Thank you, Owen, for kind introduction and thank you especially for the hard work that's gone into organizing this exceptional meeting. Speaking for NIH and all the folks who are here, we're really welcoming this opportunity to hear from the community about where we need to go next with this very exciting area of science, which is just bursting with opportunity and potential for understanding aspects of human health that had been outside of our reach until recently and are now coming forward in a way that all of us are truly excited about. And as Owen has said, we are at a critical juncture here where the microbiome project having lived for a while in the common fund is now moving out into lots of other territories, lots of institutes involved. And it is a great moment to hear from all of you about where those opportunities are most compelling. We at NIH live unfortunately in challenging times when it comes to resources with things like the sequester having put us in a historically difficult position as far as being able to support all the science we would like to, all the more reason why we have to think carefully about how to set priorities and getting input from the scientists in this room. On this topic is a great example of the kind of thing that we're trying to do more and more of. So, Owen, thank you and your team of organizers for making this possible. Believe me, NIH is listening, participating, delighted this is happening. My task I think is to basically set very briefly a little bit of the historical context here and then I'm going to pass off to Eric Green who can tell you where we are right now in terms of the things that NIH has supported in this human microbiome project. And then that will sort of make it possible for all those speakers who follow over the next couple of days to go forward from that with exciting new ideas. That's exactly what I think the intention is of the meeting. My title here I thought about a bit and you could basically blame me for being a little hyperbolic here with all of these superlative supercharging and superorganism and not to mention the attempt at alliteration here. But it is a superorganism. We're talking about in terms of the interactions between host and microbes and the way in which we would like to see that move forward is to move that science in ever more powerful directions to understand how that works, how disruptions in that superorganism result in health and disease and what we could do about it. So very briefly in terms of the background, this certainly fits the mission of the NIH quite powerfully and compellingly. You may know NIH has this twofold mission of fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems, but also the application of that knowledge to extend healthy life and reduce illness and disability. Microbiome fits smack in the middle of this longstanding mission of the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world, the National Institutes of Health. Going back to sort of the historical side of this, you could say that microbiome was a very natural fit for NIH. Going back to our very original origins, many people aren't aware NIH was actually established a little over 125 years ago as a hygienic lab testing samples for infectious disease in a small laboratory not here in Bethesda at that point but on Staten Island. And over the course of time, of course, NIH are playing roles in many other ways that feed into what we're going to talk about as far as the microbiome, including as you can see the photograph here of Nirenberg, the genome project of course fitting in here. And interestingly, wondering where this genomic return to microbiology comes from and where the term microbiome first arose, it seems that it came forward in this article by Joshua Letterberg and Alexia McCray, Alexia is at the National Library of Medicine, where the formulation of words that begin in OM was put forward in a rather categorical and somewhat tongue-in-cheek way. But Letterberg very much, as you can imagine, having won the Nobel Prize for his own work in microbiology, was attracted to the term microbiome to signify the ecological community of commensal symbiotic and pathogenic microorganisms, pretty good definition, that literally share a body space and have all been ignored as determinants of health and disease. And here again, the term superorganism, we should think of each host and its parasites as a superorganism with respective genomes yoked into a chimera of sorts, well said, Josh. Of course, the ability to be able to sample the microbiome as we are now talking about dependant very much upon the ability to be able to collect nucleic acid information on organisms, many of which are not directly culturable. And so I'm sure much of today's conversation will relate to the fact that that has become within reach because of this curve. As you can see, and everybody who studies genomics is fond of showing curves like this, dropping the cost of a human genome from $100 million back in 2001 to now, as current estimates, exactly $5,671 are thereabouts. And of course, the technology to do that has advanced and that's why this has become possible from machines that look like this, some of which of course are still producing lots of data to things that are more micro-scaled, in this case an ion torrent, but there's lots of other competing technologies. And this has not anywhere near exhausted its potential for reducing costs and increasing throughput. And that has been such a phenomenal, wonderful ride to be on in the microbiome and of course, in lots of other applications as well. So how did microbiome become at NIH a project called the HMP and how did it find its way into support through what was at one point called the roadmap and then became the Common Fund? I asked Jane Peterson, who was engaged in the early days of this, to do a little walk through memory lane and remind me of sort of how this all got started. And she reminded me of a Valentine's Day evening meeting at NIH all of three hours, which a number of the people in the room were present for, where this idea of organizing an effort to focus on metagenomics, which ultimately I think we decided to prefer the term the microbiome project, might be a very timely thing to do, bring together investigators and sequencing capabilities and make this an effort which crosses institutes and therefore fit quite nicely into what was at that point called the roadmap and effort that Elias Sirhouni had put together and shortly after that became formalized because of congressional authorization into the Common Fund. All of that I think timely because here in 2006 it was beginning to become clear there was real potential here to apply the kind of DNA sequencing efforts that were becoming more and more achievable to do this kind of metagenomic analysis. So the argument then that this would fit nicely into the roadmap and ultimately the Common Fund was a pretty convincing one because the whole point of those kinds of means of supported NIH were to support projects as you see here that should be truly transforming that would require participation of NIH as a whole. No single institute or outside entity would be likely to do this on their own to place the outcomes in the public domain and again I'm glad to hear an Owen's description. That's something we have to keep pushing as this moves into other sources