Hi everyone, it's really great to be here with you all today both in the room as well as online I know I'm the last thing before lunch, so I promise I won't go late But to get started a quick intro about me. I joined American Express in 2013 I started on our AmEx offers team, which is our card linked offers program I then moved to the digital payments team where I've been for a few years Currently leading our emerging payments team and I've worked on a range of Payment products from digital wallets commerce qr peer-to-peer and others So today really excited to be talking to you about how we think about innovation at American Express How we're set up to be able to do this effectively and then walk through an example of this in action So when you think about innovation the first thing that comes to mind might not be a big company You might be thinking start-up fintech But what we found is that innovation inside a big company is essential It's necessary to keep evolving adapting growing staying relevant to your customer base Innovation inside a big company is also easier because you have all of these additional resources that are available to you to tap into and And innovation inside a big company is everywhere. It's not just happening in a single pocket But it's happening throughout the entire organization And so for American Express innovation is a rich part of our history Founded in 1850. We started as a freight forwarding company very different than the type of work that we do today But from there we moved into the travelers checks business before moving into the credit card business Which we since expanded globally More recent examples of innovation you see from the team come in the form of the destination airport lounges like the Centurion Lounge Our recent co-brand card with Delta where the cards made out of pieces of a retired airplane Our expansion into banking as well as our AI powered chat servicing within both our mobile and our web channels and Many other examples including the one that we'll walk through today And so one of the ways that we're able to create some precision around this agenda of innovation Is through a group called AmEx digital labs? So labs was formed to focus on the short to medium term adjacent Opportunities to be able to deliver new products and services to both our existing customers as well as net new customers And so there's a couple things I want to highlight there. The first is the short to medium term So we're not looking too far into the future, but rather what do we think is going to be relevant today and in the next couple years? Adjacent opportunities, we're not looking too far afield, but what do we think is still going to resonate with our customer base? And when I say customer, I mean this really broadly we're an enterprise team So we're thinking about all of the customers that AmEx serves So those are our card members whether they're consumers small business owners corporate card members our merchant partners as well as our network partners And so one of the ways that we're able to do this effectively is the way that we're structured So we sit within an organization called enterprise innovation partners, which is made up of three teams So this includes labs as well as strategic partnerships Which manages the relationships with our largest partners at American Express and then corporate development which includes AmEx ventures AmEx ventures is our venture portfolio where we invest in startups and then corporate development manages any mergers in acquisition activity And so by sitting within the same group We're able to partner very closely together and keep a pulse on what's happening outside of American Express So what's going on in the startup community? What's the new emerging technology? What's top of mind for our partners and that allows us to be able to quickly identify new opportunities to pursue and move forward? The other thing I want to highlight here is we are truly an enterprise team So we're not sitting separate. We're embedded into the business Regularly engaging with people across the company to understand what are both the challenges and opportunities that we can prioritize and pursue And so taking this outside in perspective. We have six key areas of focus payments commerce membership blockchain and web 3 AI and next-gen servicing and then a little bit of a catch-all bucket at the end called R&D slash disruptive tech And so I'm not going to go through everything on the slide and this certainly isn't exhaustive But gives you a sense of some of the things we currently have live in market like our digital wallets as well as some of the areas That we're currently exploring like the future of work The other thing I want to highlight on this page is this concept of graduation So labs is a relatively small team less than a hundred people and there's benefit to staying nimble So once a product reaches a certain level of scale We look to graduate that product to another part of the business for that team to then carry it forward Which frees up the labs team to then kind of focus on what's next? Good example of this is the consumer checking product that we launched last year So this is something where the labs team helped to build out the checking functionality But then once the product launched we fully graduated it to the consumer banking Organization that had recently been stood up and that team has continued to carry that product forward iterate and scale it and So when we think about success we have four key metrics that we're looking at both yearly and over time So the first is around revenue growth So we have a specific target that we're aiming for And we're looking at both direct as well as indirect revenue that our products are contributing to the organization We have new products launched So we have a specific target that we're aiming for each year usually between 20 25 new products or pilots that we want to get live and Then customer engagement slash satisfaction So this is to make sure that we're building products that can reach a large number of customers We're not just designing for a niche sub-segment and that when our customers are using our products They're finding value and they're engaging with them on a regular basis And then lastly we have speed to market So we're always looking for ways to be able to cut down on the amount of time it takes to get something live And so the teams made up of three different types of roles So you have product management, which I'm part of this team is responsible for managing our current portfolio of products As well as all new product development Partnering very closely with engineering design marketing as well as other product teams across the organization Then we have product enablement this team is responsible for partnering closely with our stakeholders to identify any risks Make sure we have the right controls in place and then taking the products through any necessary approvals processes And then lastly we have business development So the business development team is responsible for identifying any new market or partner opportunities Managing those partner relationships any contracting and then helping to drive the go-to-market strategy And so each roles requires different set of skills We have a very united approach when it comes to sourcing the best talent So we're focused on bringing together a group of talented diverse individuals Who have a growth mindset? They put the customer at the center of everything they do They're adept with tech and ultimately they have this curiosity They want to know how things work and they get excited about building new products and bringing them to life And I think this is truly what makes labs and AmEx special is its people So when we think about innovation We take a very methodical approach Leveraging the formula you see on this page So it's not just this like aha light bulb moment where we're coming up with new ideas But rather a very intentional process that we're following and so start first by identifying the emerging trend or customer sentiment This allows us to understand the urgency in which we need to take action as well as how is it relevant to our customers? Second is defining the customer problem to solve and how we can uniquely solve it and Then tying this into the business strategy. So how does this help us meet core business objectives? And at that point you then have an elegant solution with a sound hypothesis that you can go out and test that your classic product management work But then you're able to leverage the scale that comes with a large organization So tapping into your internal infrastructure and existing partner network Identifying colleagues who believe in the mission stakeholders who are ready to go on the ride with you teams who can connect you to partners and Then you're able to leverage the customer reach and existing marketing engine that you already have to let your customers know about this new product That's available Knowing that you've already earned the permission to be able to trial and test new concepts with them because they trust in your core product And then lastly taking advantage of the gift of time that a large company affords So being able to get something into market gather feedback Iterate let the pilot breathe and at that point you're then leveraging all that a multinational Organization has to offer to be able to effectively innovate and deliver something really impactful So we'll go through an example of this the example I have is virtual card number, which is something we launched in partnership with Google earlier this year So virtual card numbers are not new they've been around for a while But what we're doing here is we're making them available within Google Chrome for the first time and So the emerging trend at the time is in 2021 e-commerce share of global retail Sales was over 20% and that number is only expected to grow So customers are increasingly shopping online and they're going to continue to do so and when they're shopping online They want it to be easy and they want it to be secure They don't necessarily want to be digging around looking for their card having to type in all their details And from an annex perspective we want our customers using their annex card when they're shopping We want to be able to capture that e-commerce spend and so when we were thinking about what we should do about this It made a ton of sense for us to partner with Google on their virtual card number initiative People shop across Google more than a billion times each day That's massive scale and so for us to be able to partner together with them Building upon our existing relationship that we have through Google pay We're able to bring virtual card numbers to our card numbers within Google Chrome And here we really took advantage of the gift of time when it came to rolling this out So we started small we made it available to 0.5 percent of customers and we just left it there And we wanted to see how is it performing? Was it working as expected did something come up that we didn't catch in testing? Was there any feedback and then we were able to address any of those issues before rolling out to more customers? And so then we gradually started to roll out over the course of several months before finally going to full availability in March of this year so the way this works is You are shopping within Google Chrome You recently completed a purchase at that point Chrome is going to ask do you want to save your card to your Google account? So this is the standard autofill experience if any of you have gone through this today And at this point your card is now saved to your Google account so that you can use it the next time you're checking out online But now you'll also have the option to be able to enroll in a virtual card number So at this point you now have your card saved to your Google account.  