we're trying to do here in D.C. and use all of your thoughts and your help in doing just that. I wanted to say that I live around the corner from that T-Mobile, so I was running center I definitely did not call it to be for music, let me tell you I was on the other side and we had a great mayor, Mayor Bowser that was right along the side saying let's not eat this either so if you know anything about what I'm talking about, I think you'll be happy for that So I wanted to start and kind of I usually try to be a little vulnerable and give you a little sense of who I am as I think it's really important as we start talking about shaping technology that's going to help shape our futures and so, you know, I have this honor for, I've had this honor for about three months now to serve D.C. Mayor, Mayor Bowser and the residents of Washington D.C. as the chief technology officer and so everybody goes well what does that mean? Well the truth is I've got a team of more than 600 people trying to think through how we create an infrastructure to allow for the innovation that we know needs to happen in our city in order to be a more inclusive and diverse city, the inclusive that we all love and that's why we sort of choose to live here and so I'm going to kind of go back a little bit. I'm the product of multiple generations of public service. Duty to community and country is firmly entrenched in sort of everything that I think through and I was fortunate enough to grow up product of a dad from inner city Baltimore and a mom from Delaware for parents that moved around a little bit and I have no idea where I was from but I went to kindergarten here and so here I am coming back to the city that I know the most in the U.S. So I was fortunate to grow up in six global cities before turning 16 due to my dad's career as a U.S. diplomat. So dinner table conversations revolved around the inner politics, diplomacy, trade and how that really shaped geopolitical stability around the globe. So you didn't think I was going to talk about this. Dad was assigned to NATO when we lived in a Plemish community in Brussels about 30 years ago this year and I vividly remember watching on CNN the many hopeful faces in the crowd as the Berlin Wall came down. Not knowing that I was witnessing sort of a major first step in the democratization of information. Does anybody else remember that? I think about half the crowd. Dad was the cultural attache in New Delhi, India where we lived across the street from Tata Motors, the Tata Motors Air when parliament at that point lifted trade barriers to allow for foreign direct investment in a country that once shun free trade. Add the world wide web around the same time and suddenly the largest democracy in the world once with the most obvious social stratification system that we've ever seen, the caste system started witnessing upward mobility and not just for the Tata family. I'm talking about middle class. So with information and trade came options and with technology came room for new ideas, small towns became cities literally overnight. Our CISO today in Washington is from Hyderabad and that was a town when I moved to India, town. When I left India there was a city and you probably know it.  I had a front row seat to the creation of pathways to middle to the middle class. For many who were held back for generations both in the former Soviet Union when you're thinking about the Berlin Wall and then throughout India. And I always read a section of Thomas Freeman's book where Jerry Yang, the co-founder of the ASEAN, quoted a senior Chinese official as saying where people have hope you have a middle class. And so technology really provided that hope in both cases that I talked about. I finally realized that the technology revolution that has taken place over the course of my lifetime, some of you think I'm young some of you think I'm old, has led to innovation policy being my work and my passion. As I believe it's key to retaining American competitiveness. And more specifically, I think it's innovation policy in our urban centers that's going to help us find a way to break those cycles of poverty so that we can remain competitive. And really so cities like Washington DC can continue to grow and prosper. And so I strongly believe that cities are our future. I'm focused on it. I love it. I came to work for city government as Adrian Fenty convinced me to come work for him think about economic development policy almost ten years ago and it was the best job I ever had. And so I tried to leave. I went to Symantec. I tried to leave. I worked for Gabby Gippers and I rapidly I loved Gabby, still love Gabby, but came back as soon as Miro Bowser decided to run for mayor because there's a lot to do and we get to do it really quickly. And so we continue to look for those innovative solutions to keep DC on track to become an even smarter city. I inherently think that cities are smart and what we are doing today is thinking about how to make them smarter. And it's got to be responsive to that diverse and innovative community that calls DC home. So it's our diversity that I believe is both a resource and a source for learning. It's what attracts some of the big players think Amazon and the startups. And it's how DC becomes one of the top cities in the U.S. for inclusive female driven entrepreneurship. So if you don't know DC has once again been named the number one city for women in tech. Most notably because women in tech are making 95 cents to every dollar our male counterparts make. Still more work to do. DC government is, if you don't know this I want you to know this. Take away nothing at all. We're a city county and state. All in one. And we regulate and implement city services. We also kind of regulate ourselves, which is interesting. So we're providing a city service. We got to go get a business permit or a building permit to build a building for DC government. It's kind of a weird world. We have big challenges and we have some of the smartest people at the table finding some big solutions. Smart cities is not really just a monitor here. When we find a technology that solves a problem, we can operationalize pretty quickly. I think some of the things that we're doing might surprise you. So at the Child and Family Services Administration, we're testing out whether virtual reality technologies can help us train social workers. So they're prepared for some of the interactions we're going to have with parents, the foster families with children, before they're actually put into an environment where that has to be realized. We recently held an innovation challenge called Gigabit DCX where we partnered with U.S. Ignite to not only offer an innovation award, $34,000. That would be exciting. But also the opportunity to work with many diverse and talented entrepreneurs actually across the globe on a common goal for betterment of our city. In this case, Vision Zero. So Mayor Bowser's commitment to reach zero fatalities and serious injuries to pedestrian fighters and other users of our transportation systems. The winners were a team of young engineers. Sorry, not Howard. If you were there, we would have won. It was Washington University, a great group of kids that presented an innovative approach to analyze video feeds in real time using data to help transportation planners make safety decisions that matter. And of course, data is publicly available. That's something that we hold preeminent. Our police force, some of you may know, Metropolitan Police Department was one of the first to fully deploy body-worn cameras for all patrol officers. So we've highlighted the approach we found that while our officers didn't act differently when they had the cameras on, the information we could glean from the footage allowed us to tailor our trainings and allowed us to ensure our officers continue to improve their ability to connect and engage with communities, especially communities of color. And so the Mayor and the Chief at that time, Chief Kathy Lanier, there was a bunch of us in a room going, so we have to spend a whole heck of a lot of money to implement this. We didn't see anything from the pilot that actually suggested that this would change behavior. And the Mayor said, you know what, we've got to do it anyway. But we're going to do it anyway because we want to see how we can better use technology that train boats in the field. And so as CTO of the Nation's Capital, I'm tasked with looking for ways to leverage technology to securely and more efficiently provide user-centric city services, making for a smarter DC. I'm working to do this by driving innovation, improving customer experience, and focusing on people who can make that happen. And so that's why I'm here. Any new job? Are you interested in doing something different? You should think about DC government. We're doing a lot of really cool things. And so the one thing that I always talk about when somebody is like, what's the top of mind issue for some of the folks in government today? And I would say it's a customer-relation management tool, it's a CRN tool that nobody has figured out. So I'm going to be vendor neutral right now. But there are tools out there that help the corporate world track sales. They are sort of a linear cycle that everybody understands. You catch the person, you get them excited about doing it. They swipe their credit card and you move on and you try to get them to do that again next month or the next year. With government, it's not really as cyclical as that. What we're trying to do is be trust. And so one of the challenges that I would throw out to this team is help me and help each other think through tools where we can start assessing trust. So wherever constituent comes into government whether that's in our school system, the police office, a fire department, to get a permit, to get a new driver's license, how do I use that experience to start building trust