Thank you for coming out. It is a beautiful day out, so we're very happy about that. And we are in a very beautiful space as well. So thank you to the ICA. And thank you to all of you for coming today. Yes. So my name is Vicky George. I am the Audience Lab Director at Arts Boston. I am also the founder of the Network for Arts Administrators of Color, which is also a program of Arts Boston. And we are here today to have a really great conversation with some fantastic people who work in the arts and who are allies of the arts. So the Path Forward conversation with Leaders of Color really focuses on leaders who are currently working in different sectors who have made some real great inroads in their career and who are here to talk and to share some of those insights. The Path Forward is the third conversation that we've had so far, paving the way in December of 2017, as well as amplifying voices in February of 2018. So initially, I wanted to have these conversations to really hear from leaders of color in the arts who are doing fantastic work because a lot of the times we don't get that opportunity to hear their voices. And so today's conversation will take part of that idea. And move it into other sectors, work that is being done in other sectors and the ways that we can all work together to really challenge our city of Boston, to really challenge our city to be better, to be more inclusive, and to really uplift and recognize the talented people of color who work and live in this city. So before I move on, I do want to say a couple of thank yous. I do first and foremost want to thank Bank of America because without their support, this network wouldn't be as robust and we wouldn't be able to do as many of these activities. So we're very, very thankful for them. And then I also want to thank Kelly Gifford. Where's Kelly? There she is. So Kelly is the deputy director of public engagement and planning at the ICA. And pretty much about a year and a half ago when we had a meeting, just a random little meeting together, she really said she wanted to make sure that the ICA could be in support of the network as much as we would allow. And we had a lovely reception here last August, outside with some really great music. And we're so happy to be back here again. So thank you Kelly for all of your hard work and for being a great ally and a supporter of both Arts Boston and the network. I'd like to invite Kelly to say a few words. Hi, thank you so much for joining us here this evening. I would like to thank Vicky and Arts Boston and the network for Arts Administrators of Color for choosing the ICA to host this discussion. It's an important discussion and I'm thrilled that the panelists are here to share their expertise and their experiences with us. Over the past decade, the ICA has become nationally recognized for our teen arts education program. And working with the Walton Family Foundation and the Ford Foundation, we recently received a grant to extend this platform to include a teen leadership program, paid museum internships, and postgraduate curatorial fellowships. Our goal is really to open up the field to a range of students and try to develop the arts leaders for the future. These initiatives are led by Monica Garza, our director of education who is here this evening. I'm sure you've all read the National Study from the Mellon Foundation that only 16% of art museum leadership positions are held by people of color. We do the work that we do and we're very passionate about it, but we know it's not enough. We really are actively trying to change that statistic here at the museum, but it is difficult and we really appreciate discussions like this and what we can learn from the panelists tonight to help us achieve this much needed goal. So I just wanted to say thank you again and thanks a lot for choosing the ICA for the panel discussion. So this is exciting, we are going to get started and I would like to introduce to you our moderator for the evening. So Myron Parker Brass is the executive director for the arts at the Boston Public Schools. She is a native of Chicago, Illinois. Myron is also a professional musician and music director working to provide access to quality arts education for students, teachers, families, and the broader community. Myron joined the Boston Public Schools in June of 2011 providing strategic vision and planning and building capacity to expand arts education within the BPS with the focus on access, equity, and quality arts education for all students. So thank you and welcome Myron. Well thank you, I'm delighted to be here to have a conversation with my colleagues here and as Vicki said, this evening we wanna have a conversation in that cross sector space. So while we're gonna be talking about the arts and how we build a space for leadership in the arts, we wanna do it from not the arts space but from the cross sector space. So we're gonna talk about how other sectors can be that advocate, that change, can be that support for the arts community as we begin to look at or look further into how we really move this notion of leadership in our arts institutions, in our art spaces that reflect the communities that they serve. And so I'm excited to be having this conversation. I'm gonna introduce my colleagues here and this really is a dialogue. If I'm looking at my watch, it's because we don't have a lot of time, it's not that I'm not interested. We don't have a lot of time and we wanna get to as much of the conversation as possible and also allow you the opportunity to share your thoughts and to ask questions. And so I'm delighted to introduce Yasmin Cruz. Yasmin is in client services and strategic planning at the Brown Advisory. In that role, she provides comprehensive strategic support to private clients to the private client service practice. Prior to moving to Brown Advisory, Yasmin was with the John Hancock Financial Services as Director of Corporate Responsibility. Yasmin is also a member of the Arts Boston Board of Directors and we'd like to congratulate Yasmin on two things. This past weekend, she graduated with her MBA from the Carroll School of Management. Yes, and even more exciting, she got engaged. So I'm glad to have Yasmin with us. And then my other colleague, Justin Kang. Justin is the Vice President for Economic Growth at the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and also the Executive Director of City Awake, a program of the chamber that works to empower the next generation of greater Boston leaders. And so Justin is preparing for a forum this fall and I think everybody should write this down. It's called Justin and the City Awake. They will be hosting a forum entitled Fierce Urgency of Now. Energizing Millennials of Color to Unlock Boston's Promise. That's a lot, but write it down. Taking place September 20th through the 24th. And so we have everyone's name and email address. We anticipate that you will be attending September 20th through the 24th. No, thank you Justin. Great promoter, thank you. Thank you. So we do have some questions that we want to begin with and certainly we'll try to keep to our time, but we also want to make sure that we're having a good conversation about the role of the arts in building this space for leadership, leadership of color, but also how the cross-sector of Boston can support that. So why don't we just start with each of you telling us a little bit about the work that you do and currently how that intersects with Boston's arts and cultural community. Sure, I'll start. It's awkward to talk about yourself, but just to give you some context in terms of how I come to this space and view it, I actually became engaged with the art sector through working with the Museum of Fine Arts Boston where I wore a few hats. I wore a docent hat, so while I'm not creative I had a lot of opinions about art. And could walk you through the collection and solicit your opinions and then I was, from 2010 up until now I remain engaged with their Committee for Cultural Engagement which was an audience development committee and now I'm gonna serve on their selection committee for choosing their chief learning officer and head of community engagement. While there I also wore the hat of a funder in my last role in former life, I was in a grant making role and that's where I helped build a portfolio that funded organizations like Zoom Mix, like Artists for Humanity, like Boston Dance Alliance, like the ICA and the MFA. And now my role is more as a director and outside kind of lending to strategy on Arts Boston Board and then I'm also on the Lennie Zakem Fund Board where I am the chair of grants allocation and there we fund small organizations like Ballet Rocks. So my view is a few different perspectives. Justin. Thank you for the opportunity to also want to say congratulations to Yasmin who's a great friend and she had a great weekend so congratulations. Thank you. So my name is Justin Kang with the Vice President of Economic Growth at the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. I always went sort of like an audience that isn't your typical chamber of sort of audience. Are people familiar with the Chamber of Commerce? If so raise your hand. Okay, good. I once had like a hundred person panel of college and it's like no one raised their hand so it was like very telling. So if you're not familiar though, Chambers of Commerce are not government agencies. They are a business group representing sort of the business community. We represent 1,400 members in the Greater Boston Region and I get to lead our economic development initiatives and in this conversation, arts and culture is completely vital to the work that we do especially around talent, traction, and retention. So I'm lucky enough to also serve on the Mass Creative Board as well as spoken word youth collective called Mass Leap and every day it gets more confirmed that for the city to keep its young talent, even if you hate millennials and you can raise your hand if you do, 50% of the workforce already are in their 20s and 30s and that's only gonna grow and grow. So from an employer perspective we do want young talent to stay here but since 2015 millennials are leaving and that's because other cities are doing a great job in providing good jobs. And when you ask someone where they live or think about moving, you say like how's Chicago or how's Boston, et cetera, they never say oh they have great jobs there. What they talk about is the food, they talk about the arts, they talk about the culture, the nightlife, et cetera and for us we need to do a better job there from Boston's perspective. I think we have a lot of fun things to do that but we need to create that emotional connection more so from a city person perspective and the second thing I think a lot about in the arts is that housing affordability is very expensive here but you look at New York and SF which are equally as expensive but people are moving there in droves and when you think about that it's not because they wanna pay more in housing rent but New York and SF at least espoused this like utopian vision of arts