Thank you very much, and can I have the slides up please? So as Jeff just mentioned, I am the institutional official at the University of Pittsburgh. I have been involved with research for many years. I am a faculty member. I've been at Pitt for 30 years. And one of the things that people don't often get about institutional leadership is the fact that they are researchers. They've been in the same role as a faculty. They are faculty. I'm still funded to do animal research. So I understand all about it because I do it for a living. Can I have it in the next slide please? So as Jeff also mentioned, I run an office and this is very typical for animal IOs, an office called the Office of Research Protections. And that includes all of our research regulatory functions at the university. Next slide please. And that does include animal research, as well as human subject research, the IRB. And one thing that people often get confused about or concerned about is, oh, human subject work gets a lot more attention than the animal work. What our institution, I think, is pretty typical. We have six times more IRB protocols than we have IACUC protocols. Human subject work is usually more pervasive in an institution, more funding, so it gets more attention. And we are affiliated at our institution with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which has its own communications department that promotes all of the health care that it does. So, of course, human subject research gets more attention. There's a lot more emphasis on it. Our office also includes support and oversight for FDA trials of clinical trials, conflict of interest, stem cell oversight, biosafety, again, gene research, which, again, is controversial, and also safety, like radiation safety. We do research integrity investigations if there's concerns about fabrication of falsification of data, and we do export control and research security.  So, yes, your institutional official is concerned about animal research, but in most places, they're also concerned about a whole bunch of other things. One of my jobs is to pay attention to what's happening and let our communications department know if there is anything going on that's either bad, that may hit the press or good that they need to publicize. So either thing comes to the top. And it's important that I know everything going on so I can do that. Now, most of the bad stuff that happens is not animal research. There's a lot of different kinds of research that go on that can be controversial in addition to animal research. We have been really hammered lately over fetal tissue research as an institution. It's been a real issue for us that we've had to contend with. And we've learned a lot of lessons about communicating for fetal tissue research, clearly a controversial topic that are very applicable to animal research. Very similar strategies you need to take to communicate about these issues. So today in a few slides, I'd like to talk about our strategies for communication at the University of Pittsburgh and to provide some advice to faculty members about communicating about their research. And this is pretty global. It doesn't matter if it's animal or human subject or any any topic at all, things you need to think about and also how to avoid landmines. So we do have a office at Pitt, the Office of University Communications and Marketing, and that office is involved with doing all of the communications that are done on our campus. These are our communication specialists. And one of the things to point out about this office, it's the University Communications and Marketing. It sort of tells you what their job is. It's to sell the university to many different stakeholders, to the public, of course, because we want their support to government. They fund our research. They also are involved since we're a state related institution and providing money for our operational budget. We also want to appease or support the most important audience of all high school students. Why high school students? Because one of the things when I got into this position that I learned that most surprised me is we're a major R1 research institution. We're number three in NIH funding in the country. But tuition is one of our biggest income streams. It's just a few dollars behind research. So getting those students in the door is very, very important. So that's why in a lot of the communications materials, you'll see very happy undergraduate students because they're important. We want more coming in. And I'm not sure if I can play the movie if you could do that for me. So this is actually from the front page of our communications website. Just to tell the world, I mean, this is publicly available, what they do for a living. And they communicate in many different ways, social media, web publications. They do all of the media relations and communications for our institution. So again, they're there to sell the institution. That's their goal. And if you want to work with your communications people, which I advise you to do, bear in mind what their job is there to sell, sell, sell. They're to make there to promote what you do for a living. So anyway, that's what communications do now involved in communications regarding research. And again, communications regarding other issues involves other stakeholders. If it's, you know, about what you do in terms of your athletics program, obviously different stakeholders are involved. But again, if there's communications about research, and this doesn't always apply, sometimes if it's a fairly simple communication, Combs just handles it. But if it's something complicated or potentially controversial, they're going to go, they're going to talk with scientists. They're going to talk with the scientists, bosses, a dean or department chair. If it's a regulatory thing and research, they'll come to me as the institutional official. And I will talk with our animal program. If it's animal research or our IRB folks, if it's human subject research, legal counsel gets involved looking at legal issues and our government relations people get involved in terms of how this will impact our funding from the government. A number of people play a role in looking at our communication strategies. And again, not everything, but sensitive things, crisis communications, a whole bunch of people look at. Now at Pitt, I think we've been very, very transparent about our animal research. We'll make it very clear that we do it. We have a website, animalresearch.pitt.edu. I encourage you to go to it, look at it. It's a pretty extensive site. We periodically put out emails and ask our researchers, do you want to be basically focused on on this website? Do you want to highlight your research on our website about animal research? It's public facing. It's there. Now, we've also dealt with the press quite a bit in terms of even allowing the press in. I mean, we're talking about major press coming in with cameras into the animal facility, photographing animals. Now, this is always clear, very carefully curated with our comms department, making sure they know exactly what their limitations are and coming into your facility and photographing. But we've been on Vice TV with non-human primates. There's also been a story on 60 Minutes. It's been a while back about our in terms of our brain interfaces and what we're doing in that area. And we're also in a sort of a segue between what we're doing with animal research and human subject research. So the things that our comms department really focuses on when they are thinking about communications or advising faculty about communications. It's, first of all, they want to promote the university. How is this going to affect the reputation of the university? Is this a good story to advance our reputation? So a good animal research story is one of the things that they want to promote. But it has to be a good story. And I think the most effective stories out there are when there is a clinical trial or there's a cure. Here's a cure. And look how we got there. That makes it very clear to people that this animal research leads to cures. I think that's very useful. As I've said, your comms department wants to market you. They want to sell you to the public and to those high school students to get them to come in and give you tuition dollars. We also look at legal ramifications of things that are going on, particularly with crisis communications. Now, if it's known that there's an investigation going on, for example, often the feedback is we don't comment if an investigation is ongoing. And that's the perfect response. If an investigation is ongoing, you don't have the facts. So why start spouting information you don't know? So you have to be very careful if you know that a legal investigation is going on. There are legal ramifications. Law enforcement gets very angry if you confound their investigation by going public. And then you also look at security concerns. You don't want to put information out there that a nefarious party could use to violate your facilities or target an individual. So you really shouldn't showcase an investigator's research, particularly animal research, if they're uncomfortable with it being out there. You need to get their permission to do it. And we've seen people that are reluctant to have their research publicized. Don't do it then. I mean, if the scientist doesn't want it done, then you shouldn't do it. You shouldn't force it down their throat. So when we advise faculty on things to consider when they are talking about their research is know who you're talking to and temper your approach accordingly. Now, this we've mentioned this several times during this meeting that some of the best ways of advocating for animal research is you're not going to the media, but talking to your neighbors, your family, etc. We've seen in social movements that's the most effective communication. You win people over one at a time, person to person. And with the holidays coming up, we're going to be interacting with family a lot in the next week, golden opportunity to sell animal research. And that's how you do it. And we've seen this being the most effective communication route. The other thing, and we've learned this from fetal tissue research, a truly adversarial audience will not be swayed by your arguments. By talking with them there, you're just giving them ammunition to use against you. You know, so if you know that a publication is going to be very adversarial to your work, why talk with them? They're not going to spend it positively ever. So be careful who you talk to. So we have complete academic freedom at the University of Pittsburgh. Faculty can talk to anybody they want to. But we also tell them that you can speak for yourself and not the institution. You can't say, University of Pittsburgh supports this viewpoint. Our chancellor can. I can't, you know, unless I'm specifically authorized to do that. That's an important point. You don't speak for your institution, you speak for yourself. One of the things when I started being interviewed about my research most disappointed me is a reporter would talk with me for an hour. And my name wouldn't be in the article or one sentence. And it's usually the sentence I didn't want quoted was quoted, you know, it's like that's what happens. A reporter may talk to 40 people to get their story, 40 scientists. And you may help inform the article, but you may not be a prominent part of the article. And that's an expectation you need to actually be aware of. And as I've mentioned in a question earlier, you may actually be embargoed about what you can say about your project. If you're funded by industry and there's proprietary information coming out of your study, you may be restricted on what you can say about it. And you have to really respect the agreement that's in place. And as I mentioned, research security is becoming a bigger deal.  And it's a very, it's a tight road that people are going to have to walk in the future. So that's another concern that we have. You know, I encourage people not to talk a lot about unpublished data, because we've seen instances of people stealing their research. You don't want that to happen, right? So you talk about your published studies. And again, respect funding. If there are restrictions on communications, you need to honor them. And again, some things that we tell people to avoid landmines, consult with your communications department prior to agreeing to give an interview. Most people don't even know who their communications department is, even though they look at their stuff every day on their computer. They look at all the stuff that they put out. But the communications department can give you good advice, including this is a very adversarial media outlet. You may not want to talk with them. So they can really give you good advice. And if you're particularly be talking on camera to a major news outlet, let your comms department negotiate this for you. They know what restrictions to put into place, how the best practices that should be there. You don't, you may not think of anything. So let them negotiate. More and more of these interviews are on Zoom. And one trick I learned, let your comms department do it. Set it up. So it's your Zoom, not the media Zoom that you're on. Then you control it. If there's chat messages or whatever, you get them, they don't. So that's an important thing to consider. Again, media training is important for faculty, particularly if they're going on camera to give an interview. And our communications department offers it. And of course, you should never let people enter the animal facility or come into your lab without permission. There's security concerns there. Again, if you are involved in an investigation or somebody's actually looking at your work, you know, you've been targeted by an animal rights group, you may not be the best person to talk about this.  