Welcome to the fourth lecture of the course on pattern recognition under the NPTEL phase two program. In the first lecture you have heard from Professor C. Murti about the importance, significance and different applications and the purpose of pattern recognition. In the fourth lecture now we will consider an important aspect in the field of pattern recognition. In fact, two aspects and we will try to understand the difference between the concepts of clustering and classification. The difference of clustering and classification can be understood best with an example. Let us start with the example of classification first which is easy to understand and then look at the problem of clustering. If you look into the slide what you now have actually are two images or two pictures of two different flowers. If you ignore the presence of the background if we ignore the presence of background in these images then if you are given the problem of classification to distinguish and say white flower is one class and that appears different from the second flower which is of class 2. Let us say then you have to identify one property, one attribute or one difference between these two images in terms of something which belongs to the flower and that property could be colour here let us say because on the left hand side what you see is an image of a flower and on the right hand side you see also an image of a flower but their colours are different. On the left hand side the flower is of white and on the right hand side you have the colour which is yellowish of the flower. So if I pick up colour as an important property which we will actually specify by the name feature later on and define what is a feature for the time being in a very simple sense let us say I take the word characteristics or attribute or property of the object from which we are solving the problem of classification then colour is a very important feature here. You go back to the slide and if we can extract colour from these two images basically the flowers again I repeat ignoring the background then I can easily distinguish or anybody can easily distinguish between the flower on the left and the flower on the right of course there are a few richer features more than colour like the shape of the pattern of each flower which we will consider later on. Now let me bring a third object which is completely different as you can see that this object is different from the other two it is not a flower of course it is an animal but if you had used or if you use colour as an important feature here you will not be able to distinguish between the left flower on white as well as the animal which is also having a white colour. This example shows that on certain occasions so if you want to distinguish between the three different types of images shown on the screen to you just now colour will not satisfy the criteria of classification between the flower and the animal. It might work in certain cases between the yellow flower and the white animal but between if the flower has also a white colour and the animal also has a same colour in this case white then you will not be able to discriminate between the two. So this example shows that you will need more than one property more than one feature more than one characteristic or attribute from objects from signals which we see which we perceive to distinguish one with respect to the other. We will move forward and see more examples of classification look at this problem you have several set of cars the problem of classification now is to distinguish between different models of cars let us say different models of car correct. If I use colour again you can see that the car on the extreme left is the same as the one which is the colour on the extreme right sample. So you have to use more than one feature may be the shape of the object the shape of the windows the position of the wheels with respect to the car various attributes of shape in addition to the colour to distinguish between different categories of cars which are looking almost similar almost same. I am not trying to distinguish or classify or categorize between flowers and cars cars and other animals but between between cars itself all cars look more or less the same they are four wheels they are front screen doors windows and so on so forth the so the shape and the size almost look similar of course there are other types of vehicles as well but between cars when the objects look very similar the problem of classification can be more difficult look at the next example in the same slide these are four different examples of fingerprints scanned from different individuals and there are experts who can actually distinguish between these four different categories of fingerprints how I will not go into details but there are features extracted from this type of line diagrams as they appear the fingerprints after they have been scanned and digitized and rectified the experts who will find certain patterns like reorientations minutiae points re-openings and closings to distinguish between one fingerprint and other which is a very good biometric trait you can use fingerprint to uniquely identify an individual it has a huge application it is a huge application in various field of biometric access control and criminal identification in the case of foreign six let us look at this as another example of biometric you are seeing here examples of 12 different face images 12 different face images what is the problem of classification in this case it is called a problem of face recognition the problem of face recognition involves trying to identify an individual trying to identify an individual recognize it from the patterns of the face now all faces look similar all of us have two eyes one nose lips ear etc and so forth the hairstyles may be differing there may be other patterns in the face so the variability of the patterns within the face from one individual to the other in terms of eyes nose gravel pixel variation may be structure and something else are been exploited by pattern recognition scientists to design a classifier which can identify an individual under certain conditions it may not work well under all conditions but in certain cases yes it is possible now if you look back to this problem of classification of trying to distinguish or classify between faces between fingerprints between faces and fingerprints and say between cars this problem was a little different from the first easy problem which I showed you between two flowers or between a flower and an animal why the samples are very different the images were different the objects were different one with respect to the other in the case of face recognition all the faces look very identical the could form properties if you extract properties their properties will be very similar similarly for fingerprint similarly for cars or similar objects so the problem of classification becomes difficult if you are trying to distinguish different type of objects within the same category different type of objects within category face recognition fingerprint recognition cars between type of say trying to identify patterns within a signature so they may be very similar and the problem becomes very close to a clustering problem which will understand little bit let us get a little bit more specific with features and classification if you look into this very simple example which has been talked of in many books sorting incoming fish on a conveyor according to species using optical imaging or optical sensing so what you do with the sample fish there may be two classes of fish which we are trying to classify or categorize these are the two examples but you can of course take any other samples of fish which you want it could be the classic varieties of the hilsa and the row which you find in India then what you do with these species you try to extract certain properties that could be used to distinguish between the two type of fishes the length of the fish the brightness of the lightness of the fish the lightness could be the brightness of the intensity the width of the fish number of shapes of the fin position of the mouth with respect to the body etc these are some examples of properties or characteristics which you can measure of course there are few other things which you can measure like the weight of a fish something which you probably cannot measure like the smell or the touch so these are important properties or characteristics which will help us to distinguish one sample of a category from the other in this case could be a two different categories of fish okay so these are some examples as you can see in the slide or example of what are called on the right hand side examples of features which one has to extract so that this helps in distinguishing one class of object from the other one these are all the listed features which can be used but