and culture and they will make that, they will pay that luxury to live in those cities, please, yeah, more so than to in Boston. So in my role in the last year these are the findings and that's why as a chamber that traditionally doesn't engage in arts and culture we think it's absolutely critical from an economic development perspective. Yeah and I guess the other thing that I wanted to piggyback on in terms of understanding Boston when you think about some of these other cities is art as a destination and how often do you experience people who say they're coming to Boston not just to visit the city and to walk around and to go to an event but specifically for arts. So just let's just go back to your comment about part of the work of the chamber is to recruit and retain talent and that you should be engaged with the arts and culture sector. So how should we engage with you? How can we make that happen? What are the steps that we as the arts community can begin that process? I think it's less about the arts and culture community and not to put the onus on the business community but I think I and my colleagues need to do a better job in communicating the value and being on the board of Mass Creative to work at Arts Boston and others I think there's a willingness on the arts and culture side and I think similarly it's on our job to make that case. So even recently we had our CEO Jim Rooney speak at an event where Mass Creative released the report so that's one signal, right? But ultimately we just need to, I'll tell you a story where it was a few years ago where housing wasn't a policy priority for the business community. We ranked our membership and it was like six or seven for eight but they would always rank like talent number two or one but I think you can easily connect how housing and talent are interchangeable but the business case wasn't there. Housing was always seen as like affordable housing or luxury housing but not anything in the middle. So I think it's only a matter of time with the right partnerships that we make creativity, arts, culture as much as a talent acquisition play and retention play as anything else. So I think we have the right leadership and it's just a matter of time. So Yasme, you talked about kind of your diverse interings into the arts and cultural world through many angles and we have a pretty diverse group of audience members so there's representation of different disciplines, different genres, large and small, some other sectors in the audience with us but as you have kind of traveled through the arts community, if I were to ask you your perception of Boston's arts and cultural scene, what would you say? I would say that we certainly are a hub given the volume of organizations, art-serving organizations that we have in this city. However, I would say that it can feel very fragmented by neighborhood. I would say that as an outsider, if you crave, well lately there have been more late night activations and opportunities but transportation is an issue. So even if there are late night options, you continue to have transportation challenges and obstacles I think given kind of the Uber lift reality we're in, some of that is minimized now but I would definitely say we're a hub, we're not really late night and there's a desire to engage and we have the talent but there's some pieces that don't all the way connect. Justin, thoughts? I agree a lot on that and I think there's just, Boston personally has a great arts and culture scene. I think it's just from a public perception it might be about equity, it's about sort of large institutions versus more community based arts and I think it's a lost opportunity but at least we have the assets and the resources that we can fix that problem. So I think earlier we heard a statistic about the low percentage of leaders inside museums that are people of color. We know that that is prevalent in a lot of our arts and cultural institutions and so we consider that a big challenge for the sector particularly in a city where we are becoming majority minority or already our majority minority. There is a serious lack of people of color represented and so how do we shake up this current leadership structure? What do we do to begin to move this? This is where you can be disruptive. You know, for, I think about this a lot, ultimately we need to empower sort of young professionals of color and give them hope and one of the things that we're focused on, there's two reasons I think why people are leaving Boston. One is housing or there's many reasons but two that are on the top of mind for me. One is housing and two is the experience of millennials of color and greater Boston. We did a report with the Boston Foundation last year and that was sort of the takeaway and it shouldn't surprise anyone that a person of color regardless of age has a different experience in Boston but we need to think it from a generational perspective now and say it explicitly. That building communities here as a person of color versus DC, Atlanta, Montreal, basically any other city is very different. So earlier I mentioned that 50% of the workforce of millennials, 43% of millennials in Boston are young professionals of color. So again, if you hate millennials and if you don't like other races, it doesn't matter because you need to make Boston more inclusive to this demographic and say it explicitly. So I think just acknowledging that. I had someone who moved here a few months ago, young woman of color, got a great job at IBM and she was like, we're all the people of color. And that's, it's bad for two reasons. One, if there weren't people of color in Boston, that's one embarrassment, right? But there are people of color in Boston being a majority minority city and the fact that she has that experience is another type of embarrassment. So I think just the acknowledgement and getting other sectors involved. And I think there's, and Jasmine, we talked about this a lot, is sort of the intergenerational sort of cooperation because of young professionals of color and older leaders of color and not trying to make it combative and just creating better mentoring relationships. And there's good examples, bad examples, but I'm sure we'll dive deeper into that. But I want to do this good. Yeah, and that's where I was gonna go. So I agree with you, I would say we definitely have a representation issue. I noticed this because when I travel to other cities and I see people of color around after I leave the airport, I'm like, oh my gosh. And I usually tap the person next to me and say, you see how many people of color? And that's when I realize I'm from Boston. That shouldn't be a normal thing for anyone. But I will say that I think things are shifting here. I remember when, if you wanted to engage with DEI mentors or sponsorship program, there was pretty much one or two options. I mean, and it was owned by kind of one leader. And now there are more opportunities to engage with mentors and to have conversations about sponsorship. And it's not kind of owned by one person. Also, I would say previously in Myron, you tell me your perception if I'm off. But when you have a generation that occupies these roles for the first time, I think a lot of the experience is how do I maintain this leadership position? And I don't think the conversation was about how do I bring people along? And I'm seeing now that shift to not how do I occupy this space and be the one person in it, but what does my legacy look like? How am I engaging the next generation? So I'm optimistic. And I'm just personally, I go up there is that I took a couple years ago, I started an organization called City Awake and it was acquired by the Chamber two years ago. And for those who know me, I would never join a Chamber. It's not my life's gene to work at a Chamber of Commerce. Transparently, it was the hip hop mogul and Art Thief. Sorry, Art Thief, take back, sorry. Time was crowned fair, great movie. But the Chambers led by a man named Jim Rooney, 60 plus years old, sorry, give us a way. She's an older gentleman, Irish, Dorchester, Brad, et cetera. I don't know you as well. It was like Twitter, someone's gonna tweet that and like, atag him, it's gonna be like. And we met and I give him a lot of credit because in so many ways, we could have not worked well together. In so many ways, when the first conversation started between me and Jim about joining forces, I could have been like, no, absolutely not. I would never wanna work for the Chamber. And he from externally cosmetically, just seemed like an old Irish guy, right? But something immediately came to clear like in our first conversations, like we both love this region more than anything. He's dedicated his career there and he's like, I don't care about credit. I just wanna make this place better. And he gave me all the autonomy in the world. And that's an example where I give him a lot of credit where he, there's a lot of CEOs that won't let other people be on the organization on panels or speak a lot. Or even like, I know some of that, you have to get CEO permission to even join like a host committee, right? And for Jim and the Chamber to push me out there and vice versa, I really appreciate that. I think that's an example of possibility. So let's talk a bit more about the role of building succession. You know, you mentioned that there are those of us like myself who've been sitting in these roles for lots of years. And we came to these roles as sometimes novices, but we came as the only one of inside institutions. So we spent a lot of our time putting that stake in the ground and letting people understand that we could do this work well, that we knew how to do this work. And so I don't think we thought about and who am I building behind me? Who am I bringing along behind me? So let's talk about how we can begin to get leaders to understand how to build that succession plan. How to begin to reach out and be that mentor. This is, there's no one way to approach how this works. I love that this is a sector approach. You need to have someone advocating for you who has relevance and access to a seat at the table. But I always have kind of this saying in my own life that I've employed is why have a mentor when you can have a board of advisors. And so I always make sure I have someone who's relevant to the sector, who can push me, but then always engage others who might have an opposing view or maybe a different gender or maybe of a different, you know, generation where, you know, the dynamics were different. So it's important to have, I think, multiple viewpoints. A lot of stock right now is being put into that mentor and that sponsor. It's important to have that. I don't think you can move forward without it. But you also need to, I think, have a broad array of perspectives guiding you. Justin. I have nothing to add there. She says, we're absolutely right. Okay. So you both are participants in the arts. You both are truly drawn to the arts on whatever level is Mr. Hip Hop mogul here. So talk about your experiences in the arts here and what's the most memorable experience that you've had in Boston and why? Gosh, you know, and I'm not artistic at all. For whatever reason, I just always been compelled by it since watching, you know, Biddy on MTV. That's when I wanted to be a hip hop mogul. You're in a crafts class.  