Let somebody else defend you in those cases. Make sure your funding source is comfortable with what you're discussing. And the other thing that we've learned yesterday is reporters may be much more interested in telling a good story than getting the details right. So remember what their perspective is. And I think that's important as well. They're not there to tell your story. They're there to tell a good story that's going to quote sell newspapers. And that's all I had in terms of the slides. And I think now we have some interview questions. Yes. So this session's a little different. Bill and I will be somebody, not from an adverse media, but interviewing Bill. And I should, in full transparency, say my daughter went to pit. So it has my money. It was a very good school. So, all right, Bill, you covered a lot of some of the questions I was going to ask. But how about has anything changed at pit when you've embraced a more open environment regarding animal research? You know, we've been much more open for a few years. Now, I think we've always been open, but again, it was about three or four years ago we put up our animal research website. And I do think we do encourage people to talk about their work. And we do have articles out there about animal research quite often, you know, during that we did a lot of the COVID work at our institution during the pandemic.  So we are open. We coach people on how best to sell their work to the public, talk to about their work to the public. But we are, I think, pretty open about everything. So would you say that it lends itself to a more, not relaxed, but more engaged environment? I think it does. I mean, I think we're pretty engaged. And we encourage our scientists to be very engaged with the public. So what would advice you'd give others who are taking institutional buy-in and maybe don't have it yet for expanding communications about their animal programs and research? Again, I think you need to be able, I mean, you tell people that you want to sell it in the right way. You need to be very open and honest about what's going on. And I think it works. Point people to places like us that do have our websites, and we are open about the research that we do. They might get started by dealing with, and your comms department at a university knows who's going to be friendly to you. You know, start by engaging friendly media outlets that you know are going to be helpful and not harmful.  And you mentioned you had the slide with all the different responsibilities you have and there's people at other universities similar type positions. So does it take a crisis to get engagement and change or can it happen differently? Well, a crisis always focuses here. So there's a lot more attention to a particular topic during a crisis. It's not the best time to tell your story because you're going to be by definition on defense simply because people are accusing you of doing things. And again, we did have some problems in terms of an infiltration that happened a number of years ago. And that did encourage us to be more open about what we did. It really taught us, yeah, we have to be more proactive about our communication strategy. So it did help us be more proactive at that point. So any advice on when leadership changes and you have to educate new senior leaders or like if yourself should leave, how do you keep the continuum going? So again, it's always a challenge because a number of folks are involved in the whole communication strategy. As I've said, there's attorneys, their government relations folks, your comms director, and they turn over all the time. So there is turnover. You just need to meet with people and talk with them and really try to get the very top institutional buy into what you're doing. And the last question is people often say, you know, public institutions have it harder than private institutions because the public institutions get funding and you know, they're FOIA. What do you have to say about that? Again, it may go the other way because if you're a public institution and everything's publicly available already, then there's a good reason you should be open about the research you do because everyone knows about it already. Private institutions may want to be a little bit more cautious because a lot of their information is protected. It's not out there and they may be more reluctant to share. So I think it's important for everyone to be judicious in the information they share with the public. You know, if I was a private, in Pennsylvania, we have an affiliation with the state but our open records laws don't force us to, for example, put a meeting minutes out. And so we don't. You know, I think that it's okay to be somewhat protective of certain materials because that allows free dialogue during meetings. You know, you do want confidential discussions to be frank and open. So if you have to put them out there, it may constrain communications a bit. Well, thanks, Bill. I'm going to turn it over to Jeff and Allison. Yes. Thank you so much. We now have a brief video of Bill, an inter conversation that he had with Lana Rivolo-Grasser, who is a postdoctoral fellow with the Neuroscience and Novel Therapeutics Unit within the Emotion and Development Branch of the National Institutes of Mental Health. So Dr. Yates, I've been approached by some media outlets who are interested in having me speak on the animal research that we're doing in our lab and at our institution. Is there institutional support for me to be able to do this? Sure. And our communications department will definitely work with you and help you and give you advice on how to do this. And some of the things to think about initially are first, who are you talking with? Because some media outlets may be adversarial to animal research or what you're doing. And then you may not want to engage with them because whatever you say is not going to be posed or relate in a very positive way. You need to actually know your audience and know who you're talking with. And you may not want to engage if you know that who you're talking with is going to just try to misuse what you say. We also give media training to actually help you talk with the press in the best possible way. If this is going to be a print article, often or a website article, they will likely be talking to a number of people on a particular topic and they'll take quotes from your interview. They may take one sentence from an hour interview. So that's why choosing words very carefully throughout the interview is very, very important. Because often they'll take the sentence out of the interview that you least want them to publish. So you have to remember that as well. Another important thing to remember is what does your research funding contract say? Because some research actually is you can't make public statements about it without the funding agency approval. That's just maybe in your funding agreement. So you need to check with that. Sometimes your results are embargoed by, for example, a commercial sponsor. So they need to approve anything you say. So make sure that you can actually speak on the topic legally. Now, if you've been targeted for in terms of the research that you've done, if you've actually been accused of wrongdoing, for example, you may not be the right person to defend yourself because you're going to be in a basically in a bad position if you talk with a press, for example, if there was a report to O law about non-compliance in your research and that was obtained by a group through FOIA, you may be very concerned that the press may actually be very adversarial. So you would not want to defend yourself. You would want the institution or somebody else to defend yourself. So think about the situation, but certainly the institution can help you in terms of navigating the press. That sounds great. And I am wondering, what are those institutional protections that they have in place in case there is some sort of retaliation or aggression from maybe not only a media outlet, but folks who are reading what's published there? So again, that's possible. People do have free speech rights. So often people will come to me and say, well, I got a negative email from a person who's opposed to my animal research. And we also not to the police department and they'll look at it. And again, if they just say that we don't, I don't support your research. I think it's bad. I think it's cruel. Nothing we can do about it. That's free speech. People can criticize you. If there is any threat of violence against you, then certainly that's something that law enforcement will get involved with. So you do need to know your chain of communication, who to go to. Often you may start with the IACUC chair and they'll point you to the police department or an equivalent at your institution who will basically give you security advice. Thank you. That's really helpful. And now what if I notice something that's going on at my institution that I want to make institutional leadership aware of so we can always be ensuring the welfare of animals in our work and avoid any negative consequences for both our science and our institution. So you're talking about an incident that you think is inappropriate. There's a problem. So by regulation and law, the IACUC has to consider any concerns. And in fact, there must be avenues at your institution to report noncompliance. So we have in our institution signs in every animal facility and in fact every animal use site about where you go to if you have any concerns about animal research. So the information's out there. You go to one of the contacts there and there's also mechanisms to report things anonymously. And you can rest assure that the IACIC will take it very seriously and we'll do an investigation. That's great. And if I'm asked about those types of investigations that are happening outside of my own work at the institution, is the recommendation like you said to not defend and to lean on the institution support to handle those types of queries? Again, if you're asked about a noncompliance event at your institution, you probably will know nothing about what the institution is doing. You may think your institution's doing nothing when in fact they're doing a lot because obviously these investigations are confidential to protect people that may be innocent, including whistleblowers. So you're never going to know exactly what's going on in the background. Allow your institution to take the lead in commenting. Often the institution's going to say, we don't know what's happening yet. We're still investigating and we can't comment until the investigation is done. And I have one last question for you, Dr. Yates. I'm curious how we handle visits from legislators or other lawmakers who might be interested in seeing the work of our university that might intersect with visiting animal facilities. So your university likely has a government affairs staff and that staff, that search job is to interface with government. And so if you are contacted by an office, a congressional office, for example, you should go to your government affairs people and they'll help you navigate that. And they'll give you advice on how to deal with it. They probably will want to be involved in this whole endeavor. And if you think that it would be helpful to have a legislator who's negative to animal research visit your institution. Again, your government affairs staff would be the people that would help arrange that. They have the contacts and conduits to make it happen. And at our institution, we have actually brought in congressmen into our animal facility and shown them around. And I think that can be helpful if it's done appropriately. Of course, it would be a big security breach if you tried to do this on your own. You get into trouble because you don't have authority to bring visitors into the animal facility without your permission. And it sounds like that's a way that we always make sure that the animals are being protected as well to monitor who's interacting with them. Right, you do not want strangers in the animal facility at any time. You need to go through official channels. But again, you have a large staff at your university, a lot of very trained professionals who are expert in dealing with the press, with the government, et cetera, and make good use of them, make use of their expertise, and they can give you good advice. Definitely will do. Thank you, Dr. Gates. It looks like the responses are slowing down if we wanted to share the results. So it looks like many thought that the conversation was constructive and effective. And if you found it frustrating, unhelpful or inadequate, I think I'd like to pass it off to Bill and Lana to talk about how they thought the conversation went. Again, I think it went okay. These things are interesting. This was actually an unscripted conversation, so it was really off the cuff. But there are lots of resources out there. I think that was the main point to make that investigators can go to at their institution to help them navigate how to communicate with the public about any topic or how to deal with the government on any topic. That's really key. You really do need to know work with the professionals who really are expert in these areas. Yeah, Bill in this case represented an institutional leader who was really