Okay, it is July 15th. We are in Beacon's Field. We are with Dr. Tarasoff and the interviewer, as usual, will be William McCrae. So, we're gonna begin with just some basic questions. So, could you please state your full name? You know, I'm Peter Tarasoff and I'm 81. I was born in April 11th, 1934. And where were you born? I was born in Montreal, but brought up in Verdun, which at that time was a separate municipality on the island of Montreal. And as a child, what did your parents do? My parents were immigrants. My mother came to Canada from what was then Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic, and my father from Russia. He got caught up in the Civil War following the Russian Revolution. And there's quite a story there, but that'd be for some other time. But he came to this, I do want to mention, he came to this country age 17, no family, just by himself with some other boys who had been in the same military school, and made his way. And they came here escaping the conflict? Is that really what that was? Well, my father, my mother, just joined a sister that was already here. So as I say, I grew up in Verdun. I went to a public school there. It was called Banditine School, Verdun High School, and subsequently went on to university. As a child, I was always interested in natural history and science in one way or another, particularly my particularly interests were rocks and minerals and fossils. And that's where I got started in my application that continues to this day. I went from high school. I went to McGill University. At that time, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do, but it was basically a choice between geology, mining engineering, and metallurgical engineering. And in the summer of 1953, I was hired by the Geological Survey of Canada as a field assistant on a survey crew working in the Yukon Territory. The leader of our crew was Bob Boyle, Dr. R. W. Boyle, who's famous as one of the eminent geol's chemists in Canada. And our job was to do a preliminary survey of the mines and mineral deposits. These are lead silver deposits. And so I spent the summer doing field surveying, doing the usual thing, walking up and down hills, looking at rocks, fighting mosquitoes and black flies in the bush. And I had already been in the first year of engineering at that time. And one of our requirements was to write an essay on our summer experience, a summer, they call it a summer essay. So I decided to write an essay about the mineralogy of one of the silver mines. Mine was called Belkino Mine, which interestingly has been reopened in recent years. And so I started working on the summer essay. And Bob Boyle was my sort of advisor, mentor, coach. He really taught me how to write technical reports. And we'll get to this later. But he was one of the people I looked at as having influenced my life. Anyways, the long shot of it was that I decided that geology in the field wasn't for me. And I don't know, I was just maybe I'm not sure that I wanted to spend my life fighting the bush. And also mining engineering. Now mine, we did some underground work as well. And one of my jobs at summer was to do some maps of the underground workings in one of the mines. And so I got to interface a bit with one of the mining engineers. And I had sort of second thoughts about mining engineering. And so when I got back to university was metallurgical engineering. Now I should step back a few years, I would say more than a few years. But my father, when he came to Canada, started out as a farm worker, and then worked in the forestry industry, and then into mining. And he spent a number of years as a miner in the Kirkland Lake gold mines. And from Kirkland Lake, he went to Nurenden. He worked actually for Nurenden mines years before I joined Nurenden. And his last job there was on the crew, sinking the number two shaft. So I already had somebody in my family, my father, who had been in the industry. And in fact, he was an influence on me in several ways. But one of them, he talked about his mining experiences. And he talked about rocks and so forth. So that helped you with your... And he had a few samples to show me. So that got me further interested. Anyways, going back to McGill, it's a great university. I was in the metallurgical engineering stream. But at that time, mining metallurgy was together because it was a small department. And from there, eventually went on to graduate school. But I do want to go back to high school, because my first job was when I was 16, I worked as a junior drassman for Crane Limited. Crane Limited was a manufacturer of plumbing supplies, valves and the like, and had a plant in Montreal. It was a foundry. And so the first summer I worked with them was as a junior drassman. But the next two summers, I went to the plant and worked in their control laboratory where, among other things, I got to testing samples of the metals in terms of their various physical properties. The foundry was a brass foundry and also a cast iron foundry. So I was exposed to metallurgy right there before I even went to university. And so I had some early experience related to metallurgy. When I got to McGill and after my first year, first summer in the UConn, the next summer, I worked for Quebec Iron and Titanium Corporation in Sorrel. And interestingly, at that time, I was hired by the research department, and the research director was none other than somebody called Jerry Hatch. And people in the mining metallurgical industry certainly recognize the nature of Hatch. Today is a major world engineering company, so I can say that I worked for Jerry way back when. And so I spent the following several summers working at QIT. How big was Hatch at that time? Well, Hatch wasn't... He was working for Quebec Iron and Titanium Corporation. He was our director of research. And a lot of people may not know that he was a major reason why QIT, as it's called now, became the successful company that it is. There were problems in the smelting of the Almanite ore, and Jerry Hatch was asked to figure out how to operate these furnaces so that they would do what they're supposed to do. And I should mention, at that time, QIT was controlled, owned by Kennecott Copper Corporation in the U.S., two-thirds, and New Jersey Zinc Company, one-third. And the furnaces that were being used there were modifications of something called a sterling furnace, which was used for trading zinc ore down in New Jersey. And adapting these furnaces to Tree of Almanite was a major problem. And so Jerry, with a crew, actually took over the operation of one of the furnaces. And eventually, he and his crew showed how to operate the furnace properly. And so this was one of his first accomplishments, one might say. Anyways, I had experience at that time in Almanite treatment as well, and was involved in some work on the, rather than smelting Almanite ore, treating it in a shaft furnace, a reduction furnace. And I got involved with some other projects that were quite interesting at the time. One of my mentors, as such, was Professor J. U. McEwen at McGill. He was the chairman of the department. And he always encouraged me in one way or another. And when I graduated from McGill in metallurgical engineering, it was Professor McEwen that suggested that I go on to graduate school. But he said, no, I don't think you should continue here at McGill. I think you should go to another university. And he said, probably you should go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Good school. What was the reason why he wanted you to leave? Because you'd get a different experience in university, which is important. Broadened your horizons for sure. And I ended up with a fellowship. It was called the Canakot Fellowship. And it was Professor McEwen that had a big hand in securing this fellowship for me. And I'm sure that Jerry Hatch was also involved, because at that time QIT, as I mentioned, was still controlled by Kenakot. And so then I went on to MIT. And at MIT, I was in what was called the Metallurgy Department and started out on a master's degree, but then continued on to a doctorate. And my research there was involved in the reaction between molten silicate. It was like a slag and a metal. It was a specifically reduction of silica from a silicate slag. What we were interested was what was called the kinetics of the reaction between a metal and a molten silicate. And in this case, it was silicon being reduced by aluminum. And interestingly, this project was in part sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission in the US, because at that time they were looking at ways of recovering or treating the product of nuclear reactors to separate the components. And they were looking at the possibility of reacting with a molten salt, as you would call it. And so this was of interest to them as the kinetics of the rate of reaction and the mechanism of reactions between a molten silicate or a salt and a molten alloy of could it be uranium or plutonium or what have you. So anyways, I graduated in 1962 and with a doctorate. And I had opportunities in the US, I had applied to various research laboratories that were metallurgically related.  