Take a list of all those issues that we know of so far that have to be dealt with. So that was that was why it was such a broad agenda because those are some of the issues that I already knew that had come up. So with that what I will do I guess is start with the Treasurer's Office. Are there issues that you know of that we have to deal with that are related to COVID-19? This is Beth. I guess I would just give you two line summary of what I just said in Senate Finance and Appropriations. We have sufficient cash to meet our obligations. We expect to be able to pay make our payments to retirees, to employees, to vendors, to individuals with needs that are in our various systems without disruption and on time. And we are establishing sufficient backups and contingencies for our systems and options but we will be able to pay all all of the payments and there will be no disruption. So just wanted to let you know that moves. That's the best news we've heard all day. Okay. So while the Treasurer's Office is on the phone I will bring up one of the issues that came from law enforcement. One of the we are no longer running training classes right now because of the grouping people together social distancing. We have a number of people who will within the next couple months be forced to retire and we have a number of people who have retired at 55 because that's the age for the troopers and the state. So is there any way at this time to delay those forced retirements because we are hurting for law enforcement right now? So that's a question for the Treasurer's Office. That's an issue. I guess I don't expect you to have an answer today but we will put that on the agenda for next week some day to really get into it and see what we can do. Does that make sense? Okay. Thank you. And Erica that probably is mostly you and Beth. I think it's probably Erica, Tim Duggan and Michael Klosson. Oh okay. All right. So are there no issues out there that we need to deal with committee that you've heard of? I thought we were still waiting for the Treasurer to identify any. Well she didn't. Well you just identified one we need to deal with with the Treasurer. Anything else that you have Jeanette for the Treasurer? No that's what I had for the Treasurer's Office. Anthony? Well we talk about it being a Treasurer's issue which it is but if it has to do with their contracts I would imagine it's a contract in other words if they're supposed to retire at 55 I just wonder what we have to take a look at the contract and see what it allows or what this allows I would think. Well it's a matter of statute actually and we'll have to take a look at that and frankly there's a committee that's been working on this the law enforcement retirement benefit study committee and we submitted a progress report. I guess I would caution against jumping ahead of that report. I understand the needs but the retirement age is a very significant issue in terms of safety as well and we would recommend that we take a look at it within the context of the current process and I understand the desire to move forward on this but it has a big impact in terms of as I said safety plus it has specific legal and regulatory issues and I don't know if it would be okay if you want me to wait till next week or we could have Tim Dougan talk about it a little bit. No I would rather wait because I want to get it on and I want to get those people who are asking the questions about the retirement on here and have some information because it we're beginning to face a pretty serious issue out there with law enforcement and we are passing all kinds of legislation that defies current statutes and does it or that is in opposition to current statutes but that does it only for a limited period of time because of this crisis that we're facing so I'd rather wait and we'll put it on the agenda for we'll put it on for Tuesday. Okay thank you. Okay thank you. Are there other are there any issues from the Treasurer's Office that you feel that we as a government operations committee need to deal with? Well I guess the only thing I would add is that that as we're working through this and you're thinking about issues I have a very strong opinion that we need to take care of hourly employees as well and there are hourly employees in the municipal system whether they work in schools as support staff to the teachers and students or whether they are municipal workers and we want to make sure that they're taking care of in the process. We're looking at our retirement statutes right now and in our practices and I just want to alert you that we might have some information on that. I don't know if Michael or Erica want to talk to that anymore but that would be one issue for me it's it's a matter of making sure that we've taken care of our people. Okay thank you. We'll put that on we'll put that on the same day. Okay okay so any anybody else out there VSEA do you have any issues that you I think that Steve are you there? I think that perhaps the issue with Woodside we should leave to the Judiciary Committee because they've already been working on that and there's no need to duplicate we have enough things to do everybody but are there other VSEA issues that we should I think the state the Veterans Home is an issue? I would say a couple that is a few things one is that the Veterans Home and across state government there's a serious lack of personal protective equipment and I think it would be I don't know what the government operations committee can do about that but it would be good to get a report from the administration where that stands because we do have people in prisons and correctional facilities and at the state hospital and at the vets home and in other places especially DCF going in locations where they could easily contract COVID-19 and there's no gloves there's no masks there's no anything okay so that would be one thing I think it's this is a maybe a little bit of a longer term issue and generally it starts in the house but we are going to need a pay act yeah I yeah I get a message from Secretary Condos about that too okay Secretary Condos yeah he was Secretary Condos you know that that guy Secretary of State yeah yeah that's very nice of him to call him yeah his concern I'll tell you what his concern was and then we'll put it on to see how and I'll talk with Sarah about how we're going to deal with this is that um he was very concerned that a lot of executive salaries have gone up and the people who are and they are working very hard that's understanding but that the like the janitorial staff their salaries have not gone up they're still working for like 14-15 dollars an hour and they're in having facing a lot of challenges with this and a lot of risk so that was his I think the only other couple of things on my list one is um I don't know exactly if this is a government operations issue but it does in fact the state workforce you know the thing that is confusing about the direction the administration has given us