I am Suresh Sakti B and I secured all India rank 59 in the Indian Forest Service examination 2019. Shankar AIS Academy helped me a lot during my interview preparation. I attended three mock interviews in the Shankar AIS Academy and this is my first attempt. So there is a fear factor associated with that. The mock interviews helped me to enhance my confidence and to weed out the fear. The support given by the academy helped me to enhance my performance and to score well and the feedback given by the panel members helped me to rectify my errors. So I want to thank Shankar AIS Academy for their support to attain success at my very first attempt. Thank you.


Members of the Abea State House of Assembly have voted to impeach its speaker, Honorable Chinne Domo Oji. The impeachment was carried out by 18 out of 27 members of the assembly who sat at an undisclosed location. The People's Democratic Party member, Chokunachi Apugo, representing Umahia East, moved the motion for the impeachment and was seconded by Okegui of the PDP, who is representing Umunnochi constituency. The lawmakers are accusing the speaker of gross misconduct and high-handedness. All in the name of showing some weak points and all that. So the House of Assembly is properly constituted here. The former deputy speaker is suspended and removed from office and we have a new deputy speaker here. The majority leader of the House is here and we have formed our courtroom and we have done the business of the day.


highlights the electrochemical techniques utilizing metal-organic frameworks, MOFs, based catalysts for converting CO2 into chemical species, are discussed. The structure-activity relationship of MOF-based catalysts in electrocatalytic CO2 reduction reactions is thoroughly reviewed. The challenges and opportunities of large-scale applications of MOF-based materials in electrochemical CO2 reduction reactions are discussed, and possible directions for the future development of MOFs and their derivatives are outlined. This article was authored by Ching Woli, Yuan Ji, Yuping Wang, and others.


This paper examines the use of lidar and hyperspectral imagery to map the spatial distribution of plant species in savannas. The authors found that the combination of these two technologies enables accurate species mapping at ecosystem scales. They also addressed the challenges of integrating pixel and crown level data, as well as the need to account for reflectance and isotropy. By addressing these issues, they were able to achieve a high level of accuracy in their predictions. This article was authored by Gregory P. Asner, Jean-Baptiste Ferret, Matthew S. Colbin and others.


Good morning, my name is Brian Andrelzik, I'm the Vice President of Design and Engineering here at SeaWorld Orlando and we're excited to be here today to bring you Icebreaker, SeaWorld Orlando's newest roller coaster. Icebreaker is SeaWorld Orlando's newest roller coaster and it's our first launch roller coaster launching not once but four times. You'll start out with a backwards launch up a 93 foot tall spike tilted at 100 degrees. That's actually the steepest drop in Florida on a roller coaster. After four launches, you'll go up and over a top hat element that is 95 feet tall with a very steep drop followed by lots of twists and turns and exciting airtime elements. This is a family friendly roller coaster at a 48 inch tall height requirement which means it's a great first launch coaster for kids but something the whole family can enjoy. Icebreaker is SeaWorld Orlando's sixth roller coaster. We're excited to add to our growing ride portfolio which offers something for everyone. Guests will be able to experience Icebreaker in the spring of 2020 located in the Wild Arctic Plaza. Excited to introduce our Park President for Busch Gardens, Stuart Clark, to give you all the news today. Thank you Amay. It's always bad to talk after somebody's taller right. Thanks Amay and hello to all of our friends online and of course to all of you here at Busch Gardens Tampa. You know we're so excited about announcing our 2020 attractions but first I'd be remiss if I didn't at least acknowledge right all of our thousands and thousands of employee ambassadors who work tirelessly every day to create all of those moments that matter for our guests right and especially our ambassadors today right here in this room who set up this great event. How about a big round of applause for those folks. You know as we look ahead to 2020 we've got to stop for just one second right and we think about all the great events that we had and we launched for 2019 everything from our food and wine events to our you know real music real masters of course right around the corner from Tampa's best haunt experience right. Hello Scream our 20th year of fear starting on September 20th so we're very very excited about that but of course Christmas Town right after that so when we think about all those amazing experiences of course the one that's exciting for people also this year in 2019 was Tigris and we are thrilled we were thrilled a year ago today to talk about the announcement of Tigris we've been thrilled about the performance of Tigris and all of the great reviews we're hearing from our guests but we've got even more coming right and so there's probably no better time that you've ever had to become a past member in our parks and we've been talking about that this week too so later today you're going to hear more and more about these amazing past member offers that we have launched right now probably my favorite and the most impressive is our fund card offer that we've never had a deal like this before and we're just thrilled to absolutely speak about that today because not only can you just pay for a day and get the rest of 2019 so Christmas Town and Tigris and all those great events together but you can also get all of 2020 included in that same in that same fund card price so there's never been a better time to buy a pass than right now in September so we encourage all of our people watching today and everyone out there to go ahead and take advantage of that that opportunity today so the thrills keep on coming right we've been talking about what's coming in 2020 and it's not only bush gardens but also right across the street at our sister park adventure island and so no better person to speak about that new attraction at adventure island than our very own Andrew Hatcher from our design and engineering team the person who's actually leading that new new event Andrew thanks dirt now while bush gardens has been celebrating many milestones this year as part of our 60th anniversary we're looking forward to honoring adventure islands 40th anniversary in a similar fashion since 1980 adventure island has been providing splash filled fun for families from rivers and pools to slides and play areas these families have been coming back to our park nearly four decades to make new memories each season and so now we're excited to announce that our future is bright with a new thrill debuting in the beginning of our 2020 season about to present solar vortex America's first dual tailspin water slide this high thrill family ride will combine high banking rotations with rapid descents sending riders on a swirling journey through two open tailspins manufactured by whitewater this raft will include three dynamic aqua loosen elements harnessing the power of the florida sun to send colorful patterns into the slide as riders reach speeds about the 20 miles per hour we're confident that the that solar vortex will provide a thrilling new experience for families when it opens at adventure island and so we look forward to sliding into 2020 with you on solar vortex and now give us a little more about bush gardens here comes dirt thank you Andrew you know our adventure island team led by Brian Kilpatrick they've done an amazing job the last few years right we've added great attractions we've added you know several several new attractions right like colossal curl vanish point and of course solar vortex now is going to make sure that our future at adventure island is brighter than ever so now we want to talk a little bit about bush gardens and a little thing that we have going on here that is probably one of the most highly anticipated thrill attractions anywhere in the world for the year 2020 and I just I can't say enough about it right but the person who can say even more about it is none other than Andrew Schaefer who is our design and engineering person who will be leading that project Andrew thank you sir and good morning everybody so one year ago I had the pleasure of announcing tigress florida's tallest launch coaster and now today I get the the pleasure of being able to announce to you the newest predator coming to bush gardens in Tampa Bay in 2020 when it opened in 1999 guasi debuted as florida's first wooden dueling roller coaster in 2020 the classic has evolved into a new experience with entirely new thrills with a much bigger bite the weight is over something's coming you've been waiting so bush gardens is proud to present iron guasi it's america's tallest and the fastest steepest hybrid coaster in the world manufactured by rocky mountain construction iron guasi will be 206 feet tall it'll feature a 91 degree drop and get up to speeds of 76 miles per hour iron guasi is the evolution of a classic wooden coaster into a modern icon from the bones of the original guasi to a new a new legend horizons to faster faster speeds and more thrills than ever before the new attraction draws its inspiration from the crocodile the largest living reptile and a legendary predator that has ruled for millions of years with a 48 inch height requirement iron guasi will be the thrill attraction that families can enjoy together and make memories that will last a lifetime when it opens next year iron guasi will be bush gardens 10th roller coaster and will offer a unique experience unlike any other keep up with all of iron guasi's updates on our social media channels as we prepare for a spring of 2020 opening thank you everybody for coming out today and joining us online we'll see you right here next year at bush gardens tampa bay to ride iron guasi and now i may will bring us a little bit


Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. Aum Dallilah, yirum pila lamin. La huma de soleilase. Y dinam Muhammadin wa al-ihiwa. Wa al-ihiwa. Salam. Salam al-ihim. How are you? Al-ihim. Salam. How are you? Very good. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity and giving me your time to interview you today for the MCC, the Ramadan for Converts. Thank you very much. It's so nice to see you. So nice to see you again. Thank you very much for the invitation to the interview. My pleasure. Most of the interview will be in Spanish because we are Latin. You are from Mexico. You are Mexican.  I am Mexican apart from my mom and Salvadoran apart from my dad. So both of us are Latin. So we want to do the interview in Spanish. But there is no limitation. So if we want to speak part in English, it's totally fine. So to give you a little context, I know you since 2019. I think we met in Mexico. Yes. And then you got to know each other when you got to know each other. And by God's will you could spend more time with each other after you got to know each other.  You are very involved in each other's lives. And God's will keep it that way for many, many, many years until we have our kids. And they have their kids, God's will. So we started with the first question. Okay, thank you. So you are our guest of honor. So I'm going to ask the questions. I think you can take over the show. First question is Tell us a little bit about you.  This Ramadan that we are right now, it's to be 23 or 24 Ramadan that is the first thing the second or third thing and whatever you want to agree to. Okay, well, as you said, I took my shahada in July 2019, and well, we have been Muslims since then, in the name of Allah. So I have been Muslim for three and a half years, so this is my third Ramadan. Yes, because I took my shahada, I think, shortly after that Ramadan had ended. So, well, that's why I didn't get it, and it should be like the fourth, but well, it's just my third Ramadan. And what else can I add? Well, I was born and grew up in Mexico all my life. Well, really, I am the only Muslim in my family, in my environment, in Mexico, in school. Well, there was no space where I could learn Islam before until I found it in my house. It was from a family that had passed away, and it was the most unpredictable way that I could. Because my environment really had nothing to do with Islam, and I had a way of finding it. It's beautiful when you don't look at that opportunity that Allah has planted in your life to be able to learn Islam. It's so beautiful. Because when I think about it, as you said, there would have been no other way to learn Islam. It's like, that's for you. It's so beautiful. It's really nice to see that. And your parents now, what is your third Ramadan?  I've met your parents. Your mom is very, very pretty. She's very sweet. Is that kind of with you? My mom always tried to be with me as her dinner for my time to have breakfast. I mean, having breakfast to accompany me in some way. And they tried to do as much as possible. Even though they weren't always as romantic as they were always going to be, they also had moments of reflection or challenge, because it's not always easy for the family to understand what's going on. So when my sister saw me decorate, she didn't understand why you decorate. I mean, it's not Christmas or anything like that. So it's like breaking the illusion that everything is going to be alright, or how we think about it in our minds, but Allah has different ways of reaching people's hearts. And maybe we have to put our part to explain a little more to our family. We would like to say that they're going to accept it on the first day, and everything is going to be happy, but it's a little harder for them to understand what's going on from one day to the next. So sometimes it's hard for them to understand how you're having breakfast, and you're not going to eat with us, or especially because I was in charge of the food at home. It was like, oh, well, it's like they took a little bit out of you. But it's part of the process, isn't it? I prefer that little by little they can absorb things and that I, in fact, have the patience to explain to them.  And this would be my first Ramadan out of my house with my mother, now already married, where she is. So now I'm Latino, immigrant, in the United States, Muslim, all these categories. Well, my tradition was, I don't want to spend all my celebrations without my family, even if they don't celebrate it. And even if I don't celebrate their traditions or their parties, even if I could have the space of your family nearby, then I decided to invite my mother for the last few days so that she can be in Shawda. And I can see, okay, not only the part that she already knows about Ramadan, but that she also sees Eid with all the color, not only when I was at home trying to celebrate it alone, but here I can see all the colors, all the flavors that Eid has, that I can really experience the other side of Ramadan. Okay, once it's over, what happens? How do you celebrate it? So that they don't have the idea that, oh, poor things, they don't celebrate Christmas with their little tree. And it's so sad for them, there's just one.  You should be a part of both sides. And not only do you see it as very harsh, right? Yes, exactly, as you say, especially being ... I think, as you don't know very much about Islam, many times when you ask people about Ramadan, specifically, they just know that we are celebrating, right? Then, as you said, It's like it's very gloom and doom, like, oh, no puedes comer o, pero este es muy, este en poder enseñarles esta parte como tú dices, it's beautiful, y es genial lo que vas a hacer, para dar a tu mamá aquí, que mire las fiestas, que mire cómo celebramos, it's beautiful, they'll reward you for that, es algo que es muy lindo, y este, it's really nice, para, me imagino tu mamá siendo tan linda como es que te van a cantar, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, erel para aquí and your mom will see many Muslims having fun, families, food, everything, very festive and it's going to be very nice. Because yes, definitely I understand what you're saying. For example, here, now, Hamdrela, this is going to be my seventh Ramadan, I think. Or maybe my eighth. And now we have the tradition of decorating every year and being, for example, this year, my children told me, let's put the calendar to put the sweets and every time we open the breakfast, we can grab a candy. So we've done that tradition, right? But at first it was more difficult, as you say. That's a reality, I think that when I think about it, sometimes I can feel it like yesterday, right? Being the only one celebrating, feeling like sometimes you're this little light and you're trying to keep it bright, but sometimes it's difficult, right? But one keeps trying, keeps trying, and then the years go by and you develop what it is right now.  And for example, I'm thinking of you and your husband as, I imagine, and if God wills, I hope to be there all the years from now, I think that your family is developing, looking at the traditions that you make between your husband and also how each year is developing differently. And talking about that, one of the questions I wanted to ask you, how are we doing on this topic right now, we, for example, don't have so many traditions in Ramadan as someone who has been born into a Muslim family, for example, a friend of ours, for example, your husband, who was born into a Muslim family from a young age, his mother said his traditional things and then when he grew up, he said, oh, my mom used to do this, I'm going to do this, right? And also like this, with several people the same, we have to do our own things. So what are some of the traditions of Ramadan that you want to start for yourself? For example, your mother, you plan to do it every year, or what things do you want to do for Ramadan? Well, as you said, I also had my calendar that I did myself because in Mexico I couldn't find any type of decoration. Chans in Amazon, you can, I don't know, but every night after obviously breaking breakfast, I had my list of the 99 attributes of Allah and then I would go through every night three and I mean, I would add the previous ones, right? So as to be able to go through and even not having done that and not having made sure to have prayed a bit of Tarawih, obviously alone because it was very far away from the mosque, but if not alone, I would have made sure that at least I prayed extra after going there and once I had done that, I would have put the little star in every night, right? So it's like part of what traditions I started doing alone in those two Ramadan that I had, what food I liked to prepare, right? So it's retaking that and it's like a challenge, too, to be able to maintain those little traditions that you have as a conversation. After that, being in a family or getting married, right? So they combine two traditions, but make sure that you have yours, you have your own identity as a Muslim, as a Reaver, and do your thing, because I feel that if you just absorb the traditions of others without feeling yours or without forming yours, you can feel a bit like a stranger, like a stranger. So making sure to have the kind of food that I made, so it was something very simple, right? Or I always liked to make a bread velvet cake, so I made it, I decorated it. So these are very small traditions, now I'm going to have my mom, but like you start building your identity as a Muslim, right? I mean, we weren't born Muslims, we didn't grow up Muslims, I, lately, I relate it a lot with a new childhood, right?  