Schultz. Allies who can send tanks to Ukraine should do it now. Countries that can send battle tanks to Ukraine should do so now, German Chancellor Olaf Schultz said during a speech at the Munich Security Conference demonstrating a sharp turnaround from previous months of slowing down tank deliveries to Ukraine. Those who can send such combat tanks really need to do so now. Schultz said at the conference adding that he plans to conduct an intensive campaign to ensure that other allied countries do so immediately. For several months, Germany has been heavily criticized for refraining from sending and not allowing allied countries to send its powerful German-made Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine while the country is fighting Russian forces. Schultz eventually relented in late January, agreeing to send a company of 14 of his own Leopard 2 A6 tanks to Ukraine, but later negotiations with NATO allies failed to collect enough vehicles to create a full battalion. 56 A6 tanks, which are more modern, Germany's defensive minister said this week that NATO partners have been able to assemble only half a battalion of A6s. Schultz said that Germany will contribute to help our partners make this decision to provide more tanks, for example by training Ukrainian soldiers here in Germany or by supporting them with logistics and supplies. The German Chancellor reportedly called for preparing for a long war.


Ukraine caused the withdrawal of Russian forces from Snake Island in the Black Sea of victory. Russia says the move opens a path for agricultural exports. Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Hong Kong to mark the 25th anniversary of Britain handing over control of its former colony to China. In the Philippines, New President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. swears in his cabinet after taking office. And in Russia, lawmakers approve a law that places restrictions on foreign news media meant to equal foreign restrictions on Russian news services.


Hello, I'm Jim Mullins, and I'm the Dean of Libraries at Purdue University. And I'm going to be talking to you a bit today about a new building that we just opened in August called the Wilmets of the Thomas S. and Harvey D. Wilmets Faculty Learning Center. And we think it's something that is very unique in conceptualization of combining both classrooms and the library. And I'll go into a little bit more detail of that first. But first, I'm going to show you some videos. Each year, for about the last four years, Purdue has sponsored, Purdue Libraries sponsors a contest among our students about why do I love Purdue Libraries. And in the past, they do these wonderful videos. And we give out $1,000 as the first prize, $750 for second prize and $500 for third prize underwritten by one of our local banks. And this year, we decided we would change it and it would be the Wilmets Active Learning Center wall. They call it the wall. We weren't quite sure what they were going to call it. We thought maybe Wilmets or the Active Learning Center. But since in the special courses that's abbreviated WALC, they call it the wall. So I'm going to show you the videos that we did. The videos I used in the past in the years to help get support for the libraries by showing it to the trustees, showing it to alumni, and showing it to donors.  So these are four different videos. College students face the challenge of trying to balance studying, sleep, and socializing. It's been said balancing all three is nearly impossible. But now with the Thomas S. Harvey H. Wilmets Active Learning Center, it's easy. Not only can you study, sleep, and socialize, but the 164,000 square foot facility houses the Library of Engineering and Science and 27 classrooms designed for active learning. Some of the quietest study spots can be found in the library. With individual booths and desk space, it's easy to get studying done. Another great study spot is the Mullins Reading Room. The room is kept quiet for individual study. However, if you have a group project that needs to work with others, there are plenty of collaborative study areas. Wilmets also houses the developed data visualization experience lab with Purdue. Students also have access to computers and printers whenever needed. The building houses many artifacts and pieces of history that can all be learned about on the archives and artifacts audio tour. The tour can be accessed online or through your phone. Site 17, the Wilmets Active Learning Center honors two brothers who earned their engineering degrees at Purdue University. The cafe, library, unique furniture, and study spaces are what make WALC such a great resource for students and faculty. The Wilmets Active Learning Center, or WALC, is a 24-hour second day of recoup for learning, studying, and collaborating with fellow classmates. With student-centered active learning, it's easier than ever to focus on what's important in the classroom. Study in the state-of-the-art grand recoup on the second floor, or try one of the 27 study rooms that are available to reserve online. The Library of Engineering and Science is full of literature, spaces to zone in on work, and plenty of help is available if you have questions. Here, you experience the newest technology with wide desktop computers, easy to use ITEP-printing stations, and convenient tabletop outlets. For activity, the best student you can be in a safe, diverse, friendly, and innovative space. WALC provides access to the resources that will be graduating in four years with a prestigious degree from Purdue University a reality. Music Purdue University is hard. Like, really hard. I'm going to go down just a little. And my favorite place to do that is the Grand Dome. Music You have things like the Library of Engineering and Science is better for instructional excellence. There's so much cool artwork throughout the entire building. You have the best view on campus with so many cool study areas with more computers than you could ever do. Most importantly for college students, you have to. But I feel like the reason that most students would want to do this, and I could have wanted to do this, is because I need to do one thing, and one thing. But there's so many cool places. Thank you. Not for ever getting a screen mark on your projects or study with your friends. Anyway, the very best part of all of your mind opinion is the fact that you can study in complete and utter. That room is absolutely silent. It's incredible. Music We have 24 submissions. I love the atmosphere and scenery and the resources available. That access to information. A lot of great insights. I love the environment that inspires creativity. Design. Success. Emission. Contribute. Walk is a great place to work together. I can work by myself. Walk is perfect for doing a project, homework, or studying. What's not to love about walk? Music Okay, I wanted to show you those videos at the beginning so you could get an idea of the space. I've had various people visit who have seen or heard me talk about it. But until they see it, they can't quite conceptualize it. Because I have to tell people when they come into the building, wherever you see carpet, that's library. Because the library is scattered throughout the entire building. And so the classrooms are adjacent to library spaces and they flow out into the library. And after 530, all of those classrooms are study spaces. So after 530, 164,000 square feet becomes a library, all supervised by the library. Okay. Now I've credited Susie Hudson, who is Assistant Director of Planning, Facilities in Planning and Construction at University of Central Florida. She had been a Purdue and so she went down to Florida and came back up and was taking pictures and she sent me the slide presentation. She did and I said, Susie, these are wonderful slides. Can I use them? And she gave me permission. She said, I'll get it, I'll add it to my CV. Okay. The Consolidate is six of our campus libraries, our science and engineering libraries. We had 16 libraries at Purdue and the majority of them are science and engineering. And so we brought together our science, engineering, chemistry, physics, earth and atmospheric sciences, pharmacy and life sciences. And the gross square feet of the building is 178,000. Science and engineering, assignable to 93,000. The internal staircase takes quite a bit of the available square footage of the building. And I've had students complain about that. But unfortunately, to get people through the building, you do need stairs. The building budget itself was 79 million. 15 million came from the state of Indiana as a cash gift. No bombing. It was a cash gift. 13 million from the university, 16 million from the libraries I had to sign a contract with the president that I would have all of the money in hand before we started the building project. And we did it. Then the university put another 18 million into the surrounding area to finish off the closet. So the entire project was just under 100 million. No debt. The artifacts that you saw the people talked about were from this building. It was built in 1924 power plant. Which at the time it was built was on the north edge of campus. By the time this building was, that we started with our construction, the campus had extended all the way around us. So this power plant was now sitting in the middle of campus. In the 1960s, a new power plant was built on the south side of campus. And in the 1980s, this plant was, as people have fondly called it, produced finger to the world. It was if you saw the picture of the smoke stack or the bell tower, the smoke stack was 60 feet taller than the bell tower. So it was highly visible and so it was the landmark that people used. When they decided to tear it down in the early 90s, tear down the smoke stack, people complained and said, but it's the icon for the university. They said at the time, I don't remember ever seeing any of our stationery or any of our publicity. Instead they built the bell tower. So when the decision was decided that we would tear this building down, I said, and I'm a history buff, I said we have to preserve this building. Building had a very important role by providing heat and electricity for the entire university. The university could not have survived without this. So the building was demolished but we saved elements. We went into it and took the pieces from the building that we thought helped to tell the story. It also served as an active learning center because engineering students in mechanical and civil took classes in there. Faculty took them in and showed them actual operations. So even though we were building an active learning center, we set us on the side of an active learning building. And we have large pictures taken of students and faculty and workers in the building blown up on the walls. You may have seen a couple of them in the slides. Okay. In the videos you may have seen that you can see it in the classrooms. A lot of the classrooms are all glass so that you look into them. That was for two reasons. Active learning requires that students work in teams. And it was to get away from the concept of having students working and listening to professor and not really having the chance to explore the ideas amongst themselves. So about five years ago, six years ago Purdue launched a program called Impact. Construction Matters Purdue Academic Course Transformation because we were dissatisfied with the number of students who were moving from matriculating from first to second year to some of our major courses. We were at an 88% matriculation rate. That was not acceptable to Purdue. We wanted to be closer to 93% to 95% matriculation. And the decision was made of the large lecture classes that was causing this disadvantage for our students. So the intent was to put the lectures online and this was across campus in chemistry, political science, psychology and then to have students working in teams. So that they could help teach each other as well as listen to the professor who was there as a coach. The president of the university