is it it doesn't there really are essential employees who absolutely need to be there and then there's all these other categories basically the governor deemed all state employees essential and and there are so there are people in who are working despite the governor's order at offices um and that really they're not correctional officers they're not bgs they're not law enforcement officers they're not nurses you know they're not immediately responding to the crisis but they're somehow being asked to come to offices we don't know why so we're starting we're trying to work that out there might be just something to have on your radar and this I don't know if it belongs in government operations or where it belongs but we're starting calls from members who are paying for child care even though their kids can't go to the child care center but meanwhile the child care facility has filled up with essential personnel the kids of essential personnel and they were concerned about uh child care centers making a windfall charging existing parents who can't present their kids while also charging emergency personnel um and I don't know how widespread that is but it's I've gotten two or three calls in the last day or so with concerns about people who are paying for child care slots they're not using while uh that slot is being filled by a child of an emergency somebody who's working as an emergency employee is your concern that they're most slots are being double paid for yes yeah that they're charging people who don't have any money to pay for slots that keep them open and also charging the essential personnel for their kid but I mean it just seems I don't know how widespread it is but it does seem like somewhere we have to make sure that the child care centers are not making a windfall somehow I can't see them making any windfall but it is an issue if it's happening right I don't know where that rightly belongs child care that goes here we'll we'll we'll look into it though thank you okay anything else that's all I got on my list for now may I ask you can I may I ask you a question yes please chris bray has joined us with a new question my question is what percent of the vsp a workforce is now working remotely I mean you said some of them were going into the office but we're not considered essential even though all state employees are considered essential what do you have a notion of how many are actually now working remotely I don't the Department of Human Resources might I would say the vast majority of them are but I can't give you a specific percentage DHR I think does track that information so they may be able to give that gave you a more specific answer to that well Tom is on the call Thomas he was there he is you're muted Tom an issue we can hear you now you're pointing your finger at us okay now I should be unmuted now you are yeah my understanding is that the administration is tracking data on where people are working I don't know I don't have the answer to the question obviously but I can pass it along to the commissioner thanks so Steve when you say that they are not essential but they're reporting to offices what kinds of people are you thinking of because I'm thinking of people like people in voc rehab may not be considered essential to responding to COVID but they certainly are in terms of dealing with their clients right so that's a good example we did we do have a lot of folks who I don't know if they're still doing it but they were there were a lot of folks from voc rehab who were being called into their offices and they were saying that they essentially could do the work from home and they don't know why they're being asked that may have changed since the governor's stay at home order okay I can speak I can speak to that I think since the governor's stay at home order any state employee who has the capability to work remotely is or should be working remotely got it okay I think what would be what would be clear as if we had a classification of like super essential people you're a nurse you need to show up you're a police officer you need to show up versus everybody is an essential employee it's just it's creating it's creating confusion for a lot of reasons well I I don't know how you deal with that exactly if anybody has the ability to work remotely even though they're considered an essential employee I mean a law enforcement officer can't really work remotely nor can a nurse but a voc rehab counselor can so they might be considered essential but able to work remotely so we should clear that we'll clear that up we'll get DHR Tom will you have some answers for us in a report on Monday I mean on Tuesday I will I will get what I can by Tuesday thank you okay other other issues that anybody has is mark Anderson on the call I am senator thank you I know that we're having some issues around law enforcement this is sheriff Anderson do you want to tell us what we're trying to do today is just get a list of the things that we need to address next week uh so I'm looking to see if we can establish a source of emergency funding for sheriffs through the COVID-19 crisis okay okay all right let's get that on the list sorry may I just ask a question of Mark yes Mark you're the sheriff's employees are all considered essential they're all doing their jobs they haven't stopped the work they're doing other than the court work which is obviously slowed down but all their town work is what what is the emergency need for funding for the sheriffs I'll use my office as an example our dispatch operates 24-hour dispatching for three agencies including my own it operates at a loss each year subsidized through the work that we do that is not part of the state or county-funded work and without any of the typical revenue that I would have coming in right now I won't be able to sustain operating the dispatch center got it okay yeah I just want to say they subsidize almost everything that they do for the state by and the towns by contracts with places like Mount Snow and Stratton and and they're not operating so got it are there other issues Mark that around getting people in terms of getting people I can't speak for the sheriffs specifically there's certainly issues with the academy and training that I think you've already outlined and that's just what it is it's and then another issue I'm not sure if it's a gov ops issue but was regarding fees for service of civil process which I proposed in the house they're they're working on that I I believe so but I'd have to defer to Sheriff Boniek okay he is he on the phone by any chance he is not okay we'll ask him because we don't want to be duplicating whatever they're doing over there if they're starting that will okay goodness six um all right um anybody else is Karen horn on here by yet by now it's 10 after almost 10 after three there are going to be I think a large number of municipal issues as we wade through that this is sorry this is chris camp in the regional commission good thank you chris okay I think