Everybody it's Astro.  We don't just beat the opposition.   That's what I've been talking about That's the fight and the bite that I've been begging us all to put back in the Everton game And let me tell you something right now Looking good feeling better right now, baby the people's hype champion is hype beyond belief Okay, and then blues showed you something without the people it don't mean nothing just like me I got the people on the back. I got the Everton supporters clubs on the back. It's all about the people, baby Let me tell you something.  Let me tell y'all something That's what we've been missing all year long and we done got it back.  We've come together this week We fought for each other and I've been saying all it takes is for one thing to click and we finally got into that We finally got into that How about them damn blues y'all I can't say it enough I can't say it enough I Mean honest to goodness. We we stared adversity in the face.


As-salamu alaykum peace and blessings be upon all of you. I've got myself a bit situated here find a bit of comfort. I want to be focused as I try to deliver a story of myself. I am a PhD of myself so I think I'll do okay as long as I edit myself as I go. Okay um you know I wanted to first start by sharing a prayer that I always recite before I speak publicly which isn't often but when I do I turn to tools of the Quran it helps us to focus bring ourselves back to our purpose why we're doing what we're doing. It is a piece of the chapter of Surah Taha and it was a prayer that Moses had made to his Lord and his need and so it I'll say it in English says my Lord expand for me my breast with assurance and ease for me my task and then tie the knot from my tongue that they may understand my speech and I always find that if I start myself with that everything just kind of unravels in a good way and I feel content with what I've said as I've walked away from it so I just wanted to share that with you all. So I also wanted to share another little thing before I just go into talking about myself and it's something that I think really relates to everything I'm about to say tonight. There was a scholar in the 13th century in Syria and his name was Ibn Qayman of Josi and he said this he said the only person who knows the reality of anything is someone who was in it and outside of it and so when I heard that it just really made me reflect on my whole life because I was born into a family that was practicing as Catholics and I was baptized in San Francisco as born race in the Bay Area and my parents were not extremely religious so there wasn't a lot of religion in the family but they had belief in God and we would go to Easter Sunday and we would attend church on Sundays and I remember as a very very young girl maybe the age of three or four and it was an Easter Sunday and I had my Easter basket and inside of the basket there was a little you know the the children version of the Bible and I just remember thinking I was so excited because I wanted to know God and I don't know why I remember that because there are probably a hundred other memories that I could have remembered from that time in my life so I I remember God as far back as I can remember being and for that I am grateful and I do think that has a lot to do with what what we've all been created with is the knowing of God it's it's a it's a fitra which is what we call in in Arabic it says like the natural state of the human being we all know God to some degree within our own self and so I do believe that that's what started my path in in my childhood and my childhood was a little bit haphazard to be honest I would lie if I told you it was the most beautiful carefree childhood my parents divorced when I was in second grade and the term I rolled upside down but I had these amazing grandparents who really just kind of held me with all of their their attention their love their presence and so that were the wings that you know helped me to kind of grow and and I did grow up quicker than the average person by the age of 15 I had convinced my family that I was ready to move out and start my life and it sounded crazy at the time and I look back and I think it really was pretty crazy if you think about it but you know it was also a time in the Bay Area where you could do that I was working I started working at my family's restaurant when I was 13 and it was kind of out of necessity because not for making money to be honest it was more because my my father worked there and so he had us on the weekends and so it was a way for him to spend time with us even though he was working and so his father my grandfather he and my grandmother they opened Lucia's Italian restaurant in Fremont California in 1977 when I was three years old and and by the time I turned 13 is when I started busing tables cleaning up helping the wait staff and and it was a really beautiful experience you know my grandparents who are very generous people they were the type of restaurant owners where if there was a community member who was having a problem they would do a spaghetti feed you know to raise money to help and and so I grew up with that charitable and outlook online and it's something I'm grateful to this day because it's shaped my business and it's one of the most important things that I take from my business is to be able to give you know to be able to feed and I think that's just a really beautiful way to to connect with people and so growing up in the restaurant I I guess the other part of the story is where my husband comes in so he is he is born and raised in Pakistan and he came to America at the age of 20 he's over there in the audience and so I I met my husband at the restaurant when I was 10 years old he had came to work for my family and I didn't know him but I remember seeing him he took our order and I remember exactly what I ordered I ordered our raviolis and a side of sauteed zucchini that's what I ordered and I don't know why I remember that he took my order except for that maybe in those days it wasn't as diverse and I was about you know 10 11 years old and so maybe my 10 year old brain saw a face slightly different than what I had you know become used to and so we started working together well previous to me working with him my my brother started working with him and my brother would come home and say you know mish is this really cool guy who plays fall with me in the back on you know our break and I'm you know 13 years old so who's this mush guy you know what are you talking about right and um and then I had the opportunity to start working with him when I was just about to be 16 years old and we became he's just a very he was a friendly gentle person and I really enjoyed you know his workmanship my grandparents by that time he had been working with us for six years were considered him like a son and my father as well very much really just loved and respected him and he was always there to help out you know anything that was needed and so through my work with him I developed a crush and I saw within my brain that this is like it's hard to explain but I was like this is the person I'm going to marry and I you know I look back to that time and I don't really believe that it has anything to do with me I don't believe that I Lisa just said you know this is what I'm going to do I really believe God put this in my heart and this was the path for me to find Islam and to find the life that I've been living over the past 33 years and so he always says that he came to California from Pakistan to take care of me and that wasn't his first school when he came to America his school was his family back in Pakistan he's one of nine well excuse me he's the ninth of ten children and so he wanted to help his family who came from humble humble means and so when I actually we were becoming very friends you know working together a lot and I said well what if we go out for dinner you know what if we have the movie together and he said well I can't do that we're not married it's one night no we're not but so he said well you know you have talked to your dad you know because I'm I'm I noticed it's not going to be just that simple you know you can't just go out together so he spoke to my father and my father gave the blessing and so we very quickly decided that we wanted to get married and it's one of those funny things where if you know the American dream everybody wants somebody to propose to them right but I was in a rush for some reason and I know the reason it was for me to accept my faith I truly believe that and so I proposed to him I said what if we get married what like why are we why are we wasting time here like let's just get married and he said well you know the thing is that I'm probably going to go bald like by the age of 30 and I said well I don't care I don't it doesn't bother me and he said and also why you know I take care of my family I spent I send a lot of money to my family and I will always do that so you would have to be okay with something like that and I didn't have very much and I said well that's I don't mind we do whatever we need to do so he went back to Pakistan with my picture this is pre-iPhone or any type of internet right so he flies back home to Pakistan with my picture tells my in-laws okay mom and dad this is who I want to marry and it's like a nightmare for any you know parent in Pakistan whose son has moved all the way to America and they come you know home with the picture of this young girl oh my gosh but then my sister-in-law had the best the best idea she said I'm going to pray a prayer of guidance and ask God for guidance and then whatever the answer is you know we'll be at peace with it and so she came back the next day and she said that it came beautiful and so she told her you know parents that just be at peace with it and they did they truly did he came back to America and got married and traveled back to Pakistan to meet the family and during that experience of me traveling back to Pakistan is where the story and it took a while for me to get here to Mirchi cafe my restaurant so the first trip that I had taken to Pakistan I was just 18 years old I had just decided I was going to enroll in culinary school I had been working with my family from you know for five years in the restaurant and I've fallen in love with you know this Pakistani man and I knew nothing about the culture and there wasn't much available in the bay area in those days so when I landed in Pakistan in Lahore it was like an explosion of everything you can imagine and then some and the most beautiful part of it was my family my new family were just standing there waiting to just accept me and give me a hug and my mother-in-law grabbed my face and she said she said you're not my daughter-in-law you're my daughter and from that moment on that's that's what I thought you know the love and respect and the caring you know so that just bursted my heart even further right and so on my wedding day it's the day that I decided that I would also convert to a song and so that was 33 years ago and um and it's really again as I started by saying the only person who knows the reality is one who has been in it and out of it and so I've lived without it and I've lived with it and so I do really believe that I know that reality and I'm grateful for it and everything good I know it's kind of cliche but anything that you see good of me is from from my faith and anything you see that needs work that's from me and I'm working hard I'm working hard and so you know imagine going to Pakistan at such a young