supportive and informative, right? Had all the facts to share with us, able to connect with the right people who to get advice from. We were also talking about this a little more after and thinking through the other points of advice he shared were to have communications personnel, the communications team that he referred to in his slides on the call, if possible with you. They can always advise and kind of monitor how the conversation is going. One of the things then that I was reflecting on and watching this was, again, a very positive leader, supportive leader here, right? What if you have an institutional leader who is not supportive of outward communication or maybe animal research more specifically? You know, I don't think that's going to happen very often. I think most institutional leaders who oversee animal research programs are going to be very supportive of them. They know that the importance of those programs to their institution. More and more we're seeing in laboratories that people aren't just doing animal research or human subject research, they're doing both. They're very interested in being translational. And people notice that, that the fact that you do with the animal research to move to human subject research, to move to a cure. There's a continuum and more and more labs are involved in that continuum. So people know that. They know the importance of this research. So Lana, what did you find hard or difficult to, in that conversation? And how, now that you've done it, how would you suggest preparing for a conversation like that with, for someone else who has to talk to their institutional official? That's a great question. So one of the points of advice that Bill had shared with me was to do an adversarial mock interview for when you're speaking with the public, with whatever the target audience might be, like in case you were to encounter pushback. And I think, you know, he just shared that most of the time chairs institutional leadership are going to be supportive, right? Because they're overseeing these types of research programs for a reason. But even if it is a supportive leader, having an opportunity to practice what that conversation is going to be, perhaps with another colleague who's gone through the process before, to make sure even that you're asking the right questions, right? There were things when we were viewing this video back, thinking about, oh, I should have asked who else can be on the call with me if there are any legal teams or communications folks that can join. And I forgot to ask that. So being mindful and just preparing for the conversation, talking it through with someone else so that you don't miss any important points that you might want to hit, and also being prepared with all of the facts and the information. So again, Bill talked a lot about the importance of knowing the outlet that you might be speaking to. So have you read pieces in that outlet that have been written before? Do you have an understanding of who their target audience is and what their goals are and being able to bring that information to the conversation?  That's why they're such a good resource. Thank you both. So this morning, we spent a lot of time talking about openness and the ways we are moving forward in that space. However, sometimes it can still feel like an institution being open is the exception, rather than the rule. And there is often a safety and numbers element that can make people feel comfortable. Do you think that this could be achieved through some sort of official mandate to provide, say, annual reports on animal research information? Well, we do. I mean, at least for large animals, we send those to the USDA. We have to. So that's already covered. You know, in terms of rodents, we actually can estimate the number of rodents we have because we know how many cages are there every day. We don't actually count the number of rodents. That's actually not required. So, but in terms of some aspects of your program, you may not want to be open. There's proprietary things that go on. And I think if an institution, if an entity is getting, for example, a lot of commercial studies, that's what they're basically doing. They may be inclined to be less open because the people that are paying their bills are actually giving them research don't want them to be so open about the work. There are a lot of considerations. I'd like to encourage our virtual audience. If you have questions, please post them in the Q&A. Alice. So I agree with everything that you've said and doc creates. But I've also run into institutions where I've heard the very frustrating response, don't poke the bear. We're just going to let this go and it'll go away. Especially when things have calmed down a little bit. And I'm thinking, this is our chance to get the story out there. And they say, no, no, no, no, no, don't go there. And this is the calms people who are telling me and who are advising the institutional leadership. When you hear that kind of thing, do you have any suggestions for how, and they also don't want to talk about it for very long. So do you have any suggestions for how to get through to people that there may be a different way to think about this? Again, I think there is institutional turnover that occurs. So I think it's important if you're having pushback at your institution, encourage the folks that are pushing back to talk to people at other institutions to get their perspective. I think that's very important. You may have, for example, a person in your council's office, a lawyer who is not so familiar with this topic because they have a lot to worry about in a council's office at a university. And go to an attorney at an institution that's more open. Get their perspective. I think that's the key. Bill, if I could, what steps were needed to create your animal research website, like what offices and departments were involved and how did that come about? So our comms department wanted to do it. So our comms department said, this is important now to make sure that we have a site that we can point people to who are concerned about our animal research. So they led it. Then they came to the animal facility folks, intending veterinarian me, others to actually get content for it. They looked, they highlighted Americans for Medical Progress because our former comms director when that site was created was a big advocate for that group and got information from their site. And then, of course, more recently, we've actually put out email solicitations to investigators, do you want your work focused here and focused on here? And you'll see a number of work from a number of investigators that's out there. And that's because the investigator said, yeah, I want my work featured here. So I think that's important. Now, sometimes investigators are more reluctant to be on websites like that because they're afraid of targeting and other things. So you also then need to bear that in mind. If they don't want to be out there, then you shouldn't push them into the limelight. Great. Thank you so much. So going back to the openness topic, because we've had a lot of discussion about that today, what advice would you have for other institutional officials as they consider movements like the USRO initiative when they're doing their internal calculus of whether or not to formally join something like that or to do it more informally? I do think that institutions, this is a new initiative. And I think it's safety in numbers. I think it would be very effective to have a campaign to try to get a lot of people to informally sign on before they formally sign on. If there's a lot of institutions think this is a good idea, but I don't want to be by myself, then that's a good way of getting a lot of people on at the same time. You just need to have buy-in in the background before you have buy-in in the foreground. Nicole? So you've talked about work that you can't speak about proprietary projects and things like that. And I was curious about your thoughts in some cases, and this has been for audiences of scientific audiences, we've been able to gather people where they're not actually talking about the science itself, a compound or the actual experiment, but rather the care of a specific model or the importance of a specific model. Have you had experience where you have a study where it's exciting and you can't talk about the actual research, but you're able to at least talk about the uniqueness of the model that's being investigated or the nuances of the care and whether that is something that we could be more open about? I think being generally open is very useful. I think it's important to do easy to do. I mean, if there's restrictions because of proprietary concerns about particular research, they just don't want you talking about the data, the exact results from the study or what drug you're studying, for example, what compound, not about the general aspects of the research. And I have one last question, but if anyone else has a question, please post it and we'll ask. So for our faculty, our scientists, how do you recommend they prepare themselves to come to your office to ask about, that I'd like to start an initiative, I'd like to make sure that you are pretty open, but say their institution is not, how do you prepare them for that conversation? Or what advice do you have for them? Again, you need to know your institutional leadership and their background. You know, I'm open about this because I've been an animal scientist my whole career. I've been on AMP's board for 20 years. So I'm open to this stuff because that's just my background. If your leader is from a different background, I think you really just need to do benchmarking. That's really what cells institutions is. This is what other people do. We're not playing the same game as other people, including very reputable institutions. So we need to actually step up to the plate and be just as reputable and open as they are, because that's the norm, not what we do. You need to have the data to back up your arguments. So oftentimes folks that might be concerned or might want to have conversations with their institutional official about these topics are not senior investigators. Some of them might be earlier in their career. They might have other positions in the facility. How would you empower them to seek out their institutional officials specifically? So again, you just need to know who they are. They're largely scientists. Most people that work up to research oversight roles were researchers themselves. That's what gave them the background to do that job. So I think you basically tell people, don't be afraid of them. They're open to discussion. And that's a concern. People actually, because I've been at my institution for 30 years, it's a little different because everybody knows me. So it's like when I go to a meeting, I have to leave an hour early because I'm going to encounter people in the hallway that want to talk with me. But again, if you don't know your institutional official, first of all, get to know them. Schedule a meeting. It's not frightening. And also really encourage your institutional leadership to get out there and meet people. That's part of their job as well. Paula? Dr. Grasser, I just have a question for you. Could you provide some, just your experience? So I know you've done stuff and has to do things. Can you provide any insights on your experience in accessing conversations with institutional officials to do something in outreach or communications? Yes, of course. So I think there's been a few intersecting questions about what if I'm an early career person, I don't quite know where to start. Also talking about maybe not reinventing the wheel and following models of other successful institutions if you're lacking something. One thing that you could definitely leverage and bring to your institutional leadership is the idea of hosting a BRAD event. So BRAD is Biomedical Research Awareness Day. We usually celebrate BRAD on the third Thursday of every April, although of course it doesn't have to be that day. It can be whatever day works for you and your institution. If you sign up and register, and I'll of course make sure that Nia gets all of this information so that she can share it out with everyone. And if you sign up and register, we'll send you a toolkit with everything you need to host an event at your institution, perhaps to educate other fellow scientists as well as staff around your university about the work that's being done and to celebrate all of the many people who are involved in making that research possible. You can also do outward community-facing events with places like schools or a community center to provide some of that education. So the resources are there, and I think if you can show, look at the success of these events. They're occurring all over the country, all over the world. That can be a great place to start and to know that their support even above and beyond what your university is offering as well. I would also say taking some time to participate in events like this to learn effective communication skills is really important. And it's a great area to invest time in for trainees really for graduate students and postdocs, even if you are feeling that you might not have the bandwidth to put on an event or take a conversation forward in a certain way. It's so important for our trainees to be educated in science communication and have that skill going forward. So hopefully that's something that time can be dedicated towards as well. Excellent. Thank you so much, Dr. Yates, Dr. Grassner, and all participants.


