Okay, we're all set. All right, so we can call this meeting to order. Yeah. At 6.03 PM. 6.03 PM it is. All right. So did people get a chance to look at the. The meeting minutes from last month. Yes. And are there any changes? Guess what? I have no comments. All right. I have nothing to say. Good to me. All right. Well, are you going to make a motion first or are we good? Well, you said dead. He did. Yeah. Yeah. So the vote is everyone. All in favor. Unanimous. I'm going to save. Yeah, really. We're going to move through this quickly. I think tonight. Public comment. There are no attendees. So that means. I think we should come in. We can amend this and have them. Come into the agenda. If everyone is in agreement with that. And so then we will move forward. And again, I'm going to put Sarah on the spot. But first of all, we have to read. We have to take a vote tonight to reappoint Sarah. We can put that into the minutes. To the community. So I, I'm a little bit of a fear into my heart. I mean, I'm supposed to chair the first meeting tomorrow. I hope. Yes. So we just have to officially and I'll let Meg. Make the motion. Reappointer to the community preservation act committee. All right. So I moved to reappoint Sarah to the CPC. All in favor. You didn't miss. All in favor unanimous. Who seconded. I'm sorry. I did. Okay. Thank you.  Second. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Likely. Can I say the only update I can give is that. Yeah, we haven't met, but I and the town manager and the residents advisory committee interviewed. Candidates for the. For Nate's position, the, um, at large seat. And I believe the town manager will appoint somebody. The planning board also has to appoint a new representative. Um, but I'll be surprised if those seats are filled by tomorrow night. So. Yeah. Yeah. But our work is just beginning. What is the total number of seats on the. Nine. Nine. And so how many. So we have. There are five. There is. Historical commission. Uh, housing authority. Conservation commission and LSSC and planning board. Uh, I don't know. I don't know. Okay. Good. Um, so it, it sounds to me like they are still interviewing. So again, if anyone is interested, I would encourage you to apply. I know back. You had to express some. Yeah. I thought we were going to connect before I put in my application, but I did work on my application. Okay. I'm just going to. I wanted to just touch base with you after the meeting. And then I'll submit it. Oh, awesome. Okay. Well, great. Um, and it's a little confusing. I'm not. Sure. If seats will be, I'm not sure if the list, the membership list on the website is up to date or not. It might be that others are going off. I don't know. So if you're interested, just put your CAF in. And if you explicitly mentioned CPA committee, then you will definitely get interviewed. Great. Okay. Thank you. Strategic plan next steps. So at this point, I wanted you to hopefully you all have your calendars. I'm trying to come up with a date that we can schedule to meet with the together as, as a committee again with, you know, so staff members, commission members to sort of hammer out our priorities for next year. Um, I think at the last commission meeting, we talked about certainly the name change being one of the top priorities. Um, so we, the other part of this is I'd like to establish a subcommittee that really focuses on the marketing end of this. And I know that you staff has volunteered to, um, help from, you know, the commission. Um, this is, uh, you know, it's not enough. I'm not sure we have to vote on this, but I'm not sure we have to vote on this. Um, but I'm not sure we have to vote on this. I'm not sure we have to vote if there's anyone else interested in volunteering. That would be great. I think two people from the commission, probably. Two people in myself, uh, two staff members and myself. And I'm not foreseeing a lot of meetings, uh, because I think we have some, you know, some really talented individuals and we, you know, who know about marketing and. Um, I'm not sure we have to vote on this. Uh, on this the, there is a little caveat here. The move has not happening as quickly as. Well, I kind of anticipate it anyways, but it's, it's not happening as quickly as I would hope back to the bank center. So I think that we should probably proceed. Um, with the name change before we did, you know, and not wait on the move and hopefully get that underway this fall. I think it will work. I think it'll work. I think it's been a long time since I've been here for the last year around the first of the year. So that depends on what the committee, subcommittee decides. How does that sound to people? I would be willing to. Do that. Hey, anyone else? Come in. Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, maybe what we could do is yeah what do you think I'm gonna have our marketing guru take the lead on this what do you think Yusef do you think we could just bring as many people as whoever wants to be involved in this you know especially if people get busy so that way even if we don't have everybody it'll be a good group but I think maybe if we do like the name change and now say sometime mid-fall and then when the move happens we like introduce the logo or something like that you so that'll give us kind of a phased approach to it I will not volunteer for that one I understand you're you will have your plate full yeah absolutely okay that sounds good then because yeah I think there may be more than one or two also on the staff who might be interested in being a part of this so we'll just we'll do that that sounds great so was there a date that I want to start with you guys first that is better toward let's see I'm just looking at my calendar over here I go off screen maybe the week of the 20th of September I can do any day except the 22nd any day but the 22nd and pretty much that's my entire month it's just I have jury duty I don't know what that's gonna lead to all right I imagine it'd be an evening meeting six o'clock like this every time I get jury duty I end up on cases so lucky you that's hard that's hard work the 23rd do I hear that that's a Wednesday that works for me all right check on my schedule that doesn't work for me let's let's do another one I can do Tuesday what works for you Victor Tuesday works Tuesday what time Tuesday doesn't work for me yeah okay doesn't work for me either Monday Thursday Monday or Thursday 21st of the 24th Thursday Monday is the golf tournament for the Chambers so I'll be busy yeah we're bit so 24th you aren't going once that was good going twice sold so sounds good what time 4th 6 p.m. is that that works all right so I will let the staff know that's happening awesome thank you so that would be the meeting of all of us and then from there probably you said I'm thinking like the first week of October we pulled together the other group yeah so that this will be the big meeting and then we'll we'll go we'll do the subcommittee meetings later is that work sound good okay well you reach out to Stephanie and see if she's interested in thank you for reminding me of that I will yeah just making a note and subcommittee okay right to then brings us right up well we are moving very quickly night any any more comments about the strategic plan I think yeah now it's just now the work is ahead of us and taking those goals and making them a reality it's kind of exciting very excited all right so quickly the coming up next is the director's report let's grab the right paper I'll start with sports what's happening in the fall believe it or not we have actually two three four five six seven different programs sports programs coming up in addition to what's happening at the golf tournament at the golf tournament that you've got my use if you've got me on the golf tournament again in addition what's happening with the golf course but so we have Amherst youth football the co-ed non-contact we're having clinics for second through eighth graders non-conduct obviously I said ace tennis instruction the ultimate skills clinic that is happening that actually starts tomorrow youth cross-country we have a group SN the sugarloaf mountain athletic club track clinic that'll be happening and we have a group and I'm not sure Meg maybe you know what this stands for NESC junior soccer yeah so that's happened for K through sixth graders and then a new problem program called girls on the run for third through fifth graders that we'll be hosting ourselves so it's a this is great a lot of good stuff Nick's Nick's gonna done an outstanding job pulling this together and we we just have a lot a lot going on so this is great in the sports world in addition to all his multiple shifts at the golf course the field as far as fields and facilities the co-facts league is I think winding down now and however the fall ball for the for the little league is happening the I was out just recently over at Miller River and to be honest with you the fields are looking a little tattered I kind of feel bad about that because I know they they put a lot of money in and volunteered a lot of man hours and woman hours to to make those fields much much better so hopefully they can get them back into shape but they said that that that program is going to start on sort of a you know mostly clinics and things like that so that's good aquatic yeah questions and just yeah I'm in any time please okay yeah is the drought causing the on the field I mean I think I think the issue was that the DPW would have gotten in there at least a mo that they have a lock on that field that DPW doesn't have a key to and then it was quite overgrown and I think we also I think different parents have come on board you know different rates of enthusiasm this happens it kind of cycles and unfortunately it just seems not to have been cared for in that that feel those two fields are generally taken care of by the associations it is it really proper that they have that they can spend they can lock it off to I think DPW is working on that with yeah they were they were surprised yeah all right they may have done it to keep dog walkers off there without realizing that that's also keeping maintenance workers helping out all right okay aquatics Grop Park a little stumbling block was closed this past weekend much to my chagrin I didn't know about it until later unfortunately so we had actually planned to have staff member up there over the long holiday weekend and we were doing to do conduct some surveys that person was going to do that so those weren't we weren't able to do but apparently there was some sort of a mechanical issue and I haven't yet been informed whether or not that has been resolved hopefully that will be taking care of soon and it is scheduled to stay open until the 27th just like the pool at Mill River so I'm hoping that we hear good news and it's nothing too serious as we move forward but I know the kids that I saw using it when I was up there and it was working just loved it things were going really well and and people were just so enthusiastic and happy to have that as a resource and it's just fabulous so and I'll keep you informed as to where we are with the status of that the folks at the outdoor pool at Mill River exceedingly happy that we're still able to continue keeping that open till through the 27th just heard lots and lots of good positive feedback and you know we're just giving the community something to do and you know there's a physical fitness certainly component to that especially for the lap swimmers who utilize the facility but every it's basically full all the time all the slots are pretty much cool of course you know the weather is cooling down that may change a little bit but so far it has been remarkably popular which is great and we've been able to staff it based largely on the fact that schools are opening later I'm not sure we would be able to do that if that wasn't the case so we will continue doing what we're doing we're also monitoring continue to monitoring the social distancing there the on the on the deck in the pool and the deckhouse and people still for the most part everyone has come with positive comments about how safe they feel at the facility which is excellent we're still looking at ways and just begun the process really of exploring ways we could possibly use the middle school pool during the pandemic and the school courses I'm sure they're protective of their thus keeping their space secure so we will see what happens I'd be great at least if we could offer open swim in the weekends but we'll see and all of that is contingent on what phase we are in the governor's sort of regulations as well Becky I was gonna say the