Karen is probably still on this uh the weekly state emergency operations call with municipal officials and regional planning commissions and EMDs um I can't speak for her but I know she shared with us um amendments at title 24 chapter 33 uh which would allow uh electronic signatures during this period um and the other thing that that was included in the communication with us meaning the regional planning commissions uh was that if you need a definition for electronic signature um there is one under title nine chapter 20 and and uh one of the things I would ask is uh regional commissions would also benefit from that authority um I don't know that we don't have that authority state agencies do but it would be good for us to have that authority as well okay are there any other uh chris while you're there um are there any other permit you know other issues that we have that need to be addressed from the planning commission point of view no I think uh you guys covered it in the um in the bill that just passed well the coverage of the deadlines and uh so I think you I think it's covered I think it's covered through there because um certainly for our operations and I think for most town operations I think we're good great okay so chris that I have this is Jeanette I have to say that that um thing that was sent out from your office about um FIMA on how to deal with that and how to keep track of everything was very helpful I sent that I forwarded that to all the people in the senate and to and I'm sure Karen Horne already knows that but I forwarded it to her too it was very clear and well well written it great it it was good great and one of the things too that we're just just so you know that we're working on within our regional commission and I'm sure others will be working on them too are uh basically a a single web page we're working with United Way and Groundworks and others as a single source to go to information for a whole variety of needs um so we can all have it in one place it'd be something that would be kept up to date um so that's a work in progress but uh we'll send information out about that as we as we continue but I'm sure other it's probably going to be done differently in different places you know organize in whatever way makes sense in some cases it may be the regional commission in our case the leadership on this is probably as far as the entities that are most connected are more likely like United Way and Groundworks and we'll make sure that we include information from throughout the region our role is going to be more the kind of coordinating and hosting of that information so this may be approached in different ways but everybody I think is standing up pretty you know quickly to uh get as much information as consumable format as possible okay thank you other things that um I wondered if I know I'm sure there's no EMS people on here but I wondered if if um the online training I know that we're still short of EMS people and that we probably need them more than ever and um if we can do something with the if if there's time if people can do something with the um online training so that we can get more people signed up I don't know if if that's something that needs to happen quickly or if it even is feasible I guess I should talk to DOH about that yeah yeah and maybe we could fast track our bill which we've sent to the house because that's that our EMS bill has some provisions in there that would help that this emergency right now so if we got that rolled out and got the house to act on it that would be helpful yeah and it may be that there's so many things in there that they wouldn't want to do the whole thing but we could at least pull out the EMS stuff maybe exactly exactly I'm just I'm thinking of the work that we've already done and and how we can prioritize within some of the work we've already done that is actually very useful right now like the licensing stuff and and right anybody else have anything that they would like to throw out here well I guess I'd expand on that which is I think we should look at what we've passed and and see if there are things that are COVID related that would help facilitate the crisis at the moment or you know I'm thinking of our OPR bill I'm thinking of the EMS bill I mean some of those bills have some provisions that could be very useful right now yeah yeah and I think we want to hear we heard from the sheriffs about possibly some emergency funding but we we will there is going to be money in there for municipalities also and in the federal bill that comes and I'm not sure how it would be helpful if we appropriations clearly will make the decisions on here but it would be helpful if we had some suggestions about how the municipalities felt that it would be most helpful to them does that make sense yes no okay so I don't know if Karen is still on here I got a note from Mark Hughes saying that if if we were hearing things that we should hear from the um disadvantaged communities that are most impacted by this and I'm not sure that he had anything more specific I don't know if Mark is on the phone but I did tell him to send me a note about what what specifically he was um referring to so we'll have that uh Chair White yes this is Chris Bray hello Chris Bray good afternoon um you know speaking of communities at risk one that I'm conscious of over here in Addison County I think it's much more widespread but there's a whole group of people who work and live on farms who are here like special visas and stuff like that they're they they don't have regular access to many things and I'm just wondering if I know that ag is aware of this but it's it's broader than just agriculture but I mentioned that if we're looking at communities at risk and maybe who don't have great access to health care and probably would also they may not uh I don't know could whoever has the phone ringing mute their phone unless it's you Chris Bray it's me Allison Clarkson shocking okay please ask people not to call you can you do that I didn't realize you could do that well you can you can put your phone in the the other room what are the chair of government operations stop calling me yes you got that Tom so maybe that's one group Allison can you mute yourself so now but I or put your phone in the other room okay go ahead Chris I'm sorry so that's all I was saying just that there's there is a farm community that has problems with access to health care and I also just don't know who's looking out in terms of work rules and you know safe distancing and all the rest with farm workers with those communities that are at risk right yeah yeah thank you yeah okay anything else two two people just spoke up I think one sounded like Karen horn and I couldn't tell the other one am I right and that one of the people was myself and it's Ingrid Jonas with state police hi Ingrid hi um I just wanted to tell them that um I haven't been told you're you've you've faded way away I haven't talked to the commissioner shirling regarding