right? And I call it rebuilding trust. Because I think right now when you think of local government you're like, why do I have to deal with you? However, if you think about our department of motor vehicles, I don't know if you've gotten your license with me lately, but I hope that you've had and if you are a DC resident you've had a better experience than the guys next to you who did go to the DMV in DC. That is my hope. We've done a lot of work to streamline that process over the last eight years in fact. So that being said, I'm really working hard and here it is, my communication scene is really good. I'm working hard to retain and attract diverse and innovative tech talent to work for DC government. Whether you're at the beginning of your career, the middle of your career, the end of your career, we can use you and you can find a really interesting path forward designing, thinking, working with different groups of people. And so in March, for instance, here's a good example of folks that I hope are on my team eventually. I met with a group of fourth and fifth graders at Henley Elementary School in Ward 8. It's a community across the Anacostia River, for those of you that are from here. And actually the community that I was specifically in is probably experiencing some of our highest poverty rates. So excited to show me a robot that they had recently designed for a competition. But then they quickly moved on and they're like, okay, robot competition's over. Let us tell you what else we're doing. They said, we have a business plan that we're putting together. These are fourth and fifth grade girls who were annoyed that the boys were stealing their iPads in class and so they turned to their teacher and said, we want to do a girls only thing. And that's why they were girls only robotics club. I love it. But they said, we have a 3D printer that we wrote a grant application for and got this 3D printer delivered the other week. And we decided that we want to sell educational tools that we're building on this 3D printer. And I was like, well that's the coolest thing ever. Are you kidding me? And I was like, what if we weren't? And they're like, well if we walk around the halls long enough, we'll hear teachers screaming about tools that they need to help in class. Whether that's a pencil holder, whether that's a place to clap out erasers. But they found, they had basically walked around the halls, I think probably like cornering the teachers to be like, hey, what do you want us to build? And they've done such a great job that now I think they were just in the hallways here last week. They were called the robots. They were talking to members of Congress about what exciting things they were working on. So I want to make sure that they think of DC government too as a place that they can come and build robots to make DC smarter. I know that the same creativity that drives and motivates the spark robots is why you're all here today. Prioritizing civic engagement, user-centric design, tech innovation for good. And it seems to me that you're all motivated by service first, tech second. As opposed to and no offense to the congressman's office, another valley where tech comes first and sometimes we think about the people, right? Here in DC the mayor has challenged us to ensure that everyone living and doing business in Washington DC is giving and getting their fair share. And so I take that challenge personally. I try to make sure that my team lives and breathes it every day. She really challenged us to work together, to advance, to work to advance together and make sure that a rising tide does in fact lift all boats. And so in the recently released resilient DC plan goal number three in the plan is smarter DC. And I'm so excited because we all envision a DC that embraces these advancements in technology while minimizing the negative consequences of change while thinking about an inclusive way, the diverse audience that these technologies are going to have to touch and making sure that we're building solutions for all. And so a smart DC is really one that works from the roots and finds a solution, not the other way around. So our mission is simple. How do we support our residents in solving our city's biggest problems? It's a reward that drives us and it's really being able to see the first-hand results to see firsthand the results in our neighborhoods, our communities and our residents. As cities across the world are defining and redefining and redefining again what smart cities mean, DC knows that the future is coming and we need to be prepared. And so I'm charging you with helping us think about how we open up new opportunities for collaboration, for public private partnerships, for data analytics and testing. We've got a new data lake on the way. We are already thinking about how we open up new data platforms so that you're able to see what we see. We're calling 18F in to help us think through Vision Zero and sort of the amount of transportation data that we're kind of overwhelmed with. We have too much, right? So much. So how do we care down to think about what we really need and what can be predictive? We want to provide values that guide and drive innovation with purpose. And we want to do that with you by ensuring that our inclusive innovation ecosystem in DC has a seat at the table for everyone to grow and to innovate. So we have a really critical responsibility to prepare DC for the technological changes that are at our doorstep. Being the diverse demands of our residents, businesses and visitors.  A lot of diverse needs. I'm excited to have the opportunity to bring what I know about resident desires and expectations, agency operations, strategic communications and the lovers at our veil throughout DC government to my role. But I'm even more excited to say we need your help. And each and every one of you has a unique position and need role. And we want your voice as we think about a smarter DC. And so whether or not you live in DC I encourage you to think about it. Try to. And if not, either way, you know, check out the resilient DC plan resilient.dc.gov. See what we're doing at octo, octo.dc.gov OCTO.dc.gov 1,100 open data sets for you to play around with. But really, I just impress upon you that we're thinking about, we're thinking creatively and the best tools that I've kind of seen develop in DC are tools that we've kind of gotten a hint of from California, a hint of from Colorado right? It's when we all work together that we find the best the best way forward. And so thanks for meeting today. Thanks for sharing and talking through really tough problems. And I welcome you to the office. I'm over. I'm not that far away. I'm sort of a walk away at 200 and I street southeast. And we're doing a lot of really good things. So thanks so much. Really appreciate it. If anyone wants to ask a question, two questions, what could be a question? Not a statement question. Who are you? Yeah, some of us will recall that Amelia, Dr. mentioned that there were a whole lot of micro businesses in the United States. These are 5 to 8 people making an average of a quarter million a year. Many of them are minority families. So we're obviously and as a small business owner still, I understand the issue. She was saying they don't really understand about cybersecurity. They really don't understand about how to protect and respect what they do. Now we have all these devices and so once DC can really develop more micro businesses, it's a very, very good question. Something that I talk about with my team all the time, I think I have two big hurdles there. So all this is great great kind of that's one huge audience, no question. But really my first audience is the employees of our government. We have to make sure I need to make sure that I'm sort of changing the way that they work so that we're better at protecting the data. And we're with the data that the public trusts upon us. I want to make sure that we're doing everything that we can to make sure that we're being thoughtful about it. And the two kids DC, every cyber attack that hits the federal government they try it out on us first. So we're kind of federal government like in the eyes of those that are trying to hack into our systems. And so I'm doing this. One is we're trying to ensure that people understand that they should be thinking about cyber. It's the same way that they think about putting a fence around their home putting a camera on their door. And how do we do that so that we're changing the way that people work at their desks in government is one thing. So I've done a mandatory training and I've got everybody that I have to have everybody take. But the other thing that we're trying to do is, and I'm going to forget the name of it and Mark might help me I think they're crypto parties. So I think they're phenomenal. So crypto parties are a way to engage a diverse group of residents that don't know each other. So you might have a book club, you might have a small business group that are interested in learning a little bit more about how to protect yourselves online. And what we're doing is we're bringing that sort of very common sense approach to cyber to you. So talking about the fact that not everybody is going to have the same need for the same type of protections. We're going to be comfortable with utilizing Apple Pay. Some of us are going to be comfortable with having our credit cards on our phones. Some of us are not going to be comfortable with that. But what we need to do is kind of remove the fear and make sure that we're giving people the tools. And so that's what we're working on. New York City recently launched an app that says that if you download it, it's unclear. So basically it's like a cyber app. I'm afraid of that. I don't want to provide a tool from the government that's like, here this is going to help keep you safe. Because I think the liability is like one ridiculous and then two I'm not going to be able to put together an app that's going to keep you safe. And so instead it has to be an ongoing conversation. And so starting with those crypto parties, we're going to start actually in communities of color at first. Because I think there's a greater fear of sort of the technological change that's upon us. So we've heard in more of our small our smallest government entity is called the advisory government commissions. We've heard more rancor about the fears of 5G and like what that means in communities of color. So we're going to start there first. Yeah. Who are you? Unfortunately also comes with a big two part question. What do you do about operating 5G and the job platform? Is the government do that in the end? Is it going to be large too? What do you do about the work that you do? What do you do about the work that you do? So what do you do about the work that you do? Specifically kind of like the workers who are not as we've been we've seen a really really large article that they're not being paid kind of like what do you all do? What do you do what do you feel that can be done? I'm going to answer what I thought was the harder question.  