So, in the interest of keeping time, I think we're going to start and hope that our coffee drinking friends will join us. My name is Murray Hebert from the Southeast Asia program here at CSIS. I'm delighted you're here to join us on the discussion of infrastructure connectivity, where Asia's big gaps. We have a great panel here. We're going to educate us on their views about the infrastructure gaps. Our first speaker is Toshiyuki Sakamoto, who is the Deputy Director General for Trade Policy at the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Trade in Japan. In this job, he's responsible for Japan's economic cooperation in the region. He's also the APEC senior official representing Japan, and he's also Japan's representative in dialogue with the ASEAN countries. He's been in MIDI for almost 30 years and had various responsibilities in energy and manufacturing. Next to him is Greg Stephenson, who is the representative of the Asia Development Bank ADB here in Washington. He's representative for North America. Prior to coming to Washington, Greg was in Bangkok, where he was the Thai resident head of the Thai office for ADB. He's also been in Afghanistan and in various other places in the region. Next to Greg is Vikram Nehru, who is senior associate in the Asia program and the Bakri Chair in Southeast Asia Studies at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, before taking this job. Vikram, for 30 years, was served at the World Bank, had various positions, including the lead economist on Indonesia and China. And next to Vikram is Suzanne Kelly Lyle, who is independent policy advisor for ASEAN Affairs. She's had various roles advising public, private and civil society organizations on capacity building, stakeholder engagement, and governance issues. Her most recent posting was to serve as a governance director for the Mekong Partnership for the Environment. So with that, I'm going to turn to our first speaker, Mr. Toshiyuki Sakamoto. Please. Thank you, Mari. Thank you for inviting me to this event. Eight trillion U.S. dollars. This number is most frequently mentioned to show the big demand for infrastructure in Asia Pacific region up to 2020. This huge demand cannot be met by government budget of developing countries and ODA from the advanced countries alone. In fact, the percentage of infrastructure investment in government budget in ASEAN countries tend to decrease due to their policies aimed at fiscal deficit reductions. This is a case for ODA from advanced countries as well, due to the same reason. So mobilization of private sector's money and introduction of private sector's know-how is essential, PPP needs to be utilized. But compared with Latin America and South Asia, PPP development in East Asia is lagging behind. In 2013, the number of PPP projects in East Asia is just 85, 16 billion U.S. dollars. This is just a quarter or one-fifth of Latin America. And more than 70 percent of the projects are electricity. So the establishment of institutional mechanism for PPP and institutional capacity building, the capacity building of people working there is essential, is needed. And there are many cases where appropriate risk sharing and cost sharing between public and private sectors are not ensured. Against this backdrop, Japan put forward comprehensive support measures for PPP promotion by utilizing Japanese yen loan. This package was announced last year. The measures includes EBF, equity-backed finance, this is a yen loan for recipient government equity contribution in SPC of PPP project, VGF, viability gap fund, this is to ensure the profitability of SPC. That credit enhancement facility, sorry for this jargon, this is to address the risk of not non-compliance of sales contract of off-takers such as electricity and water SOEs. Japan is also carrying out a lot of capacity buildings, including the support for the development of comprehensive infrastructure development plan in Asian countries, support for the establishment of PPP institutional mechanism, as well as support for formation of even individual project. The gap exists in terms of the quantity of finance, but also gap also exists in the quality of infrastructures. There are many, many cases where although the initial cost of the project is cheap, the construction delayed or a designed performance was not realized, et cetera, et cetera. So Japan put forward in APEC the proposal on the quality of infrastructure, including life cycle cost, because the developing economies tend to focus on initial cost. Environmental performance and the safety, including resilience to natural disasters, APEC developed with Japanese initiative the guidebook on this element of quality of infrastructure. APEC last year also agreed upon the blueprint on physical connectivities, which includes the three cross sectoral issues, PPP, quality of infrastructure, and other principles like human-centered investment, including local people employment, environmental and social considerations, financial soundness, et cetera, et cetera. People now talking a lot about AIIB, but I believe that AIIB needs to discuss in such a wider context. My Prime Minister, Prime Minister Abed's commitment on quality of infrastructure is deep and firm. He discussed this with President Jokowi Indonesia when he visited Japan in the end of March. And Jokowi welcomed Prime Minister Abed's commitment on, quote, a quality infrastructure for quality growth, unquote, through human-centered investment. The details of this initiative has yet to be seen, but you will see that in due course this year in a lot of international fora, not only APEC, but also G20, Japan ASEAN, and Japan MECOM, et cetera. Last but not least, let me touch upon CADP, Comprehensive Asia Development Plan, which was developed by ARIA, E-R-I-A, Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia. I mention this because this is the example where Japan and the United States can collaborate in order to identify what kind of infrastructures are important in East Asia from demand side point of views. With the mandate from East Asia Summit, October 2009, ARIA developed CADP in collaboration with ADP and ASEAN Secretariat. Comprehensive Asia Development Plan, CADP, was endorsed by East Asia Summit in October 2010. They identified about 700 infrastructure projects and prioritized them. The amount of investment necessary is 400 billion US dollars. And they also found that about 20% of this project can be financed through PPP. They also carried out a regional economic impact analysis in case major economic corridors were established. This became the basis for ASEAN's M-PAC, Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivities. Now this plan is being revised with the instruction from, again, East Asia Summit. United States can join this discussion, can join this initiative because this will be discussed in EAS Economic Ministers' Meeting this summer. This is a unique East Asia-wide project that can't be implemented by APEC, covering China, India, Cambodia, Routh, Myanmar. We will, CADP2 will look into how the connectivity could be strengthened in order for ASEAN to further participate in global production network. Infrastructure quality as well as disciplines of donors will be also addressed. As was the case original CADP, ARIA will collaborate with international organization, most notably ADB. ARIA expects the input from US government as well as US business communities. And I hope that this will lead to meaningful infrastructure development of Asia. Thank you very much. Thank you, Toshiyuki-san. Craig Stephenson? Craig. Thank you, Murray. And good morning, everyone. Asia has become the world's growth engine, but the infrastructure deficit across the Asia-Pacific is substantial. In 2011, the Asian Development Bank estimated that by 2050 an additional 3 billion Asians could enjoy standards of living similar to those found in Europe and North America today, and the region could account for over half of global output. But this promising outcome could only be realized if Asia sustains its present growth momentum. In a 2009 report entitled Infrastructure for a Seamless Asia, we estimated that Asia will need $8 trillion in national infrastructure and $290 billion in regional infrastructure through 2020, or average infrastructure during this period of about $750 billion per year to sustain the region's current growth trajectory and establish the foundations for the next phase of growth. This report I just mentioned, Infrastructure for a Seamless Asia, is where this $8.3 trillion figure that gets mentioned so many times came from. And it's worth taking a look at. The numbers are broken down by subregion, by country, by sector, by subsector. There are lots of projects listed. I guess most of the money is sort of earmarked for mobile phones, ports, and sanitation. But the Asian highway, Asian railway, and Asian container port schemes also figure prominently into things. Asia's development dilemma is one of high levels of robust growth across the region, not yet translating into adequate and quality infrastructure. ASEAN countries, for example, and there are a lot of success stories in this grouping, but ASEAN countries need $1.1 trillion in infrastructure investments. This inability to undertake necessary infrastructure investment in line with the pace of their economic growth has exacted a heavy toll. All you have to do is look at traffic and traffic congestion, pollution, and it's not a stretch to say worsening distribution of income to see what I'm talking about. In each of the key sectors, roads, railways, phones, electricity, and clean water, the subregion has a long way to go before it catches up with OECD countries. We should be investing 5 to 9 percent of annual GDP on roads, railways, ports, urban development, power, telecom, irrigation, water supply, and sanitation, and the like. But with the possible exception of Vietnam, no ASEAN country has come close to what they need to spend. Indonesia's economy has done well the past few years, but it's only spending 2 to 3 percent of GDP on infrastructure, and we should probably be spending at least twice as much. The same applies for the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia. Existing international financial institutions like ADB and the World Bank won't come close to closing the financing gap, and the countries on their own through their government budgets aren't going to make much of a dent either. ADB's combined operations last year, including co-financing, totaled over $21 billion, or less than 2 percent of Asia's infrastructure needs for last year. ODA from all sources to the entire world, I mean from the entire world to the developing world last year, totaled about $130 billion, or 17 percent of Asia's needs. It follows that ADB welcomes the emergence of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank based on an understanding that it will adhere to international best practices on environmental and social safeguards, as well as fair and open procurement procedures, and we look forward to considering appropriate forms of cooperation once AIB is formally established. Given what I've just said, I'd like to posit that Asia's binding development constraint is not the lack of funds. It's really its inability to develop and channel existing pools of savings into bankable projects. Many Asian countries possess significant domestic savings. ASEAN alone has more than $700 billion that could finance infrastructure, and with yields on government bonds at record lows, international banks, pension funds, and private investors are scouring emerging and frontier markets, eager to fund long-term projects that offer a better rate of return. Unfortunately, memories of the 97 Asian financial crisis and more recently the world financial crisis remain fresh in