Good morning! My name is Katie Levinson and this is all the ways you are doing robots wrong. I can't operate a computer. Too much hangover. All right, so who am I? I have done four years of competitive robotics. I've done six seasons of coaching. Five of them were first year teams and first year teams have extra excitement with retardation. Two years at NASA, you can read.  I am currently the director of development at Hacker Dojo which is kind of being shut down by the city of Mountain View because they are anti-awesome. So if you would care, like, to help us in reopening our building, we'd really appreciate that. And my phone makes a cha-ching noise whenever you donate at hackerdojo.com slash Kickstarter and I will drink when that happens. I'm sorry. If I can find more alcohol, I would love to give you a shot too.  I'm sure as you know, all DEF CON speakers are only accepted if they are exceptionally qualified. And I feel like I've done my homework in this department. Speaking of which, this is the trip to Vegas. And this is why. This is a photo of my grandma in 1937. She was 19 and graduating from rice for math.   She's, yeah.  And so this year I wore a fancier dress. But I'd like to take a second to remind this community. The reason I do this is to remind this community what we spent so many years teaching our bosses and our, like, you know, feds and all of those people is that it doesn't matter how you dress or do your hair or what you do on the weekends.  And the rest of it is all water under the bridge.  If you have a question, come on up and ask it. I'd like this to be a nice kind of casual light talk.  But we're going to go through a lot of topic really fast. And so it would be easier if you just stop me and ask your question. And there are a lot of bright lights preventing me from seeing that far into the audience. So please feel free to shout. I may regret saying that. All right. Outline. Input is hard. Output is hard.  And here are some bad ideas. Input is hard. All right. The infrared. Infrared is a type of sensor you use on robots. It works with a laser. Lasers are sick.  So it's really bad with mirrors.   Because most cameras have an infrared sensor which determines the focusing length of the camera. And so I can't tell you how many teams I've seen that like all those little news clips are like oh it works great when the camera is not rolling. It literally works when the camera is not rolling because the camera is bathing the robot in infrared light. So yeah. Bad. This is actually a problem for normal cameras as well. The solution is yeah. So sunglasses. Yes. Thank you sir. So you can put sunglasses on your robot and it will filter out the infrared light.  And so that's great.  And the great thing about this is it's not entirely obvious because infrared sensors have a minimum distance.    So read the specs of your infrared sensors and put it in the range that it's supposed to detect. Rocket science. I know right? This is an ultrasonic range finder that's being this little thing that looks like people always identify it as the robot's head. Basically noise comes out of one and bounces off the wall and comes back into the other. And this works kind of like sonar. It's pretty sick. This is my friend's robot.  It's called hexi if anyone, they're really cool actually. They're bad with fuzzy things. Because fuzzy things don't reflect sound quite right. So you can actually put two of these together and then this will detect the mirror things and the ultrasonic range finder and the infrared mechanism will detect the fuzzy things and that's pretty pimp. This is straight vodka. That's cool.  Okay. Oh this is a puppy. So I talk fast and so when we have a new idea I'm going to show you an adorable picture. Because that's a great way to transition because I talk too fast and we need a break for ideas. All right.   And for robots this is pretty difficult. So this is our robot and it's near the wall and it would like to measure how far it is from the wall. So it's always measuring like how far we're right now and then I'll take like I'll know that and then I'll know my velocity. But the thing is your sensors aren't perfect.   But just don't take it raw. It's kind of the big takeaway message here. Ah. So speaking of like fear and loathing in Las Vegas, the walls bend. And this is actually really kind of trippy the first time you see it. So you're shining a little laser into that corner and the corners are doing one of these things. And that's like whoa. And why does it do that? It's because the little arrows indicate the thing coming in and as you can see it bounces its way down the corner and then comes back which makes the end of the corner look farther away.   The dumbest one is to assume that all of your walls are square. And that isn't too terrible of an assumption. There have been tons of ways I've seen people look at the ceiling and use those little lights. They know a light is supposed to be every ceiling tile so they measure out how the room warps. There are other people who basically do a 360 scan and then they assume like I know you don't think I'm the whole way around but I am. So we're going to assume all of these points I found are points and then I have a spring which represents my confidence in that point and then you assume that the first point equals the last point and you let the spring, it's really actually cool to visualize. What is it? Crap. OpenCV. OpenCV has a great library that does this and it's really cool to watch visualization because it's like room, room, room, and it snaps together and actually looks like a room. It's really sick. And yeah, that's awesome. This is the only movie where Keanu Reeves was appropriately cast.  