This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Yes, we're back on J. Feidele. This is Think Tech. And this is, what is it? Think Tech Asia is what it is. And we're studying Asia as we must because we're in the middle of the Pacific and we are affected by, we are a part of all these events that take place in defining the Pacific region. You know, there's a book. My name is Pacific by Simon Winchester. He used to teach at the East West Center. It's a very interesting book. It's anecdotal in the sense that he has about a dozen stories of things that have happened in the Pacific going back when, from the war on forward. And he tries to tell you to find what the Pacific is. Because the book is written about three years ago. He understood about the South China Sea, by the way. He understood. Anyway, if you were to write that book today, today, you would have another anecdotal story in there. It would be about technology. It would be about China's technology revolution and how it affects the Pacific and how it affects us, how it affects the U.S., how it affects the world. And Russell Liu, my inimitable co-host here on Think Tech Asia is here to talk to us about that, about the technological revolution in China and how it affects us and the U.S. in general and the world and how we better watch what's going on in China. Welcome to the show, Russell. And I'm glad to be back, Jay, back from China. And today's show is going to be fascinating because we're going to talk about something that is very special. There's a revolution going on in China. It's a good one. And that revolution is going to change not only China, but the world. And how does it apply to Hawaii? Where can we position ourselves? These are really lessons that are very timely today. So what's happened in China? I mean, there's something remarkable happening. First, we see China stand up. Deng Xiaoping, right? He said, let's be a player on the world economic stage. And presto, China was. China was manufacturing everything for everybody in every continent. But then things changed. Now, as of a couple of years ago, I guess it was Xi Jinping or maybe his predecessor, his predecessor. Hu Jintao. Hu Jintao decided we're going to have a consumer economy just like the United States. We're going to find technology to make the consumer market. We're going to consume our own goods instead of relying on selling into other places. And by George, they have done that. Part of that change is the technology.  So rational, so mindful, so using the technology. It's happening right now. So can you describe what life is like in the consumer technology in China? Well, we have this word we call a digital age. What's a digital age? Yeah. And you're starting to, if you go and Google the internet today, you'll find headlines all about China's being the leader in digital age. What is a digital age? Well, you know, when you think about it, digital age means technology that is changing the lives of everyday citizens, transforming the society. You know, 30 years ago, if you go and store in China, you'll see the shopkeeper with an abacus. Today, that abacus is no more. You're seeing people with smartphones. It's a society that's ramped up through technology, making digital payments. You're seeing the convenience. Nobody carries cash today. Nobody carries credit cards. Mastercard visa? Who cares? You don't carry plastic cards. So when I'm out at Bikki, I'm looking at the bikes, they said slip your credit card in. They've refrogged above, beyond credit cards. Opho. Opho. Opho bicycles, right? They use scanned QR codes. They're digital. It goes into e-commerce applications through WeChat. WeChat Pay, Alipay, Bingo. The bank sends the money to a vendor. It's gone. The deal is done. Cash flows and moves quickly. The society moves. And so all this is happening because China has made a big move to change its old economy in the 70s and 80s. We're looking at China as being the garage mat for manufacturing society, slippers, sandals. Umbrella's are made in China. China made a conscious decision. We're going to move up the value chain. We're going to do something where we know that we have to do something that's going to sell our economy. What it's done is it focused on innovation, technology. And so people were laughing. The West was laughing a couple of years ago. We don't think they can do it. But today it's different. They did it. They did it using technology. And they're still doing it. And it lubricates the daily transactions of our lives, make them faster, easier, and more of them. And so the result is they have achieved this new paradigm, this new consumer economy, focusing on technology, like that QR code thing. Yes. And the beautiful thing about Jay is that, remember, everyone in China, you can be in Xinjiang, China, Guangzhou, China, Beijing, Shanghai, Guilin, Chengdu, and you have the same application. You can get services. You can get goods. How about the country? How about the country? The country's stabilized. You know, people are happy. How about the country? Way back. Way out. Way out towards the Gobi Desert.  They still have the technology because it's the internet. They've got internet. And the last 10 years, 20 years, China has made a conscious move, invested in the logistics, invested in high-speed rail all across the country. So it is amazing what it's done. It's allowed small businesses to grow, the backbone of any economy. It's allowed big businesses to grow, and it's allowed people to convenience. But you know, digital age. So what are we talking about? Let's take a look at a quick video of what's it like. An everyday person, this is going to the food stand in Beijing to get a glass of watermelon juice. Watermelon juice. Okay, it's a famous watermelon juice video. Here we go. Okay, we're back here. We're at a point of purchase. And what it's looked like, it's fresh watermelon juice already to go. So we are going to now show you how we will pay. And I will simply get my WeChat. Open your WeChat. This is the plus button on the top. And all you do is click scan the code. And then you scan the code. You just scan the code. And then you can enter the amount of money you need to pay. And how much do you cost, yeah? So it's 56.5 for all these wonderful drinks. I press this. And the green button is like pay. It's processing. Now it's pay now. I hit pay now. I touch my thumb frame for my ID. It verifies it. Up to then. And it's paid. That's all it's done. No cash. Money. Simply transfers. To your account. From my account. Automatically. So now we can all join the Watermelon Juice. Thank you very much. Another episode from CTECH Global. Live Beijing. Russell Leo and my guest here. Sorry to keep you. Russell, the watermelon juice looked pretty good. I know. I was just about to comment. We could use a glass of water just right now. That's very refreshing. So I mean this is remarkably easy. And I've got to think about it. Think about each step, each frame of that 90-second video. What you get is a system that is much easier than a credit card. It's a lot easier. And it's a cashless society. And the good thing about it is that two things that are important from a microeconomic point of view. Development of small businesses. Who can now get consumers coming in. They don't have to worry about counterfeit money. People have more of an urge to spend. Consumer spending. Convenience of it. And also the money is transferred. They're going to be counting the banks instantly. No question about collectibles. And the government can figure out the taxes. So it's a site that works for everyone. And the growth of small businesses. And it's sort of like they call it China. China Dream. And it's amazing when I come back to the U.S. I've got a bumble for my cash. Oh, I don't have enough cash. It's an old system. So my question is we need to take a critical look because these are the platforms that are changing the world. And it's because the Chinese are going outbound and are spending a big lot of money. And the majority of the global financial knowledge they're looking at China. One out of every three startup. A knowledge startup. That's over a billion dollars. It starts in China. And that's big money. Well, I don't think we've been watching carefully enough. I mean, I don't think this administration fully understands the power of innovation. And we've been going backward lately. This makes it even greater stark relief to compare what's happening in China and what's happening here now. We're losing ground and they're gaining ground at a very rapid rate. Well, that's why it's a paradoxical because in the U.S. we're talking about making America great. We're talking about bringing hard manufacturing jobs to communities in America. But let's face it, you know, things are changing. The money is being made in financial services and technology. And factories in China are all automating and robots. They're being outsourced to other places in Asia. That's right. And so again, we are. Are we slipping back today? Where we're in the curve? And it makes me question because the institutions upon which the banks to rely on here, you know, they have their way of doing things. But we're not buying into technology. It means that we're going to be behind because around us the Chinese are spending a lot of money and they're going around the world. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, the local banks in Hawaii, they do not have great internet technology, online banking and all that. And they're cut well below the average city bank. I mean, big city bank on the mainland. But those banks are cut below what's going on in China. And we're just not into innovation. And in this administration, we're going backward as fast as we can. Instead of getting away from coal, which is China's target, we're going to coal. What? What? It's backward.   First of all, let's understand, you know, the mechanics of it. So I am flashing my camera, my cell phone camera on a QR code. Okay, my camera reads the QR code. How does the shopkeeper, the guy with the watermelon juice, know that he has been paid? It'll show my application as they transfer me success. On your phone? On my phone. And he will also see it on his digital side, the technology. Oh, he'll see the same thing. Yeah, some of the registers are tied in that way. Also, they have their own scanners. And I have my own QR code. And for example, WeChat pay. I have my special QR code. Oli pay. I have my special QR code. And they will scan mine. And that QR code that I have is tied into my bank so that money is automatically transferred. And it's amazing because I'll tell you a little story the other night. I was asking a friend who's coming from Beijing to, they're going to visit here. And I asked, can you get a pair of yoga socks for your wife, cheaper in China? And she said, OK. She went on the Chinese internet, e-commerce. And I sent her the link that I purchased earlier. She ordered it. And she sent me a WeChat miss saying it costs 64 RMB. And I said, great. And so I take out, I mean, here in the US, in Hawaii, I take out my WeChat. I find her WeChat pay account. And all I do is I say, hey, I'm going to transfer. This little button says transfer. You're in the US. In the US. And I transfer. And I type in 64. And I hit Enter. You have just paid. I've just paid. And it's chosen her in. And guess what? She sends a message three seconds later. It says, received. Thank you. And see, this is why I'm saying it's not China. It's global effects. It's going across. Chinese are traveling across. They're coming to school here. They're buying things. And that's where it is, the beauty of it. It's a global thing. And so where are we in this old scheme of things? But now let me go back to the mechanics for a minute. So the class of watermelon juice costs what? Two kwae, three kwae, four kwae? Oh, it's fresh watermelon. I had about four or five cups for the crew there. So it was 60-something kwae. 60-something kwae. So what did that come to? Well, maybe about $2. $2. Okay. So suppose I wanted to buy something for $500 or $1,000 or $5,000. Can I use the same system? You can use the same system. Is it safe? It's safe. You know, I've actually, I did some research on it. And it's so far, there are some problems, but overall, it's been pretty safe. And they work it through the e-commerce vendors, Alibaba, Alipay. Oh, so when you want to buy things like, Alibaba's like Amazon, yeah? Mm-hmm. You can buy all kinds of things using this very same QR system. You can buy them. Yes. Because it allows all these vendors. You don't have to have brick and mortar. You don't have to have an Alamone Shopping Center. You could be in the far-reached Mongolia, inner Mongolia in China, or something. And you'll get in two days. And a little story. At the university where I teach law, the basement of the university, small shops, there's a guy who has a little bakery. And his baker is from Mongolia. And she makes black forest cake. She makes New York cheesecake. And you would think, well, where in the world is this guy going to get people who are going to come in here and order the stuff and have a cup of cappuccino? Yeah. What he does is at two o'clock in the afternoon, all the orders come in through Alipay or WeChat. Yeah. People have ordered it. So they're baking it. And it's the cheapest overhead. They have a smaller bakery with a little shop. They bake it. Next morning, it's lined up the boxes.  And they send it all across Beijing. So what you're saying is that the amount of capital you need to start a business like that is minuscule compared to what it would be, say, in this country. Yes. You can put it together in no time at all. And it reminds me of something I think was on 60 Minutes. We've talked about this before about a woman who was retired. She decided she liked cooking. She decided she was going to be a caterer person. And so she would take email from her customers. She would cook in her own kitchen at home. She would trundle off on the street with a little wheelbarrow affair. She would visit their homes. They would do the QR code transaction. And she had a job with virtually no investment at all. Now she had a nice job business, if you will, only because she was using her telephone for these transactions. It was quite remarkable. So it's really remarkable because, you know, no matter what you say, the world is changing the internet locally. Bank of Hawaii. I noticed the war branch is closed. I noticed a lot of locations have downsized because, and I've heard about some ad talking about the bankers are studying e-commerce. And that's the world, the digital world. But the question is, where are we? Are we our masters of our fate? And I really think we need to take a hard look at it. Okay. And when this break is over, when we come back from this break, Russell, we are going to take a hard look at it. We're going to discuss step by step how it can be done here in Hawai'ine. We'll be right back after this short break. Russell, you. This is Think Tech Hawai'i. Raising public awareness.  So far up in the confusion. Nothing is making sense for me.  She said, What are you doing? Research says reading from birth accelerates our baby's brain development. Push! Read aloud 15 minutes. Every child, every parent, every day. Aloha! My name is Steven Phillip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist. And I'm the host of Shrink Rap Hawai'i, where I talk to other shrinks. Did you ever want to get your head shrunk? Well, this is the best place to come to pick one. I've been doing this. We must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at. I'm here on Tuesdays at 3 o'clock every other Tuesday. I hope you are too. 3, 8, we're back. We're back. We're live at Resolu, an American lawyer practicing in Beijing, and having a wonderful time examining the, what do we call it, the arbitrage of technology between China and Hawai'i and the U.S. And so, you know, what makes it so successful in China that we get to learn from? What are the things that the government has done to set up an environment where people can actually use these tech platforms in order to achieve instant and low capital businesses? Well, I think the government is a very important driver because the government has been very flexible. They've allowed the Internet giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent called that to actually grow, to develop the e-commerce platform. But along with it has brought in a lot of money. It's one of the largest investment countries right now coming in, venture capital. American venture capital. They've come all over the world. They're investing in China, to these companies. Because they see the possibilities. They see the potential. So no matter what we do, it's a global thing. It's a cross-border, you know, and we've got to think here how, where do we fit in the scheme of things, okay? And I think what we have to do here, a selfish thing locally, although it's a bigger effect on the U.S., is we have to look, how can we capitalize this? What do we need to do? Are we going to sit here and continue the same old economy? Our economy has been a labor-type economy. The way China works these days, you can criticize the whole communist business and all that. You can criticize their aggressiveness in the South China Sea, their ambitions, geopolitical things. But the reality is, in terms of the economy, they're very rational in creating a country where 1.4 or 1.5 billion people have a good life, if not right now, today, then soon. And so, you know, we aren't going the same direction here. We have structures and bureaucracy.  