What will happen is the autofill drop-down will appear You'll be able to see both your physical card as well as your virtual card to select if you select the virtual card What happens is a real-time call is being made to AmEx to retrieve those card details And then the card details are being auto populated into those checkout fields So as a customer you don't need to enter anything so I'll play this quickly so you can see how it works So click in drop down select the virtual card and now your details are populated So from a customer perspective is really simple You don't have to enter anything and then the other advantage here is that what's being returned is not your actual card number Instead, it's a token. So a token is essentially an alias card number And comes with that added layer of security of not needing to share your actual card details with the merchant when you go to complete that transaction So we just launched in March So still early when it comes to being able to report out results But some of the initial things that we're seeing is that we have 50% faster checkout when compared to manually entering in your card details So this is really streamlining the experience for customers and hopefully ultimately driving additional purchases The most popular merchants by spend are in the travel industry So seeing a lot from hotel bookings as well as airlines And this is definitely a function of the time of year But we saw a lot in Q1 in the form of purchases for tax services And I think this is actually a really great use case for virtual card number You're not filing your taxes on a daily basis. Thank goodness But it's something that you need to do and so you're not necessarily going to have your card saved on file With the tax service provider you're using but it's an important transaction And so now you can reach for that virtual card number to be able to easily check out and feel secure when doing so And so still all your days a lot more that we need to do when it comes to Seeing how this is performing iterating evolving the product some of the things we're going to be looking at is how is this helping to drive Additional conversion so ideally additional purchases more spend How is this impacting fraud rates and we'll continue to track that and see how this scales over time And so in summary key drivers of our success when it comes to innovating within a large company The first is having leadership and stakeholders who believe in and invest in innovation So this is something we have with with labs the way that we're structured our CEO Steve squary used to lead our tech organization He gets it Great talent who believe in the mission. So like I said before this I think is truly what makes America Express special is its people Innovating just at the boundary to make progress without breaking trust. So again, those adjacent opportunities And we've established a track record of piloting with some successes that are now ready to scale across the enterprise And that's ultimately allowed us to leverage the power of enterprise back in And so that's all that I have today. Thank you very much really appreciate it


HTML block. An HTML block is a customisable block allowing you to add images, text, links or even embedded code or widgets to blocks at the side of your course. You don't need to understand HTML code to use it. And you can add more than one block, as you see here where we have, for instance, an image of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris which links to a website of Paris tourism and a weather widget using code from an external site. To add a block we turn on the editing and then from the add block link at the bottom of the nav drawer we choose the block we want, HTML block. Let's add an image and link to that image so when the block is added we need to configure the new HTML block by clicking the icon. We give it a title, I'm going to call it Bonjour, and then in the content we add the image we want. I already have a public domain image of the Arc de Triomphe on my desktop so I'm simply going to drag it in. Note the text editor I'm using is Moodle's Atto editor which allows you to drag and drop an image in. We could simply save it and display it now but we are going to link this image to a Paris tourism website. So if we select the image and then click the link icon we can then paste in the URL of the Paris tourism website which we will have already found and copied in another tab. When we save the changes we'll see the image there and it's linked to the website and that is how to add HTML blocks.


Oftentimes, it's worthwhile to ask what is the in-behavior of a function? That is, what is the behavior of the function when x grows arbitrarily large? That is, x is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Or in the other direction, what if x is growing arbitrarily small? That is going, going, going, going to the far left of the graph there. So really, in this lecture, we're interested in the idea of limits as x approaches positive or negative infinity. In our previous video, we had asked what happens, you know, what are the limit calculations when the y-coordinate gets close to positive or negative infinity? That gave us the idea of a vertical asymptote. In this video, we want to talk about limits, and we'll talk about this in many of the next few videos in this lecture series as well. What happens when you take the limit as x approaches positive and negative infinity? Well, oftentimes, as x goes to the infinite, y is going to go with it, right? As x approaches positive or negative infinity, y might also approach positive and negative infinity. That's a very common behavior for many functions. We'll talk about some of those in this very video. But there will be some times where this limit turns out to be a finite number, in which case, as x approaches positive or negative infinity, y approaches a number, not infinity or negative infinity. In that situation, we refer to that as a horizontal asymptote, and that's something we'll talk more about in the next video of this series. As we ask what happens as x goes to the far left or the far right of the graph, this is often described as the in behavior of the graph. How does the function behave as it gets to the very end on the far left or the far right? One example we can talk about would be a monomial function. Imagine n is some positive integer, so like 1, 2, 3, you got it. If we ask ourselves what's the limit as x approaches infinity of x to the n, well, the in behavior in that situation is going to be infinity. So if we were to draw this picture for a moment, imagine we wanted to draw y equals x to the n, just a typical monomial function, well, the right-hand side of the graph is going to look something like the following. It's just going to get bigger and bigger, bigger curving upward, and the amount of curvature will depend on the power to itself as the power of n itself. What you see in front of you kind of looks like half of a parabola, so that's why I said two, but as n gets bigger, it's going to get flatter right here and steeper right here, never actually becoming a vertical line, but it gets steeper and steeper, steeper. And so what we see for these monomial functions, y equals x to the n, is if we take the limit as x approaches infinity, then x to the n will become infinity as well. And this makes sense that if you take a big number and then you take a positive exponent of that big number, the number will get even bigger. Well, assuming that exponent is something larger than one, which for positive integers, of course, is the case. So taking powers of big numbers makes them even bigger, and thus as x gets closer and closer to infinity, x to the n will likewise get closer and closer to infinity as well. But when it comes to the left-hand side, that has to do with the parity of the power, that is whether it's an even power or an odd power. If you have an even power, the graph will be an even function. It'll be symmetric with respect to the x-axis. You're going to get a picture that looks something like this. It'll be a perfect mirror image right here, y equals x to an even power, in which case then, because the right-hand side does it, the left-hand side will do the same, you take the limit as x approaches negative infinity of x to the n, this will likewise be positive infinity. But on the other hand, if the power was an odd power, like we take x cubed or x to the fifth, this graph won't be an even function. It'll be an odd function. It'll be symmetric with respect to the origin. So you actually see the curvature going down here. So this would be y equals x to an odd power. Both sides will include the yellow piece right here, of course. And we see that as we take the limit of x to the n, as x approaches negative infinity, you end up with negative infinity right here. So like we talked about in the previous video about vertical asymptotes, when it comes to the