any needs for vsp so perhaps on Tuesday we could report back yeah that would be great and senator white it was rose mary grit kowsky also hopefully at the same time um and I have Mike shirling uh excuse me Mike de Rocher is also on the phone from fire safety and we would love to have an opportunity to discuss um some of the licensing requirements for electricians and plumbers that are in the fire safety um in their purview for regulation so if that could be put on the agenda I think we'd appreciate that we can do that thank you yes you're welcome is that what you were going to suggest Mike yeah okay great thank you senator and if you if you think of other things from DPS that need to or the troopers either one just um I know that this was pretty short and the uh issues keep coming up instead of it isn't a list that is finite on Friday afternoon thank you I wish it was a list that was finite on Friday afternoon wouldn't that be nice finite Fridays okay other was Karen able to join us I think Chris indicated that she was probably still on that meeting but I know that she she did say that right now the most pressing thing for them right now was this electronic um signatures and um I'm sure that if other things come up that she'll let us know so what I would suggest everybody is um I don't want to keep us here any longer than we have to unless there's something else that if people think of other things that we we do need to deal with um and all we're dealing with this week is in response to to COVID after that we may start dealing with other um according to our leadership we may start dealing with other other things that are important but not in response to the the emergency so if you think of other things I if you would email them to me um oh I do have one other thing Betsy and Rask so kindly reminded us that if we have any interest in passing a constitutional amendment it has to be done before we adjourn we have four constitutional amendments on our wall I believe I think three of them uh deal with um length of term and one of them deals with free men and free women in the constitution does anybody have an interest in taking any of those up before the end of the session no we're shocked we're shocked Chris uh can you hear me it's not not this year okay Anthony I don't feel an urgent need to bring them up no we have other things to do Allison I'm with Brian yes mine was a resounding no also so okay ma'am I had one more thing that I had on my list sorry um yes I know that this is a larger discussion senate as well um but our committee might be interested in thinking through and making recommendations to the full senate on uh the how we might do remote meetings with voting and remote for the for committees as well as for the full senate since that's something we worked on regularly anyway and just produced a bill so I know that senate rules is looking at it but I wondered if there was a role maybe for senate gov ops to play as well yes we will find out and I think that we have our our um constitutional and case law person right there on the line with us right that's the end I think he's still there yes okay and Tucker as well um Tucker would also be involved with that he couldn't be here today because he was double booked but he just wanted me to let you know that he's here in spirit and he can be here if you need to speak with him also thank you thank you um okay other things yeah this is gail and I just got an email from Karen horn apparently she will be dialing in shortly okay do you know what time it is right now I don't have a clock I'm so out of it here it is it's what 323 okay we have a little bit of time okay should we wait for Karen to dial in yeah okay we will wait in the meantime does anybody else want to say anything at all about anything can I just bring up what Chris mentioned ma'am chair the um the two resolutions that we passed and I assume um they've gone on well they don't need to be approved by the governor do they uh one of them did have to do with committees being able to vote remotely and I thought we passed that and also any joint committees uh with the ability to do the same thing the question that we were going to be grappling with was whether the senate as a whole body could do that am I not remembering correctly I think I I think you're correct I think that the maybe what Chris was referring to and I'm not sure that this was right was um how how best to do it I think there are different ways that we might um vote remotely and the committee it isn't as essential but with 30 people in the senate what are what are the safeguards and how best to do it the issue the issue that I understood from this morning because we talked about this quite a bit in the senate call was the body voting as a body yeah so the we've taken care of the committee voting but what we haven't taken care of is how the senate votes so um and we have a lot of expertise to pull together on that uh it's remote voting is done all over the world so there is Kevin Moore I know has expertise in this and some other obviously expertise we can uh uh reach out to but that uh if you weren't on that call Brian Becca Becca and Joe have asked us to send us their ideas by Sunday yes I realized that Allison I was responding to what Chris had mentioned that's all oh I'm sorry right and beyond voting another discussion related to all this was should the senate adjourn and if so you know would we modify something like joint fiscal to give it capacities beyond what it currently has to just make budget adjustments to make it a more fully rounded committee that could work through the bounce of the year post adjournment whenever that date comes right or the emergency uh the joint emergency committee was discussed well right so that's exactly the kind of discussion the eboard is quite small right joint fiscal is bigger but they're both very small compared to the full body and and might we want to consider recommendations for instance on making them a little bigger to represent different aspects that are they're basically fiscal at the moment right and I I do think that um although this is an issue for the entire senate to grapple with and for the joint or for the rules committee um I think that we we could have some conversations about because we are we are the voting committee I mean we that's what we do is elections and voting and so I think that we can um tap on the expertise that we have available to us so joint rules could consider delegating some of that work to us is what I think Chris is asking well I'm not even going to delegate I'll just we'll just put it on our agenda right we could do we could also take a look at whatever they're considering look at the options and we could discuss the options and prioritize which we think might be more appealing right yeah I wasn't really recommending delegating just uh that discussing like something we might want to evaluate and make a recommendation to to rules for instance go the other direction right well