We have all kinds of trouble going on in Washington and around, you know, the government. And the state governments, for that matter. So we're not nearly in a place where we could establish the same kind of rational platform for using this technology to build those businesses. I mean, so that's not so easy. It's not so easy. And my question, as before, is, so, how do we do it? Well, you know, let's take a look back at this. A few years back, when Governor Guihei was in office, my understanding was that Intel was looking at places where they're going to develop their chip manufacturing industry. So they looked at Honolulu. They looked at Austin. And our economy is a different kind of economy. More labor, not knowledge-based. Okay? The Chinese are more of a knowledge-based. You see what I'm getting at? And they're way ahead of us. So when you have a labor-based economy, you don't have the capacity to do things. Also, it's too expensive. So, of course, they went to Austin. And we know the history of Austin after that. They changed their economy as flourished because they have joined the technical age, the digital age. So we have a chance now. Why do we have a chance? Because I'll tell you why. Because the Chinese, up through game, the venture capital has to go out with more outside, more joint ventures. The big America markets are there, number one. Number two, some of the work in China that I've been doing in the past was, you know, the Chinese companies go out now and you do a joint venture research facility. So they learn technology. They learn certain skills. And so they do it with an American company. Three, you need to build a global capacity here. And how do you do that? Well, it's opportunity because the big thing in the U.S. why was it a FBI national priority to find the Chinese student who was missing at the University of Illinois? Because one of the biggest industry things is education. A million Chinese students who have gone on travel majority come to the U.S. college. They pay full fare. For law schools, they've been supporting the law schools. Starting going to them. They're going down. They have the priorities right. And the government has a mandate to increase that so that they will learn more about the West. They learn more about innovation in the Western style. So they do that. And so why not the big, second largest employer in the state as a University of Hawaii? Why aren't we doing that? Why aren't we working as one group, Clearinghouse, to get these Chinese students into STEM courses? Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. So let me pull out the assumption in my first obstacle, my first challenge, that we have bureaucracy. And maybe the second one is that we don't have political will. We don't see this. And we don't decide to move down the track. Let's assume that we do. Let's assume that we are all of a sudden, we find ourselves capable of reducing the bureaucracy and the cost of the bureaucracy. And we find that we can understand what they're doing in China and we want to do it here. So that's a really wonderful playing field. So my next question is, so given all of that, those two challenges aside, what do we do to incorporate this kind of new technology in Hawaii and in the U.S.? Well, I think especially I'm a selfish man in Hawaii, we are truly a cross-cultural place. I don't think we really capitalize on it. The cultures that we talked about cross-culture are 100 years ago. We have a misconception and we don't understand the issue. And second thing is that we're looking at Asian economies that have passed, Japan has passed already. You've got to follow the money.  We follow the money. And the money is the Chinese. Think about this. 40% of all venture capital investment in China was created by these three Chinese internet companies. As compared to only 5% of U.S. venture capital created by Amazon, Facebook, and Google. So there is room to grow. There's going to be money somewhere, okay? So you need big capital to develop this consumer technology. Right. And we don't have big capital here. That's where everybody stops. And they say, we don't have big capital. How do we do it? Well, you know what?  Build the playing field. Kevin Koster and that movie. Build the field and they'll come. What do you mean by build that field? What do you mean? It's easy. Number one, start getting the Chinese students here in the STEM courses because they're going to come here. After that student was abducted and killed in Illinois, they create a huge tech core out of here. There's a lot of smart Chinese kids. Bring them here. They teach their kids how to be global, which is important, very important. Number two, language capability. Instead of focusing on Japanese, let's focus on Mandarin. Look at the schools. Marino is doing an immersion program now in Mandarin. Yolani is going out there to get Chinese students. Again, we need to follow that. Government needs to lead. It's a government-flexibility leadership. You've got to think globally. And you know what? I'll tell you something, Jay. The handwriting isn't a wall. It's the broken ahana, is what I call it. Kids don't come back here. Grandkids don't come back here. In the Chinese circle of life, the grandkids come back to take care of their parents. The parents take care of their parents. And the whole family lives in that harmonious environment. Family is so important for social stability. Family is super. Social, economic stability. So let me go back to the woman who retired and would like to set up a business, or for that matter, the watermelon stand. So I want to open up a watermelon juice stand right here on Bishop Street. And I don't need a lot of space. I can do it in a very small amount of space. So I rent the space. And I make the watermelon juice. And everybody loves my watermelon juice. But I want to make this really easy. I don't want to take credit cards. I don't want to take cash. I want to use the QR code technology. For example, just one example of Chinese facilitating technology, consumer facilitation technology. How do I do that? Well, first, I suppose I have to get the software. I have to have the unit there where I can read the fact that I have just been paid some money for the watermelon juice. And I have to get you, the customer, to download that app on your cell phone so you can pay me. How much trouble would that be? What would that be done overnight? Is that easy or is that hard? Can we take that from the Chinese? Can we use the Chinese software? Do we have to develop our own and who would do it? You raised the trick question, Jay, here. The answer lies in your question. And what it is is, what happens is that let's work with the Chinese to bring them here to do the joint ventures and to do the applied, create a market here. And it's a big thing because this is how you get money in the global economy. This is how you get research. You bring them in here to joint venture. Let's bring in some other major U.S. Internet giant and work with the University of Hawaii. And we create desk markets. And it brings more Chinese tourists. They'll use their WeChat pay. And once you set that up in the system here, I mean, it takes a user about two or three minutes to download it. And once you download it, you put in your information and your bank. And I send a scan picture of my passport. So they have it all there, OK? It doesn't take much. But we need to go actively out there, learn from the Chinese, work with them. Because that platform also means that the Chinese are spending abroad. They're going to come and buy things in the U.S. because consumers. Sure. It's part of the universal system. It's a global system more than anything. And so what I'm saying to you is that this is an opportunity for you to change the economy, from a labor economy to a knowledge economy. Yeah, yeah. And bring the kids back. It sounds like such a simple thing, but the implications are enormous. It means that my lady retired can go and make a business all by herself with no capital investment. It means that I can open up my watermelon juice stand. It means that I and you can participate as customers. It means that there's more commerce, more flow of commerce. It's easier to do business, easier to make revenue. And really, we wouldn't have to do much at all. All we would have to do is have a Chinese partner, I don't think that's really essential, but learn from them, get that software, and then put it into play and sell it to the public so that they're willing to make the download and the businesses are willing to do it, not much, in order to take the money from the people with the download. And if we did this locally here in Hawaii, we would create a community of this kind of QR facilitating software. And all of a sudden, the world would see that it could be exported out of China, used elsewhere, and it is global. And we could prove that here, right here. And I'll give you a very easy way to do it, to test it. There's a Hawaii Retail Merchant Association. They work with the Hawaii Tourism Authority. And so, with all the shops in Waikiki and all the tourist industry, ABC Drugs, they're all of them. They work with Alipay and WeChat Pay. So, the Chinese tourists come here and they send it out back to the banks here. And there's got to be a way to figure that out. And you can test market that. And I'll bet you that sales will triple. Oh, that you're right, because it's so easy. You don't even have to take your wallet out. And it will increase Chinese visitors coming here because they'll say, you have a platform. It's not a Chicago. It's not New York. New York. New York. New York. New York. New York. New York. New York. New York. And again, these are all blessings. And it puts Hawaii on the global map. Brilliant. Brilliant, Russell. So, let's do it. Right after this show, let's make a deal. Let's make a deal. Let's get that watermelon juice outside. Yeah. Think Tech Asia. Make a watermelon juice with QR codes. Thank you so much, Russell. Thank you, Jay. Russell Moon. Think Tech Asia.