Hey, thank you someone for donating. I will pour you a drink later, whoever that is. So yeah, so we want to fix that second bit where LiDARs are really expensive. There's some really cool open source work which could bring them down to like $30 and if you're interested in making the world more awesome and full of robots, talk to me in Q and A. All right. This is one of those expectations versus reality.  And what you're really doing is you're scanning while you're moving and you're actually taking the sampling of the wall in three different places. And so it looks like your wall is like this. And that's a problem. So you can sit still while you scan, you can do math for how fast you're going, you can do lots of things. But the takeaway here is don't use your data raw. There's a little bit of thought that has to go into this. Oh, and this makes sad robot. Sad robot is sad. Oh, and then you can do this in 3D is what you can do is you can set up a whole array of little dudes along the bottom and then you just scan it up and down. I actually met like a crazy lady at an interview I had. She was in like HR and she was like, yes, these are the yes, yeses and the no-no's. And it's because the ones that scan this way are the yes, yeses and the ones that scan this way are the no-no's. So these are used frequently with LiDAR.  And so you can get a good floor level. But the scans will come in and you have to do the math to pull the scan. Hey, thank you someone. You have to do the scans in 3D. So that's how that is. Oh, compasses, compasses work on magnetic fields. Motor's involve rotating magnets. So don't mount your compass next to your motor. That will get very exciting, very fast. They're actually a number of sensors which are very sensitive to electromagnetic interference. Certain variants of gyros, certain variants of accelerometers.  Or you know, if something's really not working, just move it away from the motors and test it just when in doubt. This is a kitty. Yay kittens.  Alright, this is a little kid waving. Robots like to wave too but it's not because they're happy to see you, it's because they're retarded. So, I'd not, anyways, look at that, it's more along. So this is, the concept here is a pit. P stands for proportion, I stands for integration, D stands for derivative. So the proportion is how close you are to your target, to the proportion of that. The integral is you take an integral of like how far away you are and then that's a number. And then the derivative is how fast the distance to your target is changing. And so what you do is you put, you slap a constant on each of these and then you combine them for your target output speed. And sometimes there's a dividing factor here. This is kind of like big O-ish notation, like the scaling of it doesn't matter. The only reasons A, B and C matter is relative to each other.  I'm sorry, it's not how science works. So this is the proportional term. Alright, so it goes, this is a horrendous graph. I'm really sorry, I couldn't find a better one. So the green line is the normal and then the black is if you lower the proportional term and then the red is if you raise the proportional term and you can see that this actually, it doesn't, and then the graphs represent like how close it is to the blue line. So over time you can see this actually levels out pretty quickly to its target. But it doesn't rise particularly fast. And when you, it is, hey, thank you. It doesn't rise particularly fast. So like compare it to like integral which rises much faster as the term increases. So it rises slower. Sorry, it rises faster because red is more, God, this is an awful fucking, no, it rises faster. I can read. So it rises much faster with the integral term but like it's going to continue to do like the itty bitty waves for longer.  And so you're basically combining these to get the arm to do approximately what you want to do because in reality the arm has mass momentum. When you're like go to specifically like this particular degree, the momentum will cause it to overshoot and then it will go back and then it will go forward and then it will go back. And like that's why robots wave at you.  The other thing you can do which is really derp is what your thermostat does.  And if you are lazy, that's a great way to start debugging.  So you can lean on it, you can push on it and the robot will actually gear up the motors to resist you without you writing code, which is awesome. Um, but it's also the beginning of the robot resistance to beware.   Um, because science is complicated, it's half the clock in the morning and here we are. Um, so velocity control. Um, so the inner world doesn't really work when you're trying to set a target velocity.  