age and being you know interested in the culinary field not only had I not experienced like real Pakistani food but I had also not experienced like continental food in Pakistan so I ate a burger um and I ate a you know you mentioned the club sandwich so we felt I'll tell that story so we went to a restaurant called Shazam it was the back then very popular it's still it's still there it's just not as popular as I used to be and I saw it on the menu a club sandwich and I remember what a club sandwich is right three layers of bread some type of meat some type of vegetable usually some cheese in there so that's what I ordered and what I got was something very similar and look but flavor was just immense you know the chicken breast was just popping with flavor the fried egg had like some of the special spice on it so there was just this extra little tingle in your mouth you know and it just redefined what I understood food to be you know I realized like this is food I'm comfortable with but it's still different and I would say that was the seed for my for my business I didn't know it you know in that moment I didn't think I'm going to open a restaurant that's going to have this food you know I went back home and worked in a family's restaurant and um my grandfather passed away soon after I graduated culinary school I went to the college of culinary school in San Francisco it's called the California culinary academy no longer exists unfortunately they made some poor choices and it's no longer in service but it was an amazing school and it was a two-year program and I learned every aspect of food pastry even butchery running restaurants table service you know the whole nine yards and and then went back to work for my family's restaurant rather than go out and work for other restaurants because my grandfather had just passed away and I just felt extremely connected to my family's business it was something that my husband and I had kind of grown up together in in a way you know grew into our marriage in that in that restaurant all the customers were very much like family to us was like a community restaurant and they all knew us and they all you know at the very beginning when we were getting married they were doubting like oh my gosh you guys are getting married she's a little younger you're 18 so yeah and I said no you'll see you'll see you'll see and 33 years later you know we're still showing them but um and so I worked on another level with my family's restaurant as I started managing and that's the beauty of the story is because if I had just gone out and worked in restaurants outside of my family's restaurant and gotten to other kitchens that would have been interesting too right I would have learned other cuisines in other ways but um running a restaurant from from the managerial aspect gave me a completely different view a different side of the restaurant that I hadn't really paid attention to when I was working the other aspects like waiting tables and cooking in the kitchen and so to manage the business was a completely new experience for me and and my husband stepped in and we kind of tagged team you might say we kind of did it together and so a few years later I felt like I needed to be challenged and that's when I opened the catering business and I left my family's business and um but then my parents my my parents were my grandfather and my grandmother excuse me my uncle and by then my my grandfather passed away my father had gone into law enforcement and my brother had also gone into law enforcement and my my grandfather I mean my grandmother and my uncle excuse me were left in the business and they called us and they said we're really in need of your help and I knew I couldn't do both because by then we had three children three young children so I had to make a decision between my catering and my family's business and so I went back into the restaurant and sold my catering and um and during that period I realized while I was working and children were growing up and they started asking questions about what type of work we were doing because when I had left they were so young that they weren't really connected to the kind of cuisine that we were selling and I realized you know when my son was asking you know you'd sell wine and you sell you sell pork items and how does that like how does that work for us as Muslims right and so I had to really think twice about what I was doing because I realized like I have to live my values and I respect my family's values and I love them dearly but at this point in my life I had to kind of be at service for my family and so we decided to let go of the business and and then at that point I was in a period where for the first time there was a chance that there would be no restaurant in my life no food service you know of some sort it's I was three years old from the beginning right I was like destined to be in this business even my great-grandmother was a baker excuse me and side note she would sell angel food cakes during the the Great Depression so she would make the angel food cakes and my great grandfather he would go around and you know sell them so I was destined to do this work I'm sure of that and and so sitting around the family table because by then some of my sister-in-laws had made their way to America and so he spent a lot of time with family and I was just throwing out this idea of hey what another restaurant if we were to you know have halal and we could do American food but with a halal you know meat and we could you know do a little you know twist of you know the burgers like they are selling the poxon and everybody was just shaking their head there was no such thing in that time there really wasn't and most of most of all the halal food in America at that time was ethnic you know just solid ethnic food beautiful food but nothing to the degree of you know a comfort American food with with this halal offering and so everybody thought it'd be really risky because the business is already very risky right opening a restaurant I think the first five years it's like 90% failure rate so it's it's almost an impossibility but it still happens and so but I'm a very determined person as you've been telling and I proposed my husband right so and there's a side note to that as well because for many years I was really embarrassed you know because again like everybody hears of the story of how the man gets on one knee and and proposes and I always felt a little bit embarrassed I didn't get on one knee but I proposed marriage basically but the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him his wife Khadija may God be pleased with her she proposed marriage to the Prophet Muhammad and when I learned that you know years into my knowledge of seeking knowledge it just it changed the whole perspective I had on my my story my love story so I'm happy to have modeled you know a behavior that was very beloved and beautiful to the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him and so let's see so we set out I you know I was very persistent and my husband God bless him he's my investor that can be tricky because we live together it's a it's a lot but he's very patient and and we set out to find a location we ended up going back to my catering business and we we bought it back from the person we sold it to and built the restaurant it took about eight months and in 19 or excuse me 2004 in Fremont Erdington district we opened Ritchie Cafe and you know back then it's funny because like I said we just didn't know what to expect number one and a friend of ours he had a acquaintance with Imran Khan who was the Prime Minister of Pakistan and a lot of people know him through his cricket years as well and he was just starting his political campaign and so he asked him hey you know my friend's opening this restaurant would you would you come and you know be a part of that so he came and it was a really beautiful day you know I I look back to that day and I was filled with you know so much hope for the future of what this could potentially mean my intentions were really a to serve the community with halal quality halal food something that again was more of an American experience rather than a traditional cultural experience because I am Italian-American and so my Islam is seen through my experience right community to model my grandparents and honor them and then also this was post 9 11 so before I married my husband but like before before 9 11 you know where's your husband from is from Pakistan where's that I don't know Pakistan is post 9 11 Pakistan are you kidding me have you ever visited oh this is scary and so that was another intention to show the beauty of Pakistan through you know the culture of eating of listening to the music as you're eating tasting the flavors but seeing a burger that you're very comfortable with right something everybody's seen in America the burger but you can taste the flavors of Pakistan so that was my bridge that I was trying to trying to build and so you know God I do believe God really rewards you for your intentions and I do know that my intentions were pure because they have definitely been rewarded we've been in the community for 20 years and it's hard to believe it's really I was 30 years old when we started the venture and now 50 and so I'm you know I feel though as though I haven't yet even climbed a bit of the mountain I'm still at the very base I never felt like I got anywhere and I think that's good because it just means that I have enough passion you know to keep going and keep trying I think once you reach a destination per se there's ever such a thing you kind of lose interest so I haven't gotten there yet and I'll tell you a story there's I was at a meeting about five years ago at the restaurant and some of the people I didn't know and so after the meeting a gentleman turned to me and he said you know I really want to thank you for opening the restaurant and a lot of people say that and I'm always flattered and you know thank you so much and he said no you you have to understand something he said I was born and raised in Chicago to a family from my parents were originally from Pakistan and I didn't know where I fit I didn't know if I was American I didn't know if I was Pakistani and I just struggled for many years with this identity he said that the minute I walked into the restaurant I sat down and I saw the environment and I ate the food in that moment I understood who I like was meant to be and then I thought wow that's crazy that's that's pretty exciting like that's really the fuel that keeps my passion going is you know touching the hearts of other people and that's that's my goal and some days I hit the mark in other days you know I don't know I try my best but but it was something really really fun to listen you know hear another perspective and let's see what else have I you know I I feel like I've spoken so much I do want to say one last thing and then I if anyone has any questions I'd be happy to answer is that when I converted to Islam my family really saw the religion as something foreign but they embraced my experience you know they were happy for me they were supportive but they saw it as me becoming Pakistani and I you know I didn't know much myself in those years I was so young but if ever I could you know do it again you might say I would love them to know that this is a faith for all it's not a foreign religion you know I have somewhat I started wearing a job 10 years ago so quite late into my conversion by my choice I was the one who chose