the minds of policymakers and investors who are very wary of risk and don't want to be burned again. Investors in particular are unwilling to commit major resources for large projects over the long term without lots of guarantees, which governments have been reluctant to provide. To remedy this situation, ADB believes first governments need to step up the game, to fast-track infrastructure delivery, and clear bottlenecks to create a pipeline of transparent, well-structured projects that allow for private investors and market mechanisms. We've spent a lot of time in government offices in ADB the last few years to see what big projects are ready to go, requiring financing. There's not a whole lot there, if you know what I mean. They really need to do some homework and get these projects ready for consideration. Second, it's necessary to address a range of policy, institutional, and regulatory impediments to create a robust and predictable regulatory environment that assures investors that their schemes will not be canceled or stalled halfway through construction and will not be renegotiated when a new administration assumes office. Third, to attract debt capital, which is essential for large-scale infrastructure financing, projects must be structured more effectively. Public sector support is required to address the high degree of perceived risk on long-tenor infrastructure financing. Specifically, governments need to resolve governance problems and to establish transparent procurement procedures and to put in place clearly designed, viability-gap funding mechanisms to entice investors to step up their investments. The real issue when it comes to closing gaps to infrastructure connectivity is not how much money is there on the table. Rather, it's the need for countries to first improve their governance regimes. The rule of law, independent regulators and judiciaries, predictability, clean politics and political stability are all essential elements in the highly competitive race for private capital. I should add that the politicization of infrastructure priorities and frequent changes in public policy don't help things much. Singapore and Hong Kong are cases in point. Worthy elements that I just mentioned in place, funds might be expected to rush in of their own accord. Absent these elements, all the liquidity in the world is probably of little use. Multilateral institutions have an important role to play. ADB, the World Bank, the A-I-B and the New Development Bank don't have sufficient resources to fill their gaps, but we can leverage our creditworthiness to mobilize Asian capital for Asian growth. For example, issuance of local currency infrastructure bonds guaranteed by multilateral agencies for infrastructure projects. I could talk more about that, but I need to wrap up. In 2011, the ASEAN economies together with ADB established something called the ASEAN Infrastructure Fund. It has just under $500 million in equity capital. It was a first step to mobilize the region's resources for infrastructure development. More recently, we've established a dedicated office and recruited a really good team to promote public-private partnerships. Many more such steps are required if the region is to sustain its growth momentum. In the final analysis, Asia's infrastructure, or inadequate infrastructure, could hobble its attempts to achieve strong, sustainable growth in prosperity, but if they do things right and we have every reason to believe they can, the region's growth potential offers benefits, which far out the cost of managing these risk and challenges. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Craig. Vikram Nero. Thank you very much, Marie, and thank you, Ernie and Marie, for inviting me. It's an honor to be here with Sakamoto-san, Craig, and Suzanne on this panel. I just want to start with the title of this particular panel. It's Infrastructure Connectivity Where Are The Big Gaps, and it's a curious title, because when you look at the infrastructure needs of Asia, actually, it's not so much roads, ports, and airports that are in demand. There are huge demands for that kind of connectivity investments. It's actually energy which comprises the bulk of the needs in Asia. But even when you look at infrastructure connectivity in Asia, and you examine the needs, they're literally everywhere. You know, there are these large inter-country projects on the mainland of Southeast Asia, north-south, east-west corridors. There are the enormous demand for ports in the archipelagic countries of Indonesia and the Philippines. There are enormous needs for infrastructure in a rapidly urbanizing region, and you need good infrastructure for that to ensure that urban centers become drivers for growth. And you need large amounts of connective infrastructure in order to connect urban centers with rural areas to make sure that people can go to jobs, and jobs can go to people, and all of this is going to be part of issues, sort of future growth. But you add to that, in addition to the urbanization issue, you add to that the environmental issue, the fact that a lot of this infrastructure needs to have a very small carbon footprint. And that means not just that this infrastructure needs are enormous, but they need to have a low carbon footprint. And a lot of the infrastructure that's already in place actually needs to be replaced with more energy efficient and better infrastructure. So the infrastructure needs are enormous. So the challenge is not where are the big gaps. The gaps are there. The challenge is how do you fill them? And that's what I'd sort of like to speak to. Now, when you look at how do you fill them, what's very interesting is that people always juxtapose the needs for infrastructure with the financing requirements. And that's, you know, the eight trillion dollars which keeps popping up. But no matter what financing needs estimate to come up with, the reality is that the actual investment infrastructure that takes place in Asia, especially in non-China Asia, is very small in relation to the needs. So no matter what the question is, how do you up that share of infrastructure investment? In Indonesia, as Greg said, it's 3% of GDP. He suggests it could be twice as much. I think it should be four times as much. It is way below where it should be. Now, the question is this. Where you have in the world economy today, low interest rates, huge amounts of liquidity, 90 trillion dollars in asset management funds, looking for investments. And you have in Asia, infrastructure investments with rates of return of 4% to 8% in real terms on average, with actual rates of return probably in several projects, much higher than that. The question is, what's happening? Why isn't there this connection between the supply of funds, which are huge, and the demand for funds, which are huge? And I'm going to point to five very important market and policy failures, which get in the way, right? The first and most important market policy failure, as I think a lot of here, as both Sakamoto-san and Greg have hinted to, is the failure of public investment and planning in the bureaucracies of Asia. Now, the role of the public sector is critical. It's critical because about 50% to 80% of all infrastructure investment is undertaken by the public sector. It's by governments. It's government financing, government investment. So unless you have good projects, you have a problem of not being able to crowd in private investment. Unfortunately, there's a lack of capacity, there's corruption problems, there are land acquisition issues, and there's poor planning. And quite often, you find that in infrastructure investments in these countries, the costs are usually 50% or percent or more above the initial costs. So there's always a ramping up of costs, largely because of delays in implementation. So how do you get countries to become more efficient? How do you get bureaucracies to become more efficient in delivering infrastructure? The second challenge is policy uncertainty, again, something that Craig referred to. Infrastructure projects take three to seven years to build, and normally have lives of 10 to 30 years. So you need a stable and attractive rate of return that requires policy stability. But in many of these countries, you have regulatory problems, you have interference in pricing subsidy and tax regimes, and these all add to risks for private investors to participate. Then there's the exchange rate risk. In the previous panel, you heard Manu talk about the uncertainties with respect to exchange rate volatility in Asia in forthcoming years. In coming years, and that's an additional risk as far as foreign investors are concerned. The third is the lack of domestic sources of private finance. Without having adequate amounts of debt finance from domestic capital markets, you're unlikely to find foreign investors coming in to support this financing because you need a certain amount of domestic debt finance to be then counterbalanced with a certain amount of foreign currency denominated debt instruments. Now countries in Asia have tried very hard to develop domestic capital markets. But to be very honest with you, this has been a miserable failure in Asia. It is one element, so it's been a serious problem as to how you develop domestic capital markets. And the history of development banking has unfortunately also been replete with failure. So they haven't really been very good sources of debt finance. The fourth, and I think this is a very important point, the fourth failure has been the lack of international financial institutions ability to develop standardized infrastructure asset classes so that there's a well understood risk profile which can be analyzed and assessed by credit rating agencies so that investor agencies can actually buy these without being too concerned about the underlying risk recognizing that there is a certain risk profile that matches those financial instruments. So it's clear that from these four binding, these are four binding constraints on infrastructure investment, but I want to add one more, a fifth one. And that is that these issues are multiplied several fold when it comes to PPP projects. These are these public private arrangements which Sakamoto San mentioned because this is where the private sector actually enters as an equity partner not just as a debt financing source. And as soon as you throw in PPP into the mix, this requires far greater government capacity than what is required for normal government investment. The reality is that PPP projects need to continue liabilities for government. They have to be managed very carefully, but more important than that. There are these devilishly difficult agreements that have to be negotiated with the private sector partner because the long gestation period is so long and the uncertainties are so great. And it's not it's not an accident that one of the leaders in PPP projects, which is India, is now having serious problems because many of those agreements have been in a sense too tough on the private sector partners. And as a result, those projects have come to a stop. And in fact, there are rising non performing loans now in this in the banking system, which have financed many of these projects. And that's and that's and that's an issue. Now, let's queue in the Asian infrastructure investment bank. So here comes a new bank. The argument for the new bank is is going to provide a substantial amount of this large financing gap, but that's not the issue. Finance is not the issue. It's the implementation capacity. That's that's a challenge, right? And so the AIIB is going to have to figure out that it has to develop the capacity to provide technical assistance just as the World Bank and the ADB have had to struggle with this. And Sakamoto-san has mentioned the role of the Japanese as well, that it has to enter this whole messy process of developing capacity because that's where the binding constraint is. And there's nothing, frankly, that I've seen as far as the AIIB is concerned, that actually talks about this, you know, talk about the environmental and social safeguards, but they don't talk about the technical assistance capacity that they're going to have to develop. And that's going to take time. So in the beginning, I suspect the AIIB will have to piggyback on the World Bank and the ADB, which is fine. But in the end, it's going to have to parallel their efforts and augment their efforts actually going upstream and improving the capacity standards of these countries. So it'll be interesting to see whether they will be able to actually add value to what the ADB and the World Bank are already doing. So thank you very much. Great. Thanks, Vikram.  