I appreciate you. We're gonna get a lot of it. This is straight vodka. God. Jesus Christ. At least I had a mixer last year. All right. So set the I target to zero and then just set your velocity and this is like an okay way to set velocity. Um, I'm gonna need a feedback loop. So put like maybe encoders on your wheels. Um, I don't want to go too much into stuff from last year because I know that some people saw the talk from last year, but the slides are all online if you search my name and the word DEF CON. Um, ah, this is a cute adorable photo of a goonson fixing a neck gear router. Um, so this is our puppy photo just as we transition. Servos. Servos are limited to just one rotation, but servos have a lot of software actually already in them. Um, so like you just set a position between zero and two fifty five and it just goes.  There's some like physics behind it. Um, there's some applications like they aren't just interchangeable for motors. Um, but they're pretty cool. Uh, and programming servos is wicked simple. Numatics are cool. They use air obviously. They're open air system and, uh, and you can't really stop the, the pneumatics shaft halfway. Like you can spend a lot of money and they have special ones with like magnetic positions that are between open and closed.  Um, you need a pump on there or you need a big reserve tank and if you run out of the reserve tank then that's, sorry guys, um, then that's, uh, then that, then your pneumatics don't work anymore.  Um, consider that.  Uh, so, have fun. Um, but the good thing about it is an inch of non-compressible fluid equals an inch of movement and you have much more granular control. Um, and it is a closed system. You can't just pump it out in the air and then pull more in and expect it.  Uh, ah, this is Casey's Crotch. Um, so, cool trick. Um, not involving Casey's Crotch.  Um, and you can really smash your head against the wall with this. Um, most camera phones don't have a good IR filter on them cause they're not like, yeah, with like the sunglasses. Um, so, you can hold up the circuit that when you think it should be lit with your camera phone and see if the circuit is blinking. Um, and this is like, I mean, most of us carry camera phones in our pockets.   Um, a great way to do this is I tested this last night is those little, um, 3D keyboards on that, on that TV thing in the Rio hotel rooms. Those work on infrared. TV remotes work on infrared.   But, um, but do check because camera phones are getting better and better and better and better and they're starting to use IR filters and I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. So, um, so cool debugging trick. This is a polar bear. It's so cute. Ah, that vodka.  That's still straight vodka. Corrections from last year.  Threaded bolts. How do they work?  What's the twerries? Threads. Yeah. All right.  Don't do that. This is a machine that does nothing but bend bolts. Don't do this either.  They do make them. Thank you to all you lovely people who sent me angry emails. Now I've corrected it. Awesome. This is still the right way in general is you're actually not, um, relying on the bolts for the holding force but instead holding two pieces of metal together and relying on the static friction to be your primary holding force because bolts are zinc plated shits. Um, and you don't want to rely on them. Four raw linkages. These things are pimp.   Uh, does everybody understand this slide? Yeah. Yay. A motion like this, you would be like, holy balls I need two motors with two dimensions and a lot of code to make sure it never goes out of these things because I want my little red thing on the top to go exactly this track and I go wrong bitches.    Here you're transferring. If you assume that that circle represents a motor that's driving that around, you're translating a like pretty rotational motion into a semi linear motion. That's really pimp.    They're messy and they're awful and they're like just like this is amazing.  Um, if nothing else, we like, we never did math for ours. We would always just take out cardboard and push pins and just be like, is it working now? Like, you know, and once you get it right, you just stab it out in metal. Like, you know, but so think about this before you start doing, if you have a motion and also you can change orientations here. So like let's say you have like, I'm a little claw here. I'm a little claw here. Okay. Um, and you want to go here and then you want to be up here and rotated. You can also do rotations by, by, by having this part of the claw, a bolt here and a bolt here. You can have like the claw like rotate as part of it. It's really cool. If you're really a baller, you can have, you can make a curve which hits any three points of your choosing, but two points of your choosing is so easy. I do not want to see anyone having like soft coated like things anymore that are like, when it gets to this position stop, when it gets to this position stop for a motor. That's awful. That's, that's bad. Use, use a four bar linkage. Use what you have.  Awesome. This is a bearing. Um, so I'm so ashamed to have to go through this guys.  Cause friction exists. Okay guys, like this is a ball bearing. You buy them from the internet, especially if there's any significant torque. Uh, they're really dead simple.  I'm sorry guys. Oh well. Thank you for donating. I'm out of vodka. Sorry guys. If anyone's got any more, it's right there.  