Was that even a work in research? In research, not in an academic environment, but in an industry lab in a lab. And among the people that I talked to was Kennecott and Asarco and also US Steel Corporation and some others. But I decided I was going to come back to Canada. And anyways, I ended up at QIT in what was their research department, which is a very small department that's for a handful of people. And I was there for two years. And in 1964, I got a phone call from Dr. Thamelis, Nick Thamelis at Narendra Research Center. And the Narendra Research Center had just been open in 1963. It was started. And Nick Thamelis happened to be a fellow graduate of McGill in 1956. He was in chemical engineering and I was in metallurgical engineering, but but I knew him. And he asked me whether I'd be interested in joining them to spearhead a project on the continuous smelting and converting of copper concentrates to copper. And at that point, I wasn't very happy with my position at QIT. I felt I was being underutilized, frankly. And so I jumped at the opportunity to join Narendra. So that was my start with Narendra, which at that time was called Narendra Minds Limited. The Research Center had been established at the instigation of John Bradfield, who was president of Narendra Minds Limited. He felt that there was an opportunity for the company to advance its technology and its business success by having its own research laboratory. And it was decided to have the laboratory in Montreal, in part because of the proximity of McGill University, and also because Narendra at that time and still does had a copper refinery in Montreal East and a brass mill in Montreal East. So it was a good site for Research Center. Sorry, around what time was that? It was 1963. And how spread out was Narendra at that time? Like which other locations? Well, the major Narendra, of course, started as a copper gold mine. This is the horn mine. And then it expanded into lead and zinc. At that time, Brunswick Mining and Smelting was a subsidiary. There was Metogamy Lake mines and a zinc mine in Quebec. There was Brenda, which is a molybdenum mine in British Columbia. And the Narendra was sort of vertically integrated from mine to smelter refinery into brass mills and into products. It had produced copper tubing, copper wire. It had a plant near Armpire, which produced cladding for fuel elements for nuclear reactors. It got into aluminum as Narendra aluminum, which still exists in Missouri. And so it was a large sort of metallurgical mining metallurgical complex. And as a result, in fact, at the Research Center, we got involved in research in terms of processes and products of not only copper, but zinc and lead. Yeah, you had really the aluminum. So much choice of things to research. It was a broad range of projects. But key to the establishment of the center was to find a director. And they picked Dr. William H. Govav, Bill Govav, as we call them. He was a chemical engineer, established a reputation. He was a professor at McGill, but it also worked in an industry. And so it was his job to set up the Research Center and hire the people, the key people, and so forth. And in fact, earlier I mentioned Dr. Thamelis. He had been a graduate student of Dr. Govavans. And so he was hired to head up what was called the Chemical Engineering Department. The Research Center then was organized by discipline. So you had a Chemical Engineering Department, a Chemistry Department, Analytical Chemistry Department, Physical Metallurgy Department, and so forth. This eventually was changed. Anyways, so I was hired as project leader on the development of what became the Miranda process for copper smelting. And this entailed what we call semi-pilot plant scale tests. We actually operated a small furnace. The Research Center was in point clear.  Miranda at that time, I meant for my dimension, gas-baked copper, of course, was in the in the fold. And at Miranda, we had two reverberatory furnaces. And at gas bay, there was a reverberatory furnace. And this furnace had been built before I arrived at the Center to conduct some tests on the smelting of copper concentrates, in particular for gas-baked copper. And so we used this reverberatory furnace as the test bed, you might say, for the Miranda process. And this was on a scale of maybe we would smelt a tiner or so of copper concentrate. You have to visualize that the Research Center was in a suburb. There were houses around, very far away. And because we were producing a lot of SO2, I'm not sure that we should be talking about this. But at that time, you know, the environmental consciousness that we have today was not there really. We did have a scrubber, an elementary scrubber using sodium hydroxide and water to try to scrub out the SO2 from this furnace. But I'm sure if you went outside of the building, I know if you went outside the building, you could smell SO2. And one result was that we conducted our tests at night. We would start somewhere around midnight and run our tests during the night when the neighbors were all asleep. They wouldn't notice as much. They wouldn't notice as much. So this, well, this has all been published, you know, the description of this furnace and so forth. But the concept of the process was to continuously feed copper concentrate to a furnace and gradually smelt it to what we call copper matte, convert the copper matte to what's called copper white metal, which is copper sulfide, and then convert that to metallic copper in sort of a continuous manner. And so it was visualized that you would have a long vessel, cylindrical vessel with twiers, very similar to what was called, was known as a copper converter at the time, but a rather elongated copper converter. So it went ahead and you're feeding concentrate and in theory copper is coming out the other end, which eventually we did realize. But in the furnace that we had for our research purposes, we could use twiers. So we used lances. Sorry, what are twiers? Tweers are pipes which you use to inject air or oxygen enriched air into a molten bath. That's right. Yeah, twiers. The twier. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the twier in English, twier. For sure. And we used pipes which were covered with refractory to protect the metal pipe itself, which was high temperature stainless steel, and injected the air directly into a molten bath and fed copper concentrate into that. But we were able to show that we could simultaneously feed copper concentrate to a bath of matte and convert the matte to metallic copper. So at the end of a test, we would end up with a layer of slag, a layer of matte white metal was used copper sulfite and copper in the bath. Now we, of course, when the process was later piloted and eventually developed and used twiers, what I like to think is that we missed an opportunity at that time because we used these lances as a convenience because we didn't, we couldn't use twiers in this furnace. But many years later, there was a process developed in Australia they call the osmelt process for smelting copper concentrate, slag concentrates and alike in a vertical vessel, and they used a lance in that process. And had we had the foresight, we might have gone to using a lance for the process, but we didn't. But that's the nature of research sometimes. You don't really think about, well, why are we using this? Maybe we can use it in a different way. One thing that's important to note in the development of this process was that what I mentioned earlier that Dr. Wilhelm was a chemical engineer and Dr. Thamelis was a chemical engineer. Chemical engineers are used to processes that operate continuously. You feed the one end of a vessel and your product comes out the other end. Whereas at that time copper smelting and converting was what we call the batch process. You smelt it in one vessel, you transferred to another vessel and converted the mat to white metal and copper in a second vessel, and then probably had a third vessel, in fact, an anode furnace to further refine the copper and cast it into anodes, and that went to the copper refinery. And they said, well, why can't you do this continuously? And that was the germ of the idea. So the actual inventors of the patent for that were Nick Thamelis and Paul Spira, who was a colleague of mine at the time, and another chemical engineer. So this idea of transferring ideas from one discipline to another are very important. I think that's come to be recognized over the years that you need to see what's out there, what are different approaches that can be used to not have a sort of blinkers. Well, from being project leader on this project, I later became group leader in what was called the Economics and Process Development Department. Now, interesting, we had an economics group, a group that would look at the potential economics of any of the research projects that we were working on. Is it something that, if we're successful, what's the payout? Because it's very important that your research objectives meet a business need, and if they meet a business need, there has to be a return on the investment. So that was a continuous thing that we had a system of, we called it, investigation of new research ideas. It was some monies available for anybody in the research center who had an idea of doing something differently to run a few tests or experiments or even just a paper study to sort of develop the idea further. It could be, we call it blue sky research, it could be virtually on anything, as long as it had some relationship to Narendra's businesses. And so this was part of, if somebody had an idea, then at some point it was a project proposal made, but it had to have some business reasons. Okay, what were the potential benefits? Not in a lot of detail, but enough that there was potential, economic potential. It's interesting, you don't always hear about the research department being fused with an economics department, I guess, but it makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. But quite often the two are not talked about. That's right. Yeah. Anyways, in the economics and process development, the process development side came that the, that department, or these are all small departments, I must say, one of its mandates was to take something that was developed in the laboratory and prove it on a larger scale, a pilot plant scale. And at that time, Gaspé copper was looking at treating oxide copper. Now oxide copper, these are copper carbonates, copper silicates. They had a large tonnage of copper oxide in the copper body. And Gaspé copper was looking at, well, how can we treat this? This is not something that you can treat in a, in a smelter, sulfide concentrate smelter. And at the center, they looked at something leaching in the, this ore, copper or oxide ore with acid. And had shown that the oxide or it could be treated by acid leaching. And developed a interesting idea, which was to use bacterial leaching rather than straight acid leaching. There was some pyrite present in the ore, but you could also add pyrite. The bacteria would would attack the pyrite converted to sulfuric acid. And the sulfuric acid was then be used to leach out the copper carbonates in the ore. So the, this was bacterial called bacterial leaching. And there was, there were other companies looking at this, this as well. The initial work was done, we call columns, just a visualized a column of ore and you're passing solution through an acidic solution with these bacteria in it. But at Gaspé, we built a, a large heap. Now in the copper business, a heap was like a, a dump of ore. And you percolated your leaching solution through the dump and collected the effluent solution at the base, which could contain copper and process that to recover copper. So we built a large pilot heap leaching plant. And my responsibility was to, to manage, oversee the, the operation of this, this plant. And also at that time I got involved in, on the product side, the research center had developed a, a new iron alloy for producing balls used in ball mills and crushing, grinding ore. I, Miranda had a foundry in British Columbia called Ocean Foundries, which, which produced these grinding balls, as we call them. And the center had developed an improved grinding ball that had better resistance, would last longer and therefore reduce the cost of, of grinding.  