Good morning, everybody. We're getting old blue ready for the road. It's time to get to work. It's pretty cold outside So we're making sure we got everything we need and that we're ready Into Winnipeg and drop it at one of our shippers and pick up a pre-loaded Stuff deck. We're gonna go down to Fargo, North Dakota with that I'm hoping to be able to get there today to deliver yet, but the way this morning is going so far We'll see what happens might be tomorrow morning This morning I tell you I went to the shop got the truck ready to go started just a bit to roll away and I'm like wait a second Wait a second. That won't make sense unless I show you real quick. It's cold Older than Scrooge's heart out there. Must be Christmas is almost here. I'm loaded tonight yet, but Here's to hoping Supposed to go down to minus 30 tonight in Fargo where we'll be sleeping So we're going to be doing everything we can to keep warm and keep all blue warm Fueled up for 580 liters just now or 553 us gallons Costed me just under $1,200 Canadian I'm not sure what that is in USD right now. I didn't do the conversion before I started talking. It is that time of year But when you're watching this there is some good news. So you ready for it? The days have stopped getting shorter The daylight hours are now Going to start getting longer. So that's good news, right? Something I mean you got to take what you can get means we're on the on the downhill towards summer We climbed the mountain of winter now. We're at the icy peak Soon will be on the other side going right down into the valley of summer summer sunshine and summer Lord Selkirk how come Lord Weasel doesn't have his own highway. I think we should petition the Manitoba government to name The next highway Lord Weasel highway or maybe even rename this one. I don't know who Lord Selkirk was Though I'm pretty sure he had something to do with the town of Selkirk That's north of Winnipeg probably one of the founding fathers of Manitoba. I should probably know him I probably do. I'm gonna say I know all about him. I have just temporarily forgotten All right, guys, I'm gonna run to the road with you watch out Don't hit me. Don't give my way. You be good You too, Mr. Tankreanger. That's icy at that intersection. Nice and slow Put my don't hit me hazards on As you can see around us, there's not a cloud in the sky and In wintertime if you've been watching my videos for long enough in wintertime, you know, that's a bad sign a clear sky in winter Means there's a cold day to follow the warm air is just being Sucked right up into the atmosphere and brought somewhere else The heat from the Sun is being reflected right off the snow and ice so it bounces right back up Officially on the way crossing from Emerson Manitoba to Pembina, North Dakota again Mine is pretty long today Sometimes busy Sometimes It's not Today's one of those busy times. I was kind of in a rush too. I kind of knew I wasn't gonna get unloaded today, but I was hoping I don't think it's gonna happen now. It's probably gonna give me about a half hour delay here at the border I had to stop for fuel that took 20 minutes to wait and see It's a nice day outside. Like the weather is really nice besides it being like colder than you know You know what? Your days are nice. It's nice to have some sunlight. It's just it brings in the cold weather. I Am cleared across though our custom brokers on the ball today. I Was cleared before I even left That's how it usually is. I don't usually have to wait Every now and then though you get one of those loads that maybe just falls through the cracks Something goes wrong or they lose some paperwork It's happened before the broker loses the paperwork Whatever happens, you know, whatever the excuse is Every now and then You're stuck waiting. I Mean physically you could just drive across the border, right legally You shouldn't do that like I said in last couple days ago if you show up to the border and your paperwork isn't in order They really don't like that They'll turn you back and you get a fine for that as well Believe it or not don't want to make sure you are Double sure and have confirmation with you that you are cleared to cross and being cleared to cross the border just means that you're the customs Customs and border protection have accepted your load your paperwork. They know who you are They know where you came from where you're going. They already have your ID on file in most cases That way when you show up to the window and they scan you in they're like, oh, yes They still ask you questions as if they don't know what's on your trailer. It's on the screen right in front of them What's in your trailer? So Don't try and lie to them Grand Forks, North Dakota just ran into one of my co-workers Jake and His fuel it started to gel up It's cold of luckily he was able to make it here to the truck stop and he can switch out his filters and add some 9-1-1 power service that melts all the ace and the gel in there and he's headed home I'm headed south makes me nervous hearing guys are gelling up out there. I still need to go Hour and a quarter hour and a half further into Fargo I'm gonna go for it. I put anti gel in my tanks just to be sure Got good filters on there It's cold. Oh, it's not like that cold, but it is really cold. I've got my winter front on keeping everything warm, hopefully It is what it is, right?  There's no room for condensation Condensation is not good That water gets into your fuel and water freezes Fargo here on the trucks is minus 18 Celsius But it's not minus 18 Let's do some Googling here First of all, what is minus 18 Celsius in Fahrenheit degrees Celsius is equal to minus 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit Thanks, old blue So both zero degrees Fahrenheit, that's what the truck thinks it is right now But I'm sitting here idling and all the heat from the engine is messing with the thermometer Temperatures actually It's ask old blue What is the temperature outside right now 28 degrees in Fargo right now. There is currently a wind chill warning in effect Feels like minus 38 with the wind chill One second here What is minus 28 Celsius in Fahrenheit? 38 degrees Celsius is minus 18.4 degrees Fahrenheit And the wind chills minus 38, so What is minus 38 Celsius in Fahrenheit? Minus 38 degrees Celsius is minus 36.4 degrees Fahrenheit There you have it folks. It's cold So it's a keep old blue running kind of night Shut the truck off in this weather for just a couple of hours you Might not get it started Depends on how long I guess but for now we're just trying to stay warm and edit some videos Clean up the truck a little bit here. I still got my stuff all over the place as you can see It's gonna be short week because Christmas starts for us on the 23rd And we have another one two three gatherings plus Britain my own Christmas Brittany we have our own Christmas Christmas Eve and Christmas Day morning. So it's four Christmases yet But to go full-on Christmas and you always go full out on Christmas always So thanks for joining me today. We made it and So far no problems But if we do have problems, we're at the Flying J 24-hour facility.  We'll see you tomorrow. Get this wood off my trailer See what they have for us


Hello, everyone. My name is Chance Kennedy, and I'm going to talk to you today about a site of product management that probably doesn't get talked about very much. That's cross-cultural collaboration, customer obsession absolutely is discussed a lot in our product management world. But we're going to talk a little bit about how cross-cultural interaction can impact customer obsession and bring an amazing experience to our customers as well. So let's get started. We'll talk about me a little bit. We'll talk about my winding, long winding path to becoming a product manager here at Amazon. We're going to talk about one of my favorite desserts in the world, mango sticky rice. Then we'll talk about how I failed from a cultural understanding perspective in Singapore pretty miserably. We'll talk about mango sticky rice again, just a little bit, and then we'll give you some examples of cultural differences that could say impact a business relationship or a working relationship. It's not to say you're going to go to these countries, but it's something to look at of, wow, I may never have thought about that as being impactful or disrespectful in some way. So it's just to give you some insights as to cultural differences to help you understand a little bit more. Then finally, we will talk about some tips for cross-cultural success. So I am a Senior Product Manager here at Amazon. I originally joined Global Mile, which is a freight forwarding arm of Amazon. In my previous career before Amazon, I was in freight forwarding logistics. So a lot of the experiences I'm going to talk about today are going to come from that side, but they very much relate to what we do as Product Managers in a global work environment. After Global Mile, I joined Product Assurance Risk and Safety and basically ensuring that the selection we offer on Amazon is safe for our buyers and legal with all the requirements that we have to meet across the globe. Then just a few weeks ago, I joined Prime Video on the trust and safety team. So we are working on compliant systems to enable us to provide you with content that you want to see and that our viewers want to see overall and that also meets local regulations and gives you the information that you need to make viewing decisions. So I'm talking to you about this today because I've lived overseas for quite a while. I've lived overseas probably a little more than 13 years between Germany, Korea, Singapore, Australia, Thailand, and in that time, I really gained an appreciation of cultural differences and how those impact not only my success, but the success of the organization overall, depending on how I interact across those cultures. So I spent time in 25 countries outside of the United States overall. So I've been pretty lucky and grateful for that. So how I got into product management, it was crazy. I joined the military out of high school. The recruiter actually took me to the recruiting station directly from my high school graduation ceremony, all right? I joined as an Apache helicopter crew chief. It's an attack helicopter. So I was responsible for fixing the aircraft. That role took me to Savannah, Georgia in the US, then to Korea, and then on to Germany after that. My experiences there were fantastic. However, at the time, I didn't really experience the cultures as well as I could have, especially in Korea at that time. When you are in the military, in the US military at least, it can be in a place like Korea, it can be very encapsulating. You spend a lot of time on base, and it's like a little bit of America there. So I was young and I didn't really make an effort to go and understand the Korean community, the Korean culture at the time as much as I should have. That was to my detriment, unfortunately. I did a bit more when