focus is on SBOM again but there is actually a lot of code out there that generate SBOM that are completely broken So we need to also have tools that help us you know validate SBOM Just first at the format level and then eventually try to go beyond that Try to understand the semantic aspect of the information ensuring that it actually is valid also at that level And the tool actually one of our colleagues is working on this Matt Rokowski And he is trying to do things like being able to show the difference between two versions of an SBOM Because SBOM are going to be huge typically you know they contain a lot of data Even if it's technically human readable practically it's not The crub is laughing you know what I'm talking about And so you need tools that will help us you know try to manipulate this data And so he's working on a diff that will help you see what has changed from an SBOM to another So when you go from a version to another We also have made some contribution to Scorecard which is a program developed as part of OpenSSF Which basically runs a bunch of tests against an open source project or repository And they will you know give you some notion of how security is based on a whole bunch of different criteria And not just the code it's not just trying to find vulnerabilities It's more about you know the policies how the open source project is governed Do you have like you know peer reviews that are being enforced and things like this And we have actually worked again trying to we are interested in being able to see the evolution of the Scorecard Between different versions for instance And then there is another thing that's coming out of IBM research You know why we are focusing very much on this SBOM that typically tries to you know pass the source code And try to understand all the dependencies out of passing the source code They took a different approach which is to actually look at the actual binaries And basically come up with very smart technology to have a very fine footprint or fingerprint of the code that's running So they can actually recognize different components and be able to have a digital signature of a program And so there's a talk about this at 6 p.m. today And if you want to know more it's really fascinating I encourage you to go attend this session Yeah our colleagues out of research their propellers spin pretty darn quickly So I highly recommend that 6 p.m. slot if you can get there So we've I think we've did pretty compelling story between myself and our know I wanted to return to these four silos associated with open security standards They remain important they're going to become even more important And they're going to sprout more teeth than they currently have So we all collectively need to be engaged in paying attention Open source code this is a great opportunity I talked earlier about how early 10 years ago it was all about standards And then now the pendulum is swung where it's largely dominated by open source We're going to see the pendulum swing to some new equilibrium I'm not going to predict where it's going to land But this is a huge opportunity for the open source community and standards organizations To more proactively figure out how to effectively work well together Open source projects don't need to become standard specialists per se And standards organizations can't develop software development capabilities at the drop of a hat So we need each other And then with better intelligence and analytics and best practices We can really help get our arms around what is a significant problem And lastly for the folks here in the room and out on the web We've got some recommendations about what can you do to get started in this space I mentioned the open cybersecurity alliance early on I would really recommend that if you're in the industry check that out CISA is actively holding open calls And again that's not for everyone But if you're interested in that space and you've got a way to contribute Go check it out In the open SSF we have some great best practices guides CROB has done some great cat herding to put together some valuable information Definitely want to recommend that At IBM we have an IBM security community And you can figure out what we're trying to do to try and again break down silos And develop better execution against this And then as another proof point Our last link in this is just from a week ago And the federal government, if you hadn't caught it yet Has issued a paper that's basically doubling down on their perspective On the importance of standards Not just the federal government on a national level But on an international level as well And if you think about it It's kind of like analogous to the post-World War II era Where the U.S. invested in the rest of the world with the Marshall Plan And other ways of helping to reach out and establish infrastructure Across the globe that improved the human condition And in the last decade or so There's been a lot of sort of turning inward in the part of the U.S. administration Well, the current administration is basically planning a flag back into the space Saying the country needs to be more proactive in these international standards entities Provide leadership, ensure a level playing field And help secure the software supply chain And with that, I think we've gotten through with enough time For five or seven minutes of questions And we've got a roving microphone and we've got stickers Crabb, you want to prime the pump with a softball? So let's say I work for an organization that might use open source How can I potentially either kind of monitor what's going on with open source and these standards Or how could I potentially contribute to these efforts? Maybe how could I donate my time or resources or efforts to make this better? I'll take a first swing at that I bet there's this U.S.-based chip manufacturer that's got a great website That Intel might have a lot of information similar to what IBM's sharing up here About creating a community around cyber security But in addition to that Everyone needs to just step back and think about this space differently Because there's a concept that was early in open source called the tragedy of the commons And it's a metaphor about how when something belongs to everyone It gets overused, trashed, and ultimately becomes a fraction of its former self And honestly with our rush to embrace the value of open source over the last decade And the way that cloud platforms have driven up exponentially the consumption of open source The industry hasn't been doing a good enough job, IBM included, of maintaining that right balance When I talk publicly about open source at IBM I really, you know, my chest puffs up a little bit because I like to say I stand on the shoulders of giants In the early days of open source, IBM leadership really understood the importance of both responsible contributions as well as consumption And we all need to think about what is the right balance for us as individuals As well as the organizations we work for How do we strike that right balance of benefiting from and consuming open source As well as contributing back to make sure that it's a quality resource that will be there not just now or next year But for the foreseeable future And to follow up, I mean on a practical level, right My recommendation would be for organizations that use open source is to look at the open source they're actually using And see if they can engage with those open source, do they have best practices, you know, are they using