So, good afternoon to everyone, good afternoon to those who are accessing from Europe, good late afternoon to those who are accessing from the Arab world. Good evening, I guess, you know, good afternoon for those who are accessing from East Asia and good morning to those who are accessing from the U.S. and North America. I will begin with six lines from Mahmoud Darwish, right, from Halat Hisar. So, I want to begin and Halat Hisar was written in 2002 in Ramallah. I begin with this. Welcome everyone to this event brought to you by Sawas and the Sheikh Zaid Book Award. The Sheikh Zaid Book Award is one of the world's leading prizes dedicated to Arabic literature and culture. Since 2006 the award has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding works by authors, translators, publishers and organizations around the world. Sawas is of course famous for its global reach and its commitment to the global south. Sawas is a world leading center in the study of the Arab world with a high profile in cultural literary and translation studies. This year, like last year, Sawas and Sheikh Zaid Book Award are collaborating in the organization of two events. The first one on publishing and technology in the Arab world took place on the 14th of September. The event was recorded and will be uploaded on both Sawas and Sheikh Zaid Book Award YouTube channels. You may have been uploaded already. Today, we bring to you the second event of this year on the detective novel in Arabic noir. We have with us three guests of honor, Saeed Khatibi, the winner of Young Author Award for Nihayyat al-Sahra, The End of the Desert. This novel was published by Hashat Antoine Nofal in 2002. Nihayyat al-Sahra is a work of crime fiction depicting the long lasting effects of the Algerian war over future generations. The book stands out as a noteworthy addition to the scarce historical detective novels in modern Arabic literature that cater to younger readers. This is a quote from the sort of the prize committee. Saeed Khatibi is a writer, journalist and translator working and living in Slovenia since 2016. He has published several translations including the translation of the poetry of Catebiasin and anthology of Algerian short stories written in French and the encyclopedia of Arab African cinema. He is author of four published novels, Kitab al-Khatayah, the book of sins, 2013. Arba'ouna Aaman fi'intighar Izabel, 40 years waiting for Izabel, 2016. Hatab Sarayabo, Firewood of Sarayabo, 2018. He also published a book about his travels titled Jana'in al-Sharq al-Multahiba, the Inflamed Heavens of the East, 2015. Saeed Khatibi has been active as a cultural journalist since 2006 and runs a cultural column published every Saturday in al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper. In addition to winning the Sheikh Zaid Book Award, he was previously awarded the Arab Journalism Award, the Ibn Batrouda Prize for travel literature and the Qattara Prize for Arabic novel and has been shortlisted for the international prize for Arabic fiction. And we have with us also Dr. Jonathan Smolin from Dartmouth College. Jonathan is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. He's the author of Moroccan Noir, Police, Crime, and Politics of Capital Culture, which was published in 2013 and the forthcoming prisoner of love, Ahsan Abdul Quddoos, Gamal Abdul Nasir, and the Politics of Romance, or as he just said, melodrama. He has translated numerous works of Arabic fiction, including novels by Ahsan Abdul Quddoos, Yusuf Fadal, and Abdel Ila Hamdushi. We also have with us Dr. Pei Zhen Tsung, who is currently an Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Culture at National Center University in Taiwan. She received her AM in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Harvard University, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and her PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in December 2021. Pei Zhen's research interests include Arabic literature, Arabic rhetoric with concentration on the theory of Abdel Qahir-Jerjani and Arabic language pedagogy. She is currently working on the comparative poetics of Arabic and Chinese allergies. So we have about an hour, 60 minutes to 75 minutes, but we can go beyond a little bit if there is a huge interest. In today's event, we'll follow the format of a dialogue. I have introduced them and Jonathan will kick off the questions to be followed by Pei Zhen and we'll take it from there.  First of all, how to access simultaneous interpretation. For those of you who want to listen to the conversation in Arabic, go down to the bottom of the screen. You'll find an icon of a globe that says interpretation. Click on it and you will be taken to the Arabic interpretation. For those of you who want to listen to the conversation in Arabic, click on the icon in the name of interpretation. When you click on this icon, you will find a link that says interpretation in Arabic. Two, when you want to ask your question, please use the function of question and answer Q&A to ask your questions. Recording, of course, this event will be recorded and will be posted on Sahas and Sheikh Zed Book Award channels later. So anyway, let's begin. So let me turn to you, Jonathan, for you to start our conversation with Saeed. Thank you so much. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you to so as and thank you to the Sheikh Zed for this wonderful opportunity and wonderful panel. And thank you to my panelists and thank you to everybody who's come. We're delighted to have you here. So I am delighted to have the opportunity to talk about this really brilliant and trailblazing novel. Mr. Saeed, I want to start with, in many ways, the elephant in the room of Arabic literature, of Arabic crime and detective literature. Your novel contains crucial elements of noir fiction, such as a crime begins with a crime. There's an investigation or multiple people investigating. There's a police character and a lawyer, but it's unfortunately a rare example of noir or crime fiction in Arabic. Of course, there are some examples, but it's by and large rare. Why do you think the genre has been delayed in the Middle East and North Africa? Why has it been delayed in Arabic? What are your your feelings about that? How are you? How are you everyone? And thank you for Sheikh Zaid Pais to give me a chance to talk about my novel. So, why? Why? That is a big question. Everybody asks the same question always. But let me talk about the case of Algeria, for example. I don't think so. Because in fact, for example, the crime fiction in Algeria, for example, began in the 70s. The real start, you know, with two writers, they have been very famous in that time, but they publish with their pseudonyms, not with their real names. It was Yusuf Khadar and Abdul Aziz Amarami. They published a series of novels in Algeria. They have been successful, you know, at that time, but nobody knows about them, their real names. Still now, we don't know them. But they were not really writing, let's say, true. They were not really writing crime novels, but let's say kind of novels that supported the dominant political party of this period. So it was more political writing with some elements of leaders, of course, inside.  We can talk about like the Mahfoud with his novel, The Thief and the Dogs. You know, it was great here. It was also, has been adapted in the cinema. It was also a great film. I think so. It is old, you know. In Contra Boy, a big literature genre. If we go back, if we go back in the time, I think if you, if you agree with me, one thousand and one nights, for example, was basically a thrill, I think. Because Shiraia, when you see him in the building, he was serial killer. He was killing his wife every day. He's serial killer, you know. We start one thousand and one nights as we are in the beginning. So I don't think that the crime fiction of Shiraia was absent from Arab literature. But there were some breaks, breakups, sorry. Sometimes you have one period, some texts or some novels, and one after some years, we have some break. So it was not in, we don't have one historical line of crime fiction in Arabic literature, but we have some periods inside. And we have also to say that the thrill is completely literary writing. Of course, freedom is, expression is an important element. We can't talk about literature generally and particularly thrill without freedom of expression. That is necessary. That is the first condition. In Nigeria, for example, we risk writing thriller. The thrill is also novel of social criticism. It's not just to describe crime or you are looking who is the killer. Now, outside, you have some other elements. You have political criticism also. So when we live in a country where the criticism is forbidden by the political system, the thrill becomes something difficult to write or to think about.  That is also another element.  So there is an audience, there is public, there is readers, there are a lot of people they want to read. And you know, the Arabic word, it's a big market for foreign infection coming from Europe or US or from the Iranian countries. You know, we have many translations in Arabic word. That means we have audience, but there are not enough good social political conditions. So freedom of expression censorship. Could this be why we see an emergence of an Algerian crime novel in the 70s? At a time perhaps when there was more freedom of expression in Algeria in the 1970s and the aftermath of course of independence. I also wonder, does language play any role here? Because the Polar, the police novel, the detective novel in Algeria, it developed, of course, in French. As you mentioned, you've got Yusuf Khaldir in the 70s, but you also have Jamal Dib, Zehra Hufani, Ismina Khadra in the 90s. There's such a rich tradition in French, but not Arabic. And so I would love to hear your thoughts on why do we have this rich tradition and development in French in Algeria in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, but not a parallel path for Arabic. Yeah, it's a good question. Everybody also, when we talk about Algeria, I think we are the one of great countries in the world. We can't say Algerian literatures, but Algerian literatures, plural, you know, because we have in French, in Arabic and also in Berber language. So we have the biggest, biggest area. I think it's not about the language, French or Arabic or other language. But Algerian crime fiction has developed thanks to the diaspora. So we have to be clear. Thanks to diaspora, thanks to authors who live in Europe in the beginning, and particularly in France, because it's the local connection between Algeria and France, who naturally write in French, they live in France, they write in French. So the real starting of crime fiction in Algeria started with writers, diaspora, they live in France. It was not because of language, but because of your geographical area.  They don't want to have problems with government or in bookstores or, you know, they don't want to invest money for book, it will be interdict later. So the diaspora which gives, I think, a new life to a literary in Algeria. So it was really kind of, they have been in Europe, they have been in France, they have been connected with another literary society. They discover something new and they bring it inside. So it was not about to return back to your question, it was also about French or Arabic, but is diaspora who participate in developing crime fiction in Algeria? I love this, I love this perspective that the language is really not significant, it is the question of diaspora. It's coming from someone who is living outside of Algeria. So does your own experience of living abroad have a connection with the interest in writing crime fiction or writing noir? Oh, by contradiction, I wrote this novel in Algeria also. I wrote it in Algeria. No, you know what, I start to write in Algeria, not all, but yes, yes. When I am in, because I go often in my home, my home country, town, of course. But when you are inside, it's not the same when you're abroad, you see differently, you know. I see it more clearly when I am outside. And inside, it's difficult, it's difficult to write.  