Let me try and move this up. I have a pretty loud voice, so I don't want to scream too much. Is it working now? You hear me? Well, thank you, Jody, for that lovely introduction. Iconic paper. Wow. All right, so as Jody mentioned, I'm Tracy Camp from Colorado School of Minds. I am really excited to be here, excited and honored to be invited to speak with you today. I'm extremely impressed by this international gender gap project that you all are working on, and thank you so much for the opportunity to be a part of it. As mentioned, I'm a computer scientist at School of Minds. We refer to my department lovingly as CSAP Minds. So the survey results that we have been listening to this week have frankly been a bit depressing, right? Many things we have to work on in our various communities. So today, I'm going to talk about something that's a little bit better news, some good news that is happening in the computing community within the United States. The point of my talk is to share a success story within my department, talk about what's happening nationally for computer science within the United States because there's many success stories, and also try to put some emphasis on things that may be a value for the gender gap project. So those are the three goals I'm hoping to cover over the next hour. So first, let me share some good news. We're going to look at some data within CSAP Minds over time for the percent of women who are in our undergraduate computer science degree program. And here shows that over a 10-year period, we actually doubled the percent of women in our program, which is pretty impressive. I think it's wonderful news. Anybody want to do a happy dance with me? Very, very excited about the percent of women we have in CSAP Minds. And it has changed the face of our department from what we had 10 years ago. So two things I want to point out about this particular data. First of all, when you consider the environment within Minds, I think the percent increase is especially impressive. Most universities within the United States has about 57% women in their population. At Minds, we only have about 29% women because we're a science engineering institution. So the fact that we are up to over 21% within CS when our population is only 29% is especially impressive. You'll also notice that most of the upward trajectory has happened over the last four years. So what happened about four years ago for CSAP Minds? Well, our department actually was created four years ago. Prior to 2015, we were in an EE computer science and electrical engineering computer science degree program. And within that degree program, we had a department head who was an electrical engineering faculty member who did not think there was a problem with gender in our department. We had no women. That's not a problem. What? Of course, that's a problem. But the priorities were not there because of the leadership within the department. So when CS was able to split away from that environment and create our own department, the faculty within CS put a lot of diversity priorities in our new department. The new department also gave us a lot of visibility on campus, which helped us see, then, a tremendous growth in our student numbers within our program. And I know that we were able to leverage this growth in student interest with our diversity priorities in order to see the impact that we have seen over the last four years. So this slide shows the number of majors in the computer science program at Minds over time. And you can see we've really been growing rapidly just over the last couple of years. In fact, we have tripled in size in five years, tripled in five years, with most of the growth happening over the last four years. It explains why I'm really tired all the time is we have a lot more students. And as you can imagine, our faculty numbers did not triple in five years. We barely grew at all at the faculty level. So yes, so very, very busy in CS at Minds. I think that with the increase in majors, our percent of increase in women is also quite impressive because the raw numbers are quite high. That is, we went from fall 2008, we had 17 women in the CS program. And then in fall 2018, 10 years later, we had 120 women in our CS program and actually this fall, we have 145 women in computer science at Minds. We actually received recently some national recognition for the work that we have done in recruiting and retaining women within computer science at Minds. This recognition was an award from the National Center of Women in IT. I'll talk a little bit about NCWIT in a few moments because I think there might be some things that NCWIT is doing that would help the gender gap project. The best thing about the award is it came with $100,000, which is allowing us to even do more good work on our campus for women in computing. We are not the only department in the United States in computer science that is changing the face of their computing program. These other institutions that I list up here also have success stories in what their percent of women look like today versus what the percent looked like about 10 years ago. Unfortunately though, not all computer science programs at all universities in the United States have diversity priorities. And so we're seeing some universities and some departments that are making great strides and we're seeing other universities and other departments that are just maintaining their low percent of women in their department. In computer science, thanks to a lot of research that has been done over the last 15 years, we know now a lot of things that departments should do in the United States in order to change the face of computing and make sure that their door is open to everyone. But again, unfortunately some departments are not doing these things. The good news is in the United States there is a computing funding agency. Many of you might have heard of the National Science Foundation. NSF, our National Science Foundation, which funds a lot of grants to universities to do research. They are encouraging the computing community to do the right thing by holding the carrot. If you want funds from the National Center, National Science Foundation, you need to have activities that are going to improve your environment for computer science at your institution. So basically the directorate, our umbrella for computing research, which is referred to as SISE, which stands for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. Everybody just calls it SISE. At the NSF, the core programs within this huge directorate, which gives out millions of dollars of funding every year, the core programs, if you're going to get funding from one of those core programs, you need to propose diversity activities within your department that will have a positive impact. Because again, we know what needs to be done based on decades of research. And so everybody needs to get on board and start doing these things in order to have the needle move. So that is great news that NSF SISE is holding this carrot to encourage those universities that are not already on board. Many of us are already on board because we want our demographics to be more gender-equal than what they are today. So NSF is also encouraging departments, computer science departments, to create a broadening participation plan, referred to as a BPC plan, which talks about from the department level, these are the priorities that we are working on to change the demographics of our department. And then individual faculty members can plug into that pink plan and say, yeah, my department is doing X. So I am going to help with X by doing these steps. And so that makes it a little bit easier for the faculty members to plug into something that the department is doing overall. So there will be a first workshop to help departments create these BPC plans at the University of Illinois shortly after I get back from this trip. So that's pretty cool. I also want to note that the growth in computer science within the United States, it's not only just happening at my institution, this growth is happening nationally within US. Here are statistics from the universities that have PhD programs in computer science in the United States. And you can see the average number of CS majors per department is increasing pretty rapidly. And we are way above where we were at the height of the dot com boom back at the turn of the century. So lots of universities are feeling this growth, but many of them, again, are using the growth to their advantage to change the demographics of their program. So you might be wondering then, what did we do at CSM Mines in order to double the percent of women in our program? Well, before I get into that, I first want to talk about the landscape in gender efforts that exist within computer science within the United States or within North America, really, because in my opinion, the gender gap project can learn quite a bit from some of the things that we've been working on in North America for the last two to three decades. So first of all, all of you hopefully know about ACM already. ACM is our international organization for computer scientists, and ACMW support celebrates and advocates internationally for the full engagement of women in all aspects of the computing field. Jodi Thymes, who just introduced me, thanks again, Jodi, is the current chair of ACMW, and she's doing a fabulous job of helping computer science globally in diversity efforts. So within the gender gap preliminary report, I noticed that you had a identify a person or create a group specifically in charge of gender quality inside the organization, in charge of looking at the gender balance, and this is exactly what ACM did decades ago through the ACMW organization. They changed what exactly they did exactly they are, it's an organization now. All right, so that's ACM and ACMW, and at CSM Minds, we have leveraged much of ACMW's work over the years specifically for retention, so I'll talk about retention in a few moments. Before I get to that though, I wanna mention two other organizations within the United States or within North America that may be of value for the gender gap project to look at. The first is the National Center for Women in Information Technology. NCWIT uses a three prong strategy to improve awareness and knowledge and motivate change leaders to act. The most important prong, in my opinion, within NCWIT, this three prong approach, or one of the very important prongs, is the prong for equipped. Through lots of research over 15 plus years, NCWIT has created many online, freely available, research-based practices for reform at every level in computer science to help individuals implement change, raise awareness, and reach out to critical populations. I would strongly encourage the gender gap participants, this project, to check out the research-based best practices that exist on the NCWIT site because as the gender gap group knows, evaluation of initiatives is needed. Only 15% of initiatives in the database had been evaluated for effectiveness or impact in terms of outcomes and benefits to participants. Evaluation is essential. If you don't know whether some activity is going to work, you shouldn't implement it, right? It takes a lot of time to implement something, so understanding the impact of some implementation is vital, and so I encourage you again to check out NCWIT's source, you can do that at this site, and within CSF Minds, the work that we have done over the last 10 years, especially the last five years, is all based on these research-based best practices that we understand now through this organization. Many universities in the United States are changing their face of computing because of what we now understand of what needs to be done through this organization, so I strongly encourage you to check that out. So a little, I'm gonna take a little bit of a tangent, and I hate to be a bit of a downer on your gender gap good practices database, but let me give you a little history lesson in computer science that might be of value. We actually created a database of good practices about 10 years ago. This database was funded by the National Science Foundation. We created the database, we got the funding, we built the database, we put it online, we advertised it through the community, and now 10 years later, the link doesn't even work anymore because there was no funding to maintain the database. That's the key point here. Lots of funding organizations in the United States, they're all about building things. They were happy to give us the funding to build the database. They didn't give us funding to maintain the database, and so for the gender gap database project, I just strongly encourage you to figure out how you're going to maintain the database, otherwise why spend the time to build it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what you need. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly what you need is some organization that oversees this database and has funding for people to maintain it over time. So building it is one thing, maintaining it is vital. So within computer science, we actually just got funding recently, again from the National Science Foundation, to again build a new database of things for the community. We're now referring to this as BPCNET for Broadening Participation in Computing, and fortunately, this is being done under the Computing Research Association umbrella, so I'm hopeful that CRA will keep maintaining this database so once it's developed. So CRA, the Computing Research Association in North America is the last organization I wanted to introduce to you. So CRA, just like ACM, has a arm of its organization that is focused on widening participation. We used to be called CRAW for women. We recently, just this year, changed our name to CRAWP for widening participation to be more inclusive of other minority groups within computer science, such as African Americans, Hispanics, those who are disabled, et cetera. CRAWP's mission is to increase the success and participation of women and underrepresented people in computing research. We provide individual and group mentoring to undergraduates, graduate students and professionals in both industry and academia, and we're impacting quite a few people every single year through the various CRAWP programs. So I noticed, you know, CRAWP's main work actually is similar to this particular bullet that is in the gender gap report, so I totally agree that that is a valuable thing to have. Another project within CRAWP that I wanted to point out is a project to increase the perception and visibility of women's research work in science. We have a project within CRAWP that matches up with this bullet within your preliminary report. We refer to this project as RECOG, for, which isn't actually a great name, RECOG, for recognizing notable women and members of underrepresented groups in computing. And we're soon going to have, I don't want to quite put up the URL because it's not quite ready to take a look at, but we will soon have an online database of women in various computing research fields that's gonna look something like this. This is going to be, or this is available, actually. This is a women in computing database for women in the architecture research field, and you can search by research interests, you can search by profile type and see various women who are working in the WIC Arc area. So one of the reasons for this particular project to get going is not just to increase the visibility of women and people from underrepresented groups, but also many of us in computer science research are tired of hearing, well, we don't have women available to invite to do some awesome role, so we hear that a lot. And so this will make the women in the various computing research areas a bit more visible to their community. Other RECOG activities include a Wikipedia project, so I noticed the gender gap tomorrow morning actually will be a session on Wikipedia for the gender gap project, and I would encourage, you know, consider or suggest that the people involved in that project check out this page for writing Wikipedia pages for women in computing. This page actually has a specific page devoted to how you go about creating a Wikipedia page, because it's actually not very intuitive on how you create it, so just having this as a resource could help assist you in your efforts. In addition to this Wikipedia, trying to get more women in computer science pages in Wikipedia, and it was because of this project that I actually now have a Wikipedia page. My kids, I'll tell you, were so excited when I got my own Wikipedia page in my favor. I was like, oh my gosh, mom's famous. But it's all because of this project that I had that Wikipedia page created. But in addition to the Wikipedia page, we also have created these computing cards where members of computer science can purchase a deck of cards where each card has a different woman in computing research highlighted, or you can download free of charge a poster of all the cards and put it up on your wall. So all of these types of activities fall within the recognition project, and I know that that is something that the Gender Gap Preliminary Report talks about as well. So you can learn more about CRAWP at that particular URL. So the best thing, in my opinion, the last thing I wanna note about these three organizations, which I'm extremely grateful for, is all three of them work together really, really well and collaboratively. We all have the end goal in mind, which is to reach gender parity in computer science, but each of these organization focuses on different aspects of the problem, and then sometimes we come together and focus on something together. And I think that that's extremely valuable for all of our individual missions. Okay, so back to the success story in CS at Mines. So what has CS at Mines done over the last several years? Well, we've actually done quite a bit, and I wish I could say what we did had the biggest impact, but the only way to know that is if we would implement one thing evaluated, implement something else evaluated, implement something else evaluated, and that would take a lot of, so we didn't do that, frankly. We just started implementing lots of things, and then we started seeing some real positive changes in our demographics. My gut says that all the things we did helped in different ways, and then combined created the changes that we have seen. So I'm gonna go through the activities and programs that we set up really, really quickly. These are just examples of things that other institutions could do if interested. If anybody would like to chat more about any given particular program, I would be happy to do that offline. So we knew we had a recruitment problem by looking at the data. We were not getting enough women applying to computer science at Mines, and not enough women studying CS at Mines, and so we implemented several programs for recruitment. One of my most favorite ones I like to talk about is DECTECH, which stands for Discover, Explore, Create Technology. This is a K to 12 outreach program where we have approximately, we have between 250 to 300 girls come to Mines every semester four times. It's a STEM outreach program where they come four times, and one of the times that they come, the focus is on computer science. The other three we rotate, they learn about biomedical engineering, they learn about electrical engineering, they learn about physics, for example. And the nice thing about the program is it's implemented by a bunch of female students at Mines, many of whom are in computer science because the program was launched from computer science. So this program comes right out of your preliminary report on strategies to implement include, and you can read those details, I'm sure you have several times, to introduce various science programs to girls, and then also mention summer camps. DECTECH also has summer camps that we offer, and in the summer camps we invite boys to come. So I've been amazed at how this program, this DECTECH program really took off. I actually implemented it for my daughter, many years ago when she was much younger. That was the whole point of the program. She's much more lovely young lady now. It's just amazing how quickly time goes. I'm sure all of you feel the same way. Anyways, I've just been amazed at how the program implemented it just to help my daughter and her friends grew into this big program with hundreds of girls being involved every single year. I had no idea the impact that it would have when I started the program several years ago, and we've won many awards through this program, various awards, but one I just wanted to point out is yesterday one of the projects that was mentioned in the talk yesterday under good practices from the million women mentors, DECTECH won the stand up for STEM award, I think like two or three years ago, so that's pretty cool. Something I noticed in the preliminary report is it says what is the ideal ratio of boys to girls in programs designed to motivate girls in science? I wanted to touch on this for a moment because this is something we looked at in regards to DECTECH. During the academic year, DECTECH is a girls only program, but during the summer we allow boys to come join the various activities we do during the summer when we have summer camps. So in the research and the reading I did about what that needs to look like if you're going to invite boys in, I saw some research that talked about how you just needed a simple majority of girls in order to make it a good environment for what you're trying to do. I saw other research that said you need about two thirds of the participants to be girls. So what we did at DECTECH, we've done this for several years, it was we have an all girls camp one week during the summer, we have an all boys camp one week during the summer, and then we have a mixed camp a third week during the summer in case one of those other weeks don't work out. But what we've found is this mixed camp is not going as well as I would like it to go. I think part of the issue is we have space to let's say have 25 kids. I have like 50 boys that one in and only like five girls that one in because most of the girls sign up for the all girls camp. And so if I'm going to keep this, you know what is suggested in the literature, I can only let five boys in for example, but I have space for a lot more than that. And so we end up in letting more boys in and frankly, it's just like what the research says, the boys kind of overtake the environment and the girls