in-behavior function, you can remember these statements about x approaching infinity and negative infinity with regard to the limits. But also, if you remember the graph, then the graph will tell you all the information. As you go to the right, the function goes up. That means as x approaches infinity, y approaches negative infinity. If you go to the left, the graph goes up in the even case. So as x approaches infinity, negative infinity, excuse me, y approaches infinity. Or as you go to the left and the graph goes down, this would say as x approaches negative infinity, y approaches negative infinity. That's all the limit statements are saying. We can remember this from the picture. So when it comes to monomials, the in-behavior is going to be simple like this. Now, of course, we can start modifying monomials. We can transform them, reflect them, stretch them, shift them around. We can add and subtract them with other monomial functions and make the family of so-called polynomial functions, the typical polynomial see right here. Now the good news about polynomial functions is that when you graph a polynomial function, and so let's do this real quick, if you were graphing a polynomial function, the in-behavior of a polynomial is going to look like the in-behavior of a monomial. What happens in the middle has a lot to do with those terms in play here. But the in-behavior of a polynomial function is just that of a monomial. And it's a specific monomial. The in-behavior of your polynomial function will just be the same as the in-behavior as its leading term. The leading term of a polynomial is going to be the power of x that's largest in the combination. That is, it's the largest power of x that doesn't have a zero coefficient. We'll denote this as a sub n times x to the n right here. n is the degree of the polynomial. a sub n, it's a number. It's called the leading coefficient. It turns out when you take the limit as x approaches infinity of a polynomial, this just becomes the limit as x approaches plus or minus infinity of a sub nx to the n. So the limit as x approaches positive or negative infinity for a polynomial will be the same as the limit of just the leading term as x approaches positive or negative infinity. I want you to interpret this as the in-behavior of a polynomial is determined by its leading term. And the idea in this situation, so let's take for example this example right here. Let's take the limit as x approaches infinity of x cubed minus 2x squared plus 1. Well, the largest power of x you see in that polynomial is x cubed. And so what we see from the previous statement is that the limit as x approaches infinity of x cubed, that's going to be the limit of this polynomial, right? We just determined it by the in-behavior. So we're approaching, as x approaches infinity, it turns out the parity of the power doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's even or odd. It just matters on the leading coefficient. If you have a positive coefficient, it's going to go off towards infinity. If you had a negative coefficient, it would go off towards negative infinity because you reflected across the x-axis. So this limit is going to turn out to be infinity. The polynomial x cubed minus 2x squared plus 1 is going to, its behavior on the right is it's pointing upward because we, because the leading term is. And why does the leading term matter so much? Well, the idea I want you to think of is the following, right? What, you know, what is a larger body of water, right? A bucket or a swimming pool, right? Well, clearly a swimming pool is much, much bigger, right? And if you were trying to like drain a swimming pool, just your typical swimming pool, say an Olympic-sized swimming pool, just so we have some type of clarity there. It's a pretty big swimming pool, right? As you take just like a standard five gallon bucket, maybe you get from like a home supply store, whatever. If you start, you know, taking that five gallon bucket and scooping the water out of the tank, right? Even though you're subtracting water from the tank, or from the swimming pool, it would take forever to drain that just by using your five gallon bucket possible. But the point is the magnitude of the bucket is essentially nothing compared to that Olympic-sized swimming pool. Well, now let's compare that to like say the ocean, right? The ocean is such a massive body of water that even if you were to take an Olympic-sized swimming pool, take a thousand swimming pools out of the ocean, you would see no difference whatsoever, right? People are very concerned about rising coastlines and such. Why is the solution not just, oh, have every citizen of California go take a bucket of water out of the ocean? Well, even that massive amount, like even if every citizen of California were to take a bucket of water, a bucket of seawater, that compared to the size of the ocean doesn't really make much of a difference. And so that's what we're trying to say right here, is that the growth rate of X cubed, when X starts getting big, big, big, big, right, is nothing, the growth rate of X cubed is so much larger than X squared that you don't even notice subtracting the two X squared from X cubed, because the difference is so much bigger. It's like taking a teaspoon out of the ocean. Sure, even if X squared is like, oh, that's growing faster, we're taking a swimming pool size amount of water out of the ocean. It still doesn't make much of a difference. The dominant term X cubed is going to be the fastest growing power function. And when X is really large, the other power functions in play, the other monomials in play for this polynomial are minuscule. They're dwarfed in comparison to the growth rate of X cubed. And so we continue this on. Let's look at the limit as X approaches infinity of negative two X to the fourth plus three X squared minus X plus two. Well, if you look at just the leading term, right, it's going to be negative two X to the fourth. Now, be aware, the leading term does not mean the first term. It means the biggest term present. So you need to make sure you look around just in case they're not in order. So if you take the limit as X approaches infinity here, the only term that dominates is going to be the negative two X to the fourth, for which then we want to ask ourselves what happens as X goes to infinity. Well, as X goes to infinity, well, by limit properties, you could pull out the negative two. And so we're going to get the limit as X approaches infinity here of X to the fourth, for which case then we see that, okay, as X goes to infinity, X to the fourth will also approach infinity. So you get negative two times infinity, so to speak. But what does it mean to multiply infinity by negative two? I mean, infinity is not a real number. Does it even make sense to multiply by anything? Now, I mean, the answer to this is going to be negative infinity. We'll talk about that more in just one second here. But the idea is if we didn't make this jump, right, if we didn't make that jump, we actually went directly to, whoops, the final answer right here. We could have said that because if you look at the graph of negative two X to the fourth, this looks like your standard X to the fourth graph. But the factor if you have a negative two, you've reflected it downward and then stretched it vertically, which in terms of infinity stretching, it doesn't make much of a difference, but the reflection does. And so as you approach the right-hand side, you're still going to negative infinity. So we don't need to multiply infinity by negative two, because again, the monomial negative two X to the fourth with its polynomial, its monomial growth and reflection tells us the right-hand side is going to go to negative infinity. But if we wanted this to be consistent with previous limit properties about we could factor out that coefficient, we end up with statements like negative two times infinity. How does one make sense out of such a thing? We'll get to that in just one more second, I promise. So another thing I do want to mention before we start delving into some dark magic in just a moment is what if we look at the reciprocal functions and ask what happens to them as X approaches positive negative infinity. We've talked about these functions already with regard to their vertical asymptotes, but these reciprocal functions also have horizontal asymptotes. That is as X approaches infinity or negative infinity, this graph is going to approach zero. So these graphs have a horizontal asymptote at the X axis. And so we can see here that if we take the limit as X approaches infinity of one over X to the end, this is always going to equal to D zero. And if we want to be slightly more precise, this will approach zero from above. You'll notice that the graph is above the X axis getting closer and closer to zero. Now if we take the limit as X approaches negative infinity of one over X to the end, this will be zero. That part's true, but I do want to break it up into even and odd cases because that seems to be the case we often see. If you take N to be odd, like we see in this picture, then you're going to approach zero, but you're going to approach zero from below. On the other hand, if you take N to be even, then you'll approach zero, but you'll actually approach zero from above. And again, this is an absence of any type of reflection of any kind. So if you want to see the even case, you're going to get something like this, like we saw previously. You'll approach zero from above. So one over X to the end, irrelevant to the power, will have a horizontal asymptote at the X axis. But how we approach it on the left-hand side will depend on the parity as well. And so basically what we can get away with is the following. We can make a statement like so. If I were just to plug in infinity here, we get something like one over infinity is equal to zero. If I were to divide by infinity, so to speak, I should get zero. Now it should be a little bit more cautious. If you take one over infinity, this should be looking like zero plus. And if you take one over negative infinity, that should look like zero minus. Like so, you'll notice in the even case, as X approaches negative infinity, you're taking an even power of a negative. So that's going to give you a positive. So the bottom is actually still looking like one over a positive number, which that positive number has large absolute value.