of support and needed development and incubator space to jump start the field because at that point it wasn't clear that the microbiome was going to move forward as swiftly as it might without that kind of incubator opportunity. And so this then was endorsed, brought forward fairly quickly as a Common Fund project. Lots of people worked hard on the effort to make that a reality. I particularly again want to mention Jane Peterson and Pam McGinnis both of whom put a huge amount of efforts into trying to organize this component of what the Common Fund was going to support and put together ideas about exactly what might happen, held various workshops, collected ideas from experts and interested parties of all sorts and then proposed a massive microbiome by standards of 2007, probably rather trivial by today, a massive microbial sequence project and then articles got written about what this might look like. This is a bunch of things from 2007 just as the effort was getting underway. A logo appeared, various diagrams about exactly how many more of them there are than of us which are part of all of our opening slides now when we talk about this got generated and we were off to the races. And of course this was not just a U.S. area of interest, the European interest had actually been there at least as early as the United States and so it was important to put together as much as possible the international efforts through this international human microbiome consortium with members and research programs that you see listed here and certainly going forward we want to be sure to take full advantage of all of those connections and collaborations. Well then I'm going to leave to Eric to describe a lot of what actually got done scientifically as a result of all this but as you know in the course of just a few years it was possible to produce really quite a remarkable foundation of data about the structure function and diversity of the healthy human microbiome, a framework for research and increasingly focus on specific disease areas where the microbiome seems to be playing a role, many of which are going to be discussed in much greater detail at this really important milestone meeting. And out of that I think be fair to say increasingly institutes that have been participating because everybody at NIH is involved in some way in a common fund project as either a participant or a cheerleader became increasingly clear that the way this direction was going would require institutes to actually embrace within their own portfolio some of the clinical applications and I want to just show you how that has come about because I think you'll be pleased to see the way in which the institutes are embracing this. This diagram for those of you who don't know the ins and outs of NIH just shows you the 27 institutes and centers at NIH that make up the way in which our budget is allocated and the way in which decisions are made about research priorities for the most part. The common fund is the exception but only represents a little less than 2% of the budget. The rest, the 98% is out here in these institutes. Before 2008 you can see a few of these institutes particularly NIGMS for instance and NIAID and a few others here NIDCR and invested in this but many of the others are not at that point now five years ago engaged in microbiome research support over the course of the next few years those numbers began to grow and now in 2013 you can see a very substantial fraction of the institutes are in fact engaged in supporting this recognizing the time has come to take the foundational information produced by the common fund supported enterprise and begin to see how that plays out in health and disease and that should be seen as good news if you try to factor that then into funding support. This graph shows you for 10, 11 and 12 what has happened both in terms of the number of grants and contracts which is in orange and the green which is the extramural funding which as you can see for FY 12 had climbed up to about 180 million dollars and the expectation is because the scientific opportunity is so compelling that that number provided that we don't get further hammered by additional budgetary distress ought to continue to grow. So I hope you'll see that as a sign of encouragement that we have begun to move into this phase of broad NIH interest and support for the areas that are represented at this meeting and that therefore it's a very timely moment to have the input from this kind of a group about how that's going and where it needs to go. Just have to mention that of course one of the aspects of this that feeds into another program that NIH is now putting some significant resources is of course the very large production of data that comes out of this kind of analysis particularly when it involves metagenomics and requires therefore some sophisticated analysis to know what's going on and we have recently in a group that I asked to look at our abilities to handle big data gotten the message that we have a lot of work to do here as a result of that NIH in a number of initiatives including one called BD2K big data to knowledge which was just announced this week focused on trying to build additional centers of excellence in computational approaches because clearly we're going to need that and the microbiome is just one example along with a variety of other approaches let's what's going on in cancer genomics the new brain initiative that's going to generate huge amounts of data from neuroscience and so on. I also have basically decided we need a key person that covers this issue across all of NIH and so we've established a new position called the associate director for data science very nice that the acronym there is ADDS isn't that cute and Eric Green who's going to speak in a minute is the acting ADDS and we're in the process of searching for a permanent person to take on that very important role and that's going to be very relevant I think to where microbiome needs to go because the data needs are going to be both interesting and pretty challenging. Well I think it's fair to say that the things we have already learned in terms of health and disease with the ability now to be able to sample the microbiome certainly in the GI tract but also in other areas like skin have told us already surprising things that would not have been predicted a few years ago about exactly how this super organism works and how things can go arrive and I suspect much more is still to come you have the feeling that we've just begun to scratch the surface and there's a lot of complexity here but it's beginning to look as if the fog is lifting and we're able to see some of the principles and some of the conclusions that might even become before long actionable and we'll hear about some of those at this meeting in fact so I just wanted to in a few moments there kind of set the stage of how we got to this point particularly to express to all of you how much NIH is excited about this area of science how it is one of those areas that we think has really arrived at the moment where it particularly was in need of nurturing as a foundational effort and is now bursting with potential that all of the institutes at NIH are interested in taking part in so congratulations again to the organizers of this effort we will look forward to seeing what comes out of this glad that there will be a report that can all be absorbed I'm glad that you're webcasting this so the people not in the room can also hear the presentations and it will stimulate I'm sure a lot of their thinking so many thanks to all of you have a great meeting it's a pleasure to be here thank you Dr. Collins for setting the tone and staying on time I appreciate that our next speaker is Dr. Eric Green I think he's already been introduced so come on up