Mitch Daniels thinks this is a very, very good way to teach. So he gave us an instruction do not want to walk into the new Women's Active Learning Center and seeing the professor lecture to the class. He wants to see active learning. So he said we need to have class so people can see into it. And that is for those rooms to be study rooms. So that activity can go on in those rooms, students can be studied and we can see in so that they don't feel isolated. We opened the first day of classes this fall. And I happened to not be there. I was in Poland with IPLA. And people started sending me pictures immediately and they said Jim it's full, it's full right away. Students were in there. It sits right in the middle campus as I said and it's on a major thoroughfare. And so the students naturally gravitated towards it. The area that you see on the left side is right inside the front doors. And our assumption was that as people are walking past and they have an hour to spend they'll come in and sit down and stay in the library for a period of time and then leave or if they have a class in the building they'll come down and use it. It has many computers as we had in our six libraries into this building. So this building, even though the students talk about how many computers it has it has no more than the six libraries have themselves. The seating is also similar. The building seats 4000. The light well in the middle of the building we hired a Nancy Friedposter who is an anthropologist. She led a team of people in the libraries to go out and talk to the students in the building and say, what is it that you want to see in this building? What will you want to know? What do you want to be sure is going to be in this building? They had several things that they said they want to see. They wanted to have natural light. They wanted to see out. They wanted to see books. And even though we all know that books are not the heavy issues that are in our libraries they said we want to see books because that helps us know that we're in a library. When the building opened we were curious about how the students would refer to this. Whether they would see this as a library or not. And I've been standing outside sometimes when the students will be giving tours to prospective students and they'll point to it and say, this is our newest library the Wilmeth Active Learning Center. And we still have our Humanities Social Science Education Library which is more or less seen as the Central Library. We also have the In Business Library VetMed Library, Math Library and Aviation Library. The Reading Room. And I will for lack of humility I did take off the mullings in front of this. Susie had mullings on there. Two years ago the President announced at my Dean's Advisory Council meeting that he was naming the Reading Room for me. I was honored and flabbergasted and then I said, and don't tell anyone. Because this was the building was just under construction and this was two years before it was to be completed and I said this is totally inappropriate for this to be known that a room like this was being named for an employee. So for two years it was kept under wraps and it was announced at the dedication of the building. I'm very honored and this is where my retirement reception will be this coming Friday. The Bridge. I think there's a bit of you here. When you're looking at the Reading Room the Reading Room has very traditional finishes in it. More or less artisan crafts, Frank Lloyd Wright. Because there's also a very large reproduction of George Washington crossing the Delaware that the President called me one day and that painting asked to hang in that building. Do you have a place for it? And I thought, oh God. This building was to be high tech. To be all industrial. To reflect the power plant. And I thought how do we put George crossing the Delaware in this ultra tech building? So we then compromised and we said we're going to redo the Reading Room and this artisan crafts Frank Lloyd Wright because it was kind of a happy meeting between the two. And my wife thought it was very odd when she first saw that there's this really very traditional look of Reading Room. On the other side is this ridge that is made out of steel and concrete. More or less to help epitomize Purdue and the engineering function of the University. That's kind of self-explanatory. The chair that the young woman is sitting in we picked those because it was evocative of the smokestack that it was called a slender. And I said, and we have to cover in red so that it's the color of the brick. Well, those of you who are not from Indiana will realize someone at Purdue would not use red. Because that's the IU color. And so I had to say it was a brick red. It's not a crimson. And we had visitors from IU. I'm an IU grad. But we had visitors from IU come up and I was pointing this out to them. And I said, well, this would be like an IU not using black. Since our colors are black and gold. And they said, oh, but we never put black and gold together. So those kinds of strange little the other thing you'll notice is the colors on the furniture all very muted. I don't know if you've worked with but they tend to really like kind of fleshy colors that are very trendy. That in five years everybody's going to say screams mid-twenties. So we kept them very much in the grays and only a little bit of color at some time. The desk there is made out of bricks from the old power plant. And the diameter is the same as the smoke stack. And the grating behind, which looks like you're looking into a boiler is actually from the old smoke stack or from the old power plant. I had not ever been in the power plant until about a year before it was torn down. And a group of us went in so that we could see it. And a group of us were standing way up on top of these grays that you can see down below us. This building about six of us were standing up there and all of a sudden the whole thing kind of shifted. And I turned to this friend of mine. I got a picture of him. He's playing. And I said, you realize we're standing 65 feet above the floor in a building that has not been maintained in 30 years. We got down real fast. But it was this whole thing about trying to incorporate the building. And you'll see up above here. That's one of the murals is on the walls where you see a faculty member a worker in the power plant and students who are learning from the experience of being in the power plant. Okay, these are the classrooms. And as we said, we have 27 classrooms. And the one performance room, the Hyler Theater, seats 329. I had to do a song and dance to the president to get him to accept that as being an active learning space. Because he saw it as a lecture hall. And was really concerned that it was not going to allow students to be able to collaborate. But along with the dance professor and people from Center in Special Excellence, we said active learning takes place in many different ways. And it's not always just people working in teams. We also wanted it for lectures and things in the evening. And it has no stage. It's blacked. So when you look down at it, you feel like you're looking at a stage that you're really not. In order to allow the person in the front of the room to easily move back and forth throughout the room. The Boiler-Up classroom, I'll show you a picture of it. It sees 300. But there are tables that see six. And they even have removable whiteboards where the students can work in teams. But they can also turn and look at the professor. This is the Hyler Theater. You'll see the large windows over here. And when the theater projector comes on, the blinds automatically come down to close off the theater. Or to cut out the sunlight. The building has a lot of glass. A lot of glass. This is the Boiler-Up classroom. You can just barely see that there are some whiteboards hanging down from the ends of the tables. And this room during the day is filled with classes. The faculty love teaching in it. In the evenings you go by and there will be students sitting all throughout the room. More or less like an abbreviated reading room. If this were in a regular classroom building, the students wouldn't be there. When we did the surveys with our students, women especially said we don't feel comfortable in a classroom building at night when there's no supervision. And so this building, we have guards, we have security throughout the building all night. The entire building is 24-7. The I2I classroom is where the students can be facing each other and working together. Six round classrooms. You'll see that some of the tables are fixed. One of our librarians worked very hard on this to come up with the optimal number of seats and configurations so that we can meet the greatest number of needs by our students and our faculty. That's the one thing that we did. We did a trial of this in our undergraduate library. And the thing that we found out was faculty hated tables that they were too movable because when they would leave a class, the last professor would have had it organized one way and by the time the next class gets in there they have to reorganize. So the registrar has to find out what are the specifications or expectations of the professor for the class so they can know which classroom to put them in. The scale up classrooms I think once again, these are movable these are movable tables. And the mobile tablet arm chairs are ones that there's another picture the flexible classrooms where the tables can be moved into different configurations. And then I also wanted to talk about it was also supposed to be talked about by the faculty. And I had our AB person give me a lot of the things that he wanted that he thought other people who were in AB would want to know about. We were very concerned about Wi-Fi saturation in the building and so it was devised for 2.5 devices per person per seat. He now says who would come in with four devices. But I think what it means is to conduit the ability to support that many. I walk through the reading room often times and I just glance to see what students thought. I never I saw a book one day but almost invariably it's no books. And I'll just let you read through that. They also did kind of a scale up all the classrooms do not have to be used. And so our president was very concerned about putting way too much technology in the building that might not be used. And so our IT department went in and scaled up different levels of AB. The wiring and everything is there to be able to take it all in the future. But there was some concern that if we didn't show strong technology or that we had spent money on YC. We do have a maker space in the building. 