Um, it's just a low friction piece of metal, um, that you use and they just rub up against each other. But they're less rubby than doing like just flat out like aluminum on aluminum. Like, like don't, no, please, please baby Jesus cries. All right. Thinking things through the whole way. All right. So not all plastics play together nicely. This is Loctite with a non-compatible plastic. This was my friend's senior project. It was so funny. Um, so when you're, when you're gluing plastics or when you're, or, uh, Loctite, we're going to count that in as a kind of glue. Check that your, your plastics are compatible. Um, there's lots of data sheets on this. You will not drive it empirically. You will look it up online. Um, unless you are crazier than me.  Um, gearbox is versatile.  Uh, so give yourself, like the difference between theory and reality is much smaller in theory than it is in reality.  Um, this is sad robot going backwards while it's leaning forwards. Oh, don't push robot. Don't push him. Cause you know what? You use your battery to power your computer, to tell your motors to rotate forward. And when you push your motors, you push your robot forward, the motors rotate and then feed current back into your very expensive computer. And then you're sad. Please no. Um, this is so easy to fix. You can have diodes. You can have cut offs. Oh, hello. What are you doing here? Um, you can have diodes. You can have cut offs. You can have tons of ways.  It just unplugged like, just a little, you know, like jacked I've switched. It just unplugged the motors from the rest of the things, but please think about this.  All right, acknowledgments. I didn't have to learn all of this the hard way. My mentor is when I was in high school and retired. I'm amazing. He didn't kill me. Former co-workers from NASA Ames LMR project, my very tolerant housemates, an IRC channel where I'm retarded, Hacker Dojo and my college which is spelled or pronounced Worcester or Worcester for the locals, not Worchester. Uh, this presentation is Creative Commons by Attribution non-commercial share alike. I am Katie Levinson.  You should talk to me with corrections or whatever else or questions.  Big questions. Sorry man. I told you I talk fast. All right, so I'm going to repeat what that man said is James Watt was more proud of the four bar linkage than the fact of the entire steam engine. That's bor. Thank you for that history. Ah Jesus. So this is a dirty secret. Is mechanical engineers think MATLAB is software? And that's a really unfortunate thing.  So it kind of sucks but like being lazy is awesome so I don't know if you want to choose to bite the bullet or what. But that's about your options. Anybody else? It's like electrical engineers think C is the only programming language which you know C is an awesome programming language but they're like I know C.  All right FPGA is in C. It doesn't matter. I know C. So it's how the cards dealt. Anybody else got questions? Hi Elliott. Thank you. Oh I got to see Elliott at this conference. That's awesome. Anybody else got a question?  Most of what I did was I worked on a lunar rover prototype at NASA.  This is actually a really good story because President Bush was like man what do popular presidents do? I know I'm going to challenge India and China to a space race. We was like hey bitches we're going to the moon in 2020 and we're going to Mars in 2030. And he called NASA and was like guess what I did.   It's because NASA was pretty much like we can't do this and Bush is like I don't know what I keep you around for if you can't even go back to the moon.   And then in 2009 he canceled project constellation and that was all the layoffs. They minimized the like oh there were only so many layoffs but like they don't count all the payload teams. They only count the teams doing the rockets and so that was unfortunately the end of my adorable lunar rover. Which is so cute. It was like 10 kilograms and I hold it in my arms. It was so cute. But yeah. Any other questions? I found it in my hotel room. No. I just found it this morning.  I love Vegas. Next question. Go at once. Go and twight. Oh hey. It was so cute. Sorry what?  Like it's really ridiculous.  So like you have a what's that math? I'm drunk. So it's like a 14 day day and a 14 day night so the temperature swing is ridiculous. No one actually I know that everyone's like oh we put a buggy on the moon but like no one is actually put a long term mission on the moon because the moon is so crazy. We put our movers rovers on Mars. The only one that's ever put a rover on the moon is the Russians and they put like a tank on there. Like the Lunar Croft was crazy. So like it's actually amazing how little we've spent on the surface of the moon because the surface of the moon is crazy. So this was a little shitty scouting mission. It basically had a camera in the front and the goal was just to drive that fucker until the sun cooked it. Because the surface is like if you can imagine the temperature switch during a 14 day day with no atmosphere and nothing to protect you it's ridiculous. Like if you look at the original Lunar extra outside of the mission drive buggy shit they used piano wires on the wheels because they