Welcome to my talk. My name is Gyanind and I work for this company, Gray Orange. So let's see, what do we do at Gray Orange? So I'll say in a nutshell, we are into warehouse automation. What it means is, see, there is in any warehouse, there is always a material movement logistics, and we just automate that. When we automate that, basically we use robots, which you call as Butler. See, alternative to automation like you can also have manual. In manual, a person will go to different let's say racks and pick up items. But in our case, the racks are brought to a particular place. We call as PPS, put and pick station, and there is a PPS operator, a human being who is going to pick up those items. And as a result of that, you can improve your put and pick operations, multi-fold. We did some benchmarking, but we don't have any hard number right now. So let's see, a typical warehouse operation. See, in typical warehouse operation, like initially or time to time, you are going to replenish the stock. And basically in a nutshell, it's a very complex algorithm because you have to know where to keep these things like affinity and lots of things. And there are lots of business rules also. There are many products that they cannot be kept together and things like that. Similarly, pick operation is to process customers orders. Let's say in case you're talking about typical e-commerce, right, the customer orders we are processing. Again, this is also very, there's a very complex algorithm because we want to see when a rack comes to a PPS, we want to ensure that we can do maximum pick from a single rack. Because you're not talking about one order, we are talking about multiple orders. So we have a put task and a pick task and there is a task manager. So put task and pick task, they only decide which rack to pick and where to bring. Okay. But eventually someone has to assign a butler or a robot to perform this task. So it's like when you take Uber. Okay. So a particular car is assigned to you, depending on one which is nearest. It's not necessary that the car has to be free. In case like you are at the airport, in case that particular car is dropping someone, you might get assigned that particular car. Okay. So we also have a similar kind of algorithm where we assign a particular butler to a task. So that is the job of a task manager. Once that is done, after that most important thing is navigation. That means now the butler has to go to that particular rack, bring that rack to the PPS, and once all the pick output operations are over, it has to take it out from PPS and bring it to same location or another location. All right. So let's say, this is my typical warehouse where you can see there are certain locations which are empty, there are certain locations which have rack, and normally you have number of PPS in butlers. The normal ratio of butler to PPS is five is to one. That means if you have 100 butlers, so we are going to have about 20 PPS. And we have seen that in a manual warehouse, on the average, a person can pick about 12 items per hour. Whereas in automated warehouse, this can be in hundreds. So you can see that there could be a multi-fold improvement. All right. Okay. Now let's see. So let's talk about navigation task. So what you see here is the task manager has assigned a butler, sorry. Yeah. The task manager has assigned a butler, like we're talking about this task. Okay. The butler has to be assigned. And the butler has to see effectively our criteria for, see, we want to maximize our throughput. We want to maximize our throughput here. That means the PPS operator should be able to pick as many items as possible. And to do that, in case I can always have a rack in front of a PPS operator, in case I can always have a rack in front of PPS operator. And once all the picks are done, it is immediately removed and brought it to some other place so that the next rack can come in front of a PPS operator. Okay. So if I can achieve that, I know I can maximize my throughput. If we say that, okay, it doesn't matter. I can keep bringing these butlers here and that will enhance or that will, so that I can ensure that I always have a rack here. But what happens, you can see that around this area, there's a lot of activity which is going on, but butlers are coming in and butlers are going out. So if I have too many butlers here, it may so happen that there's no place for this butler to go out because there are already butlers standing there, right? So I cannot have too many. Otherwise, and if this butler cannot go out, other butlers, they cannot come in. So if I say that, okay, too many is not a good solution, let's have too few. If I have too few, I cannot ensure that there's always a rack in front of a PPS operator. So what I need to do is I need to ensure that we have just enough. What is that number? It is being decided by the type of warehouse, the size of warehouse and various other things, okay? So if in case I can have just enough navigation task that does not create a clutter here, as well as it can almost ensure that there is a rack in front of a PPS operator, I think we are home, all right? Okay, so let's see. So this is our requirement, okay? In terms of our real life use case. And to achieve this, we use gen stage. So gen stage is a part of, it is not really a part of Eluxer, it comes as a dependency. So if in case you install Eluxer, gen stage will not be there, but you can download using a dependency in the mix. So let me give you some idea of gen stage. Then we'll see how we are going to use it to solve our problem. So normally what you do, you create a data pipeline, okay, so normally this is how we create a data pipeline. You have a producer, like in case you talk about Erlang and Eluxer, everything is a process which holds to your state. So you have a producer and it will initiate the data flow, then you can have intermediate process. These are optionals. In case you want to make any transformation, so you can have multiple of them and then ultimately it comes to consumer. So you can see that in this kind of scenario, we are not really controlling the amount of data which is getting pumped into this pipeline. We are not really controlling, okay. But if we change the direction, if we change the direction, in case we say that okay, the consumer will decide whether it's ready to process a data or not, okay. And based on its demand, based on the demand of a consumer, the producer will send the data. Just, it's a shift. It is just a shift, all right. So if we do that, if we do that maybe we can regulate the amount of data which is coming to a consumer, all right. And this is basically gen stage. In gen stage, this is what we do. Gen stage, the consumer will control how the number of events that will flow into, that will flow from producer to the consumer. But the question is, in case I want to understand, how does this really behave? Because you can see that at every stage, like you can have multiple producer, then you can have multiple consumer, here also multiple producer consumer, you can have multiple producer consumer here, you can have multiple consumer here. And each one is making a demand and then based on demand from various consumers, it is going to dispatch events. So initially when I started reading about it, I found it very complex, okay.  