So I was involved in that as well. How, if, if I don't know if you know, but what, what would be a regulator, the lifespan of a regular ball at the time, compared to the ones you were working on? That I wouldn't remember. That was a long time ago. Anyways, I think we can just moving on. I later was head of the chemical engineering department, which was primarily involved with process development, using pyro metallurgy, high temperature processes, both for treating copper concentrates, was in the process, of course, lead concentrates. We had even looked at applying in a random process to treatment of nickel concentrates, and, and, and so forth. And later, well, I went up through the ranks. And was eventually I was appointed assistant director. And in 1988, I succeeded Dr. Govan as director of research and development. By that time, the research center had about 140 personnel, 70 engineers and scientists in the budget around $17 million annually. And in 1988, the new director was was brought in. And I was appointed vice president and chief scientist of Miranda Mines Ltd.  Now, if we step back from that, Miranda was already, Miranda Mines had already expanded broadly into, into the metals industry, different, different metals, and was vertically integrated. But also, this is when Miranda got involved into forest products and oil and gas. And the idea was that because of the cyclical nature of the, of the metal business, not various metals, particularly in terms of price that, you know, the price has to go up and then they would go down depending on the economy. And maybe to offset this, if you were in other industries, they would sort of even out the ups and downs in terms of the ultimate bottom line of the corporation. So, and of course, forest products are still natural resources, which, which minerals were and oil and gas was also natural resources. So, Miranda then expanded quite broadly into, of course, in forest products that was eventually took over McMillan Blodell, which is a major forest products company in British Columbia, and other forest product companies. It was one in New Brunswick and got into lumber and plywood and so forth. It was also Miranda got involved in looking at new business opportunities. You know, what else could Miranda do besides, you know, the natural resource industry and looked at taking an interest in particularly smaller startup companies that could develop into and do something larger. One of these small startups, if you want to call it that was really small, but there was a professor in Nova Scotia that was developing a new technology for producing gallium arsenide. And gallium arsenide was a key component in developing chips, computer chips as an alternative to silicon. And so this was seen as an opportunity. And so I got involved in in monitoring the work of the small startups, so gallium arsenide. That never manned out. And they weren't even looked at waste treatment, recycling of garbage, basically quite a variety of potential opportunities. When I look back at this, I wonder, you know, what did it really make make sense? One of the things that that I think is unfortunate is that Miranda probably missed an opportunity. Maybe it should have stayed in mining and metallurgy and looked at expanding and becoming a world leader in that area. When I looked generally at the mining metallurgical scene as it was in the 70s and 80s when I was involved, you know, we had Miranda, of course, we had Inco, we had Falconbridge, on the steel side, we had steel company Candace, Delco, we had DeFasco, we had Elcan. And you look there, where are all these companies now? All have been taken over by so-called, you know, foreign interests, European interests. And on the other hand, you look at other countries, look at Australia. Australia had an early history in mining and metallurgy similar to the Canadian one, but they managed to build world-class companies that are still existing looking, looking at BHP or Billiton or Rio Tinto. They all started in Australia, you know. I think we, Canada, missed the boat somehow. Canadians that were involved, a merger between Miranda and Inco and Falconbridge could have created, you know, a world powerhouse. How do you see or try to explain that phenomenon? That's a tough question. I don't know. Of course, you have to look at the shareholders and who are the controlling shareholders and what do they want to get out of the company? And I mean, I wasn't privy to any of this. I'm just speculating, but I look at the controlling shareholders of Miranda at the time, and they probably just saw an opportunity to make a big return on their investment by selling off the company because they basically put it up for sale. And these were not the kind of people that created Miranda in the first place, just as a specific example. I mean, Miranda was initially created by people who were miners. They may have had a non-mining background, but they were miners. That's what they called themselves. And, you know, the Bradfields, who was a geologist and the founding president, and there was Murdoch, and these people saw themselves as mining people. Not, they didn't come from an accounting or financial background. Mind you, Alf Pallas, who was a major force in Miranda, was, of course, an accountant. And Adam Zimmerman, who was his successor, was another accountant. And, you know, Miranda did very well under their leadership. But, you know, I think at that time, I don't know for certain, but I think the ownership was probably well distributed. But eventually, you know, ownership started being concentrated and then controlling shareholders. And, you know, it's what they saw or didn't see. But people in charge may be also too distanced from the actual product, from the actual mining. Well, you know, it's looking in the future where we headed, what are the opportunities out there? Let's grow this business instead of selling it off. But then you can ask, you know, what happened to Stelco? You know, where is it today? What happened to DeFasco? What happened to Alcant? It still exists. But, you know, different guys. Kaminko, I mean, Tech Mineral still is there, and that's Kaminko. But, you know, the name has disappeared. And that also brings me to another point. I, early on, I got involved in Canadian Research Management Association. And earlier than that, I got involved in some technical institutions. But, you know, in the 70s and 80s, it was sort of a, you looked around in Canada there and also research laboratories. Alcant had a research laboratory in Kingston, and that's gone. Stelco had a research laboratory in Hamilton, which was a going concern. DeFasco did. Kaminko, of course, still does. And Sheridan Park and Falcon Bridge had a research laboratory as well. But there were, and then look at Sheridan Gordon laboratories. And these are all hives of, you know, activity. There were lots of products and processes under development. Maybe in the industry too, you know, look back when we were working on the in-render process. There were other people who had similar ideas of, you know, continuous processing of the metal concentrates. Warkra in Australia, they were developing a process for continuous melting, converting interesting, using lances. And we eventually, in Randach, and Kanzan Creotinto at that time, got together. And we had an agreement to basically work together in a way that whichever process was the successful one. You know, maybe you would have some involvement, counter involvement. But looking broadly at the nonferrous industry, particularly in copper, there was the anaconda in the US was looking at a hydrometallurgical process for copper, which is coming on strong. Sheridan Gordon, of course, had its pressure leaching, ammonia leaching process initially for nickel, but eventually applied to copper. Kaminko got involved there. Lead and zinc, there was something called the QSL process that was being, which is Quinoa Shuman. They were the inventors of Lurgy. And it was a continuous melting process for lead. The Japanese were also developing continuous process, Mitsubishi, which was later adopted by Texas Gulf and eventually operated by Falcon Bridge, was a continuous copper smelting and converting refining process. And so there were a lot of new process under development. Some were successful, some still exist, and others just didn't make it. I'm not sure how much is going on now. Perhaps today, the idea is that maybe you could just buy technology, as opposed to developing your own. And there is something to be said for that, let somebody else take the risk in developing a new process or a new product and just license it when it's been shown to be successful. This can make a good business sense in some cases. But just as things have changed, of course, I'm not currently, I don't have the same perspective or insight, you might say, as to what's going on. If we look back at your career in Narendra, what would you say would be your biggest accomplishment, either personally or something that was accomplished under you or under your supervision? Well, I never really thought much about it. Research is a team effort, and ideas come from lots of people, and lots of people work together as a team in developing a process or a product. So let me rephrase, within your team, what, if you had to maybe pinpoint, one of the proudest or biggest accomplishments in Narendra, what would it be? That I was personally involved in? Yeah, or as a team. Well, I don't know. Well, of course, I have a special thing about the Narendra process, because that eventually became the first continuous copper smelting and converting process using what we call bath smelting, namely in a bath. And I make that distinction, because Arakumpu had developed the flash smelting of copper, and of course, Inco had a flash smelting as well. But that was not done in a bath as such. And the process was also later licensed by some other copper smelters. And that process is still used today at the horn smelter in Narendra, so it's still going strongly. There have been modifications, it's not quite the same as it started out, because the producing the copper in the same vessel was later dropped for various reasons. So that's something that I particularly fond of recalling my involvement