3D. We also have a vision wall. I gave the team in the libraries who were working on how to demonstrate this very large screen which is six panels, nine panels. And I said I only want to show something that becomes obvious of anybody doing this. Why you need a screen this big. I didn't want to see just a big Excel spreadsheet. I want to see something that a person immediately knows why you have to see something this big. So they did. They worked up a very good demonstration. One of them was they brought up an image and I had the trustees all sitting there. And the image when it first came up looked like a beautiful flower bigger and bigger and bigger. And you realize it was representing all of the connections that the scientists and the researchers had in the Cancer Research Institute. They started showing all of the connections of how they collaborated. And it did a better job of showing that interconnectivity that faculty had in their research than if we had shown a list. Because now they would see a name flow by and they'd go oh there's so and so. And then they would see who he was connected to or she was connected to. It was one of the best examples. Another example was two professors. One professor in theater, dance and another professor in computer graphics. And it showed a young woman dancing at the same time her image was being of the image behind her that was very, very beautiful. And we couldn't have seen that if we were looking at a small screen. Another one was a GIS application about soil degradation in Indiana. Okay, I'm going to go through these real quick. I wonder what happened. Oh, there's one. So you can see that there are classrooms around the edges. But then in the spaces where it says open study, those are library spaces. And basically the students really now see the building as a library. The second floor. The reading room is in the bottom left. The bottom of the center. Although the library faculty for science and engineering, we have 18 library faculty specifically for science and engineering. And they're all located. They have beautiful offices. I make the distinction. I make the decision when I'm taking tours who is on the tour. I don't take other faculty in there. I don't take donors because it's some of the most beautiful views in the building. Looking out onto the bell tower or looking out onto the mall. I definitely don't take other faculty because they would be very jealous. Okay, here's the mobile table chair classroom at the beginning of the day. There it is at the end of the day. And it really allows the professor to create an environment that they want to have the students want to have. And it's a place where the students can put their bags underneath as well. Okay. That's pretty much it. Oh, last thing. We've given a lot of tours of this building. And we've been finding that it's getting more and more difficult to meet the demand that people have asked us to create. So we're planning a forum at Purdue in April of 2018. And so I was giving a preview to this to be watching for it. It'll be minimal registration but it'll be a day and a half. We'll have panels of students, faculty, librarians, architects to really talk about this building. This we now have a $1.5 million endowment for the building. Our goal is to get it up to $5 million. And this is not to support the maintenance or anything. It's to support the replacement of equipment and furnishings as the building ages. Okay. I'm going to stop there and turn to questions and answers. Thank you very much. This is my swan song. I read two weeks, three weeks from the day I'm retired.


So hello, welcome everybody to the fourth day of the hackathon. Today, we're going to have a talk by Phil Iwells about tools and guidelines for NFCOR. And after the talk, we'll tell a bit more details about the social event today. Join us later for a separate Zoom session for this social event at five. And yeah, I'm going to tell more details about it after Phil's talk. It's cool. Thanks for the introduction. Thank you everyone for coming back on day four of the NFCOR hackathon. I hope everyone's been having a good time so far. It sounds like there's been a lot of activity on Slack, so there's certainly a lot of commits coming in. So I think we're making great progress. Today, I'm just going to talk a little bit about the NFCOR help with tools package. Those of you who have been involved with developing things for the NFCOR will be fairly familiar with some of it already. But I thought I'd go over the different commands which are in there. Some of them are quite new. So I'll talk about the newer features in a bit more detail because it will affect most of the other one who is working with NFCOR. So I'll dive in. For those of you who maybe are just joining now, my name is Phil, Phil Ewells. And I'm working in Sweden at the National Astronomical Center Structure, which is part of the SILO Club. And so too, and GitHub and whatnot. And one of the founding members of NFCOR. And yeah, today is all about NFCOR tools. So this is the name of the GitHub repository. I tend to overuse the word tools everywhere. But basically what I mean with this is it's a Python package. So you can install it through Git, the Python package index, or you can install it through Conda. It's a Python module which you can import and use in your own scripts if you'd like to. But I'm not going to talk about that today. The main thing it gives you once you've installed it is a new command line and command, which is NFCOR. Not very inventive, but hopefully easy to remember. So what can NFCOR do? If you just type that without anything else or with the minus minus help, you'll get the help text. And that lists all of the different commands that are available to you. So there's multiple different subcommands. And those options at the top, the version, verbose, and help, they work with everything. So if you ever want the verbose, output, or the debug log messages to NFCOR minus B, and then the subcommand that comes first before a new subcommand. The different subcommands here are kind of roughly in two different categories. We have a bunch of commands at the top, which are all about running pipelines. So if you feel like a user for NFCOR, if you're using NFCOR pipelines, you're not necessarily developing anything. And I'll go through those in a second. And then the ones at the end are all about making pipelines and helping developers. So start off with tools for running pipelines.  So quite recently, so all of these screen grabs are pulled from NFCOR development version, which will hopefully be releasing. There's my aim to release it this week. We'll see if it happens. And I've tried rewriting a lot of the help texts. So don't forget that this minus minus help exists because it's usually quite informative. So if you hit NFCOR list, minus minus help tells you what it does. It's from the simplest of all commands. It just tells you what NFCOR pipelines exist. So basically the same as the NFCOR website with a few extra things. So you can give it extra filter keywords if you want to. So if you just want to see pipelines which are related to RNA, you type NFCOR list RNA. You can also sort by different things. So by default, it sorts by the most recently released. You can have JSON output if you want to use this programmatically. And that's about it. I don't know why that's there. So if you run it, you'll get output which looks kind of like this. So just on the command line tells you all the different NFCOR pipelines and when they're released. But the useful thing really is tells you on the right-hand side the last two columns, whether you have a local copy of this pipeline. So that means have you used NextFlow run with that pipeline? And if you have, then NextFlow will have pulled that pipeline to your local NextFlow assets folder, which is usually in your own directory. So this command looks to all of those, finds them, tries to identify them, and checks when you pulled it, how long ago, and also compares that against the latest release which is available. So if it's green and tells you you've got the latest release, and if you just run NextFlow run via recon, you will be running the latest stable release of that pipeline. And if it's red, it shows you that if you just do NextFlow run, and of course, a taxicare in this case, I'd be running kind of a random development version, which is not the latest stable release. So it's good just to keep an eye on, and helps you know whether you should be doing NextFlow pull on any pipelines. Just a good, quick check to do. This screenshot, like many others, when you get version 10, 1.10 will actually look a bit different, because I've just been spent the last few days of this hackathon, mostly today and yesterday, rewriting all these outputs. So it's actually in a really pretty table now, using a new library called Rich, which was suggested. So I've been kind of having fun with that. The terms are the same, and the outputs basically are identical. So don't be afraid if it looks a bit different. Okay, next up, NFCore download. That's pretty much what it says. If you give NFCore download the name of the pipeline, such as here is NFCore download the taxicare, it will grab all of the workflow files from GitHub and download into your computer. It will also get the NFCore configs repository to download that. And it will actually edit the pipeline config ever so slightly, so that by default it knows the relative path to those configs, which means that all of those institutional profiles work without an internet connection. It takes all these files which have been downloaded and it compresses them. And this basically, the whole point of this command is that if you're running on a cluster that has no internet connection and you try and do next-play run on NFCore taxicare, it won't be able to pull the pipeline for you. So you have to do that on a different system. And this just simplifies that process for you. So it just gives you a nice single archive file which you can easily transfer to your cluster and then run offline. If you run with minus, minus singularity and you have singularity installed, it will also pull the singularity image for you and also put it into that same archive. And of course it's very nice and gives you the tar command that you don't need to use on the cluster. So you can just uncompress it very easily. Okay. And of course license is probably the least used of any NFCore commands. Most people even on the NFCore core team, some of them I believe don't know this exists or didn't until we were writing a manuscript and I described it. This has been like a side project. I just, I can't remember what we needed it for. There's one specific thing and I kind of realized we could do it because we're using conda, environment files and the Anaconda API has all the information about all of these packages. We can fetch the license information for every dependency within an NFCore pipeline. So if you run NFCore licenses, RNAC or TAXIC or the name of an NFCore pipeline, we'll fetch that environment file and it will pull all the licenses for every single dependency. I'll also tell you what all the different versions of those dependencies are which are in the environment file. Bit of a niche tool, you know, kind of cool. Right. Those are all the commands for if you're running pipelines. Now I'm going to go on to the slightly more kind of probably the more commonly used to be honest or certainly the more powerful commands within the NFCore tools package, which are all about making pipelines and helping developers. The number one command, which is probably the real core, the real crux of NFCore is the pipeline to create a new pipeline and of course create. By default, you can run this without any arguments and it will prompt you for a name, a description and an author. Using these three values, it will then fill in basically a template, a template pipeline, put those variables in all over the place and create a skeleton pipeline for you. It also sets that up as a git repository and gives you these commands just here. So you need to CD into that directory, add a remote. So we get a remote repository and then tells you to push all of them. This basically completely sets you up for all of the downstream things you want to do. And if ever you want to make a pipeline part of NFCore, it's really going to make your life much easier to start with this. One of the key things it does is it sets up that git repository but it also makes the first commit which is a completely vanilla of a template and this helps the automatic synchronization of a template that we did later on. This skeleton output that generates looks something like this which will be very familiar for any of you who've worked with NFCore pipelines. So it gives you a change log file, it gives you the NFCore code of contact, the MIT license read me file, all this kind of stuff and also gives you the actual pipeline main.NF file. This is a mini but fully functional X-ray pipeline right out of the door and should all follow NFCore guidelines from the word go. There's a lot of files here and it's a bit overwhelming, especially for newcomers to know where to start. So one of the things we've done is we've littered these files with little comments. These are specifically formatted as to the NFCore. So you can see here, this is a documentation usage.md markdown file. We've got a little comment here saying to do, document what you