best practices So for instance, I'll give an example, very personal I'm also involved in Hyperledger, which is another Linux Foundation project And you think, you know, security is a big deal for blockchain And when I started engaging OpenSSF and I found the best practices and things like vulnerability disclosures and stuff like this I looked and I said, I'm not sure Hyperledger is really, you know, up to notch on this one And I started bringing that up And I'm also a member of the technical steering committee at Hyperledger or technical oversight committee now it's called And I brought that up And I think this is the kind of, so now the Hyperledger is looking very closely at this and trying to improve its security posture And this is something that's fairly simple that any organization can do Is you look at the, and it's, you know, it's in a way self-serving as well because you look at the open source they actually depend on And you say, okay, what can I do? And it can just be this, being the advocate for this improvement in security posture Trying to, you know, make sure that people who are actually developing the software that you use Are aware of this movement because OpenSSF alone cannot reach out to all the different committees, all the different projects out there So we in the industry can all play a role in passing the world that there is something that needs to be done And I'll provide one additional answer to that with a quick show of hands How many had their holiday disrupted about 14, 15 months ago by Log4J raised your hand? About half the room raised their hands, the other half didn't want to admit it But I know that CROB, for example, as well as a number of folks at Intel and IBM and other places spent a lot of time scrambling And it isn't a question of if another Log4J will happen, it's a matter of when So the impetus to take action is now, it's not going to be a sprint, it's going to be a marathon But if we all collectively work at it like we'd like to do in open source And again, reach out to standards organizations and engage with them effectively We can start to move the ball down the field Okay, we have another question I'm Hassan Yassar from Carnegie Mellon University and also faculty member and so director at the research pieces I have been contributing many standardization IEEE, IEEE, Open Group, anything else We have a lot of standards, but you said that one is the best practice I think as a community, we have to think about a best practice So what that means best practice because best practice depends on who you're asking Depends on who are the standards owners What do you think about that the landscape have many standards but lack of best practices? Well, the old punchline comes to mind of I love standards because there's so many to choose from But beyond that, it is a big challenge I mean, if you look at my slides again upon review, you'll see many, many entities identified We can't all be everywhere at once So it really comes back to making sure that all of us have limited resources What's most important to your organization and you as a developer And where are you going to make some investments, right? Because the answer can't be, oh, this is overwhelming I'm going to just, you know, not participate And that's my high level answer I'll ask if you have any other thoughts on that No, but I was going to say something similar I mean, yes, there are many and I think anyone is better than doing nothing When I say complex, if you look at any standards, more than 30 pages, 50 pages Is it time to read the 50-30 pages of report? We feel your pain because that's one of the things We try to message back to the federal government as well as other standards organization, right? Simplification is needed Yes, thank you The correct response of something like this call to action around open source Shouldn't be that yesterday we had to read 400 pages of directives And now we have to read 600 So we're also trying to work through IBM's G.R.A. or government and regulatory affairs group To politely but strongly message back to standards organizations and governments That simplification and clarity of direction So that you don't have one part of government saying Oh, I own this and I say X And another part of the same umbrella government organization saying Well, I have a stake in this and I say Y So it's not, you know, there are going to be hills and speed bumps along the way It's going to be challenging I like to have a simplification like usually developing instead of 10 steps, 5 steps Whatever the steps are We can bring the level of developers and say Here is user 10 steps as an example I'll give you an honest answer again from an IBM perspective Because we're trying to solve three tough challenges simultaneously IBM is working hard to improve its own supply chain security internally And we're doing that with a mix of both third party products As well as IBM technology so that we can drink our own champagne Because customers come to us quite often and say Man, IBM, I've got this headache, you know, you must have had to fix this What are you doing? In addition to those two challenges, we're working out here in the open SSF Because what happens in the open ecosystem will be highly influential And if we just hunker down and focus only on those two tough initial challenges And don't actively participate like I know myself and others are doing What happens out here could have a big impact and put us behind the curve But I think part of the solution to the problem is also going to be tools that help You know, alleviate some of these excruciating work And we have also systems like Salsa And there's already a badging mechanism that exists in open SSF Salsa in a way provides a new type of badging That will, you know, kind of allow us to identify quickly Okay, this build system is Salsa level three And that comes, you know, with a set of guarantees that you can rely on And I think we're going to have more of that that will help us, you know So we don't have to get buried into all the details The requirements are at a much higher level that simplifies things And again, just total candor, and we've got one last question coming up Is that right now we're doing a lot of this SBOM generation in part manually Because the quality of the tools available isn't there yet But ultimately we have to find a way to crawl, walk, run towards a level of automation Because the scope of this problem is such that it really is going to require, you know, better tools and automation I have a question My question is, can I get a sticker? Absolutely On that? And show us the tools page so we can take a photo of the URL So the SBOM utility, when you click on that, where does it go? Oh, the, go to OWASP Yeah, it's actually, this is the original, but it's been contributed to OWASP now So you can go directly to OWASP Absolutely And in closing, I'd like to really thank my colleague, esteemed colleague, Arno Because I submitted this talk with another IBM colleague based out of Germany He was not able to arrange his calendar to attend So Arno jumped in and, you know, with his accent He most expertly covered the European landscape much better Exactly So thank you all and thank you Arno Thank you for being here