It just sort of reminds me every month and I dread going to it because I'm like, oh, I've got to be so bad, et cetera. It's a Saturday or Sunday. I want to just like relax and watch Netflix and I go and like every month I took a photography class at Boston Photography Workshop. It was amazing. Next month I sewed and knitted or something. I've made a tote bag and gather here. I did glass blowing at the Abloh Glass School. I just made a ring making class at Artisan's Asylum. I did a writing class from the immigrant perspective with Grub Street. Next week, next month I'm doing a painting class and I know that was multiple moments, so I'll address, but I will just say, the one that I loved, all of them were so insightful personally, you know, insightful for me to go through. I loved the one that Grub Street, though. I went in there not thinking I was going to share what I wrote and I did and it was because it was just me and a bunch of older Latina women who are just so giving and they were just complimenting me left and right and it was awesome. So, and they just made me feel so welcome and I was like, very, I've, you know. Did they give you a nickname? I don't know, they were just, you know, they were just great. And I share what I wrote because of their encouragement and I've never done that and for Grub Street to provide me that opportunity is pretty memorable. So my most memorable arts experience happened when I was in high school and I think that's why it was so important to me and continues to be important to me to connect young people to arts. I think young people have to work to access the arts even if it is a graduation requirement, but Myron, you're working on that and I know the ICA is working on that as well. But I remember the John Bigger's exhibit at the MFA and just being blown away that there was a story about African Americans on walls that I didn't expect them to be there and that will always remain in my mind and then another is in the South and I was brought by my parents to see a documentary about Asada Shakur. And this was in the late 90s and this was in the Sowa district before I think it was as cool as it is now. But I remember being able to be out late with my parents and having seen that movie and trying to digest it. So those are two of kind of moments where art shifted my perspective in how I saw the world, how I saw my culture and experienced identity. So we certainly have more questions but also being aware of time, we wanted to give you an opportunity to either ask questions of Yasmin and or Justin or to provide some insights from the work that you are doing or just to start a dialogue amongst everyone that is here. We do have a mic so we do ask that you come down front to ask the question because it is being live streamed and so rather than me trying to repeat your question and not get it correct, we're gonna ask you to come down and ask your question or give your insider on whatever moves you at this moment. Good evening. So thank you so much for this wonderful opportunity in this conversation. My name is Sarah Ting. I have a comment and a question. I'd like to actually share a really wonderful, powerful quote by Aristotle who said, educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. So I think where we have to begin to elevate the arts is in education and it's very, very sad and disappointing to hear that there are actually some public elementary schools that have no music at all. None. So I would like to present a question and also share with you how we can use the arts to not only be elevated, but to also address this critical issue we call diversity and lack of diversity because I think the arts can play a powerful role to help address issues of lack of inclusion. And I'd like to share with everybody a poem that actually received a resolution by the Boston City Council recognizing it as a powerful tool to reduce prejudice. It's called The Sun. It says, are you greater than the sun that shines on everyone? The black, brown, yellow, red and white, the sun does not discriminate. So this poem actually inspired a song and a program called Singing Equality Across America and Around the World, and the song was performed at the United Nations by children. If you go to our website, worldunitink.org, you will see a video of 429 children singing the song and they're even doing it in sign language. And we will be producing another video of 800 children singing the song and even doing the verse in sign language. The song was written by John Chamberiello and the title of the song is We All See the Stars. So I want to share that with this wonderful audience. The thought of the arts helping us address these critical social issues. And I wanted to present it to the panel, your thoughts about how the arts can not only play a role in the economy and bringing people, but how we can play a critical role to addressing these critical social issues and how to help the business community recognize that. Thank you. I'll start because we were talking a little bit about before and this is my own personal opinion out of the chamber. We need to invest a lot more in arts education, arts funding and all that stuff. That's my own personal opinion. And why though is part of my job is also think about new technologies, new economies and creativity is the thing that will distinguish us between humans and robots, point blank. I've been learning a lot about AI, robotics, automation, et cetera. We definitely value technical engineering STEM skills and we should not go away from that. But ultimately the jobs will be given and provided to those who have creativity 25 years from now. We don't know what those jobs are but it is absolutely fundamental. And you made a good point before we talked is that we label these sort of skills of arts et cetera as soft skills. And then we create this construct binary of like hard skills versus soft skills and we gotta pick one or the other and that's wrong. So for us as a business community and for us to continue to provide to fill these jobs now and then 25 years from now is that we need a workforce that has the ability to think conceptually, abstractly. Otherwise the jobs that require sort of rinse and repeat sort of behavior won't exist. So I think you make a great point and I fully support it. Yeah, I totally agree with arts being a vehicle for understanding each other yourself. I also think art builds community. Art is a way to have a discourse in a way that could be productive where an absence of art may not facilitate the same discourse. I think we're all in a grand, this is a tough environment in the corporate funding community for arts. There are very few corporate funders who find this in their focus area are dedicated to arts funding. So making that business case can be challenging but education certainly is something that is within many organizations priorities. So I think it's always about finding the right angle and making the case and Justin provides a great business case for innovation is huge and creativity is a 21st century skill. So I think if you're able to convey that in a solid way, maybe we can unlock more funding to arts education. But unfortunately, I don't think we're an environment where if you say, oh, please come fund my wonderful arts program that resonates. I think you definitely have to draw on some downstream impacts of art. And as Justin and I were talking earlier, I think it really is about changing the narrative and so how do we move that narrative about the place for arts, arts education, arts and culture. And Justin talked about talent acquisition and retention. We know that there's businesses booming in Boston. Lots of development is happening. There are lots of large corporations coming to Boston. And so how do we change that narrative at the table? When they are there, how do we help them understand that in order for this to be a vibrant community for all of those employees that they wanna bring to Boston that they anticipate will move here, the city has to then be that welcoming space. So it has to offer them not only that cultural life that arts opportunity, but it also has to give them a place to live and be a community. And included in that is the schools. And so inside your schools, they wanna make sure that their children are gonna get the best education. And so we need to change that narrative about what that quality education looks like. And that inside there, it includes quality solid arts education because those skills, those that creativity, that innovation, that team being a member of a team, those are not soft skills. Those are hard skills. And we teach those skills in and through the arts. And you use those skills in so many very different ways. But it is how we move this narrative. How do we change this narrative so that we know when Justin is sitting at the table with his business partners, they all understand that language as soon as he starts speaking. Other questions, comments? Yes. We will have to repeat your question simply because we are live streaming it. So I will try my best not to paraphrase, but please. That is a really great question and comment. So thank you for that. And for you all, that is a good question. And if you have examples of ways in which within your current positions of power, how have you been able to kind of look to see who are the next folks coming up behind you or sort of activate and be a sponsor type mentor in that way? Make sure. So I joined the arts Boston board last year, I believe. And then quickly after we had governance come up and I recommended my Pakistani lawyer friend. So I've already brought someone else to the table with me. I think tokenism is a tough thing to be in the only, only club. And try to, like you said, if you have a seat at the leadership table, bring someone else along with you. And that's man to man one-on-one combat. That's not shifting this in a dramatic way overnight. And that has to be part of our understanding. The imperative and the urgency and the interest has to be there. But the reality is a lot of this is shifting things one at a time. I mean, thank you for your comments. And there, I think everything you said is spot on. The stuff here that we're talking about in Boston isn't simple at all. And I'll be transparent. I think about race a lot in the context of business and community. And sometimes you just get so much hopelessness because you think about how historical and institutional the inequities are from a generational perspective. There are individuals we can help now, but it's just generational from redlining to the war against drugs to everything in between. And now we're talking about decades, centuries of work to get done. And in terms of the work that I do, well, I think, and that's the framing I always think about it from. In terms of when we talk about racial equity, at least in the business sphere, what does that mean? And one of the insights that we've done a lot of research on this is just social capital. And I think you spoke a lot about it too. It's sort of, we talk about financial capital being as inheritable. But in terms of like from a young age, what is the best indicator of your future economic success or interest success in whatever it is, is who you know, your community, et cetera, and their networks and their connections. Because if you even think about it, the internships you got are things of equity.  