Good morning, John. Wow, that's what my voice sounds like. In a world where a guy has to make a video blog, even though he was up quite late and that his baby was up quite early. He makes a video blog. Earlier this week, Lauren Lapkus tweeted the following. Older siblings are the original influencers. When I was little, my brother said sausage pizza was gross and I didn't eat it again for 20 years. This was apparently hashtag relatable for a lot of people, including me. I quote tweeted this and I said, my older brother thought that it was a good idea to make video blogs and like I want to emphasize that that's not an exaggeration. There's this thing about older siblings and I don't know if this is always the case, but it seems Lauren's tweet and my experience combined, like there's something about this relationship that creates this absolute clarity and confidence in the correctness of like the taste making ability of this child and it's a kind of a remarkable responsibility for a child to have. I don't expect children to live up to this responsibility. Of course, sometimes your older sibling is into super weird or dumb stuff like smoking cigarettes and reading Ulysses for fun, but John for the most part and especially when it comes to music, which I find this weird because you're not particularly musical. That's okay to say I think you have extremely good taste in music like all of the bands you have gotten me into over the years have been way better than like what would be sort of a random selection. I can literally remember the first time that you and Matt Brown brought Flood, that there may be a Giants album, into the house and put it in dad's like Giganto CD player. But like if that had been a Chumba Womba CD, I probably would have learned every word to every song on the album and I would have like plumbed the depths of Chumba Womba's backlog of stuff. I don't know if that exists. I don't know anything. Maybe Chumba Womba's great. I apologize to Chumba Womba fans and also to Chumba Womba. But my sense is that I probably wouldn't have been able to cultivate like a decades-long love affair with Chumba Womba if that's what you brought into my life. I'm in Portland, Oregon right now where I have traveled with my wife and child to go see probably the 12th They Might Be Giants show of my life. For those who don't know, They Might Be Giants is a weird, artsy, nerdy rock band with generally opaque but like still meaningful lyrics and a musical style that is somehow extremely cohesive without hardly ever sounding like itself. So part of me thinks that I'm super into They Might Be Giants because it's what nerdy guys my age are supposed to be into. Like it's just sort of the thing that happens to people like me. But I'm honestly more interested in listening to my gut here and my gut tells me that there's something good about this band. And the more and deeper I listen to any song or album I just keep finding layers of interestingness there. It gives me the sense that they make the music with the goal of like creating something simple to enjoy that has a lot of complexity within it. And they're still releasing new very good albums. They're in their late 50s and I'm sure financially stable but they're still learning new instruments and creating new ways of doing the thing that they do. Still touring, still making people happy. There's something in it that lacks pretension that leans into enthusiasm and effort that's kind of maybe infected my entire life. And that infection started with something that you brought into our house. I think the self-awareness and honesty of this music and the persona of this band is what gives it such longevity. It was never trying to be anything but what it was. But it was always trying to be interesting and good which has allowed it to be a lifelong gift for me to enjoy and also to be inspired by. I know that you didn't know that you were giving me that but thank you anyway. I wish everyone was so lucky to have such good and nerdy taste makers in their lives when they were growing up. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.


Hi everybody, and welcome to the biocell webinar number 73. Today we have Marta Lorenz-Linares from NBL Seropian Bioinformatics Institute, and she will speak about competency frameworks to support training, design and professional development. So I'm most in this webinar, I'm Alessandra Villa, and I'm located at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. With me is Otto Andersson from the Finnish IT Center for Science. I just want to inform you that the webinar is recorded. So during the webinar you can ask questions, usually the Q&A function that is on the bottom of Zoom application depends on which operating system you have, you can see this symbol or this symbol. And when you could also tell us if you have or not a microphone. Usually at the end of the webinar we will unmute you so you can ask your question directly to Marta, or if you have no microphone I will read the question for you. After the webinar we have also, if there are still questions, for one week Marta will be able to answer to your question in the forum askedbyuxcell.eu, and there you can see that there will be a subcategory dedicated to this webinar, number 73, and Marta will be able to there for one week. Now I would like to tell you something about Marta, Marta is a scientific proton manager within the training team, OMBL European Bioinformatics Institute. She is working in many European projects, among others, per Mede COE, and previously she was also working for Bioexcel. She also developed organized competence based training activity for several other European project, or project in general. She has experience in running training, training the trainer course, knowledge exchange workshop, and webinar series. And now she's currently responsible for the development of NBL Competencia. And this is what she will tell something more now. Please Marta. Thank you Alessandra. Share that one. Can you see my slides. Okay. So, yeah, hello everyone. I will, as Alessandra said, I will be talking about competencies, I'll be talking about competency frameworks and how we use them to support training design and professional development. I work at the NBL EBI training team, and therefore training design is really a key in our work, and that's quite important for us. But I want to show you also how you can use competencies for your own professional development, your career choices and things like that, because when we talk about competency frameworks, sometimes it feels that it's very abstract, it's something that it's very top level or very general, and it's like, what's in it for me? But I would like to show you how this is, this helps us with quite common conversations or quite common questions or issues that we might have in our daily life. Before we have here a life scientist that will start doing simulations soon, and will need to improve my computational, their computational skills. It's like, they are wondering how they can do this. And then there are, might be other people saying, what do I need to become a computational chemist, or some other job role. And these are things that we think quite commonly in our life, but we are, we might not be sure where to find information about it or how to address them. And then a competency based approach can provide a structure framework for this. So it defines competencies career profiles and related training, and it can help us addressing these questions or this issue related to both training developing skills or professional development in general. It also provides a common language so that you can talk to other people that share the same framework in the same terms, using the same kind of words so it's easy to understand each other. So, in this presentation, I'm going to tell you about competencies, and about the MBI competency hub, and then I will show you how we can use competencies, showing two examples of what we have done one is how the biocell training program is developed. And another one is how you can use the MBI competency hub to plan your own professional development. I will have a summary slide at the end just to finish with what, with, or what I said. So, a competency is an observable ability of any professional that integrates multiple components such as knowledge skills and attitudes and this one help us define in a bit more detail the competency, and then a competency framework for specific competencies for specific groups of professionals. And what we are talking about this competency based approaches they have a certain features that make them quite practical. One of them is that competencies are observable. So you can validate them objectively, and this means that evidence of competence can be collected, and then it can be used as share currency so again, you share a competency framework with someone else you will be talking the same and you can say, I have competence in this or that other ability or knowledge or so on, and they will immediately understand what you're talking about so this can help when you are looking for a job or when you are doing some appraisal or so. So, as an example, we can have a competency that says install or deploy prebuilt software on a desktop or server computer. As I said, competencies can have some more elements that help us define them in more detail like knowledge skills and attitudes. And here I have some examples and this is light. So for knowledge, the stages of software release cycles, or the dependencies of the software for skills uses package managers is able to revert to revert a system to an own state. To consult the manual or checks licensing before installing or running software. And on this slide I'm showing you two of each knowledge skills and attitudes. But in general in the frameworks that we've worked on we have a few more, I would say between three and four and six or so, because then it