So we'll see. I'll try to figure out what I can say. The first one actually Lark Tony who I was talking about it's on my team in the back and she's going to have to be happy to point her out. And she helped me stand up a reverse job fair earlier on this month actually where we had unemployed and underemployed residents get into a program and spend a year with us. They got certified in three different areas. They all worked really really hard. I invited the people that try to sell to me.  It's going to be this reverse job fair. And so I had each of those each of the interns actually sit at stations and so instead of having like Amazon and Cisco and all these sort of big names around the room and people having to approach potential employees having to approach potential employers I reversed that. And I asked those employers to hit every single table. So it kind of I thought it was neat. It kind of worked. The way that I see some things that we're going to test out going forward is we'll put folks in different rooms. So you won't even sort of the bias DNA bias that you have as you approach a table. You won't even have the bias to sort of skip over a table or whatnot. You'll have to enter each room where you'll have a different candidate. So those are kind of some of the things that we're trying out. The best example that I've ever seen was an organization called Foster League in DC and they had an intern network and it went away because Adam decided to like start his own business but the idea was we're trying to think about how to bring it back but the idea was if you were looking for an internship sorry if you were looking for an intern the algorithm would sort of populate a part of a resume without the name without the address without the college actually. And then the employer would say hey yeah we're interested and then the first time you would meet and get sort of the personal details was at that meeting. So trying to do as much as we can to think about taking out that inherent bias before actually getting it. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Sorry. Alright, let's give let's see Parker another round of applause please. Can my panelists for the AI and privacy panel go ahead and come to the stage please. And you all just let me know that I have to clear bites sharing is caring everyone. Alright, I'm going to begin by introducing our moderator Yosuke Toshu serves as the media and democracy programs director for Common Cause where he leads campaigns to engage the public and policymakers on key initiatives around media reform and broadband access. Prior to joining Common Cause Yosuke served as a policy fellow at Public Knowledge where he worked on a variety of technology and communications and communications issues. His work is focused on broadband privacy, broadband access, and affordability as well as other consumer issues. And Yosuke I'm going to give your panel until 3.30. So 3.30. Alright, take it away Yosuke. Thanks Alisa and thanks to Public Knowledge Apprentice Together this amazing event. Thanks for social changes and a huge passion to mine. Everyone, I'm super excited for this panel and for all sort of panelists that I get to meet with today and hear a lot about what they think about these issues. So we're going to talk today about artificial intelligence privacy and the impact on communities of color. So artificial intelligence is emerging as a transformative technology and it's likely to grow even more ubiquitous in the coming years. As big data and autonomous systems become prevalent there are legal and policy issues that are continuing to ramp up as Congress and other lawmakers start thinking about these issues. What often gets left out of discussion is how these technologies impact communities of color both positively and negatively. Issues such as algorithm bias, a lack of comprehensive privacy protections and the future of work all affect equal opportunity to access to news and information, education, employment housing and a host of other issues. So this panel today will explore these topics as we discuss various approaches to privacy, artificial intelligence and the impact on communities of color. So to start off I just want to give each panelist an opportunity to introduce themselves and briefly explain to the audience here what is your particular approach to how to look at AI privacy. Thank you and thank you for having me. My name is Sean Pariment with the Internet Association My official title there is Director of Diversity and Inclusion Policy and Council It always strikes people as kind of an unusual title. I work at looking at diversity through a policy lens, specifically how do algorithm bias works, how do power communities of color affected by issues of privacy. And I think the way I approach this is that we have to look at the current landscape of what's going on even though AI is quickly advancing, algorithms are not a new thing. This has been in our society, the data sets have been in our society and they've been problematic all that time, but now we're finding some new technology how do we look at this and do it in a responsible way in ways that we haven't thought about before, frankly. So that's the lens that I come at this from from a policy lens, having worked on the know and now working for a trade association that represents a lot of the biggest tech companies in the country Good afternoon. My name is Italian Conde and I'm a tech policy analyst and I'm a fellow at Data and Society Research Institute in New York City and I come to this conversation really as an advisor to Congresswoman Vivette Clark. She's the Vice-Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and in January of this year when the 116th Congress came in, one of the things that we were told from the leadership's office that was that tech accountability was going to be a legislative priority. So when I look at these issues, I'm looking at them both through a human rights lens so thinking about how can we how can we ensure that these technologies that are being developed many of which I'm now seeing, we keep hearing that they're advanced but quite frankly I sit both in the research and development world as well as the policy world and a lot of these technologies are still experimental but they're being used on test cases which is in my opinion problematic but also looking at market structure and how can we think about changing incentives because the other part of this is incredible wealth is being made and concentrated outside of communities of color so can we enact antitrust and other vehicles to try and create economic equity as well as some of the concerns that we would look at through a human rights lens. Hi everybody, my name is Frencel Archilo, I work for National Hispanic Media Coalition and I think of myself as the translator to make sure that we find ways to humanize the impact of some of the data harms that we're talking about. When we think about what our data regulations look like and the truth is that we have various templates to look at however the truth is I think we don't know what's the fit for our economy and for the type of society that we want. The truth is that we want to hold on to a lot of our capitalist values but something that Miss Esquela mentioned on the last panel earlier today was something about digital colonialism and for those of you who have maybe never heard of it I think it's a great frame that way, it's essentially thinking about a small number of organizations, companies controlling data for the masses and the problem with that system is that a lot of their bias and a lot of the issues that historically cause separation of wealth and other socioeconomic division are essentially embedded into code and those codes and those regulations are basically seeping into the way data is shared and managed by certain people at the top and other people at the bottom and there's no way to get out of that digital caste system. I think that it's important for us to be able to translate some of these things in plain language so that more people are involved in the conversation. I think that it is important to talk about not just how these things impact communities of color but how we can impact consumers of color and I think that it's important to remember that the things that are good for consumers of color are very often going to be great for all consumers. And my name is Leonard Bruce. I have two main gigs. So my first one is working with my community, the Hue River community down in Arizona. That's a program that I work for our government. Working on up-over-ight issues for child welfare, things like that. Also I'm an HD student at ASU in the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology, which