and Greenway Nash Wauke Watton will be the pioneers first round matchup. The Titans have exploded onto the scene this year going seven and two after four straight losing seasons and they don't plan on going home anytime soon. In his 23 years as head coach of the Titans, Bob Schwartz admits this may not be the most talented team he's ever had but the team just finds ways to win. We've had more talented teams that haven't gone as far and uh it uh but uh ultimately comes down to winning and these guys have won so they deserve to be where they're at. Six of the team's nine games have been decided by eight points or less with the Titans coming out on top and four of those matchups including their 12-6 win over Proctor in the section 7-3-8 title game. We love coming from behind and coming from as an underdog stepping up and being the better team you know at the end of the game. It's just uh a will to win and we haven't had that for uh quite a few years here it's it's been unmatched our will to win this year. Now the Titans are headed back to state for the first time since 2011. Oh we're all pumped come believe it was our dreams from we're younger. I can't believe we made it this far. On this final buzzer sound we it was nuts it was awesome great feeling and despite having to take on defending champion peers in the quarter finals they have no doubts about their ability to survive in advance. We got to play our game and uh there is no defending state champions anymore. There's eight of us that made the state tournament and we're approaching it that way. So they call my defensive and offensive line if they win the line of scrimmage I think we got the game. Because the team has one goal on their mind. I think our team can make it to the bank. I think we should make it all the way go get to the bank peers is pretty good uh just gonna have to beat them. We're expecting to make a run here we want to make a push and we want to give peers a game and you know earn their respect in the state's respect. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


OK, so what are we going to cover today? We're going to explain what a vehicle diagnostics adapter of VDA is to you. Then we're going to talk about some research we did attacking the VDA. And then we're going to talk about ways and approaches we took to defend the VDA. And then finally, we're going to talk about some educational things we did with the VDA. So specifically, we had four challenges in last year's carcane billet CTF that were based around the VDA. This is a picture of it here. We had it in Vegas mode, so yeah, look at that. Binary modification for Vegas mode, awesome. And we also did some educational things at the Cyber Truck Challenge we'll talk about. So Alex and I are on stage today. But Edward and Sam did a lot of this work as well as a team effort, so we wanted to acknowledge them. We also wanted to acknowledge Dr. Jeremy Daley, who put us on the path to looking at VDAs. And Friendly Vendor Person, who will not be named today, but helped give us some of the VDAs for some of the educational things and was a really good partner working with us to shine light on this part of trucking security. Cool. All right, so finally, what is a vehicle diagnostics adapter? So your truck has an OBD port in it. It's a thing that you technicians can plug into to pull diagnostic information off the truck. I think the VIN number comes through there as well, so you can pull the VIN number through there and also some information from some of the ECUs or the controllers on the truck. It also sometimes is used to flash the firmware of the ECUs within the truck. So the idea is you pull into a service station, you can plug in there. And I guess the way they do it is there's a little computer, the VDA, that actually plugs into the truck. And then there's, for some reason, it's always a Windows computer that plugs into the VDA. So you have a Windows laptop with these vendor DLLs that there's kind of like a joint protocol. I think it's called RP-1210 that everyone used to talk to the VDA. Then the VDA talks to the truck and it pulls data back and forth from it. And you can kind of see here on the right, this is kind of a diagram of the VDA we looked at. So on the right, there is the computer interface. So the USB, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi also, is how you connect directly to the VDA. And then the micropostor connects to the vehicle network. Usually over J1939, unless it's really old. Okay, so congratulations. We all now know what a VDA is. Okay, so now we're gonna talk about attacking the VDA. So we do a lot of embedded device security or a balloon. So attacking embedded devices, it's a pretty simple formula. First you need to get the thing. The internet is really good with this. Pro tip, get more than one of the things because you'll probably break one of them in the process. I think you broke one of these, yeah. Then you wanna do the hardware reversing. You know, figure out, I guess enumerate all the components on the board. Figure out if it has JTAG, UR, stuff like that. Then you wanna get the firmware either from the board or from some sort of firmware update thing. Reverse the firmware, figure out how to update the firmware. And then if you can modify the firmware and put the modified firmware back on, you can change how it works. And then you win. So this is pretty complicated. So when we started working on this, we decided that it was so hard that only our interns could do it. And so that's where Alex came in. He was an intern at the time, he's a full-time employee now. So he's gonna walk you through the work he did as an intern, trying to figure out how this thing works. Awesome, awesome. So the first step that we always go through when reversing a new device is grabbing your favorite screwdriver set and taking it apart. So that's what we did. This is a shot of the PCB of one of the VDAs. And as you can see, the vendor did a great job making connecting to JTAG and UART super hard by giving us really awesome adapters to use and just plug into. We've identified the flash, the microcontroller, and then a Wi-Fi chip and a Bluetooth chip on this board. Now, the more astute of you might be noticing, the Wi-Fi chip has a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth stack, but there's also a Bluetooth chip on the board which begs the question, why? We don't have a great answer. I think these memes probably illustrate some of our confusion as to why there were two independent Bluetooth stacks on this device, but it had both. So once we took a look at the hardware and read a couple of data sheets, we were able to make a super legit power adapter to plug in the VDA in a way that it's not normally powered. Yeah, this is what happens when you tell an intern to power a VDA, but it gets the job done, so that's cool. And then just grab your favorite female adapter cables to connect to the UART and not have to do any work with that, really, because the vendor provided a handy-dandy interface. So once we connect it to the UART, unlike most devices that try and obfuscate and make it really difficult to find out what the debug options are on a shell, the vendor just gave us a really easy way of dumping memory. So we typed in dump invalid option and then got every possible permutation of dumping we could ever want, so it was pretty simple. We're just like, hey, can we get the first copy of firmware on the device and then it spits it out handy-dandy over ASCII over UART. So I wrote a really complicated extraction algorithm which is dump the whole firmware to serial and then write a Python program to convert that into binary. So once we actually had the bytes of the firmware sitting in memory on the device, what we wanted to do is reverse engineer the file format that actually puts those bytes on the device so then we can see whether we can actually change the bytes that are put on the device. So as Wyatt mentioned, this piece of hardware uses a Windows laptop in order to do the firmware update. And so I was a little worried because I hadn't done Windows reversing that this would be kind of complicated, but it turns out the firmware update format file was just put in the files for the application on Windows like called firmware.bin. So that took about two seconds to look at and then we had the full firmware update file for the manufacturer. This is a colorized gif of me reversing the firmware update. It did not take that long. We're not going to go into the details of how this firmware format actually works, but if you spend enough time looking at it, you will be able to figure it out. And once we did that, we knew how the vendor firmware update file translates to the bytes actually sitting in memory on the device. So once we've done all that really complicated reversing work, we wanted a way to be able to replicate that so no one would have to go through the same process. So internally, this is our tool called OFRAC. This is what Red Balloon Security uses internally. It's also open source, you guys can try it at home. And it allows us to very easily go through all of the steps that we normally do to reverse engineer and modify firmware. So we can identify arbitrary binary formats, unpack them, analyze them, make the changes that we want, and then repack them up in the format that the device expects. It's in Python and we have a really snazzy gooey on the right. If you guys want to take a look at it in more depth, we'll be at our booth over there and demoing it. So after I've reversed the format, we can write a script in Python that specifies the firmware format and allows us to make the modifications programmatically and have it spit out a binary that we can just drop back on the device. So saving a lot of time for anyone else to have to do any of the reversing. So now that we know how to make the firmware file for the device to take, we wanted a more fun way of putting it on the device than just putting that file back in the Windows file system and clicking through the vendor tool to actually put it on. So the firmware update happened over USB.  