But with the world champion on the inside of you It is a tough call to that run to that first corner, but Who knows it could just be Robert Lambert's night But for Jason Dahl apart from one poor ride where he just got a bit of an actress on the inside gate He has had a pretty smooth run through this evening Winning three races from the outside gate. Could he make it four here and the all-important Final here this evening in Croatia It's been a terrific night of speedway considering the conditions we've encountered There's no doubt that some these riders really have dug in and shown great skill and determination to power their way through to get to the Completing for the completion of the meeting Jason Dahl on the outside He likes it there just doing a bit of gardening first final of the year And here's the lineup for it then Bartosz Mardzik on the inside on a warning in the red helmet cutter alongside him Robert Lambert and gate number two in blue Gate number three and white is Freddie Lingwin. What a night He's had to get to the final and Jason Dahl on another warning going from the outside in the yellow helmet cutter Brilliant stuff here for more laps who's gonna sit on top of the Russell stand on top of the rush room here this evening Would it be the world champion will we see a debut win for Robert Lambert in the final here this evening He's ridden superbly world. He's looked really composed here tonight as well. Yeah, he has a very lingering when he's got nothing to lose I don't think at one point tonight. He would have expected to be in the final Well, it's not the worst gate, but he's the only rider out there that's ridden in every single Croatian Grand Prix, so he's got the experience It's guaranteed 14 world championship points even if you finish this fall So it's been a good night for Freddie even before the tapes go up here. Here we go then So He's up on his bike the race will continue Smartix out of shape now running very well, but he hangs on to it Back in second place Freddie Lingwin looking like he's gonna be on the rush on this evening He can just hang on in there, but the world champion out in front Looking good set for back-to-back wins here in the Donya Kadyevich stadium Brilliant stuff from him Lingwin's not just selling for the bronze medal tonight He wants to get past Robert Lambert. He's got the pace to do it, but meanwhile Sparsely Stealing a march up front just enjoying himself Brilliant stuff from the world champion one lap to go Stunning got a feel for Jason Daly was there all but there and just got himself in a bit of a trouble and lifted Round the last turn First win of the year for Barthol Sparsely the world champion back-to-back victory is here in Croatia the Millennium Stadium fans on their feet Deligently have won here once again gets his campaign off to the perfect start here this evening under difficult conditions He touched the tapes earlier on he was under pressure But he's shown great resolve and character and the class has shone through superb stuff from Sparsely That's why he's a three times world champion He just works through difficult conditions work through his own mistakes and well We've got Robert Lambert also celebrating down with the fans But that man there Barthol Sparsely Couldn't have asked for a better way to start the defense of his championship brilliant stuff superb stuff From all three there got a feel for Jason Daly was just there just Be a little bit pretty so frustrated, but nonetheless is still a great showing from the Australian But for Robert Lambert, it's not going to be too much Lambert before he is on top and winning Grand Prix Great showing from him throughout the evening. It really has been rock solid But you just can't count smarts like how when you look at the stats when you look at the numbers He is the man. He's just a little bit too good right now But I sense with Woofering and going well Lambert riding strong he's there Freddie Lingwin healthy Lingwin. Yeah, Freddie Lingwin healthy There's plenty to get excited the result then of the farmers Smarsley counting front He won nicely Lambert back in second place Freddie Lingwin on the road on the roster in third place and Jason Doyle We'll see it now. Just missing out. Yeah, it's such a bad luck Jason. Do I gets across there I don't know if it was a right or it's just body position But the bike just lurches forward he's got absolutely no option at that point But to get off the thing and bit of disappointment for him but sportsmanship he gets straight back up wants the race to continue and You have to take your hat off for him for that because he would have been feeling that he would be so disappointed But he's made the final fourth place, but it's all about Bartosz Smarsley this race just gets himself out in front and Pulls away from the opposition with Robert Lambert coming under a lot of pressure from Freddie Lingwin But what a start to the defense of his title brilliant stuff. Yeah, the perfect start for the reigning world champion winning here tonight in Croatia As you say, it's the perfect start for him And they're probably quite relieved to see Tyler Wiffen didn't amply not make the final here this evening But nonetheless Robert Lambert pushing on there in second place great scenes. These are So we will see the world championship standings after the opening rounds here We know who's going to be out in front It will be Bartosz Smarsley who picks up the big 20 points Lambert on 18 Lingwin on 16 great effort from Freddie Lingwin How's he done that Jason Dahl 14 Wiffen and still good night for 12 points for him Mikkelson 11 newly on 10 solid start to the campaign for those top eight Jack Holder on eight Max Frick when you look down here some big hitters Leon Madsen and Matej Yanowski work to be done Nine rounds ahead of them, of course, but they need to find some form before they get to Warsaw in two weeks time So Celebration times with the presentations to come Smarsley He's still hungry for it, isn't it three world championships in four years just got out battled in 2021 Which was an incredible season by Artem Leguta but apart from that Bartosz Smarsley is the best rider in the world right now and I sense he's not going to have it all his own way There's some of these riders really beginning to believe that they can take it to him, but All in all in difficult conditions This comes through in flying colors. Yeah, he has that's what makes him a champion Yeah, just him and his team work so well together, you know, they're so relaxed in the pitch when things go wrong. He's touched the tapes They don't panic. They just work out. How do we make it right? So now let's get some reaction from the winner on the night So Bartosz Smarsley gets down there and it's going to be joined by Scotty Nichols Yeah, I'm joined by a round one winner Bartosz Smarsley Bartosz You came in as favorite and you just show and show why thank you very much and I'm all winter missing for that This feeling that I feel now Yeah, you had the pressure on you you touched your tapes earlier You didn't have it all your own way, but you showed a lot of character to come out and win in the final Yeah, but I'm very good feeling on the practice and after fierce hits the second hits Maybe tape for me in this moment So better that the start from gates three so hard and after maybe you know too much change on the bike that when I take the tape I'm staying the same setup for the old night and Keep and keep and very hit so more better. It was difficult conditions. How good does it feel to win round one? Ha so nice Feeling clearly I am all winter missing for the this film what I'm feeling now Would you like to say something Polish to Polish fans? Thank you very much that so many fans came here to support us Polish so thank you very much and see you on the other stadiums Fight for the world I think It starts well Good bye.  Congratulations Yep truly Outstanding performance from the world champion no question about that if you heard it there Kelvin Bartosz Smarsley is addicted to winning and so yeah, and That's that that's not good news for the rest of your competitors. That's for sure