need to do here. So this is really useful. Many code editors can automatically find and highlight these kind of to do statements. So as a starting point, you can just find all of these and just work your way through following the instructions basically. Following on from that is the NFCore lint command. Now, with something the size of NFCore, we have all these guidelines that we ask you to adhere by, but manually vetting all of those all the time across all the different pipelines with so many different contributors is just impossible. So we have to automate this. And so linting is just a term that means basically code checking. It's this kind of meta code that checks code. So if you run NFCore lint, can you give it a pipeline, the directory that has your NFCore pipeline in it. It will run a whole suite of tests against that and check all of these things that we expect you to do and not to do within your NFCore pipeline. Many of these are stylistic and some of them are hard passes and some of them just give you warnings. So in this case, you can see that we had 85 tests passed, 36 gave warnings and there are no failures. So that's pretty good. Each one of those gives you, we're told about all the different warnings. So each one of them you can see comes with a URL of the NFCore website with the ID of that specific test type. So if you follow that URL, you'll find this documentation in about what the lint test is looking for, why it fails and hopefully it will help you to fix it. It also gives you a little bit of description text you can see here saying what went wrong. So there is a problem here with the GitHub Actions workflow. There are two condo packages where it's checked the Anaconda API and it's found that there's a newer version of MultiQC and FastQC available so you can update. And then it also finds all of those to-do strings that I mentioned earlier. So just in case you weren't sure if you had all of them running the NFCore lint, we'll tell you if it finds any. Pretty cool. You can run that on the command line and I recommend you do. But also this tool runs automatically with GitHub continuous inspiration on GitHub Actions. So every time you push a commit and every time you open a pull request to the pipeline, this will automatically run on your code. So this is a screenshot for GitHub Actions interface and you can see exactly the same command with exactly the same output. This is really great and it works beautifully and it means that when we are reviewing pull requests if you get a little green tick next to this you know that there's nothing seriously wrong. One of the new things which is going to come out in the next version of the template which I've been playing with quite recently and I really really like it. Hopefully it will be useful for everybody. One of the problems with this is that here you can see there were no test failures and that means that this automatic test got a little green tick. Basically there were no errors. But you can see there are lots of warnings here about content packages being updates being available and stuff like this. So these test warnings are kind of still interesting to see as a pipeline developer. However, if you get that little green tip the chances are extremely high. You're never going to click through to this interface to get a log output. So these are very often overlooked until something actually breaks. So one of the additions we've made is we've added a new step in the GitHub Actions workflow which checks this output and does something kind of a bit intelligent with it and actually automatically creates a comment on your pull request with the results of those NFCore lint tests. If you only got past tests you didn't get any failings and you didn't get any warnings this will show up saying what the overall result was and how many of those have gone up. It's basically a rich text output. And this little details tab can then be expanded and you can see all of the different test results and again click through to the documentation. So hopefully this will be useful and make those warnings a bit more relevant. Okay, on to the next commands NFCore bump versions. This is not a very interesting command but it's very useful. Each NFCore pipeline has a version tag which is very useful for stability and everything. But it's all over the place. It's in an actual config file. It's in the metafiles. It's in the script and it's in the name of the condor environment. It's just in loads of different places and if you try and manually update this version number everywhere you're almost inevitably going to miss one and that will just break all kinds of things. So we automate this and now you type in NFCore bump versions give it your directory of your pipeline and tell it the name of the new version that you'd like and it just goes through all of your code and updates it in all the right places. Simple. It can also have a minus minus next row flag so if you need to update the minimum version of the next row that's required to run your pipeline you can do that. And of course sync one of the most feared pipeline commands one I've spent a lot of time on and no one else has touched because it's a powerful and a bit terrifying. Sync command is for synchronizing your pipeline against the main NFCore template. So say that you run NFCore created with version 1.6 of the NFCore template and then we bring out new versions of tools which have improvements within that base boilerplate code. We want to make sure that all of those NFCore pipelines are all using all of those improvements that we need to synchronize the template files. But of course this is not trivial because you've added loads of your own code on top of the template, modified it in a hundred different ways. So the NFCore sync command automates as much as we can of the synchronization process. And if you've worked with NFCore pipelines and sort of seen mention of this mysterious template branch this is where this really comes in. And I don't think I have any screenshots because this is very code heavy and kind of text heavy so it's not very interesting to look at. But basically the template branch should contain vanilla template code. So exactly the output of NFCore create command and it should have a shared history with your main pipeline. And what we do when we do the automatic synchronization is we check out that template branch we delete everything. We run NFCore create again with the latest version of the template. That gives us a new command and a new diff on that template branch between what changed from the older version of the template and the new version of the template. And then because we have a shared history with your main pipeline we can create a pull request from the template branch in. And every time we do this it knows about the previous times it's been merged in. So the more times you do it the simpler it gets and hopefully it knows which parts of the template you've already customized and makes this possible. So when we do the pull request and we have a small regular updates this pull request is fairly small and it's just for one play updates. Unfortunately we're not very good at doing small regular updates. We always promise to do it. So what you might find is when this automated pull request is opened you have a lot of merged conflicts and you have to fix them manually. But that's there's a lot of documentation that we've written recently on the NFCore website. So you can run which is bundled within the NFCore package that you have installed. And that just works on your local pipeline directory. Again, it needs this template branch, which is there. But there's also a magic minus minus all flag, which is used in the automation. And so when we push a new version of NFCore tools, this is run on GitHub Actions. And it tries to automatically check out and sync every single NFCore pipeline. It is a terrifying thing for them. We've only written this and rewritten it twice now. So it's run about three or four times in total now. And it gets a little bit better every time and a little bit more stable. And each time it happens about five or six or seven pipelines fail, I try and figure out why. We're gonna do a new release of NFCore, like I said, hopefully this week or very soon. So this will run again and make me sweat for a few minutes and we'll see how well it works. And if any pipelines are actually synchronized. Brackets. For those of you who are keen eyed, you will have noticed that I missed off a couple of those commands at the start. Those commands were NFCore launch for users and NFCore schema for developers. And this is because this is a suite of new tools which are coming out with a new version of NFCore tools, new helper commands, which is completely new. But it's gonna become a hard requirement for all NFCore pipelines. So once this new version of tools comes out, all of your lint tests are gonna start failing until we update the pipeline. That's intentional. I'm sorry about that, but we just want you to update your pipeline. So what is a pipeline schema? Right, let's go back to basics. In NextFlow Pipelines, we have params.foo and we set it to a default value and we can use this like a regular variable. So we do NextFlow run and we get hello world. We can then run with minus minus foo. And of course, that's overwritten within NextFlow and we get this nice customized output. Now, as everyone knows, we use these params all over NFCore pipelines. How you customize every little nook and cranny of execution. And in the bigger pipelines, especially there can be a massive number of these. You have to use them really to run pipelines that are completely required. And it's quite easy to make typos and it's quite difficult to know what parameters exist and how to use them. At the moment, we have manual documentation which we've just written out. The developers just have to kind of make sure to keep that up to date. But of course, with so many parameters, it's easy to miss them. So sometimes parameters become undocumented or outdated. And this can cause quite a lot of problems. So what's coming? There's a new file for every NFCore pipeline which is called NextFlow Schema.json. It's a pretty simple file. We just describe every single one of these params which is used. So here we say it has a parameter called foo. It should be a string. So not a boolean or not a number. The default value is world. It doesn't miss default. It doesn't always have to match the NextFlow config but it should 99% of the time. And then we can write a description of what the parameter is. There's a few more fields we can add but these are kind of the core ones. Now this is written using a standardized format called JSON Schema which makes it easy to kind of tie in with lots of other systems. And it just allows us to automate all kinds of stuff. One of the most obvious things is that we're gonna use it for validation of user inputs. So that is if you do minus, minus foo but you give it a number instead of a string or that's a bad example but if it said a number and you gave it a string it would fail immediately rather than trying to run the pipeline and failing at a later stage. Also if you try to run with a typo then it might say as an unrecognized parameter or if you miss out a required parameter then it will just fail immediately. So this automated validation is gonna be incredibly useful and hopefully save you a lot of time by making it kind of a fail fast system which can be very validated. The other thing is because we're writing description and actually also help text within the schema files we can reuse this all over the place because it's programmatically available. Instead of being stuck in a static markdown file we can pull it out when people run things on the command line so we can have command line help. So when you do next row run pipeline minus minus help it will be able to use this file and spit everything out. We can also use it to generate the documentation on the website and we can also start to build user interfaces and the same text comes up place and place