sounds super fancy and I'm so excited to say it every time I do. But a lot of my work here is looking at the future of work indigenous people need specifically, how emerging technology are affecting indigenous communities in Arizona and across America. Specifically looking at how automations impact jobs and on notes it's really interesting being here in the 3D printing panel because I think the question of there's a lot of negatives that are possible and that we see there's also a lot of social good and social change that can be brought about by these technologies if they're leveraged the correct way. So a large part of my job and also my research is how can you leverage those technologies to a future that we want and not a future that is kind of handed to us. Good afternoon. My name is Gabrielle Raichwe. I'm a law fellow at Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology. The Center is a think tank focused on privacy and surveillance law and policy as they affect marginalized communities. So coming to this panel I hope to bring a perspective for looking at how you look at the demographics of people who are designing these technologies and their predominately white men. The schools that they're going to they're not receiving an education that's centering ethics. And when you look at the news every week we're hearing a story of bias in technology. And that's a reflection of the education that they're not receiving. Communities of color don't really care about these topics about privacy about AI but they're not in the rooms and they're not given the chance to share their concerns and if you empower these communities to share their concerns people will see a change in the stories that we're seeing. Great. Thanks. So I want to start the conversation off by talking about how do we address algorithmic bias when it comes to AI, AI technologies. One of the issues that I'm really interested in and what sparked my interest was a panel I was on a few weeks ago organized by Lisa and others, was data sets and incomplete data sets. So I'm really curious what is the impact when there are certain communities, particular communities of color that don't necessarily have access to these technologies and how do data sets or incomplete data sets impact that? So Leonard and Bricella, I want to turn the two of you to really answer this question. If you can provide any examples of how certain communities don't have connectivity that may be impacted by the lack of data that goes into AI. I'll give you a recent example. One thing that I think about all the time is government surveillance and how essentially when we decide on whatever data sharing regulation we come up with, here the government is going to essentially exempt itself. And one of the most dangerous things is the way that they've actually used information with third parties or how they collect information from companies. And I was thinking about the Motel 6 settlement and for those of you who aren't familiar, Motel 6 just settled a client earlier, it was about three weeks ago, to make $12 million because they were systematically passing over information to ICE to target whatever they got with Latino sounding names of people who are staying at their hotels. And this was the system. ICE agents would go and stop people at the front desk at Motel 6. They would collect information about their names, ID information, license plate information anything they could, room numbers, card information. And then they would target the people and stop them. And they would detain them. Sometimes they would question them and if they weren't satisfied, they would open up deportation investigations that led to hundreds of deportations. And there was absolutely no consequence because those families won't be reunited and people are legitimately living in fear. What happened is that wasn't only happening when Washington State brought suit against Motel 6, it's also happening in Arizona and other places. And the truth is that, you know, a fine yeah, it's the slap on the wrist, but the truth is that it shouldn't have happened. And those people are among the most disconnected population Latinos are only ahead of Native Americans living on tribal lands in terms of disconnectedness. And so the truth is most of them don't have access to go and find out what type of information whether it's the government or their apps, phone tracking how you think they don't have access to find out what kind of information has been collected about them. However, they are constantly being targeted and in that case supported. Yeah, and I think it also talks about one of the big issues that we have is it's really interesting to see articles that question the digital vibe. We all kind of know that it is a real thing. Especially in tribal communities, on reservation, I mean that's where I grew up and that's where I live. And it's very interesting to see how many folks do not have access to these systems to be able to get online what is increasingly like common passes online. You know, college applications of this application will be there. But I also think, and that same comment that Yosef was on I watched was about data justice. One of the very facts is that when we talk about onward bias, we talk about there's a lot of data that is not going into those data sets because folks are not having their data capture, which is can be just as problematic as being over surveying. And so one of the things I looked at was there was a great report that came out about the Jose of America that came out from Walmart and McKinsey in collaboration talking about our future work. And so they broke down every American county into kind of eight different architects of what is how is automation going to impact these different counties. One of the things that was left out, which is often left out, is how it's going to impact Native American reservations. And you know, it's really problematic that these are sovereign nations. There's five hundred and seven hundred tribes in America, and we're not included in that conversation. It makes it really hard to be able to come lobby on the hill if we don't have that kind of data and research to be able to back up our clients and our consumers. Super helpful. So Sean, I want to turn to you. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how the tech industry has addressed it and said what actions they're taking. Yeah, I just wanted to weigh in really quickly. Tech has done some things. Microsoft, Google are all trying to, what we're talking about here really is twofold. One being broadband access. We're trying to get to these communities, whether they be rural or urban, that don't have broadband access. And we're doing initiatives that do that, but really this is a government. This needs to be a government-led solution because the economics of it are such that we're not going to make a rural community more dense. And that's the only way for us to make economic sense for a lot of these companies, unless you put some other intensive from the government in there. But the other thing we're talking about besides broadband access is power. Because, you know, a lot of people here probably live in some way or another, live in an IoT connected device, whether you have a watch or whether you have a smart thermostat. You're generating millions of data points at any given time throughout the year and you can imagine how much that is in real lifetime. And you use that data to benefit in some way. It could be whether for your health care, it could be saving conserving energy or whatever. These communities that have already been marginalized are left out of those data points and they cannot use that data because they don't have connectivity. However, they are still subject to algorithms and AI in the most perverse ways because they're being surveilled. You know, whoever is going on in New York where Congressman Clark is from, they just had a low income community that installed facial recognition technology for all its residents to see, you know, I don't know what they're monitoring, whether the bright people are going into the house or whatever. But that is notoriously technology that can go awry, that can actory especially for communities that they're targeting. So we have to think about not only just protecting people in their privacy, that is important in paramount as well, but also there are communities that are left out of the data conversation other than for surveillance and law enforcement purposes. And we have to somehow reconcile that what's going on there. Interesting points. So there's clearly issues with lack of connectivity, and there's a lot of resilience that disproportionately impact communities of color. I want to shift the conversation a little bit and also start talking about our communities who have access or who are actually actively participating in using these technologies. There are still harms when it comes to biases, inherent biases and algorithmic biases. So I want to turn to Gabrielle. Maybe you can start talking a little bit about what are some of the commercial data practices or uses of technologies that unfortunately impact our communities. Sure, so everybody beats up on Facebook, so we'll start with them. So looking at their advertising algorithms, Facebook collects a lot of information on you to the post that you like and the pages that you follow.   