You sniff the USB traffic and store it as a PCAP. And then we spent a really long time reversing it. We're gonna go through the protocol later and then wrote our own little Python script to just do the firmware update and then got rid of our Windows laptop because we don't really like Windows. So to go over the super complicated update procedure of this device, you first have to send hex three and then the size of the firmware update in hex as a USB packet and then wait for it. You just send the entire bytes of the firmware update. There's no encryption. There's no signature. It has a CRC check, but you basically just slap it in USB packet and it just takes it up and rewrites the firmware. For those playing at home, there's bonus points. This same unauthenticated firmware update works over HTTP. So if you have Wi-Fi on the device, you can very easily just connect to the access point and then do this exact same update format over HTTP. So now we have a full way of having bytes that we can modify our computer and putting it on the target device. So what do we do with that? Well, the first thing that we always do when performing this type of analysis is testing that are unpacking and repacking and this whole process works correctly. So the first thing that we normally do is just by modifying a string and seeing whether the device still boots. So that worked. And then we wanted to do something more fun, which we showed you at the beginning, which was the LED toggle that we hooked into ping. So you can see the code on the right. Pretty complicated, but again, we used Ofrac, which is our custom unpacker and packer tool in order to put this code into the binary. And specifically, we used Ofrac with a tool we wrote called PatchMaker, which allows us to compile C into bytes and then link it into the full firmware image. So it's really easy to iterate and write code and just plonk it back in the binary without having to deal with any linking. So this case was a little bit more difficult than normal. If you can see on the top left, the compiler directive underscore underscore regarchs. The calling convention for this toggle LED function was kind of abnormal. So the architecture of this was Motorola Cold Fire and for this specific function, you needed to pass in the first argument as a register, which kind of messed with our compiler tool chain. So we had to use a different tool chain written by the wonderful Dr. Volkl Barthaman. Shout out to him, who made the VBCC tool chain and then we just had to integrate it into our tool and compile that code in and then boom, just add in our modification. Yeah, Dr. Volkl Barthaman. His website's pretty cool, I would definitely check it out. VBCC supports a lot of architectures. It looks like it's from the 90s, but we built it and it worked right away. So just to highlight this, this is kind of how we do binary modification with OFRAC. We can use, so run ping cmd as a function we found in the binary and we wanted to over place it so whenever we pinged, we would toggle the LED lights. And so in this case, we were able to call toggle LED directly in the C code that we're writing and then using PatchMaker, we can compile this code and then link it in so that all the addresses just work with the target binary and then just use OFRAC to copy it back into the target binary. So you get pretty readable like C, it's really useful for developing binary modifications. Awesome, so far we showed you a cool demo with LEDs, like why do we care about this ability to modify the former of the VDA? So most VDAs are used to update the engine control unit in these big trucks. So the workflow is you have a new engine control unit firmware for the vendor that needs to be updated. It gets passed to the VDA, which then directly uses it and sends it over to the ECU to flash it. And so the engine control unit obviously controls the engine, very important part of the car. That's why it's worrying in particular that the VDA is normally completely unsecured, right? Like this is a device that technicians use at the dealership, not really locked up, not a part of anyone's threat model, anyone could sort of walk in and do this kind of firmware change. And then in addition, since we found so many ways to update this firmware, really not a good thing that this is a critical path in terms of getting firmware on the engine controller. Excuse me, so as a result, you could for example, put an implant on the VDA, wait for an engine controller update, add your own modifications to it, and then unbeknownst to anyone else, you now have code running on the ECU of that big truck, which is obviously really not great. Yeah, so this is kind of where the attack work ended. We're able to, as you see, modify the firmware to put in Vegas mode, flash the LED lights, which is fun, but those LED lights are what tell the technician that the device is on or off with Wi-Fi's connected if data's being transmitted. So you can use your imagination to think about what things like that can do. Alex mentioned, you know, sometimes firmware updates these use pass through this device, some diagnostic data come out, so it's a really nice place for an attacker to sit. And this work kind of extends work that Dr. Jeremy Daley and Shreeka Kumar did. They presented an SCAR this year about attacking the Windows application that communicates with the VDA. So I'd recommend checking out that work. They looked at the Windows DLLs and found that it was pretty easy to insert Shim DLLs into the process and peak and poke and manipulate packets on the Windows laptop. So kind of all the way down to the truck, there's all these places where you can insert and manipulate the traffic. Something interesting just to think about. Okay, so now we're gonna defend it. We're gonna fix all the problems and go home. Yay. So we're not actually gonna fix all the problems today. We're just gonna focus on some of the low hanging fruit. So the immediate problem here is you might have noticed there's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on this VDA. And I think you can imagine that some people might not want that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled. I wouldn't want enabled. I think people maintaining military vehicles might not want to have Wi-Fi access point on their VDAs they're plugging in or Bluetooth as well. But this is kind of a classic situation in not just automotive but all embedded devices where the vendors either they don't want to or can't remove the hardware components and software components that these features are implemented on. And so the way you disable the features is essentially flipping a bit in a config file saying don't turn on Wi-Fi, don't turn on Bluetooth. But as we all know, the code that underlines it and the hardware is still there. So an attacker can still modify the firmware or use an exploit to then turn on these features. So it's a very ripe attack surface. So we're gonna be talking about VDAs but I encourage you to think about this is a broader problem. We have component X as features ABC. We don't want those features. We can't remove them because the vendor won't remove them. So how can we remove them in the binary? Okay, so what we're gonna do today to talk you through on what we did is like how can we apply a binary patch to the VDA firmware that removes all the code that underpins these features without having any side effects on the device. And of course, this is an example of a general problem. How do we remove features XYZ from component A so there's no side effects and those features can't work and the attack surface isn't there for people to use. So we use a technique called Autotomic Binary Reduction. So the name is derived from nature actually. It's a nice place to look for inspiration. So Autotomy is when animals will shed a part of their body when they're being attacked to make it harder for predators to catch them. So ABR was proposed by our CEO Ong when he was a graduate student at Columbia. That's where the work comes from. So if you wanna really get into the math behind it, you can look at his dissertation. But to simplify, there's really just four steps. First you identify the high level feature that you don't want and then you identify the entry point in the code for it. Then you can use analysis tools to identify all the code and data that are exclusively control for dependent on those entry points. You wanna do this very carefully. So if you're not sure, you'll leave something in and then you remove that code and data and then you recompense the high level entry point with a return patch that makes sense if the program ever calls it. So if you think about like a Bluetooth subsystem, there's usually some sort of process that initializes everything. You can remove the code for that and insert like a return negative one or it depends on what is actually in the system but return code that will tell the system this is not up and it's not gonna run. So this graph I think simplifies, obviously it's more complex but at a high level this is the idea. If you have feature A and feature B, we wanna remove feature A. We look at the control flow graph, find all the functions that are exclusively control flow dependent on feature A. So function five, we cannot remove but functions one and two, three we can. And then we insert that return patch there. So the workflow for this is fairly standard and actually Alex did most of the work already that you need human input for now in. So we've understood how the firmware works and how we can update the firmware. So next step is just to identify the feature points and then all of the actual autotomy work about identifying the code that needs to be removed and removing it and packing the firmware. We can completely automate right now with the work we have. And what we're doing as a company is we're trying to move up the stack to automate this entire process. So there's minimal human interaction needed into it. Okay, so identifying the feature entry points. How do you do that? Well this is where you have to roll up your sleeves and do a little reversing. So on embedded systems like the VDA this can be a little complicated. But sometimes you get lucky. So in this case you can use symbols to find leak source code online that you can use to then label the functions in your project. This was using cold fire. So in this case we use Gija but you can use any other disassembly tool as well to do this. And then you can kind of start labeling the features inside the binary. So a new binary comes in. This whole process can be automated. You can start with the debug strings within the binary and then work up to find the functions and then automate this process removing that code. So for this like proof of concept we generalized five entry points. The OS tasks that initialize the subsystems. We also wanted to remove the UR debug commands because we found them super useful. And yeah, it should be harder to figure out how to dump the memory from the device I think, yeah. Then we also targeted some driver initialization code for these things as well. And these were the results. So we used the ABR algorithm that we have, ABR balloon, we removed in total 574 functions and end up being 144 kilobytes of code. So that was about 7% of the binary. And you can kind of visualize it here. Everything that's dark was unmodified and the stripes of green here are the areas where ABR removed the binary code. So it's kind of cool. You can see like throughout the binary there's huge swaths of functions that are just not needed and attackers can't use it anymore. Then we worked with friendly vendor person to test the image using the functional test suite that they used and they confirmed that performance was consistent with the original firmware image. So that was