I went to Germany. I got to take part in a lot of the festivals and things of that nature. Lots of great beer, but still, I didn't take advantage of it as well as I could have. So when I got out of the military, I went to school, way too much school. I studied electronic music production and digital audio engineering, then went on to study Korean language and literature at the University of Washington, and ended up doing a year of study abroad in Korea at that same time. I graduated in 2008, and it was a high-to-financial crisis. So there wasn't a whole lot of opportunities out there for someone with my background. So I decided to go do my MBA in Korea. Now, all the way through school, when I was in the U.S. and post-graduation from university, I worked in restaurants to support myself and to make a living. And we'll talk about how that kind of influenced my career overall. I never would have thought a restaurant job would impact my career to this day, but it absolutely has, all right? So this is mango sticky rice. Mango sticky rice is one of my favorite desserts on the planet. It's a traditional Thai dessert, and it's simple. It's a freshly cut mango, and with some very gummy sticky rice, it sticks together quite well. And then you cover that with a creamy coconut sauce. It's fantastic. I love it. One of my favorite foods to eat on the planet, I do have to say. So how is mango sticky rice important to what we're talking about today? Let's see. So, oh, I'm sorry about that. Let's try that again. So when I was working in the restaurant industry, we had this customer name, we'll call him Mr. C. And he was a bit challenging at times. In one particular night, I went to ask him, is table what they would like for dessert? If they would like some dessert? And you can never quite know where Mr. C was gonna go, but this time around, he decided to be funny. And so he turns to me and he says, eh, we'll have some mango sticky rice because he was with a Thai group of business colleagues. So he thought it was hilarious.  He didn't think we were gonna be able to get that for him, right? And he was making a joke at the expense of someone else's culture in a way. So I was like, what can we do? We've got these visitors from Thailand. Is there anything we can do? And the more I thought about it, I was like, all right. All right, Mr. C, that's what you're thinking? No problem. I'll be back in a minute.  So off I go. And then about 12 or 13 minutes later, I come back in with dessert just about ready to go. Go to the table. All right, Mr. C, are you ready for your mango sticky rice? Oh yeah, yeah. Bam, mango sticky rice. Needless to say, they were very, very surprised, but it made them really happy. So, all right, so I didn't go and have the kitchen cook mango sticky rice. We actually had a restaurant next door, a Thai restaurant next door, kind of higher end. I just went next door and asked them, hey, do you have mango sticky rice? And they did. So I got some to go and we took it back to art restaurant. We plated it up all nice and neat and brought it out to the table. So it was a small thing to obsess over the customer and show the Thai business guests that, hey, we do have an appreciation for your culture. I know what you have is amazing, that food's amazing. Let's see what we can do to make it happen. It made Mr. C look amazing because he thought he was playing games, but then he got it and he was able to give a great experience to his business guests, okay? So that's the story of mango sticky rice. So when I did my MBA, I went to do an internship at a company called Expeditors. That's the freight forwarding company in Korea. I managed to get my foot in the door and it was a great experience. Was working in a different culture, cultural element for the first time. And that was pretty eye opening, to be honest, very, very different than what we would experience in the United States. And after I finished my internship, I said, hey, I wanna join the company and I want to become a management trainee in Asia. And they said, okay, do you wanna go to Singapore or Hong Kong? And I said, let's go to Singapore. Only because I knew that English was the first language in Singapore. It's really Singlish, but that's all I knew about it at the time. I didn't do my homework, anything like that. And I ended up going to Singapore, all right? So I get to Singapore and it was a great experience. I was really excited, right? I was like, oh, I made it. I'm in Asia. I'm doing the management trainee program. Oh, amazing. And I worked hard. I went through the different, I was attached to the different teams, learned a lot about the business, got to know the people, got to understand more about the culture, the work culture, the food and things of that nature. And I thought I was doing really good. I even threw out some Singlish every now and then to kind of demonstrate my appreciation of Singapore culture. So eventually I became the assistant manager for security, health and safety. And in the security world, you're always worried about somebody coming and trying to steal your freight. You're shipping electronics, things of that nature. And so part of our security protocols was that we would have anyone who came on site sign in at a guard house. So we knew who was visiting our premises. Now the guards were supposed to have people go sign in, but time and time again, they would just wave them through. Or if cars just drove through, they wouldn't chase them down. So we had in some instances, no idea who was there. And that upset me. And I tried hard to get them to check IDs, but all I had known up until that time is leadership in the army and how we would motivate somebody to do something in the army. So it probably wasn't the best way to go about things. So Josephine Lamb eventually says, Chance, give the guards a break. And she explained to me that in Singapore culture, someone who does that type of role may have a different level in the societal hierarchy. And they may not garner the respect that they should necessarily. And so I was like, okay, cool. I'm gonna go out there and I'm gonna practice with them. But I went out there with a chair. I changed my strategy. I went out with a chair and we just practiced over and over and over until they built self-confidence to a level that they were actually able to do their job appropriately and everybody was getting signed in. They would chase cars down if they just drove in, got them signed in and it showed them that they were empowered and built their self-confidence and it helped us do what we needed to do to be successful as a business, okay? I failed terribly at the beginning because I didn't understand those minor details of Singapore culture. I was approaching the situation as an American as I would have in the military. And I wasn't being a good leader at the time to be quite honest. And that was a really great lesson learned for me. So eventually I made my way to Bangkok as the district manager of Bangkok. And in Bangkok, we focused on customer obsession. And when I got there, I wanted to make sure that we were all about the customer and we were adding value for our customers. Basically, if a piece of business came along that we couldn't add value to our customers, I didn't necessarily want it. I want those customers to have the best solution possible for them overall. And my belief is that if we do that for them, it's gonna benefit both sides. And if they need us down the road, they'll come back. If they don't use us that first time, whole concept, add value for your customers and obsess about them, all right? So this comes back to the mango sticky rice. So since we're in Thailand, what we did is for anyone who actually got a customer compliment or a compliment from a service provider or anything like that, we gave them mango sticky rice.  And we would talk about what they did. And everybody knew the story of mango sticky rice. It's something I told them about at the very beginning. And so we would give mango sticky rice to all the people that got compliments. And it was fantastic. They get some nice food. They get some support for the work that they've done. And they get to share the mango sticky rice as well with their colleagues. And it was really great. So what we're looking at here is actually, these are like a book that the team put together for me when I left. And every one of these pages has references to mango sticky rice. And when I received this, I was a little bit blown away. They really took mango sticky rice to heart. They understood the importance of customer obsession. And for me, it was important that they understood I knew elements of their culture and I respected their culture. And yes, it's just through a dessert mango sticky rice, but it's something special and unique. So it meant a lot to me that that had stuck with them and hopefully it helped them continue to achieve success down the road, okay? So let's talk a little bit about some examples. Korea is a very confusion, historically confusion society. What you're looking at here is actually an offering given it one of the holidays to deceased ancestors. And if you're doing business in Korea, working with Koreans, there's some things you have to understand about that. There's a big respect for age, authority, education level. And with that, you're going to talk to another party a certain way based on those aspects. So what can happen a lot of times in Korea is somebody may ask you very early on how old you are. And in America, that is not appropriate from a cultural perspective, but there they're really trying to understand the hierarchy and how they should address you and the type of language that they should use with you. If you're older than them, they're going to speak to you in a different way than if you were, if they're older than you, okay? So some industry there. Bowing is a big deal in Korea. It's a sign of respect. You bow deeper than the senior. And when you say thank you, hello, goodbye, what have you? And I learned this lesson very interestingly. We went to a shop with a older friend of ours and as we lived the shop, he turned me around and made me bow and I didn't go deep enough and he pushed me down farther to bow to show respect, okay? So very important for that culture. A business card etiquette is something you may not think about. If you were to go to Korea for something like a business meeting, you're going to meet, I don't know, your partners on your teams over there. Business card etiquette is very important. You never want to give a business card with one hand. In America, you can just kind of throw it over, slide it on the table, no big deal. It's for contact information. But in many Asian countries, it's a very important card. So you want to give with two hands and you also want to receive with two hands and then look at the card, take time to look at it, see what their name is, see what their title is so you can understand seniority. And then you typically lay out the cards nice and neat on the table for use throughout the meeting so you can reference the names of people and whatnot. If you weren't to do that, it may not come across as respectful and it could actually impact your business relationship in some way, shape, or form, okay? So always give with two hands.  