to wear it and um and I was kind of struggling with should I wear it should I not wear it and I asked one of my teachers and I was making a video for Pakistan to show the beauty of Pakistan I said I'm making this video do you think I should start wearing a job just like you know first the safety of being in a public eye and you gotta feel more comfortable and he said don't do it for that he said if you do it for that you're going to take off so if you're going to do this do it for God and that's you know over time really was set in my heart and then one day it just became like if I had to because I love God so much this is a public display of God's love that's that's basically what this is and what happened when I took the job because I had been you know looking like an average typical American person for 40 years of my life I could walk into any room and become anything you know like I wasn't identified as a Muslim and so um but it's sometimes it is a little difficult but I'm not complaining about it because this is something I've chosen but if there's any message like I would love to drive forward is that you know I met a woman a few years ago and I was talking to her about my past kind of a little bit of the history I was telling you and I could tell she wasn't really interested and I was okay with that because not everybody's interested right but it wasn't until I connected my father who she knew very well to me then suddenly I became Lisa the chia in her eyes again and and it was like so stark like here's a person who is foreign who I don't understand and I'm like this is Lisa from the Bay Area like you know this is Lisa Lucia like you know I'm sure I'm Lisa I'm odd today but I'm Lisa Lucia this is who's inside of here right all the experiences that I experienced as a young girl as a teenager even growing up into my adult life that's who I am and I forget that people don't see that right away you know they immediately see something foreign and and I respect that I think that we meet people where they are and my job is not to you know it's not to fix it but I'm happy to answer questions you know but it was a real stark moment it's like oh I got my identity back but then as she connected me to something that was comfortable for her right so I tried to also look and be mindful when I see something that looks foreign to me not to meet it with with you know with that understanding trying to keep myself open so I um I would love if anybody had a question I yes please hi thank you so much I feel you I'm also nervous so forgive me I are only I don't mind yeah have you been to yes yes actually we were there in December yes and I'm grateful to say it's my it was my fourth visit yeah but I also waited until I was 40 and I think the first thing I thought when I finished the pilgrimage uh when I was you know in that year I can't do the math in my head right now but 10 years ago there we go but um I just remember thinking oh I didn't come soon enough and these legs will not carry me forever and and physically it was tiring um and it was new and I think the fear of not knowing right made it more tiring and after it felt as though if you've ever experienced something where it was such a grand effort and after it's over you feel so peaceful and that's that's how I felt yes and then after we went to Mecca we went to Medina which is where the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him is buried and it was very stark indifference because Mecca is more like majestic it's very powerful feeling there's a lot of high energy and you feel that high energy and it's sometimes overwhelming in a beautiful way but overwhelming and then you get to Medina and it's like a cool breeze and you just want to sit back and you know just enjoy that beautiful feeling so that that was the experience that that I had from both Mecca and Medina thank you so much for your question anybody else so profitable well you can ask you can ask my husband get into the business okay well I mean um okay so the true answer is I'm not sure if we've ever been a hundred percent ever profitable I know that sounds crazy and a lot of people see the success that we've had in 20 years um but here's the thing my business is a passion business so what I mean by that is I don't cut corners to make profit so things are extremely expensive right now and in any level headed business owner would start to cut cut cut as much as you can to stop any bleeding but because I've devoted myself to this business honestly for the sake of the community and for the sake of my love of what I do my husband is my investor um and he's the one who fills the gaps when they're needed I always joke that he's you know he's the guy who's subsidizing the Halal Burger scene but here's another part of the story if you want to endeavor into opening a business a restaurant business the first thing is like really truly do your homework meaning that you know exactly how to do every single job that and you know exactly how to cook every single thing that you're cooking and you know how to do all of the service at the bit you know how to do all of it first because if you hire people to do it for you you're not going to be able to manage them correctly right if you don't know the job yourself secondly find a very inexpensive lease that even exists anyone because the overhead that this is the very simple approach to this restaurant business 30 percent is food cost of your total right 30 percent is labor and in today's world it's really hard to keep it in 30 percent we're like at 40 percent right now because it's like between 20 and 25 dollars per hour per person so just you know if you add that up it's just it's really hard but you know we believe in fair wages so there's that too and then this this remaining right 40 percent is like your overhead it's every fixed cost and insurance and taxes so it's really like a business where you're saving pennies to to make your saving pennies to make money it's it's not an easy business and no fool would ever you know it's like some days i think i'm very foolish to be doing this it's very physically painful to you know i got slip discs and bad back and you've lived heavy things it's very stressful there's a lot of problems a lot of problems and the minute you fix one problem then there's another problem and then 10 problems after that and you never find you know you never find like you're at the top but if you are passionate you really believe in the work you really love what you're doing connecting to your customers you know then it's then i say absolutely go for it yeah yes please sure well um the truth is i didn't want to expand my husband here he he thought there was great potential in the Dublin community a lot of our customers were begging us please open in the valley please open and you know maybe Dublin i just knew that i'm only one person and i cannot ever be in more than one place at one time so for me it just seemed like a no-win situation you know but we found a good lease and i'm a dreamer too right so i said yeah sure let's do it and why did i pick Dublin um honestly it started with the good lease i'm not going to lie because you can't afford just to open up anywhere right and but secondly i grew up between i grew up in San Leandro Hayward and Fremont but the valley was where my cousins lived and so i have a lot of fond memories so it's like all a part of you know my childhood and so it felt very couple and my brother lives in Dublin so yeah thank you okay thank you any other questions anywhere coming into time a few more minutes right so i watched shows like kitchen numbers but go around and see i see this very high-ranked person and i see you it was very like they're surrounding you here and so i'm just curious like uh you know i'm expecting a shorter book who's like to do all the things and you've got this like or a big chef kind of look at the meats and everything that's all things up you know it's going like for you well no i mean i that's a good i i don't know that i always use you this energy i'm sure if you ask my family they have another story to tell right nobody's perfect um but i'm not a line cook mentality so like in the restaurant industry there's different like slots that we all have to fill and every one of them is important so i'm not a good line cook because i don't like to do the same thing every day you know like repetition that makes my like my ocd brain crazy like i want change and so i'm more creative and so i think the creativity is what you are sensing so that's where i fill the space in my business at this point where i'm always looking for the quality control i'm always looking for the problems to solve and i have to do that in a very calm manner because if i approach my staff up here they're not going to listen you know they're just going to shut down and and then we're going to get nowhere right so i've learned over the years like you just have to really bring it down inside your like process it first here and then formulate how am i going to approach this problem and get myself heard and i'll be honest i'm a woman on top of it and that's tough sometimes and i don't mean to sit and play that fiddle but you know if i was this angry person in the kitchen with my staff then i'd be labeled you know the angry woman right and it's really different when when the man comes in and he's powerful right i'm angry and they're powerful and so i've also learned how to kind of use my femininity to you know kind of finagle people in a way that they can hopefully honor and understand right like this is important we need to get this done so rather than forcefully demanding it you know yes please that was about the beautiful inspiring story i mean thank you you mentioned that you you wanted to know in your early age you wanted to know about god yes and knowing god or finding god is a journey yes so when did you feel that you found god and what inspired you when you began to work with what was the most exciting for sure um so when did i truly know god i feel like i always did and i you know as a young girl i would i would pray in my own understanding of what prayer looked like in my bed you know i would talk to him and i looked back at that little person and i just want to give her a hug you know because i didn't have any tools i was just doing what was innately you know natural to me and so i'm grateful for that i don't take any ownership to that i don't know why he picked me you know i don't i just don't because i know there's a lot of my beautiful beautiful friends of mine who struggle with understanding you know the connection with being close to god interestingly enough my name lisa is from elizabeth and it means close to god which i didn't know until i converted and everyone said you have to change your name to a muslim name but then i found out no i don't if it's a good meaning i can keep my name and i think close to god is an amazing name so i'm keeping it um the other question you asked was uh what inspired me and the honest truth and sometimes it's not as like easy to package but it was love of my husband it really was the catalyst that that brought me into islam that's the truth i was very interested because i was in high school at that point and i was in the history class and they were teaching about the history of islam and i was like i know a muslim i work with him and so i would ask him some questions and he was like you know laid back cool guy you know so that's the truth you know it's not the stories that you know sometimes a story is not as straightforward