of course you can use a few more if you can extract and then use it in your classifier this is a definition of the word feature which you may find possibly in some dictionary it is a property or characteristics of an object sometimes quantifiable sometimes not and then which is used that is the main purpose which is used to compare or distinguish between or classify two objects I repeat it is a property of an object which is used to compare or distinguish between two objects or classify two objects so hence forth in the rest part of the lecture we will deal with these features we have seen some examples of features to repeat them from the beginning of this lecture color shape intensity size minisher features length width shape features we will see some examples some more examples position of certain important landmarks of the you know and an account of a certain landmarks in images or objects using these features the question comes as comes is how can you do classification and of course the other question is what is clustering but before we go there we will try to see some very important properties or desirable properties of features features must be invariant to translation rotation scale noise and other type of projective transforms this is much to do with images what does it mean in an image if you rotate the object keep the object anywhere in your screen scale the object make it bigger or smaller or if there are noisy artifacts in the image or if you have projective transforms as you can see that if I am going away from you I am appearing smaller this is a classic example of scale variations due to projective transforms a classifier should be able to still recognize my face invariant to where am I compared to the sensor or the camera which is picking me up features are expected to be invariant to all sorts of affine transformations if you go back to the slide some examples are rotation translation scale noise and projective transformation other desirable properties of features it must be distinct and unique for a given shape object or a signal now if you have these two objects one is in usb mouse the other is basically a pen you can see that the features like as for example if you even if you take intensity as an example and and the short of a ratio of the height versus width if you take that as a feature they will be different for two different objects so going back to the slide it must be distinct or unique for a given object the cost of computation must not be very high for a feature because otherwise the classifier will take a lot of time to do the processing and must have graceful degradation due to discontinuities and missing parts that means if the picture is not very clean and there are certain discontinuities in the object which has been images which has been imaged still the features should not show much of variations the feature should not show much of variations it would still pick up similar identical value of the feature from the image these are some examples of features which are using visual patterns you pick up you do pattern classification mostly with images you can perform classification with non-visual signals also we will come to that in a moment but let's look at visual patterns which is one of the most important example of pattern recognition some of these will be explained later on but just let us name them these are something to do with shape features normalize central moments elongation compactness connectivity oil and number they need to sometimes model the background or a foreground texture of an object so you use measures like gray level co-occurrence matrix or glcm you can use filters like gabber filter wavelet filters and so on you can use color histogram gmrf or gaussian mark of random field and these abbreviations which you see are very rich features which have been just you know discovered or worked upon over the last decade or so h o g is histogram of oriented gradients i repeat again histogram of oriented gradients this is hog do g dog is called the difference of gaussian i'm sorry i should repeat again h o g is histogram of oriented gradients do g dog is diff difference of gaussian scale invariant feature transform is sift and surf is speeded up robust features curvature scale space is css chain codes polar signatures corners dft discrete Fourier transform dct discrete cosine transform discrete wavelet transform dwt short term Fourier transforms stft and hilbert transform these are different type of transforms which are used m at is middle axis transformed ltp is local ternary pattern lbp is local binary pattern shape contest very rich features for representing shapes for motion people use optical flow vectors and also super quadrics for modeling blobs when they see it in images these are some examples of visual patterns which you can detect from images pattern recognition area is applied for any type of signal visual as whereas non visual something which you hear say an audio signal let's go back features using other signals these are examples of features which are used in audio music speech like the capsule coefficients lpc linear predictive coefficients spectrogram speech tone peak chroma or harmony then of course you can have model parameters which can do for visual or non visual like the hidden markup model hmm the arma model autoregressive moving average condition of random field crf some most similar to gm rf people also extracted features like rhythm beat and tempo from music and of course you can measure weight order taste fine you can use them as features also that's a huge list of features some of them are not exhaustive some of them why couldn't mention because there's a technology involved in some of them like pca features we'll talk of them later on all the lda or the icf features we'll talk of them as the course goes on with respect to feature we should know what is a feature vector because a single feature is not useful for the purpose of classification and a set of features are used together to perform a classification they form a feature vector so what's the difference between a feature and a feature vector well you can say a group of features are combined together to form a feature vector what is the dimension of the feature vector the number of components or the number of features which you have extracted to form the feature vector let us say you take three different features color the area of an object and say the eccentricity of an object repeat again color area and any arbitrary moment like eccentricity or moment driven parameters like perimeter you can take perimeter area and color let us say this three very three simple features color area and perimeter are the three simple features which you want to use all these features because you know that if I use all these features together I can do a problem of classification much more accurately than picking up any one or two of these so when you take all of these three features together you form a feature vector where the first component of the feature vector is color the second could be area the third could be parameter or it could be something else also doesn't matter so what do you expect this feature vector extracted from a sample belonging to one class or category of an object should be different from the feature vector extracted from another object and the problem of classification would be to distinguish between these two feature vectors belonging to two different class of objects or if possible learn and know from a priori samples as to what this features feature vectors would be what this feature vectors would be for sample belonging to class for samples belonging to class a and how they are different from samples belonging to class b and that is the problem of classification and this will lead us automatically to the idea of clustering as well as for example if you go back to the slide this is an example of a two-dimensional feature we talked about this pair of features to be extracted from fish and if the two features which we extract are say brightness and length forming the two components x1 and x2 as they are indicated in your slide then capital X to your left is a feature vector the transpose indicating that we typically talk of this is a column vector than a row vector so the transpose is given as a row vector then the feature vector will be of dimension 2 one could be brightness the other could be width or they could be something different so if you select or identify a set of 10 feature vectors sorry 10 features from an object if select set of 10 features from an object your feature vector will be of dimension 10 or even larger if you have more number of features feature vectors lie in a feature space this has to be learned it is something like the vector space samples of input when represented by their features together are represented as points in feature space if a single