gives us a quite good level of detail and granularity within each competency. So these competencies can be used for a few things and this is only some examples and this is light. As I said I'm working in the training team so for us using them for course development is quite relevant for our work. And they can help you to determine what content to include in some course or training program development, because depending on the competencies that your target audience needs to have, you can decide which content to include in that course. And it will help you to pitch the content at the right level, because again that would be a combination of understanding what the competence level of your audience is, and which competencies you want them to develop so then you can see whether to start at a more introductory level or at a more advanced level if they already have a certain level of competence. And once you combine which competencies you want your trainees to develop and what's their actual level, you can easily write the learning outcomes that will tell you what they will be able to do after the training course. Competencies can also be used for career development, and this can be at a more individual level so you can use them to think about your continuum professional development to assess yourself to decide which competencies to develop further, but they can also be used by institutions or organizations in annual appraisals or assessments. So if your institution has a competency framework, this can be the common framework for a line manager and an employee to discuss about how their goals have been during the last year and to assess how it's going and what the goals for the next year or which competencies to develop in the next year. And they can also be used for staff hiring because of course they give you an idea of the competencies that your team has and the ones that you need to be looking for in new employees. You know, at MBI training team, we have been working in competencies for for a few years and when we started developing competency frameworks in the, in the context of some European Union funded projects or some other initiatives like the competency framework for the International Society for Computational Biology. We, we have them mostly in reports in project reports that even if they are public, they are sometimes not very easily accessible for everyone or it's not easy to find them. We found that a competency framework was a very good resource for anyone to have. And we decided to build this website, the MBI competency hub, to make all this work available for anyone so they can use them in their own professional development, or when they are developing their own training courses. In the competency hub, at the moment you can browse career profiles, you can assess your competencies, you can get information to design training courses and training programs, or you can find relevant training courses to develop certain competencies. Right now there are nine competency frameworks in the competency hub, which is this nine that you see up here. There are certain areas of computational biology and then also for professionals working in research infrastructures for data stewards, or for professionals working with human data. Today in this presentation, my examples will be on the framework on computational biomedical research, which is the one that was developed by, by Excel. In this competency framework, we have a list of competencies and I'm going to go in a moment to the site so we can see them there. We have the list of competencies in different domains, and then we have a series of career profiles, and a series of trained resources that you can access from there, and that are associated with the competencies. And I'm going to show you that on, on the side. But I will later on during the presentation I will do a more detailed demo of the site. So now again, this is the landing page and we have those nine cards, each of them going to a specific a competency framework for a specific group of professionals. So if we go to the one in computational biomolecular research, we can see the information that it's here. We have some career profiles to start with, and I will show you how they work a bit later during my presentation but we have this list of career profiles. Then we have the competencies that in bio Excel are divided in three different domains which is scientific competencies computing competencies and parallel computing competencies. And some of them are apply expertise in formal and natural sciences appropriate to the discipline and follow best practice in experimental design, or user driven service provision and support. So if we take on each of them we will expand them and we will see as I show you the different elements inside of each of them, knowledge skills and attitudes, which help us understand what's in this competency and what's the detail that it has. Then we have some training resources that again are associated with these competencies so you have a full list of training resources. And you will always be able to see which competencies they relate to they help you develop so we have for example this beginner's guide to interpreting results from biostatistics and it's related to a competency and data driven science, or there's another one about licensing and that one is associated with the competencies about licensing policies. So we have some learning pathways, which we, which should be appearing there, and which help you add a collection of training resources that are put together and for to address specific challenges that we think that our target audience might have. So I'll show you one of them in a bit more detail later. So if we now go back to the presentation. I'm going to tell you how we are using this by Excel competency framework for to use cases one is the by Excel training program and the other one is how to plan your professional development using the EBI competency hub. If we start with a by Excel training program. And I'm going to start with a short presentation about short introduction about by Excel so by Excel is the European Center of excellence for computation biomolecular research. And its mission is to provide open source molecular modeling and simulation software user support and community building events for life scientists. To enable these life scientists to use the software that by Excel is providing by Excel developed a competency based training program. And what this means is that the training program is focused on the abilities that are required for professionals in computational biomolecular research. And we needed to define these competencies and certain career profiles to start with to be able to design the training courses on top of that. And in addition to defining the competencies. So the training needs analysis to prioritize the topics that our users have in have more need for because we cannot cover absolutely all the competencies with the limited resources of the project. So that's why the training needs analysis was added there. So, to start with developing the, the by Excel competency framework and defining these competencies for computational biomolecular research. We started with some related competency frameworks like the one from the international society for computational biology, or the ones developed by the Corbell project and the right train project which were more focused on research and so this provided like an initial draft the list of competencies. And we also defined some initial user groups defined in quite broad terms as beginner users advanced users and system administrators. And with that information, we gathered some experts together in a workshop, so they could decide which competencies were really relevant for, for by Excel, and at which level, each of the different types of users had them. And then this allowed us to define the first version of the framework the competencies for professionals in biomolecular in computation biomolecular research. But as you use the framework you can realize that some competencies need more detail or that some others might not be so relevant because everybody knows them so they might be not so relevant for us to develop our training program. And then there are also some new methodologies and new competencies that are required in the field for example right now, everybody's talking about artificial intelligence in all areas of our lives from everybody using chat GPT to a artificial intelligence being used in many different research areas. So we need to keep an eye on those developments and we need to constantly revise what the competency framework includes. So that's why the current version of the, of the framework for professionals in computational biomolecular research is framework is version three. This is something that you can see on the, on the competency hub, and you can also check the previous versions if you want to. So this current version and has a 17 competencies in three domains as I told you early scientific competencies computing competencies and parallel computing competencies, and each of them has a series of knowledge skills and and they are quite a focus on computation biomolecular research and on the software development and provision that bio Excel does, because that's where a bio Excel is putting its focus, but we also consider that for these professionals there are some other more general competencies in more transversal skills such as communication or project management or teamwork that are also required. But we are not including them in this framework we think there are also there are some other more general frameworks like the, the one from the International Society for Computational Biology, or the one from the from the European Union for research that include those kind of competencies in more detail. In addition to the competencies we also define a career profiles which are roles with associated