Thank you. Good morning. Thanks very much to CSIS, particularly to Murray and to Ernie for including me in today's important event and with my very distinguished colleagues. I'm so pleased that Vikram's already made the link between infrastructure and environment because I plan to focus more on that as well as this question of capacity of the AIIB. The pace at which industrial development, excuse me, we have a slide presentation as well, and I just need to make sure that it is up. I was told that it was. Maybe somebody, do you know the slides have come up? I'm going to begin and this slide should be up. The pace at which industrial development is occurring in Asia rivals a Western industrial revolution. The anticipated demographic shifts resulting from continued economic growth in Asia creates strong and urgent demand for energy, food and water. As we've heard today, plans for large-scale infrastructure projects in critical sectors from energy to transportation will provide the foundation for this historical transformation. However, as in all rapid transformative processes, competing interests pose a challenge to maintaining peace and stability. And in Southeast Asia uneven levels of economic development, education and effective governance frameworks add risk for investors as well as to the communities hoping to share in the promise of ASEAN's full economic integration. The so-called food, energy and water nexus animates discourse across sectors, engaging government, the private sector and increasingly civil society. In most countries in Southeast Asia, Lao being the possible exception, the press amplifies these concerns of all stakeholders. And here I just wanted to give you a quick snapshot. Which one is the, I'm sorry, I'm a Mac user. Thank you. This is a little bit difficult to read, but just a snapshot. This is one of, one page of four of local press from the region. This is all local language, publications, covering just infrastructure and environment-related issues. It's not like the old days, the press is on it. They are paying attention. Increasingly decision-making around large-scale development projects from Dauai and Myanmar to the lower Cesson 2 in Cambodia to the region's vast economic land concessions have come under scrutiny, often becoming contested spaces where stakeholders do find little accord. As we know, conflict translates into added cost, both in blood and in treasure. Ossion is changing at a pace that poses legitimate threats to human security, while clearly offering new opportunities for economic growth, some say unprecedented opportunities. These sometimes contradictory forces are manifest in large-scale projects such as hydrodams, land concessions, and new highway corridors. The scope and scale of challenges advancing the region's ambitious infrastructure plans far exceed the capacity of any one single stakeholder. No investor can solve all of those challenges. A cooperative approach that enjoins stakeholders will help ensure successful project implementation while mitigating risk. Multi-stakeholder cooperation should be the center piece of large-scale infrastructure projects in the region. Government, private sector, and civil society can find common ground in order to raise investor confidence and propose projects and decrease potential for conflict to create a more enabling environment. To achieve this objective, concrete steps need to be taken to harmonize key environmental safeguards in the region. For example, a regional environmental impact assessment standard will help level the investment field and increase investor accountability, contributing to improve development outcomes for large-scale infrastructure. Regionalizing social and environmental safeguards would mitigate risk to the environment and reduce potential misunderstandings with the communities in which projects are to be cited. This is really a key issue right now around almost all the large projects in the region. A harmonized approach either using a voluntary protocol or an ASEAN certification process would contribute to creating a normative standard to which each stakeholder group's respective interests are more likely to be represented. Now the ADB's new social and environmental safeguard policy is a good place to start and could provide a blueprint for a regional protocol. A lot of investment has gone into revising that set of policies. And recently leading investors such as the World Bank and ADB have placed greater emphasis on robust stakeholder consultation as part of effective project planning. Elevating those practices to the region's overarching architecture within ASEAN could drive positive change and build needed cooperation among government, civil society and investors. Regularizing and improving on current community engagement so that local voices reach regional platforms in my view offers the best opportunity for more equitable development outcomes. And importantly the mitigation of potential negative social and environmental impacts of infrastructure in particularly around the transboundary projects. Now since we're talking about gaps I'd like to also offer one way that we might fill a gap is to support a high level development investor partners consortium. They could act as a liaison between civil society networks in the region and key institutions such as the ADB, World Bank and China's new AIIB. It could also serve as a brain trust and be called upon to advise the region's evolving energy and infrastructure needs and encourage responsible investment practices for example through the adoption of the equator principles. The proposed sustainable ASEAN trust could also help improve coordination, reduce redundancy and current donor led efforts to address these challenges and advocate for greater regional harmonization at the level of national and regulatory frameworks. For smaller localized civil society organizations, regional and international protocols are often critical in leveraging external support. Here's a very quick snapshot that's impossible to read unless you have extremely good glasses but this is an organizational network analysis looking at all the civil society organizations in the lower Mekong region working on these issues. And as you can see, there are quite a few and the density of cluster which is actually indicated by a red star and I'm not sure if you can see those is the level of connectivity among organizations. So even tiny organizations at the community level are now reaching up international and regional networks. They have influence. They're gaining a voice. And when we take a slightly closer look, we can see that the issues and sectors that civil society organizations have identified as their top priority are very much related to infrastructure development. Hydro power, land rights, livelihoods are all among the top. It may surprise you to learn that among three or 400 CSOs queried as part of a regional assessment, policy barriers were identified as the greatest challenge to enhancing social and environmental safeguards. I argue that a window of opportunity exists for cooperation among stakeholders in the public, the private and CSOs in reforming uneven legal and regulatory frameworks. And I propose that finding common cause in frustration with cumbersome, often opaque regulatory frameworks provides an important window of opportunity for investors and CSOs to find common cause and begin to build trust. Since the launch of its Go Global Investment Overseas Policy in 2001, China's become, as we've heard today, ASEAN's largest trading partner and is a key regional investor, and particularly in terms of large scale infrastructure projects and most especially in the Mekong region. China is no longer just asserting its soft power alone, but increasingly focus on economic power. Capital intensive infrastructure projects need the $50 billion infusion that the launch of the AIIB promises. Now, leaving aside questions of the changing power dynamic in the region, I posit that the US should engage the AIIB but with conditions. And that is to build on the excellent work of the ADB and others on including robust social and environmental safeguards as part of their lending and investment practice. Now, I'm running out of time. What can investors do? What can all of you do right now? A couple of things. This is very hard to read. I apologize. Support for a regional environmental impact assessment standard, I believe, is critical and could really improve outcomes. Encourage the adoption of the equator principles in Asia. There's one Chinese bank in Asia, the China export bank that's adopted the equator principles, no others. But if the AIIB encourage this as part of its lending process, I think we would see a big change. Engage constructively with civil society as development partners and not adversaries. Again, partner with China but do so conditionally. And increase opportunities for robust public consultation. And what does that mean? It means that communities are not consulted after the EIA processes complete but at the beginning when their projects are going to be cited as part of planning. If we do all of this, I think we get a triple bottom line win. And that means that we account for the people, planet and profits to secure livelihoods and lands. And importantly to reduce risk and increase investor return on investment faster. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Suzanne. So we're going to now take questions from the floor. If you raise your hand, I will identify you. And then somebody with a microphone will come and please tell us your name and your affiliation and try to ask a question. I saw I end up there. Josh. Thank you. I'm Shereen Mohamedi with Moody's Investor Services. My question is for Vikram. I'd be interested in what you think the impact of a sustained low oil price environment would be for net commodity exporters in Asia, such as particularly Indonesia, and their efforts to finance infrastructure and growth. Well, as it happens, you know, there's already been some analysis of this with lower oil prices. Indonesia's revenues, government revenues from oil have declined. So even though it had a subsidy reduction domestically and it based its budget for this year on the subsidy reduction, it was in a sense caught by surprise by the sudden decline in oil prices and therefore had a big decline in oil revenues. And that's meant that in order to protect its infrastructure program, which still is pretty small by the amounts that they actually need, but in order to protect their infrastructure program, they're going to have to increase non-oil revenues in the budget, which are basically corporate revenues. And that's essentially what Bhaggita Viriavan was mentioning in his keynote address, that they have to expand the tax base. They have to go, as you said, not hunt in the zoo but hunt in the jungle, I think was a phrase he used. I thought that was very, very interesting. And the worry is that if they hunt in the zoo, especially foreign investors, are extremely worried that they will be called upon to make unacceptable sort of tax payments well beyond what their original sort of agreements were. So it is going to have an impact. I don't think they're necessarily going to make this big 30% increase in non-oil tax revenues. And that means that the infrastructure program is going to be heard. And that's an interesting outcome of lower prices for a country like Indonesia. Vasuki Shastri from Standard Chartered Bank. I just wanted to get the views of the panel on this inherent tension between policymakers in Asia always look upon China as saying the China model of infrastructure development is something they'd like to emulate, of getting things done fast, of really having the ability of finding the financing, finding the projects and getting it done in a defined time table. And the creation of the AIIB where everyone is now seeing this new entity should adhere to World Bank slash ADB type standards. Just wanted to get a sense from the panel, are there any best practices? Are there any projects that you are seeing in Asia outside of China and outside of Korea and Japan that one can actually build on? Are the airport building in India, is that a model in PPP that others could emulate? And how do you square this tension between China's ability of building super world-class infrastructure? But a lot of people criticizing the lack of, the perceived lack of standards. I can take a little bit of that and then let Vikram take over. I mean, I can't speak to engineering and technical expertise, but clearly the social and environmental safeguards and other standards have been set in place. And so it's really up to the AIIB partners to exert some pressure on the bank as part of their participation to insist that these standards be used. I mean, it's true. If you talk quietly with various ministries in Southeast Asia, people will say, well, given a choice, we'd like to go where there's less restrictive lending. And it's very attractive. But the long-term cost is enormous. And I think there's a moment of opportunity right now because Chinese SOEs have been badly burned in Southeast Asia for investing in projects that really went awry. They felt reputational burns both in the media, but also bottom line economic losses due to these things. Myanmar is quite notable in this regard, but also in Cambodia. So there is a moment, I think, where the AIIB will be more open to trying to upgrade some of those standards. So actually, there are two issues. The first is that I get a clear sense from talking to those who are leading the AIIB effort from the Chinese side that they believe that while they want to very much adhere to the standards of the ADB and the World Bank, they don't necessarily believe that the means by which these two institutions adopt those standards is efficient, that it takes much too long. It takes five years for an infrastructure project to be developed because there are all these safeguards or reports that have to be prepared. And they believe there is a quicker way to achieve the same standards. Now, I don't know whether that's going to be right or wrong, but that is their assessment. And it'll be interesting to see. And that's why I think the introduction of the AIIB is a good thing because it actually adds competition to processes. And if you believe competition is good in the private sector, well, why shouldn't it be good in the public sector, especially in the multi-development banking field? So I think it's a good thing. And let's see if they come up with new ideas. The second point is that I think the AIIB is on a different score, going to be in for a bit of a rude shock because Chinese investors in China are used to having extremely capable implementation agencies. But they're going to have to deal now with a much messier situation in Asia, especially in Southeast Asia, but also South Asia. And this is what is going to, I think, be the bigger challenge as far as the AIIB is concerned. And by the way, if you just if you take the airport case, the PPPs of Indian airports, there's a recent report by the Comptroller in order to general of India, which points out enormous problems actually in these airports because it's just the reality of PPP projects and infrastructure that they are complicated. You cannot take into account all the contingencies unless you have a very good mechanism to deal with disputes as they arise. If those disputes fester, the project becomes a failure. I'd just like to footnote what's already been said by referring to this. It's something that KPMG International did in 2009. It's a list of the 10 major impediments for private infrastructure. And I'll read off just a few of them. But again, politizization, I just cannot pronounce that word, of infrastructure project priorities, frequent changes in public policy, lack of appropriate public policy, lack of a sense of urgency, corruption, misuse of funds, and on and on. And what's striking about this list is that nowhere is finance mentioned. So there's AIB was no doubt a diplomatic coup, I guess. But I'm not sure really in the overall scheme of things, especially since ADB's capital base is larger and we're putting in about 2% of what's required, how much of a financial coup it's going to turn out to be, at least, in the short term. I guess what we expect is that AIB will co-finance with ADB and the World Bank in the first few years to get some things started and when they have their own capacity to design and process and implement these projects, they'll strike out on their own. Surely China has a lot more resources where this came from, but AIB has morphed, I think, the past few weeks into something very different than what was planned. First, it looked like it was going to be Asian countries, perhaps a few from the Middle East, lending to other Asian countries. And now that the Europeans, Scandinavians, Eastern Europeans, South Americans, who knows? Well, Australia and New Zealand, it's become something very different than what I think its founders thought it would become. And that's going to mean that they take on a different business model, I think, than what was planned and how this translates into projects, whether they look a lot like those that ADB and World Bank support or whether they look more like the Chinese way of doing things. Thanks to single-party state, I think they were able to get things through the system a little bit faster than some of these other countries where politicization is an issue. But yeah, that's my comment on things, thanks. Rather than directly answering to the question from the floor, I would like to echo what Dr. Nel said. The emergence of AIB created a competition among international banks in terms of process. The recently, ADB decided to combine two different, but two different funds in order to increase significantly their lending capacity, that Craig knows the details of this. And also I heard that the ADB decided to improve their procurement procedures. I think this is good things and I think this is a good side effect of AIB, thank you. Ernie? Ernie Bauer with CSIS. It strikes me that when you're talking about the gap here, that the United States looks, this is sort of a policy question, the United States looks sort of flat-footed and unable to respond to how dynamic the Asia that you're describing is. What recommendations would you have for US policymakers to sort of catch up with the dynamism that you're describing here? I mean, I think we're in a really awkward situation where the United States has said geopolitically, Asia's the most important part of the world. They have quote unquote pivoted to the region that I think Asia felt like that was a little military. Do you see a comprehensive economic policy that includes development and finance and trade anywhere in the different drawers in the US government? How would they pull this together and respond to what you've described? I mean, you've quantified and qualified the need. I'd like to hear the panel's take on that. Well, there's a very easy one for you. Who's gonna start? I like a challenge. I think the rebalance, I mean the point that you just made, the rebalance really has been understood in terms of military rebalance and there's been a real paucity of investment to stand behind that. So the US has, I think, still a very important and dynamic role to play in the region. One of the things we could do is to really look more at ASEAN from the policy perspective. ASEAN has a unique history. It is the key architecture in the region. I don't think the US has played the role it could. I think that if we were to put more resources behind ASEAN to help with some of this regulatory harmonization, in particular, again, to ride on the AAC and the TPP, this is a great moment. And I think under Malaysia's leadership, there may be greater openness to the US having a different relationship with ASEAN than in the past. So that would be my first suggestion. Anybody else? I thought your question was terrific, Ernie. And the reality is that the United States currently, in my view, is playing with a relatively weak deck, right? It's, apart from its fiscal situation and the fact that China has huge resources, growth of trade between Southeast Asia and China is growing at 20% a year and has been for the last 30 years. So increasingly, the countries of Southeast Asia are being drawn into the gravitational orbit of China. And that gives enormous impetus to expanding this trading arrangement into financial areas and we didn't talk about trade and services and so forth. So there's a progression that's taking place in Asia which is going to enter into financial flows, which is going to follow trade flows. And the United States doesn't have that advantage. So that's the first point. So how can the US deal with this deck of cards? Well, it must leverage itself and the way it should leverage itself, in my view, is first of all, be far more proactive as far as IMF governance is concerned. So there isn't this pressure that emerges in the creation of other institutions. But you may or may not know this. There was a global infrastructure financing facility that was created in the World Bank that was in fact torpedoed by the United States and other sort of advanced countries because it would have been largely financed by China and they didn't, they saw that as a backdoor entry of China getting greater say in the World Bank. That kind of unfortunate defensive thinking has led to the creation of the AIB and complicated matters a great deal. So I think a much more supportive participatory approach, it would have been great if they had agreed to join the AIB right from the get go and have much greater influence from the inside than be seen as a petulant observer from the outside. So I think that attitude I think has to change and there should be a willingness to engage a lot more. Just purely personal views. I just would like the US president come to Asia every year. There's a good opportunities for him or her to come to Asia. APEC summit and ASEAN summit in usually October. Any good policies, different policies can be developed only through the dialogue, the real dialogue. And the presence of president or leaders or the nations really, really encouraging for us officials to facilitate the consideration, the preparations, trying to come up with a real outcome through APEC and the dialogue with ASEAN. Thank you. Mike Massetic, PBS Online NewsHour. I know we're talking about Asia but isn't the real issue in terms of the United States that our whole attitude and financing of infrastructure at the moment is really lagging. How can the US be a pusher or an innovator on infrastructure development when the common wisdom