So that 3-year-old girl, what is she absorbing? What is she living? What is she learning? And she compares with the other adult person, who already had experience in another religion, in another belief. So these two girls and adults combine in one, what happens, right? That's like the result of our new identity, our new identity, like built. So it's important that we have our own, traditions, whether it's like Latin, we say, okay, where is our food? Not everything is Samosas, or I don't know what other traditional food is always in Ramadan. I really liked that in the mosque in Mexico, I imagined that lifting was going to be the typical thing, right? I mean, I didn't, and I liked it a lot to see, well, in the new lifestyle that I had, that it was Mexican food, and I said, yes, there's no, there's no specific type of food to Ramadan, right? So, doing it with our recipes, our food, is totally valid, right? Ramadan doesn't have specific recipes. It's all in the recipe, right? Exactly, right, I agree. That's what you said perfectly. I tried to explain that vision, like a little girl being a Muslim young woman, and you did it perfectly, Hamdorella, that you feel like you're a Muslim, depending on when the shahara was taken, and in that, yes, I believe in the memories, I believe in the years that follow, it's set it beautifully, and I think it's like starting again. I mean, it is, right, when you take your shahara, you start again with your statement of faith, but being able to do new things in your life, how are you going to change things and your own traditions, speaking of Mexican food, today a few friends came to my house for F-Tar, and I was thinking, what am I going to cook?  And I was like, oh my gosh, I'm going to make soups. So my mom, as I live here with me, she's going to make this tortilla, she's going to make the soup, and we're going to make soups. So the sisters who are going to come, one is Latin, the others are not Latin. So, yes, to say that, and they also know why none is what is considered, this, how do you say, typical of a Muslim, right? None are what people who do not understand Islam, in their minds what they think is typical of a Muslim, none are of these ethnicities or countries. So they're going to recognize that, oh, you're making them your flavor, it's beautiful, right? And I'm still looking forward to eating soups when the time comes to finish the meal. Yes, exactly, that's like the beauty of Islam, that there are all kinds of colors of nationalities, and it's like our task for us and for the others, to form those new traditions, and to be able to share it with them, I think it's very important, before learning about other cultures, or especially sharing, right? That's right, I agree, I agree. And so, now I want to, if you can, with your permission, to share with us your first Ramadan. How did you feel? I know that, as you said, when you took your shahara, it was very close to the time of Ramadan, it wasn't officially your first Ramadan. So, the first Ramadan where you observed it, and you said, how did you feel? How did you feel before starting Ramadan? For example, some anxieties, some kind of fears that you had, possibly, and also, what do you remember more about that first Ramadan? Before I took my shahara, for some reason, I wanted to try to have breakfast, and I remember that it was so easy, like by the will of Allah, that I said, okay, then I can do this. I mean, I don't know if it's like my last fears, or last worries before taking the shahara, and it was so easy that I said, then I can do it. And, Alhamdulillah, that took away from me that bad expectation of fear, of not being able to do it, insecurity. So, the other situation was that COVID arrived, and at the beginning I said, well, now I'm not going to be able to take the shahara, I'm going to feel alone, but Alhamdulillah, the plan of Allah is always better, because thanks to that I was able to meet so many people online, especially in the area. Every Wednesday, Talif had a prayer circle, and there I was connected from day one. I found that company that Allah had destined for me, and now that I look back and say, it's nothing, because that COVID was for everyone, but for each one, it was planned in a very special way, the same time that it was planned for everyone, like Allah is the best of planners. And that's why my Ramadan was so special, because I could share with all these new people, and these new people welcomed me so warmly. I also found another group of Embrace, so Saturdays I was connected in the morning, just like I knew more, Reverts. I had the whole company I needed, that I wouldn't even have had in Mexico, if there hadn't been COVID. So I had more company with COVID than if there hadn't been COVID. Wow. So, really, I had that kind of expectation every night, okay, I'm going to connect, or even if it had only been once a week, well, I had the opportunity to clear myself from school, because I was at the university, also online, and that was another blessing, because Allah made it easy for me, instead of sending me every morning at 5 in the morning, having breakfast at school, I kept myself at home, it was easier to pray, to have breakfast, to study, for everything, it made it easier for me. Hamdolah. Hamdolah, so, I was able to be in the perfect conditions in my first Ramadan, and then, physically, it was easy for me, what we usually do, I found out what recipes worked best for me for my Suhur, for the Iftar, to know that, okay, if, obviously, the first times in Iftar, I wanted all the desserts, and then I realized, okay, the sugar makes me feel worse the next day, so, like, to know your body as well, Hamdolah, I mean, not only, I mean, obviously, we seek the spiritual part, but it even helps you to know your body, it makes me feel good, it makes me feel bad, to listen, or to be able to understand more how our body works, and then that Ramadan was very beautiful, even though I was at home all the time, I didn't go out for anything, and, well, even there, it was my first day at home, and even so, I felt good, I mean, I felt that emotion of, okay, somehow, like, Allah sent me that, like, happiness, and even though I was the only person there, well, I mean, there is when you understand how you're never alone, Allah, like, India is always near, so, no matter if you're alone, no matter if the situation that is COVID or not, worked in the perfect way for me, and, well, yes, now it's like, just the, now that I'm not alone, like, how do I share it, because that's also another challenge, right? I mean, we, many things we want, nothing more for us, and above all, something spiritual, which is new for us as reverts, and then having what to share costs, because it's like, no, this is mine, I didn't share it with my family, and now I have to share it, sometimes it's a little difficult, but... I agree, I agree, because my husband, too, when we both got married around the same time, for the work of God, being very good friends, I think it was beautiful, that we had this opportunity, and I remember that the other time we were praying, my husband told me, he wants to pray, and I said, no, I want to pray, I'm alone, not the prayer that touches us almost five times a day, but rather, doing a du'a, because, as you say, there are some things that we are used to more than ourselves, and yes, it's a while to share and make that connection, right? I have to connect with God, with my husband, but it's also something good to have that, I feel like they have that, and I think you feel the same, in having that relationship with God, just us, you know, I hear God, just like give me some time, just me and God. I don't know if it's for the camera, but let me do it. Okay, perfect. And something else, hey, when you mentioned that, that, look, every week, you went to the meeting with Tatlif, who is here in Fremont, that they had, it was like, perfect, what they did during Ramadan, to do everything online, and the community that was together was so beautiful, and he said something that is, let me pack up, I don't remember if it's an adit, or if it's something that is in the Quran, but the verse says, if you do something regularly, you have more blessings in that, right? And it's like, you're proof of it, every week you went to the meeting, and you got a lot of benefits, and it's something that our Islamic traditions give us, and we see the fruit of that, we see the blessings of that. It's very, very beautiful, and I think it's so interesting, as you said, that that time in Mexico, obviously there was the mosque, but it wasn't very close, right? But part of the mosque, obviously it doesn't look like many Muslims in all of Mexico, and Allah put us in a situation, He put you in a situation that you surrounded yourself with a lot of Muslims internationally, instead of in your own city, and I think it's beautiful, like, yeah, it's just, when you think about it, the bigger picture is like, oh, that's so beautiful, it's mashallah, it's a blessing. I was able to get to those Muslims who weren't close to me, thanks to that situation, I'm sorry.  