it really came through love of a person and i see that a lot did that because he knew me better than i know myself and he knew how to grab me he knew what i needed and he gave me that and then he allowed my heart to open because he also knew me well that i'm a very soft person like my heart gets hurt easily so he gave me in-laws who were so soft and so loving and and not judge myself you know i didn't come in you know into the religion looking like this right i looked like lisa lucia who was born and raised in the bay area to you know american family which is fine it's a beautiful thing but i didn't have any knowledge at all i remember going to pakistan the first time when somebody said like oh don't put your feet on the table there's food now i wasn't doing that thank god but in a moment i was like who's an american like we just go home and we like put our feet up right and then there's food there but they honored the food so much that it was a huge no no or if somebody wanted a glass of water and they didn't just pick up like in my palm we just here here's the water right and again no disrespect but in the islamic world they honor it it's on a beautiful train right and i've witnessed those things as a young girl an 18 year old girl and and that opened up my heart to the beauty right and it's the simple things that pierce the heart if you can't you can't pierce the heart with the deep stuff right away because the heart's just you know doesn't know how to take it in you have to start with the little things that you know your day-to-day stuff so those are the things that like started to open up my heart and i met my nieces in labor and we were very close in age because like i said my husband's the ninth child so he has a lot of siblings who are much older than him so they had children who are close to my age and they were very different than myself but we were close to an age and they were very they were very pious that's the best way i can describe them in a beautiful way they're just very beautiful pious people and and i just like was attracted to that it was just beautiful you know so it was little by little and the beauty of it was it was not forced down my throat nobody told me what to wear nobody told me how to do anything they just accepted me for where i was at and that allowed me to take my experience you know at my own pace right because when we force things down people's throats usually they you know fight back and so so that yeah i hope that answers the question you get to hear more from me again oh first of all thank you so much for coming thank you part of the way you're welcome to be really appreciate everybody here thank you but i'm reminded you have something we might have adopted whether i'm a third-band or the rest of me say 56 years ago yes but one thing that changes people's attitude is food and what's what's listening to you guys and religious questions is essentially going to go about the rest of yes yes i agree 100 and i think that is the bridge right that is what we're all working towards doing here is to get you know one another to share our experiences this is just my small story this is what you know ultimately we all have a story of God in our heart you know we all sit here together and we share that and that you know it's just to me the most beautiful special thing that we can do with each other so thank you all i'm embarrassed to even talk about myself so thank you so much for welcoming me and your community i hope to see you


Well, hi everybody, it's Sandy. Welcome to my YouTube channel where today I'm gonna be blending with colored pencil And these are Prisma colors that I'm gonna be using and this is for the Mama Elephant Stampede for their new release called Christmas Spirit And they sent me the stamp set and I knew I wanted to do it in colored pencil because these little guys are really cute And they're gonna be great to color with my pencils I masked the live-in-day lights out of these stamps so I could use them all in creating a little tree With all of the stamps in one image and then I scanned it and printed out four of them for myself If you do this kind of thing, it's for your use only. Please never share any images like this. That would be illegal And you don't want to do that This is my case for my Prisma colors And I just invested in the full set recently and had to get some storage for them because the box they come in is Really unwieldy to use so I got these two cases one carries most of the colors And then this one is for my Neutrals and they both have this cute little snaps that hold the zipper in place And that works pretty well for me so far. And this is my new colored pencil sharpener This is one that I got because It has an auto stop and for me a sharp point and an auto stop are both really important and a sharp long point Which this one does pretty well I've been looking for a sharpener for a long time The Prismacolor pencils come with this stubby point on the left and the ones on the right are from the new bow stitch One that I've got and they make me happy because I want to show you the difference between what happens with Using the stubby point versus the sharp point now There are plenty of colored pencil artists and I've seen them on YouTube and they all say oh, yeah, that's the kind of point I love I love the stubby point or They get a pencil sharpener that gives them the stubby point or whatever and that makes me crazy Because of my technique and I'm going to show you what that is here You can see that I have like sketchy lines And that's what happens when I use the stubby point because I need a really sharp point to get into the paper texture and I go back and forth in different directions kind of in little circles all different kinds of different ways to try it I Guess negate the paper texture a little bit. This is the Nina 80 pound cardstock that I normally use for my Copics and it works great for this too when I'm doing my fine art Illustrations, I often use a really nice Bristol that has a little more tooth to it It's a little softer and it takes the color even better than this, but this works great for cards the technique I'm using here is going to take a while to do and It's going to look amazing by the time it's all done because I really liked how it came out But this is also not as much time as I would spend if I were doing a finished illustration And I'll be sharing more of that eventually doing more of my finished work My fine art type of work, but I will also link you in the description to my illustrations page So you can see more stuff that I've done with colored pencils Layering the color on as lightly as I do allows me to do this Which is to take that reddish color that came out a little too pink for me for this the flesh tone and Add some yellow to it and I'm adding just a very very very light coat of it But since I haven't built up a waxy texture I have the ability to add in that yellow if you go in really heavily with your pencils You're going to have a waxy surface and not be able to make any adjustments so I can make adjustments both for tone and for depth of color for Shadows for all different kinds of things if I keep the touch really light When I do that with my really sharp pencil it makes a huge difference So let's look at the same difference from above So I wanted to take a different look at it and this is another one of the pencils that has the stubby point and It ends up with just lines It's really hard to get in between those lines with the stubby point And if your colored pencils look like this when you color with them for me That's why and that's why a lot of people use gamsol or baby oil to do the blending because they don't have this sharp point to make that those pencil lines go away and This is how beautiful you can get in there with the very very sharp point Now there's an even sharper point a longer point I shouldn't say sharper because I think the end is just as sharp But the longer points in previous videos that I've done have been with my Panasonic pencil sharpener Which I think I still love a little bit better than this one just because it gives me the longer point so I can stay a little further away from my artwork and Really get that pencil nib in there, but I think it's just perception I think I'm just used to having the longer point because my Panasonic is no longer being made and It's like $300 on Amazon. So it's a little on the crazy side since it is so rare But they don't make it so I've been looking for and purchasing a bajillion Pencil sharpeners so I could find one That both did a very sharp point that I I liked as well as has that auto stop Because a lot of color pencil sharpeners or even just regular pencil sharpeners I don't think there's a difference between colored and non-colored pencil sharpeners the The sharpeners don't stop automatically see you have to pull your pencil out when you think it's sharp And then put it back in and then pull it back out And I bought so many of them and I just put the pencil in and I wanted to see how long until it decided to stop And there were some that were nubs It ate the entire pencil and I sacrificed them to the god of trying to find the right pencil sharpener But you can see here I can get layering with a second green and get a little bit of dimension going I'm not going for a massive dimension in this image because it's very cartoony and I wanted to keep it light and cartoony But just give it a very slight depth around each one of the shapes and This really sharp pencil it really helps I just wish Panasonic still made that one because it was really awesome And I bought two of them when I was in college because I was afraid I wouldn't find it again I'm glad I did because I you know You get hooked on a supply that you've used for a long time And it's really hard to let it go But I did do a side-by-side and the pencils actually color the same no matter which pencil with pencil sharpener They've been sharpened in and Here is the flesh one again And we'll look at this one from above so you can see The the way the the pinkish color goes on so it ends up being a little pinker than I wanted but since I know I can Have the room I have the the room on the paper Meaning I have a soft enough touch that I'm going to be able to add another color to it and another Three colors to it or another five colors to it if I'm coloring a skin tone in one of my fine art pieces That suckers probably gonna have 15 or 20 colors minimum Because I really love the way that color pencil layers and don't worry. I am gonna get to her other ear in just a moment here. I Learned this color pencil technique from my professor in college Her name was gay Holland and she illustrated children's books using this technique and she was even slower than me So I was like little Miss Speedy next to her But she got way better results than I ever did but I did not have the patience to do what she did a Lot of the illustrations that you'll see on my illustrations page those things would take a month a month and a half They took forever and ever and ever which is why I do cards now because cards are much smaller but I do want to get back to doing some of that type of illustration work and Figure out what I have time to do because it just takes me a long time to do this much detail this much pencil layering But it's fun to be able to do it on cards and be able to have a smaller format To use them in the way that I love to use them so I'm adding another layer of the pink on top of the yellow and just building a small amount of dimension