over and over again but you only have to write it in a single place. So this is much more efficient and much easier to keep up to date. Writing a massive JSON document is really dull. So one of the first ones we built to do this was NFCore schema and then build. And again, you give it a path to your pipeline. And this command does a lot of stuff. So let me walk you through it. The first thing it does is it looks at your pipeline to see if it finds a schema file. If it doesn't find a schema file it generates one based on the NFCore template which is of course bundled with the tool. And if you use NFCore create from the next release onwards then when you start your pipeline you will automatically have that schema file there already. If it does find the schema though it just checks it, make sure it looks valid. There's lots of code in here to validate a million different things. So revalidate the schema with the JSON in the right format basically. Once we have that schema passed we then start to look in the next way.config. Actually run next to a config and get a list of every single parameter that your pipeline uses. And we also scrape manually from the main.net file. Once we have that huge list of plans we check that against the schema and we look for any mismatches. These are then prompted on the command line page. So you can see in this example we found three parameters which were in the next row config of the pipeline but not mentioned in the schema. And it's saying, do you want this to be added to the schema? So this might be new options that we just added in the code. It works the other way around as well. So if it finds things which are in the schema and not in the pipeline it checks that they're definitely meant to be there if you changed or camel case to a set name or something like that would change it for you. So it works you through that on the pipeline and then it saves the updates of JSON file. So that's great. But of course you still don't have any description text or help text and we haven't ordered anything and really we want to do a lot of kind of manual customisation of this file. And again that's really difficult to do either manually or even on the command line. So what the schema build comes with is a web builder tool which is integrated with the NFC call. So here it says in verbal, do you want to launch this? Hit yes. And when you hit yes it should like open up a web browser for you. Importantly, you can see that the command line here carries on running. You've still got that little typically going bottom left and it's just waiting for you to use the website and it will sit there for a while basically until either you exit or it finds an updated status on the list. When that URL opens you'll be presented with something like this. And you should see all of the different things that you've got in your JSON schema. So there are three new options we added which are at the bottom and we can drag and drop them. We can give them a little nice icon. We can write some description text which can be marked down. And we can write some longer help text which is also marked down. So this is a really graphical tool. It comes with a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts as well so you can move around quickly or do things patch and you can preview the help text as you like it. And you can set all the different attributes like whether things are required, different variable types, what the default value should be. And this gives you a lot of power to customize it. You don't ever see any JSON data changes. There's also the settings at the end. So you can set up things like regular expressions which were strings up to validate or if there's a list of values which were allowed to be set and you can see you're going to see values when you can set that list. So this is really powerful and that can help you very quickly to use. Once you have finished, you hit save, save changes and you hit that big blue button on the top right which says finished. And then what will happen is in the background that command which was sat there waiting with all the checks and pins of our site every couple of seconds and you'll see that the status is updated. It will download that edit with JSON schema and it will save it into a file. You can run JSON schema build with many times as you like and it will just update it, update it. And of course, if you don't change anything then it will just run a window. So this is both for building it in the first place and also for keeping up to date in the future. Cool. So now you've built your schema as a developer. What else can we do with it? The first thing which of course is super cool to do is we can start to make nice interfaces to launch pipelines. This is now pretty, pretty developed and there's also coming out with actually some other cool things. If you go to NFCore website some of the newer pipelines where the developers, no name of mentions got excited about this underneath feature have already started building schema. And if you go to a Tati Chipsy ego, I think maybe one or two others, you'll find that the button that normally says like new code now says launch version. And this is only showing when the schema file is found for the latest release. You click launch version and it takes you to a new page on the NFCore website. It looks a lot like the schema builder but now instead of customizing where these things go you have a list of all these different parameters and you can actually start to fill in values for them. They're treated intelligently so if it's a string, you get a text input. If it's a number, then you get a number field. If it's a list of new major values you can select drop down list. So it's kind of built intelligently. And also the JavaScript on the front end validates this as you get. So if you have a patent for example for this email, it tells you immediately no that's wrong or no you missed required input. When you're finished, you can hit launch on the top right there. And again, it saves as cached version much like you did with the schema but now it's saving the cached version of all the parameters that you just inputted. And it gives you these nice commands underneath. So now we have this NFCore launch command with minus minus ID and then cache identifier. If we copy and paste that, paste that into our terminal the NFCore command line tool now sees the ID. It checks the NFCore website for that ID. And if it finds it or download parameters file which you've created, and then it saves it in your current working directory and offers to run the pipeline for you. It knows which pipeline you built it with. It knows what version of the pipeline you've selected and it puts all of those parameters into the JSON file which you can run using the minus collection file. There's some options for example, if you don't want to use the JSON file you can tell NFCore launch to build it all on the command minus minus this, minus minus that, like you might do manually. And there's a few other options there. So this is now super user friendly. You can do all of this with a click and kind of very native interface which will be hopefully be really easy for both kind of experts and newcomers alike.  Super cool. Natural thing of course is that it'd be rather nice to take these parameters and launch them in other places such as for example, I said, next row tower. That's not escaped our attention and have to keep your eyes peeled to see if any new buttons appear in the future. This is great. But of course everything I've shown you so far requires an internet connection. And lots of people use next row on clusters which don't have internet connections and things like this. So the NFCore launch command also works really well for pipelines which are offline. So you can run NFCore launch on a local directory. This can be any next row pipeline, doesn't have to be NFCore. Again, it checks that schema. And now you get a command line wizard which takes you through all of those same options, prints and descriptions, prints to help text, renders them up down on the command line which is super cool and validates all of your inputs here. So checks where the things are required. And again, you can see all these different options of groups here so you can kind of work through the equation. And this would be a numeric value and you can see immediately this telling you that. So again, it's very user friendly, maybe not quite as visual as the website, but very quick and easy to use and intuitive. And this runs on any next row pipeline with a schema and it runs without an internet connection. Pretty cool. Right, that's it. There are other things coming with NFCore tools. I haven't described, for example, a new series of commands called NFCore Modules, or which will be for working with it, NFCore Modules DSL2 code, but it's still very much in development. And there's a whole load of changes which have just been made this week, finding things that are making things nice. So when you do try this out, hopefully things will look even spiffier. Just like everything else, we have a Slack channel for tools. So if you're using this and have any questions or suggestions, jump on there and all the code is on GitHub, like everything else. With that, I hope that was useful and maybe hopefully everyone learned a little bit new with something new about the NFCore tools package. I'm happy to take any questions. Thank you, Phil. Very interesting developments and exciting developments on this NFCore, new NFCore tools for build and launching pipelines. Are there any questions from the audience? Please write them into the chat. And I have a question meanwhile. So for the NFCore build and launch, the parameters get caching the website for how long are they available there? Seven days, I think. Okay. Off the top of my head. Yeah, if you try and access it, it will be told that it doesn't exist or it can't be found. And every time this tool runs the website checks all the different caches into each of the old ones. If you're worried about data privacy, of course, use the offline tools, even if you have an internet connection, that's part of the reason that we've built those. Perfect, thank you. Yeah, we have a question from Alice. Could it be possible to have an assume yes option for the launch command to launch from a job on a non-interactive session? Yeah, so I thought about this with the NFCore schema build, there is that option, but it's not called assume yes, it's called from no problems, I think, but it does basically the same thing, goes through it and makes sure that the schema and the pipeline match. So the NFCore launch tool, it makes slightly less sense because if you're gonna run it non-interactively, you may as well just run next-flow run. That takes all the same defaults and that does exactly the same thing. So if you run NFCore launch without entering anything, all you'll get at the end is an next-flow run command with no options. So it doesn't really make sense to run NFCore launch in a non-interactive way because that functionality is the word you're available with next-flow. So no, that option doesn't exist in NFCore launch. If you can come up with a compelling argument for it, then I'd be happy to listen. With one exception, as I know, yeah. So you can also give NFCore launch parameters file that you've previously written. So for example, if you run an X wave and then a core pipeline with a schema once before and you wanna run it again with using exactly the same inputs you did before but tweaking one or two, then you can supply that file and it will go through and basically overwrite the defaults with whatever you did before. So you can go through and check and edit things and rerun if you want to. And I was gonna say you can run that non-interactive but that's a lie, it still has to be interactive. And again, if you wanted to run that non-interactive you just do it with an extra command. Okay, perfect. Thank you very much for this talk, Phil. We are all really excited to try it out. So we hope to push for a release soon. Yeah. Yeah.