is that the gateway to the third world is Kennedy Airport and compare our subway system with any subway system in a major Asian metropolis? We're just way behind on this thing and I don't know if any of you feel like giving advice to the United States but we seem to be having a problem in this area. Is anybody wanna engage? Yeah, don't take me seriously but it was suggested by someone the other day that the US should sign up for AIB to become a borrower to improve its infrastructure with Chinese assistance. No, but I think- That's a joke. But I think there is an important point that is being made here. The problem as I pointed out are that these five big binding constraints to the movement of private capital of which there's a huge amount moving for infrastructure development and that's a challenge not within the United States. That's a challenge because there are problems within the developing countries which need that infrastructure. So that's not a US problem, that's a developing country problem. The only way that capital then can actually move if it's not gonna be the private sector is the public sector and that's where the United States unfortunately has relatively weak instruments because its aid budget is limited. Congress has a clear sort of concern about the amount of actual aid that is going to be transferred or the amount of participation or increase in the capital of both the IMF and the World Bank as well as by the ADB. And so there is a limitation on the amount of fiscal resources that are being applied but that currently is the main channel through which advanced countries can support infrastructure development in developing countries and that's incidentally exactly what the AI be doing. These are fiscal instruments, these are not private sector financial instruments. On a slightly more upbeat note, actually USAID does offer high level technical assistance specifically geared toward infrastructure development in Southeast Asia. It's been working very closely with the government of law. It's trying to work with Myanmar. I think increasing those levels of funding would be a tremendous step in the right direction. It's also interestingly, probably one of the few areas in our own country that both parties could agree on. For sure private sector actors working in infrastructure development in the US would love the opportunity to engage more directly in Asia. So I'd love to see more funding go into USAID projects targeting that way and for the State Department to maybe take a greater role. Can't apologize for the infrastructure here. Having lived in Asia this past year, every time I came back to the US I thought it was a strange reversal of how things used to be. Sorry, the woman in the red blouse, please. Hi, my name is Anna Yucananov, I'm with Reuters. I was wondering, this isn't strictly the topic of the panel, but one thing I find interesting about the AIB is that it's also operating in the broader Asia, not just Asia Pacific but also Middle East and Central Asia. And I was wondering how that, you think that would shape what kind of projects it does and should it influence the other banks? For example, outside of just partnering with the World Bank and ADB, something that should partner with some of the Middle Eastern countries and their investments since they've already invested, you know, Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, thank you. Anybody have views? I worked on regional economic cooperation schemes for a number of years. I was based in Almaty and Bangkok and worked with a bunch of different countries on prioritizing investments and transport energy and what have you. And the Chinese were part of all of these schemes because they're a member in good standing with ADB and a lot of Asia shares a border with China. I wouldn't be surprised to see AIB providing support for infrastructure development with neighboring countries that needs to be done but because, you know, sometimes getting things done through a multilateral institution is easier than doing so bilaterally because things tend to get politicized when it's done bilaterally. I wouldn't be surprised to see AIB take on some projects that are good for everyone in the end but which China has been unable to do on its own. I'm referring to roads, to transmission lines, to pipelines, railways, roadways, ports, airports anything and everything that will improve its connectivity with countries that share its border. What's the end game in this? I'm not quite sure. We've all heard of the Eurasian super continent where you've got high speed railways from Shanghai to Edinburgh and pipelines that crisscross the region and so on. I guess all of this is possible now. You know, not just because of AIB but because Iran has signed up for AIB because Myanmar has opened up because finance isn't the problem really, it's just coming up with bankable projects and maybe this new instrument to get things done will allow us all to see some things happen that we've been unable to do on our own. Please. Arshad, I'm from Peabody Energy and I've worked in the same institution that Wickram has maybe for half the years but I have a very simple perspective now coming out and as you look at what is needed here and you look at the cost of capital in Asia, in many of these countries is much higher than what you would find here and as we know, firms go for a simple equation return versus risk and how do you bring down that risk? Wickram pointed to many of the factors that are political, social, you mentioned as well and the economic side, right? One of the ways you bring down the cost of capital is through creative means of financing this and the way you are able to do this is very important, particularly in project financing where you bring in debt, equity, instruments and other things and whereas the discussion is so far being on governments and what the failures have been to characterize Wickram's five points, more on the government and market failures, a less so in fact on the fact that the international institutions, particularly the World Bank, ADB, IFC, themselves have not actually addressed this, particularly the technical capacity side, not just on the government, which is also important but internally as well and the reason I say this because as you think of AIIB, I think the assumption is that the bank and the IFC have the knowledge, have the technical capability, have the ability and going by the past 30 years one would have the struggle to look at real successes in project financing that the bank, ADB, IFC have done and so why would you suddenly not believe that AIIB, you could teach something to AIIB besides the procurement standards and things like that? So it's a question I ask about internal capacity within the international institutions as you think about AIIB. Wickram? You know my response to that Arshad is that it's not for lack of trying but the World Bank and the ADB and others have found it so difficult to draw in private financing to infrastructure projects. It's just because the nature of the problem is so complex. Now for example, if you have, the big, the two big risks are political risk and policy risk, right? Those are the two big risks. If you have through, cover your political risk through MIGA, the Multi-Lateral Investment Guarantee Agency and you cover your policy risk through government guarantees, you can get over a significant amount of those hurdles. But then when you have government guarantees that introduces a continued liability, the continued liability then has to be factored into fiscal policy and many of these countries already have significant debt burdens so this is a constraint as far as public policy is concerned, it's only when you have enormous public fiscal space that you're able to take on such significant continued liabilities. So there is an engineering dimension, the financial engineering dimension that can be brought to bear on these but I don't think they necessarily get to the nub of the question which is eventually sort of the policy constraints that developing countries face. So question back there. Yes, hi, thanks. I'm David McCauley from WWF and previously colleague of Craig's at Asian Development Bank where I was climate director. So I'm pleased to see the sustainability issues coming out in this panel and Wickram kicked that off by noting the need for low carbon development as a part of this infrastructure investment. I would add to that also the need to cope with the anticipated impacts of climate change and the resiliency associated with the infrastructure. And it's not just limited to the Asian push, we've heard about the need for infrastructure around the world and of course G20 is pushing this within its discussions as well. So I would just put to the panel as a part of this call for technical assistance and a framing of the investment climate. No pun intended. How can we encourage policies and structures to this investment that are going to encourage attention to say renewable energy over fossil fuels or rail versus highways for intracity investment or smart electricity grids and electric vehicles versus those kinds of investments which are really necessary as we move forward in a carbon constrained world. Thanks. Could I just suggest cause we're about five minutes from finishing this panel there's another gentleman on the same table who's had his hand up. Maybe we take two questions and then we'll have our panel answer. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Paul Carrera from the University of Toronto and as with many other things there's very little light between me and Vikram who's a former colleague at the World Bank as well. I'm wondering whether a lot of this debate is premature in the sense that there are great many paradoxes and said well why did AIB get set up? What's wrong with the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank, et cetera? And if we step back a bit and thought about well what are all the paradoxes involved here? We might actually come at this with a somewhat less alarmist frame. The equator principles everybody says great idea the private sector will come in, they'll invest, there'll be standards. But remember the equator principles are principles.  