feature is used then you are working on one-dimensional feature space so now you have to learn and you have to know that a feature vector is now represent represented as a point you know a vector has a magnitude and orientation depending upon the value of its components but in a feature space which is like a vector space which could be 1 d to the minimum but generally very high dimensions of course we can visualize up to three dimension only but if you have a large dimensional feature vector it is basically indicating a point in that feature space okay the feature space dimensionality is dictated by the feature space dimensionality is dictated by the dimension of the feature vector of course you can have variations like one-dimensional case where these are examples of points representing sample in one-dimensional feature space what does this color indicate it is possible that the red colors could be indicating points of features extracted from one category of the object and the blue color could be representing another category okay to your right but we have just extracted one feature and hence the feature space is one-dimension and the points are marked in one day of course you can have features in two-dimension also where you can have points in two-dimensional space which we will see in the next slide but in general you can have an n-dimensional feature space next what we are going to see is an animation which will take you into this feature space since our visualization is restricted to 3D so you will see this animation which will take it in 3D space and you will see a set of feature vectors sometimes they form a cluster sometimes they form two distinct clusters or a weird looking cluster we will see what is this cluster and what is this classification see the difference between the two in this animation and come back and continuing the discussion between of the difference between clustering and classification so let's look at the demonstration in the screen now this will give a visualization of a feature space in 3D you may actually feel that you are traversing in space in a shuttle what you have to realize is that each of these dots on the screen represents a point in a feature space a point in a feature space is also a feature vector okay now as we are passing by you will not notice any particular type of pattern or group or cluster or anything remarkable which would be happening here but as we move ahead in the screen you will start to notice a distinct set of points which are now appearing as a dense set of points a compact cluster a dense cluster the distance between a pair of points which are marked in yellow are much less in general compared to any two points which are in the background marked in white so you see a cluster being formed here which is marked in yellow this set of points form a dense cluster the distance average distance you can say if you are able to measure it between any pair of points is much less than if you take any two points which are marked in white and they are in the background let us say this distance is much larger than any pair of distances which you see here the question comes is how do you estimate that this is a dense cluster cluster you must have some measure by which say the cluster density can be estimated from this feature space remember we are observing this space in three dimension but in general a vector can be of very large dimension and the same thing may occur in a large n dimensional space so how to measure the density if you move on in the space you will find after sometime two spheres two spherical volumes or spheres marked in two different colors around the dense set of set of cluster points marked in yellow if you pick up any one of this any one of these pair of spheres you will find what we have done is the points in yellow which are within this sphere are actually marked in red you can see here they are marked in red although they are overlapping remember this is a three dimensional visualization so points within the blue sphere are marked in red points yellow points within the red sphere are marked in green I have shown two spheres just to indicate that if we make a count or do an estimate of the number of points inside the sphere it will give you an indication of density the definition of density from the basic definition of density we know that it is mass divided by the volume so assuming that the volume of both these spheres are identical if the number of points within a particular sphere is large then we estimate this the density at this point we much larger than the density at some other place but in general the density estimated around any region within the cluster or any space within the cluster will be much larger than if I would have put this sphere here in the outer space where you do not have a cluster but a few spot set of points it is possible that this cluster could be generated by a set of feature vectors obtained for a certain class or category or type of object what are these points they may not belong to a particular category or class of object so this is how you measure density of course you can replace the sphere by a unit cube and an estimate of the number of points which actually synonymously represents the mass at that region divided by the volume unit volume you this you can visualize this to be unit sphere or a unit cube will actually give you an idea of density so cluster density is one common measure used to detect the presence of a cluster I repeat again the density will be having reasonably large value when you measure it somewhere in this region of the cluster if you measure it somewhere else you will have a much lesser value of cluster density indicating the absence of a cluster so that is what we saw as a cluster do all clusters appear same well may not let us move a little bit forward in space on the left hand side of your screen now you see two different clusters one marked by red dots the other which we had earlier were in red dots they are two different clusters what is the significance of these two different colors which I have used to indicate the two clusters well it is possible that the feature vectors here indicated by this cluster could have been measured from images or signals or certain object categories resembling one type of object and this could have been obtained from another class of object you can have two classes class a and b class one and two and this picture all resembles two different clusters in which I can put these two different spheres find the count of the number of green points within this sphere out of the red and the green points out of yellow within the red and estimate density of both these clusters indicating that I have two distinct clusters here there is no cluster elsewhere because when you measure density at the background somewhere here you will not detect the presence of any cluster because the cluster density value will be much less whatever you estimate will be much less in the background this figure also illustrates the problem of classification vis-a-vis clustering we have two different clusters all right but the clusters are separated in space there is a distance between them and the distance between the clusters indicates how far are these two different classes or categories or object types for which we want to do pattern classification task remember the difference you have to detect clusters is one job of clustering after you have detected clusters let us say you have detected more than one cluster it is possible that the two different clusters could be belonging to two different object types and then you can actually find the distance between the two clusters by one of the simple methods is we can compute the average or the centroid of the set of clusters for the red points or the red markers for the yellow markers you can also find the mean or what is called as the class mean average or centroid of this cluster and look at the distance this distance is called the separability between clusters i repeat again this distance will give an indication of the separability between clusters the larger the classes or categories are separated in space the more will be the distance the less the separation we will see an illustration of that less the separation the distance will start to collapse or the distance will start to come down if you move ahead now what you see here is an interesting phenomena of i have removed the color of the dots i have removed the color of the dots if you remove the color of the dots that means you do not know which point is belonging to which class you can still it up these two clusters in space very clear because in fact now i have removed the background in fact you can detect these two clusters using cluster density estimation techniques one of them which we have just discussed is put a sphere and measure the number of points inside a sphere you will