So I took a break. In fact, I'm telling you through my personal journey. Then slowly I said, okay, it doesn't matter. Okay, I don't understand it, that's fine. Let me write some code and see how it behaves. And that is what I usually do. So whenever I get stuck, I write code because I found at times, you cannot infer everything from the documentation, okay. And when you write code, you can write code to understand a particular use, specific use case. So I started writing code. And what I found that, okay, I have a consumer. Consumer sends a demand to its immediate producer, then see this acts as a producer as well as consumer. So this is producer for this consumer, but this one is consumer for this producer. So this also sends a demand, okay. But the demand which is being sent by this consumer to this producer has no correlation with the demand which is sent by this consumer to this producer. Second thing is, now let's see on the top. See, producer gets some events. So each producer has a dispatcher. So we'll talk about dispatcher a little later in more detail. So that's his strategy. So this producer will, based on the dispatcher, it is associated with, it is going to send events to this, which is acting as a consumer. Once this process receives events, it becomes producer and it really doesn't matter. When it acts as a producer, it really doesn't matter how it received events, okay. It really doesn't matter how it received events. So you can see that it's been, so for all these intermediate processes, it's role as a consumer or it's role as a producer, there is no correlation. They're independent. So that means to understand the whole thing, I can treat these two, producer and consumer as an independent unit. Then this producer and this consumer as independent unit. Similarly, this producer and this consumer as independent unit. Okay, so my light went on and I was happy, but this you have to write code to really understand this. So what we did next, what I did next, okay. I think this is what I have already explained, kind of. Okay, so let me skip the slide. So like I said, okay. So this is what I was explaining, okay, the same thing. So in case I just try to understand these units separately, probably it'll be easier. So this is what it is. Now here what you see is I have multiple consumers and I have multiple producer, all right. Now each consumer is going to send demands or we call it subscription, okay. So each consumer is going to send subscription to each producer and these subscriptions are independent, like demand. It doesn't need to make the same demand to all the producers, they're independent. Similarly, each producer is going to receive subscription or demand from each consumer, okay. They're independent and it's up to you. Based on your use case, you can decide what kind of demand, what kind of dispatch or everything. Another thing which is important is these two producers, they are not aware of each other. They don't know each other. Similarly, these consumers, they are not aware of each other. A consumer knows both the producers, okay. A producer knows all the consumers, but a producer one does not know what is producer two, what is producer two doing. Or a consumer does not know what is, consumer one does not know what is consumer two doing, all right. So effectively, for all practical purpose, I can treat them as two separate units, okay. So this is my producer one with consumers and this is producer one with same set of consumers because they are independent. I can always do that, all right. So now, just let's talk about one of them. So now I can see that the whole complex thing, whole complex structure, I can break into a very small structure which I can easily understand. So what happens here? What is the producer's characteristic? We always associate a dispatcher because they're multiple consumers. So we associated dispatcher with the producer which will dispatch once it receives events. So dispatcher is a strategy. So based on this dispatcher, it is going to dispatch events to its consumer, okay. And a consumer, and a consumer is configured when I talk about subscription. What we do is a consumer is configured with what we call as maximum demand and a minimum demand. There are two things, okay. So this is what you need to specify. In case you don't specify, the maximum demand value is 1000 and minimum demand value is 500. And this is what is being sent to the producer when it subscribes. So producer maintains the maximum demand, the subscription of each consumer separately. The producer maintains, and another thing is when you do subscription, when the consumers, they do subscription, they do one by one. So let's say consumer one first subscribes, then maybe consumer three subscribes, then consumer two subscribes. So this is called as subscription order and it plays a role. So whenever, so let's assume that, let's assume that we have subscription for all three consumers, all right? So whenever a producer receives, not only that, when we have subscription, the maximum demand is sent as the first demand to the producer. So that means in case, let's say it has sent, it has, in its subscription, its maximum demand is 10. So that means the demand from consumer one to the producer will be 10. Let's say from here it is 20. It'll get a demand from consumer two as 20. And let's say here it is 30. So producer will receive a demand as 30. So that is the initial demand, all right? And whenever the events come based on the dispatcher, it is going to send those events to these consumers. But there are certain rules. The rule is it will never send, so events could be very large, like it can receive hundreds of events together, okay? To any consumer, it will never send demands which is more than max demand minus min demand, okay? So let's say in this particular case it was, the max was 10 and min was six, sorry, min was four. So at any time, at any time, it will not send more than six events to consumer one. And likewise for other consumers. Second thing is, all right, so initially the current demand, initially the current demand was 10. And let's say it has sent five events. So the current demand reduces for consumer one. It becomes five, okay? Then let's say a little later it receives another three. So it becomes two. The current demand becomes two. So whenever its current demand falls below minimum demand, it will send its next demand, okay? And the next demand value will be maximum demand minus current demand, which will be, in this case, it will be eight, all right? So that is how it operates. All right, so any question here? No, I think I am going. So now what we are going to do is we are going to see different kind of dispatcher. Like I said, okay, let me go back here. All right, so what happens? GenStage has a behavior called dispatcher, which has about six callback functions. And it also supports three implementations of them. Demand dispatcher, which is a default dispatcher, broadcast dispatcher, and a partition dispatcher. Okay, so we are going to look into these three, one by one. So demand dispatcher, the way it operates is, like you have multiple consumer, okay? And the current demand decides, the current demand for each consumer decides which one is going to get events. So the consumer which is most greedy, that means the one which has the most maximum current demand will get the events. So let's say the consumer one, the current demand is 10. For consumer two, it is six. For consumer three, it is, let's say again, six. Okay, so consumer one will get the events because it's most greedy right now. In case all three of them, they have the same current demand. In that case, it goes by subscription order. Like I said, subscription order is important. So it goes by subscription order. All right. There's no max and min. What do you mean by? Mm-hmm. Yeah, see the, he's saying that there's a constant demand. Okay, I am still not understanding your question.  Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah, that is mandatory. It is mandatory that he has to put max and min. Okay, if it doesn't put, it'll take the default value where max is 1000 and min is 500. All right, so I don't think we can avoid it. Okay, so this is how the demand dispatcher works, which is the default. Now let's see the second one, broadcast. See, broadcast is fairly simple. See, broadcast works like this. Like I said that all the consumers, they are sending their subscription. So you have multiple consumer. So whenever producer receives the first subscription. Okay, so that, like in our case, let's assume that, sorry. Let's say in our case, let's say consumer one is the first consumer which sends its subscription. So you can assume that this is like a master consumer. Okay, and you can treat this as a producer with a single consumer. And it works like a demand dispatcher only. Except for the fact that whenever it is sending events based on its maximum demand and minimum demand parameters, the same events will also be sent to other consumer. It's a broadcast. So that is the difference. So the behavior is dictated by producer and the consumer one. Okay, and other consumers, consumer two and consumer three, you can say they are like siblings or parasites. They don't play any role. They just receive it. What is the use case for this? I don't know. I've not used it. Okay, I don't know. I can't tell you right now. Okay, now partition dispatcher, this is interesting and this is what I used in my real life. So in partition dispatcher, what happens? A producer has a function. By using that function, it can partition all your events into a set of mutually exclusive partitions. All right, and like in our case, it's a PPS. So PPS is a coordinate. Okay, so I can partition all my events based on that coordinate. It's unique for each PPS. So once it partitions, you can see that. So let's say I have a set of events. So I partition it and I create subsets, each belonging to a partition. So I can say that effectively my producer is nothing but, the main producer is nothing but a set of small producers, each belonging to a consumer. And after that, this is like a demand dispatcher. So that means this producer will create a subset of events which should go here. And out of that, how many events will go? It will depend on what is the maximum demand, minimum demand, and its current demand, just like a demand dispatcher. That's a good question. Okay, so the question is, how do you get the fault tolerance? So there are two aspects to this. Okay, your OTP, see basically if you really see, gen stage is built on top of gen server. So you always make a part of supervisory tree, but that's not the complete answer. So you can restart. But let's say in case it has not restarted for some reason. Okay, I make this as a transient in my supervisory. So in that case, what will happen if there is, let's assume that this has died. Okay, now there are certain events for this now. So they'll not be lost. Okay, the producer will keep them. All right, so that is the complete answer. Okay, in case that particular consumer is not available, that is not thrown away. All right, so now let's see our real life example. So what we have is, we have a navigation task. A navigation task about consist of many parameters, but I'm going to talk about there's a start location and a end location. Okay, end location is nothing but, okay. You can see that this is my start location and this is my end location. Okay, so you can see that each PPS has a end location which is unique. And my navigation task, I need to specify these things so that the butler knows, we calculate the path, all those things, and a butler knows then how to reach here, all right. So you can see, this is my producer, this is my producer and it gets bounded with all the navigation task. So using the demand dispatcher, it will send tasks to a particular PPS, all right. Now how do I manage? How do I ensure that? Because here the number of tasks could be too many. How do we ensure that this PPS or any of these PPS is not bounded with many navigation tasks? Because otherwise we're back to the same thing. Like near this PPS, we'll have too many butlers and that can create a deadlock. So what we do is we find out the appropriate value of maximum demand. Let's assume that this maximum demand value is 10 because it all depends on the type of warehouse, type of orders we are getting in all those things. And my minimum demand will be, if it is 10, although I didn't mention it explicitly, it'll be nine. That means basically what I'm saying is, just give me one navigation task, all right? And in my each, like I said that they are all gen server. So in my state of this gen server, what I'm going to do is I'm going to keep maximum demand as one parameter and also the number of navigation tasks, they are in progress. So initially it'll be zero. Now the moment I get first task, okay. So if you really see this is also a kind of a PPS coordinator, the actual navigation task will be performed by another process. So it'll just offload that to another process, okay? And this is done in a particular function called handle events. The moment you come out of handle events, since my minimum demand is nine, it'll send, this particular consumer will send another demand for one, okay? And so if there's another task for this particular PPS, the coordinator will send it. So it'll keep sending it immediately. And you'll see that on the average, see what happens when you talk about navigation task. The butler has to go to a particular location and it has to bring that rack to the PPS. And after that, the PPS operator has to pick up all the items. So you can see that on the average, it can take 30 seconds to one minute. It is, because it's a physical device which has to move. Whereas the interaction between the, this PPS server and the navigation coordinator, it is fraction of milliseconds. So that means I get the first task, it is offloaded, and immediately I send another demand, I get the second task, that is also offloaded. So it is almost happening concurrently, all this task. So if I say that my maximum demand was 10 and I keep track of how many navigation tasks are in progress, okay? So the moment I hit that, my navigation task has 10, which are in progress. At the same time, what I'm also doing is, for each navigation task, heuristically I can