Yes there need to be the sort of rules that the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have for procurement and safeguards. Yes and that's why the AIB got set up because the clients of the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank to a lesser extent don't like waiting five years for a complicated infrastructure project and dislike the contestability of the inspection panel and then being ripped pieces again as members of the banks that are then protested against. So it strikes me that we ought to in this debate be giving more thought to why is there discontent and is there a 21st century way of delivering this and not looking at China because there have been some spectacular engineering failures in China's infrastructure. That if we stood back for a moment and thought what is the problem we're trying to solve we might do a better job. And I'm suggesting I don't have the answer to that question but I'm suggesting we ought to stand back and rather than blaming the Obama administration or looking at China's need to keep its rapacious construction industry employed or saying there's a lack of capital and nowhere to put it somewhere. We ought to actually step back and say well what is it that these countries need and where are they likely to go and what can we do to make that simpler and faster. And I don't think we've come up with that answer yet even though there's been a great deal of time spent in this room and then think tanks all over the world looking at that. Just to sort of inviting maybe a member of the panel to respond to well what would a simpler answer look like. Thanks. So two questions on the table. Who wants to kick us off? I'd like to start with the second question. I think what you've said is critically important actually and I think the first answer to that is the broader engagement in the discourse. I mean it is not simply the purview of investors of the multilaterals in a closed door room to make decisions about large scale infrastructure that will affect the lives of millions and millions. So part of this really is engaging with other organizations in civil society. These stakeholder consultation processes are not just supposed to be a check the box. It's a very important way in which local people can have a voice in this. And I would say that also gets to the point of sustainability and what types of projects and will they be climate resilient for example. If you ask people in a local community whether they want smart infrastructure once they understand what that is is a microgrid useful for you. Most likely they say yes when they understand how it works versus sometimes a large scale hydrodam for example. So I don't think it's so complicated and insurmountable. I think the real challenge is again with these larger institutions trying to break down these processes that have evolved over time and go about this in a different way which is to bring in more local voices. Anybody else on? Great, Toshi-san, Yona. I would like to answer, respond to the first question about climate and energy matters. I think in order to facilitate low carbon, in order to facilitate the introduction of low carbon infrastructure in particular energy area, policy incentive is really essential. For example, Japan created new crediting mechanism for low carbon infrastructure in particular. Energy infrastructure, power generation facilities. As you may know, UN, United Nations introduced CDM, Clean Court Development Mechanism. It was too bureaucratic, too difficult to use. Therefore, we Japanese government decided to introduce bilateral crediting mechanism rather than multilateral under UN which is called JCM, Joint Crediting Mechanism. This creates incentive for developing countries to introduce low carbon infrastructure and it has been quite successful. Another example is public financial support for highly efficient coal-fired power plant. This is a contentious issue vis-a-vis US administration at this moment but in order to address climate change issues, we believe that it's essential to continue such financial support for highly efficient clean-core power plant. Thank you. The Krimmer. Yeah, let me try and answer the first question which I thought was a great question and I'm gonna give you unfortunately a very narrow economist's answer so I apologize in advance. How do you ensure that you get low carbon infrastructure with really three simple, well not three simple one, but three ways? The first is through regulation. The second way is through having some kind of a carbon price or the third is to apply the shadow price of carbon to projects. The three ways that you can do this, right? The United States has chosen a regulatory approach. Europe and China at least in a pilot project have tried to develop a price of carbon through a sort of carbon exchange mechanism so that's the second means by which you can try and establish a price of carbon and the third is by introducing a carbon tax. You can actually introduce carbon tax but that means that you're gonna have to figure out what the carbon tax is. There is no market mechanism by which you can arrive at a carbon price. So there are all these means that you can do so and lastly of course apply a shadow price for carbon but that's to my mind perhaps the least effective because it doesn't introduce incentives into the system to ensure low carbon footprint. All this is very easy to say from an economist point of view the challenge is always a political economy of these approaches and they've received absolutely no traction in not just in developing countries but also in advanced countries as you well know. I'm not quite sure how to say this except in the past 48 hours I've seen two articles. One referred to Chinese support. The implication was AIB but we'll see. Chinese support for a pipeline from Iran to Pakistan. It's been talked about for years. It's never gotten anywhere. Sanctions and everything else came into play. Meantime Pakistan has a huge energy deficit that it's dealing with and for all the problems in Pakistan today it's hard to imagine that people are gonna make much headway unless the energy situation there is addressed in a more well unless they have more juice and if Iran can provide it and the Chinese will build it how this sort of issue gets played off against the concerns that you're raising David will be a real interesting discussion and I would say that if AIB takes on this project this is a real test for them whether they do it right or wrong whether the US will join AIB someday or say we told you some and we're staying away. The other article and it had to have been wrong referred to a new railway that the Chinese will construct between Tibet and Nepal and I presume to the Gulf one day. Through Mount Everest. They're gonna put this giant tunnel through Mount Everest and I read that and thought no it can't be true and anyway on the one hand there are these good things that could come out of this new dynamic that is taking place and could really transform some of the problems that we've all been contending with for a long time move some things forward. On the other there's a lot of static out there too that's very confusing and sort of lens ammunition to the critics that maybe things aren't as good as they seem and all I can say is that we just have to wait and see. Meantime the argument is really whether you see a glass half full or half empty. Great, thank you. Before I ask you to join me in thanking the speaker I'm just gonna mention that we're going to have pause for lunch. There's gonna be food in the back. Please go and get your food and we'll resume here at 12.45 so half an hour. So please join me in thanking Toshisan, Craig, Vikram and Suzanne, thank you.


Welcome, everyone. My presentation is going to be a very different side of things. So in many ways, this is covering small data and what researchers have asked us to do, rather than big data or large data sets or what have you. Rule of thumb for me is if it fits on the laptop, it's not big data. So Jenna's image set probably won't fit on the laptop. Big data has different approaches, whereas mine is hundreds of records, usually sort of field data collection. The FAMES project started in 2011. We've been building field data collection modules or notebooks for the last decade. FAMES has been and is an offline multi-user, multi-entity GIS capable and multimedia collecting data collection system. Lot of capabilities there. FAMES 2 generally went from 2012 to this year. We were hoping that we were going to support people this year, but went till this year and with any luck, FAMES 3 will be out next year. We've delivered 70 data collection workflows that's distinct scientific data collection methodologies used in the field. Most of them are up on our GitHub repository and we've calculated that there's about 11,500 person hours in the field using our app, give or take. More to the point of this presentation, we've gone through the Syro on-prime innovation incubator at Jazz Hands and that shaped a lot of our design work for FAMES 3 because it turns out that one of the fundamental issues with designing an app for field researchers is if you ask them what features they want, they'll tell you. Unfortunately, the features that they tell you that they want are not the features that they end up using and so in many ways, this presentation is about a number of the blind alleys that we went up to and how vocabularies fit into those. I also plan to work up this presentation into a blog post on our website in case people want to comment there or have thoughts about how I can make this a better blog post. Please email me. And so this is a conversational presentation. I was planning on a fairly straightforward presentation and then I read a really interesting retrospective on a market failure of an indexing surface on a literature review service. Strosser is in my bibliography and this presentation and my bibliography are available on GitHub. He was looking at an AI-based literature review service and a quote really stuck with me that most knowledge necessary to make scientific progress is not online and not encoded. And he's saying that this year and I stopped and I thought and I went, wait, no, that's about right because the researchers using our tool have this huge, classic understanding of what it means to do research in their domains. They are experts in their domains. They are collecting data useful to them and they are responding to market pressures. And when I say market pressures, I don't necessarily mean money, although money as a function of funding is there. But I mean the structural nature of what it means to be a researcher, what it means to get prestige, what it means to continue to hold down a job. And it is those market pressures that they respond to rather than a theoretical approach where we say, yes, we'd love to have your research encoded in a machine readable format so that other researchers can benefit without crediting you. That last bit we don't usually say allowed. And all of us here, I imagine, have tried to say, well, no, people can cite your data. There are ways of fair data, open data that benefit you, the researcher, except that at the end of the day, again, a quote from Strosser, technological utopians and ideologists, there we go, like my former self, underrate how important context and tacit knowledge is. And this ties directly into credit. When a researcher is bringing their tacit knowledge, their understanding of what gets published, their understanding of how to do research within their discipline, so a very Lakotoshi in philosophy of science, trying to map that to other vocabularies or more to the point trying to draw in theoretically established vocabularies into their work is actually really hard. And so Strosser again notes that research knowledge graphs are always designed around the domain and approach of a company and are tightly integrated into their infrastructure proprietary data sets and IP. And so Strosser was talking about biomedical companies and biomedical literature, but we can just as easily apply that to research data. And so when I was looking at presentations on YouTube for this group, there are a great deal of presentations on standards and building approaches. And I very much got a vibe of build it and they will come, right? Where if we build something that is theoretically appropriate, that is well specified, our users will show up to use our wonderful standard. It turns out this hasn't worked for us at all. There are three reasons. One, the pain points and temporal horizons of researchers preparing to go to the field, they've got about a month usually. They don't have time to alter their ways of understanding when it comes to vocabularies or theoretical knowledge models. Research reward structures that I talked about before. And of course, how many people raise your hand if you had to deal with Psydox CRM? I'm just interested in any anyone who's had to deal with Psydox CRM. But it turns out that none of the projects that were going into the field, derived any benefit from Psydox CRM. But that's one of the standards for archaeological data recording. And so the risk of building and they will come is an imprecise identification of what it is and who they are. And so it turns out that being market driven in this case means that we then have a population that we can try to sneak in better value propositions into. And so talking about where we've been. A lot of this design work is a decade old, right? 