get some idea of the cluster density you can also measure the distance between these two clusters if you are able to detect them but the question comes is if the class labels as they are called which were given by the color markers remember this cluster was marked in red this color was marked this cluster was marked by yellow markers what we only have coloring is the points which are inside the sphere that is the only indicative which we have we have lost the color information then it becomes a different problem of classification sometimes it is called an unsupervised classification this is the case when you have to detect clusters and assume that each cluster belongs to a separate class or category or type of an object this could resemble a particular type of fruit this could represent a particular category of flowers let us say this still good point here which we now have at till at this point of time or till this point of time is this the clusters are still separated in space that means you have some distance based on which you can separately detect these clusters the problem can be more difficult as you can see now that I am bringing one cluster close to the other one and you can see the region here very clearly you can see the region clearly that the points are starting to overlap this is the region where classification becomes a very difficult problem if you visualize all these set of points together can we have that visualization yes look at it now this could actually represent a cluster by itself that cluster will not have a regular appearance the cluster may not have a regular appearance as we had for these two distinct clusters when they were separated out but this could actually represent a cluster and it is this situation where the cluster starts to overlap that the problem of both clustering or the problem of classification if we introduce back the colors let us see now how it looks like look at this problem this problem is not that difficult but we are entering a situation where the classifier given the fact or the class labels that these points belong to one category class a the points in yellow belong to another category class b the classifier will work reasonably well perhaps if you have a powerful classifier design but it will make errors here the region where that the cluster points start to overlap between classes so you look into this problem of classification busters clustering here which we are trying to discuss this is can be considered as a problem of classification if you remove the colors it can become a problem of clustering even here you can detect two clusters but I am not sure whether a very naïve classifier or naïve clustering mechanism can detect two clusters prominently it might detect two it might detect three it might detect four if the number of clusters are not known if the numbers of clusters are not known you might think that this is a cluster which has a very irregular shape that is possible we will give some examples later on of certain shapes which are geometrical in nature all right but they are not very smooth but of course the other problem which is not clustering is the problem of classification as you see here in this problem of classification I have reintroduced the class labels with the help of color markers and the problem of classification is to discriminate features or feature vectors belonging to one class vis-a-vis or with respect to features in the other class the difficulty is what in this case for classification that there is an overlap the distance between the classes is much less is much less compared to what we had earlier look at this problem this is a much better situation for both classification and clustering where what is called as a inter class distance between these two classes of feature points is much much larger much much larger compared to of course the scatter or the spread or the width of the individual clusters there is hardly there is in fact no overlap I can actually draw a line here and say to my left of this line I have all the red points think of an imaginary line here or a point along this line to the left I have all the red points with respect to the this line as you can see here which I am drawing on the screen to write I have all the yellow points so classification becomes easy if I bring them close see if you bring them close as you can see that the cluster distance now is very minimal there is a lot of overlap there is a problem of classification to produce accurate results so we have to see in two scenarios now where classification and clustering could be easy these are the situations where classification with class levels or if I remove the color information clustering also could be difficult problem I will leave it to you for visualization if these two clusters overlap quite a lot more then you may actually have just one visible cluster out of the two and even if the class information of the color levels under overlap is given the classification algorithms might struggle to give certain good results so we will now look at we will now look at two different methods we list a methods a few methods of clustering and classification we have so far understood the difference between the two what it takes or what does the clustering problem of clustering solve vis-a-vis the problem of classification we have seen it we have seen some animations some static pictures and also a table containing discriminating points between the two now we will just list a few methods of clustering and classification a few state-of-the-art algorithms will just name them mind you because now what this you are at a point where you can understand how you can write algorithms to solve this problem and we are going to do that to the rest of this course discuss many methods of clustering as well as classification but we will just name them now keep them in mind as we go to the rest of the course where these methods will be discussed in detail we go back to the slides you have a list of methods on your left hand side column which indicate which are names of methods used for solving the problem of clustering representative points split and merge linkage there are many methods of linkage we will discuss that later on som indicates self-organizing map a special class of neural networks which can also solve the problem of clustering although actually they do solve a problem of mapping model-based methods vector quantization we will discuss most of this to the rest of the lecture series of pattern recognition not today what are examples of classification well the classic best example is the best decision rule which will be discussed in detail then we have the linear discriminant analysis or the lda which is called the fissures criteria then we have methods based on kn nearest neighbor called the kn the feed forward neural network is the most commonly used architecture under the class of artificial neural networks or a n n i repeat it is called the feed forward neural network which uses a back propagation learning law support vector machines the most popular and the powerful one till date and random forests we will discuss most of these as we go on before we end up the talk we would also like to see the general categories of methods of clustering data usually most books will be categorizing them into two different classes one is called the hierarchical or linkage based the other is called the partitional methods even within the hierarchical you will have a divisive policy and an agglomerative method of clustering again I will repeat you have two methods called agglomerative and divisive methods of clustering under the hierarchical category of methods partitional methods some examples again two categories exclusive or probabilistic under exclusive you have the minimum spanning tree which uses the representation of graphs the k mean at the k may doids and under probabilistic you have the gmm called the Gaussian mixture model and the fuzzy c means fcm as it is called which is an extension of the k means or c means algorithm this categorization of methods of clustering is is a very generic one it may be that when you go to certain literature and read from books the clustering this categorization of the different methods of clustering may appear a little bit different than what I gave you but of course you still have methods which are based are partitional which are hierarchical and some of them are probabilistic and some of them are exclusive I have just confine myself to discussion of between these four different categories of lectures there are alternative view for algorithms of clustering also some would like to say an unsupervised method of learning is also clustering or an unsupervised classification is also called clustering examples are k means and k may write this is where most people will confused do you think unsupervised learning or classification is