around the face and Smoothing out a couple areas. I go back and forth a lot when I I do this especially on my finished Fine art illustrations because those I'll just keep working at them and working at them I take a little eraser and I'll I'll go in and Just take out one little dot of color with a kneaded eraser and one little teeny tiny spot I'll flick off with an exacto knife or a fingertip knife There's just an immense amount of detail that I get into when I really get into it So I added some Some shadow here with a purple and I went for more of a reddish purple instead of a bluish purple like I Normally have done on my Copic work Simply because these are really playful images and they're not going to be trying to look like they're real So I wasn't trying to make my shadows look realistic because this is not a color you would see on any person for real. I Have that little line on her cheek there So I went in with the pinkish color instead of going back in with the dark color And I could also go in with an eraser and try to lighten that line and then build the color up around it But again, this is a card. So I'm trying not to be too crazy about the detail And get too nuts about it. This entire image took about an hour to finish so it's It's definitely something that's not for the fainted heart if you don't like to spend hours on your cards However, if you think about some of the techniques and stamping and all sorts of things that folks do an Hour is really not out of the norm for a lot of cards There's a lot that will take us an hour and especially if you get all the stamping done and Have them printed out for yourself then you can just sit in color and enjoy that portion of it when you have time to do it But remember don't share any digital images you ever make of any stamps with other people I see people doing that and it is illegal. It really harms the industry when you do that So even though I did that here for myself I just wanted to put that reminder out there in case anybody's got any big ideas from seeing me Scan my work and be able to use it for multiple cards But the masking on this as you can tell is a little on the cray-cray side When I actually did this there were some of the images that weren't complete because I I set my mask down wrong or There were places where it went over So I went in before I scanned it with a black pen and I filled in any areas that didn't work And I also took a white pen and filled in or wiped out any areas that went over the edges and stuff So that I could have a really good clean image for printing out for my cards So that is one benefit to being able to scan it and do something else with it So then I wanted to add some gold elements to the card So I'm starting to by the way, you may have noticed I'm speeding up now because we'll never get through this if we don't and I'm adding some golden hair and What I find is that once I add my shading to this I can go in with and you see me doing a little repair with my eraser and my knife I can go in with a brown pencil and add a more waxy line For the hair and add a little more detail to it Since the under coats all the other colors are so soft It allows me that freedom to have that space to do it so Here I'm adding all of the black elements and those are all being colored in charcoal gray first there are Both warm and cool grays in the Prismacolor collection and I finally both work just as well One as well as the other so I don't stress about that too much just like I do with my Copics I use both of them kind of interchangeably Depending on what the project is that I'm doing And then I'll finish out the rest of the coloring on this And before I Get to the end I want to remind you that this is part of the mom elephant blog hop stampede So three days worth of mini blog hops That you can get to using the link in the description down below To go to my blog and see all of that fun information I also have all of the supplies used the pencils the cases the sharpener all the good stuff Is in the description as well as on my blog And the list of colors that I've used here will also be on the blog I didn't have it handy when I was doing this voiceover and since I was traveling I kind of figured well. I'll just put that list in the blog post later So there you have it. Um, if you need the exact color list However, use the colors that you have you don't need to use exactly the colors that somebody on youtube posts Not required But here's the simple front that I came up with I just took a die from Avery L the dotted pierced rectangles and Popped it on some dimensional adhesive and I put the sentiment on the inside the Merry Christmas from the stamp set Came out really cute and super simple and fun And here are a couple other pencil videos if you're interested in seeing them These both use the other sharpener. So you'll see the longer point of that, but they both color the same Check out all the links in the doobly-doo and I will see you guys next time Don't forget to hit the like button and subscribe and I will see you guys later. Bye. Bye


The title of this book is super red writing hood Super red writing hood written by Claudia Da villa Not far from here near a small forest lives a girl named Ruby Ruby's favorite color is red She loves red berries Her red boots and especially The red cloak her grandma made for her When Ruby puts on her red cloak she becomes super red writing hood See here in the picture a Little girl has lost her doll. It's up in the tree She cries out my baby Super red writing hood flies off to get it One sunny afternoon Ruby was very busy playing superhero in her room When she heard her mother call from downstairs Ruby is it something important mom? She called back. It sure is Looks like super red writing hood has an important mission Ruby declared She was ready super red writing hood reporting for duty she threw on her red cloak and grabbed her flashlight a Superhero must be prepared for anything See she slides down the banister You've been indoors all day Her mother said Why don't you go out? Pick some raspberries To have with your snack. This did not sound like an important mission to Ruby But she could see that her mom meant business Ruby kissed her mom goodbye and set out along the path To the raspberry bushes With her lunchbox in hand The woods are deep and dark and full of danger Ruby said to herself But super red writing hood is never scared Ruby was marching along bravely when oh No Ruby's big red rubber boot almost crushed a tiny snail in the middle of the path This is a dangerous place for a little snail. She said luckily super red writing hood is here to rescue you She carefully moved the little snail out of harm's way a good deed done She said Ruby skipped toward the woods afraid of the deep dark woods the deep dark woods The deep dark woods Afraid of the deep dark woods Not me She sang when she got to the edge of the forest She stopped and peered ahead a chill drifted out from the shadowy darkness a Superhero must be silent like a cat and watch out for danger Ruby whispered and Tiptoed into the woods The forest was full of strange noises crack It was a very good thing. She had remembered to bring her flashlight twig woodpecker She said aloud shining her bright light toward the different sounds Who's afraid of the deep dark woods the deep dark woods the deep dark woods? Afraid of the deep dark woods Not me She sang as she walked for long. She came to a sunny clearing with raspberry bushes She ran to fill her lunchbox with juicy red berries Accomplished she said triumphantly She was just snapping her lunchbox closed when she heard a new sound a big rumbly growly terrifying sound Ruby's tummy twisted in a knot Her teeth began to chatter Superhero must be brave. She reminded herself Who's afraid of the He towered over Ruby looking frightful with his sharp claws his yellow fangs and his bushy tail Swishing from side to side the wolf inched closer Soon he was so close to Ruby. She could feel his steamy breath on her face Excuse me, I'd like to get by Ruby said in a voice smaller than she would have liked the wolf didn't move He grinned and asked in a crackly growl Where are you going all alone in this big dark forest? Ruby narrowed her eyes and peered at the shaggy beast. Why do you want to know? Oh? Um, just curious. I suppose maybe you can tell me this What's in the box? Before she could answer the wolf lunged quick as a rabbit Super red riding hood hopped out of the way and used her super skills to leap and dart past the tricky wolf She scrambled up an oak tree and perched on a branch just out of the wolf's reach While she sat and caught her breath the grumbly wolf skulked around the trunk of the tree Ruby had had enough. She called down. Let me pass But the wolf stayed put wolf I'm going to count to five. You'd better leave me alone The wolf still didn't move One Ruby said firmly to he could see that Ruby meant business Okay, okay. I'll leave you alone Ruby started climbing back down the tree, but then grow Wolf it's it's my tummy the wolf moan I'm just really hungry Well, why didn't you say so? Ruby jumped out of the tree Her red cloak floating down behind her like a parachute If you wanted some of my snack, you could have just asked She said The wolf looked at Ruby with a big drooly smile. Okay Can I have some he asked holding out a paw Ruby pulled her lunchbox out of the wolf's reach not so fast wolf You really scared me before Snarling at me with your big fangs and those sharp claws The wolf's ears drooped He looked at the ground I'm sorry. He said Ruby took a long look at the sad Hungry wolf ah Forget about it. She said at last the wolf perked up Please He asked very politely a Superhero always helps those in need so Super red riding hood Did what any superhero would do? She popped open her lunchbox and Shared the juicy berries as Ruby and the wolf snack together under the big oak tree Ruby remarked. I didn't know wolves liked raspberries. Oh Yes, said the wolf cheerfully there are favorite The wolf sat thinking for a little while as he munched. I didn't know little girls could be superheroes He said. Oh, yes said Ruby with a wide smile. We can Ruby and the wolf part ways They say goodbye and Ruby heads home