just kind of watch and it is not what we're looking to do. So we just decided this summer, this past summer, we're not doing mixed camps anymore. We're going to have girls camps, we're going to have boys camps and that's what we're going to be doing moving forward. So another thing we implemented when the CSM minds program department was launched is we created a program called on tour CSM minds on tour in this program we go into schools. Dectec is an after school program and so it only works out for the girls that are able to come to mind after school several times during the semester and we wanna make sure we're reaching, you know, all the kids in our local community. So in this program, we send diverse CS students into various schools. Sometimes we go into elementary schools, classrooms, sometimes middle schools, sometimes high schools and we talk about computer science and we implement fun engaging hands-on activities when we do it. Many of these activities address very subtly the biases that we know exist in computing and so we're kind of subtly, you know, putting this out to the kids in our local area. So I think that that has been good and the activities and, you know, kind of the fun things that we do in this program are based on advice, again, from the National Center for Women in IT. We also revamped our 101 class. A lot of students at Mines take 101 which is a breadth computer science class. It's not a programming class. Many universities start with programming and they don't start with the societal impacts that computer scientists have on our world and research shows that women, more likely than men, are really drawn to computer science because of the impacts they can have on society and so we created a 101 class that is specifically a breadth computer science class that talks about the societal impacts of computer science and then we added a peer mentoring program where our peer mentors, there's half women, half men, all computer science majors. I have African Americans, I have Hispanics, you know, a very diverse group of mentors and we train them in inclusive practices before we put them to work in the program and so I think that that has helped encourage other diverse populations to consider computer science degree program at Mines. Then lastly, we do some professional development of teachers in our local area and this allows us to get connections with high schools so that we can help train the teachers in inclusive practices in computer science as well as we can recruit from them. So those were all recruitment type activities that we started. We also knew from our data that we had retention issues and so we've implemented a few things to help with our retention problems, one of which is making sure our ACMW student chapter is strong and thriving and active and successful so we do that. Another is we have implemented a celebration of women in computing where several women at several universities come together, several university computer science women come together every other year to support and encourage each of each other. We started it as the Colorado celebration but our other local states were interested in joining so we changed the name to Rocky Mountain Celebration so this was the last one last fall and I make sure to take all, as many see us at Mines women that I can get to go to this event. I make it a priority. So that picture shows our t-shirts and our branding and the community coming together and then that's a bit more fun of a picture. The other thing I've learned through the years is that our recruitment programs actually have helped with our retention programs and I didn't realize this was gonna happen but looking 2020, I mean hindsight is always 2020, it totally makes sense. It's groups of women and diverse students that are helping implement these programs so of course they're going to bond and support each other and help each other through the program so that's been an added benefit of those recruiting programs. Then lastly, a welcoming culture. We know that a welcoming culture is key to make sure that the female students know the door is open and encouraged to walk in through our door and so we have spent some money to create nice welcoming spaces like our hello world wall when you first walk into the computer science area. We do a lot of things to make sure we have a nice strong community within see us at Mines. In fact, other students in other programs are often envious of what we do within see us at Mines. So for example, we have a Funch or Fike program where see us at Mines students can ask a faculty member to go out to lunch or go on a hike, a Funch or Fike and spend time with a faculty member outside of the classroom. And this program does not cost that much and our students, many of our students really enjoy it. We do a two truce, that's a binary two, two truce and a lie of all our faculty where our students have to guess each faculty member's lie that we post on the door each year so the students start to get to know us. We celebrate our successes. This is Quacker the Hacker, our success duck that gets passed around based on who has a recent success and we have a every semester computing innovation fair where we highlight the projects that students are working on within our classes. So I showed you a picture of my daughter. Here's a picture of Max, my son. And there if you like CS history, make sure to go to Bletchley Park sometime. It's a great outing. All right, so we've done a lot in CS at Mines which has helped led us to the success we've seen and a lot of that might be a little overwhelming. So I wanted to kind of bring it all down to what I think departments should do and I would encourage the gender gap project to consider putting something like these steps in the preliminary, the recommendations. In my opinion, it is vital to set goals. What are you trying to accomplish? If you don't have goals, if you're just implementing things randomly without specific goals in mind, then you're not gonna be heading to where you wanna go. So first set goals. Then second, you have to understand your environment and your local data to be able to implement the right things. Implement activities strategically based on the data in the environment that you understand. If you're implementing something that does great in solving problem X and you don't have problem X, then don't waste your time implementing that. Figure out where your problems are. So for example, do you have cultural issues within your faculty? If so, implement some implicit bias training and other things to try and change the culture of your department. How many women apply to your program? How many women are accepted? How does that compare to the men? How many then commit to your program from the accepted base and how does that compare to the men? Where are the issues within your program? Each of our programs are different. Many of us have similar issues, but some of us have different issues than others. So figuring out where your issues are and then implementing strategically is in my opinion, vital. And then a constant feedback loop is needed. It is an ongoing problem until we reach close to 50-50. We're just gonna have to keep working on this. So real quickly, goals within computer science. So we set these goals. When we set this 20%, we set it back when we had about 11.9% women. I thought this goal was like a huge stretch goal. We've already surpassed it. I'm now thinking this is a huge stretch goal because this is what our current population is. We would be at parity if we reached 30% by 2030. But maybe it's not such a stretch goal. We'll see what happens over time. We also set a goal to implement 90% of NCWID's best practices. Maybe best practices is a bit overboard, calling them that. They call it activities. So NCWID has this activity reference sheet with 81 different activities, departments, computer science departments may wanna implement. We set a goal to implement 90% of them and we currently have 74 of those implemented. And I know that that has made a positive impact for our particular program and other programs that are seeing improvements in their demographics in computer science. So I encourage the gender gap to check out that document. Again, understanding your environment and data is crucial. We have many surveys that were created for computer science community that could easily be adapted for other disciplines such as the student experience of the major. What do your students think about your program? How do those students compare with students from other universities? Where are the issues within your particular program? The Data Buddies Project helps us see how our students compare to other students from other universities so we can see what we're doing well in certain parts of our department and what we need to improve on. There's also various things where you can analyze surveys where you can analyze what the faculty think about work-life balance and what cultural issues you might have within your department. And there's some inclusive instruction. Are your faculty using inclusive instruction practices within their department? If not, then that's something you can work on. So again, understanding your environment is vital because we all have different environments and then understanding the data is also vital. The data in the literature, the data in your university, the data within your department. To give you two examples, we had a major attrition problem for computer science at Mines. This was a freshman to sophomore attrition problem. And so when we learned that, we implemented specific programs for freshmen to sophomore retention to turn this particular data around and now male and female attrition is about the same. A second example is we learned that 21% of the female applicants to Mines were accepted but we were only getting 16% that enrolled. So again, we implemented a specific activity just for this data point. And that activity is we have current CSM Mines women do video calls with accepted women to talk about our program and encourage them to come to Mines. It was a very simple activity that we implemented and now today we actually have a, the acceptance rate is still about the same but the committed rate is closer to 25%. So we were able to turn that data point into something positive by a specific strategic implementation on that data. So again, understanding your data and implementing activities strategically is what is needed. And then a constant feedback loop is just, just yeah, it's just required until we get to gender equality. So a final few thoughts, computing has made progress but we still have a long way to go. This progress requires commitment from the department, commitment from the administration, commitment from the broader community and organizations involved in computer science. And fortunately within CSM Mines, I have all of those things and then requires us to just have constant focus, tracking the data, seeing where our issues are, implementing strategically and moving the ball forward. So I always put pictures of my kids in my talk. I actually have a reason for doing so that you can talk to me offline about that if you would like to. But one time I got asked, do you have a husband? I do, his name's Glenn. So thank you for your time.