phase one reopening does not have students in the middle school it has phase one students going to the high school so that will buy like some time when no one's actually using the building for learning and with the polling actually went really really well within the building the buildings on election day that was what the superintendent said during his school committee update so there might be room for that negotiation for until at least phase two which is November could you expand on that in terms of being went well like what the clean up afterwards yeah the town had a protocol for clean up afterward and it the superintendent's update was that it went really smoothly and like they had no issues kind of thing and there is projected to be classes the day after the next voting cycle which will be in school so if you know if metrics you know are within the projections then students would return the day after voting which means that maybe some of those concerns around excess people in the building after the fact will have been addressed uh-huh very good thank you any other questions around aquatics all right so let's move to the golf course really exciting news is actually play has been incredibly brisk I know we we brought in almost close to $38,000 in revenue in August which is unheard of we haven't I can't remember when we've had brought in that much revenue and that's you know whether we're not doing our pro shop at the way we normally would our beer and wine cells are not quite when it's not in front of you sometimes they don't think about it they're more apt to unfortunately bring their own in which they're not supposed to but so that is mostly golf and carts which is pretty incredible so we're hoping that that trend continues certainly a lot of that is driven by the student population and with the student population and different and lots of beginners we have we've seen you know we've had some challenges on the course but John's been able to dress address those as as they come up in terms of you know if there's damage or other incidents that happen there but for the most part I think it's it's been terrific and it's a really it's just shows you know if it's that we're able to provide a resource for people you know recreational resource and it is being taken advantage of by lots and lots of folks so that's great a lot of new faces up there a lot of new golfers and so that's really exciting you said did you have I know you golf a lot there so I'm sure you wish it was more yeah I know I'd get in trouble no but it's definitely you know obviously the weather didn't cooperate you know as for the actual health of you know the grass and stuff like that but you know right now it's back you know it's kind of looking very happy now so after aerating actually helped a lot too with the greens and you know it was good what you could tell the difference when when you were able to get more people to work with John you know so I think it's good I'm wondering is the car usage a lot more as a percentage now that people are supposed to be one in the car um I'll have to look at that more closely to be honest I'd like to compare it to other years I'm not sure I would think you know just from an anecdotal you know it seems like there are a lot more carts being used when I come up there's few in the corral on a Friday Saturday Sunday definitely I mean this past weekend we were straight out and there was a point where carts just weren't available because they were all out yeah no I think it looks good then you know I think it's just I wish there was a way and maybe now with Nick having his first season under his belt you know we can you know I know a couple people that would be willing to help on it on like an ex-officio kind of committee you know to try to help them out and do different things and maybe bring in more beer sales have people hang out more and find out other ways of to get some income so well it's part of the it's part of the big picture beer and wine and and other snacks and and what have you there is just a difficult operation wouldn't wouldn't the state laws about our guidelines about no bars you have to have real food you can't just serve alcohol and snacks right but we'll have to look into that yeah but I'm finding a way around it you know money when we can and this is one of the only things that we do that brings money we do offer you know we have hot dogs and we have other snacks so I think we've covered that pretty well okay if we have people helping and working you know we can do more hot dogs and burgers or whatever you know the thing that we can explore a little bit more figure out how to do that all right and we're not a traditional bar at all and it's kept in it's it's a single-serve kind of operation so it's a little different than it's not a bar I just want to make that clear yeah I would say there's something else I want to just add on to what you have said is what part of the goals and objectives this year for the the town's budget and whatnot that whole process was to appoint an advisory committee and to look at operations so you know you said and if anyone else is interested in helping on that committee we'll probably pull that together in November so let me know or let you said no if you're interested in the two of us now our heads together and put together a committee of you know they're a lot of good business people out there certainly there's a lot of expertise at the university and within our membership I have we have some really capable people yes Sarah sorry there were those fellows or maybe it was one fellow came about a year ago hoping to expand entertainment options there would I don't know if he's around I don't remember who it was change I'm not really pushing to make it a you know money maker and yeah I'm not sure what happened to him honestly I haven't spoken to him since I think at least since he said he was gonna do that but again yeah so I don't know what's happened but well I mean I think you might be one to include in the contact if he is still interested because I think he was looking for some support from us to move forward with any changes yeah yeah I have his information I don't have it handy but I know who you're talking about yeah he was one of the gave one of the citizens proposals for the capital planning group and yeah capital group but anyways yep well thank you we can follow up with him I'm just trying to remember his last name but it's not coming all right so this is under after school but it's really child care so some interesting developments have happened and quite frankly I'm not really caught up on everything hopefully by next week I'll have more information and writing from the state I don't have it now but let's see I think it was Thursday the state came out with a new kind of relaxation of childcare for municipalities that in fact municipalities could provide childcare in a different way that it wasn't overseen by EEC which is the state entity that oversees our school age program but by local authorities so it would be much like how we run our our day camp so we're we're sort of investigating this the schools have approached me asking if LSEC would provide daycare at the middle school but they want to do it with all of the three different after school programs at one site I see your face Becky yeah and my first reaction was much like your reaction Becky it just doesn't make any sense they had they have between 17 and 30 families right now who are interested these members these would be children of staff members from the school and certainly there would be staff members from the town so those would be your first two priorities and I'm not sure if they anticipate opening up to the public or not I don't think so though so then it becomes we would be running three programs for ten kids each and I'm not sure how that would work so I'm I'm confused I'm concerned doesn't it just it doesn't make sense to me but maybe I'm missing something so I know that Marta Gravera tried to reach me today and we're playing phone takes so I will try to follow up with her in the morning and just investigate this a little more but I could see us instead based on the relaxation of sort of the regulations in the child care regulations and possibly our ability to provide child care at a different site a town-owned site let's say either the library the bangs I'm not sure where that would be that's still up for discussion that's not you know nothing cut in stone or anything here I would just at this point sort of brainstorming how this might work but I think would be better if we just kind of went and did our own program versus trying to do it with two nonprofits who would run separate programs in addition to ours at the middle school so I'll leave it there and now I'm open for questions and comments I just I had one so is this the same program that you were talking about the last meeting that could potentially be a cracker firm right and now they now they want to do it at the middle school correct you know now that I hear what Becky said about them not having any students there I sort of get where they're going there but I just don't see three of us all competing for the same kids just not working for me yep I got a question is this is this just is this just for a ton of embers employees I believe and again I haven't had the discussion yet with Martha Gravera but initially that was the plan it would just be for staff members from the schools and staff members from the town's children's children Sarah so is there anything for the residents right well that's what that's my concern yeah because I could use that could use it yeah I'm sure we can fill it and if it's even if it's a town town program you know I think it should include residents I agree I would like to see it expanded myself right I don't know how you just I mean I would be interested to hear what is the justification for using town resources specifically for town employees you know I understand the need but as Victor says it's a lot of people who desperately need it so I don't know I mean so I know you don't know much but don't I don't have that clearly we're curious about I feel like I'm sensing the same sort of concerns I have yep Becky my understanding as a staff person is that only staff who had children in school like K through six who were being asked to return to the building but did not have their kid like could not say they could return to the building because that they they did not have child care because the school that their child would attend was not in person in a way that would allow them to work which is why the district looked at it do you have any have you heard anything it's a rationale of having all three of the different providers be at the middle school that you saying it two minutes ago is the first I've heard of that and I it kind of goes against the blending of different groups of kids so I don't know if they're anticipating a survey just closed on Friday requesting child care or the deadline was like Friday to request child care if you were going to be returning to school um so I don't know if that was the reason for three or that like I'm not entirely certain I know that the survey closed on I think it was Friday afternoon okay yeah the person the individual I talked to is his name is Dain Dwayne Shambl and he works for Marta both of you know they do the outside of school I forget the official time out of time program there so um I was you know I voiced my concerns and then he said that that Marta would be calling me so we'll have that discussion hopefully tomorrow morning and I'll also have a discussion with the town manager tomorrow morning as well so all right so I just want to make sure we're all on the same page you I mean does anyone have a different feeling that we should be with the other two providers at the middle school no or any other really have any objections I just have questions so go ahead just learn more yeah I think we need to we need a little more information that's a lot more information that's for sure yeah I could say it's really like this is such a huge need right now and um but and I think we're well situated after you know holding the aquatics program by you know we're not through yet but we were very successful with that you know we know we know how to put our protocols down how to follow them and we've been we've been you know really vigilant and conscientious about making sure we have a safe space for folks to recreate and certainly childcare falls under our our previ so hopefully we can pull something together for the community any other questions all right just a few items related to adult and youth education