Well, yes, I had like all of them, well, like many of them could also be afraid that I'm going to have the same concentration in work or school, and I do remember like, well, I don't know, having online exams or doing my homework, sometimes, obviously, like our brains need sugar, right? Or whatever, but after being able to focus on me, the state of Ayuno really helped me, because I'm usually multitasking, so if I'm doing a task, I'm not concentrating on anything else, but when I was doing it, well, at that time, my brain only had energy for one activity, it allowed me to finish my tasks or my exams before, instead of being disconcentrating, so it worked as a challenge, but at the same time it was an advantage that by having less energy, I could concentrate more on one thing instead of being in a thousand different activities, right? So, that and, well, I mean, at least for me, cooking made me a special moment for me, because, really, well, yes, you're with the food in front of you, but I didn't feel that torture, that I couldn't eat it, but it was like my connection with the food, that I had never been so grateful to be able to cook, to be able to have that food to eat, to break Ayuno with that, so it's like my way of connecting with those blessings of the food, and not just seeing it as, well, I got to my plate, right? It was my way of really connecting with that part, and since then, my relationship with the food has improved a lot, right? Because before, it was very... How to say it? Well, we always have these influences of... of what is the ideal body, and since I started to eat, I started to understand the different concepts of how to eat like a Muslim, a third of the water part, a third of the food part, a third of the air part, and that's where my relationship with the food improved a lot, my relationship with my image, and the truth that transforms into many areas of your life. I agree. You know, Tupano, that's been a challenge for me in trying to follow that journey, right? The Prophet Muhammad SAW, that, as you say, it's a third of water, a third of food, a third of air, because being coming from a family, we're used to eating a lot, because we're going to... There are many other traditions of different countries, but it takes discipline, right? So I think that, I don't want you to come for many years, because you're just your third Ramadan, and you're already applying that more, and I feel that this is my first Ramadan, where I honestly feel that I'm coming... I'm thinking about that, about reducing the amount of food and not getting tired, as it's said, right? And how long?  And another thing that you've said earlier about the sugar, this Ramadan is one of the first Ramadan where I noticed that my energy level is extremely higher than when I'm eating, and from what I've been reading, and from many sisters who I know, who tell me that they cut a lot of carbohydrates, not like a lot of carbohydrates, but that they cut sugar, I feel like that really is helping me with my health, as you say, and I come by the means of eating, to be able to know these things, to eliminate food, because there are people like me who don't have much discipline with food, that say hello, help me and forgive me, but now that I have to eat, I'm forced to be in a situation where I have to have that discipline, because I have to do it for God, and there are benefits, right? As you say, and I love it, because now, Insha'Allah, if God gives me the power and the ability, I want to reduce the amount of sugar I consume, and also the amount of carbohydrates, because I recognize that this is affecting me, and my energy level is greatly affected, and with three children I have all the energy that I can have, so these are things that I'm looking at right now, but Insha'Allah, I hope to carry it over after Ramadan, with the help of God, of course. Insha'Allah, yes. Yes, that's what happened to me when, because it's like a cycle, right? You can say that I'm going to take the intention or the decision to improve this aspect of my life, but it's like a process, so when I noticed that I'm not filling myself, I'm not filling myself, I'm eating, eating, eating, and even so, I'm still hungry, I said, I have to eat, and I was already eating, and it was like a reset, my body began to understand again, okay, I already ate, I already feel full, and it was like I was breaking that cycle of I need more, I need more, I need more. So Insha'Allah, it's like that reset that our body, our physical body needs, I don't even need to talk about how the spiritual part is. Yes, it's exactly another benefit that comes from having breakfast. So, I think this is going to be the last question, or the last question to be able to finish the interview, so that we can also do what we have to do to prepare for the Leftar, because you already have less hours before the Leftar comes here, I still have more hours left. So, tell us about a memory or a moment in some Ramadan, or a memory of some Ramadan that is very special to you, because as we had said, not only making traditions, but also memories, because for example, I think something very important is the memories that we can think of. Oh, I remember this Ramadan, it's very important for us, it's being converted, so for you at the moment, what did you tell us about a memory that was very special to you? Okay, so I think my second Ramadan, and COVID was a little more accessible, so I had the opportunity to travel and stay at your house, so that was my second Ramadan, and then I was able to meet all the people who only saw online, from the Zoom calls and from Tali, so I remember that night that night I was in Ought Night, so I think it was the 27th or something like that, and we went to Tali to Leftar, so I remember that I said, okay, I'm allowed to not have breakfast, but I said, I want to have breakfast, I want to keep my breakfast, even if it's about two hours extra from my usual time, to be able to break the breakfast with everyone in Tali, so I kept the breakfast, I never felt, I mean, of the easiest breakfasts I had, I mean, I felt so calm, so good, I had breakfast, and well, we went to Tali, and on that same trip, I made the decision to finally tell my dad that I had converted to Islam, because I had not told him, I was just trying to wait for him to never ask me why he covered me with a turban, every time I saw him outside, so I made the decision to send him a letter just before going to take the flight, so that day and that night I had a lot of blessings, because I obviously took that leap of faith to send that letter to my dad, to be able to meet everyone, all those who had met me in Tali, so that, that Iftar, that Qiyam, that odd night, Insha'Allah, I hope it has been one of those Laylatul Qadr, because it is one of the blessings I have had the most. So, we were in that Iftar, I was enjoying it a lot, because I was meeting everyone, finally in person, I was already with Muslims, with me, after being alone in my first Ramadan, and in one moment of pause between the Tarawee and the other, I got the answer from my dad, because obviously I was very afraid of what he was going to tell me, and I had made a lot of prayers, because he would answer me well and take it well, and that was one of the blessings that answered me well, and I was proud, and Alhamdulillah, I can't explain the happiness I felt that night, of being a whole peace, and that's what Islam always brings us, like the peace of being with Muslims, the peace of being content with everyone, with our family, like it was a weight that took away from me, or that my dad finally knows that I'm Muslim, I don't have to hide anymore, so that's like one of the blessings, and it's my most special memory of all of Ramadan. My God, so beautiful.  Yes, and inshallah looking forward for more, like beautiful memories. Alhamdulillah, I look forward to seeing you in one of the Ramadan, I know that you live here in the United States, you're in Jersey, but you're not very far from me, and I hope to see you, inshallah, in a year, or that the family is together, the family is together with my family, and that we spend a few days of Ramadan together, inshallah, and that we can make more memories, and as I said, your house here, also your second house here in the area of the Bahia, and we'll wait for you to come back. Yeah, I can't wait, inshallah. Thank you. Thank you so much for this interview with me, and give me your time, because I know that time has a lot of value, especially during Ramadan, all these blessings that God gives us, and all the good things that we do are multiplied, because they are very blessed months, so I'm so glad that I have the opportunity to talk to you, and to relive these memories, and that God bless you and your family, and may Allah allow us to know each other, inshallah, forever, and that we can't meet again, in Yenah, inshallah. Thank you so much for everything. Any words before we start? What would you like to say? No, as we said, that they build their own memories, that they treasure in those new memories that they are going to create, and that Allah doesn't forget how difficult or easy it is for us, especially when it comes to conversing, Allah doesn't take for granted our efforts, especially when it comes to reversing. I feel, and I hope, and I know that we have so much more rewards for our resilience and patience, inshallah. Inshallah. And with that, thank you so much. Very beautiful words with what to say. You can't talk to anything else. So from here, I guess we will say, I will say, As-salamu alaykum, thank you first of all for everything, and I hope to see you around, and inshallah, we'll talk soon. Alaykum As-salam, inshallah. Alaykum As-salam, adios.