Dave White, what's going on? Well, I want to go back in the way back machine to when I heard somebody on the air tell me that they paid a couple of tuition to college on trading options expiration on the OEX. Exactly. Circa 2001, 2002. Right. And three. And there's just, if you can get it right and you wait for the fastball down the center of the plate, how much and how good these trades can be with a little bit of risk and a huge amount of reward. There's no doubt. And what you hope for folks many times when Dave's talking like this is you hope like there's a huge amount of movement on the Wednesday before the Friday. Are we on the Tuesday? It doesn't matter, right? You know what I mean? Or in this case, man, this is gonna be really wild because we're gonna lay right at the highs. Who knows? But talk to us about what you're gonna be teaching, Dave. Well, we're gonna go through all the different things that I use to put together a trade. We had a really good one in AMD going into options expiration last month. But how you put all the different things together, sometimes you can look at 1,000 different indicators and all it does is confuse you. You can go with one and it's kind of hit or miss. I like to think of it as kind of an ensemble. You got four or five good players together. And they get to play in real well together and you've got a jazz ensemble and you kind of go with what moves you. You're not stuck with the idea that you start with. The music can kind of move from then. But I like to call it kind of a jazzy ensemble of indicators that I use to put together the trade, which are things like the options expiration chart. And if you figure out where the most amount of money is gonna be lost, it gives you kind of a good idea. I take that a lot further. In fact, the first big article I presented was Christmas of 2004 in stocks and commodities. I remember that, that was so cool. Setting strike price at probability and expiration. Yep. A lot of the stuff still holds. The difference is that there really isn't an OEX to trade. So the numbers have kind of changed. But they all kind of track back in and we'll go through that. There's some other things that we'll be handling. Let me find it here. Well, and you know, it's so cool folks. It's so cool about the option market that Dave does. So picture, we're in the probability business. And of course, inside the option market you have premiums and you have decay. What we're talking here though is we're realistically talking that Dave's gonna be doing this on a Wednesday and he's gonna be trading the Friday options. But you're gonna learn so much because the fact of the matter is that yeah, there'll be a lot of them that are at the money. But then when Dave puts this together, as I just said, he's gonna know where the options are. He uses his power vector. And that makes a huge difference. So over the course of the years, Dave, it's pretty cool how you built on top of the aspect. And I feel like we always seem to have an edge. I mean, because of the fact that good, you can get the options, but then, okay, we're looking at the rest of this to say, okay, hey man, I think we got a little edge here. Right, and two, you can find options for a quarter or 20 cents. And if you write just 50% of the time, if you get one that's a quarter and goes to a buck, you've got pretty much the makings of a long-term strategy that you're not winning a little bit all the time, but when you are winning, you're winning so much that you go way out in front. And that's kind of my model. I wanna try to be as right as I can, but I know that maybe I'm gonna be right 50% of the time, but like last month, I'll have options that maybe at 60 cents average that go to three bucks. And those are the ones where you can really figure out that you don't have to be perfect. You just have to be right on the long-term. And it's kind of turning the stock market on its head where you're the house now. And of course, there are the people coming in and betting at the last minute. So you get kind of a really nice risk reward, but you have to pick your battles. You have to be a rifle, not a shotgun, and figure out how to do those. But yeah, everything from my power law vector indicator, which in last month, I was looking for a few things and my sector oscillators, they showed a bottom in the SMHs. I found AMD and it was also making some really good pictures. I thought it was gonna go to 78 to 80, and then like the 78, 50 or something, but we were able to buy starting at around 75 bucks. And under, down to about 73 bucks, the 75 calls. And of course, it went up to 78, 30 or something like that. So you get 60 cents, you turn it into close to three bucks. You can be wrong the next couple of times and still make a lot of good money, but you've gotta know how it all starts. And it starts on this Wednesday with everybody going Delta neutral. That's when option market makers start hedging all their bets to make sure they don't lose their shirts because it now costs them more money than normally they would make. So it's kinda, I say it's kinda like an arms dealer starts selling arms to both sides because he doesn't want the war to be over. He wants to- They can kill us, now I'm with him. He wants to continue it on. That's right. And of course, I have some other proprietary stuff. Let me get it here, I wanted to pop it up. I have what are called options expiration charts. And not only the number that they point at, but the way that they point at it in the forms, there's about eight major patterns that I look at. And they'll tell you whether or not you should look at that as more of a range, or this thing's really pointing to pin at expiration. In fact, we talked a lot about it on Friday shows about Apple pinning over and over every option expiration to within a lot of times 20 cents of the biggest loss that there could be. And that's kind of what you're looking for. You're looking for a good indication that the option market makers, people involved in the market wanna push this thing around a little bit because there's so much money to be made. Right now on the S&P 500. A minimum of $2 billion is going to be paid out right now at expiration. Now that'll move around. They'll start buying and selling them and that number will move, but that really starts on Wednesday when they go delta neutral. And from then on, you can start seeing what the option market makers believe. And of course, they're the best traders that there are on Wall Street. If they weren't, they'd be broke. And folks, it's very easy to commit to this workshop. You can just come over to our website at TFNN. You're gonna see right into featured content, the path of lease resistance. You just hit that button. You can get the path for one month for $119. Six months for $599, a year for $985. They all come with a 30 and many back guarantee. Bottom line, just get in, get the newsletter. It's a great newsletter. You're gonna get a great education. If you wanna understand how Dave looks at the option market, it's really cool, man. Been doing it a long time and you're always looking for an edge. Dave, thank you so much. Have a great one, safe one. We look forward to show you tomorrow.