with that. But beyond that, it's just the satisfaction of having run and managed a very successful research laboratory. In the 1980s, just from, let's see, about 1980, it was a four year, five year period. We did an economic analysis of the results of R&D. And at the time, we took 10 sort of the accomplishments, the major accomplishments of the research center. And these were processes, actually nine processes, and one product development. And did an economic analysis. What we did was we looked at the research costs to develop these processes and products, the capital costs to implement them industrially, because all of these were adopted in the operations. And looked at the cost benefits of these processes, costs avoided in terms of switching from one process to another, and then eventual cost savings down the road. And this was done by our economics group, and they came up with a return on investment of 25%, which is pretty fantastic. And that 25% also took into account the total cost of operating the research center. So that was quite amazing. I guess we had not really thought of it until somebody sat down and actually did this analysis. And I was asked to actually make a presentation to R&D's board of directors about this analysis to convince them of the good business sense of having a research center. I might add that when I went on from being director to vice president chief scientist, the name of the research center was changed to R&D technology center, perhaps to better reflect what it was actually doing, because research also sometimes has a connotation of searching for new knowledge. And we did a little bit of that, I must say, at the time. And so R&D research became the R&D technology center. And at the time, R&D a couple of years before had appointed a senior vice president technology, it was felt that there should be somebody in the corporate office responsible for research and development and technological developments. Prior to that, research reported to operations. It originally started, we had a research committee which was composed of people from the corporate office and people from the operations. And they operated as a research committee. So you had, at the time, we had Canadian copper refiners, which is a copper refinery in Montreal, had a president. So the president was actually a member of the chairman of the committee for a while. There was a vice president of metallurgical operations. And he was a member of the committee. And Barney Morrison, who was also been in operations and was then at the corporate office. And we would meet quarterly with the research committee and present the results of our research over the past quarter and talk about our accomplishments and also misses because sometimes things don't work out. And so we had a direct interaction with operations directly and indirectly. And of course, there was always liaison, close liaison, with the operations in the field, like with the managers and superintendents and so forth. Later, the chairman was a senior group vice president of operations. So again, research reported right into operations, which was a very important link. And so this change is now, instead of having that kind of a link, the link was a senior vice president technology. And of course, I don't know where all that went. I was, I got into other things, among them looking at growing trees and things of that sort. The lumber business. Yeah, looking at the global warming. We did a little study of potential impacts of global warming on neurons operations and so forth. Anyways, the technology center, we celebrated our 25th anniversary in 1988. And the new senior vice president of technology convinced senior management that the center should be expanded. And there was a major expansion of the center in terms of new buildings, new pilot plants, increasing the personnel substantially. And so we now have a major new technology center. And now where is this technology center? It doesn't exist anymore. Where this center was, there is, it's now a housing development. And I look at that and think Bill Govah, our first director, he was always conscious of having a smaller, hard hitting research group. You know, don't get too big. That was something that he always cautioned us about.  And during my tenure as director, Narendra went through some some hard times business-wise in terms of profitability. You know, when there were downturns in the economy and downturns in consumption of metals and so forth. And a number of times we had to really tighten our belts at the research center and reduce our costs and not ask for an increase in our budget but either stay the course in terms of budget or even come back and ask for a smaller budget because these are hard times. We had to be part of that. And I think in part the center became, as a technology center, became a bit big. It was an obvious target. If there were hard times again, you know, wouldn't you cut? And there's this, you know, now it's no longer 17 million. I don't know what it came, but it's probably double that, at least, you know, it becomes an obvious area to cut. But also what did happen was that when Falcon Bridge took over Narendra, and that's an interesting thing in itself, because in a way, I don't remember the figures, but I think Falcon Bridge was smaller than Narendra. But anyways, whether it was a merger, takeover, you know, it became Falcon Bridge no longer Narendra. And of course, Falcon Bridge had a research laboratory so that eventually it was a factor in the closing of the technology center. But I think there was more to it than I think was just the operating cost. And perhaps somebody said, you know, we can buy technology. But I guess this is just a conjecture on my part. That's the way I look at it. But as I had said earlier, I think it's sad that there's no real Canadian international mining giant that's, you know, quite broad in its operations. Yeah, we're in the gold mining area. We do have major companies, Barrick and Gold Corp. Even Barrick's going down. And even Barrick, yeah. I had interviewed Peter Monk. Okay. And we had talked about a similar subject about not only the mining and metallurgy business, but basically any big Canadian named company seemed to have a downfall. They'd never seen a last. And what was it? It'd be interesting to know what he had to say about that. Yeah, and he even mentioned Barrick, which isn't doing as well as it necessarily is. Well, it depended on, in that case, on one metal. They have tried to expand into copper. But maybe at the wrong time, because, you know, price of gold. And that's what Narendra faced over the years, the price of copper, you know, they jumped up and down the price of zinc and lead and aluminum. And that brings me back also to the center again. And that is that we had a significant product development activity. And the idea was to expand the markets for some of the metals that Narendra produced by developing new products. Now, the approach to new products was primarily through things like alloy developments. And Narendra Research Center did develop a new zinc aluminum alloy. So here was an alloy that could be used for producing a variety of castings. But that used both two metals and Narendra was producing the zinc and aluminum. And it was called the Z-A series. And Z-A 27 was a trade name for one of these alloys. I don't know where it is today. But it was an important development at the time. We also looked at applications of byproducts, such as selenium. In the gold refining process, one of the byproducts are selenium and tellurium, you get bismuth and so forth. And our researchers came up with a xerographic plate using selenium. Now, I should step back to xerography. It actually is based on selenium. There's a drum which is coated with selenium. And that is the active ingredient that picks up the photons and eventually makes contributes to the actual photo image that you get in a printer. And we had some research group that looked at producing these plates, but with an improved sensitivity by manipulating the composition of the selenium and how it was applied to the plate. And the particular application that we looked at was for mammography. Because in mammography, you use a plate to image the breast. But traditionally it was like a silver-based photographic plate. And we looked at why not use selenium, which you could use in a similar way as you do in xerography. But it's more precise. And it's more precise. It could pick up any problems there because it's precision in terms of the size of abnormalities was much, much better. And it was actually tested in the field. I don't know where it ended up. But that was one of the potential product applications we looked at. There was a spin-off eventually from this, that there was a company established in Montreal by some former members of the Neurator Technology Center to produce high-purity selenium, tellurium, and other byproducts of copper refining. So there is a spin-off out there. I forget what it's called. 