They think everybody is good, everybody is nice and they don't accept it. Well, for me, from my own experience, yes, to travel abroad, it helped me a lot. It helped me a lot about to see my history, my history of my country differently. So it helped me a lot. And also, it gives me some kind of freedom that I will not have it in Algeria. Of course, if you write something that doesn't, that this political system doesn't like, they will not do nothing to do, but you will lose your job, for example. You will have some problems, you know. They will not tell you this in a direct way, but we have some experience. Some, the writer, they suffered a lot with them. So since I am relatively free, yes, I can write now three and more and more and more. So I defended my freedom, my own freedom, so. And it was necessary to feel free. I don't say, you know, it's difficult to give right definition of freedom, but I was free in my imagination. I don't, I don't practice now self-censorship and myself. That's it. It's a necessary point to think to write the current number. Fantastic. So obviously October 1988 is a pivotal, pivotal moment in modern Algerian history. But it's also where you anchor your novel during, you know, your novel during this period. Is there something in particular about that historical moment that lends itself to noir, to crime, to investigation? Well, you know, there is not so much books or audiovisual material about October 5, 1988 in Algeria. For me, it was really a major event. It could be a hundred movies about and a hundred books about, you know. Because October 5, it was the first most tragic moment in Algeria after Independence. When at that time there was not, you know, nobody think that one day could Algerians killing Algerians. We have already 25 years from the Independence. We think that we will make great country, we dream, we dream, we dream a lot, but we are doing nothing in reality. And one day you wake up and you have hundreds victims in the street. At that time, I think that we need hours and hours to explain why it happened, you know. But I will just say briefly that at that time there was not single murder. It was not just one crime. Now, but hundreds, against hundreds of Algerians, hundreds with guns, above now with somebody, they come with knives and everything to kill other Asians, in public, in the street.  It was some tragic moment like you are in the war. And after hundreds of victims, kids, teenagers, adults, everybody was be able to be killed in that time. Even kids 13 years old or 14 years old has been killed in the street. In my case, for example, in my level one, when I have main character, she was young, you know, she was also dreaming. She wants to live, she wants to be happy. And one day she is killed because a lot of people are young people in the same age like her has been killed in the same time. For me, it was just metaphor of this generation. Maybe metaphor of Algeria also because after October 5, we killed also the dreams of those who freed the country from colonization. And to come back in the past, in your question, in the street, there were manifestations, protests, there were victims, we know them, but they were never investigation. We don't know, nobody was thinking to make investigation, who killed, nobody. We have just take things, we know them, but we don't, we don't meet any investigation. So in my level, I try to answer my question. The biggest question, how did we get there in this tragic moment? That is easy to describe what happened, that we can find also maybe in some books of history, but not necessary to tell me what happened, but I want to understand why it happened. Not the protests, people in the street, but what is the reason to make people, at one day in all the country, in the same day, it was not entered at that time, no Facebook, no connection, no thing, even telephone to call somebody, it was difficult. It's not easy to find the telephone in the street, but in the same day, all the people, all the country, they are outside in the street, in front of the police army everything, and the hundreds and hundreds of pictures. Thank you. I have one final question before we move on, which is, I'm very curious about research, your research process. And I've heard you mentioned elsewhere that archives are outside of Algeria. If you want to research Algerian archives, you have to go to France. One thing I'm curious about in my own work is that I'm constantly navigating or trying to find material which is not in an archive. And I go to magazine markets and newspaper markets or just old sellers of this and that and out of the way places. And this for me shows that even if there isn't a good archive, there's still a public interest in the past in newspapers, magazines. And I'm wondering in Algeria, even if there are no archives for your research, are there still people and places to find newspapers, magazines and other materials or artifacts from the past? Was that part of your research process or has it been in the past? Of course it's part of my work. Yeah. You said, use people smart. No, it's not, nobody. You know, it's this kind of archives you can find them at somebody, at his own. You must know him, you must know somebody. He will collect you with him. It's really complicated inside. But yes, I can find some of them. I can find. And also, yeah, yeah, mostly of archives in Algeria, they are still here. I don't know why I hope that one day could be returned back to Algeria. But we still, we still have to go in some, some institutes, you know, in some centers of archives in France, in Paris or in the south near Marseille to check and, you know, you are not able even to take pictures, to check inside with your screen, just to be inside. You don't have to, to take screenshots or something. So you have to go personally there. So it's still difficult question of archives in Algeria. But also what we have as archives, some centers, as Algerian, we don't have access to them. I don't talk about archives in France, but in Algeria it's difficult to have access to check them. Okay, thank you so much. Yeah, before we turn to Peyton, there's a comment that I like to read to you because it's about sort of the context, right? Of the emergence and development of mystery, or mystery novel, or police novel, right? And we have from our audience, Amrita Shodan. I hope I'm not butchering your name. It is suggested that crime fiction in English is a conservative genre where the outbreak of crime and its solution functions as social catharsisism, where the social fabric is torn asunder and then restored by the work of a detective or other intelligent gentleman operator. This has been linked to the disruption caused by the coloniality, imperial experience, Dickens and others, for example. Perhaps this specificity of the British experience suggests that no one should not expect the fiction of this sort to appear in other societies where the experience is quite different. So that's an interesting one. But now let's turn to the novel itself, the fabric, you know, the composition of the novel, and let's turn to Peyton, who will sort of like take part in this conversation with Zahid. So Peyton, the floor is yours. Thank you, Professor Olyam. Thank you for this opportunity to participate for me as the intellectuals. And thank you for the event. I'll start with Zahid Khadibi. My question will focus more on the novel itself as Professor Olyam said. So first of all, it's kind of like a follow-up discussion to the question that Professor Smolin addressed earlier about the time that you pick for this novel. So at the last, like, the final section of this novel, that one of the characters, should I mention his name? Camel? So Camel encounters a demonstration that occurred on October 5th of 1988. And I think you already mentioned about the reason that you chose the specific era. But I would like to know if you intend to create a dialogue between the events of 1988 and the Arab Spring. Oh, in the media, always we have some kind of sentence that we repeat without understanding. Always they say on October 5th, 1988, with the Arab Spring. Now it's not true. It's not true. Maybe in the image, you can see that. But when people, they went to the street outside, they didn't want to change the political system. They didn't say this. They were already dominated by the single party at that time. They weren't just simply because they were hungry. At that time it was the same as other countries connected with Moscow or the US. At that time, society, of course, it was a period of big economic crisis. The price of oil fall down, nobody for the budget for the state. And when you go to the store to buy, you don't have nothing. No milk, no oil, nothing. Even with your money, you can buy nothing. It was the same in Hungary and in Romania. But they didn't protest before. In general, it was the first one. So I'm not sure to compare October 5th to Spring. But it's for me, it's suffrage revolution. I prefer to compare October 5th to Berlin war. I think because between October 5th in Algeria and Berlin, when it falls, it's one year. Exactly one year from one year and one month. The first moment, I remember the book of Foucaima when he talked about the end of history. He started talking about the socialist part. It fall down. But I think the end of history stopped in Algeria. The biggest party against socialism stopped in Algeria before in Berlin. Thank you. And you mentioned about the fall down, like the collapse of the socialism in Algeria. And this lead to actually to my second question about the title of the novel, the Nihaya of Sahara. Actually, when I first read this title, it give me, like I was interested, now a Sahara has its Nihaya. So, yeah. Do you think it's an optimistic prospect for some solution or the end of a particular circumstance in Algerian society? About the title. Yeah, like the title, like the end. Yeah, like a metaphorical. We can have many applications of the title. Often geographically, the novel taking place in one small town near the Sahara, of course, geographically. We can see the atmosphere of the Sahara, how much is hot water. We can see that we have the same feeling. The name of the hotel, it takes part because the most events of this novel take part in one hotel. This hotel for me is the picture of Algeria. In this hotel, we find all Algeria inside. The name of this hotel is Sahara. And the end for me is also the end of one history and the link of another. Because after October 5th, we have another Algeria, different. Two different periods. We have been from 60 to the independence until 88 in single parties. It was really a very hard period. Then we opened the door. Okay, we opened the door for a few years then. Black Decade started and theories and everything. But between before October 5th and after October 5th, the end of history and the beginning of another one. Can I come in Sa'id? Excuse me, I'm just thinking about the desert itself and the multiple meanings of the desert in the Arabic writings. I'm thinking also of Al-Qasida, for example, in which the desert journey is very important. And you can argue that on the desert, some sort of transformation happens. And then you have something new that emerges. So that's one. And the other one, as a Libyan, someone who is very keen on Ibrahim Al-Kuni. A desert is also an alternative community, where once upon a time, there was a different vision of the universe, of culture, of civilization. And I was wondering more about your desert. You have a hotel that is Algeria, but outside is a desert and there is Nihaya the Sahara. There is the end to it. Is it the end or is that something else going on? Tell us a bit more about your imaginary. I was more enticed in the Sahara, the Sahara. I don't agree with this romantic opinion about the Sahara, about this vision, about this beauty. Now, the Sahara today, I talk about my Qidizat Sahara in Algeria, for example. It's a space of all kinds of violence. It's very difficult to live there. It's not because of the weather. Now, all kinds of mafia, all kinds of crimes, you can live, you can see that. For many years in Arabic literature to also abroad that we describe the Sahara as a beautiful space, you know, it stays and romantic. And for me, it's really colonialistic. It starts with