During somatogenic meiosis, chromatin changes due to transcription, homologous recombination, and chromosome synapses must be coordinated. Here they show that AMYC and BRDT regulate release of paused RNA pool II to induce a transcriptional burst during packaging of prophase I. This article was authored by Adriana K. Alexander, Edward J. Rice, Yelena Lujik, and others.


Thank you very much Nathan. Many thanks to you as I understand the main organiser but also everybody else who contributed to the organisation. This first presentation can serve as a form of introduction. And so I will try to place the Persephone tool in context as exemplifying the benefits of interdisciplinary dialogue between computer scientists and field workers. Linguistic fieldwork is probably very familiar to all of you, but I'll still recapitulate briefly what it's about. This is the core mission of the research centre where I work, Langues et civilisations à tradition orale. So this lab was founded over 40 years ago to document and analyse under-documented languages and cultures. And the languages on which fieldwork has been done so far are indicated by pins on the map. So the pins in red are where PhD students are currently active. The pins in white are where people have been but have not archived any data yet. And in orange is where some data are available from our open archive. For instance my own fieldwork took place here. It has its little pin on the map. For people familiar with South-West China, here is a close-up map showing the position of Nasi. So the Nasi language you may have heard about it because it's famous for its pictographic script. And the pictographic script area is shown on the map with little red dragons for the corresponding places. Now, which is the language I'm doing most fieldwork on, is spoken at the border between the Chinese provinces of Yunnan on the south and Sichuan on the north. Then you can see that Myanmar, you can't see it, but Myanmar is just across the black border and Tibet to the north, northwest. So since 2006 I have conducted nine field trips in this area, specifically in this village, transcribing and analyzing materials and learning to speak the language. So this is what it looks like, the plain of Yongning. It's inhabitants in festivity costume. Here are some water buffalos which were introduced as a 21st century innovation for plowing. But now, less than two decades later, they have already been replaced by tractors. So this is at the same time a 21st century site and already a thing of the past. So things are changing quickly. Here are some mountain streams, villages, and here is my teacher. And this is what her voice sounds like. So this is a Sino-Tibetan language and when working on an unwritten language, one needs to work out the sound system in order to be able to transcribe. The knowledge of neighboring languages helps, although there are generally some discoveries to be made. This is where linguists come into play and we know the distributional analysis to work out what the vowels and consonants are, what the restrictions on the combinations are and so on. And as soon as possible we begin recording texts. We transcribe them with the help of the consultant and we annotate them. So this is a passage from a story where the multilevel annotation allows one to spot the mismatch between tones at the sentence level and the underlying tones of individual words. So this is near the beginning of a story. It's said that there were two siblings and you can see from looking up the word by word that, for instance, the sister, younger sister, doesn't have the same tones in the sentence where it's nimi, halo, and in the word by word glosses where it starts with a mid-tone. And this is what I study as a linguist. We can also have any amount of lavish notes, translations into any languages we want. And now when we get to analyzing the combinatorial properties of tones, we can look for instance at, he went hunting the montiac. So we know the tone of the noun, the animal, the kind of animal, the verb to drive away, to chase, and how they combine into a tone. So this is the first step where the object and verb have a certain rule that tells you what the tones are going to be like when you combine the two, a bit like declensions in Latin or conjugations in languages that have it. In this case, when an object and a verb get combined, well, if you know the tones of both, you can know the tones of the output, but you have to know the paradigm. Then there is verb serialization, he went hunting, and some post-lexical processes. So this is what I did, doing the big tables saying if you have an input verb that has high, mid, low, or mid-high tone, including the sum categories, and monosyllabic objects or dyssyllabic objects with this or that tonal pattern. This is what you get at the, what people say, how they combine, tonally. Now it's been a few years work, more than 10 years, so all the resources are available online. It's open access, it's Creative Commons license, so everybody is welcome to use it for their own research or for some other purposes. And the excerpt that I showed you a moment ago is now shown in its online setting that anybody can look up without having to download any tool. It's all in the browser. Files can be downloaded, including the original audio and the full annotations in XML format. We have the metadata that you can also download in full. You have a reasonable sample laptop saying who's the speaker, who did the recording, the annotating, everything. And we have DOIs, that was a specific request by Nathan who said the archive is good and it shall be usable when you have DOIs. So not really as a suggestion or a question about what you think about DOIs, and we didn't think very highly of them, but a request to implement them and so we did it, an overlay of DOIs. And they do facilitate citation for people who want to refer to a specific sentence within the text. They can have a one-click link to that. And my book was proudly published in 2017, so that's dropped on, in a sense. But the problem here is now that we do have some of the files that are transcribed, those that have a little scroll as an icon to the left. And that's okay, most of them are, but as you scroll down the list you get this whole list of stories that sound interesting about adopting pets, about dogs and cats and how they're seen locally and how long in living memory they have been around and the fact that dogs are special friends, kind of totem animal and lots of information, but you only have the audio and no transcription. And it's unlikely that I will ever do the hand transcription for all these recordings because it takes so much time, maybe one hour for each minute of recording. So if the story about pets is nine minutes, that's nine hours, but I can't do it completely on my own. I'd need to be with a consultant. And now, you know, like, aging people, I have to. I don't have to, but I chose to supervise PhD students and have other administrative responsibilities, and if I'm happily in the Himalayas transcribing all this and annotating it, somehow I'm not doing all the tasks I should be doing. So I could say, you know, posterity can manage. They've got the dictionary. They've got my book and my dictionary, so they should read my publications. The linguists say that. And they can just do what I did, look at the gloss text and continue for themselves. But I see Mandana nodding her disapproval. And having limited access to these documents for now for my own research is a problem because if I want to track the use of construction, that's not so common, but I do feel one can, I can hear some instances. I would really like to navigate the whole corpus.  