3M or not 3M. Anyways, there is a spin. So it just shows you how you can broaden your research. What else? I have a question. Switch it up a little bit. I often ask this question just because it's often get a similar answer. But because you worked more in the research and development and lab and the tech part of mining and metallurgy, how present or absent were women in the workplace? And how did that change or not throughout your career? Well, in my time, there were a lot of women in the kind of science we were involved in, say, metallurgy and mining. And I'll get back to that. But we did have some women scientists. One in particular, Lucy Rosato, was her name. And I still only remember interviewing her when she came to the research center seeking a job. She graduated with a degree in chemistry from Concordia University. And she proved to be a real gem as a researcher. And just as an indication of that, she eventually moved on to her zinc plant, an electrolytic zinc, and was technical superintendent and eventually was manager of the plant. And unfortunately, she died early and had cancer. But she developed and her team developed a process for treating the what we call zinc residue in the zinc plant. You extract the zinc from the ore. I won't go into the process, but it's basically a roasting hydrometallurgical process. But you end up with the iron being in an iron residue. And that's a problem for disposal. Where do you put it? And at CZ, there was limited space for this. She and her team developed a system where you could dispose of the residue in a much more land efficient way. You could pile it up as opposed to it sort of flowing and filling upon. But she was involved in other hydrometallurgical developments and there's been even a symposium in her memory. So anyways, there's one. And we had several other women scientists. But more of the women were technicians on the technical side, typically in the analytical laboratory. So it wasn't any 50-50 or anything like that yet. Still, I mean, still not in the natural resource world for sure. I mentioned mining. I'm probably rambling here. But another accomplishment I look at it that I was quite pleased with was that we developed research in mining. When I started Research Center, there was certainly no research in the mining field. And we did do work in the mineral processing field. And it became obvious that looking around this major mining company, we buy our mining technology from others. And why shouldn't we be looking at developing some of our own? And at the time, with the help of a professor at Queen's University, a business professor, developed a proposal to develop and start a mining technology division at the Miranda Research Center. And we presented that to the powers that be, Research Committee and the Miranda Executive. And they agreed that we would start a mining technology division. And we hire a mining engineer who is particularly, his particular field was rock mechanics. And he quickly put together a team looking at rock mechanics. What can we do to improve the stability of the underground operations? And this also later looked at remote control of mining equipment. And then there was a merger with the instrumentation department, which had been established at the Research Center. That was after I arrived. But during my tenure, we had in particular one hotshot scientist who was very good at applying physics to solving industrial problems. And he and his team were developed a number of instruments of one kind or another. One was a magnograph, that's the technical name, something which has had been licensed, was licensed to another company, a system for detecting faults in wire rope and mine hoist rope. Because the rope used in mine hoisting eventually crows or wires break. And you have to detect this sooner than later, for obvious reasons. There were instruments available, but not entirely satisfactory. And so our research group developed an improved technique using a magnetic field, hence the name Magnograph. They also came up with a way of measuring the temperature in a copper bath, a copper smelting bath. And it's called a TWIR parameter, those same TWIRs that you inject air. You could actually look into the bath. And measure the temperature. And so they came up with a way of measuring that temperature without interfering with the operation of TWIRs. TWIRs have to be what they call punched. You push a rod through it to clear any slag. You got to keep them open. If you don't do that, they would just block up with slag of freezes in there. So this instrument has to sort of get in, take a temperature and get out of the way, basically. And that was also licensed. It was probably still available somewhere out there, probably not here under its original name. But the same person in charge of this group, Frank Kitzinger, is his name. He's quite a remarkable man, in my opinion. Also looked at, is there some other way we can blast rock? And he came up with the idea of using electricity to blast rock. And this was developed to a fairly advanced state. The idea was you drill holes, standard, your typical drill holes. But instead of loading them with dynamite, you put in a liquid in there, which is a conductor, you put it in an electrode and you discharge a very high energy electric impulse. And you get the same effect as you do with a blasting agent. You get a sudden expansion of gas, but you're not using explosives. And so the mining technology division developed this from the circular laboratory to starting to actually blast big blocks of rock and eventually testing it in the field. It didn't prove to be commercially successful. That's what I was going to say. It sounds more expensive than dynamite. Yeah, well, there were some, you know, not... A nice idea works very well, but there are some, you know, practical drawbacks to it. But it could have been used for breaking up large boulders. Because in mining, when you blast, your rock isn't all small.  They use mechanical means typically. Here you could actually drill a hole in it and, you know, break it up that way. In quarries, they call that secondary blasting where they break up or open pit mines. So that was a... So the mining technology division, as we called it at that time, it became quite successful too. So that's one of the things that I was involved with. If we shift a little bit from mining into your own interests, one of your big interests that you had mentioned when you were a child is geology. Now, what work have you done on your own? Before we talk about that, I would like to talk a little bit about my professional association and departments. Absolutely. Your organization. Dr. Govall always encouraged us scientists and engineers to get involved in scientific and technical organizations. Now, we call it networking today. But also, this is a way of, you know, seeing what's new. In the metallurgical industry, the Canadian Institute of Mining Metallurgy, but more importantly, probably the American Institute of Mining Metallurgy and the what was then called the Metallurgical Society of AIME, American Institute of Mining Metallurgy, was a bit of a forum where you would, I remember, you know, you're going to a meeting and you would see people from the copper industry, you know, smelter superintendents and researchers for other copper companies and you had a real networking opportunity. And in the nonferrous metallurgical industry at that time, I don't know how it is now, there was a lot of back and forth. I visited many copper smelters and zinc and lead smelters over my career, you know, as a researcher, but people from operations would do the same and we would receive them in our operations and they would look at how we're doing things. We looked at how they're doing things and you would pick up ideas for, you know, improving your own operation, not in a big way because they didn't tell you about their secrets as such, you know, but you would see things that, hey, this is a good idea, never thought of that. And so there was a lot of that. This is aside from the actual technical papers where people presented papers on their operations, describing your operations in great detail, but that's where you learned a lot as well. So we were, you know, encouraged to to participate. I got involved in the metallurgical society of CIM early on and I was the program chairman of the conference of metallurgists one year, another year I was chairman of the conference and got involved in various committees. One of the committees that would interest you, I founded a historical metallurgy committee to look at and document the history of metallurgy in Canada in particular and we used to publish papers in what was called the CIM bulletin at the time and on various historical aspects of Canadian metallurgy and mining. We also published a book on the history of mining and metallurgy in Canada and I also got involved in the metallurgical society of AIM at the time and worked in various committees. It was a pyro metallurgy committee. These committees organized symposium symposia in various topics. The non-ferrous pyro metallurgy committee that I was involved with, we would organize a lead zinc tin symposium which brought people in from the international lead zinc tin community together and present technical papers and also interface and so forth. There was a symposium on copper metallurgy and others and that was a big thing with the metallurgical society of AIM, not so much with the conference of metallurgists at the time. I got quite involved with the metallurgical society of AIM and eventually I was nominated appointed elected president of the metallurgical society and that's something I'm also proud of in a way that I was the first Canadian to be president of the American metallurgical society. There were two, there have been successors since and so at one time I was sitting on the board of trustees of the American Institute of mining metallurgy. There was a Canadian there. So that was very satisfying. I also got involved in the Canadian Research Management Association which was a forum for research managers in all fields across Canada where we talked about there was technical sessions, short sessions, but we also developed position papers on various aspects of R&D in Canada and eventually I was also the chairman of that committee and probably as a result of all this I was asked whether I would sit on the minister's national advisory committee to Canada Center for Minerals in Energy Technology and I agreed and I was later appointed chairman of MNAC as we called it and this was a committee that responded directly to the federal minister of natural resources at the time I was chairman it was Jake Epp and so it was an opportunity what we did was two things one we reviewed the programs of Canada which is of course a federal agency research agency on our committee we had representatives from mining metallurgy sectors the companies all from industry and so we reviewed the programs offered our advice on the programs and also reported our views on the programs to the minister so we would actually sit down with the minister of natural resources and advice and advice you know you know so that was an interesting experience as well anyway where are you um are you going to the MetSoc conference in Toronto in honest no I uh I've sort of you know once I retire I retired from metallurgy for sure and I keep I keep in touch from you know I'm still obviously a member of CIN when I'm of course I was president and did you go um two months ago there to uh no I uh personal reasons I I couldn't go oh yes I remember that was a satisfactory you know to to uh be president of CIN which so yeah I've been rather deeply involved in many organizations of over the years and there's a sense of satisfaction there as well and uh anyway I think you want to talk about geology sure your interest that turned into more than an interest I guess yeah well I was always interested in geology and as I mentioned I decided not to pursue it as a career but I pursued minerals as as a hobby as an avocation and over the years it became sort of more serious uh we're we're really things that took off was that uh uh about the time