Some very special eating etiquette as well. So if you pour a drink for an older colleague, you always want to pour it with two hands or a senior colleague, you pour with two hands and you can see here, the gentleman has his hand under his wrist to pour some soju for his colleague, all right?  Not my, they will. And that's because that's just part of their culture. They want you to be happy and they show their caring, I guess, through food.  So if you want to stop eating, you'll eat just a little bit on your plate and they won't keep refilling it, all right? Finally, this one is something that when I went to Korea the second time really struck me as odd and I didn't appreciate it at the time. So our older Korean friend, he didn't really speak English and every time he would call me, he would ask, what did you eat? And that means as I understood it at the time, have you eaten rice? I could never figure out. I was like, why is this guy always asking me if I ate rice? But turns out it can also refer to meal. So he was asking me, hey, did you have breakfast? Did you have lunch? And that's just them showing a level of respect for you and that making sure you were nourished and you got your food. So it was an interesting experience until I really understood what was going on, all right? So China, something called Guangxi and I'm probably saying it wrong and I do apologize if I am saying it wrong but Guangxi is something that's very, very important in China and it has to do with relationship building and the fact that you do business with people that you have a certain level of relationship with. If you are to just go over as an American and you fail to develop a quality relationship with the people you're working with, it may not be as successful as you would hope because you haven't built that Guangxi, okay? Business card etiquette is still there and you can expect small talk, small talk before jumping into major business discussions. So in the U.S., we have no problem just jumping right into the discussion. We're having a meeting, here's what we're here to talk about, let's talk about it. But in China, that's not the case. You can expect to have small talk at the beginning of the meeting. They will probably ask you about your meals. They will ask you about the weather perhaps, how your travel was, if you're gonna go see somewhere while you're traveling and that's all about building that relationship and that rapport, okay? So they may also ask you to go have dinner and drinks as well. It's something you wanna do. This is part of building the relationship in China and building that Guangxi with the people that you're working with or the business partners that you're working with. So go enjoy it, enjoy the different food. There may be a lot of drinks, some of them be prepared for, but yeah, it's something you really wanna do. So in Asia in general, handshakes are not the same as they would be in the West necessarily. Now before COVID, here in the US, a firm handshake was something really important. You're taught as you're entering the professional world that you need to have a firm handshake, not too hard but not too soft and that is going to be a bit of a signal to the other party about you. And if somebody gives you a weak handshake, it can come across as less than positive. In Asia, however, a weak handshake could be quite common and that's not a negative thing, it's just shaking hands is not historically part of their cultural background. And so I think things are changing a little bit. It's becoming more common, but if you don't get a really firm handshake as a foreigner in Asia, just don't be surprised, okay? The other thing I haven't listed here is losing face.  In Asia in many places, that's a no-go. You do not wanna make anybody lose a level of respect in front of other people and make them lose face that can absolutely damage a working relationship. So just be careful of that, okay? So we all work in a global environment and especially here in the tech world, if we're product managers, we're gonna have engineers from all over, the operations teams from all over sales, different stakeholders from all over. And you need to understand that, okay? We're not just working in a bubble, we are a global workforce at this point and it's important to take that into account in your interactions with people. And so take the time to learn different cultural attributes of the cultures you're working with. How do you say hello? How do you say thank you, things of that nature? What's the proper business etiquette if you're to go overseas to have meetings with colleagues in a different country and learn some of the language? This is one of the biggest things. All you need to do is learn like one, two or three words, something like thank you, good morning, hello, and it's gonna show them a level of respect for their culture that they're absolutely gonna appreciate. So biggest game changer I could actually tell you is to learn the local language if you're working with those colleagues, okay? Ask how to refer to someone in the US, not much of a problem to call somebody by their first name, but if you were to go to a place like Korea and you're to call someone by a first name, it's very senior, really disrespectful. So when you're meeting someone, you can ask how would you like me to refer to you? What would you like me to call you? I did it just today in the meeting. So don't be scared to just ask that question, okay? Practice active listening, repeat back to the speaker what you heard them say. Sometimes some context is lost in translation and by practicing active listening, you can alleviate any of those barriers that may creep up because of that. Avoid slang. If you are going to use slang, be prepared to explain it to the part you're talking to because it's not always understood, okay? And then practice culturally appropriate etiquette, do study beforehand and take it into account, okay? And then ask your colleagues if you're actually doing it the right way. I believe that I'm doing this correctly. I'm eating the right way. I'm not putting my chopsticks in a bowl, putting it on the table. Is that the right thing to do? Or I poured the drink to a senior with one hand. Was I supposed to do that? And that'll guide you the right way and that will also build your rapport and relationship with them because they see that you're taking an interest in those important cultural attributes of their culture. And then finally, embrace it. When you get to experience something like that, go all in. It's a lot of fun. It can be uncomfortable at times, say if somebody wants to go to Asana in Korea or something like that, but that's a very traditional experience there. Or in Norebang, it's karaoke.  But embrace it. It's part of their culture. It is who they are. And when you embrace it, it just kind of opens doors for you overall. All right. So thank you very much.  So those cultural aspects come into play every day for my life. If you have any questions or thoughts and whatnot, you can reach out to me at LinkedIn. Feel free to DM me. The key thing here is appreciating those cultural attributes and the people you work with and your colleagues and potentially customers, stakeholders, it can impact the success of your work and the success of your business. So make an effort to actually learn about that and practice some of those cultural elements, all right? And then use those to obsess about your customers and that will help you succeed. All right. Thank you very much. I appreciate it and have a good day.


Hi, I'm Andy Goudry with Investor Intel. We're at PDAC 2018. I'm here with Mr. Eric Dizilnier of Nouveau Monde. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's our pleasure. How's PDAC 2018 treating you this year? Pretty busy. I guess that's why we're coming, but pretty busy. I'm sure I want to have time to meet everyone I want to meet, but I'm doing my best. What's new and exciting with Nouveau Monde? A lot is going on actually at the moment. You saw we just announced trail results. Yes. So in the next few weeks we'll have an update of our resource estimate for the South Zone. Okay. And then we'll start our feasibility study, bankable feasibility study of the commercial project. And at the same time we're building a phase one capacity that will be up and running in June. So we just finish stripping the whole mining area for the next two years and then we'll starting to blast in the this spring. Okay. And we'll start to mine that in our plant in June. So phase one we'll be able to produce 2,000 tons of flake concentrate in the next two years to start qualifying our product. So a lot of stuff is going on on all different front. That's fantastic news. How is the graphite market in Canada these days? It's a very interesting year for graphite market. On the demand side, the demand is picking up significantly with the steel makers in China, resuming operation significantly. At the same time as battery material is becoming a significant market for graphite. It used to be 9% of the market a few years ago. Now it's 25% of the market, battery material, you know. And it's getting higher and higher. But there's one big guy in the room is CIRA resource. Okay. Everyone is looking at CIRA who started production in January. They have a lot of different problems like I think one of their circuit catch fire and it's now shut down for a few months. So all the market is looking at this new capacity that's coming online. Will it be enough to fill the growth in the demand? It's a very interesting year. On top of it, there's 23 big factories, battery factory being built on the planet. By 2021, 2022, they will require an extra 450,000 tons more graphite. So this demand is, will need to, there will be a supply squeeze at some point in the next five years. And you want to be there right on time with our project to fill part of this supply. That's great news for Nouveau Monde. And for shareholders, what can they expect from you guys for the next quarter or two? Yeah, as I said, resource estimate, start of the bankable feasibility study that will be filed in September. And also on the demo plant, we'll start producing in June. So you will see some strategic partnership, some agreements on sales. So that that's what we're really focusing on. And also major partnership for battery material grade. So now it's great to make flag graphite in our plant. We want to do before Christmas this year, battery grade material in our demonstration facility. So there will be a lot, a lot going on. A lot of moving parts. Pivot all year, as we say in English for Nouveau Monde in 2018. Well, that's amazing news. And we're very grateful for you to stop by today. Thank you.