some orientalists, not all of them. Orientally, they want to describe, because for them, they discovered the Sahara the first time and it was different in that time, of course. But since many years, the Sahara is the stage of all kinds of violence that you can imagine. Very much, Ibrahim al-Kounis desert, right? Ibrahim al-Kounis is a place of violence, of confrontation and conflict. Exactly. And if I may, I'm teaching Hussain Qanafani's Men in the Sun this afternoon. And of course, the desert is a place of suffocation, right? And so weaving in this kind of literary reference here, I think we can't forget Hussain Qanafani in this respect. Absolutely, yeah. Patron, back to you. Oh, yes. Talk about the hotel already. Yes. And, yeah, you talk about the hotel already and I would like to know more about the characters, like the voices of the novel. So the characters are also narratives of this novel. So the result is like a multitude of voices. So please tell us a little bit more about your thinking about narrative voice and the effects you were trying to achieve. You made this technical choice to make a lot of voices inside. Mm-hmm. Yes. Okay, how to start. Because there are lots of people getting inside. So I will, I will, because I am always correct to be in the past, you know, because also it's really, it's crime novel, of course, but also historical, it's crime. So, okay, Marvel. So my start is October 5th, okay? In 1988. In that time, we have only single party rooms, the country and everything. It was political conditions, very difficult. For example, if you don't have one card that you are like membership of the party, you can't get any position at work or you can't have any shop, you know, just like this. It's the same as other socialist countries. That means at that time, we have only one TV, one radio. Everybody, they dress the same. Everybody, they eat the same, you know. Everybody is here in all the country, you know. I was sitting in the beginning to write this novel with one narrator, only one person. It could be more easier for me. But if I do this, I will be in contradiction of restoration. People, they are under pressure of this political system. They want to talk, they don't have room to talk. And I will also do the same. I will make the novel with one voice and I will attempt others to talk. I choose to make several narrators, several people talking inside to respect their reach to talk. Because in that time, you know what people, they wish to be, to have the microphone in the TV or radio to talk.  The only thing that I can give to these people, this generation, I give them the right to talk. So that is why I decided that everybody has the right to talk every time. Because they were many years under a single party and they don't have right even to protest. It was forbidden maybe to go. If they find five people, just five, in the same place in the street, they took them in the prison, in the jail. Because they will think that they prepare any protestation or something. So I decided to give all characters the right to talk. The only thing that I can help for them. And is this related to the Arabic storytelling tradition? One follows the other to complete a story? Everyone gives one element of the... Everyone gives an element. And the reader will make those presents to understand all of it. So everyone has an element. It's like we have one group of speakers. Everyone gives the information to make all in the end a pyramid of information to know what happened from the end depends eventually on October 5th. Yes. And also, could you please tell us about the role of cinema in this movie? Because the characters mentioned about the cinema and the visualization in this novel. Yeah. So I have also another element in the novel is one, another novel, a British novel, The Sheik of Edith Mudd-Hool. It's very novel, you know. I like it. And also, I always would describe it as a romantic novel but it's a thriller also. It's story of kidnapping is one British woman has been kidnapped in the Sahara project. So my novel, The End of the Sahara, takes the same place where it was, happened The Sheik in the same geographical area, the same place. And this novel, it has been one of the first biggest success of Hollywood because it has been adapted in the cinema with the Rodolfo Valentino as main character there. It was black and white movie that time without picking. It was in 1920, something like this, in the beginning of the last century. The biggest success of Hollywood at that time. And the movie is about Algeria, you know. I was really attracted by this story, how the biggest success of Hollywood came from my area, you know. So for me, it's interesting to talk about that. So I have all, during all this novel, we have the shadow of The Sheik. Everybody talking about the movie or about the novel. And even the novel will be the reason to, that's what character is meant to be asked by police. And then this novel is making big problems inside. So, but there is another reason. This novel, it was Orientalist novel. She described another Algeria, the beginning of the center. I wanted to, just to have like dialogue with this novel, to tell her, yeah, okay, you describe, I will describe to you another Algeria.  It was, inside is one dialogue between two lovers. One is British and one is Algerian, but they both take place in the same area, geographic area. So in 80s, also the only thing that people, they could forget their own life, their problems is to watch movies. Before the terrorism came and black duke had, we have a lot of cinema theaters in Algeria. Then all they closed them, you know, after terrorism. So cinema, it was the only reason to, to escape from your reality at that time. That is why people, they go to watch movie, not to enjoy, but it's some kind of feeling to escape your reality. That is why they watch a lot of, and if you check, also they prefer foreign movies, not local movies. Because local movies, they are also under censorship. They don't show the reality. So they want to watch something different to forget their own life. Yeah, and this actually leads me to another question to dig into more about the character. So first I would like to know, we talk about the movies and then the character Ibrahim, he actually emerged as the sole male character in the novel who shows like appreciation of literature and film and ours in general. But he works as the owner of a video rental store. And he's like men focus is actually on the rental porn. So does he speak for the Arab like the Algerian intellectuals? Does he speak what? Does he, does he speak for Arab or Algerian intellectuals? Yeah, you know, I started the novel with the first chapter is Ibrahim in the first one. Yeah, it was like architecture. But also it was closer. You know, in that time, it started when, you know, when you have the economy, the first time Algeria had economic crisis, now the state doesn't, government has not able to control the situation. And the first time, you know, the black market developed. We see in the evening by him, he will buy one. It was gift from when his friend in the black market in the, in the novel. So when the black market started, when the state fought, the first mother is the Algerian educated people because the traders or other mafia they will come and they will take your place. So during older novel, we can see Ibrahim as the only one who is educated, who is graduated, but he is the only looser. Because in such kind of society, we don't accept you.  We prefer to trust somebody who is selling drugs or selling in the store or somewhere, but we don't trust somebody who is educated. You know, to be educated in that time, Algeria is really suspected, you know, we believe on some theories of conspiracy and something like that. So during older novel, I want just to talk about subgeneration of Algerian entrepreneurs, but in the same time, they are the most looser in Algeria. Yes. Yeah. As we talk about the characters in this novel, I feel like every character in the story engaged in like illicit activities. Like they made mistakes, like ranging from lying or hashish smuggling to murder. So why are all these characters in this novel flawed? Because the society was like, if they have the picture of all our social groups, you know, when you live in one area, why society varies, for example, we see all the, for example, even Ibrahim, he's like, he has videos of everything because he was not able to have a job with his employer. And everybody, we see them, they are without job. And if you have a job, you have a job because you have a job because you know the manager of the leader of this society, of this company, of this office or something. So we live in some kind of society, there is no job, there is no hope also. And all they dream to live, we have one character, he was really apprehensive by Ibrahim because he went to France and he succeeded in France. Everybody wants to integrate. So in such a society, what we expect, we expect of course crimes, we expect drugs, we expect hashish, of course. That is a human reality. I didn't create nothing. It exists like this. Yes. And we talk about that the people in the novel, they commit crimes. Is there any particular reason to pick Kamal as the murder? If there is a reason to make Kamal murder. Yes. The one reason that I talked about it all because this technique of work is the low punishment because Kamal, he lived under protection of Meymun, the manager of water. And he committed many crimes before to kill Zakiya. He never had to take or receive any kind of punishment. He feels like he can, everything is allowed for him. You know, that is also psychological theory. I didn't create this from my imagination or the fiction. One of my questions in this novel, how to become killer? How somebody in normal way has ordinary life and one day become killer. That is one psychological process. And I have a lot of, inside a lot of chapters about Kamal because Kamal is one of the important characters inside from his childhood until he became killer. How he is the only son in the family and he was under protection of Meymun. A lot of things helped him to think, he was young, to think that everything is allowed. Whatever he do, he will never be, or he will never have any punishment. He has like self-confidence to do anything. And then after what happened with Zakiya Zakwani it was also like blackmailing him with money and everything. So he did, he did by mistake. He said after that his intention was not to kill him. But he did, he did this. So it was really, if you look back the novel, it was very long, some long biography about the psychological chances of his character from childhood to become killer. And I also feel like a lot of emotional intensity happened for the characters especially for Kamal. And my last question goes back to Zaza. So he, she engages in singing and some romantic attachment and then she just like commitments. And then she gained a lot of like adoration. But she is ultimately silenced. And she met her death at the hands of the people who actually loved her before, like formally.  I didn't decide to make her the victim. I am sorry for that. Sorry for that. You know, yeah, of course she's metaphorical. I think in October, in October 5, 1988, we don't have just victims instead. We have another corpus, another invisible corpus. It's Algeria corpus, you know. It was one country has been killed. And Zakiya, yeah, it's metaphor of Algeria. Because when the period of 80s also started the religious radicalism now, then we have Black Decade, 10 years of bombs and of killing every day. The first target of radicalism, the first target is women. Just to be a woman, you are an enemy of radicalism. Just to be a woman, don't do nothing.  They have a big problem with women. So Zakiya, because here it's symbol also that after Zakiya, you know, thousands and thousands of women that has been killed in Algeria. Before Zakiya also, a lot of women they have. We don't have really like, a lot to protect women. During marriage or after divorce, you know. She is always with him. No thing to protect her. So Zakiya, she defended himself. She had also problems in the family, raped, you know. And after the rape, she hates all men, you know.  