great. We basically showed we were able to remove this feature and the regular performance of the device wasn't modified at all. Okay, so we didn't fix all the problems. So as we're reflecting on this, it's kind of Zen. We were able to use some of the reversing that an attacker would use. It's the same workflow in the beginning to identify the features and remove it. So removing the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi code is good. We would challenge vendors to reconsider whether they even need it. Yeah, I think that's something we can all think about. Do we need to put this in? Can we support firmware builds that don't have it in? Another thing to think about is ideally you want to at least not leave the headers on to JTAG and UART. Ideally disable them as well. That just makes it a little harder for people to mess with the device. For production devices, of course. So then we get to some kind of the lower level challenges. How can we make it so anyone can't modify the firmware? So some sort of secure firmware update mechanism, maybe a secure boot mechanism would be useful here. And then how do we know that the firmware hasn't been modified? How do we know that the VDA that's on the shelf in my technician's office hasn't been tampered with? There's some sort of runtime protection monitoring could help there, because then you could see that the device has been corrupted. Okay, so we've attacked, we've defended, and now we'll just talk about some education we did. So we repurposed this research to build two educational things to kind of take these real world problems and make it challenges that people can use to kind of learn about this specific issue. And this is another area where the friendly vendor person helped us out, because we only had two of these devices, but we were able to, at the Cybertruck Challenge, have, for the last few years, a two hour workshop.  So I encourage you to check it out. There's also some really good educational resources on the website as well. So if you're not super familiar with J1939, that's a good place to start. But anyway, in our workshop, we walked them through this process. They physically took apart the devices, dumped the firmware, getting you out was a really fun moment when you get the shell there, also because one thing that we've kind of observed is that familiarity with command line tools is something that probably we could build on more. So connecting the UR, getting screen working and stuff like that, it was a really good moment for the students. And then we walked them through the boot string modification and a contained environment where they could toggle the LED lights there.  So challenge one was a real world challenge. We gave them a Peacup and we gave them a modified firmware image and said flash this image on the device. And so there the flag printed in the boot shell once you're able to flash the device. Challenge two was a little too difficult. It was ambitious. I think we would remove it if we did it again as CTF, but there the challenge was to essentially put the device in Vegas mode. And then challenge three, there's a really good write-up online that kind of walks through the process, but challenge three involved finding a super military grade encryption scheme on the device. I think it was just a bunch of like X soaring data against the XOR like repeating key. And so the write-ups really cool because they showed you how they use the ability to map the firmware to load a Geiger project, find the function. And I think they actually emulated the function in this to get the decrypted key there. And then challenge four was OTA to save the day. So we had the Wi-Fi access points turned on and you had to do the firmware update procedure but over the air. Okay, so just to recap, yeah, so that's the binary modified image in Vegas mode. We talked about what VDAs are. We showed how it's relatively straightforward to try to modify the firmware on them and attack it. We can think about what that implies to the industry. We talked through some ways which binary modifications could be made to harden the image. So we don't need to go to the end manufacturers who want to. And we talked about how we can use, I think this is a really good takeaway point. You've used real world research and convert it into challenges to educate both students and also push people out of their comfort zone. I think this was the first VDA that was at the Carkinville CTF. And yeah, I think we just want to acknowledge Edward and Sam who couldn't be here today, Jeremy and the friendly vendor person for helping out with this. So, oh, and lastly, we're Red Balloon. We're hiring now, so if you want to learn more about OFRAC over this work, we can take some questions now but we also booth over at the Carkin Village and we have two different CTF challenges that we contributed to the Carkin Village CTF this year as well. So yeah, thanks for your time. Thank you.


All right. So what do we got first? Okay. First up, from our favorite British maker, Simon Monk, we end Duncan, Amos, I guess, also friend. Probably our second favorite person comes as awesome, Electronics Notebook. We have a couple of Electronics Notebooks we've stocked, but I really like the design of this one. It's got some cool things going for it. One, Spiral Bound. How can you not love that? So you can both tear out pages and also lay it flat. I always love lay flat binding. It's got the nice plastic binding as well, so it doesn't get bent. Yes. It's got the extra reference pages that you have expected and seen in many books. So in the back, they've got the color, resistor chart, common op amp circuits, ASCII tables, MicroPython and CircuitPython, GPIO 0 and Arduino, like starting guides. But what I really love is, so on each page you get both grid, which is great. It's a nice light grid, but on the other page you get this half size breadboard layout that's kind of faint so you can draw your circuits over it and then make notes about your circuit diagrams, which I thought was like a funky trick. You still get three sides of the page that are, you get the left, sorry, the back of the page is still gridded, but then of course you can write over the breadboard. It's kind of lightly printed, but I thought for, I think, I kind of imagine that SideMonkey, he's written a lot of books with circuit diagrams and he's probably like, hey, I want a notebook that I can use to diagram my schematics on a, you know, you can draw like a Pico or Arduino or a Trinket and write out the LEDs, so it's like paper fritzing. So I have a bunch of notebooks and I've been like, you know what, if they were spiral bound I would use them. And then they just sit there because I'm like, oh they don't lay flat and I can't do what I want to do with it. And so I have like a pile of notebooks. So this is like one of the first ones that I've seen. And I don't know why people, some folks stopped doing spiral. I think just the way, you know, everything was a mole, wasn't moleskin. I actually, I apologize, I didn't realize this, this is dedicated to Duncan. He was, he was an assistant, but he actually passed away. Okay. Well then it means more then. And that's really- I didn't know that there, this is actually, there's like this beautiful epitaph in the beginning. Oh well. But I didn't read it before. That's okay. What a great way to have a tribute to someone that obviously Simon cared about. Yes. This is really good. So, you know, this is the thing about supporting maker companies. There's more to it.  And like, this is dedicated to someone who probably had a big impact on, on Simon's. Well, one of the things I'll say is everything that Simon designs is like really, he's really thoughtful. He's very thoughtful. Yeah. All right. Well, I'm going to take a look at that right after the show. Check this out. Okay. Next up, you saw this from a group of makers that love to build stuff with bricks, sometimes called Lego or Lego compatible bricks. This is a builder mat specifically designed- Oh right. For those fo- Remember you asked about that? Yeah. I was like, we should stock this. And here it is. We added another photo afterwards. That was, yeah. Well, it's okay. You can show it on the overhead. I'll show it on the overhead. But basically it's, it's one to one- Yeah, you put the bricks on there. Hold on. Hit the bricks. So hold on. Let me actually grab the bag of bricks. All right. Well, I'll show this thing here. I got a bag of bricks. Yeah. I got a bag of bricks. So if you have a bag of bricks like this, so what's neat is, especially if you're like, you don't want to count and do sizing, this is sized exactly for doing- So this is like your, you do a lot of Lego stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And it's all like, apparently like it's got like the one-third width, like it's everything is, sorry, it's this way. So it's like double block and then, yeah, this is the height.  You don't have to like count it out. And there's also an area for angled, the angled pieces. And then this is life size of the little human figurine. Yeah. I saw this and I was like, this would be kind of neat and now that it's in percent, it's even more impressive. Yeah. It's actually very nicely made mat too. It's like really thick and it lays nice and flat. Okay. Cool. Great for brick builders. Next up, you know, the code was succulent. So this is why Mark DeVanc, who's been doing an amazing job with these artistic beautiful, lovely succulent. Yeah. You know, the best artistic LEDs in the world. I mean, this is it. There's nothing else like it. Yeah, these are cool. I'd actually like the succulents because the color actually looks like the color of succulents. So we had green and now we have a yellowish green. Okay. And the stars show tonight besides you, Lady Aida, our team at Adafruit, our community, our customers is. We have updated the quad or sorry, 14-segment quad alphanumeric displays to have STEMI QT connectors on the back. So it's the same size and shape and pinout as before, but now you can plug and play it much easier. For now, you still have to solder the digits onto the display, but you can get them in. Let's see. Click on the first one. Yeah. It's blue, red. Even better photos. So the next one I think is green, yellow. So yeah, no, they've got the contrast going well. So yellow, orange is yellow, white, and green. So red, yellow, white, blue, green. So each one of them, it's again the same code as before, but now plug and play. And I'll show that on the phone. Yeah. I'm going to show these. One of the things we get asked once in a while is like, does Agent Fruit do like CGI stuff because no one ever shows any electronics with the lights working on it. And so we're like, no, we actually do this. It's hard. And we also do live demos on our shows as well, because we really like to show these things to show you. It really is easy. You can run a company, run a show, and somehow manage to