Everybody Matt here for late in sports car drip in one box of 2023 panini select WWE hobby This is for Michael B. Good luck Michael. Let's finish out select WB strong here. There's Edge Giovanni, Vinci silver Otis You've seen a that Christian Bencourt Undertaker DDP this is white Randy Orton and And Sparks relic Candice Leray Randy Orton this beef cake pink Walker Rookie tri-color John Cena global icons my bar Jimmy Uso light blue Mackintyre and Emma says maroon to 149 Becky Lynch rousy icons Hogan Ronda Rousey silver Strowman and Mackintyre bam Keanu James Carmella silver and to 49 that is relic auto-red Matt Riddle That no That is way way more annoying and way way tougher than Lesnar X pock There's Roman Reigns light blue. It's a 249 Reigns sensations and Becky. There's the Miz Speaking of awesome Charlie Dempsey red Bianca Belair and Roman Reigns warrior There's Shinsuke Nakamura silver And to 49 that is rookie auto-red Channing stacks Lorenzo They really have to stop Just taking two random celebrity names like oh you kind of look like Channing Tatum. Oh, so we're gonna call you Channing There's Finn Balor You do that with too many of them. There's the rock big E Tri-color live Morgan and carry on cross. I'd rather they just use like an internet random name generator Asuka Charlotte Roman Reigns die cut Gable steveson global icon silver and on the back be on cabell air ring side All right, that'll do it for your box appreciate it Mike. We'll get these right out to you


The people at Visit Bemidji are hoping to persuade more tourists to come to town, so they're launching a big survey to figure out what exactly will draw them in. Lakeland News reporter Cheryl Moore has details. Did you know the last big visitor study done in Bemidji was 20 years ago in 1997? With all the growth the town has seen, it's safe to say we needed an update. The one that we are going to soon be launching, which is going to kick off early December, just in a few days, is actually called an interceptor survey. Six survey assistants will be all over Bemidji in the next 12 months, asking visitors why they come here. The 45 locations range from restaurants to stores and hotels, then of course to popular attractions like ski resorts and the Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox statues. We are working to build our leisure travelers and our business travelers increase the quantity of them so that we can offer a huge economic impact to the Bemidji community area. Now the whole point of this survey is to figure out why people come here, and hopefully with that data we'll figure out how to get more people to visit. It's also going to help us identify areas of interest for perhaps economic development and areas where perhaps the visitors would hope that we would have an expansion on our infrastructure. There's a simple way the community of Bemidji can help, and that's stay friendly. The best things about Bemidji is how we really have such spirit of our community and that we all are really effectively being ambassadors of our community. So there isn't per se any particular thing that the general public can do, except continue with their gracious welcoming good manners. Reporting in Bemidji, Sramar, Lakeland News. The full service will not be complete until after fall of 2018. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


Hello and welcome back to the channel, I'm Will Rad, and we are on MegaStage in the itaming server Doing some tandem practice for EC in round 2 at MegaStage So we are switched to sequential, so I do not miss just when you add in a lot We're trying to get Chase and Daddy to run into some leads and Chase tonight Trying to get a couple more some time here You need to buy Addie a little bit of a, whoop, almost killed me A little bit of bobble, but a very solid lead nonetheless So we're just doing more and more runs here, trying to get more and more comfortable Because like I said, I'm qualifying tonight, so that is what I've really been focusing on So we're going to get a lead on Addie right now, so we can run almost like our qualifying run Now we're going to switch up So I get some tandem practice in, as well as I get some lead practice in So it's definitely a very good time right now There's the judges going through what they want to see to qualify Obviously quick snappy angle, no angle change How impressive I want to be first I don't have angle, and I kind of slow to angle, my rate of angle speed is not that fast So unfortunately at that point, I will also lose points So it's a very trickulous track, we've got to do some quick snappy transition So we're going to do another solo run here And these guys go Addie and Zack, go up and add E-10 and at least R34 in solo This is just a very tricky section You've got to make sure you go wide enough so that you can come in and bring it back Otherwise you have a bit of an issue I'm going to wait for somebody to come back to pit so we can actually get maybe another chase run So definitely feeling a little more confident in the car Like I said, I've switched to sequential, so we just have it banging through the gears now instead It's having some shifting issues The car does have dog box shifting So it's definitely a good thing to have anyways We get a chance to follow Zack here The guy just got behind us Got lost in the smoke a little bit Which caused me to lose my position Not a bad overall run Chasing down a little bit of a bobble here and there But not overall two pads Like I said, way more confident in the car A lot more settled So we're going to give a lead to this massively fast Viper I should have waited for that This Viper is so gripped up Flying through the sky Addie died So like I said, qualifying for me is tonight Qualifying for me is tonight So we're going to be qualifying in the late practice We'll have some time to get a little more practice in But hold on time Don't want to overdo myself with practice So we're going to try to chase him How fast he just pulls up the hill It's insane how much grip that car has It's not 285 It's definitely the same weight We're trying to all dive and drift it On that last little bump and go And probably manage to not die completely And then go sailing like Addie If we can't get a chase on Zach That 400Z, definitely an amazing looking car Like I said, this is great practice for me To be able to do these runs with these guys And drive with the car that I've driven before Especially with these cars So even though I'm only running qualifying tomorrow This is going to help me a lot Because like I said, I get to run qualifying Leave runs and I get to run chases So I get the best of both worlds When you're in lobbies like this So now we're going to try and run up Chase by Zach just creeping in On my door like that Definitely some solid practice for this I can't thank these guys enough High tandem, OTM, and all the other guys While we're chasing him now Getting this car dialed in on a setup And you know, just able to be able to throw down right now And have a good time So we're going to chase here on throws Alright, little grassland We cannot see anything with the mana smoke That I have going on on my screen Maybe to turn my smoke down This is smoke and I'm noticing I probably see why I cannot see Especially on this downhill track Some of the lines are gone I'm just going pretty much off muscle memory Which, you know, FD drivers do the same thing Ah, big bobble by me But I think my bobble counteracted his bobble So that we would be a pretty even lead for his chase This is going to be a fun round I cannot wait for the round of 32 and everything I will leave the link where you can watch it Down in the description box below if you guys want to watch some You know, we can keep on Saturday Round two here at MegaSpace I think we're going to try and give Addy a good lead here To end this episode off Like I said, big thank you to all the guys in the IT and them And all the teams that have helped me out in this process Of ESD8 I had a glitch in my game That was a bit of a glitch Kind of plugged that And he was probably Wow, I confused that what's happening Oh, so that doesn't have it Qualifying Yeah, there it was again I think somebody may have joined this So I think that'll do So here on a set of courses Some tandem practice And some lead practice So we can get a little bit of lag Yeah, we got a bit of a ping spike So big thank you to all them And big thank you to you guys To make sure you guys follow me on all social media I'll leave the link in the description On where you can come to watch ESD8 Round two at MegaSpace So as always, thank you guys for coming back and watching I'm EvilRabbit I'll see you guys on the track


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I can see that we have our next two guests here. I believe this is Dr. Santos. Please correct me if I've mispronounced your name and Dr. Cohn. And I don't know who would go first, but welcome. And we've just had an hour with Brian going over two bills. And we'd love to hear from you. Eugene, you wanna do first? I seek my time to the gentleman from Dartmouth. Thank you, John. So I just wanted to come and say, and I actually was listening earlier. I was on YouTube listening to the discussion. Yeah, these are all the questions. I just wanna refer to one about, where are the technology experts? Do they have the questions yet? And I'm gonna be blunt. We don't have quite the questions. We don't have quite the answers, but there's a lot of focus areas that really has to be addressed. So like the question is like, hey, what is this AI actually doing? Those of you who did get a chance to watch Coded Bias or any of the other shows just comes up with, why did they make this decision? So I'm gonna give you sort of the point of view that I think is important at least to me as an AI creator is that if I'm gonna be putting out a technology which is AI, what is the transparency has to be behind it? What are the intentions of that AI tool? One of the biggest things that people don't talk about as much when they put out a particular AI system, what is the goals? In the end, it's a computer algorithm. You could say that it is a mathematical function that the computer algorithm is trying to compute and trying to optimize on. So, a simple example is that I have some sort of mathematical function that ends up in the end when it has to do like, let's just go ahead and talk about facial recognition, when it has to classify something, it's trying to optimize this function. As a creator, when I dig into those