since actually since that's going to happen pretty quickly I think maybe we should put that on for first thing on Tuesday good idea and maybe Jeanette you'd be kind enough to email Becca and Joe and and let them know we think we might take first crack at it yeah I will do that so while we're um waiting here for Karen to dial in is Susanna uh Davis are you on the line some of your weight Karen is going to us okay is first of all though is Susanna on the line I'm here madam chair okay thank you from the administration's point of view is there anything that you can think of that you um that we need to deal with as a government operations committee you know perhaps you might be asking the wrong person but okay I would say no I think that if I can speak on behalf of the admin we're here to respond to needs that are raised here I I'm personally unaware of of things that um that someone in the admin may want to bring before this committee but I can follow up by email afterwards if that's not accurate okay that's great thank you and thanks for joining us my pleasure thank you for moving to hearing yep Karen and Karen Chris Campani did um comment about the electronic signatures so if there are other issues that you need right now in this lull but while we're waiting for Karen I have to say Anthony your your it looks like geraniums are beautiful you thank Debbie for that thank Debbie for that hi this is Karen um I'm getting cut off but I seem to be here for the moment yep and it's it's better if I don't have a picture because then the then it seems to hang on for longer okay so are there issues um that you can think of right now that we need to deal with besides the electronic signatures um the electronic signature seems to be the one that is most important right now and I'm waiting to um I'm hoping to get some you know other proposals from folks but I don't have them at this point okay the one thing that I that might be helpful and I don't know how how we would do this at all but there is and I don't know if we really have a role here but generally the appropriations committee asks us for recommendations when it comes to um giving out money and I know that in the federal money there bill there will be some money for municipalities and I don't know if they'll ask us for recommendations but if if so once we know what's in there um if we can have any um be helpful to the municipalities that would be great so as um yeah so this morning when I was listening to the Ways and Means Committee I believe uh and then also Congressman Welch was on the emergency operations center called for local officials um it sounded like perhaps it was the governor's office that that made those decisions I'm not sure in any case um we are going to have big holes in municipal budgets due to um late payments and and delinquencies and requests for abatement of taxes and we're also going to have um significant expenses for our emergency medical services folks particular so um yeah we will have um recommendations slash requests around the funding piece and I'm happy to put those together for you okay that sounds good anything else nobody else okay anybody else have anything no oh sorry okay so what I would suggest is if people think of stuff um when they think of them just email if you email them to the whole committee and to Gail so that we all kind of see them and then we can put them on a list and start um looking at them and we're scheduled for Tuesday from one to three and Thursday from one to three is that right Gail right that's what that's what I'm understanding and I'll send that out to the committee and others on this call so that you'll have that in front of you okay and then Friday if we need it we may not need it but okay yep great thank you thank you have a good weekend


A neurobiological group of fenifera has condemned the attack on the house of Sondia de Amor, popularly known as Sondibuho. The group described the attack as a return to the late Saniyya Bachar era and noted that a dark cloud is descending on Nigeria. Igbo's house was attacked between 1am and 2.30am on Thursday by gunmen who he claimed are operatives of the Department of State Services and the Nigerian Army. Two persons were killed in the attack while cars and other valuable items were destroyed in the process of the raid.


But what I really want to say is, I said it early and I say it a lot in my shows, New Years is a good time to really sit down and think. Think about what? Well, about the most important thing you can think about, which is your life. Is it going the way you want it to go? Are you achieving the things you want to achieve? Are you being ruthless, ruthless in pursuing happiness, in pursuing life, in pursuing your values? Are you being ruthless in adhering to a rational moral code, to being rational? But again, rational doesn't mean spark-like, unemotional, detached, the opposite in a sense. It means passionate, valuer, living for your values, striving to achieve the values, fighting to achieve the values, working to achieve the values, just fill in. Replacing your life, your values, your enjoyment, your happiness at the center.   Don't have too much pleasure. And as a consequence, Americans tend to get drunk, and Europeans do, tend to get drunk as a substitute for actual enjoyment, for actual pleasure, pleasure. Find things that cause you pleasure, please yourself, enjoy yourself, have fun.  I mean, start by achieving. Make sure to enjoy it. Now, of course, everything's at what price? Everything is a trade-off. But think about those trade-offs. Don't let the Christian guilt in you deny you the pleasure, deny you the values, deny you the spending the money, subsue your values, work hard, achieve great things, and then enjoy your achievements, and spend time enjoying your achievements, and relish them, all right? What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning, any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims, or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism, and impotence, and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist brought. All right, before we go on, remind them, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it, but at least the people who are liking it, you know, I want to see a thumbs up, there you go. Start liking it. That go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know, the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So you know, and if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes. But if you like it, don't just sit there, help get the show promoted. Of course, you should also share and you can support the show at your own bookshow.com slash support on Patreon or subscribe star or locals and show your support for all, for the work, for the value, hopefully you're receiving from this.  You'll know what shows are on, when they're on. You'll get notified, right? So yes, like, share, subscribe, support. Like share, subscribe, support. There you go. Easy. One, all of those, please.