it looks like we'll be continuing our online presence so doing a variety of different programs that we'll have in terms of virtual programming for kids but right now we're the only program that we'll be doing it's actually a zoom type program it's called real world math for middle school and high school age kids and and outdoors for adults we'll be viewing the the kujang and the yoga again and those have both been very popular with adults outside in you know and again but weather-dependent but has been have been extremely well received by the community next is special events so we've got Halloween coming up we're working with the bid and the Amherst chamber right now to to come up with some sort of programming for Halloween for kids um we have a couple of ideas that were sort of you know kind of percolating one would be um they're a trick or treat my ride Halloween car parade so a contest around you know families decorating their cars kids in the car is kind of themed out and whatever that that car looks like or however they want to present uh so we'd have a parade and at the end we would hand out packaged you know things for for kids the trick or treating i noticed some communities that already put out the word that they are not going to allow trick or treating i i'm not sure what Amherst is going to do but um and there may be something from the state i don't know around that so we're we're looking at you know just different ways to to have some fun certainly the the uh the the painting of the Halloween windows that we've done is something we think we can definitely pull off again for the different businesses and i think the chamber is excited to be part of that again and the bid and um and then the and then doing a program around masking you know maybe a contest and you know i have kids involved like online they could show us their masks and take pictures and i would just be really fun so so nicky is working on that with me and and um we'll have something to to put put forward and and happen in um when the Halloween went the end of the end of October so fun yeah any ideas questions yeah yeah jack the lantern contest people could bring them stick them on the common they you know it'll be hard thanks you know you carve it at home sure let me write you could write a number like if it were a contest you could write your last name on the back of it but light them up and stick them good idea put around the common mm-hmm see who can grow the big area what was that sorry victor who can grow the biggest pumpkin you know my my only concern with the trick my ride thing which i love in part but that that is only available to people who have a car so i want to find a way where other people could be involved um and i wonder if we could like i would love to think of a way that we could be more inclusive of people who don't have their own transportation um i went like maybe we could encourage what i was trying to think like i wonder if we could have materials to like make scarecrows and like like there there's ways that we could involve the community without making it dependent on a car or like trick your stroller kind of thing or you know a bike kind of thing where you that i think we were just trying to figure out a way to still have sort of a parade like we've had the kids love that but yeah that's tricky but what if we did have a couple of buses for kids that didn't have cars i don't know that would that be like other kids in buses i don't think that kind of separates people i see what you're saying i love you also have to spread them out so far on the bus but the type right it doesn't necessarily have to apply to a car i mean a stroller a some kid in a scooter and they just decorated just gotta be you know cars and strollers and bikes and make sure there's no one you know hits one another physically distance or something and differently the strollers go last or whatever safest we'll talk to the police we'll let them decide how we should do it yeah i think that's and yeah that trick my ride is anything that you how you get around bike stroller i like that you can also have the parades on different routes like you can have a bike parade down one section a car parade through the center of town like different ways where people would be encouraged to go downtown for a longer period of time and maybe grab some lunch or something but well just like a regular parade you got the marching bands go at one point you got the you know so you can have the cars go first at like say one o'clock and then the strollers and bikes can go at two o'clock or you know so it's ongoing but it's different things for different people we just have to be careful with the the gathering again we'll have to we'll work with the the the public health department and the police and you know make sure we stay within the guidelines make my question about this is i'm wondering like okay so if we do a car parade or anything are there supposed to be people at the side of the roads cheering or like is it just a parade of cars all hunking their horns probably going to be just a parade of cars going by the different businesses hopefully the business owners will be out waving the seniors parade though there was some decent attendance for the class of 2020 parade oh that's right so and that was socially distanced kind of at the height of like everyone's yeah of the pandemic so they had a long enough route that people could really stretch out kind of thing and they were in cars correct or they were in cars yep okay i'm just i guess i'm also wondering like if if we're gonna have families decorate their cars or their bikes or their strollers or you know whatever skateboards i don't know they can anything um who would actually be watching this like if are the kids watching i don't know like i'm just trying to picture are the kids in the cars yeah niki's idea is that they come to let's say the they finish up at the high school i'm just throwing this out i don't know for sure and then there's sort of a recognition if you will participation award and have you and then maybe trick-or-treat bags for each kid yeah i think this is some fun to do this is you know yeah with the family that's that's all yeah anything anything i mean if word comes down that they can trick-or-treat i mean how bad is that these poor kids yeah no fun we heard the halloween storm yeah yeah that's happened that's true all right any more on that i was i was mentioning jpm facebook live um like at the end of the parade so if people don't feel comfortable i don't know venturing out they can still see it you know the cars at the end of the parade come by oh that'd be cool do it live and then we could record it too so that's awesome yeah all right love these great ideas thanks all right let's move on um see niki's still going to it went in her spare time she's going to be doing um um let's see uh the program called um family samos i'm not exactly sure what that is and i still need some more details of what that is but it's going to happen on site at some of the housing areas uh in a socially distanced distant way um and also she's continuing to provide nature kits at puffers pond and gruff park uh quen offering corresponding program online so that is happening um in terms of outreach right now although she's been very busy i mean her schedule has been eating up a lot with working at puffers pond and at cherry hill so she is limited time right now so once that finishes up um we'll be doing more outreach talked about strategy planning so much so yeah all the staff just continue to work shifts at puffers pond um the senior center meal deliveries grace has been doing that we all worked um they all worked um as poll workers i kind of went or did my rounds to the various precincts so we were very involved in the election um at the polls and we'll do that as well in um in november so um all right i think that's all i have any comments quite any more questions i have a question please sorry go ahead someone else oh i was just going to say how long um how long do you anticipate people being at puffers for you know i think it's just about the same as the pools till about the 27th and that's weather dependent we've had days where we didn't go up because of the weather uh this weekend looks cool so i'm not sure i know i'm not anticipating a lot of crowds there last weekend was quite busy though and how about cherry hill how long i mean i yeah cherry hill will stay up until november 15th 14th in there again weather dependent usually mid we are there mid november any other questions comments great work okay well this is good so we'll we'll meet i'm excited about getting started on starting to implement some of the the goals and the strategic plans we'll get that going we're going to have a busy fall and with the name change it's going to be an exciting time for us um uh so on that note there aren't any more questions or comments we need to think about our next meeting date our regular this is in addition to our meeting with the staff sarah i'm sorry i'm sorry i should have this should have occurred to me earlier during the cpa thing um the the request for proposals i think is we hope that it'll go out next week sometime and i think uh it's the general hope that that the committees have looked at them ahead of time right that even if staff are developing them that that that they do come to cpa with the backing of the like the commission if there's if there's going to be a recreational recreation project proposed that yeah i haven't heard i'm sorry i did i may wrap but um right now i i don't i i had asked dav if we don't really have much but i'm trying to figure that out so do you know those are due so we can time this i mean we could do that as part of our meeting um on the 24th sorry did i miss we have a new commission meeting date no no the 24th when we meet with the staff we could do a you know use maybe part of that the very beginning of that meeting to talk about potential proposals would that work i think i think the um they do i think the schedule will will be going up if it isn't already on the website because i don't know if it's if it's actually the committee that has to approve it or it just comes out of the accounting department i really don't know i mean i've seen a draft schedule but i don't know if it's and i can tell if i can find it i'll tell you what the draft dates are but i don't know when it moves from draft to yeah i think we've got a little bit of time um it wouldn't be this quick so why don't we do that we'll add that to our maybe just to vote 15 20 minutes uh to our meeting on the 24th to discuss c-pack is that okay there's anything you yeah and then if we make a you know we we have and then we'll do i hopefully we'll have more of an update to you as if there is anything for recreation i kind of feel right now we have our our hands full with other projects that we're trying to complete so um you know the only one that might be the outlier is is mill river again if we decide to apply for a park grant we were turned down two years ago i'm not sure if there's um a lot of energy about reapplying this year so i uh let me uh dave's on vacation but i think he had mentioned uh in an email that i was just looking at before we started that he's he wanted to to get together and discuss um potential projects but okay well he should he should know he should know when they're due yeah yeah that's the only one i can think of um just and while i'm i'm talking about that the um the basketball court i've been assured by gilford that that work is going to start this fall on the basketball court at mill river so that will be the first phase of that is moving that to the west and enlarging it to include a children's uh section of court at mill river and renovating that that resource okay another kind of random question do you have or is there a timeline for kendrick park at all is there a timeline yeah um let me get that to i don't have it handy i know there's been some activity i was on vacation and there was there was a meeting that i wasn't able to attend so um i know there were deadlines and some some things that had to be submitted and i'm sure that all is happening as you can see there's activity at kendrick park now in terms of putting in that asphalt pathway um but i can i can provide that to you at the next commission meeting sounds good okay anything else all right then um next commission meeting let's see september october so the next if we were talking about a month away would be the second wednesday in october the 14th i can do that works for me that works for everyone tober 14th that's six o'clock okay next excellent all right make do you have anything else to add um i think that's it wow that got it done under an hour excellent all right so we'll see everybody on the 24th i will try to get you at least some preliminary information before then and keep you updated as to what's happening with child care yes sarah yeah uh unless i missed it you didn't send out your report in writing is that the case you know that was an oversight on my part i'm sorry let me just append it to the minutes this fine okay just append it to the minutes okay it's actually included in the minutes but if you want i can send it to you but i'll send it to you anyways yeah all right excellent well thank you everyone all right thank you have a great evening and uh we'll see you soon okay all right bye