functions, let's just even talk about deep learning. Oh my gosh, what the heck is this function? I can't even understand it. And then, then our job as a creator nowadays can I decompose it in some way? Can I make it in some way so that we humans then can understand it itself? So, for me, having served on the task force, one of the biggest benefits that I think that if a setting of commission would be is that, hey, we have this diversity of viewpoints from other members too that are not necessary creators. They would be potentially the consumers, the people who would help also evaluate impact across society and all of helping me as a creator. So I'll just focus back on me as a creator, focus on where I should go, what information should I provide? So, like Representative China had said, for the second bill that was just presented, these are the elements that, you start off with those questions and then you could dig in deeper on that. So that's my point of view. One term I use a lot is, and it's my own work, it's intentions. If I know the computational intentions, if I know the AI intentions, that at least gives us a context for explaining people what this AI algorithm is doing. So let me stop there and I'll pass that to John now. Thank you. Great, I really appreciate that, China. So just by way of introduction, I'm John Kohn. I'm an IBM Fellow at the MIT IBM AI Lab. This is, I've been at IBM for unbelievably 40 years. I see some former IBM colleagues here. But I had a very interest, my career has mostly been in the creation of computers and chips and I'm sort of a newcomer, a digital newcomer too, running this AI lab. I, and the other background that I have is I'm a strong STEM advocate and have worked for many years in promoting science, the love of science and technology in the state and have served on the Vermont. It was the Department of Education then Science Advisory Council for many years in the early 2000s. I prepared a few comments, mostly around Representative China's bills and I just wanna say beforehand how much I appreciate everyone, their deep consideration of this topic and of those bills. Just our experience on the AI task force was very, very interesting. At the time, that task force was the first in the nation and we really looked at it through the lens of how do we maximize the benefits? This is an amazing technology and is already providing a lot of value. But I came away with a much fuller understanding of how we have to minimize the negative impacts. And I was very struck, we in the course of the year, we were very struck by, I think not just me, about how much concern there was. And if anything, I became much more sensitized to that. But I also realized that a lot of the sensitivity and concern was well-founded, but a lot of it was also based on a lack of understanding and fear. But I came away really very excited about the recommendations that we had in the task force and that's why I'm very excited about a very supportive of H410. The idea of trying to take that piece of work. Like I said, I think Vermont has at its advantage the brave little state that we're small enough to actually get things done. And we have kind of a lead in that to sort of lead by example. And I really am happy of that. What I'd like to say is there are a couple of specific things in H410 coming from the AI task force that I really, really think are important. One thing that kind of building off of what Gene said is the need for standards and guidelines and ethical use of AI. Right now it's kind of a wild, wild West. I mean, the problem with things like ethical standards it's there are some things that are absolute in ethics and some things that are kind of relative. And we really need to have some guidelines as a yardstick. And the US has been a bit behind like the EU and Canada in coming up with a set of ethical standards. But so in our guidelines we adapted and adopted with representing Gene's leadership, the EU guidelines. And I think we need to, we really need to have an evolving but a standard set that we can kind of use as a yardstick. So I think having standards is important but standards without some sort of oversight wouldn't really get us anywhere. So one of the main recommendations of the task force and one of the main recommendations of H410 is the need for an ongoing oversight committee to actually do the business of monitoring and adjusting. I think it's so key that we do this on an ongoing basis because in my 40 years in technology I've never seen anything grow this fast. And this is not hype. We're already, AI is, and everybody's cell phone it's everywhere and anything that tries to statically capture what it shouldn't do what it can and can't do is gonna be out of date the moment you do it. So I think it's absolutely essential that the state of Vermont has some sort of an oversight group and that's why I really support the commission, the ongoing commission and we'll support that in any way I can. My personal, in terms of the other recommendations that are in H410 and the AI task force the three things that really struck out to me beyond having ethical guidelines and a body to observe them, monitor them, make recommendations and adapt as the technology adapts as the first is education.  I very, very much believe that we have an opportunity and kind of an obligation to educate the public on what AI can do, the potential because I think it's huge, what it should do, what it can't do, what it shouldn't do and I personally believe that the best vector, as I mentioned before, I was very struck by the lack of nuance and the conversations that we had with educated people about what AI might do. I believe that a major vector in educating the public is through students and several of us on the committee, noticeably, Professor Donna Riso is a professor at UVM. I'm also a professor at UVM. I should have said that. We were thinking, well, we really need to try to get exposure to AI technology, AI ethics, AI privacy, these kind of things. You can start having these kind of conversations as early as middle school, maybe even elementary school. We went out to look around and found out that not only is AI not being taught in any consistent way or not in any way really at all but computer science in general or technology is very, very spotty in the state. So we really support, we've been a small group of us have been actually trying to act on that. We've actually got an NSF grant in and something called computer science for all that we're reapplying for. We have several other programmatic ways including things like first robotics, which I work in to try to introduce students to the basics of computer science and thereby introduce them to AI and then able to have not only technology discussions and career discussions, but you can have ethics discussions. So I think that trying to tell people about the promise but also the danger of unintended consequences is a very, very important thing that the state could do. And I believe very much, again, this is where our brave little state, a small state where we can actually make things happen. So education is my main goal in this because I think an educated population makes the best decisions, whether they're building AI or using it. The next one would be around incentives, an incentive structure. I believe that once we've got a good handle on what ethical AI is, we wanna figure out how do we maximize the benefit to the state? And that also includes economic benefit. I think that the AI jobs, and I'll talk about future of work in a second, but AI is changing all sorts of types of work and it builds great opportunities. And if we could attract more, what we call good, clean, ethical AI jobs to the state, they're low resource, they're environmentally clean, and it's an intellectual place. And as a longtime hippie, Prius driving Birkenstock wearing hippie from Vermont, you want people like that moving here. This is a great place to do that kind of work. So I believe that we can come up with incentives that help high tech companies in general and specifically AI companies, and they don't necessarily have to be buckets of money, they can be access to accelerated computing, et cetera, through the University of Vermont. I think this is something that the task force came up with and that I think we should look for creative ways that the state can afford to help incent those kind of jobs. Finally, I mentioned the future of work briefly. My group at MIT is doing a lot of using AI to look at the impact of AI on the future workforce. And we have to really think about that because there's a lot of worry that things like AI or robotics are gonna displace human labor and create, and some of that is true and some of it is not true, but we're actually trying to look at it analytically. And one thing that we've noticed is that on the low end of AI, I mean the low end of kind of wages, those technologies, human labor, manual labor, et cetera, are not that susceptible to AI specifically. On the high end, there's certainly gonna be lots of high-end jobs like mine that'll be formed and there's great growth opportunity. The big concern is that in the middle wage jobs, which is the bulk of them, service jobs, et cetera, there's going to be job displacement, job migration. And I believe that we need to start factoring that into our career mentoring of students to figure out how they choose careers, how they tool up for those careers. Once things like service industries, restaurant jobs, retail, et cetera, are getting highly automated, how do the students prepare for that? And for people of a certain age like me, if they have to retool in mid-career, like I became an AI person in my 60s, how do you adjust? How do we retrain people? So I think all of these things, I think in H410 would, acting on the recommendations would be good. If I have, I would really like to talk about H263. Is it okay? Can I keep talking for a few minutes? Well, you know what? We have, our chairman is gonna be rejoining us in just a moment. And I know that it would be helpful for him to hear your testimony on the bill. I see that we have a few committee members who have questions. Would it be okay if you- Okay, if I can, I would like to talk about H263. But sure. Of course, absolutely. Sure. Representative Chase. Thank you. I have the initial formation of a thought and I would appreciate both of your insight on it. Something you said was a, the ethical use of AI and I wanna highlight the difference between that and the use of ethical AI. Like the idea of developing a quote unquote evil AI as a test bed to create like a war game sort of scenario where we could find vulnerabilities and so forth and how that might be. I'm not sure whether that would be good or bad. And I would appreciate both of your insight into how that could fit into this discussion. Whether that's something that we want to- Interesting. Jean, what do you- Okay. I got a thought, but- Okay, yeah. My reaction to that is that this is something that has to be addressed here.  