couldn't use rubber because it would boil. Holy balls. They couldn't use metal because the first rock would pull it up so they actually took piano wire and tuned it around and then they let the rocks get absorbed up into the piano wire and then like the and then the rocks would just fall out later. Like the the science like it's so crazy. Like I understand why Mars is so important and so awesome and someplace we might actually live someday. But like the moon is such an ultimate engineering challenge. I think that people really underestimate the moon because of the distance involved. But the moon is such an awesome engineering challenge for thermal engineers, for mechanical engineers. I mean basically on a Lunar mission software is the like we'll fix it in software and support team. We clean up everybody else's messes. Like someone wanted me to overclock and underclock the processor to function as a heater.  Like it's very very humbling to realize that like despite the fact that you have to have a mathematically foolproof system, you are not the one holding the hard challenges on this team. And that's an incredibly humbling experience. I'm sorry. I don't even remember what your original question was. Did I answer it? Any other questions? Oh my God. I can tell you so many stories of Epic Fail. So one time, I know I put this in last year but it's so good. So like one time I we were making a robot and it was two nights before the ship date because this was for competition where they take away the robot. And so we were just testing the robot and you know the battery is whatever. Like you know it needs to stay in there. So we bolted it down with some metal C clamps. That seems reasonable. And then as we were driving around the metal C clamps like waggled themselves out and got over the contacts and like arched it right into the steel frame. And now I advise you to use Velcro on your batteries. Because fire is bad. Most important formula for robots black plus red equals fire.  We also I was once on the Carnegie Mellon. That was actually really humiliating because I graduated. I was like chilling with Carnegie Mellon and then my alma mater is the one that wins the half a million dollars for the Lunar X Prize.  And so they were great. They had no suspension on the robot. They were doing a Lunar Regolith Excavation Challenge.  And so they dropped it into the pit where it was supposed to compete.   When you let the magic spoke out of the computer bad things happen. So that was bad. Let's see what. Oh I ruined two walls in my high school.  Fun fact kids when you get out of range of your wireless you need to have the robot stop. When it detects it is not getting anything it needs to stop because otherwise you will have no way to bring it back. This is really important if anyone does UAVs. Just put that out there.  Let's see what else. Oh goodness I've broken so many things. Yeah that's all I can think of right now. Anybody else got questions? So like I know. He says that's the best most people here are getting. So you know the question was one way of robots we can have sex with. So that's hard question. You would either have to tether it or finish fast I'm sure isn't a problem around here. Because right now like the really limiting factor that's keeping robots out of our daily life is battery consumption. I actually wanted to put a slide on this but I got you drunk. So it's actually 100 times more efficient if you're allocating about 30 pounds for energy, for your energy budget to put a generator on there with gasoline than to put a lithium ion battery even pretending that cost wasn't a problem.  So unless you get turned on by a generator going rrrr. I would say that's one of the more serious barriers to robots in our everyday lives for sexy times or whatever else. And it's really great because cell phones are now like really up against the wall in battery life and they're putting a lot of money behind this. On the other hand, I cried inside when I saw the Apple and they were like, like, Apple has so much money and they're like, oh my God, guys, we made it so much better. I'm making the battery bigger and I'm like, no, make me a better battery. I want robots everywhere. So if any of you happen to be billionaires that want to be like philanthropists and don't want to give it to the hacker dojo, and want to make the world a better place, I would say that the place where you can really make a difference is by improving battery technology because that's what's really holding us back from the robotic revolution. Is it's just not energy efficient and people don't want generators and horrible gas smells and the rat noise in their house. I go off topic a lot. What's up, dude? Baller? My thoughts on self driving cars is they are baller. They are an example of a gas fueled engine, as previously stated. They're amazing. I really hope that they get good at what they're doing before the legislature goes, oh fuck, guys, we have to stop this. They're really cool. On the other hand, I'm really sad because Google's solution to running a self driving car is to be like, we're doing a $30,000 car and strap a $70,000 lighter on the top.  It's like, fuck, no, I'll buy a Tesla for $100,000. So I'm really looking forward to lightars coming down in cost and I believe it can be done. I believe the technology is out there.  