having me. So I'm very glad that we already had these two speakers before because there were already a lot of, sorry the microphone there, there were a lot of subjects already that were talked about using bigger models and doing transfer learning and then the convex hull in the last talk that I will need. So thank you for that. Yeah, so we're speaking on machine learning thermodynamically stable materials and I will start with a small introduction why do we actually care about this problem and point one is that we really need to discover alternatives to current technology. So we have for example a new demium iron boron magnets that are used in electric cars and then you need extra dysprosium there and the production is quite limited. This can become a problem in the future for cobalt and the production or the demand is projected to increase 50-fold in the next decade due to lithium batteries as well in electric cars and so on and then of course cobalt is produced in the democratic republic of Congo so there's human-wide issues and yeah there are a lot of these cases and the second point is that we would also like to enable new technologies. So like p-type transparent conductors, room temperature transparent ferromagnets, room temperature superconductors and so on. Everything that would be very nice but nothing is really there for industry at all in the case of room temperature superconductors just aren't very ridiculous conditions and can you achieve that. So in our case we are not looking for anything specific but all strategies more widespread find as many but materials as possible and hope and then that there are the researchers interested and when they know the materials will be stable to scan them for the properties that they need and so how do we do this and the traditional way to find new materials efficiently are prototype based state throughput searches. So we take a structure you already know the perovskite structure from the last talk just an example we fill it in with candidate elements and get a few hundred thousand compositions then we use a million or more maybe CPUs for a ternary composition to do all the geometry optimizations get the energy and then we go to the convex hull and that was introduced in the previous talk and we have our energy relative to all possibility composition channels and yeah and then we know the stability of this distance is zero. Okay so far so good but then if we want to do thousands of these ternary prototypes I mean it becomes really expensive or for quaternaries we already had 15 million compositions so we can't really do this anymore and yeah what people have now been doing maybe for the last seven years or so is machine learning so you predict all the distances to the convex hull with machine learning model and then just validate the ones closest to stability and in the beginning this was quite limited so the first models and we also ended this maybe five years ago where just for a single prototype you have handcrafted features, decision trees, conoridge surrogation and so on but it's I mean it worked for single prototypes then over the last years people have tried more deeper neural networks that were also based on the composition however here we have a problem and this is just if we consider a pair of skite structure and here this sodium and nitrogen and beryllium-3 we don't actually know which is in which position in the structure and so you can't learn the to differentiate these polymorphs properly so purely compositional models don't work even though some of them have good performances on the same materials project or similar datasets. Now you could extend these representations to an extra dimension to just say okay we have one vector for each site but then we are limited to one prototype again and we can't profit from big data and pre-trained models and so on and what as I mentioned already. Okay so we need structure sensitivity I think everybody has heard about these crystal graphs already during the last days where we mapped the notes to sorry the atoms of the crystal structure to the notes and then the edges usually people use some distance representation however we have this problem and that we really directly want to predict the relaxed energy or the distance to the convex hull of the relaxed structure and but yeah and we don't have the right positions so we can't really do this and the idea we had instead just take the physics out and just say okay the atom is the first neighbor we don't care if it's one angstrom or two and yeah just use a embedding for the graph distance so this is first neighbor second neighbor and so on and then just throw more parameters at it and see if the model runs it so what we have already heard in the first talk a little bit so our models are not quite large but also larger for maybe material science and purposes so we also use attention mechanism not the same as in natural language processing but somewhat similar and yeah I also was used in ruse for example another application in material science we did some small modifications and but yeah let's just say we end up with the message passing network and with maybe 60 million parameters that we want to train and I mean it doesn't need as many GPU hours but maybe I'm still a few thousand and so we thought we also need some more data as we have quite a few parameters so we curated a new data set so we had a few and by now maybe two million calculations of our own group lying around and then there's a flow and the materials project and in the end we ended up with 2.4 million crystal structures and the rather complete convex hull which is also important for us to determine the stability of the compounds that we are predicting and you can also find this data set online and so yeah please go ahead maybe it's useful for someone here yeah so then we trained with this data set and now here's again one of the pitfalls of this data set that we have already was already mentioned in the first talk we can get the perfect error better than chemical accuracy on our normal test set that we randomly select however and this is just the indistribution error and then if we remove for example all mixed perovskites where the larger data set of these lying around we removed all of all the materials with the same composition and space group and then we end up with this error of 500 milli electron volt pattern however and the problem here is also that these materials were rather unstable so there's a distributional shift of maybe one ev and if we actually consider only the ones that are closer to stability we get a more reasonable error still not great but yeah it's okay and these are anyway the materials we're interested in as the ones at two ev and nobody really cares okay so then we had the pre-trained model and we wanted to check how good we can get it with some transfer learning for the specific data set and yeah as you can see the blue curve of the pre-trained model always performs better than the model without pre-training and especially in the lower data regime and then we have some other purely compositional model that was changed to I mean differentiate these polomorphs and yeah it's not really competitive okay so then we had the model and as we already had it we also did a throughput search of these mixed perovskites and you can see here the in orange the training distribution and then in blue the predicted systems or that we validated with DFT so we validated everything below I think 200 milli electron volt and yeah and we found quite a few stable ones and we think that with distortions or we know this from a different study that we have done on these mixed perovskites that you can stabilize them by more than 100 milli electron volt often with distortion so maybe a few more of these will be stable in the end and another interesting metric maybe so here the predictions for the unrelected structure so when we go from the unrelected structure to the energy of the relaxed structure distance to the convex hull am I actually really good now and even though we am only enter this graph distance and it's really competitive to if we start with the relaxed structure and we use one small trick here and that is we use a few different cell constant ratios so we do a few more predictions for each composition for in this case just take the minimum energy and this way we get the better prediction for the relaxed structure from the unrelected one okay so up to here this was all already published and now these are some new results so we started with this pre-training or continued with this pre-training for a few more maybe 15 more compounds and produced some more DFT calculations 400,000 and then roughly we retrained the model and it's now performing better one big problem was before that and nobody had really sampled lanthanides and actinides a lot so the error for these was higher before and now yeah they are better sampled and with better performance there and then we also trained them to train the model to predict volume so we have to do less geometry optimization steps in the end and now we just work on doing a lot of high throughput searches so we're trying to do all binary, tarnary and quaternary prototypes that we have with less than 20 atoms in the unit cell and yeah not as space group numbers larger than 10 that appeared these 10 times in our database and this next slide actually changed even yesterday so before yesterday we just had maybe 1,300 of these tarnary prototypes done but now we've read all the output files of the WASP calculations and now we have searched this roughly 1 billion compounds and yeah you can see you can see the median distance at the convex hull for the predicted tarnary and binaries here so 50 for the binaries that are a lot easier and 100 for the tarnary and then we found here more than 23,000 compounds that were below our previous hull and which is quite a lot and below 10 mille electron volt which is still super close to stability and we found another yeah we found 43,000 in total and maybe just to give a small impression of the scale and below this white line here we have roughly 1.6 times as many inorganic crystal structures as we have in the materials project so below 100 mille electron volt and yeah so now we're just left with the quaternaries and have to see how they will go okay so to summarize the crystal rough attention networks can actually predict properties accurately from unrelected structures and discover new materials now the challenges that we are facing directly are mostly related to the data at least these are the most pressing for us so this element bias I already talked about we think that this will be corrected more or less just through doing more and more throughput searches and it's getting better prototypes are different because we will always do calculations for or predictions for prototypes that we haven't sampled yet and so we wanted to do some active learning there so probably weren't that successful but already learned a lot at this conference and talked to all people that I found that did active learning and maybe with this knowledge now we can be more successful there yeah then the second point is really this accuracy of dft so we use the pb functional and right now like I mean basically everybody in the community would decide throughput calculations and but it's quite inaccurate for formation energies actually or the errors are unreasonably large in comparison to our machine learning models and so and we recently published a data set of 175,000 pb solar geometry optimizations with scan single point calculations and these the scan calculations should have a better formation energy or distance to the convex hull for most material groups so there's also available online and it's also maybe 10 million or 15 million cores something in this region so please be free to use it and so that yeah we get something out of this money or basically someone can profit from it yeah and also maybe there are band gaps for these with scan as well and high-campus sampling maybe it's also interesting for someone okay and yeah then we're just left to explore the space of all the other known prototypes and then afterwards we have to see what will happen okay thank you very much oh of course most importantly I didn't do this work alone so there are a lot of people involved with this project and I would like to thank especially my supervisor Miguel March who also despite being a supervisor does an unreasonable amount of calculations and this helps a lot okay yeah and thank you for your attention thank you Donatan for a wonderful talk how about some questions yes great talk I'm just a bit curious I guess about what your strategies are going to be with trying to uh I guess like from the point of view of the quality of your data like you said the PBE may not you know may present sorry oh sorry can you hear me yeah now we're now it's better okay um you mentioned there is uh some challenges using the PBE functional have you what are your plans to I guess yeah so basically the problem is that the I mean one problem is that there's also very little experimental data information energies so nobody can be that sure even how good the PBE actually is but from what we know um the scan function should perform better than even the PBE with the materials project corrections and so that's the main thing and of course scan geometries are also more accurate and we don't do scan geometry optimizations because they are um difficult to converge so that's why we choose the PBE soldier that has as accurate geometries so it's kind of a cheap way to get there and yeah then what we are doing right now is transfer learning again we have the pre-trained