No, I don't want to walk down the gorge. I want to die When I get a just push me just push me bro Challenge accepted I'm not sighing bro Look at what they are saying here I acknowledge that I'm aware the consequences of an accident whilst rafting On Zambezi River can be serious This is more like kayaking but a dangerous kayaking Good morning, how are you all doing?   We do take people who are not swimmers on the river This guy is giving me some confidence vibe man The youngest person we've taken on the river was 5 years old If a 5 years old can do water rafting Then I'm going I was told that this is the best place to do water rafting In the whole world In the whole world And I'm from Africa Today I must do it Whether you guys like it or not Come along with me Listen pray for me Pray for me Pray that I come back Because listen everyone is saying that You can't go You can't go You need to do water rafting And listen Zimbabwe is giving me all these memories I'll make it happen I trust these guys man Please make sure you're always behind me Just in case of anything Alright let's go Alright Good morning Good morning how are you? Great Are you ready for it? No But do you think I need to do that? Exactly Why is it so necessary to do water rafting? Of course more fun More action More fun More action Let's go and have fun And do some actions today Probably it's an exercise for the muscles That's what I read Let's go So we just arrived at the Victoria waterfall entrance And we're supposed to pay how much? $10 national park fee Okay To enter into the national park This is different from the price that you're going to pay For the rafting right? Yeah So if somebody is Like after my video Somebody get inspired I don't want to inspire you to come and do water rafting though Yeah but if you get inspired and you want to do this How much is the fee for water rafting? It's $150 per person Capacity It's $20 Together with a $10 or $2,000 a $10 $150 for the rafting Then $10 national park fee Okay So together you're paying $160 It's time to go do the payment This is exactly the same place we paid When we were going inside the waterfall A big shout out to Shockwaves For making this dream come true If you ever get inspired to go for white water rafting The only company for you to go with Is Shockwaves But listen Before you go You definitely need to sign your death sentence Inside plan I'm not signing bro Look at what they are saying here I acknowledge that I'm aware The consequences of an accident while rafting On Zambezi River can be serious Jesus Christ There's a 5 year old rafting Did you see the baby that's rafting? The 5 year old kid If that 5 year old baby signed this I'm signing it I'm signing it I'm signing it Now a whole crown guy now is afraid to sign 5 year old What's today's date? To the 1st of July 2022 By the way guys See you in first of August So funny To the top of the gorge now The top of the gorge? Yes Remember we need to walk down the gorge We're driving to the top No I don't want to walk down the gorge I want to die No I don't know When I get there just push me Just push me bro Push me Challenge accepted Challenge accepted So the drive is about 20-25 minutes Depends on who's driving It's me 10 minutes The first rider So it's 10 kilometers on the third road Then we go up road on the last road So 4-5 kilometers So we'll finish our drive inside the national park We're here Oh my god Please don't leave anything on the truck Oh my goodness I'm really not ready for this But I just have to do it We only leave once Sometimes you just need to face a few years This is the national park right?  No but we have similar foes in here Okay guys go for some humans Right after this he said you're done Can I go back home? You're not going back home yet? Uh huh Alright Too late buddy This was the scariest moment of it Or knowing that you cannot go back And the safety precaution Made me scared And to be honest I really wanted to give up When you're pulling somebody back into the ramp Who is a short swimmer You do not pull somebody using his arm like this We have to take advantage of the points of the left If I push you down When the left hand pulls you To pop out Then you become very loud As long as you listen to your guys Everything will be safe You're a good swimmer bro Yeah we are Go and save your friends You see He is your friend Hello guys He is like You guys You're listening to the safety guys You're like what are you doing in this early world bro Because it sounds so scary I don't know why I'm doing this I don't know who forced me But come on I think sometimes you just need to face your friend Do something Great adventure man Descending down the coach It's not easy Like it looks so scary Making sure Your foot Down the right place At the right place Because Yo And somebody just fell right off My legs are even shaking Like you wouldn't believe me I've never done anything like this before I love traveling But I don't like doing things I extreme like this But I feel like you know what Since you're on a journey bro Sometimes You gotta face your fears You know I mean traveling alone Is like facing your fears I mean sitting on the plane Every single day From one country to another It's very risky I mean personally I don't enjoy flying at all So Yeah if you can do it I think You can face your fear And do everything You just have to be brief Believe in yourself Have a positive mindset And make it happen Forgive me But I'm just trying to Inspire myself Till I get there I need to inspire myself Before I get there Alright So Yeah My legs My legs are shaking My legs are shaking Yo We're still going down there This is giving me a vibe So far I'm killing Manjaro man Let me just Put away the camera Before I fall down You know those videos About Stowaway The people that wants To cross their mediterrancy This is how I'm going to feel like Me I don't want to go to Europe I want to go to another African country So I'm just away from Zimbabwe to Zambia Wow look at that I'm excited Even though I'm scared But you know We only live once Let's go Experience this For the first time And it's time to practice Before we go for the real adventure Left turn This is whereby we want to spin Our boat to the left side On the right side So when I say left turn The guys that are sitting on the left side You pay to pay for it While it's the guys on the right They continue paying for it You will see our boat will spin to the left Okay So let's go left turn Back on the left forward On the right Right turn Back on the right Left Everyone get down Get down Get up Get up Get down Get down High five On the right side Please stand up Then guys sitting on the left side Turn around And hang your feet in the water Turn around Excellent Back to your position The aim of this gorge that we are after Is known as the Batoka Gorge Batoka Gorge named after The tribe of the Batonga people Who are usually found In this canyon Doing some fishing On both sides of the river So river left When facing downstream It's Zambia River right It's always Zimbabwe We revise the border between the two countries So today if you fall out and swim And you end up on the Zambian side No worries You don't need a passport today We don't give immigration people down the river He's not allowed in Zambia Alright team let's go forward Stay about today Right because you see my card It's got one look at the front Then one look at the back I come straight to you Okay I'm going to ask you to hold on to my card To get the prize We pay too hard to wrap it number 13 The mother And I'll ask you guys to get down Get down Yeah get down and hold tight Remember to get down Alright we'll get down And hold this right Yeah Everyone get down Get down Wrapping number 18 on Is all brilliant On a level 5 Stay you do that And focus and enjoy the ride This is one of the best feeling ever I'm just going to tell you that I was pretty scared From the beginning Four days trying to convince me But you know the power of a woman There was a woman who actually convinced me Such as doing this All her life And I'm like I'll do it too And here we are Here we are Yo it was so much fun So much fun I made it alive bro I was not expecting it But yeah If you have never experienced this You have to do it before you die I'm not sure if I'm alive or I'm in heaven Am I still alive? Really? Yeah it was amazing Amazing trip? Yeah How was your trip? Good Good The best part of it all Is the rafting But Climbing up here Is not fun bro Don't try this at home I'm sorry But yo It was so much fun bro I love to do this over and over again


It's a pleasure to be here, and I've enjoyed hearing the other presentations today. So I'm going to try to be a representative from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, but I don't know if I'll completely succeed. We have a pretty broad mission. But I do want to at least focus on two of the programs that we're engaged in. One is looking at collaborations with NHGRI in the reproductive prenatal and neonatal genomic space, and then I want to tell you about the Include Project to study Down Syndrome, which has just been launched and was alluded to by Dr. James Coulomb in his presentation. And then finally, I had to end with something provocative to try to keep you awake, so you'll have to stay tuned for that. So first of all, collaborations in reproductive prenatal and neonatal genomics. These are sort of a challenge. Now, you know, our broad mission, and you know what, I have to say, okay, here we go, is that although we are the Child Health Institute, I have to contradict a little bit about what Chris Dawson said this morning. We actually only fund 18% of the child health research across NIH. That means the other 26 institutes and centers are funding the remaining 82%. Now, that 18% is probably the largest proportion of any of the institutes at NIH. But nonetheless, there is child health research that is really spread throughout NIH. And our mission is one that includes studying pregnancy and neonatal health, childhood health. We also have the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research. So we have a large portfolio in rehab medicine. And then we have research on children and on intellectual and developmental disabilities. And this is a picture of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who in the 60s and 70s opened up her own private swimming pool to children of color with intellectual and other disabilities to swim, and was pretty groundbreaking in her own right. So that's what we're all, that's what we're trying to cover with a limited budget. When you think about selected human genomics topics that are funded by NICHD, there's a bit of a range. But none of these really is that well funded at NICHD. In the reproductive genomic space, we're only funding about $5 million in research and reproductive genomics. This is really underfunded across NIH in general. Prenatal genomics really includes the biology of pregnancy or epigenomics, and that's a little bit better funded, about $27 million. Neonatal genomics is only about $8 million, and even less for SIDS. So what we really are looking at is a dearth of research in these domains. So we have engaged in partnerships. That's what we do at NIH. When we don't have enough funding to really tackle something, we try to find other partners. And so in collaborating with our partners at NHGRI, we've been involved in the ClinGen project that you've heard about today, the Undiagnosed Diseases Network, Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Program. And then I want to introduce you to a program called the Newborn Sequencing and Genomic Medicine and Public Health, or INSITE program. So this has been co-funded by NHGRI and NICHD, and it's wrapping up its first five years. The goal is to explore the challenges and opportunities associated with the use of genomic sequencing in the newborn period, including ethical, legal, and social issues. Now