So then I couldn't have some stories again, a new version. And sometimes she would talk about an interesting topic, and I said, ah, could you record this? And you say, okay, think about it, prepare it. Every time when it's in the box, it's something really very precious to me. And having access to those beyond just the way file is important. So for me and for other interested users. So when you think about this situation, maybe it's all because of digital technology. So if there were no digital technology, we wouldn't record so much materials. So this is text by Franz Boas, 1902. And this is the same method that we apply today. People will tell a story that they are confident narrating, be it about their own family or skills that they have, how they learn to make a crossbow, for instance, or traditional folk tales like this story. And the reason why he didn't record reams of text is because there were no audio recorders at the time. And so now we have these digital technologies, and we can record basically as much as we want, even video, because we've got big hard drives. So it's a digital problem. So maybe digital tools could also help us solve the problem that they've created by using natural language processing. You know, automatic glossing, automatic transcription, automatic translation. And somehow they owe it to us, you know, clean up the mess that they're creating. A difficulty is that our method, we are happy with it. It's tried and tested, it's more than one century old. And so as linguists, we don't want to give up what we already know, what we already have, for some fanciful alternative that may work, you know, 67%, but what does it mean if it works? 67% that we can't get students to graduate and we can't finish our grammars if it's just 67% accurate, right? And spending a lot of time wading through the errors and doing error analysis sounds like maybe we're not doing our job and we have lost track. So this is where the dialogue with natural language processing begins. And it is a pretty slow process. My own first attempt was in 2014, I was in Hanoi in an engineering centre. So that was easy. There are lots of toolkits for doing NLP, including speech recognition, automatic transcription. And so a colleague in the same room said, you know, let's try the automatic processing of Yongmimna. We'll develop a light acoustic model, light because, you know, you have so little, so few data for this target language. And then we will also try to complement it with heavyweight models from five national languages. They had Khmer, English, you know, Chinese, German, French, something like this. And at the time it was interesting, but very far from practical usefulness. There were lots of errors, so you could think about, oh, isn't it curious that when there's a... in the microphone it gets transcribed as a uvula, as if it were the syllable ko, but that was not practically very interesting. Now, when it did become interesting was when Oliver Adams, who is fortunately here with us today, did a PhD at the University of Melbourne and tried various things, including transcription by means of a neural network with connectionist temporal classification, which is... you can date it from different periods, but mostly it's something from this decade. It's something that allowed for much progress in classification, so typically you have a sound and which phoneme is that, how do you want to classify it, given that you have a finite set of phonemes, and in language it has to be one of those. So the input to the tool was audio plus transcription aligned at the sentence level, and importantly the training was done from extant fieldwork data, so what I had collected that far, and that was data from just one speaker, about three hours of notice. And that was appealing, not having to work for the tool, saying, you know, you have to record different materials, you know, red materials, I can't do that, the people don't read, or having a whole lexicon, I didn't have the lexicon ready at that stage, so it was just saying, given the output of your fieldwork, this can be fed as input to a tool for transcription. So this is the training set. What really matters is the audio, and a sequence of target labels. So in this case just retaining the initials, the rhymes, so the consonants and vowels, because it's mostly a CV language, and the tones. And this was in 2017, late April, and Oliver had said, you know, I can try something, but it won't have tone, and I thought, you know, that's a pity, because my book is about tone in Yongning now, but anyway, you go ahead, you show me, and I'll tell you if that's useful or not, and in the last few days he said, I found a hack, and now there's going to be tone, and what is it like? And so this was the audio. And in the first line there was just one error, which was the tone on the copula nie, which should be a low tone, but when you come to think of it, the last three syllables, they are mid low low, but that's realized as gradually going down. So the low tone in the middle is phonetically more like a mid tone than a low tone, because in that language, when you get a sequence like mid low low, you don't rush to say mm mm mm, you get mm mm mm, it goes down gradually, and the way people process it, which is language specific, they get the tones right without having to really stick to a three level scale with high mid and low. So that sounded very, very promising and really useful practically for the new transcription. So of course, this is just phonemic transcription, it doesn't understand the words or chunk into words really. So you have to do that at the spelling, sorry, at the punctuation, add comments saying that B here is not to go, but it's the adversative morpheme, and then I would check some things like is it this tone or that tone and make notes on those, I put those into comments, and then the translation I still do by hand. And then you can compare for a test set that was already transcribed and is not part of the training set, the output of the transcription with the linguists' transcription and see, you know, do the error analysis. And some colleagues said, you know, that's too good to be true, there must have been a mistake that if you have 85% accuracy or something which is on the order of 13, 14, 15% error rate, especially for an off the shelf model that hadn't been worked on very long, but just getting the thing to work and obtaining this result, it has to be something wrong because when people speak, they don't give, there's not 100% of the phonemes as neat segments in the string when they talk, some words get gambled, and for instance, you know, Mrs is from Mistress, but now it's went its own sweet way because in that context it was used as a title and not full noun, and some people today wouldn't know that Mrs Smith is from Mistress Smith, and that's what languages are like. So the first part of our answer to, you know, it's too good to be true, it can't work, is that we're doing what would today be called open science, it's documented, the code is available online, the data sets are available, and the results. We get is available online too. So there's GitHub repository, where this is available, and it's open for anybody to look at those materials relating to Persephone, and that's the whole list of parallel text for the test set. It's called story fold cross validation. I learned some technical words that was fun. It means you take out a story, retrain the acoustic model on all the rest of the materials