But she's also symbol of this Algerian woman after independence. During the colonization, during the period of the Liberation War, the woman is here. We like the woman. Okay, they are good. They are fighting for the country for liberation. But since the country is independent, all the women has to go back home. We don't see them in the public place or in the street. That is the reason why Zakiya is really a metaphor of this generation of women. Thank you, Payton. I think we'll come back to you, Jonathan, for Ms. Kulchitam. Last question from the panel, panelist. And then we open the question, we open the forum to the audience. I think I see three questions already. Jonathan. Fantastic. So I do want to keep, be mindful of the fact that this is a novel and that novelists have a writing process. And so I'm curious about your writing process. How did you begin to put together this massive collage of a novel? Where did you start and how did you expand from there? You want me to tell you my secret? That is my secret. Zakiya, Zakiya, I think what you can do is really talk about your vision for the future of either the detective novel in Arabic or Arabic noir. Now, I am joking. I will answer this question. Of course, no question. No, no, no. Of course. Now, I don't have, you know, the writing is changing always.  It was what you can make plan. You can have some idea, of course. But the process, of course, first, searching, as you said before, archives that it took a lot, a lot of time for me. It took a lot of time, also. And the writing and the second part is a lot of psychological searches, you know, to understand the psychological of, because it's not just to say for either that somebody is killing somebody. You know, for me, psychology is more important, you know, before writing. You have to understand the cycle. Why we kill? Why? We explain somebody, there must be something more deeper, more inside, in the human psychology. So, I divided all my characters, you know, in my like files, you know. I made like, I can't say what I think plan, but psychological plan. Yes. I'm had to, whatever they do, it must be logical with the psychology. It's not been logical with the history, but with the psychology, because everyone has different history than the second one. So, am I allowed to abuse my position as chair and ask you about psychology and psychology of the criminal, but I'm more interested in, for example, what you think of the Mahfouz psychology of the not terror, is the interrogator, right? Someone who punishes, right, uses torture, torture, torture prison sort of prisoners. I mean, what do you think of it? Is it just out of curiosity? What do you think of Nakeem Mahfouz? And the other one, let's start with there. I have so much Nakeem Mahfouz, you know. I read, I can read the same now a lot of times, you know. A lot of times, and every time is different feeling, you know. And his Freudian psychology, of course, and set up, right? Exactly. Nakeem Mahfouz, for me, is one of idol, I think. Maybe some people, they took Nakeem Mahfouz just in the technique, Nakeem Mahfouz only in this realistic writing about area, about things in Cairo, for me, how he was really you know, smart to make connection between characters, transition between event, for me, to read Nakeem Mahfouz is a great creative writing course. You know, you don't need to go to school to for creative writing, but you have just to read with your passion, with love and with passion Nakeem Mahfouz. Yeah, I also think of Nakeem Mahfouz as the best theorist of the novel, right? He's the best. If you want someone to find a theory of the novel, Nakeem Mahfouz is the person who will give you theory of the novel, especially the Arabic novel. Now, speaking of Mahfouz, there's a question from our audience, right? That sort of like brings Nakeem Mahfouz to mind as well, right? His Mariah. In the way of writing, this is from Sami Habbati, I'm sorry if I'm not pronouncing your name correctly. We notice a sort of polyphonic dimension in each chapter where every persona is the narrator of that chapter. Is it a game of mirrors by the writer Mariah, L'Abbat al-Mariah? Does this reflect a different way every part of the novel conceives conceives the truth? Right? So this is from another question. So this is the second part of the question from the same person. The end of the novel seems to be open. Would we expect a next part of the novel in the future, a sequel? Oh, thank you Sami for this question. Yes, it's polyphonic novel because as I said before, October 5 people, they were just, they wish to talk that I try to give them the right to talk, to expect their wishes to expect what they want. So I want to, that everybody had, everybody has right to talk because before October 5 nobody has the right to talk. About the end, yes, it's the end and I think I don't expect another another volume of this. No, I don't expect that too. Yes, because our history also doesn't end. Our history is also open. It doesn't know the end of this past. So for me, I don't think that I will return back for another volume for this now. So what's next? Saeed. What is next? I am I usually I don't know because as I said before the process can change or I think I'm still writing, of course, but I don't know what could be the result of your food in the end. But I am still interested by the history of my country of my area in North Africa and what is happening there. I am I'm making a lot of searches and I want to be something to work harder to take your time to be to be in the same level that the reader expects from you. Great. Now this is like this one is a very light question from Mariam Sami and this reminds me of my childhood. Have you read any Al Ghaz right? I guess these are cartoons and translated which is a famous detective genre in Egypt, the famous Al Ghaz one. I don't know whether you remember these. In one major series five children and the dog saw big crimes like murder, kidnapping and smuggling. So this is just a question. Have you read Al Ghaz series? I think these were translated. Al Ghaz? I can't remember the it might be too young for it. When I was growing up I read those. Sami I don't remember the answer but in Egypt they have a lot of experience of crime fiction but some of them they were some only commercials but but for me one of as I said before is the thief and the dogs we don't talk a lot about this novel. It was a great novel for me and it was one of the great affairs in Arabic literature and I am really I read a lot of Egyptian literature of course and I like Egyptian so sometimes I don't remember the name or the title but I read a lot from Egypt. Sounds good. Okay, any more questions? Jonathan, Payton if you have anything like you would like to add before we conclude today's session Saeed anything you would like to say? Thank you so much. Jonathan, Payton Thank you very much. It's a really wonderful panel. Thank you so much. I had such a fun time as well. What happened to Saeed? He left. Okay, so everyone thank you again for coming and thank you Saeed for letting us interrogate you and thank you Jonathan and Payton for taking part in this interrogation. So I'll see you next year I hope. See you. Bye. Thank you so much again for coming. Thank you everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


This here is a Linux Tech Tip regarding playing synthesized sounds. Oh, you know what, let me real quick here, because I forgot to do this before I started recording. I'm going to open up Patchage and make sure my audio output is going my input that way. You can hear the notes that I play. Do take an account. I don't know exactly how loud they're going to be for you, so I hope these aren't too loud or too soft when I play them. But basically, on most Linux systems, desktop systems, that is, you're probably going to have play installed. If we man that out, you'll see that it's part of the SOX, Swiss Army Knife of Audio manipulation. And it's probably installed on most systems by default, if not definitely in your repositories for desktop systems anyway. And it does a lot of things. I'm going to play audio files. I can do recording. And in this case, I'm going to show you that you can play synthesized sounds with it. I'm going to show you just a very basic examples here. I can do a lot more. But I'm just going to type the play command, then dash QN, and we'll get into that in a second. We'll say synth to pluck is the type of synthesized. It's going to sound like a plucked guitar. And then we're going to give it a note. I'm going to say a C note. So again, nice little synthesized guitar plucking sound there. Of course, you can do other notes, G or E. And if we go back into the man file for play, we can do a quick search for the dash Q. And here it says show no progress bar. By default, play will show you a little, I believe that's for the audio bar. Basically, it's not going to give any output on the screen. It will just play the sound. So depending on what you're doing, you may or may not want that in there. Also, we will search for our dash N command, which is probably up a little bit higher, and null. And you can use this in place of an input or output file name. Since we're not giving it any files, we're saying null and then we're using a synthesizer. So that's those commands. But another great thing about this play man file is something that's good with all good man files. If it's a good man file, you're going to have examples in it. So let me quickly search through here. Here we go. They give you an example here of another type of synth here. And if you read it says this will play a synthesized a minor seventh chord with a pipe organ sound. So let's quit and we'll paste that in there. We'll hit enter and so I hope you heard that was a little low. So we're giving it, you know, here where it fades in and fades out. We didn't do the quiet. Let's put our quiet command in there so we don't get the output here. So that's another example of command. And then I'm going to write a quick little one liner here to kind of play three notes in a row. I'm going to say four I in an inside braces. I'm going to say C comma G comma C comma E comma G comma. I'm going to say do play dash Q N synth to pluck dollar sign I. So this is the same command we ran earlier. And the change here is instead of giving it the letter directly, I'm going to use a variable. So it will each time it loops, it will go through these will go C E and G. What I want to do is I kind of want to them spread out, but overlapping. So I'm going to do is I'm going to say the ampersand there to say continue running next command, put this in the background run next command, which then I will say sleep point two five seconds. And then I'll say done to close my loop. So what we're doing here is we're looping three times one time for each of these letters. Each time we're going to play those notes as a synthesized pluck sound. But we're not going to wait till each one finishes before doing the next one. What we're going to do is we're going to wait just a quarter of a second. And this is what we get. And of course you can go the other way as well. We can go this way and say G C go down instead of up. We can also, you know, put a bunch of different notes in here. We can go G G C E C. I don't know, I'm just making stuff up right now. And you can write out a little song like that. Not the most efficient way to write a song, but you could do it. And there are a lot more options on other synthesizers in there. This is to show you the very basic little option there. And that is playing a synthesized sound with built in, well not built in, but with play which is usually installed on most Linux systems by default. And if not, it should be in your repositories. So I thank you for watching. I hope you found this a fun little tutorial. I don't know how useful it will be. It could be if you wanted to have your script play some notes when a process finishes or when something becomes true. Maybe you have a script checking for emails. You can have it play little notes. So I do thank you for watching. I hope you did enjoy it. And I hope you visit my website which is FilmsByChris.com. It's Chris with a K. There's a link in the description. And I hope that you have a great day.