So I really want to see commercial lightars because I believe that that is what will hasten self driving cars into the reality that you and I live with. By the way, I'm really not good about the future. I love these questions but like, I'm as much of an expert as this microphone makes me. So please take me with a grain of salt. I'll give you my best effort. What's up? So what languages do I like to program in for robotics?  And you actually look at like the computers we have on robots and they're awful. So there's usually actually two computers that are seriously involved. One is the embedded system on the robot itself which is extremely bare bones, extremely power sensitive and that is all embedded C.  So that is written in a variety of languages. There are excellent libraries for Python, excellent Python support. Another friend who's doing amazing work, if you think I'm good at robots this man I think will be the next father of modern robotics. And his name is Kevin Harrington and he works at Neuronrobotics.com. They have phenomenal Python libraries. There are a lot of good Python libraries. A lot of it depends on OpenCV. OpenCV is varied if you want to do vision stuff. Let's say embedded C and embedded Python for the off board computing side are probably the general tools of choice. Although I've seen everything. Because robots is such a new field.  I don't know if anyone's going to use it. But like everyone's trying to get into being the operating system of modern robotics which is bullshit.    Like operating system modern robotics until we get proper batteries on there is a joke.  Next question. What's up? Can you shout a little louder? Ah Jesus. Neuronrobotics has one. Willow garage is trying RTOS A for effort. Sorry. Ross not RTOS. RTOS is something different. Ross. Thank you sir. It's trying Ross A for effort. They assume that you have this like magical infinite battery life. But they are shiny. And when the battery industry catches up they'll be kind of hot. I don't know if they'll be outdated before then. OpenCV is baller. It's actually used by a much broader community including general computer vision. I can definitely answer that question better by posting something online.  If that's cool with you. Next question. What's up dude? Not intensively. You mean the arm? Is there's a robot on the international space station? Are you familiar with that? Are you meaning the arms or? What?  Sorry dude.   I'm gonna give you my best educated guess.  What's up dude? What kind of programming languages and design strategy is going to lunar reverse?  Because NASA is obsessed with flight heritage.  Someone else flew it. They obviously did their homework. It's like conference papers. It's like I'm qualified to speak this conference because the people who spoke at the conference before think I'm qualified. Not this conference.  Because this one the goons decide. I mean they don't talk. So it is complicated. People use VX works which is... I have nightmares about VX works. I really hate that system. And they also use it on your wireless modems and oh those work so well. I'm never getting a job from them.  I don't wanna work for them. So there was a low earth orbit. So there's a big differentiation between low earth orbit and higher earth orbit because the van ellen belt is like pew radiation. You're fucked. Because imagine when you're designing your programming system any bit can be flipped. Like your stat counter oh I just changed that. Oh your PC counter oh I just changed that.  So VX works is what spirit and opportunity run is what a lot of the computers run. I mean Rad Harden computers are...  Because they don't like intercontinental missiles. I don't know why.  Defense I mean like this is getting into my political belief but defense contractors have gutted the American public's capacity to do science with their hardware and it's really frustrating and I'm sure that many people in the audience hate me for saying that but it's the nature of things. I feel. Are you throwing me off?  Alright thank you so much you guys


Now that we all agree that service provisioning through IMS is the way forward for NGN based service creation and delivery. We need to look at how the overall physical network architecture of for service provisioning is designed. It is known as the multimedia communication center or MCC. It has some liking to the data center which provides access to data. So again here it is an access based network for certain services to be offered. So we are going to look at a standardized view on MCC. We look at how threading or multiple client parallel support can be realized through agents and then we look at some functional and non-functional requirements which are mandatory for MCC to achieve in order to make it scalable, sustainable and efficient. So the MCC is essentially a standardized way for accessing services. These services are basically the information services which are invoked by either the user or an intermediary like a proxy agent that works on behalf of a user. Now this customer or a user which communicates with MCC can have access to the services which are backend services or which are sometimes actually involved or engaged with the