You turn around and you look at what advertisers then do with that information. And so in 2016 for a public of that report that advertisers were able to target or exclude certain communities from the same advertising. And then you can imagine with employment as well, you target trucking jobs to men and then nursing jobs to women. And so that's one example of the data practices that they do. You look at Amazon as well in 2016 when they rolled out Sandy Shipping originally, they excluded predominantly neighborhoods of color. And so that's not necessarily a practice where they took data and then committed a harm. But you see how when you're invisible or you're not including the data they Amazon defended themselves by saying that oh we looked at where we had warehouses and so that's how we determined those things. But when you take the picture of the communities that were excluded and you put the maps from redlining back in the 50s and the 60s, it was almost 100% a perfect match. We're seeing how these algorithms are either using data then to exclude people from opportunities like housing or from commercial services and how it's just a continuation of the stereotypes and the bias that we've been seeing for years. Super helpful. There's definitely a lot of discussion about how advertisements or data practices are specifically excluding certain communities. Matali, I want to actually turn to you. When we talked about these biases and how our communities are being excluded or targeted one way or the other, how are lawmakers actually looking at AI technologies? How are they looking at some of these practices and what's the view that they should be taking? So in April, Congresswoman Clark was the house sponsor for that algorithmic accountability act along with Wharton and Booker in the U.S. Senate. And when we look at that act we were thinking about it in two ways. I do agree with Sean that there are some parts that are government responsibilities so certainly around public education to your point to make sure that people understand what algorithms are and how they impact them but we were also looking at industry. And there are tools that can be used to audit algorithms to think about the inputs that they're using to make sure that the racial proxies are not then visited upon the marketplace. So for example popular input is zip code because it can be got from census data, it's free. But with zip code the history of redlining and the racist history of redlining, then yes, perpetuated out. And the issue that we are looking at in the bill is actually a commercial law issue. So if we look at the Facebook algorithm, Google algorithm, the Amazon algorithm, these are protected by these are black boxed. So they're protected by commercial law because the company will argue that's how that's our secret source. That's how we know to do what we do and we do it well. And one of the things that we're trying to do in that bill is really argue that if this, if Google search for example which is ubiquitous is used by over 90% of the population is actually much more from public utility than it is a private product so we need to be able to look at that input to find out how it's impacting the American people. We're levying personal fines against company owners as well as fines against the companies themselves and even within that there are arguments like the FTC are going to levy this $5 billion fine but Facebook just made, if you look at the Q1 earnings, Facebook had $50 million, excuse me, in Q1 earnings for 2019 so levying a $5 billion fine is like a parking ticket. Like it's a lot probably to you and I. Well it's a lot to me. I'm not going to talk about that. I'm going to learn but it's not a lot to them so how are we thinking about changing incentives? I don't know if that was too long but we're just trying to think about ways of taming the beast when the beast is so big. That's actually super informative and thinking about alternative ways or ways outside the box to tackle some of these problems. Well I'll turn to Sean who maybe talked about how tech companies are trying to limit some of these biases and also looking at how they're trying to change some of their practices, some of the issues that Tyler talked about and how they're collecting data or whether current enforcement system is working, whether we need to change that. So I think that some of the things that are going on and people are probably familiar with this already, we're trying to get more human centered when we talk about AI, when we're trying to get humans in for oversight at all stages to make sure that things are not going to arrive. The important thing though to remember is that it shouldn't just be any human we need to think about communities that are most impacted by this and I think tech is coming to that realization and that's something that needs to be addressed but also having diverse data sets doing auditing I think that's what mentioned earlier we cannot be with AI at least some of the consequences of this, you can't just test out in a while you have to make sure that it's implemented in a responsible way but I think what's important here is we talk about risk assessments and I sort of smirked a little bit when we talked about tame police I don't want to minimize what happens in tech, I think there are certain things that are very concerning we're talking about advertising and what we're talking about taking whatever you use or AI for in the tech platform but there is algorithms in AI being used to send these people unfairly there's AI and algorithms that are being tracked like you have LPR or license plate readers that are tracking your every movement throughout your city and that's being used so when we talk about tameing the beast, I think we have to think about what is the risk here, what are we really talking about and what would be the real factors that are up with some of this technology and I think there are companies when we focus on the technology we aim at tech but not technology so when I meet by that we're aiming at the tech industry which there are a lot of things that need to be fixed within the tech industry and you know they're taking some responsibility for that but when we talk about the technology that's used by banking, that's used by law enforcement, that's used by the legal field, you know your mortgage how your mortgage is calculated, they're using AI for that and a lot of the data they're using may not be used responsibly so I think that there is a need for us to have this conversation and talk about how we regulate these sort of things but we have to make sure we're having the full conversation of how this technology is really impacting society and it's not limited to one industry Thanks so I want to actually take what Sean just said and Mary that's what we're talking about, I kind of compare the different idea to some of the new points and hone in a little bit on how specific communities are using this technology, some of the biases they might be experiencing, some of the disproportionate impacts, I don't know, Francella, and the two of you can maybe talk a little bit about how are the indigenous communities and the Latino community actually experiencing some of these disproportionate harms So I think it's interesting because like Sean had this conversation before is that you know algorithms are not new, I think it's a great buzz word and it's bringing something to do with core social issues to the front so I mean one of the things in my community specifically like I have a very clear example of this is like carbon and having a vehicle in Arizona is really important because if you're not living in a metro area you're pretty much screwed for getting anywhere unless you have a car So when you look at something like that, conservation is one of the things and this is, I mean there's a variety of social reasons for this but it's really carbon with the carbon and the folks who are on our community are paying 20-25% interest rate on standard carbon if they can get the car and so some of these are just created and perpetuated by some of the algorithms that have been created by the carbon that are surrounding us and so there are situations like that and there's other situations where there's been algorithms that have been used for a long time that are now being created and perpetuated more in the AI that are expanded and I think a large portion of it is because you have more data and it's quicker and you have a system that can move through it that is a lot faster that there has ever been export. So specifically I think one of the main things that I would think about going back to what Sean is saying is like looking at some of these technologies I think AI is kind of a tagline for the panel but there are a lot of technologies that are reliant on just that data processing that we really do look at the technology that's there and the people who are building it. There's sometimes a technology that can do that but then also I think people building it go back to the earlier comment there is not a lot of like an extreme engineering there's not a lot of ethical requirements for you to build a system so what happens when that system is built by a small startup and then suddenly the interaction you don't know what it's going to be when I think about the impact on Latino communities but about what are essentially the far-reaching consequences of feeling like you are in a community that's constantly over-policed, constantly under surveillance, constantly targeted, whether it's online for predatory lending, whether it's by your government by watching all the time and hoping for deportation leads. The truth is that it manifests itself into people who are maybe in mixed status families not wanting to enroll their kids in school, not wanting to seek medical services, not wanting to take advantage of government services that they're entitled to because they might work in big taxes just like all of us and they still don't take advantage of it because they don't want their information into a system that they really can't see into and can't control. That has consequences also under participation and voting and participating in the census and these are things that essentially you start with a harm you end up with essentially a group of people who feel like they're constantly suspicious and then there's additional harms because then they don't participate in the census and