Mae'n meddwl i'r ddweud wedi'u cyfrifio'r Gruffydd Nôr, ac yma'n mynd i'ch gweithio'r gwaith o'r ddatatau. Dwi'n dechrau, rydw i'n ddweud i chi, i gael eu gwirio i'r ddechrau eu phoenu ohono. Can I say our speakers main talk will be on the record. After that the question and answer will be off the record. So, we're I think privileged today to have Dr Stefan Heumann with us. He's a member of the management board of the foundation for new responsibility in Basiton, Berlin. His topic is China, the United States and Europe. Germany's AI strategy in a global context. Felly, os yw'n mynd i ni'n gyllidio y Dyn entitledau ichi ddweud wedi'i ddechrau ar gyfer y dysgu'i ddechrau. Ieithio ddweud amgylcheddurau ar gyfer y dyfodol, ac yn debyg ar ôl o'r strategio ar gyfer y dyfodol. Yn ddweud, mae'n ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o hynny, yw ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r cyffredig. Mae'n ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o dr Hoymans Dyftung, yn y amser i'r gwahodd y gallwn ei gwahoddiad yn ei wneud ohol ar gymrydeithasol. Roeddwn i'n g uhhhol o gyda'r bysgel. Roeddwn i'n g Sisters Okaith. Roeddwn i'n gynnig i ymddangoson mwy o'r sefyllfa IEZO? Roeddwn i'n gynnig i'r newid yddiad ar hwnnw. Roeddwn i'n gynnig i'n gynnig i'r newid yn gyffredinol i ddiwethaf, Catherine, Yn ystod y gallu'n cyffredinol i Dublin. Mae'n fyddion i chi i gyddiolol i gael a'i gyda'u am ymweld i chi, ac yma'n edrych i'r gyda'u cyffredinol i'r target i'r cyfrifolio i Irish. Mae unrhyw gyffredinol yn ddiwethaf, yn ffwrdd ymlaen, yn y ffordd a'r cyfnodol i gael cyfleol cyffredinol o'r cyflwyno cyflwyno. Mae'n cyfrifolio o 20 cyfrifolio ac yn Ymbylwn. Mae'n ganddaraf, ac mae'n ganddaraf. We work with both the tech sector and with government officials, but also with NGOs and academics, and we really try to bring them together to develop expertise. We don't think that you can find the answers on how to react and assess the rapid technological changes at your desktop. You really have to go out and build networks and find the experts that engage in conversations with them. Over the next two years, in 2017, we had a conversation with the German Foreign Ministry, which is a close partner. And we run a lot of projects with them. They were interested in a project that was a new technology that was kind of a horizon that they should start thinking about. They were self-critical, kind of missed the internet trend. wrth dweud y tynnu gennymol, oeddeithasio mewn cyfleol, a opyniaeth newydd sy'n gallu cyfrifonau cyfioedd hynny, mae'r gwyloedd yng nghymru a'r desgol. Rydyn ni'n arferwad i'r rhaglen, dyweddwn ni'n cyfaciliadau, ma'r rhaglen newydd. Rydyn ni'n gweinydd am hyn arill yn nhw, a rithog rydym yn sefydlu yng nghymru ychydig eisiau ymddangos ates. erioedd yn ei ddweud o'r economi digital a'r bobl yn ei ddweud o'r economi data i'r economi i'r plathu US i'r cyffredin iawn. Mae'r bobl yn ei ddweud o'r 21 yma eiffan grei fynd o'r economi data. Ac mae'r ddweud o'r cyffredin a'r ddweud o'r cyffredin a'r cyffredin iawn, ac yn ddim yn ei ddweud o'r economi. Mae ddechrau'r data am yw, mae'r un o'r cwyrdd yn intech arnynol cwyrdd, fyddai'r graffa i bwysig, mae dafwyrd o'r gyfrifol, o ffwrdd gwirig ymgyrch, ymgyrch, a'r internet of things, mae'r ddweud o ddim yn higwrdd ar y dyma'r amgwil, a mae'r ddau cyfrifol mewn data ac dasgwyr. Mae hynny i'n ei fwyaf o gymaint i ddim yn ddweud i'r ddweud i'n ddweud i'r ddweud. It's that. We will need intelligent automated systems that make sense of all that data. That's basically what under this catchphrase of AI we are talking about. We are talking about tons of data that is out there that no human being can process in any way, meaningfully. We need systems, computer systems that help us to make sense of that data. Aie is going to be a key technology as we moving into that connected data driven world. We started out, like we usually start out, we do a research sprint, we look at what we can find. Could we find any papers and publications on AI informed policy? We didn't find very much but we did find AI experts and we were talking to diplomats and we structured an initial input paper around that and started a conversation with them. And part of that research and looking internationally we found of course what everybody of you has heard about, this global race for AI that is largely led by the big tech companies from Silicon Valley that also China has now produced a very ambitious strategy for AI and China wants to become a global leader in this technology by 2030. We also identified that as a key technology moving forward and we also seen that inside of the EU other countries were really working on AI. We saw that Great Britain was having discussions on an AI strategy that France had started a process and what we were frustrated about at that point is that Germany hadn't started yet working on an AI strategy given how important that technology is. And Germany was a little bit reluctant to join that and I will explain to you why and I also will show you the moment when that changed. So that is Chancellor Merkel in early May 2018 on her visit to China and when she visited China she also went to Shenzhen and some of you may have heard that Shenzhen is one of the AI hubs and especially hardware hubs in China and she was visiting start-ups there, robotic start-ups and she was personally very very impressed what the Chinese were already doing with that technology and she came back from that trip and she was really questioning her cabinet and her ministers what are we doing on this technology and is it really good enough what we have been doing and the question is really good enough what we have been doing in Germany is a longer going conversation that we are having about digital and tech because the German track record is not super great if you look at this statistic from that the EU has the digital economy and society index and I marked for you where Germany is right at the middle it sorts of assesses how well developed the member states are of their digital economy and digital society and they look at connectivity, they look at skills, human capital they look at how widespread is the use of internet services they look at the integration of digital technology into companies in the business sector at large and they also look at how digital public services are and you will see that Germany is right at the EU average and you will probably pleasantly have noticed that Ireland is ahead among the top groups but there has been a long going conversation in Germany that we have had for years that we are struggling to adopt our public sector to digital that we need to be more proactive in pushing digital technologies into our society into our education system but also into our business sector and so the conversation about AI started at a point where there was already a lot of criticism on the German government that we are not strong enough and not doing enough at the moment and so Germany joined that race late they decided we really need to turn this around and we really need to move Germany forward and you can see that we followed a trend that has been going on globally that a lot of countries have been adopting AI strategies and this is from Tim Dutton who wrote a block entry that is artificial intelligence strategies that I highly recommend for anyone who wants to dig deeper into it he constantly updates it and he gives you an overview in terms of where the discussion is in all these different countries that have started or already adopted AI national strategies and you see we also have a process going on now on the European level but we have quite some member states being also from the EU already being very active in the field particularly myself like the Finnish AI strategy so if somebody wants to look at a particularly innovative one from my perspective I recommend them to take a look at the Finnish one and it's been translated into English so you don't need to learn Finnish to read it so what complicated the conversation in Germany is that AI is not a new research field in Germany last year the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence celebrated its 30th anniversary and this was one of the reasons why the German government has been reluctant to adopt an AI strategy because our research ministry has always been saying we have been working on AI for 30 years this is a very large research centre that has several locations in Germany and a network of over 800 researchers that work in it but they have been mostly working and focused on what's called symbolic AI AI is really not a new research topic the traditional AI systems go a long way back over 50 years people have been trying to make computers intelligent and there's really two camps on how you approach it and the traditional camp is what you see in the slide is the symbolic AI that is you start with knowledge you understand something and then you try with logic to tell the machine to follow that logic so a very good example for a symbolic based AI system would be for example systems you use for your tax returns so there's lots of rules around if you're in this income category these kinds of rules apply and you can deduct this and that and a lot of that you can translate into logic for a machine to learn and then the machine can help you calculate your taxes that's what's called traditionally an expert system and that's the symbolic AI the problem with the symbolic AI is when it gets really complicated it's really complicated to translate that into logical systems that work consistently for example how do you explain to that sort of system to recognize a horse or a human being you have to say it has to have a nose and ears you describe it but monkeys have that too and other animals how do you differentiate that so that kind of approach also ran into lots of roadblocks and what we're seeing now really taking off in AI is the statistical based approach the data based approach which is we don't start from logic we don't start from knowledge that we understand what a human is and then we try to translate that into rules and if when rules to a system that can apply it we rather let the machine learn it based from data so we give a machine lots of pictures of a human being and the machine will figure itself out the patterns behind a human being and get so good at the recognition of that pattern that it in the end can recognize human beings by itself and that's the statistical machine learning approach and this machine learning approach is really what took off and it's really what's driving around all the AI hype right now I think the AI term we can have a conversation how useful that is because I don't think we're talking about artificial intelligence we're talking about very specialized systems that can do very specific things that is very different from human intelligence and really the big hype is on machine learning is on training computers at certain tasks or at the ability to recognize faces to recognize speech based on massive data inputs and these are really the drivers of machine learning that have come together in the past years so neural networks is this learning based approach and it's derived from neurons this is how our brain functions it was inspired by neurosciences and how the brain works and translated into computer software that simulates the learning process then we have data and during the past years the availability of data has just exploded the problem by neural networks didn't really take off earlier even though we had the concepts already developed in the 1980s was that you need a lot of computing power to build neural networks especially deep neural networks the better you want to get at the pattern recognition the more layers you need in your neural networks and the more computing power you need to do that and we just didn't have that kind of computing power in the 1980s and 1990s to do that and so when we started to have the computing power and also the large availability of data we had key ingredients in place there are two more that you need that's talent that's people who are able to work with neural networks to work with data to write the algorithms to put it together and that's currently the biggest bottleneck because these breakthroughs are very new we don't have so many people trained in this specialized area that there's a global competition for experts in this field and that's why you read a lot about this in the newspapers that AI experts get these very high salaries why so many people get moving into the tech sectors from the universities because you just can earn so much money with this knowledge at the moment and then I wouldn't underestimate this this is why Silicon Valley was really leading in the application of machine learning and practical use cases why would you invest so much money in building computing power in analyzing