models which is a big advantage and of course um and we also have the code online although it's more one of these phd student codes and not um the facebook research engineers and but um yeah and then we are transfer learning to the PBE sole and scan data okay thank you don't know the student codes we've all learned a lot from them any more questions oh yeah zoom it's actually not a zoom question but my own so now that you've done you've studied so many materials and you've got the distances to the convex hull what what are you doing with the results yeah so i mean for the last like um 100 000 dft calculation we just finished reading the output files yesterday so we haven't done anything yet but of course i mean we'll do a lot of statistics to see actually what are the distributions for example and for the stable compounds and so on in this ternary compound space especially because it's not really i mean known that well yet and then i mean we will for the stable ones calculate some basic properties like other ferromagnetic what's the band gap and so on and with higher quality and yeah then um we will i mean obviously um publish the data and um yeah advertise it and hope that people find you so but okay and of course we will try to contact as many experimentalists as possible to synthesize some of these materials especially new material groups that haven't been found so far and so i mean we had a few experimentalists here so if any are interested in some completely new material groups and synthesizing them please talk to us we would be super happy okay thank you actually i had a question very similar along these lines so you've created a gigantic database this is very helpful and you seem to be searching for stable materials of many different compositions uh within there but then your title was about thermoelectrics right so i'm guessing you're scanning your title was just thermodynamics oh thermo oh okay sorry i was just wondering if there's any particular class of functionality that you're interested in or if you're just planning for the stable materials just to compute a range of potentially useful functional properties and then many people can use them different ways or so right yeah right now i think um or we see that there are some needs maybe for some materials in the near future or 10 years i mean with um what's happening and so we thought that this is the most efficient way and these are all low-hanging fruits i mean these are the known prototypes and but if we can find maybe i mean 50 000 structures closest stability in year or two and with this then i hope there's something useful there and then yeah we can't i'm i'm not really an expert on the material science but i think there are a lot of people who who are and maybe can find something useful great then also one thing i wanted to add is now there's been in the last year or two quite a lot of works on synthesizability or predicting machine learning synthesizability so i think this is like a step forward beyond like finding which ones are stable energetically stable uh then from these then there's some works trying to predict which ones of these then there are synthesis routes for so you can also like add this on on top of what you're doing now to make it even to boost it even more to other people who already know what they are doing there can just take the data um yeah but for sure there's um a lot of things that can still be done and i mean right now we maybe tell experimentalists maybe one in four so they try and might be stable and but this can this can help a lot definitely okay i see one last question yes let's have it thanks a lot of really interesting stuff um it's not really a question more a suggestion or a thing that would be really i'd be really interested to see so um i don't know if you know chris wolverton of the oq md so they have a database about a lot of uh also convex hulls like this he did this really cool thing where he did at the convex hull for the entire periodic table so one hull for all the compounds so if you do this and then maybe use our sun reliable tools to calculate intrinsic dimensionality maybe we can know what the intrinsic dimension of all of the known solids for now are so if you do it if you think you can do it i'd be super interested to know what that number is okay yeah sorry i'm not i don't think i'm entirely sure yet um where you're going but i'm sure i think we can definitely discuss it in the break afterwards because it sounds very interesting yeah thanks thank you jonathan again for your presentation and now let's welcome our next speaker okay our next speaker is felix arant from the group of marix yorka at yena and uh he'll be talking about machine learning applied to glass materials so thank you very much yeah good morning um my talk will be about the evaluation of descriptors for property predictions of glasses by the means of machine learning


Clark with the free kick for Bradford. Oh, here goes Donaldson. Oh, is that a penalty? It is! Lawler with the challenge. Now Donaldson having won the penalty is going to take it. Oh, calmly chipped over the goalkeeper to give Bradford the lead. Rowe with the layoff to Macalmont. Nicely worked out to McElhaney.  From Connor McElhaney. Here goes Fage. Lots of space down this right side, all the way across. Oh, they should have scored again there, Oldham. Picked up by Rowe. Nicely done by McElhaney. Gets it back again. Pushed away by O'Donnell. Here goes Fage. Another good crossing position. Oh, the header's off the crossbar from McElhaney this time. Forward by O'Connor, but it's a giveaway. Bradford's passing has been very poor. It's come out to this left-hand side. For Oldham, Rowe has a go. Could easily have been another goal. McElhaney lifted into Keela Dunne and pushed away by the goalkeeper. Made off to O'Connor. He's been caught in possession not for the first time. McElhaney brings it away. They've got three up here. And look at the space for Garrity. Garrity to finish in here. Oh, he's putting it wide. That's a lovely turn by Rowe. Takes it on. Oh, what a goal that is. An absolute beauty. Oh, he's sold his man a bit short. No chance for Motley-Henry there. Here's McElhaney. And a huge chance and a great save by O'Donnell to keep Bradford in it. Time running out. It's pushed away. O'Vance. That was the chance they've been waiting for. And in this battle of the all-league two clubs, it's Oldham Athletic who are through by two goals to one into the third round draw.


I would like to welcome you here to the scientific university of technology in Hong Kong, on behalf of the local organizing committee, and wish every success to our students in the next two days. As you can see there, the sun should be shining now, before we kill it. No more than that. We are only about 200 meters from the sea, but it is what we intend to go away during the session. It would be an interesting case to kill us all this year. Before we go into the formal proceedings of the days, I would like to just say a few words about our university, and our interest here to relate to the proceedings of the students. The university is a city university, it is in the central part of the eastern city, and you can see in the figure on the field circles are various buildings of the university. It is not very unnecessary to consider. But you can also see, you walk around, within about 1,500 years, some of the more traditional buildings, that have been built in the city, that have been donated by the municipality to the university, and they use the four minus the cent house. It was fortunate to have one, which is when I was vice president of my academic affairs for four years. The lower left building is the library, and the one on the right-hand side is one of each major theater conferences that are not here at the university. We are here, and you can see in the right corner, but we don't have time to go to work at the university, CFC is a young university, it has been in operation for 11 years. In this short history operation, we can see that the university is doing well in terms of academic output for us, and it is being run consistently higher in the central part of the university years. The recent rankings of the times of higher education lists are ranked in the top of 3,315 universities in the whole world, and we are suppressing them in the scientific degrees, which is an incredible achievement for such a young university, because they are experiencing a lot of these problems, they are all in that direction. So, back to the subject area of the coursework, which is focusing on the ideal structures that we are monitoring. This is an area which is very central to our own research interest here, and activities, and I just want to say to you guys about the things we have been doing that relate to this area and some of the new initiatives that we are trying to work on. Some of you may remember a couple of years ago I was invited to talk about the Smart Center at the UDMTM program, which was focusing again on the use of monitoring combined with any other techniques to be able to develop smart project methods for design and technical management of infrastructure. Of course, there are many other related activities, and recently we had a study at a university, in our group research group, called Smart and Eye, where the focus is on smart solutions to sustainable marine and ocean infrastructure and environment systems, and all of the things that we are going to talk about here in the next couple of days, to relate to some of the main things that we have in this group. Our aim is to promote and develop our own mass research application and also to facilitate the industry of the same effective critical infrastructure through smart, proactive and integrated solutions and commercial technologies and so on. And you will see some of the key focus areas that we are working on. We are working on a range of techniques, and we recognize a lot of the techniques that we will discuss related aspects during the workshop, ranging from monitoring sensors in the process, in the analysis, and so on, which find the application in design, designization and technical management, life cycle management, right to the policy, the three key areas we are focusing on in this Smart and Eye group are energy, infrastructure and safety and environment. Energy is an important area in the whole industry, but there is a particular interest of us here in Cyprus now to the energy-oriented gas industry in Cyprus generation, so this is one of our key focus areas. But we also have to promote technology transfer, which also integrate policy approaches across the three key areas. And our role of the nation is really to bring together the industry and government and allow the industry to work in some kind of disciplinary and natural framework of operations. And here we will see then the colleagues who are part of the group, and some of them are here today, and you can have a chance to meet them. We have 11 colleagues who come from different schools, so we bring their process in the area. We have industry developers with a long experience in the industry, who are activities and also for research development. Just a quick license of the key project areas that we can work on that we are working on. One is the sponsor of my interview in 2004. We have a joint industry program on safety and protection of offshore and gas operations. We have also established the original method of scaling orders in the Eastern Mediterranean region, where collaboration is safety and management protection of ferry and gas operations. We have a project that deals with more legal extreme management ways, sea traffic management, legalized identification techniques for workings, and drilling projects for workings. We have energy, other access codes where I can start to check the management from other countries. As I mentioned, the energy area of energy, the energy industry and the offshore and gas operations are also available, particularly in just one. Some of the current activities are focusing on aspects of the range, whether they are marketing analysis or experimental aspects are also available to us. And monitoring, which is the value of safety and protection of other legal techniques. We are in the process of establishing some new important projects in order to share with you. And the other very important activity that we started recently, we are working on a phase one study for the creation of a national center of excellence where the force will be on energy and the again, if you mind the main motivation or the reason for working in that direction is the energy and well-informed energy. We expect that in this project as it proceeds there will be again a strong focus on the smart infrastructure monitoring as well. So there will be areas of interest to be improved. And we believe that the key element of success is the model which is to bring an academia industry government together. We have the support from the state and government for progressing this and establishing this center. And also we are working towards establishing a national international framework of operators from different state-owned schools in order to be more effective in our approach and our work. And in this context we have strong ideas of collaboration with yourselves in the areas of our interest of this structure. And I hope I can give you some taste of where we are, the university and what are the key areas of interest that are all in our the interest of this structure and which also have the interest of future collaboration. And with that I would like to close and we share this with you today. And I would like to thank Sebastian for being more formal business today.