So one of the things that we're focused on, at least from that perspective, is internships. We're gonna be focused on a program encouraging the private sector to hire more first gen students of color to paid meaningful internships in the summer. But even that is like a band-aid because we'll reach maybe 30, 50, 100 kids, but we'll see how that goes. And then the other part is, how do we make a majority minority city not just so segregated in the ways that you're saying if you're walking down the street, et cetera, because I do this every time I go into a bar. I count like, I just notice. I'm like the only person of color in this room. I always do that instinctively. It's instinctively, that's what I do, just like nationally. I actually said to my friend once, I was like, wow, I'm the only person of color in this bar. It's 150% and he was a white guy and then it was like, whatever, like he didn't care and then we got into a fight. And it's like weird thing over drinks, but. But one of the strategies, so we're hosting this five day festival for specifically for millennials of color in late September. One to explicitly get this out there. And we're taking a few strategies and one is we're getting major institutions to host events catered to millennials of color. So for instance, the Museum of Science is gonna be hosting a hip hop concert in their public garden area kind of thing, right? And then we have the Red Sox hosting millennials of color night against the Orioles, right? So traditional places where you don't see people of color into that spaces. But on the flip side though, it's not just making traditionally white institutions more, you know, we want more welcoming. It's also about elevating the existing work of institutions across traditionally more prominent communities of color and getting people to go to that place because you want that foot traffic too. So seeing, you know, as parts of Roxbury getting becoming cultural districts, designations, et cetera, there is great work and it's about elevating. So anyways, that was rambling because I just, I think everything you said was right and long road ahead, but yeah, that's all we got. And I guess from my seat, we are training the next generation. And so unlike most urban districts, Boston has been very purposeful about building quality sequential arts education. So our students are learning those skills to either be that artist, to be that arts appreciator, to be that creative, to understand how to take advantage of opportunities because a lot of what you talked about was this opportunity gap. So where is that space that we help them fill that, be knowledgeable about what's available to them? How do I access that? And so we have had the good fortune to kind of build that space inside BPS. So our young people are leaving our buildings and they are artistically literate.  Do we have a lot of work to do? We absolutely do because building that space around arts and culture is more than me just training my young people and pushing them out the door, then the community has to be waiting for them. The community has to be, you know, helping them understand what is my next role? How do I take all my artistic literacy, this creativity? How do I use that? And how do I give it back to my community? But what I hope we are doing in addition to that is helping them understand and celebrate who they are as young artists or as young creatives, culturally, you know, racially, what that means to them and their community. How do they support that community? I mean, so we will continue to do that, but we would love them to use all of that here in Boston. You know, we would love for them to stay here. We would love them to feel like this is a place where I can take all of that and I can still, you know, be very excited about the place that I live. Yes. So, hi, my name is Alison Crony-Moses. I work at the Elliott School of Fine and Applied Arts. We have a schoolhouse in Jamaica Plain where we serve a lot of people, kids and adults, but we also have a very large outreach program that I'm in charge of and I work really hard to do programs in schools, but also at libraries and other sites. Recently, we started an Artists in Residence program and my question is really around as an organization that is doing work in communities for quite a while now and recently we have, I think, a lot of energy around us. We wanna make sure they're attended. We wanna make sure people know about them. We wanna make sure that we are inviting local artists in those communities to actually be teachers with us. Recommendations for you guys. The question is, do you have recommendations on how do you get the word out about things that are happening because you talked about how we're separated by neighborhood. Definitely feel it often. So, how do you get the word out? Are there, other than posting on this great network email group, are there ways to promote events or promote workshops, opportunities, teaching opportunities and also to do two things, to make sure that we are making sure that everyone has access to the opportunities that are out there, but also making sure that we are actually recruiting talent from Boston, people of color from Boston, that grew up in Boston and not just outsiders that move here that have talent as well, which I love them too, but I'd like to support Boston people as well. Sure. My book more Arts Boston than the Boston Calendar, so quick plug there, that's not my book, that's a true story though, I check it every week. I think it's actually interesting, Facebook has these algorithms and recently I noticed all the events that they showed to me are the same events and I share that story because we face that problem where we live in our very siloed communities and we see just the predictability of the same people that you see at every event and you get into this trap. So, it's something that I struggle with because it's like how do you then expand those networks and I think ultimately the most successful events that I've ever done is sort of leveraging, recognizing that I don't have credibility in X community or Y community or whatever and then finding the right pipeline channel partner to push it out. It takes hard work, it's not easy, you gotta build that community trust but just the events that I've packed to X amount of people have always been done on the support with other organizations that I don't have the connection with but they do and for whatever reason they think the event is aligned in that way. So that's the best advice I can give there. And you'd be the best person to give advice because Justin can absolutely fill a room. And it's such a tough environment. I don't really see arts covered in the way that maybe I would like to from a media perspective. I wish that would shift, that's one of my frustrations. If there's a podcast of kind of art reviews, please let us know just because I feel like you really have to search for that content. I wanted to say that I'm very encouraged by the cross-generational talk that I've experienced in the last maybe two years. I did one of these talks in December, was it? And I had about seven people take my card and say that they were gonna contact me and actually everybody did. Alicia was one of those people from the Elliott School. So that I've been giving out my cards for years and I know that 90% of the people who take my card I'll never hear from again. So to hear from that many people that night, all of whom I've actually sat down with at least once, a couple more than once is encouraging. I think information is everywhere but I read. One of the things I will tell people is that you gotta at least glance through the paper paper because there are things in the paper paper that you don't see glancing on your devices. I go to websites as well as Facebook. I have created databases. I email a lot of people and there are people in here who can say Candelary has sent me an internship, a job, an article. So I have on my personal outlook, I have list of photographers. I have list of writers. I have list of different people. I have something called Info for Children. So everybody I know who has a child, I have one for teenagers. And I just like when I go from this, if I've gotten a couple of cards, I'll figure out what list you should add to. And as I see information that might be interesting to you, I share. So I would say that the number one thing that I think in terms of both career paths, and I'd like for you all maybe to talk a little bit more about your careers at larger institutions as well as creating social capital, networking and connecting is to follow through. A lot of people will be given a card or will be introduced to somebody and either because time sucks us up and we're all so busy or because we get shy, like okay now I've got his card, what do I possibly say? To actually do the follow, the follow through is what really makes people move forward and being willing to read people's resumes, read people's cover letters, read people's grant applications and just share because a lot of times people, when I was younger, I probably would have done more quicker if somebody had just told me well this is sort of the right way you approach this and a lot of times I didn't know and I had to really look from a distance to say, oh I admire Myron, so I'm too shy to ask Myron if she would talk to me but maybe I'll just sort of look and see how I can learn a lot of what she does. So I'm really curious about career paths and what you would say your career paths have been and how you find information. And my final comment with that, I think that having the jobs list that Nat puts out has been very important to know that there's at least one place you can look where there are all these different people feeding opportunities to it. Thanks. That's great advice, I just wanna echo that. Just following through is so important but also recognizing who you meet today, don't dismiss, we live so day to day that we don't realize you might see this person six years from now or 10 years from now or 20 years from now and the number of times where I met somebody years ago and then it was like a coffee and never met again and then like 10 years later it's like my colleague or something, I don't know. You can't predict that, predict who's in your life and it's just a quick story. Corey Booker did a commencement and he was just telling a story of how there was a crying baby and the mother and it was embarrassed and he was just a kind person to this mother and this baby and then like 15, 20 