voting. So we create new problems from those original from where we started. One thing I do want to make sure is that I cannot be separated from this conversation is digital literacy because the truth is that once people do have access do they really have the tools to be able to navigate, oh I can control my privacy settings on this app or oh this is how I turn off my tracking, like does the ordinary person know how to do that because a lot of us who have several ways to log in if I have myself on my laptop right now I still it would take me a second to walk through some of my apps to turn off certain settings and the truth is that for people who have limited access do they necessarily have the opportunity or even just to know how to be able to do that. So I think part of the reason why some of those voices just are simply not included in this conversation is because we haven't given them the language. I think the truth is that we're talking about data sharing and privacy and algorithms and for some people especially in largely non-english in Latino households that predominantly speak Spanish at home, they are coming from countries that are traditionally suspicious of government regimes and they are now under surveillance every time they walk out of the house. So the truth is we have to be able to give them the language to be able to participate in conversations about saying these sort of things that you can do to safeguard your information because I don't think people are always thinking about this is that we are constantly contributing to a digital footprint that we will not be able to escape for a lifetime.  The rate that you're paying for your mortgage is going to be similar to the rate that you pay for your next mortgage. These are things that we create this digital footprint and have we given people the tools to be able to help shape their own profiles. Super helpful and that leads perfectly into our next discussion about privacy. So everyone knows Congress is actively thinking about privacy legislation right now and we've heard a lot about one key piece of that which is the algorithmic bias and the particular impact to creating the color but I want to actually broaden this out to talk about all the other aspects of privacy legislation. It's complicated, there's a lot of parts to it, so I want our panelists to help us break it down a little bit. So I want to start with you. About the algorithmic bias issues, what are some of the harms that communities of color are experiencing from all that privacy protections or the current privacy regime that we have now that isn't as adequate as it could be? Are you asking about like what should privacy look like? Yes. I think step one is kind of taking a step out from just privacy in particular. At the center we're trying to encourage conversation not just to be about privacy but about data practices writ large so that we're encompassing all of these things including your algorithm that's deciding what more did you get or how much you paid for a car loan. We're hoping that this legislation centers civil rights protection so there's strong anti-discrimination language in the bill to ensure that it's not only Facebook that can't use an algorithm against you but also like we said like these other industries that are also using algorithms. We're hoping that the FTC gets rulemaking, strong rulemaking authority, in addition to empowering state attorneys generals so that they can also bring claims. We think about California or New York that has a history or like in other states I should say that have strong histories of consumer protection and making sure that they also can have, they can also help the federal trade commission in this work. I think I'm trying to find out a lot of other things. I'll turn back and tell you in a second. I won't actually go to Mattale. One, if you have any additional thoughts on what should privacy legislation look like outside of the health advice issue because there's a lot of other issues that we haven't talked about some of which we all mentioned but also what is the issues of privacy or how tech companies are looking at it and what are some of the concerns you have with the approaches they might be taking. So one of the projects that I'm working on now is looking at facial recognition and really not so much that this is a very technology centric conversation but there is another part of this which is usage and specifically from my perspective and the people that I'm working from, we want people to be able to invent. We want to make sure that there's innovation but we also want to make sure the deployment of these technologies are in the public good. So just to correct Sean slightly from earlier, I serve a New York based New York City congresswoman and within the district that she covers there's actually a landlord that wants to replace keys with facial recognition technology because it would be more convenient to look at your door and it opens than use a key.  So it's not just this fourth amendment question around surveillance that we're concerned about. We're also concerned about once those faces have been captured, and we know that IBM has this project for a million faces and they are using, they're using arrest data for people that are perfectly innocent. They're using pictures of people that have been sex trafficked and all of these really, you know, really horrible ways of diversifying the data set, what, if you're enterprising and you have these faces anyway and you're in an African American community and African American building, there's nothing to say because we have no regulations or laws around this that those faces could be captured and then sold on. And I think that that's really the issue. So as I'm looking at facial recognition as a policy area, I'm thinking about the use of facial recognition and I'm so, I'm going to be in San Francisco in the next couple of weeks speaking to some of the people out there because they want to ban it. They want to ban these big facial recognition within the city and I love California for many reasons, not just Tupac but many, many others. I'm on the black panel so, you know, but I do really like that state because they are very, very serious about this idea that we have the right for private space. That's actually part of our inheritance for living in this country. That's why people like me am great here. So I would say that we're looking at quality life issues. We're looking at secondary markets. We're also looking across to Europe. So we're going to be in Brussels trying to figure out how the EU are thinking about this and we understand different continent, different history but can some of those learnings come here and the reason that we do, the reason that we're very much focused on the tech industry and the big companies isn't because they're not the only people doing this to Sean's point. This is addictive. But if we can bring down a giant then by bringing down the giant and showing that the work can be done there it's going to have huge impact across the industry. So Sean, I want to give you a chance to respond to that. I'm also just really interested in how the tech industry looks at privacy policies, how they're updating the policies to limit and reduce a lot of these harms that all the panels address but also maintaining some of the positive impacts that tech companies also offer. Thank you. I would hope the goal is not to bring down any particular company. The goal should be to protect citizens from overreaching whoever it is. It shouldn't be to bring down a giant. I think that's some of the concern that you have companies that are successful then it becomes a big problem for them. Let's look at them. I think we need to look at how these are going to be used across the board. We had the FBI come in and tell us that they had this massive facial recognition since database that is made up of a lot of driver's license photos. It's like, do you go to a DMV and thinking that you're going to be entered into an FBI system where they're going to scan you every time they're looking for criminal? No. So I think we need to think about privacy. This is a larger thing outside of bringing down giants. But to your point about privacy, the Internet Association released a privacy principles late last year. And I think we need to look at this. I think the industry recognizes there needs to be a federal legislation on privacy period. There has to be something. And the data needs to be yours. It needs to be portable. You need to understand that. You need to be understanding how your data is being used. All of those things are important. So I think it's making a privacy framework where the American public has an idea of where my data, how is it being used? Can I take it? Is it my data? Can I take it with me? All of those things are important and we have those principles out. Did I answer your question? I know you were asking about what the industry is doing. But I think everyone's looking for a federal legislation on this. So just to follow up on that, Francaela, I know you've been working on this more than most advocates. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on some of the issues that we've talked about with the various provisions to privacy legislation. But I'm also curious in all of your advocacy, what do you see as the role for members of color or try caucus members to really play a role in shaping privacy legislation? Okay, a couple of things. And now Francaela has a couple of my concerns about some things that were mentioned earlier about data minimization and what happens when you essentially say I don't want my data minimized anymore. I had a really important question from my four-year-old nephew, Zander, and he was talking to Alexa and he is like, where'd that voices go? And he's like, and I was like, and he's like, I think they're in there. And I was like, I don't really know. And I never really thought about it. And the truth is that it's part of my terror all the time. It's like where is this information going? And even when we're talking about facial recognition technology, I know that I think it was Senator Schatz and Blunt if I'm correct to introduce the Facial Recognition Comprehensive Act last month or this March, I think it was. The thing is, it's like, I know that Congress is thinking about it. I know that they're thinking about what are ways that we can take essentially steps towards whatever is this larger framework. I think that in general, the larger framework is going to have to address this in bite-sized pieces because essentially the issues that I have with maybe facial recognition are a little bit different than some of the other Internet, you know, Internet of Things issues versus just how you're choosing information, sharing data online. So I think that in general we need to think about, okay, we can take this step here, we can take this step here and not try to address it all at once. But I do think to the question of who does this data belong to is something that it has taken a long time for whether it's companies or even the government to get to a place to say that the data is yours. That has been a very long, like, long struggle to get to be able to say that out loud. Because the truth is that once you claim the data is belonging to you, then all of a sudden you are vested with these new rights that didn't belong to you before. Because remember a lot of the times before, you have a lot of third parties who are sharing your information that are saying, I've manipulated it to the extent that it is no longer yours because it cannot be re-identified. Is that really true? I don't know because you won't show me your algorithms because they're proprietary. So we have this riddle. And so the truth is that we have to decide, okay, fine, we're in a riddle. Let's start deciding on what can we actually find a solution for right now. Because I think that we do have good models about things that we can extract to say yes, this can work in our society. But to Gabrielle's earlier point, we have to constantly be thinking about centering the voices that have been either silenced or marginalized into this conversation. Because again, we are going to bring whatever our bias, whatever our divisions, whatever is the separation that we have before this is about a digital economy and essentially embed that into code that's going to carry on into the 22nd century. So I think that we should be thinking about this with a forward-thinking approach and I think we should think about what can we address bite-sized pieces at a time. It's super helpful. And Leonard, I just want to give you the final word before we close out privacy legislation. You have any particular thoughts on what legislation should look like? I'm really interested in what Frank Selig has said about real solutions and maybe key provisions you think should be included in the bill, whether that is focused on indigenous communities or some of the civil rights aspects. Yeah, I think it's... So the privacy conversation is really interesting because Native Americans historically have been super over surveilled. Going back to the non-preservation, having also surveilled them, having to get many passports to leave for innovation. And so I think one of the really key things for us when looking at some of these privacy issues is, like Frank Selig said, having to see at the table, having people to be in those decision-making positions, because I think a lot of the times when these policies aren't active, they are not enacted in a way that provides an avenue for meaningful conversation from not only Native Americans but for many communities of color to be able to take a seat at that table and say, hey, wait a minute, there are aspects of this that we're doing in a way that is going to affect us very equally. So I think one of the major things that I think about, and this is going back to Gabrielle's earlier point about in ethics training, is that we have to have more diversity and inclusion, not just necessarily at the policy-making, but also at the creation of the technology at the teaching and the training of the engineers who are building these things so that we have stuff like what happened. I think it's great what's happening in Google where the employees are taking a stand and saying, hey, wait a minute, we shouldn't be doing this project in China over-sensoring the internet because you're making these ethical principles and you also have a company which arguably is enabling and empowering their employees to be able to make those decisions and speak up, which I think is what we need more of. I think regulation, in personal opinion, I don't know regulation will be quick enough with the emerging technology. We had a talk for free bringing about Moore's Law, and I guess Moore's Law in convergence with all these technologies, I don't know if we can ever create a legislative protection fast enough to deal with this stuff. So instead I think we need to really focus on the individual as well and make them so that they can be empowered to be able to speak up and also to be knowledgeable enough about how it works.  Back in, as after the New Deal when states were essentially implementing welfare, it was totally ridiculous if someone were to come and raid your house and basically determine whether or not you should be eligible for welfare. And even in thousands when they were like asking people who were part of welfare programs to do DNA testing on your children in some states, you're constantly being asked really invasive questions about your partners and your sexual history, all sorts of things that's documented. And the truth is if you were in a group of people who's never been surveilled, I'm just giving you an example of poor people who are constantly under surveillance by the government.  I'm going to ask you to log the DNA of all of your kids to make sure that you're eligible for certain benefits. That would sound ridiculous. And the truth is that the problem was that when the government was trying to implement these rules, it was kind of like people in a room that were probably very homogenous decided that this was going to be a great idea because they were raiding houses of people of color. And I just want us to be thinking, whatever we're thinking about, whatever framework we come up with if we can find a way to include more voices at the beginning, we won't have to raid people's houses because we built it together. And I think that's the way I want us to kind of think about how we're approaching the problem solving. That's a great point. And I think including more voices, more diverse voices is just a strong point that should be prevalent in all of these issues today. And that gets to the third and final issue we'll cover before questions, which is AI and the future of work. So Leonard and Gabrielle, I'm really interested in both of your takes on how will AI impact the future of work, particularly in communities of color, who hold current positions right now that are likely to experience automation? Sure. So with the future of work and automation and how it's going to affect communities of color, if we aren't so, sorry, taking a step back, the surveillance aspect, we're seeing that again in the future of work, where algorithms are managing workers. And then maybe you didn't see, but there was a lot of news articles coming out about Amazon automatically firing workers because they weren't working fast enough. And so when you think about these warehouses where it is people, maybe not only people of color, but these are people who are marginalized, who don't have as much power. That's something that we're going to start working at. When you think about gig workers that are also predominantly people of color who are now, this is their only form of income, and the algorithm is telling them to do this and that and they don't know how much money they're getting me. That's what we're looking at. And so if we aren't, if the culture is this and the backing star is profit, we're going to continue seeing a lot of these principles where it's, you need to pack the spots in 5 to 15 seconds. And if you don't do that, then this is going to automatically fire you because now we need to make sure that our company's model is on customer clicks and they send in all the information and 4 hours need to make sure that's ready to ship. We can't, I mean this is my reason all the sendries we use, but so you can be really on Mount Everest, you can be virtually in Jurassic Park, you can be really, but not really inside Chemical Park. Yes, that's a great way of describing it. So how many people here have had a virtual reality experience before? Stick around. So the way, I mean, historically you think about it, there's actually very prominent computer sciences and I think he's like, it's the new doors, it's one. So now, he has something called like the reality spectrum. So on one end of that you have virtual reality, which deals with, you know, computer generated background. So the way I over this is, you know, what's the difference between VR and AR and XR is something as simple as it's the background. And more specifically in technical terms, in Unity we'll call that the scene. So in VR, the background is computer generated. That scene was actually developed by hand developers. In augmented reality, the background of the scene is actually the real world. So you have virtual objects. So for example if the sign he had an AR object that looked like the sign he bought it would actually sit here on the table. So that's what augmented reality is.  