2012, 2011, where we created a, we went to a workshop. We ran a workshop and we asked archaeologists to agree to some of the standards for data collectors. It turns out they couldn't. We asked them to talk about 10 things that they would want to see in a data collector. They couldn't. And so we had to build the generalized way of collecting data in the field. And so that's what's framed our old version of things. We thought, okay, in 2016 we got some money from a New South Wales grant and we're like, great, let's build in semantic data, linked open data, all of that stuff at some costs. We're talking $20,000, $30,000 for that feature. No one has ever asked to use it at all. It was an utter waste of time and money because it doesn't solve any of our primary user's needs. It doesn't factor into their reward structures. It doesn't do any of this. And so we really wanted to have linked open data working and no one cares. So what field researchers want from our vocabularies is something that is useful pragmatically in the field. They want rapid and more to the point consistent selection of complex hierarchies of terms. Why not a standard one? Well, it turns out that it's their complex hierarchies of terms as they are appropriate for their research. So it's not that they're interested in using other people's hierarchies, although they'd be delighted for every other field researcher to share their data first. There's no paradox there. But they were collecting colors or animal types or soils or textures or bones. But specific subsets of these for their research environment that have compatibility with their way of working. As I said before, most researchers already have data collection methodologies. And phase two wasn't particularly compatible with a researcher just starting out. We recommended researchers just starting out to run a pilot before spending weeks or months developing a data collection module. And researchers don't have time to figure out new methodologies while they're preparing to go into the field. And so their time for luxurious data cleaning comes after because they can throw grad students at the problem. And again, this is incompatible with published vocabularies because published vocabularies are for slightly or very different environments. Only one team in 10 years has pointed us to a published vocabulary online and asked us to call terms from it. And it's a team for famous, who's asked to use phase three. It's because of the editorial control and the compatibility problem. Most researchers have wanted CSVs or shape files. Some of the projects have wanted KML outputs. We're talking about Excel or at the extreme Python or R-based data analysis workflows. We're not talking about anything that machine encoded knowledge would be useful for. We're in the middle of phase three development. The reason why I don't have any screenshots is our UI is rapidly changing. It is a ground up rewrite. And we are trying to come at this problem from a pragmatic perspective. How we thought to ourselves, can we encourage structured vocabulary adoption while specifically addressing pain points that will lead to uptake rather than theoretical compatibility, rather than ideological compatibility, what specific issues have researchers dealt with. And it turns out that copying and pasting some of the terms from a vocabulary is kind of tedious. And the ability to import a list of terms and then prune them in a UI is quite valuable. So we plan to do that. However, we have no plans for advanced knowledge representations until someone pays us to do that. And we're using that willingness to pay us to do something as our gate. Now, look, when we say willingness to pay us, it's probably not going to be the cost of implementing the feature. But if they're willing to pay for a feature, that shows that it's valuable to them. And what this is in support of is that researchers vote with their feet. And so if we are responsive to researchers and we are responsive to their pain points, they will continue to use us and we will be able to support them and sneak in good data and good vocabularies where we can. And so we really don't want to build theory downwards because theory downwards doesn't address researcher specific value propositions. This is the XKCD's 18th standard. We don't want to be the 18th standard. We can't enforce it and researchers don't care about it. We need to make sure that the people who are paying us are the primary beneficiaries of their work. And this is why we're not doing really fancy triples or linked open data to start with because the primary beneficiaries of these things are repositories and publishers rather than the researchers. And this is not because they're not valuable to researchers because they can be. It's because researchers don't get credit for it right now. And until we can solve the reward cycle, we have to focus on things of specific and immediate value to the people who are choosing to use us. And finally, the thing that's guiding our development is we have to figure out what people are willing to pay for and now pay for in time or money rather than what they say they want. Because when we listen to what they say they want, we spend five, six digits building what they say they want and they never end up using it. And so here's our bibliography. This is again available on GitHub. And we want to thank all of our partner organizations.


My name is Claire and today is the international day of Hello My Name is campaign. I'm going to put all the links below but just to give you the low down of the campaign it was originally started by Dr Kate Granger and back in 2013 she was she had the misfortune of being diagnosed with cancer and unfortunately became a patient at hospital and she realised that all these health care professionals were coming in and out of her room and they weren't introducing themselves so they were all doing these different procedures and things she didn't have a clue who they were what their names were so she got really mad she had a rant at her husband Chris Poynton who's another fantastic person and he said to her something like stop moaning about it get out and do something about it so she did and the hello my name is campaign was born it's just fantastic it's gone worldwide unfortunately Kate Granger passed away in 2016 but you know what she lives on in this campaign her heart and soul is still in this today and in Chris Poynton her husband who has done such an amazing job with this campaign and he's allowing her legacy to live in in himself in the campaign and he's making sure that other patients don't go through the same thing that his wife went through because it's not nice it's simple communication isn't it we should all be introducing ourselves we shouldn't just be going into people and not introducing ourselves it baffles me that this has happened and to be honest i didn't know about the campaign until last year i thought do you know what this isn't okay and we're gonna become a hello my name is campaigner and so today is really a celebration of that if you're watching this and it's before 3 20 p.m we're holding a whole minute silence across the whole world if you're watching this 3 20 p.m hold your minute silence for Dr Kate Granger just take that moment to just stop wherever you are and just think about things so now the hello my name is campaign is fantastic like i said the links are below have a look and get involved wherever you can on the website you can buy mug you can buy lanyard you can buy badges you can buy t-shirts and all of the money is donated to charity so go and check it out and have a look just go out support the cause support chris pointon and everything he's doing i'm going to put all the twitter links and social media links as well for you and just go and have a look go follow it i just want to say a massive thank you to chris pointon for spreading the message everywhere because you're doing such a fantastic job you're doing amazing and if you don't already know who chris pointon is go and have a look at him i'm going to leave the links below again he's just fantastic he does talks he goes to conferences he's traveling worldwide with this campaign he really wants the message to be out there to stop this from happening again and he's just amazing so thank you chris pointon if you're watching you're fantastic it's an amazing campaign and i'm really happy to spread the love spread the message make sure everybody's introducing themselves and just yeah i hope everyone has a fantastic day don't forget to introduce yourself to someone today


zoned as R2. And our five, and the recommendation is to rezone that area as B3. And so that, there's these properties here that this is the, the Capitol Theater's up here. And I think this is Fox Library is here. It's a little context. So it's these properties. This is the multi-family apartment house. This is a two-family condo. This I think is three apartments and this one across the way, I believe is also three apartments. And so this is B3 up in this way. So it would just extend the B3 through here. And then these I believe are B2. Next one is about zoning map amendments. And this deals with notification of a butters in the event of a change in the zoning map. And then apartment parking minimums. So currently, as we're very familiar, single and two-family housing requires one per unit. This would, but in apartments, we require more than that. And so this would bring that all into alignment so that basically all residential would be one parking space per unit. The next one, open space uses is to change the uses that are allowed in the open space district, basically to more align with our current, with town's current practice. Next one, restaurant uses would be increased the amount of area that a restaurant can occupy before it requires a special permit. Because currently that's only 2,000 square feet. So this would is proposing to double that to 4,000. So appeals, this has to do with once, if the zoning, if the inspection services has determined that there's a violation, how long the occupant has to remedy the situation and how long the special services has to try to remedy the situation before it would actually come before our board because we would be the next level of appeal. This one, and then the mixed use of business districts basically change with the proposal initially is to change the FAR and all the business districts to be two through be five to four to encourage the development of more mixed use in those districts. And then the next few are ones that I had put forward on behalf of the board. One is to add a definition for porches and to add porches to the list of things that can project into the minimum yard because currently that is omitted. So the current porches here should be underlined as well. But this is just basically to bring the zoning bylaw into alignment with our current practice. Yard encroachment, this has to do with that when you create a porch that it does not create a space that you can then enclose by right that if you want a porch and we approve it by special permit, that's fine. But if you then want to go ahead and then close it, you do have to get a special permit. You do have to revisit the permit. Large additions, two parts. One is to just clarify that it's the lesser of 750 square feet or 50% of the building's gross floor area that is considered is the threshold for being a large addition. And then there's some questions back and forth about what is included in that calculation, whether the current currently in special services does not include portions of additions that square footage is within the existing footprint of the house. So