clustering well may not be clustering has no class levels unsupervised learning has no class levels but the purpose is different in the method of clustering you try to group data try to find structures within data in the case of unsupervised learning or classification you tend to form groups that is also true you may detect clusters that is also true but actually they are not same it is not wise to call a method of clustering as an unsupervised method of learning or classification in a very loose sense you can tell that but that may not be actually true other methods involve density estimation which we talked about when we are using spheres to indicate how to measure density in the feature space typical examples of density estimation couple of some of them could be parametric type that means you estimate certain parameters from the density Gaussian mixture of Gaussian as it is called GMM is the classic example you can take non Gaussian distributions also although they are not that popular the Dirichlet or the beta distributions then there are other methods called the Banchen Brown piecewise quadratic boundary nearest mean classifier or a maximum likelihood estimate these are just names of different methods of clustering based on which are all parametric density estimation there are non parametric density estimation also as given in this slide which are also often used methods based on histogram nearest neighborhood or neighborhood neighborhood kernel based methods graph theoretic methods iterative value seeking some of them we will discuss if not all of them in the remaining part of all lectures I would like to conclude the lecture today of clustering versus classification with the acknowledgement for my master students Mr. Pathik Srivastav for helping me in creating this animation and Mrs. Suranjana Samanta and Professor C.A. Murthy for helping me to prepare the slides thank you and get back to the remaining set of lectures to understand all different methods of clustering and classification and many other applications thank you


Yeah, super. So yeah, as Anna said, Claire couldn't be here. So we decided out of kind of convenience instead of trying to play around with having me talking into a prerecorded something that we just prerecorded our conversation. And then I'll come up on stage again and answer any potential questions you might have. But so yeah, please let's play the video and I'll go through the bizarre experience of listening to my own like conversation. And then yeah, just feel free to save any questions for later. Hello and welcome to our discussion on the political potential of Ospos here at Ospo Con London. I am really sorry not to be with you in person today. I think Aster will be with you in person today. So I'm going to get Aster to give a wave now on screen for the recorded piece, but also a wave in person somewhere around us because we're hoping that he will be also there in person. But we are delighted to be here today to talk about this really important topic. My name is Claire Dillon. I work with Inner Source Commons. I also am involved in the Ospo plus plus network, which is a global network of Ospos who have come together to collaborate in the public sector space from universities, from cities, from governments and from civic institutions. And I'm here with Aster. Aster, would you like to introduce yourself, please? Sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Aster Nomellin Karlberg, policy director with Open Forum Europe, where I think I'm working at the intersection of open technologies and public policy. Thank you, Aster. And we're here today to talk about this idea of the political potential of Ospos. So Aster, perhaps if you can move to the next slide, what we might just reflect upon is the fact that we have seen a huge growth in the momentum of the creation of Ospos outside the private sector and outside the idea of a corporate Ospo. And we're seeing them in universities, in cities and in countries, they're springing up at a regional level, or sometimes even in global organizations or NGOs. So we have some examples here. Aster, again, if you can thank you, show those. But we're seeing them across the world in universities like Johns Hopkins University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, UCLA Santa Cruz in the US, also places like Trinity College Dublin here in my hometown. But all across the world, we're seeing many more universities create Ospos as a central point for their open source activities. But also, we're seeing a growth in cities and countries. Paris has recently announced that they're creating an Ospos and we're seeing them pop up all across Germany and in other countries as well. At a regional level, the European Commission has recently created their Ospo as well. We're seeing them in the Cascadia region in the United States. But across the world, we're starting to see more and more Ospos looking at these challenges at a regional level. And of course, in global organizations or NGOs like the United Nations, they are also exploring the idea of how they can use Ospo to progress their goals. So Aster, maybe we'll have a little think about the recent report that came out from the European Commission to give an indication about why this is such an important theme at this point in time. Sure. Thanks, Claire. So early September, the European Commission published its, I would say, landmark study on the impact of open source software and hardware on technological independence, competitiveness and innovation. We call it just the open source study for short. It has to do with the economic impact. And it was meant to be used as kind of the background document that foundational study for understanding where open source is in the market in Europe today. And from our point of view, working with public policy and open source and open technologies in general, there's, of course, a lot to be said around this study. But one of the kind of overarching points is that it has perhaps not changed the arguments we're using promoting open technologies, but it has added more to our toolbox. And in short, there's this transition of moving away from an old style of argumentation towards a new style of argumentation and understanding of where open source is. So in many ways, the old way of thinking about it has been kind of like open technologies for the sake of open technologies. The way we should approach things in, especially in the public sector, for its kind of moral benefits, there's this should argument. And then, of course, there's been a big focus in the public policy space around open source and procurement law. And one of the big takeaways from our study is that writing a good law, it's not enough. The main success factor for any kind of open source initiative coming from the government has, you know, is the degree of kind of cultural shift in the organization. It's about education, buy in within the hierarchy. So in our view, the most important things and actually moving forward in the conversation around open source in public policy has to do with the institutionalization and maintaining knowledge, skills, and then momentum over time to actually reach scale and impact. And this study is one of many reasons, but for us at OFE, the main reason why we feel comfortable to talk about the potential of open source in meeting strategic goals. But with that, let's get to the a little bit of an overview of the actual economic findings. So in short, the big kind of factor that we've been focusing on and what crystallized from the study was the importance of code contributions and increases in code contributions for economic growth and the positive externalities of this. Something I think most of you in the audience know is that open source code and components are integrated in the vast majority of software. A lot of reasons for this. I mean, it's everywhere today. We might know this, but it's also very good to have this empirically backed in kind of an ecosystem of documents, something that is needed to be repeated in policy discussions. In terms of economic presence in the markets, open source software makes up between 0.5 and 0.7 of the EU's GDP. Now, for a continent like Europe, this is a lot of money. To put this in perspective, it means that open source software contributes to the European GDP in a similar way or actually more than both air and water transport combined. So it's really a massive part of today's infrastructure. In terms of a more dynamic number, if we saw an increase in globally available open source code by 10%, we would see an increase in the EU's GDP of between 0.4 and 0.6%. This is, as you can imagine, a big dynamic change in the economy. And in terms of kind of an investment point of view, open source software, and this is from numbers in the private sector, it has a cost-benefit ratio of 1 to 10. And if you take into account hardware and