Welcome. Very glad to have you all here today. My name is Lisa Cardi. I'm the Deputy Director of the Global Health Policy Center here at CSIS. We're very glad that you could join us for what promises to be a very exciting event in our ongoing statesman series of speakers. A particular welcome to Dr. Shah and also to his staff that have joined him today. I'd also like to welcome our several hundred guests who are joining us online. Most importantly, I'd like to bring you all, but particularly Dr. Shah, greetings from John Hamre, CSIS's president, who unfortunately is overseas today and can't join us. The statesman series is CSIS's premier speaker series, generously supported by the Lavrantiatis Group. It's designed to bring global leaders here and to give them a platform to talk about the critical issues of the day. There was a time when a discussion on health and development might not quite have risen to this level, but luckily that time is long gone and that's no doubt in part due to the extraordinary contributions of USAID over many decades that I think have proven beyond any doubt that not only is development the right thing to do, but it's the smart thing to do. CSIS has been enormously fortunate in having many AID administrators come here and speak in the past, but I believe this is actually the first time we've had two administrators here with us. That's at once both a current administrator and a former administrator. So I am really delighted to be able to welcome this afternoon Henrietta Holtzman IV. As many of you know, Ms. IV was AID administrator from 2007 to 2009. Prior to her work with the agency, she was a very successful career in both the public and private sectors. She's a trustee here at CSIS and also a very good friend of CSIS. Most importantly, she's someone who really cares deeply about development and about creating more opportunities in the developing world. So I'd like to invite Ms. IV to come to the podium to introduce Dr. Shah. We'll then have Dr. Shah's remarks and then we'll have some time for Q&A. Thanks for joining us. Thank you very much, Lisa, and it is great to see all of you here today. It means that development is alive and well and strong and that's very important for all of us in the world. I would first like to mention the good work that's being done here at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Lisa Cardi to you and Steve Morrison. Thank you because it has been seminal work on health but also before this the work on food and other issues. So thank you for leading that. I think it's important that we all talk about and engage in the discussions of what development is and what it can do. As all of you know, the United States Agency for International Development is the premier institution that leads development around the world. And it leads in peace and security, it leads in infrastructure and economic leadership, in ways that help in legal systems and that help with governance and democracy building, humanitarian assistance in education, in health, and of course in disaster assistance in Haiti. Our administrator, 16th Administrator Rajiv Shah, is with us today because he is a remarkable symbol as well as a leader for USAID. There are many experts within USAID but we are delighted that Raj is a doctor. So as a medical doctor it means that he can lead with enormous integrity in the field of health. He has initiatives that have spanned from food to entrepreneurship to health to online activities and ideas that stress innovation and that stress integration. And today he will talk to us about health and about the opportunities of the Global Health Initiative. In a town in which we often do not have bipartisanship, Raj and I have a good relationship and it is with great pleasure and an honor that I am able to introduce Rajiv Shah, the 16th Administrator for USAID. Thank you, thanks very much. Good afternoon. This is a wonderful group that you've assembled, Lisa. It's very impressive. It's great to see so many familiar faces turning up to talk about global health. That's very exciting and I look forward to this conversation and to hearing your thoughts, ideas and questions. Henrietta, thank you for that overly kind introduction and wonderful description of USAID. I'm still learning how to do that so it's helpful for me to take notes as you're doing that. We are in many ways building on some of your important successes, especially in rebuilding the human resources of the agency through the Development Leadership Initiative. Every day we think about the contributions you've made in that regard. And I really do want to commend CSIS and the leadership of Lisa Cardi and Stephen Morrison for really paving the way towards the integrated health approach that we'll hopefully talk about today. It was in fact your global health policy group which replaced I think the earlier AIDS task force and has been really pointing people conceptually and in practice to the concept that the future lies in smart strategic investments in health systems. I'd like to start today just by telling you about two women. Two women with one thing in common. They're both pregnant with their third child. Consider for a moment the dilemma of a woman in Sub-Saharan Africa and even one with the unique access to many of our own U.S.-funded programs. To get the prenatal treatment that is necessary to prevent her from transmitting HIV to her child, she must travel a great distance with an infant on her back and a toddler in hand to a PEPFAR-supported clinic. And to get her two other children immunized against measles or other vaccine-preventable diseases, she has to make another arduous journey to a different clinic at a different point in time. Neither clinic is equipped to provide complicated obstetric care. So this mother, like her mother before her and so many others in her village and her community, will likely decide to take her chances in birth at home because the journey to an adequate facility is too arduous and too difficult. The burden of fear generated by this ordeal weighs on her entire family and, in fact, her entire community. Now consider for a moment a different situation. That of a woman here in Washington. A woman also carrying her third child. A federal employee whose health plan provides convenient, comprehensive care throughout her pregnancy and a healthy head start in life for her first two children. Healthy children we know are more likely to learn, more likely to thrive throughout their lives and as adults. The peace of mind that comes with knowing one's family will be well cared for by competent medical professionals spanning a broad range of potential needs enables this woman, my wife Shevam, was due to deliver our third child in November. And her husband, that would be me, to focus on, in case there was any question, to focus on giving our real utmost effort to our jobs, our family, our community. Medical technology and strong health systems have made maternal death a relative rarity in our world. According to UNICEF, an American woman faces a 1 in 4800 chance of dying during childbirth. But in Sub-Saharan Africa, the story is very different. The chances of dying in childbirth there are 1 in 22. The fact that some women are more likely to be HIV positive and more than 200 times more likely to die during childbirth than a woman in the United States is simply unacceptable. The President's Global Health Initiative is designed to close that gap and to bring about a convergence between the stories I just described. Health is in fact at the heart of human progress and we recognize that the well-being of people around the world is not just an important end in and of itself, but it is strongly linked to the security, prosperity and partnership of our country with our colleagues around the world. And that's why Global Health is a central part of President Obama's and Secretary Clinton's plan for a more peaceful and a more prosperous global community. This administration's initiative is about helping partner countries achieve major advances in health by working smarter, by building on past successes and by making some tough decisions. To achieve these advances, the GHI will invest $63 billion to this end. That's more than double the amount of money we spent on health during the preceding six years and a significant commitment of resources during a very difficult fiscal time. Through integration and efficiency, we will be very focused on getting more value for every dollar we spend in health and ultimately saving millions of additional lives worldwide. GHI builds on remarkable progress in public health that we've all seen. Over the last decade, we've made huge strides through a variety of disease-specific or intervention-specific campaigns. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief is the largest single effort by any country to combat a single disease. The first phase alone provided anti-retroviral treatment to more than 2 million patients and supported care for more than 10 million people affected by HIV worldwide. By all accounts, PEPFAR was a game changer. And to support its efforts, the administration is increasing funding for PEPFAR consistently and in greater ways than before. Similarly, the President's Malaria Initiative reduced the intolerable burden of malaria, which causes 900,000 deaths each year, most in Africa and most among children, through a package of proven control measures. Since the initiative began in 2005, we've distributed more than 19 million insecticide-treated nets and 40 million lifesaving anti-malarial treatments. These low-cost interventions, coupled with behavior change programs and real outreach and engagement, has resulted in really remarkable results. In Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Zambia, we've seen malaria deaths come down significantly and in some communities come down by half or more. The work of the diverse leaders and advocates behind these breakthroughs leaves a legacy that actually goes even beyond the life-safe, and that's many of you in this room. Your work has helped teach the world that rampant disease imperils global stability and must be addressed. Your work has shown grassroots communities that support for global health is critical and you've triggered an upsurge in attendance in global health courses in colleges around our country, in the faith communities, activity and commitment, and even amongst branch-conscious consumers like myself that own red watches or red t-shirts and wear them with great pride. It has helped expose the weaknesses of health systems in developing countries and forged a bipartisan consensus that we should do more to spend our resources to save lives abroad. So I thank you for that. And yet, in