competencies and certain levels that they have a like a PhD student in biomolecular simulation, a computational chemist or a research software engineer. And on this slide you can see an example from the competency hub with the junior research software engineer. So you see for some of these, we have different career stages so we can have a junior and a senior one. And then we show some text on qualification and background of this example persona and also what the activities of the current role are. And then we have the full list of competencies in the framework and at what level that competencies require for this role. And once we have that it also when we are designing training which is the part I'm explaining you now, and it helps us understand our target audience. So it helps us designing this training because we can see what competencies and at what level the target audience has them and therefore which ones they need to develop and whether we need to start in the training course at a more factorial or a more advanced level. And that's what I'm going to show you a couple of examples of in a minute, and then later on we'll talk a bit more about these career profiles in, in the context of thinking about your professional development. When we have these career profiles and the competencies defined, we can really develop our training courses targeted to this specific user groups and their needs. So for example this one says I will need HPC for my simulations and I don't know where to start. So this issue has prompted by Excel to develop some courses like introduction to HPC for life scientists which is a course that has run already several times. Or to develop this learning pathway on using HPC infrastructure to perform by molecular simulations. And I'll show you that learning pathway in a bit more detail so that you see what a learning pathway in the in the competency hub is. We have these using HPC infrastructure to perform by molecular simulation which again is for someone who wants to start access HPC and run by molecular simulations on it. So we have a bit of a general overview about it and what the learning outcomes of the learning pathway are. And then if you go on Star Pathway you have again some general explanation about what the, what the learning pathway contains, and then you can go to each of the different modules. It starts with a unique shell, which will will be important if you want to start using HPC. And here you have a description of what this course is, and you can go and take this course. And we have a quiz to test your knowledge, which you can take after going through the course or if you think that you already have enough knowledge you can go directly there and check. And if you score highly in this quiz you can directly go to the next module on this large workload manager. And again, here you have some resources and some narrative around them and a quiz at the end. And this is what the learning pathways that we have contained. So if we go back here. Apart from these more introductory courses, we have also some gain courses for other user groups. So here we have a researcher in biomolecular simulations. Who says I have been using Gromax for some time but now I need to learn about enhanced sampling methods for my new project. So they are a user of one of the software that by Excel provides, but they need to know more like more advanced methods in this software. So by Excel also developed some advanced Gromax workshop, specifically for this type of users that one are already using the software but want to learn more about it. So these are just a couple of examples. But of course if you go on the on the bio cell website or on the competency hub you will see some of the other training activities that by Excel has developed. And now I want to move on on to how you can use the my Excel competency framework to plan your own professional development. And what we are thinking here is, if you have questions such as what career options exist out there so you might be doing your PhD, or being early in your post dog and you have always been in academia, you know very clearly what's what options are within academia, but you're thinking that maybe you want to try something else but you have no idea what's out there. So the career profiles in the data associated with the with the competency framework can help you identify in those other career options and taking a look and seeing whether they are for you. And then you can also check how they compare to each other, or you can see what do you need to become a computational chemist or any other role that you are interested in, or how can I develop my skills further. Okay, and this can be a very general question like, again, you want to start running simulations in HPC or you want to start to program in Python or in R. But you don't know exactly how you can develop those skills or which training resources exist out there, and all that it's something that the competency hub can help you with. So, we will go to the to the competency how have now and I will show you how you can do this. So the first thing will be to choose the relevant set of competencies as an I told you, and as I told you, and today we are going to be using on professionals in computational biomolecular research. So, we can go there, and we choose. We start by choosing the framework that is more relevant for us in this case, we are going to be using this one today. The first page that we get there is the one with the career profiles. And here you can start answering those questions that we were having and you can start by simply browsing them. And you can see here we have computational chemist we have a research software engineer or you have a PI. So then we are going to take a look at the junior research software engineer. And we have this is the one that I had in my presentation as well so you have some information about the qualification and background, and then some activities of the current role. And you can take a look at these and see that they are working in a center for high performance computing. They are working on, on the software packages that are required for the researchers that they are available for them and they are also doing some training for the researchers to use these, these software packages. This might be something that sounds interesting to you or it might be something like oh no I don't want to do this and then you can just go to, to another career profile. But if this some, if this is something that you can find yourself in and that it's interesting to you you can keep looking down here and you can also see that we have the whole list of competencies. And there's a scale associated to it about in three levels awareness working knowledge and specialist knowledge. And then we go here and we can see that the first one apply expertise in formal and natural sciences appropriate to the discipline, and this junior research software engineer has level one on it. And then, if you are doing your PhD you can think oh I'm probably above level one so I will be fine in this one, but then the next one is user driven service provision and support. And you might not have any contact with users during your career and then you might think, oh, they have level two here so this is important for them. If I want to become a junior research software engineer, I really need to develop this competency further and you can take a look and see what this competency includes for example as a skill manages expectations effectively. And then you can start thinking about which competencies you want to develop further if you want to become a junior research software engineer. So this is one way to go in the in the competency hub you can also then take a look at how it compares to another one and you can then decide to choose the senior research software engineer to see which competencies will be the ones that you will need to develop further if you continue that path from a junior research software engineer to a senior research software engineer. And then when you open this you will see again the full list of competencies and there will be a comparison between between the two with the levels in two and you can see that the first one apply expertise and natural sciences appropriate to the discipline. It's the same level so it's not something that they develop much further between one stage and the other, but if you go to this one or this one that it's about data management. It's developed from level one and level three so this is a competency that it's considered really important in that work as a research software engineer and you will need to keep developing it during your career there. So it's not going to be an exercise for all the, all the competencies here. But apart from from that from just looking at the, and the profiles that are on the side, and thinking about how relate to your, how they relate to your skills and how they relate to each other. So add your profile yourself on the, on the competency hub. And when you add this it's saved on your browser so it's not going to be shared with anyone else or anything like that but it, it will be useful to you, you need to add your name and job title.  