you can imagine when you start talking about sequencing newborns, some people get their hackles raised. And so this has not been a project without controversy. But we also think it's very important to be systematic and thorough about how you explore this in a pilot manner so that you can actually start to make some progress and make some important discoveries. One of the goals is to compare with known newborn sequencing results. And there have been four funded awards that are now going to be completing a no-cost extension in August of 2019. These are the four funded sites. And they're really trying to answer one or more of these three questions. How can genomic sequencing replicate or augment what is known newborn biochemical screening results? Right now, newborn screening is really based on biochemical assays for the most part. So genomic sequencing has the opportunity to really augment or potentially replicate or replace conventional newborn screening. What knowledge about conditions not currently screened for newborns could genomic sequence of newborns provide? And then what additional clinical information can be derived and learned by sequencing newborns, not necessarily just newborn sequencing, but newborns for other contexts. And I wanted to highlight just a couple of the discoveries from the N-Site program thus far. One of them has actually been looking at comparing head-to-head exome sequencing versus conventional tandem spectrometry and has actually found that sequencing can augment but not really replace conventional newborn screening. But there have been a number of new genes that have been discovered and that can lead to new therapies. The baby-seek program has looked at standard of care versus next-generation sequencing for newborn screening and has found that for diagnosing rare diseases, certainly newborn next-generation sequencing is superior. I think that that is probably an obvious conclusion, but it's also been interesting to see how many parents of healthy newborns have been hesitant to sign their children up for newborn sequencing. So there are some barriers with regard to understanding and implementation. And then finally, Stephen King's more at Rady Children's Hospital has been looking at sequencing of very acutely ill newborns in the neonatal intensive care unit or NICU settings and has found that sequencing, rapid whole genome sequencing sometime with results obtained within 56 hours has actually improved diagnosis in up to 57 percent of infants and actually impacted their acute clinical management in up to 65 percent or more. And this includes interventions such as changes in medication or deciding that heroic efforts are not in the best interest of the child or the family and then referring to palliative care and even reproductive genetic counseling. So this is a pretty high yield and I think many people are wondering whether newborn sequencing in the prenatal period might also provide helpful information that can guide even the delivery of that infant and the neonatal care. I think it's a very, it's a relatively small jump to consider that prenatal sequencing for phenotypes that impact humans could also be replicated in animal models such as mice. So as a follow on to the end site program, we've been trying to decide what to do next and so a group was convened by Drs. Eric Green and Diana Bianchi, my director for NICHD and basically trying to explore these issues of genomic technologies, their implementation and ethical and social implications in the reproductive prenatal and neonatal genomic space. So we're saying we've already looked at it at least in a limited fashion in neonates, let's move it even further back. Let's challenge the LC folks as well. And so we co-hosted a workshop after about a year's worth of planning in April of 2018 and we involved many members of the community. It was interesting because we brought together people who had not typically interacted before and they helped us develop some strategies and some prioritizations of initiatives. And right now we are developing some new initiatives which I can't tell you about because they haven't been made publicly available. But the major questions for that workshop were really what current genomic technologies are ready for implementation in these three spaces in the reproductive prenatal and neonatal periods? What are the LC related issues and what are the challenges to implementing these types of genomic interventions in these aspects of human health? And we have an executive summary and a meeting report that are available online and if you Google NHGRI and ICHD and reproductive health you should be able to find it pretty readily. But I just wanted to highlight a few that I think have some relevance to your activities and the COMP and INPC initiatives. So just looking at implementation of genomics in health care one of the recommendations was to investigate and develop animal models that may inform the clinical issues across the lifespan. With regard to reproductive genomics as I mentioned our investment is so low and we really don't understand a lot about the genomic and genomic causes of reproductive outcomes and reduced fertility. We also don't understand the impact of aging and environmental impacts on reproduction and how impaired reproduction might ultimately influence the health of that adult as he or she ages. And then understanding the origin of de novo mutations and gonadomosaicism in germ cells is another area. In the prenatal genomic space we coined a new word which you all may have grown about and might say well we already know all about that. We call that embryonic lethality but we don't like to use the word embryo and fetus when talking to families and putting out public documents. Sometimes that's a little controversial. So someone has mentioned the intolerome. Those are genes that are critical to human development and in which mutations are not compatible with survival to birth as a source of gene discovery. And again I think we don't really understand embryonic or fetal phenotypes very well and understanding some of the genes that are part of the intolerome may give us some clues to help us understand these genes and their contributions. And as we just heard from Dr. Murray about 25% of your genes that you're evaluating have an embryonic lethal phenotype and even with sub viability that increases even more. So I think this is an important area that has really been understudied. And then of course we want to consider the lifespan perspective and the Barker hypothesis and really understanding how these changes in the prenatal and fetal period can predict later health and disease. And finally understanding the impact over the lifespan and the variability of phenotypes related to genomic changes. So stay tuned as we try to develop new initiatives around this space. So now I'd like to switch and talk a little bit about the Include project for Down syndrome research at NIH. And I think that everybody can recognize a person with Down syndrome. Many of you probably know individuals with Down syndrome so it's a relatively common condition. It's known to occur in about one in 600 to 700 live births in the United States. So there are about 5,300 babies born each year in this country with Down syndrome. And what's remarkable is that the lifespan for people with Down syndrome has more than doubled in the past 25 years. It used to be less than 30 and now it's between 50 and 60. So that's a remarkable improvement and change. And in part it's because of our improvements in care particularly for some of the previously life threatening comorbidities such as congenital heart defects. And this is just a graph that shows that in the 1970s cardiac surgery and infants became routine. And but initially it was not the kids with Down syndrome who got their hearts repaired. It was kids who didn't have Down syndrome. But then with screening and more interventions in the 80s and 90s, 97% of children with the atrial ventricle septal defects, which is one of the more common heart defects in Down syndrome are getting repaired. And now these kids really have superior post-op outcomes than kids who don't have Down syndrome for one type of defect. But this has really been a major sea change in leading to the increased lifespan for people with Down syndrome. So just this year, less than six months ago, in part because of some advocacy organizations that were very discouraged by the lack of NIH funding for Down syndrome. We've been hovering around 15 to $20 million a year across NIH in terms of funding support for Down syndrome. And so legislation in our FY 2018 omnibus basically directed NIH to develop a trans-NIH initiative to study Down syndrome with the aim of yielding scientific discoveries that would improve the health and neurodevelopment of people with Down syndrome as well as the general population. Because people with Down syndrome are to increase risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, leukemia, heart defects, immune system problems, autism and other conditions. In contrast, people with Down syndrome are relatively protected from many forms of cancer in most solid tumors. Rarely will adults with Down syndrome have developed prostate or breast cancer, for example. And they rarely develop heart disease or have heart attacks in spite of having other risk factors such as abnormal lipid levels and obesity and diabetes and other types of risk factors. As a consequence, we've developed an NIH initiative involving 18 institutes and centers. And we just spent $22 million in additional Down syndrome funding in this fiscal year. The Include project, of course we have our acronyms at NIH, right, we couldn't live without them. So Include stands for investigation of co-occurring conditions across the lifespan to understand Down syndrome. I realize that's a bit of a stretch, but the acronym is intentional. And in part it is because people with Down syndrome and people with intellectual disabilities in general and other forms of disabilities have been excluded from many forms of research in the past. So the first component is to conduct targeted, high-risk, high-reward basic science studies on chromosome 21 biology, to assemble large cohort of individuals with Down syndrome for comprehensive analysis and biomarker evaluation, and to include these individuals in existing and future clinical trials while building an infrastructure for clinical trials. So I wanna focus on component one because I think that has the most relevance to this audience. When we talk about targeted, high-risk, high-reward basic science studies, we really wanna include some of these topics, chromosome silencing. Have you all heard of chromosome silencing? I see a few nods. So the work of Jeannie Lawrence at the University of Massachusetts, she's basically taken the exist locus or a portion of the exist locus, put it on the extra copy of chromosome 21 to basically shut down that chromosome in a cell culture environment to really show sort of proof of principle that you could potentially turn off that extra dosage of genes in a relatively controlled manner. So that's kind of a pie-in-the-sky type of therapeutic approach, but it's a really pretty exciting basic science type of discovery. We also wanna encourage people to look at multiple genes on chromosome 21 simultaneously, not a gene-by-gene approach which has been taken in the past, and unfortunately has not been very productive or successful. We also want these basic science studies to look at the epigenetic, metabolomic, transcriptomic profiling in model organisms, and I'll show you perhaps the most used model organism in this field in just a moment, but also look at induced pluripotent stem cells and brain, organoid, tissues, systems, and other model systems, and also the development of novel model systems and potentially novel mouse models. The goal here is that component one will inform the more clinically oriented components that are also a part of the include initiative. So I have to tell you a little bit, just a little bit about the mouse models for down syndrome. There is no such thing as the perfect mouse model, as you all know, but certainly not for down syndrome either. The problem is that the genes on human chromosome 21 are really distributed across three different mouse chromosomes and that has created challenges. The most common model is the TS65DN model, which is indicated here on the left. So it has 90 genes from human chromosome 21, 90 orthologs from 21, and then the problem is it has some extra genetic material from another mouse chromosome and it's missing about 56 of the genes that are found on these other two