years later when he was running for XYZ, he gets a letter from the mother with a donation and then the son or daughter volunteered on his campaign. Like those simple acts are just so, you can't measure them. Just my career path is your typical millennial story. But my point being I jumped around a lot intentionally and there's been studies saying that jumping around in earlier in your career is important to understand what you appreciate and whatnot. So I come from sort of a startup world, a couple business accelerators, two years at a national policy organization, two years at another startup and all that sort of different cross-sector experience of business, nonprofits and government wasn't intentional but has given me a lot of sort of the perspective of how I lead my work and not just exhuming my day-to-day responsibilities but the empathy whether it's nonprofits or philanthropy or et cetera because I got to work in that day-to-day it's I guess built up my authenticity. So the other part I just sort of what shaped my careers I never really think ahead of my career I just try to do good work and a lot of times in our careers we think about the next thing but the best way in my perspective of networking or advancing your career is just like do your job great right now and then doors open up because every opportunity that's been presented to me has been because at least I trick people into thinking that I've been doing good work. So at least pretend to do good work and see where it happens but that would be by autobiography or memoir I guess. Well mine is a great deposition because I started at John Hancock straight out of college and I was there for 12 years. You're loyal. So I did not shop around and I had many opportunities within that time it was important to me if I remained there to have a new role or at least some upward mobility every two years I had even if I, you know the next job I had been doing that role for three years before I got the title I some new project or something. So there is a way to stay at an organization for a good amount of time and make sure your skill set continues to evolve and you don't get stale. I started out as a stock analyst and then the great recession happened and that pushed me serendipitously into corporate philanthropy and that's when I was able to embrace really complex challenges like workforce development and poverty alleviation and how to be a good strategic supporter and empathetic funder. So that was my career trajectory until ending business school I wanted to spend more time and strategy and that's what I'm doing now and on this side I have one client that I work with who I'm helping as a thought partner for their philanthropic work. So I'm able to continue to use that muscle. I just want to just echo what Yasmin said. Somehow I got to become the token millennial in a lot of conversations and people asked me for my advice like how do I manage millennials, et cetera and because we're both like the most narcissistic but also the most compassionate generation ever so it's like, you know but the one thing that I think is consistently true is what Yasmin said is that even working at a company it's not about work sometimes it's good to work for like a social impact driven organization people think like oh millennials want to do social impact every day but it's more about personal professional growth and that happens in the two, three year sprints usually. So it's not that millennials want to jump around from job to job to job it's that they want to be perpetually challenged. So from a manager perspective it's like, okay two years probably getting a little you probably master that skill set what can we do next? And if you can't change it up in that thing maybe it's best for that person to leave and you should be proud, right? So that's honestly of all like the millennial trends generalizations, et cetera that I would say is probably in my opinion the truest. I agree with Justin said that you do the best job you can wherever you are doing that job I think that's just good work sense. I'm not gonna give the number of years that I've been at anything because then I start giving away my age and I'm not gonna do that today. But I knew I was going to be a performer I'm a musician but I also knew I wanted to be an educator and so I've moved between those two roles my entire career path. Started my teaching career in Chicago in the public schools moved to the University of Northeastern Illinois University to do teacher training of music teachers. When we moved to Boston from Chicago I landed in that space of arts administration just by a phone call and so that's the space where at that point there was not this degree for arts administration there was not this roadmap for arts administration we made it up as we went along we planted those stakes and we created those jobs but still in that very much always educating always in that administrative space and moving into the Boston public schools again having the opportunity to be both that educator and that administrator. So I'm not sure if that was a planned career path but I always knew that my goal was to take what I loved my passion and my passion is music education music arts education in general but to take that passion and make it what I did every day and so I've been fortunate enough to do that and I think along the way I have impacted lives I have impacted opportunities and I have hopefully been a mentor and have thought more about how do I then leave that legacy being that there are people who come behind me who can continue the work and who feel like that whatever step I gave them you know it was a step that was pretty solid and they could stand on it. I don't think you have to hope so I actually knew of Myron before I met her in person because I know one of her mentees and when we would talk about what would be next in her career she would talk about her conversations with Myron Park of Brass and it wasn't until being in a meeting somewhere you walked into the room so you definitely are a mentor so thank you, that's good to hear I just met her 20 minutes an hour ago she's my mentor too so that makes me feel good so we are at time so any last comments to our audience about how we keep this conversation going besides passing out cards and giving them to Kendra I'll you know on its first I just want to say thank you to Katherine and Arts Boss and ICA and Vicki and I generally mean that you know the success of this region needs to include the arts and culture creativity perspective so if there's something that we can partner on from the lens of the business community I'm very open to it it's not as gonna happen the night and day but we need to push our business leaders to respect the arts and culture as a mandatory versus like a nice to have so I have business cards etc and very much look forward to continue that conversation yeah and thank you for having me here this evening I really believe in what we're doing which is you know support this sector you know you know from the ground up and from the top down and from this you know outside in so continue to engage folks who are you know outside of the sector continue to engage the leaders and put pressure on them continue to support you know the grassroots organizations who are doing you know the front line very tough work well thank you for joining us this evening thank you so can you hear me thank you so much everyone we really do appreciate you being here this evening and again thank you thank you thank you to Marion Parker-Braz to Justin Kang and to Yasmin Cruz for just being kind enough to be here and to talk about your experiences and to share with us this evening so we are really appreciative of that thank you again I was going to run one more round of applause please and again I do want to thank all of you for coming out this evening and for the really great insights that you shared yourselves and maybe a couple of things that I'd like to leave you all with and maybe challenge you all as well like Justin is currently in a challenge to do one new creative arts experience every month maybe something that we can do either individually or collectively with with our peers or people that we work with is to challenge them to have an arts experience in a space that they're not used to going into right we need to cross the rivers or the one river that we have right you know well that's true we can cross the mystic too but we do as a community need to be really sort of inclusive of not just our neighborhoods but other neighborhoods that we don't typically find ourselves in and we really need to be mindful of why we don't find ourselves in those neighborhoods and what our perceptions are of those neighborhoods which are often very wrong right and so I challenge you all to think about you know going not just the Arts of Boston calendar to see what's happening what's out there but really just taking that initiative to get all that information to get on all those mailing lists to read magazines that you don't typically read and to just be well informed because the more informed we are the better off we are as a society and hopefully the more inclusive we can be as well that being said I do want to mention one thing and one of the reasons again why we have been having these conversations around leaders leaders of color in the arts leaders of color who are allies who are really doing this work is because the narrative that there aren't enough qualified leaders of color or enough qualified arts administrators of color is still a narrative that exists in Boston and certainly not just in Boston with some of our other peers who are in other cities that have networks like this and we've been thinking long and hard about how do we obviously change that narrative by certainly having these spaces and these conversations but by also putting together programming that we think can be in support of young leaders of emerging leaders and mid-level career leaders as well and so one of the things that I've been working on this past year is to really think about how we can formalize this path and how we can be sort of create a mentorship and sponsorship program. Now there's research that's out there that says that women and people of color are, they are over mentored and yet they are undersponsored and there's a really big difference between a sponsor and a mentor both of which are very valuable experiences and people to have in your corner but a sponsor really is someone who is going to be willing to put that seat for you at the table who is really going to make sure and to look at your career track where you want to go the communities that you want to serve and make sure to open those doors for you and so we are in development right now putting together a sponsorship and mentorship program that we do hope that we will be able to launch in a couple of months so we're gonna take the summer to really figure it out and find some good funding for it because that's also very important and beyond that I do also want to shout out to your point about the arts as a really strong economic driver which is very, very true even here in Boston. So in 2014 Arts Boston put out a report called the Arts Factor that showed the economic impact of the arts in Boston. You can feel of the arts experiences that people do in one year in Boston you can feel Fenway Park over 488 times. So we are out there and we are doing great work and the city of Boston itself has the highest number of arts organizations per capita than any other metro city in this country. So we're out there and that's information that we've been sharing and information to people here and we're really happy to be able to actually update the report this year to be able to have that available so when that comes out I expect that all of you are gonna share it because again we need to make sure that our various communities and cross sectors are aware of the impact of the arts not just as the arts being a luxury but also really being a power player in the economic community here. Finally, I'd like to invite you all downstairs into the former cafe area which I know is called something else now. The common room. We have a little bit of nosh down there for all of you and our lovely panelists and moderator will also be down there as well if you have some follow up questions and if you didn't get your beverage ticket please let us know because I wanna make sure that you did get that as well. So thank you all for coming out this evening and we appreciate your time.