it's only the portion that's beyond the footprint of the house. There's been some questions back and forth. So we're just having the town clarify very clearly as to what's included in that calculation. Next one has to do with the rules and regulations for the zoning board of appeals. Currently there's a very large section that is additional rules and regulations that are in the zoning bylaw. So we can't actually change them and it takes two thirds vote of town meeting to change them. So we are asking that those all be stricken and that what just remains is what's in actually an understate code, which is that the zoning board of appeals should adopt its own rules and regulations. Then further tweaking of half story because the part of it, the definition is getting very regulatory all of a sudden. And so there was a request to basically change it so that there's a definition, which is much smaller and then there's actually now a regulatory section as to how it's calculated. That's what that is. And then the last one here is dealing with unsafe structures that unsafe structures have to be determined by the director of the special services. That's not up to a contractor to determine that it's unsafe. But those are all the zoning articles that are currently underway for regular town meeting. There are apparently three proposed articles for the special town meeting that have not been published yet. My understanding is one of them has to is we have a provision in the zoning bylaw that says if you extend the existing line of a house parallel to the sidelot line that that's not, that that could be done by a special permit and that actually doesn't really work with the current interpretation of state law so that I believe the recommendation from the ARB is gonna be just strike that section. But there, that has not yet come up for discussion at the ARB. So if you have any questions about all of these, the list that I showed you is available at the ARB's website. They do have a hearing coming up on Monday and they always have a public comment period at the end. So if you have comments about any of them, you can add them then, but it's easier just to send them an email, write them a letter and let them know. Chairman. Chairman. Chairman. Chairman. Chairman. Chairman. Chairman. Chairman. Chairman. I was just going to mention that the ARB is scheduled to vote on all of this. They, they don't vote on it as they go along the way the select board does and they're planning to vote on all of it, I believe on April 4th and they're planning to incorporate that and have it in their report to town meeting on April 6th. So that gives you an idea of what the timeframe is to make your views known. Thank you. How meeting starts on April 25th. There's some time in there. Mr Moore. Yes, thank you, Mr Chairman I just want to inform the board I was at most of those ARB meetings and I want you to know that your chair acquitted himself very well in this presentation of the article. Related to, and it went so much more smoothly when Mr fine was presenting and the other articles so I want you to know that he is, he's representing your board well. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Mr Moore. It's nice when I bring forward things that are not very controversial. It does help you're right. One of our agenda I don't ever throw is discussion meeting schedule. So the board in the way past had a schedule that we met Tuesday, the second and fourth Tuesday of the month. And then, as we went through with all the 40 bees we got way off track and everything got sort of tossed about as we tried to meet time deadlines and such. And we would like to get us back onto that schedule and restrain us to the second and fourth Tuesday of the month so I just want to make sure that there were no objections to, to doing that. Mr Chairman. I do one of the things that I that that I think is important for us to think about is, is trying to provide a good service to the, to the public and you. What sometimes happens that while we have had in the past this the second and fourth Tuesdays have been sort of indicated as days that we would meet. And we didn't meet on other days, we didn't always meet on those days because sometimes you didn't have any new cases or new hearings to do. And during that period of time we didn't actually come together and approve opinions in the way that we do now we circulated them. And so the opinions didn't necessarily need to wait for another meeting. They could be all signed off on and then sent to the town clerk. And I think that I would like to have us consider the possibility. I mean, to be sure if we have absolutely nothing to do with there's no reason to get together just to chat, although it's always fun. But sometimes all we have is administrative items, but if we don't have the hearing if we don't have a meeting and a meeting which with all administrative items can take 20 minutes if we don't have the meeting, then an applicant has to wait for a few weeks in order to get final action on on on an application. And I'd like to encourage us to sort of be willing to meet to do the administrative things it doesn't take very long. But it would, it would, it would, it would, it would provide a material benefit to the people whose decisions were waiting for our decisions. And obviously this is a lot easier when we're virtual. And it would be if we all had to hike over to some common place in order to spend 20 minutes doing those things and we may have to, I think we should be thinking about ways of handling that when inevitably we go back to something that's not all. That's not all virtual but at least for the time being, and I'm willing to try to hurry and write the opinions to get them out. And it just would be better if we could do that. I do agree if we could, and then certainly it's a lot easier to do if we're online. But if we, for a standard hearing we need, we need to advertise in the paper and stuff and it takes a while to do it but for regular hearing we only need to notice 48 hours in advance. So, I think if we, it would be advantageous for us to try to do that if we can, even for the short, you know, if they're just short meetings then, then they're short but at least we get we get what we need to get done. And certainly if, if it's a meeting where we're only doing administrative, if we want to change the time I don't think that would be an issue necessarily either we want to do it. We wanted to start late if there was some reason for that we could work with that. So for now if you've been pencil in on your calendar all the, the second and fourth Tuesdays, and then we will certainly the next one, April 12, we do have stuff scheduled. And then the next docket item the number five is policies and procedures so when we get into the so for April 26, which we don't currently have anything scheduled for I would like to have a meeting where the board can sort of review the current rules, rules and regulations document we have and also the way we handle procedures to see if there are things we would want to adjust things that we would want to improve going forward. And the second the sort of the last half of April is traditionally when we do our annual election for positions on the board. So we have the two positions we chair and vice chair. And so the election for that would be on that date as well. So, questions on those being none. I'm going to ask those who are town meeting members who are up for reelection this year good luck to you. I don't know. Mr Mills, are you, are you running again. No, I'm not up for election this year.  Oh yes, myself as well, and reformulated districts so this is how this goes. But then you're not on town meeting, are you. Depending on where you live. I'm easing my way. There's some precincts three write ins and you're in. I can't encourage Roger because he's been using my precinct so. Oh shocks. Venkat I don't know if you're involved in town meeting or not. No, I haven't. Always fun to see how the sausage is made. Very good. Well, if we have nothing else, I guess, oh, I do need to actually formally go back to agenda item number 10, which is I got three, six, eight, eight, 44 and then we need to formally. That hearing. So I move that we continue the special permit hearing for 44 Edmond road until a Tuesday April 12 at 730pm. Second. Vote and of the board Mr. Dupont. Hi. Mr. Hanlon. Hi. Mr. Mills. Hi. Hi. Mr. Holly. Hi. Chair votes I that one is continued.  We voted to continue the special permit for, for four to six River Street until April 12. Do you want to vote an affirmative on that? Yeah. Okay. That way I can, that way in case somebody misses next week, we can still keep you on. With that, unless anybody has anything else to discuss this evening, I think we're about ready to vote to adjourn. I will read my last little bit of my script here. Thank you all for your participation in tonight's meeting with the Arlington zoning board of appeals. Appreciate everyone's patience throughout the meeting, especially wish to thank Rick fell rally and visit leave for their assistance of preparing for and hosting tonight's online meeting. Please note the purpose of the board's reporting of the meeting is to ensure the creation of an accurate record of the proceedings is our understanding that the reporting made by ACMI will be available on demanded ACMI dot TV with the coming grace. If anyone has comments or recommendations, please send them via email to zda at town dot Arlington dot m a dot us that email address is also listed on the zoning board of appeals website. And to conclude tonight's meeting, I would ask for a motion to adjourn. Thank you, Mr. Hanlon a second. Second. Thank you, Mr. Dupont. Vote of the board Mr. Dupont. Hi, Hanlon. Mr. Milks. Hi, your giddily. Hi, Mr. Holly. Hi, the chair votes. The board is adjourned. Thank you all very much. Nice guys. Good night, everybody.


The number of measles cases across Minnesota continues to rise as the outbreak is nearing the end of its first month. Today was announced that three new cases were reported in Crow Wing County after one case was reported earlier last week. The new cases are believed to be connected to the first case. Health officials say that with the number of Crow Wing County cases now at three, there's a very good chance that number could balloon in the coming days and weeks. There certainly is a good chance. Measles is very highly contagious. Those who are susceptible to measles, I think the attack rate is about 90%. So for people who are exposed and susceptible, you know, those who are not vaccinated or have not had measles disease in the past and gotten immunity that way, have a very high chance of contracting measles if they're exposed. Russell also says that the outbreak across Minnesota has reinforced that position that the best way to safeguard yourself from the virus is to get your measles vaccination due to the outbreak. The typical vaccination periods for children have been accelerated. They have because of this outbreak that we're having in Minnesota and the cases or cases that we've had now in Crow Wing County are recommending an accelerated vaccination schedule. So typically that first dose is given at 12 to 15 months. The second dose at four to six years, but they're recommending an early second dose. The first dose as soon as possible after that 12 month or that one year birthday, then there just has to be at least 28 days or four weeks between that first dose and second dose. So they're recommending getting kids that second dose early just to get them fully protected as early as we can. The number of cases confirmed across Minnesota is well over 50, with the majority of the cases being reported in the Somali-American community in Hennepin County. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.