chromosomes, 17 and 10, mouse chromosomes that are basically centenic to the human chromosome 21. And these mice are also challenging to breed, but that's really been the best model for far and some of these other models each has its flaws and its limitations. This TS65DN strain was developed at Jackson Laboratory and I mentioned where it derives its genetic material. The mice actually replicate the human phenotype in some very important ways. They have developmental delays, some learning problems, they are hyperactive, they exhibit poor growth, you can see that they're smaller than their wild type lermates. They have some craniofacial features consistent with Down syndrome, as I mentioned they have reduced fertility particularly in the males and they do develop the amyloid plaques that are characteristic for Alzheimer's disease and seen in humans with Down syndrome and with Alzheimer's disease. And you can see this little ditzel of extra genetic materials, a freely segregating extra chromosome found in the TS65DN mouse. And so we have a contract with Jackson Laboratory to make these mice available. They've been successful in really making sure that to the best of the ability they are stably breeding and breeding at maximal capacity. They've eliminated a retinal degeneration gene that was in some of the mice that had been carried on. This is my poor attempt at humor, these are three blind mice because they were before they were able to breed out the recessive retinal degeneration gene. They've developed some sperm cryopreservation methods that can allow transmission through those rare fertile males. The parent of origin studies show that males and females transmit the phenotype equally well. And then there's some additional strains that have been added to this resource at JAX to make mouse models available to the Down syndrome research community. And really why this is relevant for Include is I think we would all agree we need better models of Down syndrome but we need well phenotype models that really replicate these co-occurring conditions which is the emphasis for this initiative. And ultimately it would be ideal to have a very robust model that could be used for high throughput screening pipeline as we develop drugs and therapies for this condition. So I'm not gonna go into great detail but I just wanted to point out these were just published on the NIH website yesterday and we've indicated these are some of the 49 supplements that were funded through the Include project so this is $22 million worth of money to supplement existing grants that either had a Down syndrome focus or could add a Down syndrome focus. And some of these I think are really speaking to some of the mouse phenotypes that I know you all are interested in. And some of the models and they cover the gamut from looking at models of cardiac development, looking at cell growth proliferation, looking at immune system dysfunction. I mentioned to you the studies to look at chromosome silencing and so Dr. Lawrence is actually gonna try to turn off the extra chromosome 21 in adult mice, TS65DN mice with this extra copy of genetic material using her model system that she's developed and see if she can prevent the development of Alzheimer's-like dementia in these mice. And then Bill Mobley is actually studying a treatment to try to prevent the neurodegeneration scene in these mice as well. So the second component of Include is to assemble a large cohort for panomics and biomarker studies and I think as mentioned by Dr. Coulomb, we have just co-funded two kids first XO1 supplements to study a large cohort of individuals with Down syndrome and either congenital heart disease and or acute lymphoblastic leukemia. We're also looking at another cohort with acute myelogenic leukemia. And so those two groups will be part of our building cohort of Down syndrome individuals that have had intensive omics evaluation. We're also planning to utilize the Down syndrome registry that's been developed by NIH and is available to families with a loved one with Down syndrome and this is known as DS Connect. And basically this is a place where families can enter some basic molecular, excuse me, some basic clinical information about their loved one with Down syndrome and hear about, learn about, be connected with research projects that are of interest to them. And none of this would be possible without the affiliation of our 17 institutes and centers who are part of the Down syndrome consortium, excuse me. I think there are 14 of these and 17 various advocacy groups that are also very engaged in trying to understand Down syndrome. And the final component for the Include project is building a Down syndrome clinical trials network for inclusion of these individuals in existing and future clinical trials. And I wanted to use the example of Alzheimer's disease. So we know that because they have three copies of the beta amyloid precursor protein which is found on chromosome 21, they're at very high risk of developing dementia in their 50s and 60s. We have just been funding for the last three and a half years the Alzheimer's biomarkers consortium of Down syndrome with the National Institute on Aging which is really studying over 500 adults with Down syndrome over the age of 25 and looking serially with them over the span of five to 10 years to look for cognitive tests, brain imaging changes, genetic studies and blood markers that will help us identify those biomarkers that predict which of these individuals are at highest risk to convert to dementia in the next several years. And we think that this cohort can be a good starting point for consideration and preparation for clinical trials to test interventions for individuals with Down syndrome to prevent some of the side effects of dementia. So this shows you a graphic I mentioned to you before how pathetic our funding was for Down syndrome from 2008 to about 2016, hovering between 15 and 22 million or so and then with this year's funding we've gone up to about 58 million per year and we're hoping to continue to increase that over the next several years. We have our work cut out for us but we'll see how it goes. Now in my last few minutes I just wanted to pose a challenge. Can you all tell what this diagram is? Does anybody know? He's throwing down the gauntlet. So yeah, the internet is an amazing place. You can find all kinds of interesting graphics. So anyway, my challenge to you because I'm also representing the Intellectual Developmental Disabilities Branch at NICHD and we have some problems. We have no good therapies and drugs for intellectual disabilities. We have problems with diagnosis and with identifying genomic bases. And so I just wanted to throw this out here and see if people have some ideas for how there might be partnerships that could evolve that might be helpful in this space. So as I mentioned, I think it's really difficult to identify the etiology for intellectual developmental disabilities and autism, particularly when they occur in isolation.  But that doesn't happen that often. And in particular, intellectual disability oftentimes occurs by itself without a lot of other physical manifestations. We certainly don't understand the role of an environment, epigenetics, and other factors in complex IDD type phenotypes. We don't know a lot of biomarkers, target molecules, or pathways.  I don't think it's impossible, but I think we want to start with more reasonable goals and things that can be addressed in a relatively reasonable timeframe. Number one, it's hard to measure IQ, hard to measure it in a mouse for sure. And it's also hard to measure improvements in IQ in a relatively short timeframe that might be part of a clinical trial for a drug. And then the comorbid conditions for many forms of intellectual disabilities are really hard to treat. And I want to highlight behavioral and psychiatric problems because those are oftentimes occur in children with intellectual disabilities, and that can be what is really devastating for the families. So, up till now, animal models have been of limited, not no utility, but they've been of limited utility for complex human intellectual disability conditions. And I'm just gonna take a slightly different spin on what Kate Rowne told you earlier today about what happens in the clinical genetics realm and what the power of next generation sequencing has meant for the potential here. So, although I've just painted a dire picture, I think there's a lot of promise here. So, in the 70s and 80s, if you came to see me in genetics clinic, I could maybe do a chromosome study and maybe diagnose four to 5% of individuals who would come through the door. With the advent of the 80s, we developed fluorescence and situ hybridization. We could probe for specific areas that might be deleted or duplicated. Maybe that bumped us up to around 15%. With genomic microarrays in the early 2000s, we really started to see some traction and seeing diagnostic yield going up in the 20 to 25 or 30% range. And this is picking up chromosome micro deletions and micro duplications. And now, with whole exome and whole genome sequencing, we are approaching diagnostic abilities in up to 50, 60, and maybe even close to 70% of individuals. So, this is huge and it's just happened within the past decade or so. And so, we're scrambling to catch up. What this means in terms of gene discovery is that we now are looking at in total genes, this little black line here, somewhere around 600 to 700 genes that have been implicated in intellectual disabilities. But we need better screening approaches with regard to identifying those variants of uncertain significance and actually interpreting their meaning in the clinical context. And this is why, this is one example of a way in which I think people are starting to do it. It's already been mentioned to you earlier today. The matchmaker exchange and some of these wonderful tools for really crowdsourcing to connect patients, clinicians, researchers, and investigators who are doing things like you're doing. I mean, it includes the Monarch Initiative and others to really try to identify causative genes, confirm that they're causative, and then hopefully develop biomarkers and treatments. So, this is really my final slide of interest. And I just wanted to sort of throw out to you what I see as some opportunities for collaboration with the fine work that you're doing with IMPC and Comp2. So, are there opportunities to investigate and develop mouse models that can inform the clinical issues that we've discussed in reproductive health and fertility? I realize that fertility is a challenge because if you make a mouse that's infertile, it's kind of hard to propagate and study that downstream, but not impossible. And I think that there are maybe subfertility and other creative strategies that can be used to identify some of those genetic causes of reduced reproductive capability. We talked about the intolerome or embryonic lethal genes, a little bit about epigenomics, fetal programming, and neonatal phenotypes, where we really don't have a lot of information. I think there are opportunities within this new Down syndrome initiative, and I think it also provides a challenge to think about understanding the basic biology of chromosomal disorders and by extension conditions that are associated with copy number variants. So, we've all been talking about single gene changes today for the most part, but has anyone really thought about, could we model a contiguous gene deletion condition in the mouse in a way that would be meaningful and would help us understand these phenotypes? I think that genes and genomic disorders that underline developmental disabilities and autism need integrated approaches not only to confirm causation, but then to take the next step, which is to develop biomarkers that are gonna help us figure out whether an intervention is gonna be effective. And all of this requires a data sharing approach, big data, data integration, team science, and this is what you guys are good at. So, I think that the environment is right for some of these opportunities. And really, I'll just leave you with this final question. What is the best role for marine models in phenotyping and in translational medicine for intellectual disabilities and for the other conditions that I've described? So, that's all I wanted to say. I just wanna thank my colleagues in the Intellectual Developmental Disabilities Branch, my colleagues also in the Developmental Biology and Structural Variation Branch that I've been sort of temporarily working as their chief too, and all of my clinical colleagues and other colleagues in this space. So, thank you.