Welcome to this fifth podcast of Robustly Beneficial. Today, we're going to discuss the first chapter of PhD thesis from EPFL, which is called Preference Learning from Comparisons by Luca Mestre, who graduated two years ago, 2018. And I usually very enjoy reading the introduction of PhD thesis, because people usually make an extra effort to have this general overview on the problem, which is very, very nice. And this one is, I think, of particular interest to AI safety. Yeah, indeed, because for the field of AI safety, learning preferences of human is a central point of solving the problem of AI risk. It's called an alignment problem, basically. Having algorithms, because we can't directly specify human preferences, because it's too complex. Having an algorithm that query humans for information and learns what are our preferences. This actually is an old problem, a very old problem, I guess, but it's also like the first models were quite old, like 100 years old. And the first basic model was by Thurston. I don't remember his first name, but Thurston, who had this very simple model. I really like the model. It's based on the fact that if you just observe people, you just query people, and whenever people tell you something, it was always consistent and meaningful, then I guess it would be easier to do this preference learning. But one of the great difficulties about humans is that we often change our minds. If it's a weakness or something good, but you have to take into account that, depending on context, on numerous extraneous factors, we often change our minds. So we need to model also this uncertainty. And the basic model by Thurston is that we have these preferences, these cardinal preferences, that we have a score for different options. And whenever we face with a choice, then there's some added uncertainty, but maybe for this time, there's some noise that's added. So that's the noise model. And because of this noise, there's some uncertainty about what the user is going to say he prefers. And basically, you can use this to then learn the preferences, even though the revealed preferences are inconsistent. I think this was a nice model. And basically, the intuition is that the further away two options are, so if you have a two very distinct, like clearly a clear preference between two options, for instance, killing all of mankind at once and saving all of mankind at once, then you should not hesitate. And it's smaller than essentially no uncertainty. But if it's very, very similar, then maybe you're going to flip often between the two options. Yes. To explain this better, maybe this model is also used for ranking chess players. And you can understand that if two chess players are very different in terms of level, then we would be sure with nearly close to 100% priority that the better one is going to win. But if they have very similar levels, then we are very unsure. And another possibility for this noise to come is not necessarily because we are inconsistent and change our mind, but it could also be that we want to measure the preferences of the population and people disagree within this population. So if we pick at random in this population and ask preferences between A and B, it might be that for proportion of the population, they prefer B. Another, they prefer A and N. What this model would be doing is actually evaluating this preference and generalizing to create a ranking of a larger number of possibilities. So what's nice in the introduction of the pageant thesis is that there's an application of this to determine how awful different crimes are. But it's very old data, so I think the things that are very weird to us, like for instance, adultery or seduction or abortion also are extremely bad for these people, maybe we would disagree now. Maybe we don't have the same preferences as the one we used to have. Yeah, that's true. One question that's quite interesting is why learning preferences based on comparisons and not on something else, for example, we could learn your preference by asking you to score every alternatives. So the answer to that is that it's very easy for us to, when we look at two things, say between A and B, which one we prefer. But the other task of assigning a score to one possibility without looking at all the other alternatives is a much more difficult task. So for example, there was also this work where they would learn an objective function for neural network based on comparison included by humans. And the example they use is for example, getting a small virtual animal to do a backflip where it's a very difficult task to write an objective function. What does it mean to do a right backflip? But simply by showing to humans approximately maybe a thousand of examples of different moves, they would learn from this comparison. It's easy to tell which one is the best backflip between two examples. Yeah, and I guess there's another historical example which is the one that Mark Zuckerberg used. I think it was called Face Match. That was not very ethical, but he basically proposed to students at Harvard to rank how pretty different girls were on campus. And the way he did this was using this comparison asking for people, I guess, male students' inputs on this question. Yeah, so this turns out to be quite effective. I'm not sure it's the ultimate, like maybe it's still better to combine it with other methods, but when you have very preferences that are very complex to describe, like for instance, why is it that the crime is really awful? That's not easy when you're trying to explain this. Well, it turns out that using comparisons is a much more practical way to go. Now, a lot of the whole physics is actually based on an assumption that we may question, which is disputed, which is independence from irrelevant alternatives. So the assumption is that if I give you choices A, B, and C, A and B first, then maybe you prefer A to B if I just give you, if you have to choose between A and B. But if I now add option C, so you now have to choose between A, B, and C, then it seems irrational to certainly change your mind and now prefer option B over A and C. And that's at least the assumption that's made throughout the thesis. So it's a bit more precise than this. It's more like the fraction of the time you're going to choose A over B. In the first case, it's the same as the fraction of time you're going to choose A over B in the second case. So that's independence from irrelevant alternative. And it's really a central assumption in all of this work. But so actually, it turns out that empirical psychology shows that this does not hold, in practice. Yeah, it's easy to propose alternatives to people and showing that this doesn't hold anymore. Yeah. So yeah, so there's examples from Dan Ariely. He talked about this at some point in his book, at least, where you have this kind of proposals and people switched, like they use, if there's only A and B, they say they prefer A, but if there's A, B and C, they go for B. And so this was an important question, like is the model flawed or should we still use the model? Is the model trying to capture something that's correct for perhaps all irrationality? So yeah, we did a poll yesterday in our reading group and essentially everybody agrees to say that it was irrational to have this switch of preferences and it's better for the model to learn something consistent. So I don't know if maybe some people disagree with this, but at some point there's a difference between just describing people's preferences and something that you actually want in the objective function of an algorithm, I guess. Sorry, what do you mean by this? So because one of the basic idea you would say, if you want to solve alignment, then you should make sure that the objective function of the algorithm is the one that a human would have. But arguably, like the human would flip, depending on what sets of choices you propose. And I guess we all agree yesterday that this was not what we should do, that we should not follow human's preferences. So somehow the way I see it is that we should not follow human's behavior because the behavior is irrational and still the preferences they, I don't see, like we discussed yesterday, I don't see how preferences could be irrational in some sense, but yeah. Yeah, so I guess there's a terminology problem as well. At least we can say that reveal the preferences of people, what people say they prefer is often inconsistent. There was like this example that we gave, all the examples were depending on how you phrase the question people answer differently, even though it's a different one. In irrational preferences, in some cases, you would end up spending a lot of energy to actually not change anything if you have a cycle that you prefer B to A, C to B and A to C. Usually, if you have some irrationality, someone could trick you into proposing these alternatives, for which you would always agree to pay a little bit of money to change and in the end you continue to pay and you turn in a circle. Yeah, so imagine you have a very, very powerful algorithm and it's able to move from A to B, but it has to kill a cat to do, or a kitten to do this, a kitten or a cuter. And the same from B to C and the same from C to A. So the algorithm would just loop between A, B and C and killing a lot of kittens in the process. And that seems undesirable. Yeah, so that's why I am, as we said yesterday, it seems totally fine to model preferences that are perfectly rational and fit a small set of axioms that we want the definition of preferences to follow. And consider that what we observe from humans' behavior is something slightly different