except that, then apply it to that story. So it counts as, you know, the tool doesn't have the answer, and then you can check, compare it with the linguist transcription. So we have those sets here, it's too small to read, but this is the parallel text sentence by sentence of the reference. Sometimes it's a bit generous because there are errors in my transcriptions that a word gets repeated, and I only wrote it once, and then the algorithm gets about mark for not being up to the gold standard, which is sometimes not so golden, but anyway, the materials are online, and people can check. And the second part of the answer to, you know, is it too good to be true, is it really working, is that other people very soon worked with Persephone. Hilaria worked at the same time as there were tests with Na, there were tests on Chatino, so Hilaria also is present today. Chris Cox, who will present tomorrow, worked on Dine, which used to be called Athabascan. So in Na, it's a language of Canada. And only yesterday evening, I got a note from Emili Prudomo, who said that they were working on Cayuga, which is an Iroquoian language, and they were using the same tool. So probably it is replicable. It's more about exhaustive transcription, so as Nathan said, you need to have everything transcribed. If you correct the transcription because there's mistakes in it, then you should do it in such a way that the computer can still recover the spoken string. So if people want insist on additions, you can place them between square brackets, for instance, and then that can be disregarded for speech recognition purposes to train the corpus because these words are not spoken in the audio. And conversely, if they said things that they really want you to leave out, because it was a stray sentence that they began and never finished, then you can use angled brackets or some other explicit encoding. And then for purposes of learning what the phoneme sounds like, they're perfectly fine. Even a word that is mispronounced would be okay. If you transcribe it phonemically, put it into the machine, probably it won't do any harm. Okay, so there are some habits to adopt and that can make a difference for some people, but that's feasible, I think. Another thing is that multispeaker will be very hard to achieve, and that's things I've learned all of this from Oliver, so I'm doing the text to speech, but here's the brain behind that. But that's common knowledge that if you want a tool that will work for men and women, and young and old, and different speaking styles, then you need to have very, very solid statistical basis, and sometimes it won't work because you can't expect somebody talking into the microphone at SOAS to have text that conforms to your expectations based on whatever happens to be in the English Wikipedia or something. So sometimes it can be good to have overfitting. So overfitting means that the computer doesn't generalize a lot, the statistics don't generalize a lot, they just recognize things that patterns they've already seen, and departures from that would really confuse them. But it's okay if you're transcribing, you know, most of my data is from one speaker because it's a very complicated language only, maybe a little like Chatino and other Ottoman languages. I don't have a replacement speaker. It sounds very awkward to say it because it sounds like I'm describing an ideolect. But all the community members I worked with, apart from my main consultant, they differ subtly in their own patterns. So I mostly recorded data from one speaker. So if I can have a tool that helps me work the 75% of her recordings that I didn't get around to transcribing, that's good, that's an achievement in itself. So overfitting to that speaker is not necessarily a terrible evil. If I could just add in one thing, there's a distinction worth making between a multi-speaker system that can capture the speech of multiple speakers in one model and a model that can generalize the speakers that haven't seen it. It's perfectly possible to have a speaker system that recognizes multiple different speakers well if it's seen those multiple speakers in training. To get a multi-speaker system that generalizes to speakers not seen in training can also be done, but that just requires a lot more data. So there's two different multi-speaker cases worth this dimension. But when you say a lot more data, what does that mean? Maybe an order of magnitude more to get the same accuracy. And this is all just very rough rules. They don't apply generally. But say what you could do with one hour in a single speaker case, you'd maybe need a few hours to do a multi-speak system and then maybe 10 times that amount to do a multi-speak system generalizes. So would you call that speaker-independent by the time you don't need to bother whether they have training data for that person? It's a speaker-independent ASR. And multi-speaker ASR would be multiple people that you know and for whom you have data, right? Yes? It's a weird question, but why would you refer to your... Why would you refer your event or the organization? Why is the organization named after the Greek goddess of vegetation and the underworld? Is there any reason for that? Yes, you can look it up on GitHub. It's open science. We have no dirty secrets or terrible hacks there. So the reason for choosing a Greek mythology is that this is where prestige is. And the reason why we're happy to have this event at SOAS, which is a very prestigious institution, Nathan carries with him the prestige of ERC and many other wonderful achievements and we want prestige. So we wanted a Greek goddess. We had the phone in Persephone and it sounds like, you know, phonetics and phonology. We'd love to say it in French. It's Persephone. Yes, yes, yes. Which is probably much less truthful to the Greek. In fact, it has no relationship to that Greek root. It used to be a goddess that was there before the Greeks moved in and they kind of preempted her into the local pantheon. So she would be goddess of nature and things like that. And so the phone is phony in there. It's not a real phone, but it did sound nice. And the real reason is that, you know, she got abducted into a very unpleasant place.  But you're looking forward to the other half of the year when you will see the light of day and maybe computer scientists feel the same when they have to find out materials which are theoretically conforming to a list of phonemes that the linguists provided. In fact, they get tons more. And the linguists say, well, of course, there are Chinese borrowings, can't you see? And of course, they've got different phoneme inventories. And you feel like, well, OK, maybe there should be a little more explicit about their methodology.   