So if we can stop sharing and Estelle can start sharing her slides. Can you see my slides? Yes, we can. Okay, I can start whenever you want. Okay, the next talk will be from Estelle in Mac on the traditional neural annealing. So you can start it anywhere you read it. All right. So thank you very much to organize us for giving me the opportunity to present a very recent work that hopefully will be out soon. And it's entitled version. So what we are trying to achieve here is okay, one second. So is that we want to solve optimization problems and optimization problem are ubiquitous in different areas. So be it in scheduling in science and industry in finance. So here I gave a couple of example here you have the so-called traveling salesman problem, which is a problem where you are actually you want to know the shortest path for let's say a businessman who is traveling to a certain number of city walls and you want to know what is the shortest path of it. Right. This is another problem in less in quantum chemistry where you want to know the minimum configuration of atoms interacting gas on potential gas protein folding crime. We want to know what is the native state of the protein and yes, portfolio optimization where you want to know what is the best way to to invest the asset you have in the portfolio and then there are minimum. So why are we physicists interested in that kind of problems, especially the ones that do not seem to be directly physics physics related like portfolio optimization or trying to see some point. So the reason is that most of this problem will be encoded in a form that we are more familiar with, which is the form of a classical is a model, right. And then the coupling constant that actually encodes the specific kind of problem of Newtonian that you're interested in. And solving this optimization prime is just simply finding what is the ground state of this classical Newtonian. But the catch is that for hard optimization problems, like for example, in glasses system utilizing glass in random field, finding the lowest state is actually and we have, right. And so basically, people are giving up the idea of finding what is the lowest state or if it's the direct program, what are the lowest states by finding approximate states. It is sometimes. Okay, so they use wasted methods to do that. I explain in next slide what it is. It's sometimes advantageous to view this kind of classical energy as some sort of energy functional over some basic configuration state or maybe conformation if you're protein folding prime. But for hard programs, basically this kind of energy landscape is very rude and and is exponential like a lot of number of local mini mass other point of stuff like that. So what you receive metal do is that they actually perform a search in that landscape. And instead of finding the deepest value in this landscape, they find values that are not so far from the deepest value. So one of the metal that has been used over the years to do this kind of search is thermal annealing where you use them are activated process to basically overcome the barrier when you are doing the search. And this has been expired by very old metallurgical technique called thermal annealing whereby to make less metal modulable or more robust, you hit it up at a very high temperature, to give like some sort of kinetic energy to the atoms of the systems and then you throw it cool down so that you find yourself in a configuration that minimizes the free energy of the material. And this has been implemented on the on dedicated hardware by by fluid. Another priority game to perform the search here is using by using quantum principle, so called quantum turning process whereby you basically turn it through the barriers in the search of this energy landscape. And this has also been implemented on dedicated to hardware. So say you don't have access to those hardware is and then you want to simulate either classical annealing or quantum annealing on your laptop. So you can still use these heuristic methods mostly based on Monte Carlo methods to simulate annealing paradigm. But what I want to highlight in this slide is the fact that Monte Carlo methods originally are not designed to to simulate annealing paradigm. It is designed to simulate the properties of classical systems or quantum systems. And so we thought of methods less in machine learning that also have the same purpose of stability dynamics of systems. And we got inspired by these two papers. There's this very famous paper by Gallia and Troyer, where they were actually using a neural networks to find ground set priorities of one many body systems on this very recent paper by Wu Wang and Zhang, where they use neural networks to find properties of classical systems. So in both of those papers, they use a variational principle to estimate the equivalent properties and they use neural networks as variational answers. So we thought of using this kind of framework, especially the variational framework to actually simulate the annealing paradigm. And to do that, we use as a better for the quantum case, the partial Monte Carlo method, which I explain in the next slide. So this is going to be like the most technical slide of my talk. I apologize about it already. So BMC is actually a quantum Monte Carlo methods that is used to simulate transit properties of quantum system at zero temperature. The way it does that is by considering the so-called variational energy, which is the expectation value of a quantum Hamiltonian over some variational state, right? And you can prove that basically this quantity is an upper bound to the exact transit energy, whatever answer you consider. So you just have to minimize it. So in practice, what you do is that we place this quantum expectation values by some statistical expectation value where you basically, let's say, take the average of some kind of local quantity of a sample that has been generated according to this probability distribution. By construction, this probability distribution is positive. And so there's no sign in variational Monte Carlo, which is different from other quantum Monte Carlo methods, right? And so when you have this framework, what you can do, you need to optimize the answer. This is an exact formula that you can use to find the gradients of each parameter that you have in your answer. You just have to replace the quantum mechanical expectation values by statistical expectation values. And then you use your with your favorite optimizer, written optimizer to basically update the parameters that you have in your answer, right? And next, the question you can ask is which kind of answer you're going to choose to emulate this kind of variational Monte Carlo. So also we got inspired by models in by no language models, very powerful models that I use actually to capture the distribution of a sequence of words like the main characteristics of this distribution of sequence of words in natural language. And when they do that, they can actually predict what is a next word, what is the next word giving some input. So I gave an example here of a text generation. And which is basically, I take a neural network that has been trained, right? And I put as input this dissenters African Physical Society Interest Conference and I asked the network to generate me some text. And you see basically that it generates pretty current text. So this is a machine generated text, it's not a human generated text. I don't know whether you guys talk about climate change today, but that's what the neural network is saying. And this is basically that's the use this this website. What you see is that the neural network has learned to has learned context, right on how to generate current sequences and that's that learn correlation in the different I mean, inputs that are given to it. So in a more concise way, let's say, kind of cultural way of understanding how these these sentences or these words are generated in the program. This way, I gave an example of a regular neural network. And so let's say that I want to see how this dissenters have highlighted in yellow is being generated by this kind of probabilistic model. So you give an in as input what I chose a PS International Conference, you pass it from RNN and really generate a word according to some probability. In this case, it generates also. So basically, you have the conditional probability of the word also given this input, right? And then in the next iron and step, basically, you give this as an input and it generates the next word and so on and so forth until it generates your last your last word for the same sentence. And you see that if you take the problem of this conditional probability distribution is actually the probability of having all the words in your sentence given the input. So now I've been taking talking about sentences. This is not related to physics. But imagine that I want to generate actually a spin configuration, right? And so instead of having words have a spin that could be spin up and spin down. So you can still use the same kind of autoregressive sampling whereby you generate you start with some input to pass your nn and then we basically generate this new spin configuration and so on and so forth until you basically generate your word sequence, right? So this edge I've written here is a hidden state of your nn in close information about the previous spin. So it somehow captured the different correlation that you have in your spin configuration. What is interesting is that using the chain rule of the probability distribution you actually can obtain what is the joint probability distribution of generating this spin configuration. And we can use that to model the amplitude of our function. In this case, for example, if it is so-called stochastic Hamiltonian, you can suppose after the square root of this probability distribution. So this kind of autoregressive sampling is actually doesn't have any auto correlation time. So compared to Markov, Markov chain Monte Carlo, for example, if you have to generate spin configuration, you have two correlation times. And for the glasses system you're interested in, it can be very, very low. And it's directly parallelizable. This is another advantage of it. And by construction, the wave function is normalized to unity, which is different from other kind of neural networks like conventional networks or residuals machine. So now that we have the answer that we are going to use inside our Vaishan Monte Carlo scheme, I can move on to explain to you how we perform our annual Vaishan annual prize scheme in the quantum case. So what we do is that we have less energy levels with respect to some sort of less transverse temperature, right, that you're going to tune somehow to perform the annealing, the annealing evolution. So usually when you want to implement quantum annealing, you want to prepare your system in the ground state for the Hamiltonian that is very easy. So what we do with RNNs is that we randomly initialize them, the RNN wave function with random weights and bias, but you want to prepare a system in this ground state. We simply do Vaishan Monte Carlo, that is we apply some gradient descent step and we land on the ground state energy of that Hamiltonian. So next we need to do the annealing procedure. So we time evolve the system. What happens is that when we change the parameter in the Hamiltonian, we actually leave the instantaneous ground state of the Hamiltonian, we need to fall back there and so we perform gradient descent steps to fall back there.  