also do live demos. Yes. And they work. So yeah, this is great, because it's so, it is really bright. I mean, the contrast is very good in person, but of course it's tough to show. They look really, but it looks nice. It's very nice. So now it's plug and play. So I've got like this, you know, this Stem IQ T board, and I just have a connector going to it. So it's easy to plug and play, and then you can of course chain more displays if you like. For this one, I just soldered in Swiss pins so we could like quickly change out the colors because I want to do this demo. So we've got bright green, and then you can also get, let's see, I'll just swap out one, you can get red, get the right way around live demo. There you go. You lit it up though. Oh. You did. What? I did. I saw it. You know, I didn't insert these flat. I was all like, we do live demos. Check this out. I know, I know, but the problem with live demos is sometimes I, yeah. I'll edit it in post. Hold on. Dude, dude, dude, look how perfect this is. De-de-de-de-de-de. Everything's fine. How did you get this? Everything's fine. Everything's okay. That thing's going on. Everything's safe. There you go. Okay. I fit it in. Hi. Everything's fine. Nothing happened. So it's nice about the 14 segments. You can see if you're doing letters, you can have like lowercase and uppercase letters. And so our libraries have, for CircuitPython Arduino, have a font that you can use that will display it nicely. Otherwise, it's plug and play. The one update that I did do is there is now, instead of two power pins, there's a VIO and a V-hi pin. So the VIO pin is the same as the systemic UT pin, which means like in this case it's running off of three volts, which is, which is plenty, plenty bright. But I'm going to do a dangerous live demo because I didn't try this ahead of time. Yeah. Okay. I like it. You learn nothing. I learn nothing. But it, so it's running at three volt power and three volt logic, but then I can connect this to USB power and then it gets even brighter. So now I'm powering just the LEDs. I can power just the LEDs alone. Blowing up the camera. I know it's pretty fast. It's so bright. Okay. Yeah. So at five volts power and then three volt, five volt, three volt, five volt. You can see it's a little bit different. Yeah. It's a little bit brighter. So handy. And then I touched on things. But it's handy if you are, if you, because one of the issues people had is, oh, they wanted to use three volt logic for the driver chip, but they wanted the LEDs to be driven from five volts to get like a brighter look, especially for the green and blue and white, which have a forward voltage of about 3.4 volts. So updated is one of our STEM and QTification projects. We're trying to go through every product and QTFI and so you can see we're going back in time. This is one of our older products, but now it's plug and play. Yep.


Thanks for the opportunity to share a little bit about the work of the police department for the last year. It's a privilege to have the opportunity to lead the police department and to work with all of you to make sure Boygan a great place to live. So to start out with I just like to really tell you where we're coming from and so our vision as a police department for the last 10 years has been to be the safest community of its size in the United States. So it's a big lofty goal. We're not afraid to take on big goals and set big goals and work to accomplish them. So that's what it's about. Our mission is to be the model of excellence in policing by working in partnership with the community and others to fight crime, the fear of crime and disorder to enforce laws while safeguarding the constitutional rights of all people to provide quality service to all of our residents and visitors and to create a work environment in which we recruit, train and develop an exceptional team of employees. So as you can see it really encompasses everything. It's understanding that really the key to our success is the employees that work for us and that we have to give them the tools and support them so that they can be successful. It's also understanding that it's not just crime but the fear of crime that really creates issues in neighborhoods and in cities and really trying to take care of that disorder so that people feel comfortable in getting out of their houses and interacting and really creating community in our city. So I'm going to start right out with what crime looks like. So we have Part 1 Crimes for the last 10 years up there and really I would point you to two things and I don't want you to get too hung up on this but I think it's somewhat dramatic. If you looked in the lower left hand corner you can see Total Part 1 Crimes for 2009, 2006 and if you look at in the lower right hand corner for 2019, Total Part 1 Crimes for 2019 is 911 and what that equates to is a 55% decrease over that 10 year period. I can pull out more numbers for you if you're really interested because in the 1990s the numbers are even higher so this is one of the things that we face both as a community and as a nation with the way we share information nowadays it creates fear and doesn't necessarily give reality to what's going on in our cities and in our communities and so why we have crime problems. The crime problems today are much less than they've been in the past and there's lots of reasons for those and I'm going to try to talk to you about some of them. So I think one of the things that would jump out at you is our assault number so it's 109 for aggravated assaults in 2019 and so that's higher than it was in 2009 and I think that's important because just looking at the numbers and not putting in context makes you think that things are really out of control but there's lots of reasons that that happens. Number one is laws change and so things get classified differently as time goes on and also one of our goals is to be the model of excellence which means that we're always looking at what we're doing, what knowledge that there is about policing and victimization and medical issues and everything that surrounds the work that we do and try to figure out how to get better at that. So of those 109 aggravated assaults that we investigated in 2019, 93% of those cases the victims and the suspects knew each other. 17% were family members and the other 76% were acquaintances. So only about 7% very small, small number of those incidents are there strangers. So the danger isn't going out and walking at night and getting abducted or assaulted by some stranger walking down the street. The real danger in our community is in our families and in our relationships. Of those 109, 50% of them are domestic abuse incidents and this is probably underreported but 33% involve either the use or abuse of alcohol and drugs and so that's an underlying theme not only in our community but really our state. So I talked about us figuring out things that we don't know and becoming more aware of what's going on and so one of those illustrations that I would provide to you is strangulation and domestic violence. So I can tell you that 10 years ago when I came here, we would have known very little about strangulation. So strangulation is when somebody puts their hands around somebody's throat and squeeze and constrict and stop the blood flow and oxygen from getting to the brain. So that when an officer shows up on a scene and they're investigating that they're not going to see evidence of that. So very underreported in the past but through research we've come to understand the importance of strangulation because there's a direct correlation with lethality. So we know that in those domestic violence situations that result in homicide, strangulation is one of the key factors that would lead us to understand that escalation is going to happen. And so we've worked with our countywide group, the dark team, domestic abuse response team to develop best practices and train our officers so that they know to ask these questions so that they can identify these. They have a lethality form that they fill out and that we share with our partners so that not only we know that this is a high dangerous and lethal relationship and that there needs to be an intervention but all of our system partners know that district attorney's office is the judges, the advocates, the service providers, they all get that information. So we can take whatever opportunities we can to try to intervene in those cases. And so I guess the big point that I'm making here is not only have we improved the services that we're delivering to the community, but also there's going to be an increase in those numbers because we're recognizing things that we didn't recognize in the past and we're trying to intervene to stop that from happening in further situations. Of the 109 cases last year, five of them involved the firearm and only one of those involved a stranger. So our gun crime is very low in this community. Now I'm just going to throw some outputs at you so that you understand really what's happening in the background with some of the work that we did or do. So a number that's not on there but our total open record requests that we processed in 2019 was 6,546 open records requests. So it's something that that's growing and something that that we spend a lot of time doing. Part of that is you'll see there's was 197 open records requests just for digital files. And so as we enter the digital world that's something that we've taken on and something that's going to continue to be a big obstacle for us. Obviously there's there's lots of benefits to it. And so we've gotten bodycams and I know that the narrative behind bodycams was it was going to catch the police doing all kinds of bad things. But really really the the truth is is that it helps us collect evidence and provide better cases to the district attorney and city attorney. And it helps them resolve those issues faster. Discovery requests for for digital evidence. We had 1326 just last year and we've provided mostly to the district attorney's office, but 8,975 digital files, mostly bodycam video to them. So lots of processing there. We've worked very hard to try to streamline the process so that there's less work involved. But it's going to be something that we're going to have to continue to deal with. In the lower left hand corner forensic down forensic phone downloads. Last year we did 992. So as everybody is now carrying a computer around with them everywhere they go. That piece of equipment is becoming more and more important in our criminal cases and requiring us to do lots more work. Not only downloading phones, but really the bigger key then is spending the time going through all of the information that we download to figure out what's evidence or what might impact a case one way or the other. I think one of the one of the challenges for us is to set clear guidelines not of what we do, process which phones we do, but rather which ones