capital costs around 1 to 4. And I really want to point out here, as we at Open Forum Europe together with Fraunhofer ISI were the authors of the study, these are very, very conservative calculations. We took very much kind of a defensive approach to really make sure we had data that we could defend in any kind of circumstances. And as I said before, all this taken together, it just kind of creates a new set of arguments and justifies talking about open source at a way higher strategic level for public policy. And I think that in any open source policy discussions going forward, it will be difficult to consider any kind of question without discussing these positive externalities in terms of economic growth. So there are a lot of things that one can say about open source public policy at a strategic level. But for today's talk, we'll focus on what we call the institutionalization question. We can simplify building auspose and the role it has in the rollout of ambitious open source policy. Claire, this is my cue to you. Thank you. And, you know, Astor, it's wonderful to actually get the very specifics of the economic impact because the economic growth argument is something that has been made in the past, but perhaps we haven't had been able to size that impact. But I mean, that's substantial, but the figures you have just quoted in terms of the potential impact for the European Union. And of course, that could be extrapolated for any other country or region across the world. So economic growth turns out to be one of the, you know, emerging policy areas that an auspose could have an impact in. Just the pure idea of innovation as well, even if that's not specifically related to economic growth, we're seeing a lot of organizations in the public sector as well as the private sector who have an actual policy around increasing the amount of innovation that's happening. And that too can be a very specific policy that an auspose can impact. Even the concept of public money for public code is, again, a potential strategy or policy that an auspose can obviously impact. You mentioned, I think, before this idea of being able to address the idea of lock-in or being able to have a sense of control or autonomy. So this whole idea of digital autonomy becomes a very important strategy that, again, auspose can help to impact. SME growth is a very particular scenario within the idea of economic growth. But it often is a very particular goal within the context of regions or countries. And it has of course been proven that the idea of open source and the open source ecosystems that come around the idea of technology transfer can have a very specific positive benefit on SME growth in terms of that innovation ecosystem. But of course, even beyond the idea of economic impact, the idea of social policies that governments or cities might want to roll out, they too can have an impact from open source in a particular auspose in the idea of actually creating competitive markets. And most importantly, my idea would be the idea of transparency and trust. So as a general goal for public sector organisations, the importance of actually increasing transparency and trust in public services has really come to the fore in particular in recent times through the pandemic and in for other reasons as well, of course. But that is an area in which open source and auspose in particular can have that huge impact. And if you can go on to the next slide there, Astor, thank you very much. Those policy goals can then often directly translate into public sector auspose goals. And what we have here is a wide range of potential goals for a public sector auspose. And you'll see many of them have correlations and are similar to the goals that a private sector auspose may have, like being a centre of excellence for perhaps governance and compliance and legal issues. The idea of just being an area that we would promote the sharing and reuse of code, community building around open source projects, cultural change and change behaviours, we mentioned these before in the context of these are very well known goals in the context of corporate auspose. But there may be additional areas in the area of public sector auspose where these goals may extend. Now it's probably worth noting Astor, and you know this as well as I do, that for the most part every single public sector organisation we talk to have a different set of goals. It's not like there's one size fits all in the public sector auspose space, but they often can be chosen from this list of goals. The idea of technology transfer and innovation in the context of that is an important one. Digital skills beyond the idea of training up your employees but actually as a broader digital skills agenda within a country or region can often be linked to auspose goals, as we mentioned before, specific goals around social and economic development, digital autonomy, diversity and inclusion and pathways into tech that may be that may be giving additional ways for people to actually get into technology and that's an important potential goal. And cross border initiatives where we may have to actually introduce shared languages or be able to address minorities in the case of a region. And then this idea again of transparency and the link to open data because we're seeing more and more auspose sometimes actually straddle the idea of open source software and open data in order to make that open data more usable and reusable I guess in that respect. So there's some of the areas that we're starting to see public sector auspose where they may have goals. And now maybe I'll hand it back over to you Aster to talk more about the very specific auspose recommendations that were contained in the European Commission report. Yes, absolutely. So the point of view and the reason why these these auspose recommendations were put in place is in order to kind of introduce policies to make open source scale for wheeling Europe in order to benefit citizens, there's a broad concept, but to really be able to address strategic challenges and big policy goals. We see the need for an institutional infrastructure and this has to do with providing competence and direction and becoming kind of that glue that makes public policies made in let's say a government or or in a ministry have effects on the ground. It's not enough to just like throw money out into the open source ecosystem because it's not that simple of a question let's say if you want to make public investments where do you invest? We need all these infrastructures and this interface between the policy makers and the open source ecosystem and the starting point and very much here the focus is on the European Commission and from that angle we will look at this but this would be relevant for any national government as well. So our first step is that we recommend actively using the European Commission auspose as the Commission's external collaboration interface to other also enabled institutions within industry, research institutions, universities and across borders. This of course to give them credit this is already in the works and the Commission but we really wanted to reinforce this work that this is the center and the interface with which the Commission connects to all these diverse stakeholders in the open source ecosystem. Then very typical classic policy recommendation but it's an important step to take is for the European Commission to identify and map the existing European auspose in industry public sector and academia with the aim to exchange you know information share best practices and all this is meant to feed into the process of identifying let's say gaps in some spaces identifying strategies around recommendation three which is the kind of first investment recommendation that we put forward and that is essentially for the Commission to encourage the building of 10 government auspose through its funding programs. Consider this kind of as a pilot program. As we all know in industry there is already a steady increase in the number of auspose this can and should be encouraged as well this is part of the conversation but for the public sector we ask them to leverage funding programs such as Horizon Europe and Digital Europe to speed up this process and to already from the outset and here will bring us to the last point adding on certain requirements so kind of not standardizing as such but adding certain key features that would be part of building these government auspose and one of those requirements in our view should be giving not just the Commission's auspose and networking component but also these 10 that they're building and the idea here we'll get into this a little bit later it's about leapfrogging the maturity of auspose that we've seen in the private sector in order to really facilitate the building of an auspose network we think that it's at the network level we will be able to