And then hopefully when we have removed, so this is supposed to be beta x0, we have removed all the quantum fluctuation in the system and then we hopefully should be found in the ground state of the parameter Hamiltonian that we interested in solving. So this is how we perform Vaishan quantum annealing and we came up with a Vaishan algebraic theorem that basically bounced the number of gradient descent steps that we are supposed to implement if we want to remain adiabatic. This delta m is basically a minimum gap between annealing and epsilon is basically the overlap between the instantaneous ground state and all the excited states. So to test that this is actually working, we consider the quantum easing chain right where we have a time dependent transfer field. And as a metric, we look at the instantaneous expectation value of the Hamiltonian given a lot of time. And so we plot this, the instantaneous value of the Hamiltonian respect to the transfer field as we perform the annealing. And we find that the green curve and the black curve, they fall exactly on the same, on the same, actually the same, where the black curve is the exact energy of the quantum easing chain and the value of gamma. What we call transfer learning here is when between two adiabatic steps, we use as input the weights and the biases of the previous adiabatic step to somehow encode the annealing project. When we don't do that, when between two subsequent adiabatic step, we use, we randomly initialize our RNN and we use the same number of gradient descent step per annealing step, we find this no transfer learning scheme where you basically go out of the adiabatic scheme. So in this sense, the adiabaticity here is, or annealing is well captured by this kind of transfer learning parameters. And we see also that the, so this quantity is basically the current energy of the RNN minus the exact energy. And that is the error in finding exactly the transit energy during annealing. And it's much lower than the gap. So we have the instantaneous variational principle that is respected at any step, right? So this slide tells us that quantum annealing dynamics can be well captured within this kind of variational protocol. So next I will move on to explain the classical part of variational annealing, which is basically this. So here now we have a new cost function, a variational free energy, which is basically made up of two terms. We have the expectation value of the program at Newtonian over basically the distribution of probably the distribution encoded by the RNN minus some temperature-dependent schedule. And then we have that multiplied with the von Neumann entropy. This is easily... You have five more minutes, sorry. Oh, fine. Thanks. Which is well captured by using an RNN. So this is another advantage of using RNNs compared to other rational answer. And so this variational free energy has a nice property like what we had in quantum annealing in the sense that it is also an upper boundary for free energy. And so we just have to minimize it for which annealing step. So we check that also. It's a proof of principle. We use the easing model. And then we look at the instantaneous free energy as we change temperature. And again, we find that we are able to capture the classical annealing procedure here. All right. What I would like to mention is that a similar procedure was used in the article I mentioned before, but they were using that word mode collapse as they were preparing or trying to simulate the dynamics of the classical system. But here we use it to solve optimization problems. Next, I will move to results. So we have the first results on the randomism chain and the randomism chain is given this by this problem Hamiltonian. So we are trying to find the minimum of this problem Hamiltonian. We have basically random couplings between the nearest number of spins. And we consider two kind of random couplings. One is a uniform disorder between the one and the other one is a discrete disorder. So as a metric, we use what we call the residual energy, which is the expectation value of the problem Hamiltonian at the end of annealing, with respect to the probability distribution of the RNA. Minus the exact energy that we know for this randomism chain. We consider three different system sizes. And at the end of the annealing, since the autoregressive sampling is not that expensive, we just generate a million samples. We consider 25 random deposition of the disorder. And this is the RNA that we use a positive tensor as RNA. And I didn't have time to explain what it is. So here are the results. We have the regenerative spin, respect to the number of annealing steps. So I should mention here that for both classical annealing and partial quantum annealing, we use the same velocity of annealing. So that it should be kind of a fair comparison that we do here. What we notice is that when the annealing is kind of slow, we are doing some kind of quenching in the system, the quantum annealing or partial quantum annealing is superior to partial classical annealing. But when the annealing is slow enough, that is the number of annealing steps is long, we see that partial classical annealing is superior to partial quantum annealing. And this is the same thing that we observe for the discrete disorder. Actually, these are very interesting results because it is different from what was found by Zanka and Santoro, where they use other formulations of classical and quantum annealing, and they found quantum annealing superior to classical annealing. And more importantly, they found that quantum annealing, the residual energy was going down logarithmically, whereas here we see some sort of power scaling. So here we get partial annealing superior to SEM, both core and quantum annealing. So next we move to harder model in 2D, another one that's on spin glass, which is characterized by this kind of quantum Newtonian. We consider first a 10 by 10 spin system. And this is a kind of architecture that we use for the RNN. We see again that the blue data VCA is superior to the green data. So here again VCA is superior to VQA. We try what we call renormalized VQA whereby we inject a fictitious thermal kind of search inside the quantum annealing search. It's a little bit better by still inferior to quantum annealing. And for this green data, we basically use what the optimization of this program is done on our answer. So this depends on the number of gradient descent steps. And we see that as we train the models, though the reason energy is going down is still out of magnitude lower than this year in the QA. So next we compare VCA with simulated annealing and SQA, simulated quantum annealing performed with pattern on Monte Carlo on the 40 by 40 spin. And we see that for long annealing time basically VCA is three out of magnitude is better than both simulated and linear simulated quantum annealing. And, and yeah. And so with that, I conclude, we found that actually we have two different parts of the VCA. So we have a problem of doing a search in a configuration landscape and one of doing a search in a virtual landscape. And it looks like the search in a virtual landscape is better than the one in a virtual landscape. We found that the virtual classical annealing is better than simulated annealing, virtual quantum annealing and simulated quantum annealing. So we advocate that is a good candidate for real world optimization problems. And we find that that neural traversive neural networks are actually very powerful and that drive this version elimination of both classical and quantum annealing. Right. And with that, I would like to thank my collaborators, especially Muhammad was the main drive behind the project I did most of the simulations and especially he's the expert of neural network. And for the purpose of this conference, I will mention that Muhammad is actually promoter. All right, with that, I thank you very much for your attention. And I think I have time for questions. Okay, thank you. And it's helpful. This very nice talk and thank you for sticking to the time that was allocated. There was actually already a question. I mean, a set of questions from my children on the chat. So I will ask him to unmute himself and ask maybe a couple of those questions and the rest will come in the discussion session later. Okay, Esther, can you hear me? Sure. Yeah. Okay. So I have some few three questions that I really need to understand. So the first question is, I'm not really able to cope with the fact that the classical annealing is superior to the quantum annealing, especially at what extent? How do you perform the circle? Yeah. Okay, I mean, for I mean, usually, for most of them that have been tested using a similar kind of methods, people have found quantum annealing to be superior to classical annealing, though there are some firms where classical annealing was superior to quantum annealing. But the main idea is like what I mentioned. So wait one second. So if I do this, and I come here. So basically the idea was what people think is about what is this barrier looking like? So if you imagine that you have thin barriers, probably quantum annealing is going to be better. If you have like a very large barriers, so thermo annealing and not too high, thermo annealing is probably going to be better. But typically you don't know what is the form of this landscape. For the results that we have obtained in late, for example, if I look like, if I look at this 2D model, it's not clear to us why this year is better. But one intuition that we have is that, so when we include some kind of fictitious thermal fluctuations in the quantum annealing simulation, we find that quantum annealing is kind of better. But this is not the true entropy, quantum entropy that we have introduced. So maybe it could be that if we're able to use the true free energy of the quantum simulation is possible for this visceral quantum annealing to be better than the visceral classical annealing. But we don't have like very strong arguments for that. Yeah. Yeah, okay, but what about the annealing time in classical and quantum annealing compared? I mean, this is the same, we use the same number of annealing steps for both of them. So the velocity of the annealing is the same for both quantum and classical annealing. In this case, we use a linear schedule for both of them. And same initial conditions. Okay, so the second question so is I wish to know, is there any possibility to consider the contribution of the environment? That is the stochastic contribution in classical annealing. As you know, practical implementation of this may necessarily need some stochastic contribution on the environment. Yeah, I mean, this is something we thought about you be interested indeed to include the environment contribution and see how it's going to change. I mean, there's been working quantum annealing to show that the annealing actual environment actually hampers the quantum annealing schedule. You basically have some sort of minimum, yeah, minimum in the expense of the residual energy respect on any time. And as you increase the strength of the noise, basically you start, I mean, yeah, landing is some bit of stability basically. But here, yeah, it would be interesting to include it. So I think we can stop for now and we can go to the next speaker.