isolation, nearly all of us agree that disease-specific approaches also have some serious deficiencies. Visit any African country and you're likely to find a health system organized around diseases and interventions, not the actual patient. You'll find separate clinics in separate places for AIDS, for children's health, family planning, and advanced obstetric care. Not only is that bad for the patient, but it is strikingly inefficient for taxpayers. And in many cases we have ourselves to blame. Our siloed, single-disease focus means that in many countries the same health system that can prevent the transmission of AIDS to an infant is unable to prevent that same child from dying of diarrheal disease before she turns five. I saw an example of this myself on a recent trip. In May I visited an impressive PEPFAR-supported facility in Kenya. I learned that every government clinic in Kenya once had an area set aside where mothers were counseled about oral rehydration therapy, commonly called the ORT Corner. As many of you know, ORT is cheap, simple, and widely credited with saving millions of lives a year. But when AIDS funding rehabilitated the government clinics in Kenya, the ORT counseling areas were often taken out and replaced by sites for HIV counseling. It is an important lesson, as unintended as it was. Our disease-driven focus can sometimes crowd out other cost-effective, life-saving interventions, even in Kenya, a country that this institution, CSIS, has rightly highlighted as being on the cutting edge of health program integration. By integrating health delivery in countries we can extend the reach of these focus interventions at the clinic and in the community. And that means a woman who enters a maternity clinic can receive the full range of services she would need for herself and her child. The Global Health Initiative is therefore about the patient, not just the disease. The initiative will enable country-led health programs to be smarter, more efficient, and more effective. We'll support community-based health systems that are appropriately staffed and stocked to deliver a broad range of health services and to reach back into more formal health systems when necessary. But let's not confuse ends and means. The ultimate target of the GHI is not to simply build health systems for the sake of building systems. It's to achieve more health outcomes and to sustain those gains over a long period of time. And we do that by rooting our investments in those who are ultimately responsible for seeing them through governments, NGOs, and the local private sector. And it's worth reiterating that effective health systems, as sometimes unsexy as they are, I particularly think a good health system can be quite sexy, saves lives and enables more people to be healthy and productive contributors to society. Just like the disease campaigns that it builds upon, the GHI will use data and clear metrics of success, doubling the number of babies born free of HIV, having the burden of malaria, cutting the under five mortality rate by a third, and reducing maternal mortality, a number that's been moving in recent estimates, by 30%. But unlike previous health initiatives, GHI will focus from the outset on, as President Obama states, creating the conditions that will reduce the need for future aid in the out years. As many people here know, the Child Survival Revolution in the 1980s contributed to rapid progress by mobilizing unprecedented global medical system and political support. That successful movement was driven largely by the force and charisma of one man's leadership, Jim Grant of UNICEF, and of course Bill Fahey of the CDC and Peter McPherson of USAID, and many, many others. But as we later learned, despite the tremendous successes of that movement to raise immunization rates, in many cases to over 80%, and to greatly expand primary care services to people in need and save millions of lives, any movement that rests on the tirelessness of one individual or even a small group of leaders is inherently unsustainable. In the early 1990s, when funding slowly shifted to other areas, immunization coverage and child survival began to slow. In fact, DTP3 immunization rates dropped almost 60% globally, and much more so in many countries where we all spend our time and energy. I mentioned the lack of an ORT corner in the clinic I saw in Kenya. Actually, our DHS surveys documented a more than 20% decline in ORT use in Kenya between 1998 and 2003. Fortunately, our experts recognize this trend and have been working to reverse it. But we as a donor community have an obligation to keep countries off of this seesaw of donor trends. And that is exactly what underpins the GHI vision. And here are some of its defining features. First, we believe in doing more of what works, a simple concept. GHI will expand proven treatment and prevention strategies in TB, HIV, malaria, and a range of neglected tropical diseases. But it also will expand what works in nutrition, in hygiene, in sanitation, in family planning, and in maternal and child health. All of those areas statistically have been under-invested in through the last decade of increased global health investment. GHI is investing in improving measures and methods for monitoring and evaluation in each of these programs. We're learning about better ways to treat diarrhea and pneumonia and children to save lives and prioritizing vaccines like rotavirus or pneumococcus to more effectively prevent disease so they don't have to be treated later. And we're learning, for example, that simply training more doctors and nurses is not sufficient to ensure a health workforce that's capable of providing care to an entire population. Doctors and nurses, and as a doctor I feel this is a safe comment, are wonderful contributors to medicine. But they're often the first to be hired away by other countries who pay a higher wage. And they can be reluctant to work in a rural environment where they might not have access to tertiary care services and the ability to provide those services. So we've learned a lot about the importance of task-shifting and the tremendous value of building a cadre of community health workers trained in primary health care who stay in their communities with the trust and respect of their neighbors. We have more than 10,000 such community health workers in Senegal where I recently visited and the commitment and connection they have to their local communities is just tremendous. And GHI will also create an environment where it's safe to report on things that don't work because that's ultimately the only way that we can experiment and learn. Second, GHI will focus on expanding existing service platforms. Saving more lives means being smarter about getting the maximum impact for every dollar we spend in health. And this means developing new insights and better methods for using our HIV, TB, malaria treatment platforms to provide a broader range of services. The good news is that we have strong platforms from which to build. Under PEPFAR, we built strong HIV aid service delivery systems in many countries. And USAID's work in primary health care has contributed to widespread maternal and child health platforms with doctors, nurses, clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, community linkages, and procurement and product distribution systems. Similarly, the President's Malaria Initiative has its own platforms for providing access to needed interventions. These different platforms are the basic foundation for GHI. We can strengthen these platforms by bringing together all of the capabilities across PEPFAR, USAID, CDC, and a full range of other federal global health partners, including DHHS, the National Institute of Health, the Peace Corps, and the State Department. Expanding these existing platforms and programs will mean providing easier access at a single location for a broader set of medical and health interventions. It means making the shift from diseases to patients. And it means focusing more cleanly on the last mile problem of getting a full package of basic health services out to those people who are most vulnerable because they lack access to any protective care at all. These expanded platforms will do more for HIV-positive patients. And it will do more to prevent an HIV-negative patient from contracting the disease. Because the current reality of two new people on treatment for every five new people contracting the disease, frankly, is not enough. Integration just makes common sense. Third, we will prioritize innovation. Under the GHI, we are identifying, evaluating, and implementing a range of entrepreneurial approaches to public health, such as results-based financing and incentives to encourage better and broader utilization of proven services. We are getting many of our best ideas from small programs that are today small but have the real potential to scale. In Zambia, for example, one clinic wanted to get more mothers to come in for prenatal services to return when it was time to deliver their babies because we all know the 48 hours around childbirth is the period when 70% of maternal deaths occur. So the clinicians promised patients inexpensive mom kits that included soap and a baby blanket and a few other things. And with this small incentive, these clinics experienced a boom in birthing visits. It's not unlike the conditional transfers we've seen in other parts of the world. And we're pioneering entrepreneurial ways to encourage more private sector participation and financing. In Namibia, for example, we conducted a campaign to convince mining companies that it was in their interest to pay for their employees' counseling and treatment and ARVs by showing them that that was cheaper and more effective than to hire and train new workers for those that they had lost to the disease. And we're building on the current experience that's just being created, which is a U.S. initiative called Text for Baby, an effort to actually use SMS text platforms to reach a broader group of people in a more targeted way with more effective health messaging. These types of applications in developing countries could now reach millions of expectant and new mothers with critical healthy behavior messages. Finally, research and innovation are critical to the Global Health Initiative. Game-changing new technologies such as new diagnostics will change the economics of treatment across a range of diseases. Tuberculosis is often cited because we're not that far from new TB diagnostics that are cheap and efficient and can make the distinction between multi-drug, resistant treatment pathways and lower-cost pathways that are less burdensome. By using these types of new breakthroughs, we can save money, treat