I I returned to Canada or from from grad school uh it was a quarry operating in Monsignol air and uh this quarry started to produce a lot of interesting minerals uh I won't go into the geology which is fascinating but this quarry has over the years uh produced uh currently about 66 species mineral species new to science and this is quite amazing there's only one or two other places in the world that have produced as many new minerals in a you know one single place a quarry and uh I developed a sort of a relationship with some academic professors university professors in in the field of mineralogy and geology and work with them and I would take samples to them to have a look at because they looked to me they looked different I wasn't sure what they were and and uh was there a collaboration they received material to do research on and so I was have been involved in discovering a number of new mineral species I forget the number but they're maybe six or ten and something like that and one one actually was named after me and uh which is called uh peterocyte which is a sodium zirconium silicate and uh I've always you know had an interest in the scientific side of minerals there are mineral collectors but they don't know too much about mineralogy you know that they care but I've always been interested in the scientific I've been a member of the mineralogical association of Canada for a long time I used to be a member of the American mineralogical association and uh I'm actually a co-author on a number of scientific papers on on minerals both here in Canada and also with somebody in Russia surprisingly but not surprising of you I would tell you the you know why because of the similarity of the geology of this quarry to the geology of some places in Russia and so it's become a it keeps my yes the sort of great gray cells from getting gray because you know it's it's a uh uh intellectual uh stimulus of scientific so I'm always interested in science I'm getting more and more interested in the broad aspects of science I'm also uh some years ago and this is now 10 years ago um as a child I often uh went to look at the minerals of the red path museum at McGill University to natural science a natural history museum and of course when I was at McGill and about 10 years ago I was asked to to be involved in developing new mineral exhibits with a professor from the earth and planetary science department and so this was we completely developed completely new exhibits on about minerals so I got involved in selecting specimens and developing the themes of the displays and and so forth and the museum asked me to you know sort of if I would continue working on their mineral collection which I agreed to and what it says they appointed me as an honorary curator of mineralogy which and so one of my current occupations one day a week I go off to the museum and work on the mineral collection I'm currently there sort of mineral go-to person mineralogy go-to person so so as I often asked that to um to many of the I guess retired folks um I always asked them if if they're truly retired or if they actually do um a few professional things on the side still so I guess that would be kind of me one curator uh yeah well in my case when I retired I retired early as you may have surmised and that that was a I was a victim of circumstance you might say because this senior vice president of technology decided to leave norenda and at that time so there was two people reporting to him myself and the director of research and development and you know I guess the norenda executive decided well maybe they don't really need to you know replace the the senior vice president retired so they appointed the then the research and director of research and development as a vice president vice president senior vice president and director of research and development and it sort of left me hanging so we came to an agreement and I left the company and I did a bit of consulting for a while some for norenda but in my field research and development it's not a field it's not like you know having developed a mine or built a metallurgical plant or anything you know what you what you could offer is there's a lot of other people who can offer much the same kind of advice so it I did a bit but not very much okay and professionally and now you would say but I I keep myself busy with you know minerals and mineralogy and inverting inverting which is you know pastime and I don't do much watching a television ring like that I do a lot of reading in particularly in the mineralogical and geological fields but I also keep up with what's happening in the mining and metallurgical world through mining metallurgical publications and Canadian mining journal and the CIM magazine and so forth so yeah I keep in touch and see what's what's going on and I do go to some of the conferences if they're in Montreal a conference of metallurgists or the CIM annual meeting and touch base that way and there is a an annual dinner for CIM past presidents and through Montreal I typically go to them and so you know I keep keep in touch but the main thing is to keep busy and the intellectual stimulation is very important and that's something I enjoy at the Red Path Museum because there's a there is a a large research group at the Red Path not in not in the field as I'm interested in but there it's a leading there's a leading group in paleontology particularly in the evolution of dinosaurs there is a group on marine freshwater ecology there's another group on in the field of biodiversity and some leading researchers and so I have a chance to talk to these professors I mean they're just colleagues as far as I'm concerned and their students and I attend lectures and seminars and occasionally I have even given a seminar and recently the museum had a public series of lectures about the areas that the museum is involved with and I was one of the lecturers and talking about mineralogy so I get my my stimulation that way and I also publish fairly extensively in the field of mineralogy not only the scientific side but on the there is there are mineralogical magazines they're called that appeal to both amateur mineralogists and mineral collectors as well as professional professionals and I've published a number of articles research them and published them okay so I keep myself very busy right now um I'll finish with two questions um one maybe a bit tough but I guess we can split it in two um but looking back at your life in general if you had to choose what are you proudest of and we could split it in with through your life and professionally we can do both if that's easier as well well in my life I'm proudest of my family good answer my wife and three children uh all uh all uh graduated from university one one is an architect practicing architect uh one work is an economist works for statistics Canada and one knows from the University of Ottawa wasn't a book publishing business but now works for Humber College in Ontario in their alumni department so I'm proud of proud of my family I'm proud of uh you know having participated in uh in the mining and metallurgical industry through you know technical uh my my I would say modest technical accomplishments uh my managerial uh work uh societies associations of all of the I've had any interesting uh bit of everything a bit interesting life in in mining metallurgy I'm I'm proud of the industry I'm a strong supporter of the industry I am not an environmentalist I I appreciate nature but I feel that the public and the media just don't understand the impact of mining and metallurgy on on the environment is as to what it is and one example I often like to uh to point out and in fact in the mineral exhibits at the Red Path Museum I've incorporated and this was part of where the minerals come from so that gives us gave me an as an opportunity to talk about mine so uh if you see copper minerals from Gaspe Copper there's a photograph there of one of these big trucks hauling ore from an open pit because hey that's where the minerals come from and uh you know the unfortunately the mining industry I don't think is getting through to the public just through the importance of minerals yeah in our everyday lives know this expression if you can't grow it you have to mine it and I often use that in talking to people students uh uh children coming through the museum if I have a chance you know think about where world you use where does it come from and as far as the impact on the environment you know I've talked about this uh too you take a plane fly over the the boreal forest and find me a mine there and you know yeah there's a spec down there it's got some great stuff about it but look at what's around it you know the in terms of the impact people talk about the environmental impact of of mines who talks about the environmental impact of new housing developments or shopping centers does anybody you see some of these organizations and they'll name one Greenpeace protesting a new shopping center no but a mine oh my god we don't want that in that backyard and the and the exaggeration of the impact uh asbestos now I mentioned asbestos because my wife comes from Thetford mines which is an asbestos mining area I was married in a as Thetford mines and uh I had a president or one of the asbestos companies was was uh at the wedding my my wife actually or one of her godfathers was an executive and asbestos mining so I have a certain relationship but you know again people yes we know it's potentially it's a carcinogen but you know under what circumstances people now and I experienced this through my mineral involvement in the museum and a and an association of mineral museum professionals as well that I'm involved with the idea that you know if you look at a asbestos mineral it's going to do something to you know it's an exaggeration do people realize that when you remove asbestos burying material from a building you're creating more of a potential problem than just leaving it there you know this is not reported in the media the media tends to talk to the people that are most vocal about you know what's wrong with with a mineral product or with a mining operation and so forth and somehow I feel that the mining industry through the mining association of Canada and the like doesn't really get through to the public as much as it could yeah there is the aspect associated with the CIM convention for example but we're now fortunately the two venues for the CIM annual meeting are Toronto and Vancouver so you do have a large urban community and their children that you can approach but beyond that