create this infrastructure to really realize that the big ambitious goals and this yeah brings us to the final points which we'll discuss also just kind of in a broader perspective as well Claire and I but we recommend the European Commission to create a program meant to network these these auspose so it's includes the European Commission's own auspose the auspose identified in the kind of landscaping exercise of industry public sector and academia as well as the auspose form would support from the EU funding programs within this like specific subgroup for different sectors can be considered but I do think that it's in order as we all know from collaboration there needs to be a backbone well funded well informed well connected that can bring this all together in a more kind of cohesive infrastructure for open source in the public sector and how it links to the wider ecosystem and then perhaps let's take this to to the next level and start discussing how we see this kind of work on a more global visionary level and the potential the political potential that auspose actually have Claire yeah thanks Astor and I think you know the points you made about the the ability for the public sector auspose to learn from the private sector auspose is a great one I mean if you even think about the gathering here today of the to-do group and and all the auspose representatives that are here in the audience today we have so much in the public sector we have so much to learn from the great work that has already gone on in the public sector in the private sector should I say and so there has there's a great wealth of knowledge there much of which can actually be applied directly in the context of public sectors but some of which may need to be tweaked and we've learned that in our discussions that it's not necessarily just a lift and shift into some of these new public sector contexts but that discussion and that starting point is it's really really valuable to have that so I think when we think about having this network one of the main goals needs to be a learning goal and not just in terms of learning from the private sector but also in terms of having all these new government auspose and public sector auspose learn from each other because it's such a fast evolving space and people are only beginning to realize the potential and the opportunities around this so sharing practices and challenges is really part of a goal for this auspone network and I think one point here to add this strengthening the links between diverse organizations I think this is one of the most interesting things from a public policy point of view I mean open source at heart why it's exploded is that many organizations be it companies or foundations realize that a lot of the the challenges that were asked to solve today one company one city one country doesn't have the resources themselves to solve them the challenges are greater than that then in order for us to collaborate we need to lower the kind of transaction costs between very diverse sets of institutions in this space the open source license is a incredibly interesting kind of institution or norm through which we can enable this collaboration without mo use without massive contracts the kind of norms and the infrastructure to collaborate is already in place and well tested and successful and I think it connects to all these other challenges especially from a european context of getting countries to collaborate cities to collaborate we have this very interesting open source license as a norm to collaborate on that we can we have only begun to start thinking what kind of challenges we could tackle using this this approach it's a great point because every time that's mentioned I think about the example and that's a shadow uses he's he runs the open source program office in johns hopkins university and he talks about that collaboration that happened with the city of paris and their new test platform and how that he took new tests and he was implementing it for a local neighborhood center in baltimore and the same francis neighborhood center and he talks about the fact that you know if he had actually had the task of actually setting up an mo u between a local neighborhood center johns hopkins university and a city in europe um i mean they'd still be talking about it today in terms of actually wrangling through how that would work legally in terms of shared code and things like that but the fact that everyone could do it under open source licenses meant that they spent all that time and all that effort actually building value and creating value for all concerned and i think it's a great example but but removing that friction from collaboration between these different scales of organizations and where they may be placed geographically that's a huge huge value point um that that can't be underestimated really um and i think it's also worth mentioning just in the context of these diverse organizations like one thing we've noted as well is that there's often organ like there's groupings and organizations and individuals in many public sector bodies who might be doing a lot of what we've just described as ospo goals i mean they it may already be happening they may just not call themselves an ospo um but there is value in having a recognizable name so that when someone from johns hopkins is talking to someone from the city of paris they know who to connect to they know who to contact when they're looking for collaboration opportunities and and so i think that idea of even if you have very diverse organizations will completely you know geographically diverse maybe diverse on scale or diverse in their end goal they still have this interface point this familiar contact point and if you have an institutional construct like an ospo so i think that's an important one to call out this idea that number one you may already have people doing it but the name having a name that's familiar to people can be a huge benefit in that mapping exercise and that discoverability you talked about earlier which in fact is we have added that as one of the recommendations in the european commission study as well to actually call it an ospo it might sound like a small point but uh in terms of institutional interoperability semantic interoperability is important calling it the same thing um really matters and i think think it's one one of the many examples of how we can lower the transaction cost between these organizations and here i think also an important thing here as we move and start talking about this you know we've started talking about this global network of ospos let's not forget you know there are many different levels where the ospo needs to be relevant we're not just you know in a pipe dream here talking about like oh networking all these things of course at the end of the day the ospo set up in an organization needs to serve that organization's needs it needs to solve the open source challenges and you know meet work to meet the goal set out in the organization's open source strategy that is all good but what we really want to push and encourage here is also not losing track of um that networking component if you look at the private sector a large a sign of maturity around the private sector ospo is them networking formally or informally with other ospos in in the similar industry or on the user side etc that kind of networking part it took a few years i would say a decade or so for it to develop i think this is a great opportunity for the public sector and the academic sector to kind of leapfrog that development and kind of start off having the the um networking collaborative component built in from the start yeah i mean that and that definitely allows for this idea of increased citizen value i mean that's what this is all about the idea being that for no matter where you are in the world and to the point you made earlier um there's no one city or region that can solve today's problems by themselves i mean i mean just even thinking about the amount of open source uh you know projects that people are leveraging today when we think about the very specific needs of cities and regions and countries um there are often common threats um but there are often very specific contextual things that need to change it's a perfect environment for for using open source so getting you know accelerating that citizen value is what we're talking about here and having ospos as a tool to do that um in the context of local policies is is exactly uh the the opportunity that we see here the trust is also very important because you know as we're moving to a stage now where perhaps there's a decline in trust in public organizations we need to find ways to bring that trust back in and indeed the idea that you can point to examples of the code being used in different parts of the world can really increase that trust and increase people's willingness