The whole point of that is that there's a lot of positives, you know, you're developing an AI to search for vulnerabilities.  What are understanding? What's the dangers of accidentally releasing this AI if you don't want it to be? I mean, it's a classic. It's like, you know, one of the historical examples is if I were to remember the, read about or hear about the Morrison worm, I think I got that John was, it was Morrison, right? I'm sorry. So this was one of the earliest computer worms that I remember that at the time, I was a graduate student back in the 80s, had gotten released and actually basically took down our early internet around here. And, you know, a lot was learned from that.  I mean, these things that I just said, if you use an award-gaming situation, we've now defined and stoked out the problem. But I think it's a very good distinction that you're putting us as a, you know, ethical AI or ethical use of AI. And each of these, this is where the commission needs to come in and help, you know, folks make decisions on that and think about where it goes. John? I really like the idea Representative Chase came up. Or are you Representative Chase? Yes. Oh, good. Everybody else has rep. I think that this whole idea of using AI to explore AI is actually catching, have you heard of what are called generalized adversarial networks? This is a GAN. So, Gene, what I'm, you know, at MIT, we have a project with MIT where we're using adversarial network, that's a terrible name for it, but it's basically using AI to explore AI. And so the example that Gene gives on the worm is that we actually have a malware AI that tries to formulate new, you know, look for exposures and then another AI that tries to block them. And it's an interesting technology because that's what's happening in the malware world right now is that, you know, the bad guys have AI and you just have to have better AI. And it is this kind of, and unfortunately, it's, you know, it accelerates, but AI is a great tool for exploring those kind of vulnerabilities. I really like the idea of exploring, you know, kind of ethical vulnerabilities. And I think it would be interesting, you know, one thing that as a UVM faculty, and Gene, I don't know, are you probably the same with Dartmouth that we would love to be able to work, you know, that's a real meaty problem. And I think that would be very interesting to see if we could seed some research in that. Cause I think that would be, I'm sure that somebody somewhere is doing ethical adversarial exploration, but I think that's a really interesting idea. Okay, great. Representative Sims. Yeah, thank you so much for this testimony, really interesting. I particularly appreciated the, you know, calling out the importance of a permanent task for us to provide this oversight, you know, I think we all are experiencing how technology is innovating more and more rapidly and appreciate you calling attention to the fact that, you know, the minute we maybe set rules and guidelines in place, they will be obsolete the next week and that this is really continuous monitoring and evaluation that's so important. You know, I think we heard some really helpful kind of context and framing from Representative China about some examples of what AI or algorithmic decision-making looks like right now. I'd be curious whether either of you could expand on that a little bit more. Are there stories that you find particularly, you know, resonant for sort of helping us who are less familiar with this world understand the opportunities and challenges that this kind of technology creates? And, you know, what are the things that keep you up at night or the things that you're most concerned about just to kind of paint the story and the picture of what this looks like for those of us who are not deep in the weeds but certainly experiencing the impact of this in our daily lives, but may not even realize it? I guess I can go first, John. Sure. All right. So, you know, I work, you know, when we looked at the categories for the second bill, you know, in terms of like support automated decision systems, or I actually can't remember the exact terms, but there that's one of the areas that I work in. And so I'll say two things. I'm going to go ahead and start off with sort of the concerns. The one thing that keeps me up at night is that, you know, if we're creating AI that's supporting, right? And it's coming and says that, hey, if whether it's like helping recognize that it looks like there's a bad situation here or it's recognizing that there's an opportunity here or this is how you should, you know, make your decision.   Why is it selecting this answer when there's other alternative answers? And, you know, the concern is that, if I don't give enough context, you know, I am influenced that, or I shouldn't say I am, my AI is influencing somebody to make a decision. And, you know, it could be compounding bias on top of bias. Am I reporting enough or the AI, I'm sorry. I keep saying I and AI. So is the AI have a blind spot itself? Is the AI making assumptions in choosing that decision for you? So that's very concerning that it says, so what does it take? You know, AI needs to work with the human being and, you know, we already have, it's hard enough that, you know, when I have to talk to other people, I'm sorry, I'm sounding very geeky like that. When I have to talk to other people, it says, you know, am I understanding them? Am I making the right decision? And of course, you know, that's a classic challenge of humanity, but then now throwing the AI. Now, on the positive side though, is that, you know, with the AI, it says there are all these opportunities. You know, we are overwhelmed, complex systems, complex world, complex data, and the AI gives us a chance to help us better organize it. And so, you know, that's the general things that, you know, keep me up at night, both positively and negatively, you know, both excitement as well as concern on that. Yeah, I mean, John, I'll hand it to you now. I'm not programmed to respond to this question. No, I'm fuzzy. I think that's really good, Jean. I think that's where I was gonna go too. I guess, you know, the sort of human computer or human AI interaction is, you know, what really keeps, I mean, there are many existential kind of things when you think out in time, but I think, you know, clearly the ethical decisions, I tend to be a technical optimist and believe we can solve those. I think the thing that practically concerns me, two things that practically concern me the most. One is that in our rush to do things, you know, we'll miss unintended consequences. You know, if you looked at like the social dilemma, did you, anybody see that movie? Yeah, that while a very good intention and one thing, or, you know, understandable intention can lead to an unintended consequence. And I think the general problem there is that we're relegating, I worry that we might skip a step when we relegate decision-making, absolute decision-making and authority to an AI prematurely. I think that my experience, I long experience in automation in other domains and there's kind of a growth curve where you build up mutual trust between you and the AI. And it is actually two-way and sort of a weird way that the AI has to trust you or has to be able to understand the data that you're giving it. And that I think that whenever we skip a step and start to allow an AI to make decisions on our behalf, whether it's explicitly or tacitly, where we're going to, you know, based on an AI decide that we're going to arrest someone or not give them a loan. I think we really have to be, we have to be slow and cautious on one sense to make sure that there's always a human in the loop, that there's always, you know, some expertise that would question the AI, I think in a, and would be able to ask through the explainability, et cetera, that Gene mentioned, you know, why is this decision being made? And ultimately from a accountability that the human would make the decision based on the guidance and would be accountable to the results. The moment we start to take that shortcut and let the AI start deciding, now clearly there are times in our lives where we have to do that. You think about, well, think about flight for a moment. Let's just talk broadly, not so much about AI only, but automation, air flight is so much more safe. It's like two orders of magnitude, I believe safer now than it was a few decades ago because of automation, but it had to happen slowly.   