we have a mining week in Canada do I see anything in the local paper about the mining week I don't see anything because I don't think the industry is doing a good enough job in presenting its side of the story and something we have again going back to the Red Path Museum is there is a quarry in Montreal it's now along abandoned which produced a number of new mineral species and I have a photograph in the of the quarry as it is now in the display and you look at the quarry and what do you see green it's been taken over by nature there's some ponds there with water and and vegetation around them there's some trees there there are I can take you to uh mine and I'm sure there are many of these across Canada one in particular that I think of in in Ontario at at the time that it was a mine this was back in the early 20th century late 19th century it was a mountain side just you know bare mountain side just rock you go there you can't find it because nature soon soon takes over rocks disintegrate at the surface eventually form soil and plants take over and and organisms and animals and so even that quarry that is supposedly an eyesore on the flank of Molesingale air eventually it's going to be taken over by by nature but the public doesn't seem to understand that well I'll get off my my soapbox I absolutely understand what you're saying absolutely yeah we have a that's true it's kind of mining seems removed from the rest of society and it's true that there's not a lot of there's not a big relationship between society and mining and and the connection between mining and the end products yeah and yeah what am I using right now yeah yeah yeah what is in there that came absolutely everybody with their iPhones don't realize how much mining exactly goes into it either came from a mineral product somewhere or it came from petroleum yeah no yeah absolutely or possibly it grew but you don't see wood in too many technology you know things not anymore not anymore so there you go absolutely um we'll finish with one question probably one of my favorites if you were to speak to someone much much younger like a student or someone like that what would be the one life lesson or piece of advice you you would give them right now well well I want to go back to my mentors because I think one of your questions was about mentors mentors I see in my life and we didn't talk about what I did as a child but anyways it'll come up I was a Boy Scout I was a Cub Scout I was a Boy Scout I was even in roller scouts so I spent a lot of time in the scouting movement and one of the people I think back was a scout leader who happened to be trained as a geologist and he encouraged my interest in minerals in high school I had a chemistry teacher who encouraged my interest in science and in particular in chemistry and he used to let me stay in the lab after after school hours and do some experiments or little tests here and there and he gave me some books to read and I still remember his encouragement of you know of science my father because you know as an immigrant he wanted me to get you know a good education he always stressed the importance of getting an education professor McEwen and McGill that pointed me in the direction of graduate school and he was an important person in my in my life Bob Boyle I mentioned earlier on the geological survey a candidate who taught me how to write and I maintain a lifelong connection with him I always stopped in to see him if I was in Ottawa at the GSC and he visited here sometimes and so there were people all along in my life that in Miranda I was somebody called Barney Morrison he was chairman of the research committee but I had a nice relationship with him and we often talked and he was a person I looked looked to and anyways so I think you have to work hard I think study hard look at science there's lots of opportunities and in science maybe it doesn't really matter what you have to find something that you enjoy that's very important in in whatever kind of work one does you have to enjoy what you're doing that's that's and obviously there have to be some some rewards as far as opportunities my I I think opportunities you take them as they come there are crossroads in in anybody's career that may or may not work out in my own career I had other opportunities while I was with Miranda at one point I was asked whether I'd be interested this was early on in working at the gas bay copper smelter you know joining the you know I was getting into operations and at the time I decided I would continue in research and later I was also asked whether I'd be interested in in working at the copper refinery in a technical capacity and again I stayed in research but you know you take take these as they come and assess them and decide and I think opportunity comes knocking as long as you you know work hard do do a good job and but education that's you know that's the the basis get a good education and in whatever field you're you're you're interested in and you even education can take you in many different directions at one stage I was on an advisory committee at the University of British Columbia and their metallurgy department and one of the PhD students there that that we looked at his his work eventually decided to give up metallurgy and he became a professional musician so at the phd level yeah well he had a phd in metallurgy but he became a musician so you never know where you know things will will take you obviously he he took the path that interested him in your most and looking back I think most of us I certainly can look back and think well you know I might have been just as interested and happy doing something in the chemical engineering field or the field of chemistry or maybe geology and mineralogy I don't know there's you have to and I think it's you have to be interested in what goes on in the world around you know take an interest in science and technology that's because it's fascinating what goes on in science now especially compared to when I started out and and certainly lots of opportunities in science and technology for any young people that's not to say that pursuing a career in other fields won't be successful but have a look and for parents I think encourage your children to you know study hard but let them let them make their own decisions is what they should do I never tried to influence our children that was their decision and they all took very different paths yeah very different paths in fact one of my sons who was going to follow me and was at Queens for a while decided that wasn't for him but I think he on his own decided he was going to follow my path but obviously it wasn't for him so okay he's the economist now yeah a little different all right well thank you very much oh you're more than welcome this would have been rather wide-ranging but anyways yes well I've enjoyed it that's a point of part of the interview


Live from New York, it's the queue. Covering AWS Global Summit 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're like co-host Corey Quinn and we're here at AWS New York City Summit. Always happy when we have users on the program to tell their story and joining us for the first time. I'm at Hatter who's the lead enterprise data science architect at Adco, an agriculture company based down in Georgia. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, so agriculture obviously, we understand in general, the joke I have for most people is, well luckily your industry isn't going through much change. And of course, yeah, that's the response we get in most. But give us a thumbnail at Adco, how long has the company been around, the focus and some of those changes that you're seeing in the industry. Sure, so let me start just by Adco. So Adco is about a $9.4 billion agricultural tech equipment manufacturer. Been around for 20 plus years and we are well known in the industry through some of our famous brands like Valtra, Fent, Massey. Coming back to your other question where it's not going through a lot of change, I get that very often and you know what? It was an eye-opener when I joined Adco. So the farming industry is actually going through a lot of change. You must have heard of agro tech. And so the farmers now, they want better efficient solutions that will help them manage their farms while they focus on their core work of farming. And they're looking at companies with manufacturer agriculture equipment to help provide that digital support, help provide solutions that help manage their farm better, help them do productive maintenance better, help them optimize the equipment and so on. And that's where we are trying to help them out. Yeah, so it's always easy to look at any industry and they're like, oh, they have it easy and it's not changing that much. You've got data science in your title. Talk a little bit about your role inside the company. We know how important data is to most companies but of course with the data scientists, it's your job to help unlock that power. Sure, definitely. Let me give you a little bit of background that will help frame this much better. So Acco realized the power of data a while ago but very recently they started working on this through something called a digital experience, digital customer experience program. What that does is basically it creates your set of connected solutions that manage the data of our customers, our dealers, our parts and machine data in a fast, reliable and secure manner. And all these digital solutions that we are creating, they are powered through analytics to leverage new market insights to unlock new opportunities to help understand our customers better. So given that particular space, I helped design the Acco's data science vision that involves, first of all, setting up a data science platform that enables us to maximize the use of our data that we have. Secondly, working with our business to identify analytics use cases which could be a part of the product roadmap and build them out and then execute this on the data science platform. And thirdly, from the point of view of architecture, understanding what things go in the design, making sure everything state of the art helps the design document and making sure that we are staying right at the top in terms of agriculture, in terms of data science and pushing it to boundaries in all the products. One of the, I guess, hidden secrets of data science across the board is the sheer amount of time and effort that has to be put into data normalization before you can start getting useful information out of it. Was that a significant concern given what you do or given