You can also add some of your qualification and background or activities of current role but that's not required. And then you can assign your, the competencies. And when you go here to, to assigning competencies, you can again click on them to expand them if you want to understand them better what it means. And I recommend that you really use this if you're doing it that you use it to to assess yourself and to reflect on on the skills you have, because this can serve to check how it compares to some of the other career profiles here but it can also help you if you have a CV or if you're writing a job application to think about which competencies you would like to, to highlight, and maybe to help you in pricing it to, it might help you giving you some words on how to highlight certain skills that you might have. I'm going to just click some of these quickly so that you can see how it works. So I would say user driven and service provision and support I don't have that much. So I'm going to leave it in awareness. This one is about literature and data sets. I'm going to say working knowledge. There is data management, not much data analysis, not much either. And then I won't go very far in the computational ones I'm going to say that I know a little bit about Linux, but I'm not going to say that much because I don't do that much computational and also because we need to move on in this webinar. So now I save this profile and you can see what I added there and the levels that I added there of course some of them are not applicable because I didn't get there. And once I have this profile created, I can compare it, and we'll continue with the junior research software engineer as we have already working with it before. And then I select the junior research software engineer, I click compare, and I'm going to see the levels of competencies that I added for myself in comparison with the ones for the junior research software engineer. And here we can see as we were talking about probably have a good level of formal and natural sciences, but not so much about user driven a service provision and support. So if I want to become a junior research software engineer. This is a competency that I need to develop further. It's the same for example for this one about data driven science and how to use this data driven science and data analysis to generate hypothesis. So those two I would need to develop further if I want to become a junior research software engineer. And then you might be thinking. So, how do I develop these you know you can again see the full detail of the of the competency here, but you might be thinking well, what do I do to develop it further. The competency hub can help you with that but for this we need to go back to the to the framework. And I'll tell you ideally we wouldn't need to go back but for now you will need to go back to the to the competencies and find the list of competencies and go to those competencies that you saw that you need to develop further like the users driven service provision and support. You can find some trained resources associated with the competency, or the other one about data driven science and again you can find trained resources associated with the competency. And here you have all these trained resources, and it's a quite long list, and which doesn't cover the full most of the resources there don't cover the full competency because they are short courses so we'll cover some elements of the competency but not everything. But then you can have a look at it get some inspiration about the things you can do and depending on your level you can decide to go one way or another for example this a beginner's guide to interpreting results from biostatistics. It's a as it says it's it's for for beginners and now it's not opening there. It's, it's quite basic so if you already know the basics from the concepts in biostatistics you probably don't want to go here, but if you don't know the basis this might be a good resource to start. But there are also quite a lot of resources on data management or programming here. You can also decide based on what it's more what is done more in your discipline so if programming in in Python is something that your colleagues do and that you think it's going to be required if you want to help your colleagues as a junior research software engineer, you can go to learn how to program in Python or how to do a specific analysis in our, for example. So if we go to this one in our again, you can see an overview of the of the resource which can help you decide if this is something for you. And you can also see that this is from software carpentry, and then you can go to this resource and start learning from there if this is something for of interest for you. So we came here to find these trained resources. We had to go back from the comparison page between the two, the two career profiles yours and the junior software research research software engineer. And then go back to the list of competencies and find the training associated to these competencies. We would like that this is changed so that you can directly from the from the page with the comparison that you can find directly the trained resources. I'm going to show you how we have been working on that. On this slide you will find some screenshots of what I've been doing now, just in case this didn't work and also for for the record so you can see the slides when they are shared but now if I go to this one. This is a prototype that we are working on but it's not available on the website if you go now, where, when you do the profile between let's say this is you and and then this is one of the profiles in the, in the website, you will have a summary before the table, comparing the competency levels in the two. You will have this summary that tells you how many competencies you will need to develop further to become a bioinformatics researcher in this case, and then it will show you a button. That says view suggested training resources and if we go there. It will show you those competencies that you need to develop further with a list of suggested training resources that can help you with this. So this is not live yet because there are some challenges in adding this here so we would need to decide which training resources to include here because for some of the competencies we have quite a lot of them. But as I said they usually don't help you develop all the elements in the competency but just some of them. So how do we decide which ones to include. So this is a suggestion the ones that are more complete or depending on the level that you have and that you need to achieve. So those could be some considerations but then we will need to see how to do that and how to make it automated so that the system knows which ones to choose and to show in this summary. We had this available in a simpler version at some point. And this was just with a manually curated the list of resources for each competency, but that's of course not sustainable if we want to use it in several frameworks with the growing list of training resources that we have available there. So if you have any ideas about how we can, we can do this in an in an efficient way. Let us know because we are we welcome suggestions. And apart from that, we are also working on trying to make the site more user friendly and make it clear there so that people understand what you can do on the side because we do some user feedback sessions when we develop the site. And usually people tell us that it's very nice and the information and looks interesting and can be useful but they are not especially in the beginning they are not sure what they can do on how to use the site. So we'll keep working on that and we will keep gathering user feedback in feedback sessions. We'll also work on updating the competency frameworks, as I told you they cannot be studied they need to constant update for the competencies the career profiles and the training resources, and we will also aim to create more learning pathways. And this is almost the end of the presentation today. So just as a summary, a competency frameworks provide a structured approach to training design and career planning. Okay, then believe I competency hub includes nine frameworks from life sciences areas and they are all openly available, and the bioxial training program is based on a competency framework. We welcome suggestions in relation to both the competency hub and the bioxial competency framework for a computation by molecular research. You can contact us at competency at ebi.ac.uk or in my personal email address. And I would like to finish thanking the MLBI training team and the MLBI web development team, which have been essential to develop all this work and also the groups working on developing competencies like the one from the International Society for Computational Biology. The Hermit CEM bioxial, which have contributed both to developing competency frameworks and to developing the MLBI competency hub, and all the other initiatives that have contributed to developing competency frameworks that are now in the competency hub. And thank you very much for your attention. I will be happy to answer questions. Thank you very much, Marta. And I was suggesting that if people ask questions, since I don't see any questions written in the Q&A, they can just raise and we can unmute them so they can just ask questions directly. So now we see if there are any questions coming up so people can think about. At this time I have a question. When you were mapping the training with the, we are using the competency hub for the training. You didn't really start from mapping first the competence and then building the training. I understood that you first built the training and then associate the competencies, correct? I mean, there are two things here. So one is we define the competencies and then from those competencies, let's say, we found out where the main training needs were for the main user groups. So for example, we have this introduction to HPC because we understand that there are certain groups of users that have no experience with HPC and would like to be using it. So that's a need and that's part of the competencies, how to access these resources. So for the courses that we have developed, they are based on the competencies and the training needs because usually, as they are short courses, they cannot cover a full competency. So they will be in general focusing on several elements of maybe two or three competencies. So they are based in a combination of the competencies and the training needs. And then another thing is that there's other training