customer. For instance, the IVR, the interactive voice response system or the interactive video and voice response system is an example where the IVR servers are placed in the multimedia communication center where this service is invoked when a certain condition requires the IVR to interact with the customer. Since we are talking about customers not in a few dozen or thousands but probably millions. In that case, the customers would all have to be facilitated in a one-on-one fashion. That is a customer should feel a prioritized and customized service. For that, the concept of agents or some kinds of threading mechanism is introduced where each agent talks to a customer in a one-on-one basis. So it means some kind of agent which is class-based object can be thought about where multiple customers can be treated in parallel through multiple agents which are created on the fly. For instance, if a certain chat service is to be utilized like for instance Skype or WhatsApp, in that case multiple agents have to be provisioned to cater for individual customers. When this happens, it actually means that the MCC is now going to have a business relationship. This business relationship implies billing and charging. For that, we need to look at the stakeholders which would be now involved with the communication center. It is the customer itself, the enterprise which houses such MCC and the network provider or the NGN operator which connects the customer with the enterprise in which the multimedia communication center is placed. It means that this business relationship would generate business opportunities and revenues and it would result into a very thriving ecosystem. Now let's look at some requirements. These requirements are scalable and these requirements are never-ending but for the sake of brevity, we are going to look at the requirements of the multimedia communication center which look pretty much the requirements like any other large data center or server farm. The first one is extensibility. So the MCC has to be an extensible or an expandable system for an increasing number of users. If more servers are required to be deployed or if more customers have to be catered for then extensibility has to be ensured. Then some kind of flexible variety offering model has to be introduced where the large telecommunication organizations, medium-sized business sectors and small enterprises are all entertained and accommodated by this communication center. Then the accessibility through wired wireless mobile heterogeneous environment in a transparent manner has to be ensured. The multimedia traffic delivery has to be transparently and seamlessly provided because the nature of multimedia communication center actually implies that any kind of information can be delivered. Sometimes the multimedia communication center can also be deployed in non-IMS networks. This is not very frequent but in case it is deployed then some kind of backward compatibility also has to be ensured. Let's look at the complete end-to-end deployment scenario of the MCC as a network. We see here that we have different servers. Each server has its own functionality. Let's name a few. We have the application server. We have the unified service broker function that identifies the nature of service that a customer is looking for and returns the addressing information through which a customer can actually reach out to the server from which it can get the service. Then there is the log server that maintains all the transactions which are taking place over this network. Then there is the communication telephony integration function which is some kind of multimedia telephony like voice over IP, video over IP, multimedia messaging mechanism is provided. So the communication telephony integration function actually ensures that the customer is connected to the right kind of service in an integrated manner. Then there is the operation and maintenance server which keeps the network in operationally viable state. Now this is the MCC. Now the MCC network is connected externally to the IMS core via the border gateway and the software control management function and the multimedia call distribution function. Let's discuss them each briefly. The software control management actually implies the invocation, revocation, grant, deny kind of mechanisms for software access and software management for all the software modules and software functions which are provided by the MCC network. Then we have the call distribution function which is the multimedia content call if it is between two parties or if it's a conference call then some kind of connectivity has to be ensured between the calling party and the call party in a one-on-one or one-to-many situations. So you see here that we have the multimedia communication center which is connected to the IMS core through these entities like SCMF, MCDF and the service support function and through border gateway. Now you see here that the dotted line is actually the signaling and the continuous line is actually showing the flow of user information or user traffic. This all sums up how our agents which is actually the customer agents are now talking to the users via the firewall in order to make sure that each customer gets a prioritized treatment.