Hello and welcome to the STM32 QBiD Edge Event Debug Features. I'm Bruno and I'll be your host for this video series. This is our agenda. So we are going to start covering the awesome features that we have for the editor on the QBiD. Then we are going to move and cover a little bit about how the debug interfaces are offered throughout all the Cortex-M series.  What are the requirements that we need in terms of hardware. And then of course the actual debug session using the Serial Wire Viewer. Alright, so let's get started with the STM32 QBiD Awesome Editing Features. When you open the project for the first time, these are the options available. Start a new project. Import from several different sources, including the .ioc file, which is the extension file from the STM32 Cubamax, or import from an example available in our repository folder, or import from another tool chain, such as the True Studio or the System Workbench for STM32. And as you can expect, you have full editor capacitor over the .ioc file. Here you can see the navigation part of the editor. I find myself using these features pretty often, so I want to point it out to you. The one that I use the most is the symbol hyperlink that leads you to the definition of the code by pressing CTRL-AFT-CLICK. So you can easily see what is the code definition, or even the entire function source code, all with a single shortcut. The brace navigation will allow you to easily check where the statements start and ends, and it's really useful when you are not using the tabby indentation in your code. The other one is the include browser. So this one will allow you to see which header files are called from the first include that you added. And finally we have the hierarchy call. This one will actually allow you to see which functions are called from the original one. As writing editing capabilities, we have a lot of features that will give clear view on the code and easy to type in. Starting with the highlight inactive code. As you can see, the code that is not part of the current project settings will have the great highlight, thus making it simple to see what are the parts being compiled and used. The file diff and compare features is kind of self-explanatory, as it will allow the developer to check the difference between files. The autocomplete is actually one of the most useful writing capabilities, as it will lease all the possible entries while pressing CTRL-PLUS-SPACE, and this will avoid typos with a brand lowercase and save a lot of time. The syntax highlight will give a clear view of the elements of a structure. This, along with the autocomplete, is a powerful way to quickly fuel all the parameters of your code. And finally, the debug part of the tool. When selecting the debugger-hardware interface, the Q by D actually supports two different tools, a ceiling, which can be used either with the GDB server or with the OpenLCD, and the J-Link. Both will have the option to either use SWD or the JTAG as the programming and debug interface. But not only that, the Q by D will also support the dual-core debugging, such as some micros from the STM3287 series, and also different programs. So, for example, you can play with a TX board and an RX board, both being debugged at the same time, so you can ensure that the communication between both boards are working. Another really useful feature is the external memory loader, as it offers a very comprehensive list of external memories with the drivers you programmed them already done, and of course, you can customize it for your own hardware, so you can create your own board support package for that. This makes it really simple to debug projects that are using external flash memories. And finally, we have our trace support, which will be the core for our hands-on video sessions. The trace is done using the serial-wire viewer, associated with the serial-wire output, an extra pin that can be added in the SWD interface. Once that is enabled, the trace will grant the user many features that will be covered shortly. So, let's check what are the debug interfaces available for each Cortex-M core. Here we can see all the STM32 possible debug interfaces. So, for our Cortex-M and M0-plus products, we only allow the SWD interface, even though that by default with the ARM, these particular core sets can actually have the G-TAG. On our product line, only the serial-wire debug interface is available. For all others, including the Cortex-M3, M4, M33, and M7, they all have both interfaces available, so that means that they have the G-TAG and also the serial-wire debug, the SWD interface. The SWD is a debug port very similar to the G-TAG and provides the same debug capabilities, like run, stop, non-breakpoint, single-step, but it actually uses fewer pins. And it replaces the G-TAG connector with just the two pin interfaces, one for clock and one for bi-directional data. So, when it comes to the trace capability of the cores, the Cortex-M0 and M0-plus will not have the serial-wire output for us, but the Cortex-M3 are higher. They all will have, which actually enables us to use the serial-wire viewer. The SWD port itself does not provide the real-time tracing, but by adding the serial-wire output SWO pin that can be used in combination with the SWD and used by the processor to emit real-time trace data, thus extending the two SWD pins with a third one. So, after mentioning a few times, what is the serial-wire viewer? So, as we saw, the serial-wire viewer will actually be a combination of the SWD port associated with the SWO pin, thus giving us real-time trace. And, of course, this is what I'm calling the advanced debugging because without howling the MCU, we are going to be able to make plots of any given internal trace that we are monitoring. We are going to be able to trace all the global variables and plot graphics. We can log everything on our serial-wire viewer console using the ITM. And, of course, we can monitor all the exceptions, such as interval services, routines that are happening in our code, all that without howling the MCU with any breakpoints. And here we have the entire list of things that we can actually monitor with the icons that are available when we enter in the debug session of our QBid. So, we can use the data trace to do live-watch. We can use the data trace to plot in a timeline graph. We can use the SWO interface to do a printf redirection. So, instead of using a new art port, we can actually use to transmit information of the printf using through the SWO pin. We can do time measurement between events. So, all we have to do is trace using the ITM and that will be logged. And, of course, we can also plot that over time. And we can do the statistical proofing, allowing us to understand where the core is spending more time. During our hands-on session video, we are going to cover each and every one of these features. Now, what are the hardware requirements? Well, the great news is that pretty much every evaluation board that we have can be used as long as we are meeting the requirements on our checklist. So, first, you need to make sure that your Cortex-M is actually either one Cortex-M3 or M4, M33 or M7, because those are the Cortex that have the trace macro cell. So, we can use the COWIRE output pin. And we also need to make sure that we are using either the ST-Link that comes along with the nuclear boards and the discover boards, or we are using the J-Link. And then, what is left for us is to start coding. So, that was it for our introduction video. I'll see you guys in the next one for the coding part of it. And don't forget to like and subscribe the video in our channel. For more information, always visit ST.com. Thank you!


Live from New York, it's theCUBE covering Big Data NYC 2015. Brought to you by Hortonworks, IBM, EMC, and Pivotal. Now for your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Hello everyone, welcome back to Live in New York City for theCUBE, a special Big Data NYC. Our flagship program, go out to the events, things like that. Signal from the noise, we are here. Live as part of Strata, Hadoop, Big Data NYC. I'm John Furrier. My co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest is Jim Pinkley. The Chief Product Officer at WAN Disco. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. Thanks, great to be here. You've been COO of WAN Disco, Head of Marketing now Chief Product Officer a few years. You guys have always had the patent, patents David was on earlier. I asked him specifically, why doesn't the other guys just do what you do? And I wanted you to comment deeper on that because he had a great answer, he said patents. But you guys do something that's really hard that people can't do. So let's get into it because Fusion is a big announcement you guys made, big deal with EMC, a lot of traction with that. And it's one of these things that it's kind of talked about but not talked about. It's really a big deal. So what is the reason why you guys are so successful on the product side? Well I think first of all it starts with the technology that we have patented and it's this true active-active replication capability that we have. Other software products claim to have active-active replication. But when you drill down on what they're really doing typically what's happening is they'll have a set of servers that they replicate across and you can write a transaction at any server but then that server is responsible for propagating it to all of the other servers in the implementation. There's no mechanism for pre-agreing to that transaction before it's actually written. So there's no way to avoid conflicts up front. There's no way to effectively handle scenarios where some of the servers in the implementation go down while the replication is in process. And very frequently those solutions end up requiring administrators to do periodic re-synchronization, go back and manually find out what didn't take and deal with all the deltas. Whereas we offer guaranteed consistency and effectively what happens is with us you can write at any server as well but the difference is we go through a peer-to-peer agreement process and once a quorum of the servers in the implementation agree to the transaction they all accept it and we make sure everything is written in the same order on every server. And every server knows the last good transaction of process. So if it goes down at some point in time as soon as it comes back up it can grab all the transactions that missed during that time slice while it was offline, re-sync itself automatically without an administrator having to do anything. And you can use that feature not only for network and server outages that cause downtime but even for plan maintenance which is one of the biggest causes of Hadoop availability issues because obviously if you've got a global appointment when it's midnight on Sunday in the US it's the start of the business day on Monday in Europe and then it's the middle of the afternoon in Asia. So if you take Hadoop clusters down somebody somewhere in the world is going to be going without their applications and data. It's interesting, I want to get your comments on this because that's a great highlight into the next conversation we've been hearing all throughout theCUBE this week is analytics outcomes. These are the kind of things that if people talk about because that means this check's being written. Hadoop is moving into production. People have done the clusters. It used to be the conversation of hey X number of clusters you do this you do that replication here and there yarn all these different buzzwords really feeds in speeds. Now Hadoop is relevant but it's kind of invisible under the hood. Yet it's part of other things in the network. So high availability, non-destructive operations is what our table stakes now. So I want you to talk about that nuance because that's what we're seeing as the things that are powering. It's the engine of Hadoop deployments. What