The challenge that we've been faced with is that telescopes are extremely sensitive devices for resolving the finest detail and they're full of moving, vibrating equipment like cryocoolers and motors and pumps. Isolating that vibration is very difficult, both because it's extremely sensitive and because everything on the back of a telescope moves and tips with the telescope as it points to different parts in the sky. So what we've had to solve is the problem that we need. The best vibration isolation that you can possibly get and we need to make one that can be tipped in any orientation and still keep working. We've developed a anti-vibration mount that solves this problem of vibration on the telescope. What's special about it is that it offers orders of magnitude better vibration isolation than anything else that's out there for this application and it does this by using a new design of negative rate springs and those allow it to have an extremely low natural frequency way beyond what you could ever possibly do with a conventional sprung mount and it does this with a new design that allows it to be tipped to any orientation and still keep working. This has been a really interesting project for me because it's been a very difficult challenge that hasn't been solved before and I've been able to come up with a completely new solution that addresses it very, very well and what's exciting is that it is not just astronomy that can benefit from this technology, it's applicable to the wide range of applications, everything from aerospace to medical and everything in between. At this stage what we're looking for is industry partners to help bring this out into the world. That includes either groups interested in licensing the technology or people with applications that have the ability for AVM to help solve their problems or anyone that can help us with feedback on the technology or the implementation or how it might be used best.


All right. Welcome everyone. It's my great pleasure to introduce three amazing talks of the session on multi-party competition. So the first talk is Garbert's Circuit with sublinear evaluation. This is a work from Abida Heik, David Heath, Ladimir Kolesnikov, Steve Lu, Rafa Losroski and Akash Shah. And David will give the talk. It's a busy day for David. Hello. Okay, there we go. So thanks for that nice introduction. It's good to be back on the stage. So I'm going to be talking again about garbled circuits. I'm going to be talking about a technique that we call garbled circuits with sublinear evaluator. So I'd actually just like to jump straight in here. So first of all, just a reminder to everybody about the basic execution of a garbled circuit. And we're going to analyze how we're trying to play with some of the parameters here. So in a garbled circuit, we have two parties, a so-called generator who takes the circuit and makes some kind of garbling of it, some kind of representation that will allow the evaluator to run that garbled circuit. And so there's basically three steps to a garbled circuit protocol. First, you generate the circuit, then you send that circuit across the network, and then the evaluator evaluates it. And traditionally in garbled circuits, the parties pay linear costs in all three of these steps. Okay, so depending on the size of the circuit, the amount of cost the generator pays to garble that circuit is linear to send across the wires linear and to evaluate is also linear. So in this work, what we want to do is play a little bit with this and say, can we squeeze on some of this and get sublinear cost in some parts of this scheme. So in particular, I want to think about a special case, which is somewhere in the middle of your computation, you have some kind of conditional dispatch over a set of circuits. So in particular, the generator and evaluator agree that the garbled circuit will choose one out of N different circuits and then run that one circuit at runtime. And what we would like to achieve here is that we would like to get the communication here to be sublinear. And also we would like to get the evaluators work to be sublinear in the number of circuits here. The reason we think that getting the evaluators computation sublinear is interesting as compared to getting the generators is because issues of adaptivity aside, the evaluators work is essentially the entire online phase of a garbled circuit based protocol. The generator can make the garbled circuit offline, you know, perhaps overnight, and then when the computation is actually needed, the evaluator does the actual work. So that's why it makes sense to try to optimize the evaluator. So that's just a way to restate what I just said. So for functions with conditionals, we'd like to achieve sublinear communication and sublinear computation for one party. Now that's a mouthful. So just for brevity, I'm going to rename this double sublinear as so called compactness. Okay, so we want to achieve to compact to PC, which again means sublinear communication, sublinear computation for one party. There is relevant related work in the area of compact to PC. So probably the most relevant work is all of the work on fully homomorphic encryption, which sort of trivially can achieve this notion of compactness, because one party will encrypt their input send it across the wire. So that parties work in the communication are kind of automatically sublinear in the actual computation that's being done. And also this work done done by myself and Vlad Kolesnikov on this technique called stack garbling, which I'm going to tell you about in in just a second, which also considers the setting of there's one of many circuits and we would like to evaluate exactly one of them. And there we achieved significantly improved communication cost, but it does not achieve this notion of compactness, because both parties are going to pay at least linear costs in the size of the of the entire function. Okay, so actually I want to, to talk a little bit more about this stack garbling technique because this is really our starting point for our technical contribution, we build on this stack garbling work to achieve this compact to PC using only symmetric key Okay, so in particular, I'm going to show you how to achieve this compact to PC for the functions of this particular form using roughly square root communication and evaluator computation. So to do that, I do want to give some background on on this stack garbling technique because we're going to use the techniques from this from this work. So the idea of stack garbling is that we are going to slightly change the way that our generator and evaluator garble and evaluate the circuits respectively. So in particular, our generator is not going to automatically go off and generate all these branches, all at once. Okay, instead, what he's going to do is for each branch, he's going to elect a pseudo random generator seed. And then from these seeds, he is going to derive garblings of each of the branches respectively. And what I mean by this is, during the process of garbling the circuit, the generator is going to make lots of random decisions about how to encrypt this circuit roughly. And what I'm saying here is that the generator should derive all of those random choices from a pseudo random generator, starting from some some short seed. Okay. And