more people, and save more lives. Fourth, the GHI will focus on country ownership. The GHI recognizes that the United States can simply not do this alone. President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and the American public are deeply committed to saving lives around the world. But the global needs for HIV-AIDS, for maternal and child health, for family planning and immunization, are genuine global responsibilities that require a full global response. Every government, every bilateral donor, every multilateral alliance like GAVI or the Global Fund, and every community from the American taxpayer to a Ugandan village must take greater ownership for this challenge. The GHI meets the Obama Administration's core development principle of working in partnership, not patronage, by supporting real country-owned plans and being willing to redirect and realign our investments against those plans. Rather than building parallel health services that frankly are often not even visible to country ministries and country leadership, we want to strengthen host country systems. Host country, we can do contracting through host country ministries, and we can work more closely with host country implementing partners. We're stepping up our coordination with critical global health partners like the Global Fund, GAVI, the World Bank, and the full range of UN agencies. And in fact, our ability to do this will be critical to our ability to align multiple streams of funding that come into countries and better align them with what countries hope to achieve and sustain themselves over time. I'm sure many of you watched the G8 this weekend. I did from time to time as well. While many consider the MCH commitments there to be modest, the G8 this year made important strides in ending smoke and mirrors when donor countries make commitments. President Obama insists that we ensure accountability, transparency, and accountability when the United States makes a commitment. These principles are particularly critical in current times of fiscal constraint. We owe it to our domestic constituencies and we owe it to ourselves to be clear about our commitments and our commitment to getting more value for money we're spending. Already, we're doing a better job of coordinating U.S. health spending within our own government. Our country teams are coming together to see boundaries and developing a harmonized approach to get more value for money. In fact, we currently have a USAID CDC and PEPFAR team in Ethiopia doing just that. We've also launched new partnerships and that will be a major component of how we improve coordination going forward. For example, we've launched a new partnership to increase coverage of newborn resuscitation with the American Academy of Pediatrics and with Lairdoll, a private manufacturer of resuscitation devices. To support introduction, we developed agreements with UNICEF in Ethiopia and we've worked with the National Institute of Health who will provide an independent evaluation of this approach. The end result is a new program designed to save newborn lives and designed to generate data and knowledge on a set of new strategies that could be applied more broadly and elsewhere. Our final approach is around focusing on women and girls. Women and adolescent girls are particularly vulnerable to ill health because of their reproductive role and because of really pernicious gender discrimination that still exists, gender-based violence and a lack of respectful care and access to such care. Improving the health of women and girls is important as an end in and of itself. But each of us in this room knows that when a woman dies in childbirth, the real welfare of her offspring is fundamentally threatened. We also know that when a woman has access to decent care and basic knowledge about nutrition, safe drinking water, sanitation, improved hygiene, she amplifies those benefits to her family and within her community and across generations. But too often, despite this knowledge, we collectively fail to operationalize this insight. GHI will look at better ways to extend healthcare to more women through simple strategies but real operational requirements such as adjusting clinic hours to be more friendly to when women can make a visit by making certain items like condoms, vitamins, contraceptive pills, and other medications available through a broader variety of commodity distribution channels like local kiosks, pharmacies, and even beauty salons. And it will support systemic changes such as broadening the range of services offered at existing clinics and extending services into homes through primarily female community health workers. Our health programs already address some of the social and behavioral aspects of improving women's health. In Ethiopia, USAID works with youth, teachers, and community leaders to change attitudes around accepted practices with respect to child marriage. Girls advisories committees established in more than 3,700 public schools are succeeding in delaying sexual debut and increasing class attendance. This is a critical health intervention because we know that this is statistically correlated with improving the health and welfare of these girls over the course of their lives and their childbearing age. And it leads to an important lesson. Family planning plays a crucial role in improving the health of women and their children throughout the world, and it will be a major component of the Global Health Initiative. By helping women space births at least three years apart, bear children during their healthiest years, and avoid unplanned pregnancies, experts believe family planning done appropriately could prevent 25% of all maternal deaths. Where family planning and other health services are linked, levels of contraceptive use typically increase. A study in Togo demonstrated the telling mothers about family planning services when they brought their children in for immunizations actually increased their awareness of family planning methods and use by up to 58%. So the GHI is already well underway. The defining features of the initiative that I've laid out before you are being implemented today everywhere we work. In addition, 10 days ago we announced the first set of GHI plus countries. We're starting this year we will focus intensive technical and management resources to get this right. The eight GHI plus countries will accelerate GHI implementation and the learning that goes along with that implementation so that we can share this with other parts of the US government but almost more importantly with the entire global health community that simply has to get this right for our gains to be sustained. Ethiopia is one of those countries. In 2003 the government there made a huge commitment to a new health care approach. They recruited, trained and hired and deployed more than 30,000 female health extension workers. So at that time we had redirected our integrated programming in maternal and child health, family planning malaria and nutrition to support this new health worker based strategy. We assisted local and regional governments in developing their implementation plans and we worked to fill gaps where governments had needs. In 2007 the Ethiopian government asked USA to join them in UNICEF in developing an integrated nationwide computer based drug and commodity management system. We did that and that system is now up and running. The global health initiative draws on examples like this and on expertise across the US government. USAID is a critical part of this effort with I greatly enjoyed getting to meet the nearly 400 health professionals that work here at USAID in the United States in Washington and to meet the incredibly dedicated and talented teams especially the Foreign Service nationals that are often medical doctors or real public health professionals and political leaders that are now part of our expanded team abroad. And I believe greatly in their ability to offer leadership and to implement the program. Yet I realize that USAID must improve how we work and in many ways we're working hard to do that. Many feel that we are too bureaucratic perhaps too wrapped in our own programs and processes and after several months of being there I agree. Over the years our officers in the field have been mired in excessive reporting requirements and Byzantine procurement practices that do not often serve the larger purpose. But I also saw a different story when I experienced our response to the Haiti crisis. I saw our team break free of the rules and I saw our team demonstrate a tremendous amount of entrepreneurial energy and evidence based decision making in trying to simply solve problems in a quantitative and smart way. We're moving forward with a package of major operational reforms designed to help our whole agency operate like our teams did with respect to Haiti. Free from some of the requirements in the red tape that can be reduced and implementing a major package of procurement reforms that will allow us to cut our contract costs, build more internal program capacity, and redouble efforts to support local institutions, invest in local ownership and develop local capabilities. And these reforms will also include a major new approach to monitoring, evaluation and impact assessment. We have a unique opportunity with the GHI to figure something out that's been hard learning for over three decades in global health. And it's how we learn to build real health systems in a targeted health outcomes oriented way and we intend to capture those learnings through strong monitoring systems. So we do need to be stronger and we're on the way to get there. But really no one should underestimate what can be done right now. Our agency is determined to make progress in the stubborn numbers that are all too familiar to you. 11,500 people die each day from HIV AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.  I've met with the mothers who've lost those children over the years and in my work in global health. And now as I soon hope to be the father of three children, five and under, I'm both terrified of that and deeply excited. But I can only imagine what it is like anywhere in the world to lose a child under five especially when you know that loss does not have to take place. By being here today each of you demonstrates your commitment to help us get this right and to help demonstrate to the world that we can save these lives in an efficient and sustained way. And I want to thank you for being here. Thanks very much.


In breaking news we are just learning a more contagious virus seems to be the virus behaves in a immediate lockdown to travel bands. The numbers of infections are going down. Lockdowns are slowly being lifted.