does, what is that? Take us through that nuance because that's one of the things that you guys have been doing a lot of work in that's making it reliable and stable. To actually go out and play with Hadoop deploy it make sure it's always on. Well we really come into play when companies are moving Hadoop out of the lab and into production. When they have defined application SLAs when they can only have so much downtime and it may be business requirements that may be regulatory compliance issues for example financial services. They pretty much always have to have their data available. They have to have a solid backup of the data. That's a hard requirement for them to put anything into production in their data centers. The other use case we've been hearing is okay I got Hadoop, I've been playing with it. Now I need to scale it up big time. I got to double triple my clusters. I got to put it in with my applications. Then the customer says okay wait do I need to do more system work? How do you address that particular piece? Because I think that's where I think fusion comes in from how I'm reading it but is that a fusion value proposition? Is it a WAN disco thing? And what does the customer, and is that happening? Yeah, so there's actually two angles to that and the first is how do we maintain that uptime? How do we make sure there's performance, availability to meet the SLAs, the production SLAs. The active-active replication that we have patents for that I described earlier and it's embodied in our deco and distributed coordination engine is at the core of fusion. And once a fusion server's installed with each of your Hadoop clusters that active-active replication capabilities is extended to them and we expose the HCFS API. So the client applications, you know, scoop, flume, impala, hive, anything that would normally run against a Hadoop cluster would talk through us. If it's been defined for replication we do the active-active replication of it if we pass straight through and process normally on the local cluster. So how does that address the issues you were talking about? What you're getting by default with our active-active replication is effectively continuous hot backup. That means if one cluster or an entire data center goes offline that data exists elsewhere, your users can fail over. They can continue accessing the data running their applications. Soon as that cluster comes back online it resinks automatically. Now what's the other? No user involvement. No user involvement in that. Now the only time, and this gets back into what I was talking about earlier, if I take servers offline for planned maintenance, upgrade the hardware, the operating system, whatever it may be, I can take advantage of that feature as I was alluding to earlier. I can take the servers of the entire cluster offline and Fusion knows the last good transactions that were processed on that cluster. As soon as the admin turns it back on it'll re-sync itself automatically. So that's how you avoid downtime even for planned maintenance if you have to take an entire location off. Now to your other question how do you scale this stuff up? Think about what we do. We eliminate idle standby hardware because everything is full read-write. You don't have standby read-only backup clusters and servers when we come into the picture. So let's say we walk into an existing implementation and they've got two clusters. One is the active cluster where everything's being written to, read from, actively being accessed by users. The other is just simply taking snapshots or periodic backups or they're using DCP or something else but they really can't get full utilization out of that. We come in with our active-active replication capability and they don't have to change anything but what suddenly happens is as soon as they define what they want replicated we'll replicate it for them initially to the other clusters. They don't have to re-sync it and the cluster that was formerly for disaster recovery for backup is now live and fully usable. So guess what? I've now been able to scale up to twice my original implementation by just leveraging that formerly read-only backup cluster. Is there a lot of configuration involved in that? Is it automatically? No, so basically what happens, again, you don't have to synchronize the clusters in advance. The way we replicate is based on this concept of folders and you can think of a folder as basically a collection of files and sub-directories that roll up into root directories effectively that reflect typically particular applications that people are using with Hadoop or groups of users that have data sets that they access for their various sets of applications and you define the replicated folder as basically a high-level directory that consists of everything in it and as soon as you do that, what we'll do automatically in a new implementation, let's keep it simple, let's say you just have two clusters, two locations, we'll replicate that folder in its entirety to the target you specify and then from that point on, we're just moving the deltas over the wire. So you don't have to do anything in advance and then suddenly that backup hardware is fully usable and you've doubled the size of your implementation, you've scaled up to 2x. So, I mean, what you were describing before really strikes me that the way you tell the complexity of a product and the value of a product in this space is what happens when something goes wrong? That's the question you always ask. How do you recover? Because recovery is the very hard thing and your patents, you got a lot of math inside there, but you also said something that's interesting which is you're an asset utilization play. You're being able to go in relatively simply and say, okay, you've got this asset that's underutilized, I'm now going to give you back some capacity that's on the floor and take advantage of that. Right, and you're able to scale up without spending anymore on hardware and infrastructure. So I'm interested in, so another company announced an EMC partnership this week and they sort of got into this way back in the mainframe days with SRDF. I always thought when I first heard about when Disco says, it's like SRDF or Hadoop, but it's active active. So then they bought that yada yada. And there's no distance limitations with our active active. So what's the nature of the relationship with EMC? Okay, so basically EMC like the other storage vendors that want to play in the Hadoop space, expose some form of an HDFS API. And in fact, if you look at Hortonworks or Clutter, if you go and look at Clutter, a manager, one of the things that asks you when you're installing it is, are you going to run this on regular HDFS storage?  And what we're able to do is replicate across Hadoop clusters running on Isilon, running on EMC ECS, running on standard HDFS. And what that allows these companies to do is without modifying those storage systems without migrating that data off of them, incorporate it into an enterprise-wide data lake, if that's what they want to do. And selectively replicate across all those different storage systems. It could be a mix of different Hadoop distributions. You could have replication between CDH, HDP, Pivotal, MapR. All of those things, including EMC storage that I just mentioned that was mentioned, the press release, Isilon and ECS effectively has Hadoop-compatible API support. And we can create, in effect, a single virtual cluster out of all of those different platforms. So is it a go-to-market relationship? Is it an OEM deal? Yeah, I mean, it was really born out of the fact that we have some mutual customers that want to do exactly what I just described. They have standard Hortonworks or Cloudera deployments in-house, they've got data running on Isilon, and they want to deploy a data lake that includes what they've got stored on Isilon with what they've got in HDFS and Hadoop. And replicate across that. Like onerous EMC certification process. We went through that process, we actually set up environments in our labs where we had EMC, Isilon and ECS running and did demonstration integrations, replication across Isilon to HDP to Hortonworks, Isilon to Cloudera, ECS to Isilon to HDP and Cloudera and so forth. So we did prove it out. They saw that. In fact, they lent us boxes to actually do this in our labs. So they were very motivated and they're seeing us in some of their bigger accounts. Talk about the aspect of two things, non-destructive operations, meaning I got to want to deploy stuff because now that Hadoop has kind of got a hard and top with some distraction layer, then analytics to focus. There's a lot of work going on under the hood, as you said, and a large scale enterprise might have a zillion versions of Hadoop. They might have little Hortonworks here. They might have something over here. So there might be some diversity in the distributions. That's one thing. And the other one is operational disruption. What do you guys do there? Is it zero disruption? And how do you deal with multiple versions of the distro? Okay, so basically what we're doing, the simplest way to describe it is we're providing a common API across all of these different distributions, running on different storage platforms and so forth so that the client applications are always interacting with us. They're not worrying about the nuances of the particular Hadoop APIs that these different things expose. So we're providing a layer of abstraction effectively. So we're transparent in effect in that sense, operationally, once we're installed. The other thing is, and I mentioned this earlier, we come in, basically you don't have to precinct clusters. You don't have to make sure they're all the same versions or the same distros or any of that. Just install us, select the data that you want to replicate. We'll replicate it over initially to the target clusters and then from that point on, you just go. It just works. And we talked about the core patent for Active Active Replication. We've got other patents that have been approved, three patents now and seven applications pending that allow this Active Active Replication to take place while servers are being added and removed from implementations without disrupting user access or running applications and so forth. Final question for you, sum up the show this week. What's the vibe here? What's the aroma? Is it really Hadoop next? What is the overall big data NYC story here at Strata Hadoop? What's the main theme that you're seeing coming out of the show? I think the main theme that we're starting to see, it's twofold. I think one is we are seeing more and more companies moving this into production. There's a lot of interest in Spark and the whole fast data concept. And I don't think that Spark is necessarily orthogonal to Hadoop at all. I think the two have to coexist. I mean, if you think about Spark streaming and the whole fast data concept, basically Hadoop provides the historical data at rest. It provides the historical context. The streaming data provides the point in time information. What Spark together with Hadoop allows you to do is that real-time analysis, do the real-time informed decision-making, but do it within a historical context instead of a single point in time vacuum. So I think what's happening, and you notice the vendors themselves, aren't saying, oh, it's all Spark, forget Hadoop, or anything like that. They're really talking about cool stuff, too. All right, Jim from WAN Disco, Chief Product Officer, really in the trenches, talking about what's under the hood and making it all scale in the infrastructure so that analysts can hit the scene. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming and sharing your insight here on theCUBE. New York City, we are here, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage of big data NYC in conjunction with Stroud and we'll be right back with more live coverage in the moment here in New York City after this short break.