now, when it comes time to actually send the garbled circuit across the network, the garbled the generator is not going to send each of these garbling separately. Instead, what he's going to do is he's going to add all of these garbled circuits together and send only the sum across the wire. Okay, and the point here is that the size of this garbling is now independent in the number of branches. Because we've, we've added everything together, we're only paying for essentially one branch instead of all of them. So now the evaluator has received this stacked garbled circuit, and somehow she would like to evaluate some branch. And for the purposes of this talk will assume that she's allowed to learn which branches is being evaluated. So what happens here is the garbled circuit, we're going to add a little bit of extra machinery that I'm not going to describe, but the garbled circuit is going to use this machinery to reveal to the evaluator, each of the pseudo random generator seeds for each of the inactive branches. Now because the generators decisions were all based on these seeds. This means that the evaluator can reconstruct locally, each of the inactive garbled circuits. Okay, I'd like to point out though, it's the evaluator is not receiving the seed for the single active branch. And this is very important, because for security reasons we can't, we can't give her that particular seed if she were to receive that seed, she would sort of automatically be able to decrypt the generators input. And now she's not getting that particular one. And now, with these comp this combination of information that the evaluator has available to her. She can just use more linear arithmetic to compute the garbled circuit corresponding to the single active branch, even though she never got the seed for it. And from here she just evaluates normally she's got the garbled circuit that she needed for the active branch you can she can just evaluate. So this technique achieves sublinear communication, but it does not achieve sublinear computation for this party, or either party, in particular because the evaluator here is garbling each of the branches. So she's paying one of your work in the total size of the circuit in order to garble all of these things and on stack. Now here's here's our approach. Essentially what I'm going to do is rearrange some of the pieces of stack garbling to drive down the cost of the evaluator. So the crucial idea is what we are going to do is take the branches from our conditional and arrange them into some kind of grid. Specifically, the generator is going to make roughly square root and buckets, and each of these buckets is going to hold roughly square root and circuits. Okay, so what will happen is the generator is going to pseudo randomly choose circuits that should go into each of these buckets with replacement with replacement is very important as we'll see in a moment. Okay. So pseudo randomly populates each of these buckets, and we add extra circuits this is why it's roughly square root and such that with overwhelming probability, every single circuit is somewhere in this grid. Okay. And then what the generator is going to do is he's going to use the stacked garbling technique that I already described to you to stack together the contents of each bucket. So he's going to choose pseudo random seeds for each each circuit in each bucket and generate them all and stack together each bucket separately. And then he's going to send each of these garblings across the wire to the evaluator. And the point here is again there's only square roots, many of these buckets. So this is only going to be square root communication in the size of in proportion to the number of branches. Okay. So now the evaluator has received all of these stack garbled circuits. But actually, I've been lying to you just a little bit about what we do here, because what we need is that what's going to happen next is the garbled circuit is going to declare to the evaluator. Hey, this particular location in the grid is the circuit you need to evaluate. And remember, we're in the general to PC setting, she should be not be learning the identity of the active branch of this conditional that would not be secure. So to deal with this, I'm going to add just a little bit more here, where instead of just using normal circuits, we're going to use a universal circuit encoding of each circuit. Okay, so universal circuit is is basically a circuit that can be programmed with some extra inputs to represent any circuit up to some fixed size. So what we can do is use a choose a universal circuit big enough that it can represent any of the circuits in our conditional. And, importantly, universal circuits have have low overhead, in particular they have only logarithmic overhead in in the general case, and also importantly as for some special cases like when I'll talk about at the very end of this talk. There's either constant overhead or in some other cases just no overhead at all to to represent circuits as a universal circuit. So in fact, what the what the what has actually happened is the generator has garbled each of these universal circuits and said those sent that stacked garbling of universal circuits across the wire to the evaluator. And so now the evaluator's view is basically that she has this grid of circuits and she has no idea what any particular circuit in the grid is. Okay. So as I said, we're going to add some extra machinery, and the garbled circuit is going to reveal to the evaluator. Hey evaluator. This is the circuit you should be evaluating. Okay. And the important point is, at this point, what we can arrange is that the evaluator can completely discard every other bucket. She doesn't even have to think about them. So we need to consider the single bucket that has the active branch in it. And this is important because there's only square root number of things in this in this bucket, which is how we're going to get our square root overhead in terms of computation. The next thing that happens is that the garbled circuit machinery is going to reveal a little bit more information to the evaluator. So before it's going to reveal to the evaluator, here are the identities of the other circuits in this bucket. So I'm not going to tell you the identity of the actual active branch, but I will tell you everything else in this bucket. This is completely fine because we sampled all of the branches in this bucket with replacement. So for instance, the fact that circuit zero is in this bucket does not rule out the possibility that the active branch might also be circuit zero. And from here, the garbled circuit is again going to reveal more information to the evaluator. Here are the generators pseudo random seeds that are used as part of the stack garbling procedure to garble each of the inactive branches in this bucket. And from here, she can just as before run the stacked garbling procedure to garble these universal circuits because she knows which branch is actually being encoded encoded so she knows what the programming of each of these inactive branches is. And again, this is going to allow her to obtain the correct garbling of the single active universal circuit. And from here, she can evaluate normally and because of the properties of the universal circuit it's going to give her the correct