But it's good. And somehow you can survive spending half the year and you can do it until time eternal. So we also hope that the dialogue will continue for a long time and that there shall be plenty as befits the goddess of, you know, growth. And so that's the story. OK. So let's me see if I can be back on track. I won't dwell on this. This is the kind of benefit for researchers to say, why would we want to do that apart from practical benefits? We get other benefits such as having a kind of signal-shaped view on our own data, which is different from our ear-brain-shaped view. Because as we know, when we learn the language, when we do fieldwork, we have to learn the language. We should learn the language. And of course, we adjust to many things, that alphonic variation. We learn to overlook it because we want to get the phonemes. And more generally, we adjust. And we don't hear differences like, for instance, words of four syllables in this language. They are nightmare for Persephone, for the tool. They are wrong every time. For instance, this is the main protagonist in the story, Achiduma. Achiduma. And not one time out of, you know, more than 10, does the name come out correctly in the transcription, automatic transcription. And if you look at the spectrogram, it looks like Achiduma, Achiduma. So calling out to somebody. And when there's four syllables, but you're saying them at one go, because it's one person's name. Then of course, they get shortened. Some of them get lengthened. The R and R that follow get together. And there's glottalization at the same time. So it's difficult to retrieve them from the signal. So this is something I wouldn't have paid attention to as a linguist, that in this language, every verb is monosyllabic. Most nouns are monosyllabic or disyllabic. And the family names which come from Tibetan and the given names, they're all four syllables. So it can be four or six. And of course, when people say them quickly, they sound pretty different. And here we have a statistical view on that that's saying yes. At some point, they're a subsystem. It's almost as if they were encoded differently, pronounced differently, and called for a separate decoding. So this is something we presented among other publications we did. One was at the latest Congress of Phonetic Sciences, so with Oliver, also Chris Cox, and Céphrine Guillaume, who's an engineer at La Citeau. Phonetic lessons from Automatic Phonemic Transcription. Preliminary reflections on Na and Sud-Ina. And that's interesting. So to summarize very briefly, defining that Chris made on Dine, he found that the orthography used to have, how many is that? Three or four vowels. And as one less, they think in the current speech. So people disagree. And now we're still distinguishing the R and R. And others will say, no, no, it's gone. Listen to the Yama speakers. So he has orthographic transcription for Sud-Ina. And the orthography makes the difference. And then he sent this in with the audio to train an acoustic model, and then applied it to new data. He has an ELAN plugin, which has been online for a few weeks now. It's wonderful that you can look at a recording in ELAN, and press a button, and out comes the transcription. And he found that the patterns for the two vowels that people said probably had merged, he thought they had merged. They were still coherent in his main consultant's speech. And they matched the lexicon. So it seems like probably the consultant is still making a difference. It doesn't prove things like artificial intelligence shows that. But it's one hint among others, and it's an encouraging finding for people who do orthography, let's not just dump this vowel distinction, which goes back to Lee Fang Wei, who did the first fieldwork, and make it simpler for the younger people to learn. No, maybe they should, since the people who still speak the language probably make the distinction, then just keep it going and see to what extent they can deal with that. So there's a kind of dialogue between the linguistic fieldwork and the work with the consultants, about which Hilaria will say much more because she has a much stronger tie to the local community than I do, despite my best efforts, between that and the NLP tasks. So basically this is most of what I want to say, most of what we have got to do for now. But I wanted to emphasize that it's an interesting process, and I think there's a side benefit for us as citizens that we can get awareness of contemporary developments. So this is also things that I owe to Oliver, though it's on a personal note like sending me a link to a fun video. I think all of you should watch this wonderful video. It's a keynote speech by James Mickins from Harvard about the whole conference was about security, computer security. And he took some very creepy examples and said, if you are currently maybe overselling a little a new artificial intelligent device that will do this or that, think before deploying. And if you want even shorter advice, it's think first. And in one word it's don't. Whatever it was that you were intending to deploy, don't do it, don't do it because we're kind of running headlong into a society where people get a yes or no on mortgage loan or whether their kids can go to university or whether they should be allowed out of jail after some time in there.  It just says that you should stay in prison and you can't easily call that into question because it's a black box, essentially that's behind it. And people who know, like Oliver and his colleagues who know how things work, they know that, of course, that the bias, if I declare the wrong set of phonemes, I'm not going to find the missing phoneme thanks to Persephone because what it will do is categorize all the sounds to what I say is the finite inventory. But maybe we could change the tool in ways that would allow it to point out the outliers, maybe find there's a pattern in the outliers and we could do lots of things. And that's a way to think of those systems that we should know about those. I put the book by Edward Snowden, that's kind of personal interest. So I found it was a very impressive book as a piece of writing, not just the man did his thing and let's buy the book and support him or something, but because it's such an informative book for citizens in this day and age. But unless we take classes in computer science, I try to listen to online classes by Graham Novig and they're really good and there's lots of things online. But doing some work with those algorithms is extremely enlightening because then you think, okay, if it works for now, then it knows something about the phonemes if it can recognize them. So how can we open the black box and see where the boundaries fall, learn about the acoustics to do some explicit modeling of the languages acoustics based on these statistics. And there's no easy way to do it now, but because there has been progress, then we can look forward to a future when other stages such as translating from and into newly documented languages could be a possibility and try to make those possible because technology will not just happen. Well, things like that, as Edward Snowden revealed, things like that do get deployed, but we don't get to learn lots about it. But we can spend some time working with computer science people and get, I think, multiple benefits from those. So, yes, for field linguists, there is the usefulness. We have some good prospects. Just from a couple of days ago, we're happy to report that project on computational language documentation funded by the FGA in Germany and INEI in France will be funded. So we can now have a 15-month contract of a programmer who can complete a good front-end for Persephonean, hopefully many other back-ends, multiple back-ends. We can continue the improvements to the back-end and think of the links to other treatments. If you have a dictionary, then if you have the phonemes, look if you could match and make hypotheses about the words that are in that string of phonemes and et cetera. So I guess I should... Yeah, this is a small community we're trying to build of people interested in computational approaches for documenting and analyzing oral languages. So the good news is that there are some computer scientists who have a long-term commitment to this kind of research and some linguists. And with a sufficient community growing at the intersection, things can get done. And this is just final photographs and waiting for your questions.