the fact you more or less control the entire thing and then you can reformulate the data as it's ingested? That was a very valid concern. I mean, what most people don't talk about is the quality of data. They only talk about data science or fancy things. So we had the same challenges. Our data was distributed in different places, had different formats, had different levels of cleanser lens. So what I did was, during the building of the data science platform, recognize this challenge proactively and make sure that we do cleanse the data. We normalize it to a format that's usable for our use cases, but we don't do it all at once. We go use case by use case. We identify business priorities. We normalize the data. We cleanse it. We normalize it. Bring it to a format that can be used going forward and we do it with every use case. So over time, we'll have, majority of it will be normalized, but that will take an incremental gradual effort. All right. Amit, bring us into the role of cloud in your environment. Sure. So cloud is a very important component. Historically, we were more like an on-premises organization and when we went on cloud, cloud data, it was a very important change. More so from the point of view, if you think about it, for a company to migrate or position itself, transform itself into a software organization in terms of data science, you need a lot of accelerators. You need data scientists. You need infrastructure. You need data engineers. And you need people to manage all of this. And all that hiring talent takes time. But what cloud does is, with your ability to procure services on demand and something which is fully managed or serverless, it allows you to overcome a lot of those barriers quickly while you have time to actually build on the solutions on top of the cloud. Over time, when we understand our processes better, our demands better, then we can think about, okay, where does it make sense to go hybrid? But cloud is that great accelerator that allowed us to set up this data analytics platform, which we did in roughly about 15 weeks. Before that, I was working in another organization where we did this on-premises. And I can tell you, it took at least like three times, if not more. So that, I mean, I think that's the real value of cloud. Apart from all its machine learning services and everything, it helped us to accelerate our processes. How, the workflow that you'd wind up going through, how close is the data that you're generating to the cloud? Are you doing this at the edge? Are you doing this in the field in some cases? Or is it, I guess, where is this data entering your pipeline? Sure, so there are different forms of data that we have. We have a lot of data that is customer-related data that essentially is more or less low-moving data that we have within the organization. That is, comes to some major bulk of the data. Apart from that, we have data that are coming from machines, which are the smart machines operating in the field, and data comes through the satellites and comes to our servers. We also have data that comes from the edge, from some of these machineries that are operating in the factory, and from there, you will get data on the edge. Among all these different data sources that we have, I would say the predominant or the initial focus, the pilot focus, is to first start with the data that we have in abundance. So that's essentially the customer data, our dealer data, to be able to understand that better, derive new market insight. But our focus is to go forward, getting data from these machines, combining that with the soil data, with the farming data, with agronomy data, to deliver these very precise, things like precise planting schedules, things like predictive maintenance of machines, as they operate out in the field, and things like value-driven care. So those are things that we are hoping to do with us as well. You mentioned machine learning, where are you along your journey, kind of with the ML, AI, and the like? So that's a really good question. So as ACCO as a whole, I think we are different stages in different parts of the organization. So a lot of the organization is focused on generating value through descriptive analytics, so which is, and exploitative analytics, whereby we are exploring the data, and we are finding these insights, and then making decisions on top of them. We are going into the area of predictive analytics, fairly recently, about a year or so, and we essentially, that is our next step. So we went into predictive analytics. We are creating machine learning models. We are creating combined stacked models. We are using services like SageMaker on the cloud. We are using Spark Sembel libraries. We are using Cycler to learn. We are using R, all of that to create predictive analytics solutions. In terms of the technology that we use right now, it's actually pretty much a state of the art. We have created our own model management engines. We are using what Amazon provides and we supplement them with what we have. So we are pretty much a state of the art in terms of current, what we are doing. We are hoping to take that state of the art and apply it to large parts of the organization. So as you look at, I guess, some of the higher level differentiated services coming down in the world of machine learning, do you find that a lot of what you're doing today in a few years is going to be something that's being handled automatically and then you're able to focus on the more interesting parts of the work? Or is there really no end in sight for, I guess, sort of some of the current block and tackle that a lot of data scientists are sort of struggling with today? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear a part of your voice. No, my apologies. As you see things continuing to evolve in this space, are you predicting that there's going to be more, I guess, higher level services that solve some of this problem for you? Or is a lot of the, I guess, block and tackle not really have a relief point in sight? That's a very good question. I get that very often. So I would like to say the answer depends, but I'll describe the answer. So there are some parts of this machine learning AI that I think will be solved by newer services, by technology going forward. You can take an example. I'll give you a concrete example. SageMaker, which is fairly recent offering by Amazon, about a year ago when we started using SageMaker, didn't have a lot of components that it currently has. And we had to build a lot of their components to get towards something called model management. Now, we built all of that, but lo and behold, after re-invent, they actually added a lot of these. So over technology, they will take care of a lot of these things, which you currently do by smart automation. Now, smart automation can take care of a lot of things. It helps you identify when you need to retrain a model. It helps you to deploy your model. It helps you to identify the trigger points. But what analytics, I mean, where I think the challenge would come is, how to actually apply it to the business? Because that needs a lot of context. And for that, you need to understand where are these specific pain points? Where do you actually apply it? Does it make sense to use as a prioritization model? Does it make sense to use it as an explorative model? Does it make sense to use an attribution model? And to help define that use case in the beginning to essentially say, going from a business landscape to come to a specific problem that you want to solve, that is the part that I think will take some time and can't be readily addressed by these technologies. But everything down the line, I fairly see that in a few years, all of that will be available. Amit, are you speaking here at the conference? No, I actually spoke at the keynote in Atlanta in the summit. Great, give us a little bit about what you get out of coming to some of the regional summits here from Amazon. Yeah, definitely, so I get a lot out of it. So the biggest thing is, I get to know what are the different things that are happening in the industry from the point of business. So not just about technologies, right? Like lots of different technologies coming out, but how are people using it? How does it make an impact in their business? Because for me, the intersection of technology and business is the key point. So coming to a lot of these regional summits where they have these different business partners, they come in and they describe their work and connecting with them, that for me is the main draw. Apart from that, there's the other piece which is you get to know about the different things that are being done in this space. For example, if you go to an AWS summit, you get to know everything that is coming to the cloud and you can try and experiment that. And you can basically create like a nice ecosystem. If you go to an AWS, an Azure summit, you get something similar. So that state of the art is also important, but more important is the draw, that intersection. And I guess one just follow-up on that is the data scientist community is, what are some of your best sources of learning and sharing today? That's a very good question. Data science is one of those aspects which has two parts to it. I don't know, I mean, now there are machine learning engineers too. So, but one part is the technical part of this to be able to create these models with pinpoint accuracy. And the second is application. So in terms of the first part of learning about creating these models, the best sources in that case would be self-learning. I have, I went through, when I was doing this, I did my PhD, I learned a lot of stuff. And then I go through a lot of articles when new things come out. You go through them, whether, what were the different sources? There are lots of them. The second part, right, application. I have found the best source of learning there is actually interacting with people who use these technologies. Interacting with people, let's say who would have no experience of data science, have experience of business, and then working with them to understand how can you take this insight that's created out of a model and impart into business. For that, there's no other substitute than just talking to people, understanding the pain points, and then solving those. All right, well, Amit, thank you so much for giving the update on AgCo and your role inside. Thank you. So much for joining us. All right, for Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage here from AWS's New York City Summit. Thanks as always for watching theCUBE.