to jump on these projects and to actually invest in them which again is an incredibly important point um but i think as well that the idea of actually having everyone engaged like giving citizens an ability to be able to see what's happening not just in terms of being able to trust what's happening but also being able to actually have an impact on their own lives like that's hugely valuable too right like it's uh the idea of of of that agency and being able to be a part of what's happening in technology in your city or country that's that's great because it means that it's just not someone building something for you it's building things with you um and i think that's that's again another very very important benefit that we can see from this global network because it's people coming together from all around the world to build things together there's a huge community building potential in that and while this sounds like big words you're all here in the audience you're part of the open source ecosystem it works it is happening it is actually done it's one of the great examples probably in history where this kind of collaboration has taken place let's just start expanding on the kind of challenges and issues that we could help solve in this kind of mode of collaboration and innovation i think that's very important i think here it's a point of encouragement as well right claire of get out there and support and help kind of expand your view of how you could spend your time in in uh in terms of contributions to open source or how to teaching how to engage with open source in the ecosystem and and just even when we think about corporate ospa goals um obviously you will have your own goals in the context of the communities you're already involved in but perhaps they can be extended to include some of the corporate social responsibility goals your organization has and giving your employees even maybe beyond the software development employees an opportunity to actually work on some of these global projects that we know are coming out from places like the who united nations um and certainly uh it would be wonderful to start seeing this network of this global network of ospa's include not just the public sector ospa's but also all the private sector ospa's and how they can actually interface and help this journey for citizen value i think that would be an excellent outcome yeah couldn't agree more from from the hyper local to the global there's uh there's a role for open source stakeholders to play almost everywhere as we're moving into digital public services or the interaction with the public sector and citizens and companies will be more and more digitized so i think there's a lot of work to be done but you know we're in a good place and we have a great model to start looking for tools to solve solve some of the most interesting and challenging issues that that we have facing us completely agreed after and so i suppose with that we'll we'll wrap up this talk i know you're there in person to take questions i'm sorry i can't be there in person as well i hope you've all are having and will continue to have a fantastic conference um but thank you all very very much and uh we look forward to seeing you again soon bye bye now thank you so yeah do let me know if you have any questions that was weird to listen to myself for like 25 minutes um uh yeah any questions or thoughts or statements please one question yeah no it's a very good question um i think there are probably many different ways it could be done so working with open source in um and public policy as i mentioned in the beginning a lot of it is and will touch on procurement law like you probably if you've engaged in the space at all uh there are arguments around public money public code public procurement in terms of software should only go to um they should only procure open source solutions and services this is all good and fine as an idea um there are however quite a lot of examples i think italy might be the best one they have a an almost perfect law that states exactly this and nothing's happening they've had it for several years um and i think this is an interesting thing to reflect over i mean this has to do with enforcement of course are there like penalties with not following it so there's a lot of details everywhere and how you design these things but also just kind of helping the individual um public servant who needs to abide by this law with clear guidelines how to work and here is kind of again the point where we really start looking at the institutionalization building up ospos um because it will be that center of excellent and excellence and knowledge that would help people across um very different diverse organizations actually follow these things develop guidelines on how to procure open source um it is a different mode of thinking it's a different mode of procurement so i think we just have to keep on thinking long and hard but it's not just about writing that great law and that regulation it has to do with you know classic things like you know changing culture internally and a very important thing and we had a conversation with the european commission and you and uh ospo guys on this they they were asked like what would you ask like what would you like to have in order to actually progress with this and they said time give us time we need to learn we need to figure a lot of things out there's so many examples of you know kind of politically driven pushes into open source from cities and regions but then that party might be voted out of government and then stops and that's where institutionalization is important you need to have something to last over time and even for big companies that are often fast faster moving than the public sector it took time for them to figure out open source and how to do it and institutionalization was a big part of it so i think we there is no which i think many wish there was like a quick solution write this law and then we're fine now we have to work from the ground up really get by in etc well things are moving at least denise let's see if i'm now it started thinking about a bunch of different things so let stop me if i'm answering the wrong question here i made this point in the talk about i made perhaps a not super exact differentiation between old and new arguments for open source in the public sector or in public policy the quote-unquote old arguments are still valid there are still good arguments around cost savings let's say that you can share and reuse between sectors and regions and cities using each other software solutions etc all this is still relevant well we're interested in and this is perhaps shaped by the fact that we work mostly with the EU institutions where the kind of systems level goals is what really matters like across Europe we're interested in trying to move new stakeholders and new participants and perhaps politicians of a different color to start being interested in these questions to move it at a bigger scale because the arguments about cost saving and let's say cities or regions that cannot afford the proprietary solutions they might be already by those circumstances forced into having to deal with open source what's interesting is to start looking and discussing why should let's say a country have a targeted open source policy maybe it's because of the economic growth the fact that investing like in procurement law instead of saying you have to buy open source it's rather how do you justify buying a proprietary solution over an open source solution when there are proven economic externalities and positive benefits to the economy by releasing more code more there are like direct links direct causation between more open source in the economy and startups being founded like there's more access and there are more ways of doing business around this right so I think instead of completely shifting that into what arguments we're using let's just be flexible and realize that there are so many more arguments that are there to be used today there's also of course just the the digital autonomy argument which is I like talking about it in the context of open technologies I mean part of it because our think tank deals with that so it's it's nice but instead of talking about digital autonomy and just you know building walls around your country only by our country's technology and throw a bunch of money on perhaps solutions that are not that good focus on open like focus on open maintain control have access lower the cost of switching providers and vendors that also gives a public institution the sense of control that I think the discussions about digital autonomy actually that is what they're actually about at the end of the day so I feel like I kind of went on the side of your question but I hope that was all right yeah okay um we're gonna uh go to the last speaker so I guess we are out of time