All right, we're gonna wing it all. So thanks. I was asked to give a talk, I guess, here and they... I actually gave this talk a little bit earlier and one of the organizers saw and says, hey, this sounds like an interesting thing to talk about since the theme is about Internet of Things. And I was at an event called Burning Man last year and I had brought a little sort of open source Internet of Things device that enabled people to have sex. And we'll go into what that means a little more in the course of the presentation. How many people here have heard of Burning Man? Okay, about maybe a third of the people have heard of it. So I have a few slides to sort of introduce people to this concept because it's actually a little foreign if you haven't heard of it and why we do this sort of thing. So Burning Man, about 330 days of the year, looks like this. It's a desert.  And for seven days of the year, this desert builds a city the size of Bukitima. About 70,000 people arrive in about a period of two to three weeks and they build an entire city. So about this many people land in Singapore every 1.5 days. So it's a huge infrastructure task to build essentially a city overnight in the middle of the desert. And if you're going to build your own city, you're going to build it exactly how you want to do it. So a lot of people come and they build a lot of artwork. So you can see they actually build huge temples on the top left here made of wood that actually gets burned at the end of the event. And then all the ashes are swept away so there's no trace of the burning actually happening in the desert. There is a lot of like different like amazing cars and exhibits, huge sculptures of people the size, you know, sort of the size of small skyscrapers being built out in the desert. There's a lot of really loud music on the top left there is a speaker system that is a bus essentially coated with speakers on one side. It has 85,000 watts of power and it's actually like a number that's more reasonable to represent horsepower. It's 110 horsepower of sound coming out of the bus. So that's about the amount of power in a small sedan and that's all being used to sort of move the air around it. You can feel it from a kilometer away and a bunch of other different buses like this that drive around the desert and they have these DJ sets that everything's free there so you can go and just walk up to the bus and listen to music and so forth. And then of course there's a lot of hippies who come along and enjoy this doing a lot of very hippie things. So all these pictures that you've seen of people coming in strange costumes and doing strange things and whatever stuff in the desert is also entirely true about the event. But one of my favorite things about Burning Man is that there's like no internet and no mobile phones, right?  You actually get a sense of immediacy.  So this is like this is one of the quote-unquote art installations is a couch someone just puts out in the middle of the desert and you can sit there with your friends and talk with them and a lot of people do building and so forth. So I mean when you don't have the internet to distract you can build a city basically in two weeks whereas if we all had the internet we would just sit there and watch pictures of cats for two weeks. One important thing about being in the desert is that at night time this is what it looks like 350 days a year. It's like it's dark. There's no lights. There's no street lights. There's no infrastructure. So what happens is that people bring lights, lots and lots and lots of lights. So I don't know if people here have had a chance to see the sort of the light exhibition at down by the Marina Bay area. It's really quite pretty and actually as people were putting it together I had this sort of eerie sense that I was again at Burning Man people sort of build this weird city of lights in the middle of nowhere and they have some pretty stunning exhibitions going on down there and it gives you a sense of what it's like to be there except this you know Burning Man it's like several square kilometers coated with lights. There's this kind of really awesome light setup where someone had buried in the desert a set of discs that all communicate with each other and you can sort of do a dance dance revolution in front of like one of these moving buses and dance on the discs they all change color and just lots and lots of lights. Everything is lit because part of the problem is that if you don't have personal lighting you can get run over by a car. People have actually been injured or even killed because they're too dark at night and then people are moving around and so the lighting is actually kind of a mandatory a thing to have. So when I go there I actually camp with a group of people it's called the Institute.   But you know we're the nerds so we actually like to build infrastructure. We actually build like the electricity and the running water and the showers and stuff in the camp and then the bankers bring along the booze. But one of the things about being out there is that everyone has to help. I mean like it's not like you can just show up and expect things to happen in this particular camp. This is a it's hard to read from back there because of the dimness of the screen and so forth. But this is like the sign-up sheet for different tasks like people have to you know manage the jobs, do treasury, gatekeeping, web mastering, making sure that everything stays in schedule and time. And me coming from Singapore it's actually very hard for me to get involved. I can't come a month ahead of time and help cook meals or prep things. And so I've built a bunch. What I do for the camp is I actually build lighting for them at night. And so for the past few years these are some examples of the things I've built like on the left hand side here is an example of a badge I made that looks like our logo, which is very pretty but very spiky. It actually got caught in a bunch of stuff. So that was actually sort of a half good idea. And then I built a much simpler one here, which is just a small badge you could you could like put on your backpack or wherever it is to light yourself some personal lighting. And I also tried building another one previously that had some sort of connectivity that would allow people to identify where people are. But at the end of the day the problem is that all these previous iterations the depth of engagement was pretty shallow. I gave people a button they can press and then another person would flash me in the side of the room just to know if they're around. But it wasn't wasn't a really deep sense of interaction. And the other problem is that like three or four years ago sort of blinky things were sort of new and kind of cool. But now everyone's got blinky. So like when I had to go this past year I want to invent something that was different and not already out there before.  But the most important piece I wanted to focus on interaction focus design. I wanted the badges to be a social ice breaker between people and not just a vanity element. And I also wanted to sort of be inclusive. I want everyone in the village that we're living together together with to start interacting. But very importantly, I had to walk a fine line to make sure this didn't turn into an SMS or chat platform. Because remember that first slide, the thing I like about brain man is we don't sit there looking at our phones the entire time.  And so I decided to model the interaction around sex. Sex is the answer to at least two problems that I had. One is how do you configure your lights? So if you have a light pattern, you want to make sure you say I want to be blue or red or green or flash to this particular way, how do you configure your lights?  And so the question is like what is end up being the minimum viable product for sex? This is the design of the badge that we end up happening. It has like here the light array, which you can see has a cap touch surface integral to the device. It has an OLED here for the menuing interface. And you can see the antenna here for 900 megahertz radio that was built into the device to allow people to interact. And this is just an example of what some of the lighting patterns look like at the end of the day and what the OLED is doing. So in an idle state, the OLED is actually doing an FFT of the sound around it so you can see the music pulsing by. And then you can also sort of see that there's a set of different lights. I'll talk about these more, but they have different characteristics, different spectrums, different hue, different patterns that you can go ahead and interact with people to try and breed the light pattern that you want. So the device itself is based upon a 40 megahertz Cortex-M0 plus sort of 1980s level computer technology, had 128K of flash and 16K of RAM. So it's not like a Raspberry Pi, super powerful. But we were able to fit in there a multi-threaded real-time operating system called ChibiOS. It's an open-source project. It had six concurrent threads running with the LED effects being bit-banged in the background in its own thread. So it's a pretty had a pretty beefy system. We were able to run a network stack and so forth inside of it. And when it comes to the subject of sex, sex is not just a gimmick to sort of like shock value people into.  Of course, when I say sex, a lot of people think about sexual reproduction. It's sort of the process of mating. That is not sex. Sex, if you type into Wikipedia, shows this picture here.  