that is available out there and I didn't go in detail into that. But when we built the competency framework, another exercise that we did was to check training that was available out there, different providers of training, just the ABI, Coursera, Software Carpentries and these kind of things. And we associated that training with the competencies to see for which competencies there were more resources already available there and in which competencies there was a lack of training so that we could fill those gaps. Okay, okay, so you combine the training need that you got from some speaking with the user somehow and then in this way you are looking at which competence you need to fulfill this need and then you just love the training. Okay, now it's more clear. So I wonder if other there can arise question on the people online. Everybody can raise their hand if they want to can unmute you. Yeah, have your as a question. I allowed him to speak please. Thank you for the really nice presentation. It was kind of interesting. I just want to clarify one question whether the training materials that have been that was mentioned, the training resources that have been mentioned in the competency framework. Would they be somehow stored within the competency hub or is it like redirecting to a third party resource. The reason why I'm asking is that, let's say, if it's a third party resource and if it gets updated but if it's not, you know, linked to this, then probably we'll end up with some dead link and then not been able. Yeah, so they are linking to third party resources so it's not. I mean of course some of them would be bio Excel ones and they will be linking to the bio Excel page or so. But we do some regular checks of the links so that if there's some deadline we remove that resource from the competency hub. So having of having resources linked to, I mean, links to third party resources. It's because then we can cover a more competencies and more elements of competencies that what we could cover only with what we are developing ourselves. So it can be of more use to the community. And then it's true that when we select what to add, I would say we try to select more and more resources that are online and the resources that are from third parties that is more likely that they keep things updated. If we have a one off workshop that someone runs is like less likely that this is updated than if it's a Coursera data science specialization or something like that. Because this is usually updated regularly, or although software carpentry basic courses in programming or unique shell or all that. At least for now they are updated and in fact the pages look completely different now to what they looked last year, even though the content is more or less the same but they are really updating it so we do keep an eye on that and of course there will be some dead links. Sometimes, but we try to keep an eye on that and remove them. Do you want to comment? Yeah. Yeah, I'm done. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Any other question? No, if not, I will just show the if you can stop sharing I just show the what are the following webinar. So let me just go to my share screen. Okay, so then I, we will have, we have a following we have been the 21st of October we will have at three o'clock as usual we will have a student webinar this is a special webinar. We have run a summer school in September, and we have select three students that are winning the poster price, and those two students will give a short presentation on their project. We will have a normal bioxial webinar on the first things of November at three o'clock. And this webinar will be run by Giovanni Bussi from CISA, and he will be speaking about thermostat and barostat in molecular dynamics simulation. And I thank you for your attendance. And, yeah, looking forward to meet you again. Bye bye.


Now, we are going to look at an interesting end-to-end scenario through an example of IPTV where the resource and admission control function carries out the admission control by taking the help and implementation of its own functional elements. We start with the requirements of IPTV and then we look at the operation in detail. The IPTV admission control is different from voice over IP because voice over IP is symmetric and it is between two live audience. In IPTV, it could be streaming content that is live streaming or it could be stored content and it is usually simplex. So we understand that NGN has different service requirements. NGH has its own different admission control. So if IPTV service has to be demonstrated through an example, so let's look at a situation where we have an inviter and we have an invitee that is two friends, a friend who wants his other friend to watch a content and the friend is not going to pay rather the invitee is going, the inviter is going to pay. So we look at the scenario where a friend A invites friend B, friend A is the inviter, friend B is the invitee and friend A is going to pay for the service. So we say that user invites one of his friends to watch a TV program and is willing to pay for it. If you look at the end to end scenario first diagrammatically and then we are going to go into the details, we are looking at the process that starts from the application layer. So the application layer gives its own QS requirements to the service control function. The service control function initiates the service or invokes the service by taking the invitee into confidence by sending it a request to allocate its resources. So the resource initiation request is sent to the PDFE of the invitee and then the policy decision is made and then the resource initiation request is made to the transport resource control which responds to this initiation request because if the underlying technology is not supporting then this end to end scenario cannot be realized. Then the admission decision is made, that is it is finally decided that the admission shall be made. So after that the policy decision functional entity has to enforce the policy. So now it sends a resource initiation request to reserve the resources and then it gets a response from the policy enforcement functional entity. Once it has finally gotten the response then the resource initiation response is sent to the SCF. Now this is the overall or the end to end scenario. We are going to look at the further details which are involved at every step. So after the invitee accepts the invitation from the invitee, the service control function sends a request to the invitee's RSCF. Now all these PDFE and this the transport resource function functional entity, TRF, FE are part of the RSCF. So whatever is happening is happening within the RSCF. The bill is going to be charged to the inviting party that is the invitee or friend A. So the RSCF does not need to check the subscriber information of the invitee because even if the invitee does not have zero credit, does not have any credit or it has zero credit so there's no requirement as such to charge it. Now the RSCF through its own PDFE makes a policy decision by referring to the policy rules if this provision is allowed for a friend to invite another friend and upon authorization it allocates the bandwidth and the QS class so it means it identifies what bandwidth is required and to which QS class does this IPTV stream belong to. Then the invitee's network PDFE is approached by the RSCF of the invitee's network to check the resource availability with the transport resource control functional entity of the invitee's network. So once the resources are found to be ample then a final decision is made. There are two possibilities if there are enough resources or if there aren't enough resources. If there aren't enough resources the media flow shall not be entertained and this IPTV service shall not be offered or it won't realize for the invitee. So in that case the PDFE sends initiation response with a rejection and also provides a rejection reason in terms of which resources are short and then this whole process is going to terminate but if there are enough resources then the PDFE sends resource initiation request to the policy enforcement functional entity to install the admission decision. Underlying actually means taking the QS policy taking the bandwidth requirement and the QS the device or underlying access technology shall now be configured to carry out this media flow transmission. Now the policy enforcement functional entity takes the final admission decision from PDFE and sends the resource initiation response to the PDFE that well whatever policy decision you made I have implemented it. Now the PDFE sends a response back to the initiator service control function that finally referring to the QS policy which I have I have admitted the resource for the media flow that you had requested. So in this whole process there is another entity which is going to carry out the charging process that is the if you recall the policy and charging resource function. So the application function which is at the top in the service stratum requests the service information from the PCRF the policy and charging resource function acquires the user profile from its database in this case it is going to be the Inviter or Friend A this can be the home subscriber station or the HLR home location register to make the policy decision. If the decision is positive then the PCRF is going to send policy specific policy which is applicable to Friend A's account and what rules are going to be implemented to the RSEF and then RSEF is going to translate it into whatever actions it has to tell to the policy decision functional entity and then policy decision functional entity talks to the policy enforcement functional entity for enforcement. So this is the final closure to the media flow that is now invoked and the invitee or Friend B is now enjoying the IPTV stream a television program and Friend A is paying for that.