data and hiring big talent if you don't have a specific use case and Facebook and Google and other companies Amazon they have the use cases Amazon wants to make predictions on what you want to buy for that they need to analyze all the data that you leave on the platform companies can't do that you want to automate that process Google wants to show you relevant search results also for that they analyze a lot of data and want to give you automated predictions Facebook wants to understand your interest based on your activity on the platforms they even want to understand what kind of pictures you upload for that they need image recognition to recognize pictures also to do their content policing to hire millions and millions of people to do that so they have really the use cases to work with all their data so that's the reason why they were pioneers in this but the use cases are much larger now and they go beyond the internet platforms they go towards diagnostics for medicine they go towards smart manufacturing or mobility and that's why we have this broader conversation how AI is a key technology all across industry and society so everyone talks about China and the USA leading and there's a great resource again if you want to see what are the most important trends in the field I highly recommend to you the state of AI report that two leading experts publish every year I don't even want to go into the details of the slides but it builds on what I said before they look at hardware, data, research and algorithms and they also look at the commercialization what worries me about their state of AI report is there's something missing there in my perspective where's Europe? they're talking about as if Europe is not even in that race at the moment and that is what I'm very concerned about if we follow the assumption that AI is such a key technology to make sense of data we're moving into a data economy we really need that capability and we're looking at the state of AI report and the leading report that's cited by experts and they're not even talking about Europe in their comparison so what do we need to do? we have woken up in Europe there's a lot of awareness about the importance of AI I think that's well understood and the European Union has started a strategy process they have already published a first paper they had discussions with member states and a further agreement how to move the EU forward but you see it's a long-term process and the EU, that's a high-level approach they like to call their expert working groups the high-level expert workgroup on AI and things take time in Brussels and Brussels is also in my opinion quite removed from the ecosystems that are driving the development of AI so there's a very important role for member states to play and the EU is actually also encouraging in its own AI strategy the member states to adopt AI strategies so let's talk about the German AI strategy and what it can be the contribution to Europe I apologize for this German slide but what it shows you in Germany so the lighter blue is the number of AI startups and companies and the darker blue is the number of AI research institutes and what you will see is Germany as a federal state has pretty much equally distributed around Germany AI research institutes but you will see that in terms of commercialization it's really focused on a few cities it's Berlin, Munich and then to lesser degree there's Hamburg but it's really the big cities in Germany Berlin and Munich that are the startup ecosystems for commercialization of AI and this is one of the biggest challenges for Germany at the moment because we usually want to promote research and innovation across the country we want to have it across all the lander we call them across all the states but we see that the ecosystems really take off in the big cities and I think we have a similar challenge in the EU everybody wants to have AI research but we really see that the strong ecosystems are based in cities the strongest AI ecosystems are in London and in Paris in Ireland I would imagine it's around here in Dublin in Germany it's Berlin and Munich and so we either need to figure out how we strengthen the commercialization in the smaller cities or we need to just accept the reality and say well we have these strong clusters what's happening there and we just need to focus on our policy there what you see is that across Germany now the different states are starting to look at their ecosystems and trying to promote them this is the governor from the Green Party the only Green Party governor in Germany Mr Kretschmar who is signing a program for what they call the cyber valley that's the state of Baden-Württemberg in the south west a very strong manufacturing machine producing area also the home tool Mercedes-Benz and they have developed a program connecting their research their leading research institutes on AI with industry and they're bringing in Bosch, they're bringing in Daimler they're bringing in SMEs also Amazon is now developing an AI development center these are kind of the local ecosystems that we need to build and that is a contribution that we can make thinking about what are our strengths in certain areas and how can we develop these ecosystems the second challenge is data the big US platforms have lots of data and we've talked about that for machine learning you need large amounts of data and we don't have these huge platforms in Europe at the moment so we need to encourage companies and industries to collaborate and to share data and this is an initiative in Germany called the industrial data space that's trying to develop a platform where companies can pool data and work together and share data and for example if you have lots of small companies that if they would come together and pool their data resources they could develop much better machine learning based algorithms than they could do on their own you even see that the big car companies are talking to each other to collaborate on developing autonomous driving systems because even a huge car company doesn't have enough resources but this is a challenge how do we build platforms for them to collaborate we can go more into detail in the Q&A if there's interest one interesting way to do this is for example what's called federated AI it's where you have the machine learning happening on site and then only what you learn you share with others and so you develop a master algorithm basically that benefits from what many different places learn you could also use that in the health sector that you have patients, algorithms that do diagnoses and what they learn and how they improve you combine what's learned in many different hospitals the advantage when that happens on premise is that you don't have to transfer any data you don't have to have a centralized data repository but rather you learn decentralized and you just bring a centralized the results of the learning together these are sort of technical approaches that I think for European AI we need to look much more into because they are much more compatible with our values and with our ideas about data protection and of course skills that are very, very critical we were just talking about this over lunch this is a traditional strength in Germany we have a very strong apprenticeship model we have strong trade unions that work together with the companies to develop training and qualification courses we have a very educated workforce in Germany that also is used to have a say in the workplace that critical interacts with machinery with management, with engineers and we need to get them ready to understand machine learning AI as they are going to be working with it and they need to be able to understand the basics of it they don't need to be able to code the machine but they need to be able to understand what are the limitations of the technology what could go wrong how can I help my engineers and my management to improve processes and use the technology and I think here we really could have a cutting edge in Europe with our trained and highly qualified workforces not only over China but also in the US as we are thinking about bringing AI into industry and then here is what the EU could really do this is an initiative also that came bottom up it's so-called the ELIS letter it's a letter that was signed by leading machine learning scientists in Europe that are demanding for more European support to build centres of excellence on machine learning they see three challenges first they argue that machine learning, as I told you before is really at the centre of this artificial intelligence revolution they think that Europe is not keeping up that the leading research institutes are overseas at the moment and that China is building them more to develop academic research centres of excellence that are combined with industrial labs and testing and to do that to really have visibility we should have a few of these flagship centres across the EU that collaborate amongst each other and really show European excellence in AI research but Germany is also the country of environmentalists about skeptics on technology and I showed you earlier the slide on the cyber valley there are protests against the cyber valley in Tübing which is a small university city where one of the leading research centres sit people are protesting against Amazon developing a huge research centre there and they are very concerned about AI taking away their employment they are worried about unethical AI they are worried about this technology being used to fight wars to develop weapons systems so I think that ethical discussion is really important there are legitimate concerns and if you don't engage with the population I think we will see a backlash against that technology and we see some backlash already I'm concerned about it I think much of the backlash is also based on misinformation about the technology because of the term artificial intelligence I think people widely overestimate what's possible at the moment because it's not human based intelligence and if you look at the media reports they like to use images of human looking robots to visualise artificial intelligence it's very far from how these systems work there are a lot of concerns in the broader population I think the main concern is about people's wealth and economic opportunities so what does that mean to their employment, to their future and the other one is am I going to be subjected to some sort of artificial system that decides over me whether I get a loan or whether I get a car insurance and do I have any way to verify that the decision was being made fair and that's why I do think that the European focus also on talking about ethics and the framework for developing ethic guidelines for trustworthy AI is a very important component of the European approach I like about it that they don't only have ethical guidelines that really centre around putting that technology in the service of human beings but that they also include recommendations for technical verification and governance mechanisms so for accountability in AI is a technical problem how do I understand if I use a machine learning algorithm how the machine learning algorithm learnt and how it makes decisions that's a technical problem and it's also a governance problem what kind of rules should a company adhere to when it thinks about training data when it thinks about quality assurance when it thinks about when can I put this into the marketplace so the framework is a very important starting point for broader discussion about how we want to bring AI into Europe and that's it I'm looking forward for a lively discussion on this and thank you very much for your attention