compute how much time it is going to take to complete, okay? So I have some heuristic data which I can complete. So when I hit the 10th, when I get the 10th navigation task, the time I do not finish my handle event function, I wait for the minimum time which is required for one of those tasks to complete, okay? And I expect that to be over, even if it's not over, that's fine, I'll explain why. So let's say I, the minimum I have is about 20 seconds. So after 10th calculation, 10th navigation task, I wait for 20 seconds, and then I go out of that function. So another demand is going to, is sent to the navigation coordinator, all right? So you can see that this way I'm controlling it. I'm controlling the number of navigation tasks, which is being performed here. The reason being, why heuristics will work for me is that, see we are talking about 10 navigation tasks. Instead of 10, if I have 11, it doesn't matter. Or instead of, still I'm not making this area too crowded with butlers, or instead of 10 if I have nine, still I can almost ensure that there is a rack in front of my PPS operator. But instead of 10 if I have 20, that means there is a serious problem with my heuristics, which I need to improve. Or if I have five, that means then I cannot ensure that there is always a rack in front of a PPS operator. And again, it's a problem with my heuristics, which I need to improve. Okay, so this is how using this particular abstraction, which is GenStage, I can control the activity around this. All right? Uh-huh, mm-hmm, okay, okay, okay. All right, all right. So the question is, how do we differentiate different tasks? So when I talk, when I'm talking about GenStage, okay, I'm implementing GenStage only for this task, okay. If there's any other task, this is being handled by a GenServer, not by GenStage, all right? So for me, I just need to regulate two PPS tasks, okay? Because if you really see this PPS task should be executed, the moment I have done all the picks or puts from PPS to a location should be executed almost immediately. I don't need to regulate it, is that correct? Okay, so I'm creating GenStage only for this kind of two PPS tasks, that's it. See, it is an abstraction over a GenServer, that's it.  So anyway, thank you. In case you have any questions, I'm here and we are always hiring. So in case you are interested, we have a booth outside. Okay, then thank you very much.


Good morning, everybody. It is my great pleasure to introduce Matt and Jonathan and engage in a conversation with them. I'll start off by introducing both of our speakers. And for the regulars at SOCAP, Matt and the Omidyard Network need no introduction. But for those of you who are new, I'll say a few words, the Omidyard Network was created to harness market forces, to create opportunities for individuals to improve their lives and their situation. It was created in 2004 by Pierre Omidyard, one of the founders of eBay and his wife, Pam. And it invests in and helps to scale very innovative organizations, both for-profit and not-for-profit, that are helping to improve the social and economic situations of individuals around the world. To date, it has invested roughly $628 million, and counting, in for-profit and not-for-profit companies, roughly $50.50 across those two buckets. And required reading for everybody in this room, in 2012, the Omidyard Network published a piece called Priming the Pump, which talks about the need for a sector-based approach to the impact investing ecosystem in our work. Matt is the managing partner of Omidyard Network, and he leads their operations and strategy. But before coming to the Omidyard Network, he was the president of eBay International, is that right? And it was also in many senior positions at PayPal. At eBay, what he did was to grow eBay's footprint from five countries to 25 countries, and he scaled the revenues of eBay International from an annual run rate of $10 million to $2 billion. So at a very personal level, he knows what it means to scale. Prior to eBay and PayPal, he was at Navtech, he was a consultant at McKinsey, and he was also a diplomat for the U.S. government in Germany, so we can speak German later. Matt currently sits on the board of the Gin Landessa Bridge International Academies and Endeavour. Some of these organizations are here with us today. Jonathan is today the director of the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, which I will refer to as SICP, because that's a big mouthful, which is housed within the Debastic Policy Council. SICP was created by President Obama, who believed that you would be able to find the solutions to the nation's problems within the communities themselves. And so SICP was created and tasked with working with private citizens, individuals, not-for-profit organizations, the private sector, and the government within the community context to ensure that we would foster innovation and create lasting change and greater good to address the nation's problems. Jonathan is no stranger to politics and policy. He served earlier in the Clinton White House and the Department of Commerce, but he's probably better known as a serial entrepreneur and an investor in our space. Jonathan has founded a number of companies and organizations and initiatives, including Ethos Water, which was, here's my prop, very well done. Ethos Water provides clean and safe drinking water to children and was actually acquired by Starbucks back in 2005, so in a way it's one of the first examples of a social entrepreneurship business that was bought by a major corporation. He also founded All For Good. He was also the CEO of Good Worldwide. He has been an angel investor, a partner at Soratory Capital. He's been on faculty at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, and I could go on and on and on with the many things that Jonathan has done, but we welcome them both here today. So, it's my understanding that you both have some exciting news to share with the SOCAP community that may impact our work and that shows how impact investing has landed on the global scene and begun to attract interest at high levels around the world, which is a great thing for all of us in this room. And maybe to set up the conversation, I'll ask you each a little bit about the meetings that took place last summer in London as a lead up to the G8 meeting in Northern Ireland, and specifically a meeting was convened called the G8 Social Impact Investment Task Force, and it took place on June 6th, and maybe you can tell us a little bit about that. Should I go first? Sure.  