we don't. Because the chance to do it is just so great that we're going to have to put limits on it or we'll never have anybody out on the street doing any work. On the bottom right hand corner there's a number 84 child interviews at the Child Advocacy Center. So again this is us recognizing best practice and how to better deal with victims and provide them a better path forward for healing and those kinds of things. So the Child Advocacy Center is located in Salkville and it's three counties that share it. Sheboygan, Ozaki and Washington County. Sheboygan Police Department is the largest user of the Child Advocacy Center and they provide child forensic interviews. And so what this means is essentially they have experts that are conducting the interviews for us. We want to only conduct one interview not multiple interviews to reduce the level of trauma on our victims and then they're going to videotape it so that it can be used in court. They also provide medical exams so children that are assaulted they have experts that they work with from Children's Hospital that are there that help give medical exams gather and gather evidence. They have advocacy so we work with Safe Harbor. Safe Harbor is a partner with them and they provide advocates for all of our child cases and our sexual assaults so that there's somebody there supporting the victim and helping them get to available resources and then the Child Advocacy Center also helps provide mental health services where it's needed. So just a couple other things that I would mention here last year with with not only the opioid but really the drug issue that we have. We collected 1,589 pounds of prescription drugs. We responded to 26 non-fatal overdoses. We administered Narcan seven times to those victims and we investigated 12 fatal overdoses from either opiates or methamphetamine or often what we call poly drugs so multiple different drugs that they overdosed on. We participate not only in setting up the drug treatment court but also as a key team member or involved in the Sheboygan County Veterans Treatment Court. We're part of Healthy Sheboygan County 2020 and we've instituted a DEC program which is a it's a drug recognition for children program so anytime that we respond to a scene and there's drugs that are recovered in the house essentially where children could have access to them we work with the Child Advocacy Center to get them tested to make sure that that if they have exposure to those drugs that we can provide them the services to go forward from there and that's a partnership with Health and Human Services. So this I'm just throwing up here so the number 25,379 is a total number of law incidents so this is incidents that we respond to where we have a need really to document significant information there so this is just a snapshot of the number of calls that we respond to so it's the actual number of interactions that with people that we have is much greater than that but I think it's a good benchmark and then the numbers that I'm really contrasting it that I want you to see is our use of force numbers and the key ones would be in red and so of all the contacts that we had in 2019 with citizens the only uses of force that we had were eight times we deployed or we used a taser on a subject that we were taking them into custody so eight times it's not something that's happening every day six times we employed active countermeasures and that would be punching kicking using a knee strike something like that to overcome somebody's resistance so six times we did that and then three times we deployed OC or oleoresum capsicum spray to try to overcome their resistance and then at the top there was one use of deadly force and that happened when one of our officers who's on the marshals task force was in Ashland Wisconsin with the marshals task force trying to arrest a fugitive that was wanted from the state of Oregon and he armed himself with a rifle and and got in his car and tried to drive some of them over but so I think that again the narrative that the police are out using force on people all the time is is demonstrated much differently in the information here the next topic so any of you that go to a neighborhood meeting what what you would hear about is driving and traffic accidents and I would tell you that that I agree with you that it's a key concern not only of our community but of your police department and what's important is that when we address this issue that we um how would I tell you this that we look at the big picture and do it in a way that we can be effective and so we have to treat each individual complaint with care and with concern but we still have to approach this from a big picture um in order to be successful if we're just trying to chase every incident we're not going to be successful in keeping the numbers down and so what I would tell you is that today there's more automobiles on the road in Sheboygan that at any time in the past people are much more distracted than any time in the past and people are much more aggressive in a bigger hurry than any time in the past so the fact that our numbers are as low as they are in comparison to past years we're not anywhere near where I would want to be but I think we're demonstrating that that we are showing care and concern and that we're trying to approach it in a reasonable and thoughtful thoughtful way and the the real key here is not how many tickets the police can write but getting each citizen to show that same care and concern and address it at at that level so just some more outputs not to bore you but to show you some of the work that's being done so we responded to 493 alarms and and I just throw that number out because this came up about a year a year and a half ago um on social media with some people believing that that we're out of line because we're charging some people after they've had multiple false alarms for that but of these 493 alarms I would bet that less than two are an actual crime or a burglary the rest are all false alarms so they're all times where we have officers involved on other incidents or involved in other work that we're pulling them away and sending them like an emergency to somebody's house or business where there's really nothing going on abandoned vehicles we get a lot of abandoned vehicle complaints and there's a lot of people in the city that think that that we don't do anything about them so we towed 192 vehicles last year and so we do aggressively address it as best as we can and then the other number that I like to talk about at our committee meetings is on the bottom is our what we call chapter 51 emergency detention so we did 110 of those last year and so that's 110 times that we had to intervene and restrict somebody's freedom so that they could get mental evaluation and hopefully mental treatment to get them out of the crisis that they were in and back living in our community so one of the big challenges that that we had last year and that will continue to have is the people on the top row are the people that that retired last year and left us and so lots of really good people with lots of experience and a whole lot of knowledge and so watching all of that walk out the door can be a challenge but I would tell you it's it's also an opportunity because you see all of those people under there that come in with a lot of can-do attitude and a lot of energy and so our task is really to channel that and get the most out of it the other thing that they bring really is less resistance to change so many of the things that we're doing they're more open to and we can move things forward faster with them so you know I think with with the number of them that we have new officers on second and third shift it can be sometimes challenging for citizens to be patient with them and let them work through things but but as that goes on and they gain the experience it's really going to be a positive thing for the city we've been very lucky in the quality of the people that we've been able to hire over the last couple years so one of the things that that we've learned is the stress that that law enforcement can have on somebody's personal life and work life and so we've tried to do many things within the department to try to a lessen that but be also make sure that the resources are in place for those that are struggling and so we've developed a chaplains program a peer support program we have EAP in the city and the program that we did last year is what we called Armor Academy and it's really about bringing in family members and significant others of of the members in our department and sharing with them all the resources that are available and then also talking to them about what the stressors are in our occupation so that they recognize what's going on maybe provide a little bit more patience to their significant other or family member and recognize when something's going on and also to try to reduce that stigma so that we have family members that are helping them to to reach out and use the support systems that we've put in place so that that they can be healthy and productive via work we've also done a lot of resiliency training and we have Matt Walsh who has went through a program trained a trainer for a national resiliency program through the FBI National Academy and then the last thing i just want to or the second last thing i just want to touch on briefly is is our work in the neighborhoods so the neighborhoods are the lifeblood of this city and where everything really starts and this is really important for multiple reasons but but the main reason is because without our officers having relationships with our citizens we're not going to be successful and i talked about this wellness piece when the officers are running call-to-call going from disorder and crisis to disorder and crisis they they start to really um what do you tell you this they start to get crazy in that they start to think that everybody is in crisis and that everybody's crazy and so we have to provide opportunities where our officers can see that that's not true and that people really are normal and good people um and so not only building those relationships for the citizens but really building those relationships for our for our officers so that they can stay healthy and maintain a healthy relationship with our citizens so there's just a couple things there about what it looks like but it also looks like 270 outreach activities last year it looks like shop with a cop blue santa cop with a cop brought with a cop coffee with a cop cops and bobbers safety town citizens academy just to name a couple and then lastly none of this happens by the police department alone it happens through all year support the support of the fire and police commission the support of our citizens and the support of individual citizens and businesses who help provide funding to make many of these outreach activities happen so thank you very much