Has somebody lied to you before, and if so, how'd you feel? Have you lied to somebody else before? How'd that make you feel?


Good evening, Cloud Native Security Conference. It's an honor to be joining you for this first instance of this new event. I'm joining you from Boston. This is Red Hat's famed Westford office. Also, you can't see much of it and this is just a small conference room that we turned into a virtual event recording booth. But with that and without further ado, let's get going. Now, my marketing manager wouldn't let me get away from the concept that I need to introduce myself. So here it is very briefly. I had the privilege of spending my entire career in free and open source software. I was the Product Management Director for Ceph Thright Hat for the last seven years. I previously was the Ubuntu server PM at Canonical. If you remember 1404, that was my favorite release there. If you go back the decade, I was the Systems Management Tsar at SUSEA. The Dreaded Systems Management Tsar, actually. Some things I worked on on the slide, a bunch of different products, and I was the maintainer of MAN for about 10 years. Technically, I still am, I suppose, but I'm letting Colin take the lead with this version. It seems like the right thing to do. So one last thing, I have a book out on AWS operations by O'Reilly. That's why you see me surrounded by clouds, and that's plenty enough, I guess. Now, Rook, for those of you that are not in storage, Rook helps reduce the operational burden storage team faces, creating horizontally scaled self-healing clusters and Ceph. And Ceph is complemented by Rook making them increasingly self-managing, even self-scaling, you could say. Rook enables Ceph to deploy on Kubernetes with ease, enabling the benefits of containerization. Storage is just another workload running on top of the compute plane. Oron Bear Metal has an external entity for petabyte scale independently managed storage clusters serving different Kubernetes clusters and possibly other workloads. So as usual, we can make things abundantly complicated. The combination of the two is a quite sweet storage solution in general, and obviously perfect for Kubernetes, which is what it is designed for. Now, security practices harden a specific point on the infrastructure. Cherry picking practices without the model of the threat and the attacker carrying it out is not a viable strategy. The joke usually goes, if you want to protect from all possible threats, you need to turn the computer off, bury it in concrete, drop it at the bottom of the ocean. In other words, absolute security is not usable and probably unattainable. It needs to be defined in the context of a threat model. Are you facing script kitties or the GRU or the dreaded privileged insider and that we should all be worrying about? These are very, very different scenarios. That's the starting point for any security consideration. Now, let's dive in on, once we have the profile, what are we going to tighten and what can be tightened? Starting from the network. We can break the network in security zones and the public security zone is the easiest to understand. It's an entirely entrusted area of the cloud. It could be the internet as a whole or you could conceptualize it as just networks external to your cluster that you have no authority over. Data transmissions crossing this zone should make use of encryption. Note that the public zone, as I just defined it, does not include the storage cluster front end. What in SEF is called the public underscore network, which defines something different. The storage front end, which properly belongs in the storage access zone. The SEF clients zone refers to the network networks accessing SEF clients like the object gateway, the SEF file system or block storage. SEF clients are not always excluded from the public security zone. For instance, it is possible to expose the object gateways as three and Swift API in the public security zone. The storage access zone instead is an internal network providing SEF clients with access to the storage cluster itself. Finally, the cluster zone refers to the most internal network, providing storage nodes with connectivity for replication, heartbeat, backfill, and recovery tasks. This zone includes the SEF cluster's backend network called the cluster network in SEF. Operators often run clear text traffic in the cluster zone, relying on the physical separation or VLAN logical separation of the network from all other traffic. This would not be a valid choice if your threat model includes adversarial privileged insiders, for example, but it is a perfectly fine assumption for other models. And this is a good example of what I was just saying earlier. These four zones are separately mapped or combined, depending on the use case and the threat model in use. Now components spanning the boundary of two security zones with different trust or authentication requirements must be carefully configured. These are natural weak points in network architecture and should always be configured to meet the requirements of the highest trust level of the zones connected. In many cases, the security controls should be a primary concern due to the likelihood of attack at this point. Operators should consider exceeding zone requirements at integration points, which for a storage product is often easier to accomplish than for other types of products. For example, the cluster security zone can be isolated from other zones easily because there is no reason for it to connect to other zones. Conversely, an object gateway in the client security zone will need to access the cluster security zones monitors, port 6789, the OSDs, all of them on port 6800 to 7300, and will likely expose its S3 API to the public security zone, port 80 and 443. Let's move on to encryption. Server-side operators overwhelmingly choose to encrypt data at rest using the Linux unified key setup mechanism, better known by all of us as Lux. All data and metadata of SF storage cluster can be secured using a variety of DM crypt configurations. And almost all of Red Hat customers choose to use this facility. A security best practice is to locate monitor demons, the mons, on separate hosts from the storage demons, OSDs, ensuring anti-affinity of the keys and the data that they encrypt. There's results in physically removing, this results in protecting against the scenario where physically stealing a machine or removing the drives does not carry the keys with the part that was stolen. The object store gateway has additional capabilities, including encryption at ingestion time, the use of per user keys, as opposed to per drive keys, their rotation with tools like Vault, support for Amazon AWS, SSC, KMS, and many more things.  These can be used throughout SEF as supplied by REL in appropriate versions. Network communication can be secured by turning on SEF protocol encryption in the Messenger v2.1 protocol introduced with the upstream Nautilus release and updated since. Here, clear text is preponderant because the networks where the cluster uses the SEF protocol are usually the trusted ones and they're usually physically or logically isolated from access. Comparability and overheads are the primary reason why backend protocols are not encrypted by default, but in most use cases, the performance impact is negligible for a properly designed cluster. Latency is shadowed by the network communication provided that you size the CPU core count to account for the fact that you're going to encrypt everything. So it's going to cost you a little bit in hardware, but you can do it without seeing a performance impact for most workloads. Looking at more specific protocols, the S3 service is usually secured between RGW and the S3 client with TLS on port 443. Also, plain HTTP on port 80 is obviously also an option depending on the nature of the data served confidential versus public. There is plenty of scenarios where RGW may be serving just web pages. TLS termination at an HA proxy endpoint is a special case where the link between HA proxy and RGW itself is in the clear text and needs to be located in the appropriate security zone. Standard network practices like firewalling individual nodes to only expose a clear list of ports apply, all the usual network hygiene things that you would normally do. Let's look at Rook specific things for a second. Rook can use CRDs to encode many of these settings like configuring trust certificates for RGW's web service. The Kubernetes secrets mechanism is not really secured by default. So that's another thing to account for. Base 64 is easily reverted and needs to be hardened with encryption at rest and access policies to containers using secrets. Base 64 is not encryption. Base 64 is just encoding. It can be reverted with one command. Rook supports at rest data encryption as we discussed earlier, same thing with in-flight self-protocol encryption not supported yet, but coming soon. You should in any event be using the cloud's extremely flexible software defined networking to segregate unencrypted traffic to private networks. Really on public cloud environment, you have no excuse not to be doing things that way. You can go wild with creating zones. Kubernetes user permission system applies to PVs. So permissions, quotas and all the rest, all of that comes from Kubernetes with nothing for Rook to do here, which is great. More interesting perhaps is KMS support in the CSI driver. This allows individual volumes to be encrypted with their own key, something that, for example, in block storage we would like to do, but we cannot do without Rook at this point. Not yet, we're working on it. Ceph ADM, Ceph Ansible and other deployment and day one tools use SSH to provide a secure command path for install and upgrade operations. This is common these days. It is the control channel popularized by Ansible for host management. The dashboard is usually not exposed to the world, but it needs to be reachable by the operator's workstation to be of use. Lastly, the manager demon supports the whole infrastructure and needs to be reachable on the storage access zone. Ceph use of keys protects the cluster from man in the middle attacks by default. A good practice here is to grant key ring read and write permissions only for the current user and root, with client admin user restricted to root only. RGW predictably supports the key and secret model of AWS S3 and the equivalent model for OpenStack Swift. The administrator's key and secret should be treated with the appropriate respect. Use administrative users sparingly to reduce risk profile as you would do anywhere else. RGW user's data is stored in self pools, which should be secured as we discussed previously regarding data at rest processes. LDAP, Active Directory and Keystone identity vaults are all supported. Operator actions against the cluster are logged and should be periodically reviewed as well as aggregated to your log management system if you have one and you should have one. Once data is deleted from a self cluster, it generally cannot be recovered for practical use. There are exceptions. However, RBD has a new facility called Trashbin where dynamic use of spare pool capacity can be used to retain deleted images until that spare capacity is needed or until a certain number of days is elapsed. Similarly on RGW, versioning of object stored buckets may result in deleted objects preserved as part of version history until they're deleted by a policy or by the administrator. Wherever user data retention is a concern, configure your data storage pools accordingly. Additionally, individual data blocks that use to constitute an object, file or volume, are typically still present on the persistent storage system until they are overwritten by use. You cannot overwrite a self cluster just by writing a lot of data to it. It's not going to work. So secure deletion is another question that we often see. And the easiest way to sanitize media is to do the right thing and use OSD encryption. And when you need to sanitize the media, you forget the key. And that's the most effective way to be able to discard drives safely without overwriting with a separate device or degossing or shredding or anything of that sort, which is usually not possible when you have to return them under warranty. Hardening options are highly vendor dependent. The following are some of Red Hat's choices. Other self distributions will, of course, vary. Worship with AC Linux on by default in enforcing mode. Of course, you know that AC Linux is sort of a religion at Red Hat, so that's hardly surprising. And we can make use of FIPS 140-2 certified ciphers as supplied by RHEL when configured to do so. Hardening of binaries is also of interest because of what I told you about demons sitting at the boundaries between security zones and being natural targets for attacks to cross those boundaries. I believe Red Hat's self storage binaries use SecComp, Pi, and several, if not all, of the ASLR options. But I didn't manage to catch my build master to confirm before recording this, so I'll have to defer this to the Q&A session if you are interested. In any event, these are worth exploring because it makes exploiting of overflows or that kind of binary attacks all that much harder. And on that note, that's what we have for today. I hope that I've given you some useful information. I'm very interested in hearing what your questions are and, remember, speakers are Pavlovian devices. So if you like the talk, let us know that you did. If you wanted more of something, tell us what is missing, what you'd like to hear. And I guess that's it for today. Thank you.