answer for the active branch. Okay. And again, emphasizing that this is only square root work. Now I'd like to mention that actually here there is a surprising technical challenge, which I skimmed over, which is I mentioned all of this information that has to be revealed to the evaluator. In particular, you can see that there's a challenge just by, I said that the garbled circuit has to tell the evaluator the location of the single active branch. So that means there has to be enough machinery in the garbled circuit that regardless of which branch is actually active, it can point the evaluator to the correct place in this grid. And doing this in compact work is actually kind of surprisingly tricky. Okay. The crucial insight that allows us to build all of this machinery efficiently so that we can actually achieve compactness in a true sense is that we are not actually going to pseudo randomly populate each bucket. Instead, we are just going to pseudo randomly populate one bucket is first bucket. And then what we were going to do is choose the contents of every other bucket based off of the pseudo random choices we have already made. So in particular here you can see that the second bucket is identical to the first bucket except for that we have shifted everything by by one index. And what this means is that we can now put machinery into the garbled circuit that can roughly speaking based on squared and positions in this first bucket can calculate based on which active branch you want to run, where that is in this grid that can calculate the position compactly. Okay. So, this was the core, the core technical ideas of this GC wise approach garbled circuit with sublinear evaluator. Again, we organize things into the square root size buckets. For each of these buckets, we stack the branches together. And at runtime the evaluators only going to consider one bucket and this is how we're getting this combination of sublinear communication costs and sublinear computation. To wrap up, I want to tell you about one, we think kind of interesting use case where this GC wise is useful. So the idea is something that we're calling garbled garbled private information retrieval. So I'd like to define that for you. The idea is, we have our circuit, and along, and we also have some kind of public database that's agreed to by the parties. So what I'd like to have happen is somewhere in the middle of our garbled computation. We would like for the garbled circuit to read some element from this large database without adding extra rounds of interaction so we want to keep the constant round property of our garbled circuits in order to read this element into the into the circuit. And we want all this to cost sublinear in the size of the database. So actually, the techniques I've shown you pretty much automatically solve to solve this problem. What you're going to do is view this database as some kind of conditional branch, where what you're going to do is make n different circuits. So for instance, the first circuit says, it takes no inputs, and then it outputs the content of the first cell of memory. Okay, and so on and so forth. So these are our n conditional branches, and now given the techniques I've already showed you, you just conditionally dispatch over these n branches, paying only square root cost. Now I should mention that this garbled private information retrieval is interesting, because the techniques I showed you earlier about garbled RAM actually don't work here, because what we want is we want to pay sublinear costs, even if we're only reading one item, whereas techniques like garbled RAM have to be amortized over a large number of accesses. So this was GC wise. Again, the idea is to make compact to PC the sublinear communication and sublinear evaluator computation for the specific class of functions that has this conditional branching in it. And then at the end I showed you this garbled PR which is, we think a pretty cool and interesting application of this idea. And so with that, I'll be happy to take any questions. Thank you. Thank you very much, David. So, are there any questions? Fantastic. And if other people have questions, please line up to the microphone. Hello. Thanks for the great. This is working. Yeah. Great talk. Thank you. There's one bit I didn't understand. I understand everything else. So that's why I'm asking if you can go back to like slide 19. So there you said that it is fine to reveal the identity of the inactive circuits because we sampled with replacement and so on. But what if that green circuit was one of the others, as I know the seed, I could like check the identity now, right? For example, if that was C zero, I can take the seed that I know that corresponds to C zero and I see. Yeah, so the important point is that even if the circuits are the same, we're going to garble them starting from different randomness, different pseudo random seeds. And so therefore, even if you see two encryptions of the same circuit, you can't tell that they're the same circuit. Okay. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. I have a question about if we generalize this grid from 2D to higher dimension, what are the trade-offs for the parameters? Higher dimension. I'm not, I'm not actually sure. I mean, there may be some natural way to interpret that, but but the way that I view it is that the two dimensions respectively are about communication and computation. So what you could do is you could put flex into this matrix so that you make your matrix wide and then computation goes up or you make your matrix narrow and then communication goes up, right? But I'm not sure what it would mean to generalize to higher dimension because it's really just these two parameters that we're playing with. I see. So just a quick follow up. Does that mean like the identification like process is not clear when it's in higher dimension? Because I think that's a part I wasn't really sure from this talk. Can you can you try to clarify? I'm not sure what you mean. Like, because it feels like the communication will for sure goes down because like it will go down to like into the 1 over D if D is a dimension, right? But it sounds like the more complex thing is you identify which grid you care about, right? Yeah. So again, the problem is, if you could characterize what it means to increase the dimension from say even just two to three, then that would be awesome. But for me, I don't even know what that means to have to have a third dimension. What is the third dimension here?  You put no, it doesn't work that way. Well, so I'm saying, of course, you can do that. But like mechanically, what are we doing with this extra dimension? Because what we have here are two dimensions. One is how big is the bucket? Meaning how many things is the evaluator going to have to reconstruct with this garbling process? And the second dimension is how many buckets do we have? Meaning how much communication are we paying? But I just don't, I'm not even sure what the third dimension would represent or what it's encoding mechanically and how the parties are doing things. Okay, cool. Thanks. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. So let's thank the speaker again. So we should be ready for the next talk. So the next talk will be on a highly efficient OT based multiplication protocols. This is