Hello. Hi, you guys. So today, it is day 23, I will be performing a monologue from The Handmaid's Tale. And this one is, I believe from season one, I have seen one episode of Handmaid's Tale because it was just too dark for me. I like to watch things when I'm in the bath to relax. And that's not a relaxing show to watch. It's a stressful, dark, sad show. I mean, just the first episode, I was audibly saying, like, no, what are you doing? And I'm usually not somebody who talks when you watch the show, except when I get excited like this or stressed out. Yeah, usually when I get stressed out is when I talk a lot to the TV or my phone, I'm watching it on my phone. But this monologue is darker. So I memorized it today. And, or I memorized it, I started memorizing yesterday, I finished memorizing today. And I still don't feel like I'm getting to that dark place. And it still doesn't quite feel like it's clicking like I get it, you know, but this is a good monologue. So I'm going to go ahead and show it to you guys today, keep rehearsing it a little bit more and then refilm it for when I use it for my after clips. But here is my self tape for today. Hi, my name is Belgium Rodriguez, and I'll be performing a monologue from the Handmaid's Tale. But you don't understand. I lied to you. This is a brutal place. We're prisoners.  Or worse, they beat us. They use cattle prods to try and get us to behave. They gouge our eyes out. If we're caught reading, they'll cut off a finger. Second defense, just the whole hand. They just maim us in worst ways than you can imagine. They raped me just once a month whenever I might be fertile. I didn't choose this. They caught me. I was trying to escape. They took my daughter. So please don't be sorry. Please don't be sorry. Please do something. Thank you guys so much for watching. Let me know what you thought. I will put the link in the description to where I found the script. And I have seen also other actors that had used it on YouTube. So if you guys want to go check out other actors performing this monologue or the actual show, I have not seen this specific episode of Handmaid's Tale on purpose because I didn't want to get inspired too much by the actor that, you know, how they're performing it. But yes, and at the end of every video, I feature another channel. This is today's feature. If you would like to be featured on my next video, make sure you're subscribed. Like this video and leave me a comment.


As usual, our Monday bulletin can't be complete without Anand Mahendra. And why is he here again? Well, for unfortunately losing the WIT battle to ad maker Ram Subramanian. In response to the first picture of Blackhole, the entrepreneur compared it to a donut. But Subramanian took the cake with his deadly vada response. This is not the most profitable app anymore. And guess what? It has lost the spot to dating app Tinder, which clinched the top revenue spot in the first quarter of 2019 with a gross revenue of $260 million. Follow your passion, build a business and sell it when it's still successful. Well, the Bansheels did it and so did the Tarakhias. After a successful run, the Tarakhia brothers sold their active business called Medianet for $900 million. And that's what you call achievement. Vigorous working hours is becoming a norm among the tech giants. Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma recently faced flak and criticism for endorsing the 12 hours work culture in an interview. India is well on its way to become a cashless economy. In which to unify the online and offline payments space, Book My Show has sparked an undisclosed amount into the payments company AtomX. In mergers and acquisitions this week, mattress maker Cologne acquired U.S. Bay Spring Air to strengthen its presence in the premium bedding segment.