Okay folks, we have a esteemed panel with us, I guess we should start with a quick introduction so that everyone knows the context we are speaking with and Bevav should we start with you? Sorry, I caught you in the middle of... Okay, not a problem. Yeah, my name is Bevav, I am into marketing at cash repayments, we are a payment aggregator, I am a power and business director in the payments space today. Lovely, thank you Rahul, how about you? Hi, my name is Rahul, Rahul Karthikeyan. I lead the marketing business for... I think I just want to change that definition. I am an internet marketing, I think that's what we follow in our organizations as well. We don't really follow the titles, it doesn't matter to us. We want to be a stable couple. My lead data is for the scale of business, it's an internet company. We are maybe 3-4 years old now. Hi, good afternoon everyone. I am Prashant, I am director of marketing with AOSWIT. So we are into manufacturing of water purifiers and geysers. We have been operating in India for the last 15 years now also. I am Viswas and I head marketing for the Hindu group. We are a media publishing house and I take care of four brands. Of course the flagship brand, the Hindu, I am sure like most of you are aware. And must be loyal readers. Then business lines, sports car and front line. Thank you. Good afternoon everyone. I am Ankur, I take care of marketing and TTK prestige limited. It's India's largest kitchen appliance brand. So all we do is talk about food and anything to do with food. Lovely, lovely. You had me at food, but we are here to talk about something about marketing, right? So folks, I guess in the last panel discussion, the panel already towards the end touched upon it. But we will sort of hopefully go deeper, also requesting the panel to share examples and anecdotes. To make it very real for our audience. So folks, what we are essentially talking about is how does one approach this whole personalization game when we talk about Omni channel marketing, right? And we'll start from the very top. Prashant, in your opinion, what does this personalization mean in the context of Omni channel? And do you think it is important, not important? Are its claims exaggerated? What's your opinion on it? It's basically creating a consistent and uniform and personalized experience for the consumers. That is what personalization is all about. It helps you to improve your matrices in terms of cost per engagement, in terms of your cost per clicks, click through rates, etc. And it all basically culminates from a very clear segmentation that you do for the consumers. So creating very distinct consumer profiles. And then targeting them in terms of the communication that you're doing, in terms of the service delivery that you're doing, so that you first of all deliver what is required for the consumer and also get a better ROI. I think in a very plain simple word, this is what personalization for me is. Got it. And Raul, how do you resonate with this whole concept of personalization? See, there's a little thin line on personalization. Sometimes it can get creepy as well. I'll tell you a simple definition of why is it creepy as well. Most of times it is useful. Imagine a scenario where you just landed on to a website. You're just browsing it. You've not given a consent. Now in India, it's not highly regulated. We do remark it. I mean the moment you kind of landed on to certain pages and you'll see that banner everywhere. Wherever you go, the brands will follow. It's a very creepy way of doing personalizations because you don't have a user consent there. So for me that's a very thin line in terms of what is very, very useful and what is creepy. As a brand, we want to kind of stay towards the useful side of it but though we sometimes falter on the creepy side as well. But that for me is personalization. When you understand at what stage the consumers are looking for that particular brand and want to engage with that particular brand, that is personalization for my part of it. I don't know. And because you folks run such a heavy offline business, how do you as a company or a brand even achieve this? So personalization is not a new term in marketing or for organizations. I mean from the time companies have started selling products, personalization has been present in one form or the other. Now from the olden days when people used to go to the stores and engrave their names, the storekeepers. And they have cherished that. They have given that as door is in that time to the kids going to other homes. To now when people are going to online spaces, to stores which are present offline and through some mediums are being part of only channel. Personalization is here to stay. It has always been. So for us it's very, very important because consumer at whatever stage of journey he's engaging with the brand has to feel that he's wanted, he's valued for and whatever is invested in the brand stays with him. Now I gave you an example in form of what engraving is to mean at that point in time. Today once the consumer has bought our product, let us say offline space or in online. And online happens to be an important space for us today. It's a substantial part of the percentage of business that we do today because consumers are searching online. It's not if I as a consumer see a product in an offline space the first habit that I would want to do is to go and check at least prices online. It's not only stock set pricing, it goes to reviews. It goes to the generality of the product. And then see if the brand stories that the consumers are speaking are true and genuine to what the storekeeper is telling. So for us it's very, very critical. Post-purchase behaviors are again as a brand engaging with them. Example if I'm selling a kitchen appliances, talking to him about some recipes. Post-purchase, telling him when the upgrades are supposed to happen. Telling him what was well with that product. He feels wanted, right? So it's very, very critical for us as well. Alright, very interesting. Anaprajita, you yourself run a such a strong legacy brand, right? And everyone knows what to expect from this brand. And you know, because it has been there standing strong for so many decades now. But tell me how do you now leverage such a strong legacy brand along with the power of data analytics or machine learning to sort of create this personalized messaging but still resonating with that mother sort of brand that you have. Okay, thanks. We are into news business and we have a moral responsibility to show the significant and important news to you. It might not, I mean you must know it. So there are these must-know news where we still have edit intervention and we believe that it will always remain so. However the entire personalization we are doing in terms of say the good to know news which is basically news of interest where we are using data analytics and machine learning to create localized segments and then we are giving, providing the right content to the right audience. But of course every day we are developing our data capabilities and you know, right now we are feeding machine and there are a lot many projects that are in the stage of experimentation. Okay, Rebha, let me come to you. Payments is such a sensitive, such a space of vertical where entrust is of utmost importance. And whenever we talk about personalization of course there is that data signals that you would want to widely leverage and given a payments company like yours has so much of data signals tell me what are some of the ethical concerns about this whole personalization you know, on privacy or risk of creating you know these filter bubbles what are your thoughts on that? So yeah, no I think as a brand we are very responsible in you know, how do you look at data and what are the data points on which you want to make a decision making. But as a payments company we craft experiences which help our businesses offer personalization to their customers. So you know, for example every time you are making a purchase if I already know what is the address where this is going to be shipped at and I can give that as a capability. I see that my merchants can see a conversion rate that could increase by up to 40%. So as a business we are building capabilities of allowing our merchants to offer personalization to their customers and that's something that has worked for us. But apart from that we look at data, we have risk engines to read the signals which can help prevent frauds and stuff like that. So that's what we are working on. Okay, thank you. Rahul, you know as an end tech company at least I'm keen to know how do you balance this whole thing of automation versus human interaction in our only challenge environment right? So back in the day you would walk into the store to buy a product or a service this would be a store which is near your house or your office you would possibly know the person there and you know there's that inherent trust but in today's only channel experience if you're selling an education service or a product what's the balance of automation versus human touch? That's a good question actually it's pretty difficult in today's world even now I want to I'm talking from a student point of view as well I still want to interact physically with an individual sitting on the other side and want to know more about the product right? So that is still exist now in some way both automation and personalization have to play together what we'd like to do is see my personalization point if you have a scenario in terms of where things can go wrong and things can go right as well I'm sure most of you must have had an experience where an end of person's name would have come to your inbox saying that thank you you've kind of subscribed for this product and we would like to relive this so you probably have that experience you must have tried interacting with a sales person whenever you get to since here listen I'm getting a very long information this is not the individual I'm on that you're sending out emails can you please stop it today's it is very difficult and that's where automation becomes a big problem statement so forget about personalization automation journeys when a brand is pulling off you need to be very sacrosanct in terms of how these automations are being built and you need to ensure that user consent is always taken and it is rightly attributed to the persona as well so for me that's automation part of it yes if you saw for that next personalization point of view yes a sales person they won't get to interact with a human figure it can be one of the co-founders or we have our own sales representatives as well but the initial nudge from their side if there is a small message as to what's happening to the conversation coming from their side which has an individual's name and probably asking for a certain time if there is sort of an empathy given to the consumer I feel in many ways that personalization can be built and I think a lot of our TG is now becoming digitally accepted and then accepting the digital nature of conversations now we don't really step out to interact with a stranger we interact in a digital ecosystem these days so I think some way the communication automation has to play together otherwise it can lead to a disaster but in many ways it does lead to better efficiencies as well from an organization point of view it is a lot of savings in this review a person is not really travelling to an A to B as well business point of view it makes more business sense as well if we can automate a lot of these costs and Vishal, any examples from your current or maybe earlier in your career yeah, so what I believe is that between automation and personal intervention there should be