than what we would observe from true preferences. Yeah, so I would say like the IAA, so the independent from irrevent alternatives is false for humans, but it shouldn't be false for algorithms. Yeah. Yeah, another thing we discussed yesterday is the noise model. Like the fact that in this, like the way I described the Thurston model for instance, was that there was some added noise to your preferences. So like there's like the true preference plus some noise, but there may be some other kind of noise model we can use. Typically when people are using the internet, sometimes they just misread things or click randomly or arbitrary on some buttons. And so you should expect or you have trolls as well. And so you should expect that there's also a fraction of the data that are just like completely nonsensical. Yeah. And that's not something that's modeled at least in Thurston's model and probably something that we should take care of. But there's a very natural way to do this from robust statistics, which is something we already discussed in this podcast. And robust statistics is basically doing this. Sometimes it's called like adversarial learning or something like this, where you have, when you imagine an adversary, but it's like it's not necessary an actual adversary. It can be just like people doing something wrong. And you get this bad data which we can call adversarial or not, but we have to be robust to this kind of noise. Yes. The specific problem we had with this model is that the noise converts to 0% or 100%. I mean, the priority with which we expect some observation converts to 0 or 100%. But... As the difference between the two options go to... Are different. But we expect like if people use smartphone for example that at least 1% of the time or 2% of the time, they would mistakenly put their finger on the wrong side of the question. So we expect that in a practice, we would not observe from human something that has really converging to 0% probability. Yeah. Yeah, and like the robust statistical framework fits in naturally, especially if you do some gradient descent which is like standard for many algorithms. Like when you do learning, it is often gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent. And you have this step where you take, you have an estimation of the gradient which is an average of all the data. And instead of using the average over all the data here, you can use some robust estimator and that fixes this problem nicely. Another thing we talked, we didn't talk a lot about this, but I think it's like it's very nice. It's actually really the point of the thesis this trade-off between different forms of efficiencies. So there's, you can call it, it's called statistical efficiency in the thesis which is like how well you doing your inference of the parameters or how good the model is essentially, the performance of the model. Of course, this is important. Like you want to actually learn the preferences and not something very different. But in practice, there are other constraints that you have. One is that you have limited computational power. So you also need a pragmatic algorithms that are fast. And this is especially hard because the ideal framework that is presented in the thesis, and it's my favorite one, is like using Bayesian inference. But Bayesian inference for this kind of problem is often very intractable because you quickly have, well, you have to imagine, well, it's a lot of computations. Maybe you can talk about Bayesianism at some point with some people, but yeah, it's not doable. So you need efficient algorithms. And so typically in the thesis, there's a search for algorithms that are going to be quasi-linear in the number of options, for instance. Okay? So quasi-linear, it means that if you have one billion videos, for instance, to rank from top to favorite, from, yeah, I was going to say top from top to favorite, but rather from top to bottom, then if you have to do this ranking, then you want the computational power to be proportional, essentially, to the number of videos you're considering. And this may seem fine at first, like for, but if you think about it, actually, even for videos on YouTube, it's already quite impractical. If you have to do this for every user, for every, well, that's a lot of computations already. Yeah, and in that case, when there are any attempts to be ranked, how many observations from the user do they require? Is it they require N times log N observations? So that's the third kind of efficiency, which is called data efficiency. How many data points do you need? So it's also sometimes called a sample complexity. And yeah, so it's actually part of the thesis. So I discuss what they discuss, so-called active learning. Active learning is when you're optimizing as well, the way you're querying information. So you're choosing, for instance, the comparisons that you want inputs on. And they propose an algorithm that's N log N, so it's quasi-linear in the number of inputs. So it needs N log N data. And if you think of YouTube, it's not doable. You cannot have a... I think that YouTube receives approximately this amount of data. But not from each user. Yeah, from the whole population. From the whole population. You can do a ranking of all YouTube videos according to the whole population, but that's not what really is of greatest interest to YouTube because they want to customize a recommendation. Yeah, specifically in the case of a recommender system, the model described in the thesis, it generalized to more than comparison.  So for example, when YouTube proposes to you 10 videos, there is one you choose to watch. And so the model of comparison is also can easily be adapted to this scenario. Yeah. Another thing that comes to my mind here is that if you have a set of videos proposed to you, like the ranking, the order in which they appear is critical. You barely see the last videos, really. So this violates like the IIF, what's really related to the independence of... Well, it's kind of the independence of your element alternatives, but it's like more... I guess you can model this as the noise that I did in your preferences. I don't know, I guess. Yeah. But maybe you should also actually model this rather than just assume that it's some noise. Yeah, I think that's what we did on YouTube. Last few months ago, we... There was a talk from someone from YouTube recommendation and yeah, it told us that it makes a big difference, like a huge... Most people click on the recommendations, but most people click also on the first three or first four items recommended. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, another thing we talked about yesterday, which is, I guess, more theoretical, but I think it's very important eventually. It's going to be important eventually, is that the other basic framework of these sort of scoring systems of preferences, trying to find a score for every alternative, is like the von Neumann-Morganstein theory. And in particular, there's a theorem by von Neumann-Morganstein, so the von Neumann-Morganstein theorem, that says that every consistent preferences over probabilistic choices, if you consider that there's uncertainty, then you want to be consistent with these probabilities. Then the only way to do this is equivalent, the obturism-orphism, is equivalent to giving scores to the different options. But the scores in this setting have a very precise meaning. Let me, if you have option A, which is as UTT 0 and option B, which has UTT 1, then if you have option C, which has UTT 0.9, it means that you are indifferent, you like as much the case where you have option C with probability 1 and probability A and B with probability 10% and 90%. So it has a very precise meaning, which seems very different from the one that, from the noise model of Thorsten's models and the different models that are studied in the PhD thesis. And this really raises the question, like is there a link between these two, like is it okay to use the scores we learned using the models of the thesis and then do some expectation of the maximization of the UTT as it's done in the von Neumann-Morgenshtern framework? Yeah, so the question, like I haven't really investigated this or maybe there are some published research about this, but I don't know about them. Yeah, I think one of the difficulties is learning these parameters from the von Neumann-Morgenshtern because if people can be inconsistent easily when we ask them simple comparisons, they are also studies that shows that they, when they need to choose their preference based on some probability judgment, they also do it in a very wrong way. A simple example for this is asking people whether they prefer to receive one or five million, receive one million with probability 100% or five million with probability 80%. Here we see most of the people prefer to receive one million with probability 100%, it's completely fine. But then when we ask a second question, which is do you prefer one million with four percent probability or five million with, I don't know, one million with five percent probability or five million with a four percent probability, here people switch their preference. But so this is actually irrational to switch your preference. It means that your preference don't fit with the laws of four priorities. And the reason why is that the second case is exactly the first thing as a first case with the added option that with 95% probability, you will not be playing. So the second case is simply with five percent probability, you would be in the first case and 95% probability, you will do nothing. So if you are rational, you should make the same choice in the first and second case. This is not what we also have from people. Yeah, that's called the alias paradox. And yeah, I guess again it raises the question like, okay, humans are inconsistent with the laws of probabilities, but should algorithms be so as well? Probably not, I'd say. And it's a difficulty. And I guess this leads us to the question like more generally, what are the preferences that we really should implement in the algorithms? Like what should be the objective function of the algorithms? Should it really be our preferences or reveal preferences, I'd say? Well, probably not. I'm going to say it. If there's an international democratic vote tomorrow about, I don't know, climate change or whatever, some controversial topic, like I would not be very confident that the result will be robustly beneficial for mankind. So yeah, it raises the sort of like the limitation of just doing preference learning. Maybe there's something deeper and the other example I always give is like, I have these preferences when I'm on YouTube. That main, like typically when YouTube is suggesting a football video to me, I have a preference to click on this video rather than this robustly beneficial podcast video just below. But I would not necessarily want to have these preferences, like sometimes called a preference of second order or volition. And maybe this volition is, the volition is sometimes described as what you would prefer to prefer if