That's pretty amazing, but that we came to that slowly. We're starting to go through the same thing in automatic driving. And there's sometimes you do have to relegate a decision to AI because a human can't react that fast. But I think we have to do this in gradual ways, whether it's in, you know, making loans, making arrests, making parole, you know, we have to proceed as in a sort of human AI partnership until there's enough mutual confidence that we can make the decision. So I worry that we take shortcuts there. My other worry is actually a little bit on the opposite side, as somebody who does AI for a living in corporate, that I worry that an un-nuanced understanding of what AI can and can't do and shouldn't do would lead to good intentioned regulation that would actually prevent the good that could happen. So I think that we, you know, kind of when I think about the second bill, I think that having, I'm a big believer in oversight and regulation, but I think it has to be very precise. I worry that in kind of a overreaction that we would say, you know, no, we can't use any kind of this technology and that we block ourselves out from the potential good and exploration. So I think we have to be very careful and precise about the regulations that we provide because otherwise I think we won't really be able to see the true benefit. So that's kind of a more of a business concern. The first one is kind of a life in limb and in humanity concern. The other is from a business, we have to make a balance that we don't hobble innovation so much that we don't get the benefit. And that keeps me up in a different kind of way, yeah. Framing this balance, this tension, you know, it can be the best and the worst of ourselves and that's our job to sort of shepherd and steward that really carefully so that my father-in-law can drive more safely at night because he's supported by self-driving but, you know, that we're not baking in the bias that we all know that we have, especially within a field that's predominantly dominated by white males and our data sets, you know, so that folks have more opportunity to jobs, not less because of, you know, we can mitigate for the bias so that depending on your name, you aren't excluded from job application. So thanks for framing again that this is an incredible opportunity but we have to proceed really carefully so that we're not exponentially amplifying the worst tendencies within all of us, thanks. Hey, we are, we are, we have our chair back. Welcome back, Mr. Chair. I know you've been on a fast ride. I think Lucy, Representative Rogers had a question. Thanks. Yeah, thank you for your presentations and for this being relatively new to me, I think one of the challenges is just trying to pick out, you know, everything seems important and just trying to pick out what's one direction to go in first. So I had a thought that I've been kind of formulating since our earlier conversation this morning and just wanted your take on it, which is something, something had come up earlier about accountability and it really just started me thinking, you know, who is legally responsible when things go wrong with AI, whether it's, you know, whether it's something where a human ultimately has decision-making or something where the technology is making the decision. And I guess just wondering if it seemed like that could be a helpful place to start because I guess the fear I have is that we get into a situation where nobody, no human is taking responsibility for what's happening. And I shared, I'll say one more thing and then I want to hear your thoughts on it. I shared earlier a story about a friend of mine who had a medical school interview that was conducted between her and a computer. And I know there's current examples of court cases with Institute for Higher Education where the Institute is being held responsible for bias and its admissions. And so it just made me think, you know, in this case, this isn't the case, but in a more extreme example, if the computer was actually making the decisions about who was admitted to this medical school, would the medical school be responsible if there were instances of bias with the maker of the software? And so I guess I'm just curious if this seems like it's on the marker, off the mark as far as a direction to be heading and when we think about what we can do legally and do you have a perspective on who should be the one responsible to make sure this all works the way it should? Yeah, I guess I'll start off with the caveat. I'm not a legal expert, so. But having said that though, I mean, these are, I think what you're saying is very much on the mark. One of the things that on the task was we studied and I was forced enough to help lead this part was for example, AI and medicine. So in this case is that, you know, at this point, you know, there's a number of AI driven tools and actually AI decision-making tools use the medicine such as, you know, diagnosing retinopathy, you know, which is, you know, was a decay of the eye nerves, a lot of systems, for example, even predicting that, you know, what is your trend and your blood glucose levels? And each of these though, like, let's take one where, you know, it's trying to predict whether your tumor is cancerous or not. Well, AI is not gonna be perfect. There's gonna be cases where it's gonna have a false negative or a false positive and who's responsible for that? Now though, this is important to address, but the one thing that gives me, how should I say, some more comfort, maybe that's the wrong word, but, you know, some more sense that it's potentially addressable is that, well, we already have other frameworks in place, which is the FDA because the FDA has to approve these things. And so I think it's gonna be very important in terms of what are the functioning frameworks that are out there, FDA, FAA, all those things that all right, see how much they can expand and how much they can actually cover.  That's gonna be, you know, I think an important thing that the commission helps address or any sort of commission like this tries to help addressing going forward. I think that this is one of the first things that, you know, we go forward on, but as also like, you know, John was also say earlier, like from our original task force, you know, starting with the ethics and at least getting a bounds on that first, then gives us a shot of finding the right path. I think this is very good, Jean. I think a couple of things, and I think this reads on H.263 is that I think we need to develop standards and those standards have to be evolving. And I do not think that there will ever be a sweeping, you know, a sweeping statement that you could say, you should never do X. I think that the kind of regulation and decision making needs to be handled on, if not a case by case basis, there can be some sort of a regulatory framework. So for example, when I think we can make a clean distinction between when a decision has to be made, has to be relegated to a machine. And I would say that those are pretty clear. Those are things where a human is not able to make the decision fast enough, you know, what I would say for like autonomous driving, autonomous trucks, autonomous trains, which there are now autonomous airplanes, that sometimes you have to relegate a decision to the computer because a human can't be consulted and a human might not be able to respond quickly enough. But I think for the most part, most decisions that are not, you know, lifeline time critical, I think you can make it always the case, and I think you have to think about these in the case by case basis that a human needs to take the final decision, whether it's a medical diagnosis, whether it's a criminal arrest warrant or a jail commutation or anything like that, that I think that AI should be working in partnership with humans and because it is transparent, it has to be transparent, it has to tell you what data it's using, what conclusion it's drawing, what data it's storing, because it's got to be explainable. So if it makes a decision, it can defend the decision and sort of say, here's the logical basis for that. And because we would have it tested for bias in whatever appropriate context that means, and we can talk about that technically, that the human would be in position, whether it's a doctor or a lawyer or a hiring manager would be ultimately, would know that she or he was responsible for the decision and that way would not lean back and just take, because if they knew that the ethical implications and that perhaps the damages implications would be on them, they will lean in and pay attention and ask the right questions and ask the AI to explain more. So I think that there are guidelines, I don't think that there are sweeping guidelines, but I think that we should make sure that we understand when a computer should be able to make a decision on its own. And that should be very limited cases where there are life and limb are necessary for that. And everything else, I believe at least for the foreseeable future would have a human that would have to sign in for accountability. And then I think, but I kind of go back to the idea of having a standards body with narrow targeted rules is the only way to do this because trying to figure this out post hoc is very, very difficult, right? You end up with finger pointing, but I actually see that there is a kind of a bright line where most decisions don't need to be made so quickly that a human can't be assigned responsibility up front. Excellent. Okay, I have a question about limiting just in terms of policymakers. So for both of you, what is the number one way we could limit or manage AI? And I'm not asking what is the best way, I'm asking what is the most impactful way to limit or control AI? Even if I may represent- For policymakers. Yeah, if I may, even that language is sometimes, I think we want to, we do want to limit in the appropriate, but we also want to enable. So I worry a little bit sometimes that we already are putting AI in the hot seat. I think what we, I hope it's okay for me to say that. I believe that what's in H.263 about actually doing an inventory and understanding all the places where we have software that's potentially helping us with decisions or in some cases making decisions for us. I think the first thing I would say is important is having a crisp understanding of what technology is in use and what technology might be put into use. I think understanding all the points where this might happen would be the first thing I would do. And I like that in H.263. Okay, good. And then I think a set of going, starting with those test cases, going through and trying to come up with a rubric for accountability and what overuse, oversight was necessary in each of those, which also I think is in H.263, I think is would be the second case. So I think those are two of the right first moves. Great. Excellent. Thank you. Mike, and then I see Representative Cheena has his hand up as well. Okay, good morning. Thank you, Dr. Cohn and Dr. Santos and Brian for your presentations. It's very, very far-reaching. And as I listen to this, it's such a huge apple that we're trying to take a bite out of. There are, I guess, four areas that I've been thinking about in terms, I guess, are jurisdictional. And one is state versus federal. We're a small state and anything we do, it's going to have limited reaches in terms of developing standards or anything else. And we're not gonna be able to reach far beyond our state boundaries, if that. So it seems to me like federal action is also going to be very important in terms of developing this. So one question would be, what's happening on the federal level on these lines? A secondary is private versus government. I mean, we're talking, we have oversight over the IT systems of the state, but we don't have any oversight of what goes on privately in terms of enacting standards or telling companies what they can and can't do. Well, we might have some, but it's kind of limited and has to address the public good. A lot of these questions are