a defined line because sometimes when your lead is say for example in our category if someone is coming onto our website and asking for a product or wants to know a little bit more about certain product features which can be easily automated through a chatbot or something like that but when he is in extreme winters when he is having a product bought he is going to kill me if my chatbot keeps on interacting with it so at that time you need to shift him back to your customer care where you do need a human intervention so there is a fine balance between the two that you need to have it's a blurred line but it needs to be defined sharply so that you know the scalability as well as the personalization or the empathy both have the right balance I love empathy when during winters I think most of the people who are here and a lot of us here are marketers and organizations today getting customer data in the omni-channel platform it's not difficult because all of us are in the digital space and more and more as the adoption is going up the data coming into the system is not an issue most of the marketers in the country today are at least few of them whom I know are struggling to understand what to do with the data we are talking jargons, we are talking yes generative AI is coming in, we are saying that yes personalization should happen but to what extent, to what measures and if at all we should be doing it for the consumer because we are now getting slowly but surely getting into the irritating space of the customer so making the balance good enough where he is at his leisure space where he is wanting to interact with you and if he or she is wanting to come to the brand and then the brand is talking to them is something that is going forward to make more sense to the brands then brands trying to reach out to them again and again and again in making that space is getting disappeared in the next decade also I mean the sooner it is getting created it may get disappeared as well I mean that threat is horrible I am almost reminded of this a liners company who I went to their website in hindsight it was a big mistake I put in my phone number and this was for my son who was 11 then and this gentleman calls me within 2 hours again the power of how fast we reach the customers and he told me that this is ideally suggested at the age of 13 years and above I said thank you very much I thought the lead is now closed and for the next 3 months every day twice a day morning and evening I used to get called from this company saying that are you interested in liners and I used to tell them that this is what you folks told me so of course my son is and this kept happening for about 3 months until I had to write an email to the founder saying please excuse me I am almost willing to pay the cost of the liners if you stop calling me so finally it stopped I don't think for everyone reaching out to founders or LinkedIn this should be the way right so okay let's talk about some of the uncomfortable topics right so measurement in this entire omni channel measurement in this entire personalization space what's your view on it how does one measure is an attribution a problem how do you know if your bank per buck is coming and is it coming from this channel and hence you should invest more there one of the biggest challenges most and I am speaking for many categories is it that attribution the word attribution it's very difficult to kind of be as accurate as possible to get the attribution now figures correct the most important piece is to get your data infrastructure pretty strong there are very few companies I think maybe gaming and a couple of other place players phenomenal e-commerce phenomenal I think they have kind of advanced themselves but there are many other categories probably there is still a lot more work to be done so it all boils down to the kind of data infrastructure that we have built basis that in some way if you are able to articulate how the attribution is for example now when I am talking to my founders it's very blind Facebook is not working now Google is working let's just pause it but it's a very long way of looking at Facebook as a channel and we did one experiment we just kind of paused Facebook for 8 days there was a direct impact in terms of the organic flow in terms of the Google search volumes stopping as well so there is dependency on all the source what sort of dependency how much can I bring in more efficiency on that now that level of data there are very few brands who are able to succeed unfortunately I don't think even Skillar has done that yes and I am very open about it there is a lot more work to be done there but still our data engineers are constantly at it to ensure that the entire data infrastructure is stable and it comes from one single source and we don't really depend on any external factors which are stored inside that becomes a very big challenge after that comes the metrics because then if you know that infrastructure is all in some way stored your metrics then becomes everything it depends on for example if I have to do brand campaign my metrics will as simple be what sort of traffic business incremental traffic what sort of click-throughs what sort of engagements have we built but when it comes to performance ROAS as well but again it has to go back to how well built your infrastructure is otherwise your definition might be wrong so I I wanted to actually share an example of what we did at Kashmir a couple of years back we were doing email call out breaches and we really wanted to test if we go to the extent of personalizing to the T how good our results are going to be so we went first by line of business perspective when we did a campaign we saw an incremental result then we said you know what the incremental output is so much that let's actually stop everything write emails where every email has an insight about that organization and when we did that results were phenomenal of course it's a function of time and bandwidth and resource you have so that you can replicate this at scale but I think with you know AI coming in and generating AI being there your ability to write better content your ability to use tools like AMV etc your ability to personalize your message to to the customer at the audience of one that is today and like every experiment we have done we've seen like incremental additional pockets and what we have seen is that you know by using data analytics and machine learning we created these live segments for our subscribers and today our internal data shows that our subscribers are 25 times more engaged than the non-subscribers that's something really great and second is we have been able to do better targeting for our advertisers and of course like we have repeat clients coming back to our business and sites for the business of course and for the bottom line as well attribution again nothing tastes better than the money which goes into the bank I mean but like we are saying it's omni channel the customer is looking for the product in one platform buying from another giving reviews on the third and then putting complaints about the product after usage on the fourth so it's extremely what we have metrics to define that okay this is the cost of acquisition this is the ROAS and all that metrics that we follow but attributing to one platform one type of activity is extremely extremely difficult marketing, universe at least in the country have not matured enough to attribute sales to an exact activity that can happen in the omni channel experience if I do it for a particular channel towards a concentrated effort I can say this activity led me to this particular results but that's very tactical that's short term because over a period of time consumers are not staying on one platform right across brands have to move across with them like most of them told here attribution is a pain at this point in time let me accept it most of you will accept here that it's exactly a pain but yes there are metrics which are slowly evolving and as we go forward I believe that yes something better will happen the customer will write back to you you know that where the customer is going today either for engagement or for purchase or for making decision wherever he is going or she is going we follow them now there are enough data points with us through the data scientist through the metrics that we are following we know where the customer is going be as a brand try to follow them and be present wherever they are it may convert today it may convert tomorrow but if as a brand we follow customers and are with them ok over a period of time there is no way that the customer is looking somewhere else touch on one last topic and then we will open it up for Q&A so folks out there can think of the question they would want to ask the panelists again across the panel what are some of the emerging technology or trends do you most resonate with when you think about Omni channel or when you think about personalization today I will give you an example which we are following there is something called AR that we are using now it is about personalization we have created modules on our web page where actually the consumer can go and visualize each and every of our products in their own space that gives an elevated level of consumer experience to him because across 60-70 SKUs you are getting to test different types of products color combinations in your own kitchen space or a bathroom space and then take a decision to purchase so that is one way in which it is obviously moving forward apart from that obviously there are things like chatbots and stuff like that machine chatbots as they say which we have to really exploit which we are using but we are not exploiting using but not exploiting whatever what do you think I just wanted to make it a little bit more controversial there is a big debate that chatgbt is like a boon for writing content and as marketers maybe it is time for us to start putting a disclaimer that this has been written by chatgbt it is the ownership of that piece of content what do you guys think about that so I think right now with this entire data analytics we have been able to pick data across the channels and especially if I am talking from a publishing perspective see while the reader can casually switch between newspaper to website social media still the channels are different but what we have done is like we could pick data from various channels and integrate them to create localised segments and we have seen early success in terms of better engaged consumers and I think in future we will be able to have better predictions and better segmentation and as you will know Harari said that the extreme eminent change in terms of extreme personalisation will be from intimacy and I think then all of us, all the marketers have to come up with some radical approach we are down to the CPNs now okay we are closing thoughts on the tools that you think are the trends yeah so one point because we started by saying offline heavy the patience of the customers is not there the retail space is becoming more and more expensive so there is one thing, there are a lot of things which are coming up in that space because the patience of the consumers are going there is something like endless eyes I don't know how many of you here know do not keep the stocks that they have they can customers walk in they have the virtual experience of the product and they can order from that store itself so the cost of the cost of doing business would come down customers don't have to wait for it that's one, okay and then in the only channel space the challenge for the brand is to make yourself available wherever they are that's one thing that we continue to strive to make ourselves in the future capable of example website is something we are actually wanting in a journey to make ourselves make it better in terms of that okay which is your turn around with the customer service ability and making customers because the customer is not ready to wait for 7 days for a product how many of us are today willing to buy a product which will come on 7 days which was true a bit just before COVID so we are also in that space where we are trying to make the product available to the customer within 24 hours 48 hours that's what the only channel experience for the customers going forward would enable the brand to be more competitive we now open it up to the audience any of you have a question for our panelists, okay this can be two things okay cool we'll close it here thank you so much folks it was lovely hearing you and thank you for taking your time