It's amazing how SOCAP has really just blossomed into such a vibrant community, so it's pretty cool. As Maya said, this year, one of the really interesting things that came out of the G8 process, which is a fairly state process in which member countries participate and there are these large conversations about big issues, but for the first time, impact investing and social enterprise were on the leader's agenda. So, Prime Minister Cameron, as the host of the G8 this year, asked to put this on the radar to make it an area of focus for the member countries, and he convened a full day forum in London in June, at which Matt participated, and probably some of the other folks might even be in this room, along with representatives from, of course, our country, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, as well as other countries. And it was a really exciting conversation that focused on how impact investing can be a strategy, not just for those of us here, but one that policymakers could encourage to accelerate economic recovery in industrialized countries like the US and the UK, but also to accelerate global development in and around the world. In addition to this kind of agreement, we also announced this task force that's being launched, which is a really exciting piece that we're gonna talk about in some depth here this morning. Great. Yeah, one of the things I'd note about convening is it wasn't just, it's GA convening, but it wasn't just governments. There are a lot of representatives from the social sector and the private sector. There's a recognition that those sectors also have a role to play. Social sectors care deeply about a set of populations that are important to broader development issues, and they have an instinct to address certain market failures. I think the private sector also plays a critical role, obviously, in identifying solutions that can be scaled up and reach millions and millions of people. So it wasn't just a government convening, per se. It was a convening that looked at the relevant roles of the public sector, of the social sector, and the private sector, through the lens of impact investing in service to a broad set of populations that OSCE care very deeply about. So the formal name of the task force is the Social Impact Investment Tax Force. It will be made up of representatives from the G8 nations, and it's going to have split representation from the private sector and the public sector as well. Yeah. That's right, that's exactly right. So the idea was how could we, to Matt's point, bring the best of the business community, the best of the nonprofit space, together with government, to think about how we can create an environment, not just in the US, which has been our focus, because the president deeply believes that impact investing is a part of our economic strategy, and how can we encourage this across the world and find ways that business and government can work together through what you might call public-private or cross-sector partnerships to move this field forward. Yeah, that's great. That's great. The task force includes, as you mentioned, the government participation, but can you talk a little bit about some of the individual sort of people involved? Sure. In the effort, yeah. So you're going to see members, you're going to see participants on the task force from all the member countries, as well as potentially other countries. So a number have already been identified, and is that slide up so people can see it? There we go, great. So as you can see on the slide, from the US side, we're quite excited about the fact that Matt, as the CEO of the Omidyar Network, will be our representative from the private sector, along with Don Graves, who's the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Small Business, Affordable Housing, and Community Finance, will be the government representative. This is fantastic. So I think this is sort of breaking news that was just released this morning. So folks in this room are among the first to know. And the other point to note is that the task force will be chaired by Sir Ronald Cohen. Some of you may know Sir Ronald from his work in founding social finance who drove the first social impact bond in the UK from his work as the chairman of Big Society Capital, which is a very innovative financial institution in the UK, and someone who spent 25 years in the private sector, both in private equity and venture capital. Great, no, that's fantastic. So Matt, since you are officially representing the US on this task force, maybe you can tell us a little bit more about what it actually means and what it implies and what will it actually be doing. Yeah, so we're actually quite excited about this. We think that it can lead to a tremendous positive momentum and impact in the impact investing arena. First of all, having a body like the G8 be interested in impact investing and put that on the agenda is terrific in and of its own right and gives the emerging sector a level of visibility that we haven't to date. But let me also be clear, it is ultimately about getting stuff done. In fact, talk to a number of people in the audience here who are of the sentiment that perhaps sometimes impact investing gets a little overhyped, right, that we need to actually demonstrate the impact on the ground even as we continue to push forward with this set of ideas. But I do think the G8 is a terrific venue. I do think things can get done in that venue in collaboration with social and private sector. One great example is the debt reductions at the around the millennium time where the G8 came together with advocacy groups and resulted in a reduction of debt in the developing world to the tune of $160 billion, which really in many ways laid a firm foundation for later economic growth. I'm also excited by the leadership here with Ronnie Cohen in particular leading the task force. Ronnie is known as the father of venture capital in the UK. Jonathan mentioned the big society capital. This was his effort where he actually led a similar task force within the UK government that ultimately resulted in the creation of big society capital, which is capitalized to the tune of 600 million pounds, and it's an impact investing firm funded by the UK government. Also leadership of Jonathan. I'm excited to work with Jonathan, and this isn't just a prop with he shows water. Jonathan is a terrific entrepreneur. Not only was this a huge success for him, but this was actually a mid-air network's first impact investment. That's right. So some ways coming back and partnering with Jonathan is terrific, and I look forward to that engagement. I also look forward to the engagement of many of you in this room. I think it's a privilege for me to be on the task force, but really I'm one person, and it is a big tent, so to speak here, an impact investing. In order to be effective, I think we need to get the perspectives and the energy from many people in the room, so hopefully we can engage in that dialogue to ensure that we can actually get some true impact from the task force. Can I build on that? Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I appreciate the shameless plug for you, Thoswater, but getting past that for a moment, we're really grateful to have Matt's leadership on the task force, because as Matt said, in so many words, the president deeply believes that the economic recovery that we're already seeing is not something that we're driving from Washington, it's what all of you are driving out here. You're driving in Silicon Valley, you're driving on the West Coast, it's being driven across the country by investors and entrepreneurs and executives like many of you in this room. So one of the exciting things about the task force is in addition to having small number of representatives from the member countries, Sir Ronald is also going to be setting up an advisory board on the US side, and that is, I believe he's in the process of putting that together, and there'll be some announcements about that, I believe later this fall, but we're really excited to find ways to bring more voices into the room, to amplify what we're able to do, and to ensure that it's a very inclusive process. So one of the things that I'll just flag is that news will be coming soon, and the reason why we need that, the reason why we need your voices, why we need a bigger conversation, is that the issues that the task force is going to focus on, offering recommendations for policymakers, getting business to move in certain areas, are things that we know we can't drive from Washington. So we know the task force is going to focus on the issue of how do we standardize social metrics? How do we get some consistency, some harmonization about how we measure impact, with the kind of rigor that we use to measure financial success? We know it's going to focus on global development, and how can we use impact investing, not as a silver bullet, but as a complement to policy, to make better progress on economic growth in developing countries, and make it part of what our policymakers use, as they think about not just aid, not just trade, but also investment. It's going to focus on the issue of corporate form. How many of you in this room are benefit corpse, or flexible purpose corpse, or all three threes raise your hand? So you know, there's not that many of you I would say, but a few years ago there would have been no one, and we're seeing lots of interest, not just on this side, not just in America, but in the UK, they have the Community Interest Corp. Other countries are exploring this model as well. It's a big issue. A fourth thing we're going to be focusing on is the issue of asset allocation. Thinking about where does impact investing fit in a diversified portfolio, and how should institutional investors, how should folks thinking about public equities, as well as private equities, think about impact investing? So there's some big issues that we plan to tackle. We don't have the answers. We'll need to dialogue the private sector to figure out how to make progress on these key points. And as I understand, one of the concrete things that will come out of this is that there will be a report that's going to be drafted sometime over the next 12 months, so we will probably see it sometime next year, that talks about everything that we've discussed here today, and I'll echo what Matt and Jonathan have said, which is that the SOCAP community can bring a lot to bear as these issues get fleshed out, developed, and the role that all of us can play will get fleshed out over time. And so I think we all look forward to engaging the SOCAP community and the greater impact community at large to help the task force and assist it in meeting its goals over the next 12 months. And if I may just make one last comment there, Maya. The report is important, but all the work that goes around the report actually in many ways is much, much more important in terms of soliciting different points of view, developing innovative ideas, developing appropriate policy recommendations, and importantly developing relationships in the process so that we can collectively have this bigger impact in the world that we all desire. Oh, that's fantastic. So I think it's an interesting, a very important development in our space to think about the role that government does play, that the interaction between the private sector, the not-for-profit sector, and the government sector have to play as we think about all of the issues that we're addressing over the next few years. Yeah, you know, one thing that I'm reminded of is that this task force we think is really important. As Matt said, we've got an opportunity to really move the ball. It's a moment, it's a moment that we want to leverage. But to step back for a moment, the Office of Social Innovation, as Maya said, was really set up by the president in 2009 to be this point of engagement on issues like impact investing, social enterprise, human capital. So we're really there as a resource for all of you. And so to facilitate this process of getting inputs, so I'm gonna do something I don't always do. So I'm gonna give you my email address because I'm sure I won't be able to chat with everyone, but I wanna make it easier for you guys to reach us if you've got ideas or thoughts or questions. So the email is really simple. It's innovation.atwho.eop.gov. So that's how you can find me. Innovation.atwho.eop.gov. And Matt, maybe you can give yourself on or something, if people want to. Do you have your number? No, I'm very easy. It's mbanicatamidiar.com. And I'm also very open to what suggestions and thoughts each of you might have and any thoughts you might have on how you might want to engage with members of not just the task force, but a advisory committee that will probably be set up for the US portion of that. That's great. Well, thank you again everyone. I think that we are gonna break now and we appreciate your attention and your time and we look forward to getting your engagement on this issue. So thank you. And thank you to Matt and Jonathan for being here. Thank you.


If you're too busy to pray, you're too busy. I can accomplish more in a prayer-filled day than I can in a prayerless week. See, sometimes we think that prayer is going to cost us more time when it's actually prayerlessness that costs us more time. Because then we go and we start making decisions without the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and we have the tendency to mess things up. If you have to wake up earlier, wake up earlier.  Whatever you have to do to rearrange your life around prayer, do it.


This is JSA TV the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Dean Perine and welcome to JSA TV We are coming at you live from the show floor at hosting con 2016 in the big easy of New Orleans, Louisiana And I am here with my new friend Jean Lawrence. Jean is the The director of product marketing for Oracle Jean welcome to JSA TV. Thank you. Happy to be here Outstanding so Jean tell us how's the show going for you? It's been really great the networking events have been good the breakfast networking the sessions have been great We've had some good traffic at our booth outstanding. So tell them was the breakfast good. Yes very good Yes grits and shrimp and all the New Orleans specials perfect perfect So far viewers that don't already know tell us a little bit about Oracle So I am here with the Oracle communications global business unit and we are very focused on communication service providers and Enterprises and enabling them to succeed in what we call the now economy the digital economy So in terms of optimizing networks in enabling employee collaboration new digital business models Unified communications all of that is reliant upon top quality communications And so that's what we provide through Oracle communications very very cool And so what's the latest and greatest coming out of your newsroom right now? So I'm with a product called Oracle billing and revenue management cloud and it's a cloud service that enables Subscription monetization of digital services. So for companies like hosting companies that want the flexibility to be able to rate by metrics like Gigabytes of bandwidth gigabytes of storage CPU utilization We have the monetization engine Through the cloud with all the security and elasticity of the cloud that enables them to do that as well as customers throughout other industries Outstanding Jean. Thank you so much for being with us today and thank you viewers for watching JSA TV We'll see you soon