so deep that I wonder whether, in the third area, whether they might be more addressed by academia than a commission. And then the fourth is distinction between operational artificial intelligence and judgmental artificial intelligence. By that, it sort of goes to what Dr. Kohn was talking about, which is, we want AI to make a decision in, if we're driving and the car has to break because of an obstacle, but we also want human involvement in decisions that affect people's lives. So the example that Lucy brought up, Representative Rogers brought up about a computer making a decision whether somebody gets into medical school or not. So these are all very complex and I think we're taking a little bite out of our huge apple and comment on that or not. Okay. Representative Cheena. Yeah, I'd actually like to comment. I know my time is up, but I'm still kind of here as a witness. I'd like to comment on that. And then I have sort of a question that I'm hoping the other guests could speak to to help elaborate something. So just to speaking to what Representative Yontagica was asking about like the debate and the discussion being left to academia more than a commission, that's something that I've heard through our testimony that this does happen in academia. This does happen within the field. One of the issues is that the public in general is not being engaged enough and that the difference between the academic work and the government work is that the government is directly accountable to all people. And so by creating a commission and empowering that commission with that work, then we are increasing the possibility for the public to be involved in shaping the policy. And it's democratizing it more and spreading power beyond academia and business where it's been concentrated out to the people. And so that's why I would argue that the commission is necessary. I see John Cohen's hand. So I'll let you speak to that. And then I'll ask, then I'd like to, if it's okay, Representative Sebelia, I'd like to ask a question for our other guests to speak to because it's something I would like to talk about but I don't have the expertise, so. So I wanna make sure that we also give both of our guests a moment to comment on the bill. I know they have been commenting kind of along the way but if there are any additional comments. So I guess at this point responding to Representative Sheena and then commenting would be. Okay, just very quickly, the representative Yantachka and Representative Sheena, this idea of how universities might fit in. Again, I feel that kind of having a foot in both, there may be some gray areas but I think it's a pretty bright line. I think that I loved the idea early on. We talked about doing research around how we could use AI to look for bias and unintended consequences. That's an academic topic but I believe that where public safety and public good is necessary that as a career academic, I would say you don't wanna leave that to universities. I think that there are things that like for example, the autonomous driving cars that if or other forms of automation that are gonna be affecting and having to say the Vermont where a public safety is an area, then that's clearly a place where I think a public good, that's why I like H.263's idea of having some targeted, understanding of what technology is being used in the state and by the state and having guidelines on those that are deemed to have a public good aspect. So I think that there's a pretty bright line, things that we might explore with academia and I really encourage, I love the idea of having a partnership between the state and the higher learning institutes, including Dartmouth, UVM, Middlebury, all of those. But I do think that the H.263, leaving that only to universities that don't have a point of enforcement, I think doesn't serve the public that well if I understood the idea. I think that having the university, drawing the universities in is not only good because it allows us to explore some things but in the same way of creating jobs, it's a great way of actually building the strength of our local universities on the topic. I mean, I think, speaking just for UVM, UVM has already distinguishing itself in some areas like in complex systems, emergent behavior. And I think that this might be an AI ethics area that might be a great place for the state of Vermont to start to distinguish itself. Yeah, I'd like to add to that too and amplifies is that academia is very good at exploring questions, exploring theories, exploring, ultimately, I mean, I'm in academia because I want to explore way out concepts and things that may be really crazy. But it's not enough because for lack of a better, once the rubber hits the road, it's gone out into the public. It's something that's going to be used. It's something that's going to affect lives. That's where the aspect of the government, the aspect of, as Representative Tina said, this is affecting people directly. That's a different point of view. I shouldn't say it's not different point of view but it's a broader point of view than say academia is actually considered. So it's a partnership that we need to draw all those together. And so one aspect, I very much also support both bills and addressing the second bill on what system is there that's a natural part of that but going back to commission itself. Commission, one aspect of it that excites me is that it serves as a bridge between the theoretical exploration and actually, let me bring up this. Today, one of the drivers of the exponential growth of AI it's so easy to deploy AI. I don't know how many undergraduates I've had company from freshmen, even high school students that are building AI and putting them out. Now the question is that, are they aware of what they're doing? Are they aware of, is the public aware of what they're doing? Are people aware of what their impacts are going to be? And so the commission serves as this mechanism to enhance that awareness further. So yeah, that's what I wanted to add on that. All right, excellent. Is there anything else that you would like to tell us about these bills today or any other questions from the committee or Mr. Chair? Is there any questions? Representative Pabilia, I wanted to know if our guests cause while you have them here it's a really important opportunity that in age 263 it talks about independent testing for bias of automated decision systems. And I think it might be, if our guests are willing to just speak a little bit about that, like how do you do that? Because if we're asking if it's done and we're talking about giving the power to the agency of digital services to have some standards around that, it might be good for them to just speak a little bit about how that's done. I see some hands. So it looks like they have some thoughts. I have a hard stop here in a couple of minutes. So I'm glad you asked that, Representative Gina. I think that the bias is something that it depends on what the bias might be because of the application but there are great open source and closed source efforts that try to look at bias in terms of representative, representative Sims talk or I believe or no, maybe it's representative Rogers. One, we're talking about bias in terms of recognizing gender bias, et cetera. My company IBM has put in the public something called an AI Fairness 360 tools. So they're tools that are open for testing for bias. They're basically curated datasets that would allow you to check bias in certain scenarios. I think I believe that there are technical solutions to this. They are gonna be application specific. They're going to be in terms of like gender bias or racial bias, but I believe that there are tools out there that would allow you to test specific decision-making based on demographics. And I think that once we have the survey that is recommended in H.263, I think we could go and figure out whether there are bias sets or not for some of these, for all of the applications and then figure out how to apply them. I suspect that there would be areas where there is no such test case and maybe that's a place where we would work with academia. Yeah, let me add on top of that. Yeah, there's many efforts going out there. You'll hear terms if you want to go search out, like just simply explainable AI and explanatory or X AI, which is one of the acronyms they use. The one thing though that to amplify what John was saying is that it's very application-specific because it depends on the question you're asking. What's the bias you should be looking for? I think something even more troublesome though is that really bias, I would say is a special case of we don't have enough information. We don't have enough knowledge. And then how do we know that we don't have that information? And that's on the side of academia. Hey, what can we present out? If we're going to develop this, can we identify this? And that itself is an open question. But again, back down the application, when you're talking about the transparency of why that decision came from and what is it driven from? And then if you can even add a minimum doing analysis on the data that you're using to drive that decision, that analysis could be a gender analysis. It could be a decision bias analysis, demographic analysis. At least that gives a clearer context that okay, I'm basing my decision as this is what we as human beings do, right? I'm drawing my decision based on the evidence I have, but now I have to self-assess. What is the nature of this evidence? Great, okay. Well, thank you very much. We appreciate all of the time that you spent here with us today. This is an interesting topic and I think we'll be taking more time up on it, Mr. Chair, anything else that you'd like to add? Just my apologies to Gene and John. I had some technological challenges and actually sprinted, I'm probably a quarter mile from Gene's office right now. I had to come to my office. So I'll be interested to watch the first 40 minutes of this discussion on YouTube tonight, but apologize, but it's been fascinating what I've heard and appreciate both of your direction and also representative Gene for his leadership on this. And we are definitely gonna dig deeper into this in the coming weeks. So I wanna thank everybody. Thank you all and thanks for taking this up. Thank you. Good to see you, John. For committee members, let's take a five minute break since we've had two hours straight here and let's come back at what time? 1107 and we're gonna have some discussion about H360 as I forewarned yesterday.