Hello Hello, this is a test. Can people hear us and is our audio balanced? Simo, can you say something? Yeah, sure. I'll say that the hack MD link should be provided in the in the mails that you receive Any other place where it was Richard? Oh, I think just the mail. So for this course registered people get the hack MD and Yeah, yeah, and different organizations have our own zoom rooms where we can like discuss stuff further. So if your organization has Provided such a zoom room or have organized such a zoom group them join join the other instructors there You can also talk there Yeah But the hack and these the main way we are we are going to have like discussion In this course. So that way everybody of us instructors not only us here in the stream Can answer any questions that you have and we already have a like a icebreaker in there. So if you feel like like Type something about how you Using scientific computing and what are you expectations and yeah, how do you start on Computing then it would be interested to hear what kind of people we have in the course. Yeah so here, I've just shared the hack MD and While you open it and you see It looks like a document You can scroll down and see where People are writing things if you go up to the top you can switch to edit mode and then Write stuff here and it appears here And this is really the way that we keep everything together in the course so Yeah, so as you notice we're in a live stream So you can't directly ask us questions, but in a course with a hundred people online No one's really gonna do that anyway Instead you can write your questions here at any time and we have multiple people Who are watching this and will be answering the questions live? also, whoever is teaching at the time will be watching the questions and And we can react directly there. We'll also share it during break times like this I'll also mention that sometimes The hack and the kind of get a bit slow if there's a lot of questions a lot of people editing at the same time So if you don't have it like if you don't feel like editing and you just want to watch the discussion there or Just focus on the stream Then you can leave it at the show mode and that will help everybody's life because it will like reduce the load on the hack I'm the inside. Yeah And if there's Yeah, correct. Yeah, and if this is anything like our previous courses, there'll be a lot of questions and comments there so If they don't get distracted by it There's also like if you if Richard you want to scroll a bit up. There's instructions or like hints like you might will notice that the screen is pretty weirdly like it's like this kind of like a Not not a landscape type of a screen Stream but but this top down stream There's a reason for it and reason for it is that it not everybody has access to multiple monitors And that's why we have this cream in this kind of a top-down perspective so that You can arrange your screens or different view Windows that you have in different places so that you can more easily like manage Things for these today's material. We are mostly told having going to have the screen going and then of course they have Can be questions But in the later days, we'll also run a lot of commands lots of stuff on the terminal No, or Separate kind of a like a access to today. It's busy cluster and and for that You probably have to manage multiple windows and it's easier to manage them by by locking them in certain places and and working with that So so if you want to organize your screen in a similar fashion as suggested there if you have like a full HD Laptop screen or something that might be a good idea Yeah Yeah, and let's see so Today we have multiple Well a lot of different sessions, it's sort of a starting day We you do learn about some important resources But overall it's a very like general starting point Yes, so so so basically today's topics are a bit more like Like introductory but at the same time you can learn a lot Like we are going to go through a lot of like interesting things that might help you along your way but we want to go like start softly and Like give you a custom get your custom to the system system that we have and I get you accustomed to do the world of Scientific computing because it's it's not only about Well, there's a lot of things you will learn today It's not only about like running programs if there's lots of things involved in it and We have a multiple different views that we are going to be Taking throughout the day at scientific computing from in like how it's organized to to what tools can you use? How do you work and personal views from? People who have gone through the whole ringer and and lots of time for questions that you can ask of us and of our talk People who are talking Yeah, let's see. We're starting to get some answers now. Yeah, like Simo, have you had formal training in programming or computer science? Yeah, some like I'm a physicist by background. So I've had some Training in HPC like our physics programs and it's it's busy coding in physics and and programming in computer science and But I would say still say that when I started actually using the systems when I actually started to do scientific computing No, no, well, it gives me a like a backbone or like a like this kind of a foundation to start build upon but it didn't Teach me like it taught me like 5% of the things so yeah, it it's it's you Unfortunately in this kind of it's a it's more of a craft than than a science sometimes that you learn by doing and and some of these things well, you you only learn by by Experiencing them yourself and we try to of course make it so that you don't have to like Experience them the hard way that we have probably gone through. Yeah Although, yeah, I had this metaphor like We learned well by doing it wrong many times Actually, this is what we'll be saying in the next talk, but yeah, like my theory is We learned well by doing things wrong many times So it's okay to like learn and struggle and so on But also like you tell a child You better be safe or you'll learn it the hard way Hopefully the hard way isn't getting a bunch of boiling water poured on you metaphorically Yes So Richard how did you start with computing? Actually, we'll talk about that Shortly, maybe we can okay. I'll answer that Um Well answer in a couple minutes or maybe one minute Yeah, like we we first first off like I we can go through a bit of the schedule like this topic Goes to the to our first talk quite soon Where we will be having an interesting talk between Richard and and Samantha One of the persons who have gone through this whole whole learning curve of competition competition, so from from beginning to Coming PhD, so there's a there's a whole View there and and this kind of a ringer that everybody goes to like this kind of a Crucible where you where you become Fluent in the computations. Yeah, it's it's it can be hard, but it can it doesn't have to be Painful and we of course try to make it Less painful for everybody and that's why we have these kind of a courses and we try to like get you accustomed to the lingo of the of the subject. Yeah


Thank you very much. Who's tending the store?  Maybe that announcement should have read the late president No, let's reword that Well in my state of the union address this year I called on the Congress to join me in cutting projected deficits significantly over the next three years I Said at the time that deficit reduction should be a bipartisan effort Bringing representatives of both parties in the Congress together with the top officials of the administration to develop specific proposals I'm delighted to report that the first result of that effort has finally reached well not my desk, but that table HR 4072 the the Agricultural Programs Adjustment Act of 1984 Will reduce federal spending by three point two billion dollars over the next three fiscal years Seldom do I receive legislation that will reduce government spending and at the same time help improve conditions for farmers? This new law will help reduce excessive wheat supplies at the same time It'll keep the production of other major crops from growing too fast by establishing more reasonable target price levels Price levels that discourage excessive production both here and abroad in addition During negotiations on this legislation We were able to provide additional funding for farm exports and for farm disaster assistance programs both high priorities for farmers In recent years Farmers have gone through some hard times because of a weak demand in export markets and unusually large harvests of certain crops That resulted in weak prices In addition Fibers went through a particularly wrenching transition from the very high inflation and interest rates of the late 1970s To today's more restrained inflation Now that the cost of fuel fertilizer equipment and the other items that farmers depend on to stop rising at double-digit rates I believe that we're poised for a more stable and secure recovery in the farm economy When the Congress passed the 1981 farm bill Few people thought that inflation would come down as fast as it did That law therefore mandated large automatic increases in farm price supports a Desperate effort to keep farmers heads above water and a rising tide of inflationary pressures Well with our success in controlling inflation those mandated increases are no longer needed to offset costs Indeed instead of improving conditions in the farm sector the mandated target price increases threatened to further depress commodity prices By creating two-graden incentive for increased production at the same time that they were adding to the deficits HR 4072 makes much needed reductions in the increases Mandated by the 1981 farm bill I want to commend the Fine bipartisan effort of the chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture Nutrition and Forestry Jesse Helms and the chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture Kika Dela Garza and Thanks as well to Secretary of Agriculture John Black for his fine leadership Their work was vital in moving HR 4072 through the Congress quickly This bill was the product of some tough head-to-head negotiations Like any compromise it's far from perfect But it demonstrates that a good-faith effort by all parties can produce results As I sign this first installment of the deficit down payment I want to give a word of encouragement to those who are working on the remaining proposals Still under consideration by the Congress The skeptics who claimed that the Congress and the administration would be Unwilling to take any tough steps to reduce the deficit. We're just plain wrong and now that we've shown we can do it We must go on to take the other tough steps that the good of the country demands So I thank all of them. Thank you God bless you and now I should do what I've been talking about and sign that bill