And so we end up having, defining a genome for the blinky patterns. So we have, I call it the blink-oam. It was a diploid genome, like the human. So you have a mother's and a father's pair. And you would have a chromosome, for example, for like the cyclic dimming, the pattern of cyclic dimming or the hue of the light. And we also used, made sure we used a color space called HSV, not RGB. I don't know if people are too familiar with these things, but it turns out that monitors are an RGB and so programmers tend to do the reasonable thing, which is like wham some values into RGB value and show them on the screen. And if you look at a lot of LED displays, you see a lot of very saturated, jarring colors in them. It's because the RGB space isn't a natural thing that's matched to the way that your eye sees light. And so if you want to build a user interface that looks good in your programmer and you don't really have a graphic designer, a hint is to use HSV. Basically, all the colors come out right. You can put random numbers in HSV and they actually look a little more like gentle as opposed to RGB. So one of the tricks we use was use HSV to make the mutations look more pleasant as opposed to jarring. This is what the blink home actually looked like and see. It was a little structure we had to find which would have like different you know bytes to define the period and the rate and the saturation and other different types of aspects of the genome. And then there's a question of how do you actually express the characteristics. So if you guys took biology you might remember these charts where they had like you know Mendel and his P experiment where they had like peas that were small and big or wrinkly or whatever it was and they would have these charts. And so we're a composite of two sets of genes one from the mother one from the father and how those genes get expressed depends upon expression function. For example black hair is dominant. You may have a gene for light hair but the gene for black hair will win. That's a function of how the proteins are expressed as a result of the gene. On the other hand like height is not one of those things where you have two people and just keep on breeding taller and taller people. You tend towards the median of height. You don't get infinitely tall people by breeding really tall people together. And so you have to sort of pick an expressions function. So for example here we had to choose an expression function for the saturation. How saturated with the with the lights become at the end of the day. And so we wanted actually lights to become typically saturated. We want saturation to be dominant. So we did a saturating add of the saturation sort of gene and created that. But if we if we instead took the average you would find that the lights would not be saturated tend towards a median of sort of a kind of a grayish color. And so we were able to through expression functions create a different set of variants that would come out in the population. For example I created a little hot spot this little bright light that would roll around the badge and it was engineered to be in five percent of the population in a random population. I put it in there didn't tell you on about it to see if people would just breed with it because it was different. And it turns out that by the end of the event a lot of people had found that little bright light and started breeding with people who had the bright light to make that much more common in the population which sort of like went towards one of my theories that people you know go for slightly unique traits just because of a vanity thing as opposed to being necessary fitness thing. We made like a left-handed or right-handed dominance and we did a faster slow spinning kind of kind of expression. So you can now see a little more sense of these lights so you can see for example this one here has a dimming property where it has a single cycle of dimming. This one here is two cycles of dimming and this one here is a extremely rapid hue cycling type of genetic expression.   It would be received. The eggs are located are generated on demand so there's no menstruation or cycle needed. A mutation function is applied which in which case the data is converted to a gray code to allow the mutations to make more sense because if you just do mutations on like binary data you can get extreme variations if you happen to flip a high bit accidentally and we bring them back and then also the mutation rate could be increased by shaking the bag vigorously during sex. So there's an accelerometer on the inside and if you wanted to go ahead and have a greater rate of mutation you could shake it up and there's a little bar that tell you like your mutation rate and one of the things I found is that people would just shake it because they thought it was funny to shake their badge during sex and people would do this thing where they would mount a carabiner on it to mount it to their bag and they would shake it with a carabiner flapping around and we end up with a lot of broken screens because they keep on smacking into their screens. Anyways at the end of the day that would create a new genome which would be saved and it would replace the current genome that's being displayed and then finally you can go about having casual sex with your friends and this is actually like the line of C codes lines of C code that it described the process of having sex when I wrote that I was like very sort of pleased to sort of be like I just wrote sex and see that's pretty cool. When we decided to go ahead and build the hardware of course we had to fund it so I went to a platform called crowd supply which I've used several times before to go ahead and do a private funding campaign within my camp and at the end of the day we were able to build these they were assembled in China we raised about six thousand dollars you can kind of see at the end of the day what all the different expenses are if you actually use the Chinese ecosystem which is a completely different talk that I can give it turns out you can build these things for fairly cheap without losing a lot of money and then finally one thing I had to consider in the process of doing this again like I said we're in the middle of the desert so there's no challenge or no symptoms square no element 14 there's nothing right so when you bring the badges out you have to bring a full repair kit I brought a soldering iron assisted optics diagnostic tools I had spare parts period so when I talked about the people who are breaking the screens I replaced like 10 screens in the middle of the desert in the middle of a like a dust storm trying to get these people ready for the nighttime because if their badges are broken at night they're dark and it's actually a very dangerous situation I had to handle firmer updates for these devices a hundred of them in the middle of the desert so I built a little device here which can see you can just you just slot the device in and press a button I called the drunk hippie test like someone had to be able to update their own firmware where they're drunk without having to ask me to do it for them otherwise I would be doing tech support the entire time and you had to bring out chargers for a hundred units micro USB cords for units and so on so forth so a lot of the sort of life cycle management also had we thought through in the process of doing this and finally you know that that would be it for the presentation thanks all right a run of laws


cars for a burglar in progress trying to kick in the back window. So it was a totally normal day I was just riding district one impact car with my partner officer Burke and the call comes out for a burglar in progress and it was like right around the corner from where we were at so the first ones to show up on the scene and we talked to a victim two males tried to break into his house. I'm clear it looks like the suspects are westbound through the alley all I've got currently is two Hispanic males did a couple laps around the block and looked down an alley and saw these two guys creeping down the alley looking into somebody's backyard so it's like all right this is kind of suspicious so we pulled on the alley we're gonna stop them pull up right behind him and jump out of the car and the guy on the right takes off right Hispanic male just ran out the front so officer Burke grabbed the guy that stayed and I took off after the first guy ran out down the street and ran down lowl trying to cut this guy off and so then I did run into him as soon as he saw me I could tell it was different he changed his face changes posture changed and he puffed up and he just locked eyes with me and started kind of made a beeline right at me I was running towards him he started to like speed up and walk real fast right at me with his eyes on me so we're looking at his eyes for a second then quick I looked down and I saw oh he has a gun in his right hand and so like right then it was like well game changed it was very clear to me that his his intention was to kill me to get away there was no doubt in my mind it was 100% aggressive attack mode he was in any good police officer you prepare for this to happen I didn't stop to think about it I knew right away he was trying to kill me a lot of stuff races through the head but that was it immediately I have to get him before he gets me so I just started running straight at him at some point one of his rounds got me in my left ankle and I knew right away that I was shot but it wasn't you know a critical injury or anything so ran for the closest cover which was a car right about that time my other partner Mike Clark was coming up the street and he saw this happen and so he realized he was you know had another officer engaged me so he took off and headed in a different direction so may may well have saved my life I jumped up and tried to run after him and I was able to run maybe 20 feet and my leg which my foot just wasn't working and so he runs down low he car jacks a lady at gunpoint ends up driving down the street firing rounds at officers out of the car he's intentionally trying to kill cops and he clearly has an extreme disregard for the value of any human life at this point so at the end of the situation this suspect was killed the other suspect that was with him was taken into custody without incident after the fact we find out that they are burglars the gun that he shot me with was stolen in a burglary and they were both parolees they were on ankle monitors at the time they were able to trace their movements back and connect them to multiple burglaries police officers I think we all know that it can end in a second and I know that because of my partners you know I will go home at the end of every day that's how we get through that's how we survive is knowing that through our training and through the people that we are the values that we have and that we are fighters and that we are survivors every day I think about how fortunate I was in that situation and I was able to walk away I'm still here and I'm grateful for that