you thought longer, was smarter, spend more time studying and more thoughtful and more caring about the world and stuff like this. Then you would get this volition which is likely to be quite different from the preferences. And this was the question like, when you're doing preference learning, are you learning people's instinctive preferences of the moment, like the system one preferences which we may regret later on? And should we not learn something more fundamental? Because like doing preference learning in the end, if you think about it, that's what YouTube is doing every day. And like we argue, or at least I argue that this is not what YouTube should be doing. So in some sense, I am against doing just preference learning. But then there's this question like, how do you learn something deeper than the preferences? How do you do volition learning? And I think this is like a very, very important question. And like the set of papers that I know that really propose algorithms to do this that I know of is equal to zero, unfortunately. Okay. So I'd say that we really need to think or to reflect on algorithms to do this. Yeah, and I think there are ways to make progress. Thank you. I think it's going to be very hard to identify exactly what we mean by volition. But maybe we should not be too ambitious at least right now, like we should just make step-by-step progress. And one progress I can think of is that instead of just looking at what people click on when they're on YouTube, whether they probably are more or less in a passive mode or in a zombie-like mode, like you just click on the next video. Arguably these are not like the true preferences you have. Like these are results of some kind of addiction or zombie mode. And if you can distinguish this from the something that's small akin to what you would search for instance online or what you would answer when you are queried in a very formal manner, like in a very serious manner. In this setting you have, maybe you express different preferences than the one you express by clicking on videos. Yeah, I think YouTube is already doing something quite similar to what you described. The day after you watch a video, it's sometimes asked very rarely, what do you think of this video after thinking about it for one day, was it a positive experience for your YouTube experience or negative one? Yeah, and another thing is that on YouTube, whenever there's a recommendation, you can actually, there's a button on the top right of the video, you can click on it and there's an option where you can say, I'm not interested in this content. And full acknowledgement like, I actually did this for you for football videos. So the example of football videos of YouTube suggesting football videos to me is a fake news because I don't have any more this kind of recommendations. And arguably this kind of input that I give to YouTube is, should be more like a poet in the learning of the preferences, this corresponds much more likely to my evolution rather than what I click on. And I think YouTube is doing this, as you said. I think YouTube cares a bit about this. But like I feel the academic world is not there. Like we should try to propose algorithms and ideas and probably work with psychologists also to better understand what we want algorithms to be learning from us. Yeah, so one thing we discussed also yesterday is that with the research in psychology we can know systematic ways in which a human reveal preference diverge from their evolution or form some sort of rational preferences. And if we know a lot of, if we understand much better this process from what human truly prefers to what they say they prefer or to what behavior they show, then we can hope to compute the inverse function and from the behavior detect what the other preferences. Yeah, that would be one approach. The other approach we discussed is in terms of counterfactual. So the variation would be, so if I follow what I said earlier like would be what you would prefer if you thought longer or like learn more. And this is like a counterfactual view. So it's a counterfactual thought experiment. And there's research about doing counterfactuals. Arguably if you change things in the latent space of the neural networks or if you, so being a bit technical here, maybe you can have some sort of ways to describe this kind of counterfactuals inside even the neural networks. Maybe there are better structures to do this counterfactual reasoning. But yeah, that would be another way to try to compute something closer to evolution. Definitely research direction that I would want to see more investigated. Yeah, another thing we discussed yesterday is going back to this data and computation efficiency that we discussed. So having quasi-linear algorithm is good, is nice, but actually if you think of complex preferences like for instance, your preferences about whether a given video should be moderated or not, this is extremely hard to describe because the set of options on which you have a preference is exponential, like this is the set of all videos. So the set of all videos is actually very, very large. So it's like combinatorial, which means that it's something like two to the power, something big like two to the power, one billion. And so if you have a linear algorithm on this is completely useless. So you need sublinear algorithms and what's pretty nice in the thesis is that the last chapter seems to have nothing to do with preferences because it's about football predictions. But actually like the two are essentially the same and one thing that they try to do is to, so one of the problems they had in this last chapter is that they wanted to make predictions for football games between national teams. And the thing is that national teams in football don't pay that often, so you don't have a lot of data about them. And arguably you can, there's a sense in which you have sublinear data. There are many more imaginable games than there are data about these games. And so you need a sublinear algorithm. And another thing is that they, what they did is they leverage also the fact that there are a lot of games that are not national teams, that are clubs, but they have the same players as in the national teams. And so they use this to do some inference. And the trick to do this is to use a kernel method. So a kernel method, the idea is that you're going to use the similarity between some data you have and some events you're trying to predict. And if they are very similar, then you're going to say that you're going to make the same prediction as for the data. And the similarity metric that they use is essentially if there's a game between team A and team B, then to predict, if it turns out that the next game is between A prime and B prime, and if it turns out that the players in A and A prime are roughly similar and the players between B and B prime are roughly similar, then you should expect the same kind of results out of these games. So they call it the player kernel for obvious reasons. And this allows generalization using only sublinear data points, which is very nice. This is very similar to how we come at the system, anticipate our preferences and know on which items and video we are going to click, because each video is represented in the latent space of few features, and for each participant, it knows what features they prefer most and they recommend video in line with this. Yeah, yeah, because there's some equivalence, essentially from near equivalence, it's not really an equivalence between feature learning and kernel methods. And so the basic idea, so feature learning is that you have this complex thing. So it can be an image, it can be all the characteristics, you know, of a football game that is going to come. It can be the video you want to know whether you're going to moderate or not. So it's a very complex object. It's very hard to analyze. What we do quite often is we use a neural network to sort of synthesize the information and to represent it and then it's represented as a vector, it's called a vector representation. And then you can say that two complicated objects, so two football games, for instance, will be similar if the vector representation are similar. And it's similar in a very precise sense. Maybe you can take, for instance, the scallop product and the scallop product is large. Then it means that the two are roughly the same. And this is actually very similar to some very basic kernel where you, well, yeah, it's very similar to, and it's way to implement a sort of kernel. Okay, and another thing I guess we discussed by doing so is that once you do so, you can actually, because a lot of the applications I've seen so far, actually all the applications I've seen so far are these kinds of methods. Suppose that there's this feature representation that's done automatically by some neural network. And there's no longer any learning of the neural network. Like you have a fixed neural network, so you have a fixed feature representation or you have a fixed kernel. But what you could do, I guess, is you can actually learn also the feature representation that's going to be able to explain a lot of the way people have different preferences. And so my intuition about this, maybe it's wrong, but the intuition I have and all the people had yesterday is that if you do this for, use the same feature learning for different users that have different preferences, then the vector representations will have in itself encoded, in a sense, like all the different ways people look at the problem, in a sense, the space is going to be stretched according to what people care about, in a sense. And maybe this can be much easier to interpret. Which is something we did not really discuss a lot yesterday, but it's going to be a big problem at some point, like you want to trust that the algorithm that has learned your preferences actually learned your preferences. And this may be very hard. And this could be a way to gain trust in the fact that these models are actually learning or volitions or something like this. Yeah, and I specifically mattered in the case of hate speech moderation. Because some people would want to reject some different kind of speech, like if it's something said about religion, it could not matter at all for some group of people, but be very important for another group. So that's why we expect some latent features in the dataset on which we learn the preferences that would be very not correlated from one user to another. Yeah, yeah. I think this could be very interesting as well to gain insight into not only the algorithm, but also like human preferences in general. Yeah, so I can find this reading very interesting. Like I didn't know that much about any of this before reading this thesis, and I found it very interesting. Yeah, I hope we'll see you next time. Next time, we're going to discuss something that's quite different. Like we're going to discuss autonomous weapons, which are a very big deal in AI safety because they can be very... They can kill. They can kill. Yeah, so I hope we'll see you next time.