Hi everyone, I'm Divyan. So this summer as Dan told you, we have worked on this generating SecComp profiles for containers, so does everybody know what SecComp is? Okay. So for those who don't know, SecComp is a Linux security tool which was originally allowed, which is used to limit the attack surface of the kernel. So you can use it to specify which a process, which syscalls can a process access. Initially it just allowed for syscalls, but later it was expanded using BPF Berkeley packet filter. Then after that you could set exactly what syscalls you could allow for a process. So it's really helpful in limiting down the number of vectors you can use that are available for exploits. So all the container engines ship with this SecComp and they ship with the default SecComp profile. So the goal of our talk would be to generate a SecComp profile by tracing all the syscalls that were made by the container so that we could tighten the SecComp profile because the default SecComp profile that ships with the container, container engines was created a few years ago by Jesse Frazell. So the default SecComp profile blocks only 44 syscalls which is quite loose for a certain workload. So by a report by Aqua Security, a container normally needs only 60 to 70 syscalls. So we don't need around 300 plus syscalls for our job. So initially in our investigation we initially proposed to use ptrace which is an obvious choice in some aspects because strace uses ptrace to trace all the syscalls. So what exactly is ptrace? A ptrace is a system called which is used by, which is used by debuggers and tracers which lets a tracer observe a tracys, observe or controller tracys, registers or other things. So generally used for restrace. In x86, 64 systems you can observe the RAX registers to get what syscalls a process has called. But the problem with ptrace is that it stops every time, the tracys stops every time a tracer wants to observe the process. So after every operation it has to stop. So it's quite slow. So we may miss some time-based decisions. Also we can't really trace the calls made by Runcy using strace. So after the SecComp profile is applied we need some calls made by Runcy. So we need to also trace the calls by Runcy. So we scrapped that idea. So next we tried the audit log. So the audit log is basically the audit, you can, in May there was a poll request in Runcy which added the scmp-aclog filter action to the SecComp profile that's available. So with that we could use that to trace every syscall made by a container. So that works for a single container. But the problem is that if you run multiple parallel containers, then we won't be able to figure out which process is inside which container because it's quite indifferentiable. And if you look at the ptrace we could get it but it's not really trivial and we could run into some race conditions. So we scrapped that. We could do that by using container ID but the Linux kernel system, kernel doesn't identify containers as a separate entity. They think of it as a process. So we couldn't do that. So the next thing we talked about was using BPF. So BPF or EBPF extended Berkeley packet filter was initially used to filter out packets inside the kernel system. Kernel and later it was used for SecComp to trace, to filter out syscalls. So and it was expanded later to add the ability to inject user-based programs inside the kernel which is really cool. So the EBPF program is attached to a designated code path which means that you could set up some certain events that could trigger certain functions which you can use to gather data or do something. For example, trace points or K probes. So you can do that in the kernel space or the user space. So how do we trace syscalls? So the thing I was talking about is you can add trace points inside the kernel and which would execute certain functions. So the trace point we use was the center. So it triggers every time a syscall is made. So a function is attached to it so we can gather the data about what process called the syscall or what syscall was called. So how do we identify what process is inside a container? So every container has a paid names and every process of the container contains, every process has the same paid namespace. So we basically take the paid one of the container and note down its paid namespace and later compare every syscall made whether it's inside the paid namespace or not. So we can check if it's inside the container. So the important question is when do we start tracing? Because we need to start just before the container is run and just after the second profile is applied so that we don't miss any syscalls or we don't have any extra syscalls. So we have to run a separate binary which would trace, which would communicate with the EVPF program. So we need to use OCI hooks. So OCI hooks is a really cool thing that allows you to run binaries during different lifecycle stages of a container. So basically if you want to run a binary before starting a container, you could use start, pre-start, or after the container has exited, you could use post-stop. So we use the pre-start hook which runs a binary before the container is run but after the namespaces are applied so that we could start tracing. But the thing is that the runtime waits for the hook to exit. So we need to create a separate process after we run the hook. So the run-c or crun creates a process which creates another process which is used to trace the container and the original process exits. And the pit is provided by the runtime using stdin. So, but we can't start tracing it because once we're inside the namespace and the container hasn't started yet during the pre-start hook, run-c is still there. It has to do some operation. So we might collect some extra syscalls from run-c. So we need to wait for PR-CTL. So PR, we, after the first PR-CTL is done, we can pretty much guarantee that our second profile has been applied and we can start tracing the syscalls. So, demo. So, the way we trigger, is it visible? So the way we trigger our hook is, OCI hook is by providing annotations. Annotation or label is a way, is a label we pass on to the hook which can be used to trigger the hook. So the hook won't run every time we run a container. So, if I run this command, then first the run-c will start creating the container, then it will stop and execute the pre-start hook and then the pre-start hook will run and create another process which would attach to the sysenter trace point. Then when the container starts running. So, as a profile has been generated. So, as a profile has been generated. So, if I use this profile, so then the container runs, but if I try to run something else. So, if I do ls-l, so it would fail because ls-l would require some extra syscalls. So, I could do one thing that, I can provide an inputs seccom profile which can be used to expand upon a previously generated seccom profile. So, earlier I just passed in the output file. So, I could provide an input file that could expand upon what syscalls. So, now what it would do is that, is it visible? So, now what it would do is, it would take the input file and then expand upon it. So, it would add the syscalls that were not inside the input file, but it won't remove the syscalls that were present in the input file. So, you could use this to put it in a CI-CD system that could automate your testing so that. So, you can be really sure. So, the second seccom profile has been generated. So, I'll show you the difference between. So, the part above the, if you see this seccom profile, you can see two profiles as names. So, the above part is from the original seccom profile and the below part is from the new. So, these are the new seccom syscalls added to the profile. So, if you try to run them, so it works. So, this is the repository. You could take a look at it and play with it. Thank you for the questions. So, okay, so you need to run as root because you need CAPS's admin to inject ABPF programs into the kernel. So, you can only run as root. So, in our demo we used, we implemented this by using the PID namespace. You could also do this using cgroups. But cgroups have been added in Fedora 31. They were not there before. So, you could also do this with cgroups. Other than that, does anybody have any question? Yeah. So, could you repeat that question? So, he's asking if I had another container running on a system, would you accidentally get the syscalls from that container? How do you make sure you're getting it from one container, not the second? So, you won't get that problem because we create, for every container, we create a new process. So, you trace, so the process traces its own PID namespace. So, that won't create a conflict. If you had two containers running with the hook at the same time, they would have different PID namespaces. So, that when the hook starts up, it figures out what the PID namespace for the container it's gonna run and then make sure that any syscalls it gets, it's gonna match up to the PID namespace. Any other questions? So, the question is that, how can we be sure that we go through every code path? So, we can't be sure we go through every code path. You'll have to test it thoroughly. So, that's why there's an input file. So, if it fails, you can expand onto it because you can put it in a system that would, you try again and again until you're really sure about if it's right for you or not because you can't really be sure if you go through all the code paths. You could also run this container in production and with the hook running. So, you're not enforcing the hook but you could continually grab it and say after a couple months, you now decide, well, it's been running fine for two months. I'll get those, the current seccomp file that it's generated, take that seccomp file and now make it enforcing code. Yeah, I can't hear you. Impact on performance? We'll let the kernel performance team that's sitting in the front here tell you, answer that question. But using a EBPF, how much is that gonna cost us in performance to watch a container? So, Shaq said that it has no performance overhead at all. Again, he said no performance overhead. Since we're in the kernel, I don't think we can get any better than that if we want to trace. And what seccomp is doing is exactly that. It's basically an EBPF filter that is running in the kernel and prevents the execution of certain syscalls. So, we somehow use an EBPF program to in the end create another one. Some people are asking why we are not doing static analysis. And the problem with static analysis is it's more something specialized. If you know what you're running or which tools in which programming language, you could basically analyze the binaries and look for which syscalls are there. But we wanted to have something generally applicable. So, something that is easy to use and to trace. So, in this case, as Tivian said before, you need to run it for a while in production and try to execute as much as possible until being really confident that it's working. Yeah, so, couple things. Another thing to think about is that this is gonna get, even if you have a multi-process container or a multi-service container, it's gonna get all the syscalls for all of them. So, I think we're just about out of time or at least she's getting the sign ready. I'd just like to point out that he's only a freshman in college, so I'm pretty good to work, okay?