If you use Amazon, any of their shopping experiences now you can use a camera and place objects inside of your house. So that's the way I think about augmented reality. Thanks. I had to go get my, this is the hashtag VR Yeti show and I think it's we hand, we customize this ourselves. It's a nice take away actually because technology should be even friendly and we really think that customizing crystallizing your technology is making it a priority. It helps people get over some of this initial confusion about some of these terms in VR. So I'll try to address that. There are a lot of semantic work games going on in VR right now. What happened is that really 360 video came out first and was sort of called VR by the media and it stuck and then VR kind of stuck. And a lot of us in the industry are trying to I think maybe unsuccessfully but I think the attempt is through XR to have a term that really can encompass the entire VR product. So the whole, all of the various technologies that are related to VR there's some sort of virtual augmented scenario, fantasy world, digital overlays, what I call AR, over reality. And some people call it extended reality. I prefer to think of it as X is just a variable that you put in front of reality you're extending to. Thank you. That's very helpful. So there are some people who may think that VR is actually a mechanism that detaches people because you know, you're behind a computer, you're behind a headset. But Hall at Discovery know that you do a lot of projects with educators from K to 12. And so I was wondering if you could talk about these projects and how you see them as actually building community empathy rather than detaching students. And then if anyone else wanted to talk about similar projects that we're working on. Yeah, I'll say what we're doing. And I think that that's one of the real power of the virtual reality is not that you can hear about very much but we're in the education space, we're in the control space. And for us it's a lot of times the story of the power you bring to an individual. So there are a lot of stories about how people have several moments that set their career. I bet that most people in this room had a moment back to it and say, you know what, I decided to go into what I'm doing now because of the thing that happened when I was this person and that stuff. But I'd like to tell the story of Ray Montaigne who was the first African American woman who run a computer department in the Navy. She was my last year in the Navy. And she knew that she wanted to be an engineer when she was seven years old and was visiting her grandfather. They was in Arkansas and took her to tour a capture of German suffering. In fact, you know this story. And she saw the dials. She put the periscope. She said, what do I have to do to know how to do all this stuff? She's seven years old. She's in Arkansas. I said, well you have to be an engineer. You don't have to worry about that. You have to be an engineer instead of an engineer. And she became an engineer. By the time she retired, she was briefing the joint Jesus staff. She was building programs for Richard Nixon. She was doing great stuff. That's one. The Cherry Grant show was a quarterback. Well, it gives him a moment when he's seven years old and won by a Sears store. And there was a football and a helmet. That's the first time he ever seen me the one. And he decided that's what he won. And don't ask me why. But then he'd get the football and throw it in the air and go pick it up and throw it back it. There are lots of stories like this where somebody was in the place that made a difference in their lives.  And I talked with a math teacher in Hollywood. And we had kids that went to the beach. We lived in L.A. and they'd never go. We'd take them on a field trip to the ocean. Right? Well, if that's true, and if rain money never goes inside that German submarine, or Terry Dungeon ever sees that football, their lives are different. With this, we really and this is sort of the game changer, the high quality VR. They're now under $200. They're accessible. You see a lot of these in schools. It means that I can take you someplace and maybe change the way you think about farming or mining or the military or about being a pilot. And it's an experience that makes a big difference. If you can start at 7 and go through 12, the people will never accept it. Right? I've heard this story in NPR last week. We're going to walk into, she's in college, never heard a symphony before. Season changed their life. Now the assistant can conduct a symphony in Cisco. $2,000 a year. She has another job. It affects us. It's one of those things where all it means owns everybody in it. So that's part of the deal. It's finding a way that it won't really work. The other thing you can do and I'm sure you'll be talking about this. When you talk about empathy, we were trying to put together videos and I thought that where you put this on and I can walk you through the world of a child that's dyslexic. I can make sure that every book you see is colored in such a way that it's very, very hard to read. You can concentrate really hard and you can do it. But to walk around like that and let teachers take that experience you only have to be in there about 7 minutes. Being able to have a child look in there. That's about 7 minutes maybe less. Then you build everything, you change. Other people walk out of people's shoes and to me that is a really, really useful thing. Can I push back a little bit? Sure. I love what you said but I think empathy is something that is a really difficult thing to talk about with VR. And the reason being, especially to folks who have had situations that we may not be able to understand or put on the device and understand. I think it may be a misstep for us in VR to call it empathy. And that's why I try to reframe my own thinking around this and I'm still playing with this idea of is it empathy or are we really teaching compassion because people are having a lived experience in VR that is simulating a real life experience. Because you're not actually having the same experience as the other person. You're able to have some level of compassion and you're able to understand what it might be like to be in your shoes.  But I do think it enables us to put people in this embodied, cognitive place where they're able to have an experience of the other or whatever the other is. And they're able to think about maybe their own transformative experience that they had inside of VR or how that might be an experience that has happened. So I worry about that empathy word sometimes. I think it can be difficult in the VR community to use the word empathy and sometimes feel like the wrong word. And I'll take cognitive, I'll take that. But I know that there was a fundraiser where we're trying to raise water for a place in a different basin. And follow one rules for a job to go here and get water and how long it could take to get one jar of water and do it about 7.5 years in a day.  So if you're right, you can't. It's like a change the way you think. But I love what you were saying about the kind of experience that people haven't had before. Because one of my colleagues that runs VR Nation and Alexander talks about it as obtaining the unattainable. Which I think helps people also expand their imagination. It helps them think about what might be possible for themselves. And that is something that both the digital media and news media work that we do and work that we do in underrepresented communities make sure they have a voice or providing opportunities to have a voice. I think we can do that same in VR, but in an embodied cognitive opportunity where people can sit inside of an experience like the one you're describing and have a sense of what it might feel like. And then to actually take the headset off, I think the key is having something we ask them to do right after that experience. So we can really use that opportunity as a teachable moment, as an educational opportunity, as an opportunity to go one step further than VR can do. Okay. I think there's another one there, which is the limitations you have with, I think VR has received this unwelcome and I'm assuming I guess responsibility to teach empathy. Now this is technology. So for example, I mean, they're just technological challenges that you have with you can teach empathy, right? So for example, you put on a headset to your question about attachment. I always say like, there's no being VR, there's no attachment.  To be quite honest, I can't. Because I can completely like into my HTC Vive and have a very normal experience in this regard, everything else happening in the world. And I'll do the same thing walking down a street with my iPhone. So the attachment issue is really a concern. I think the concern is that how do we build as technology, how do we build a sense of presence in VR? Like that's the true technological challenge. And oftentimes we can't do that right now because there are still areas of human computer interaction. For example, how do I truly smell in VR? So I'll never know what it's like to be a chef. I can't smell the casino actions. What does it actually feel like to be a person of color and unfortunately have to be tapping? Well, you can't really feel yet in VR. So even there are limitations to teaching empathy that we hope will be solved with new areas of human computer interaction for the next few years. Thank you. That's really interesting. So I'm wondering if there are current hurdles for people to access VR. So whether that be education about their technology or the neighborhood you live in or affordability. And if there are hurdles, you could talk about them in ways that we can combat them. Sure. So this is predominantly what we do. We provide access to anyone in our community can come in and use about eight different tools that we have. We teach several different classes on VR content creation. We help people support people when those tools go away because the start-up that started them just went poof. And then we provide ongoing opportunities to build community around VR technologies. So we had a VR eco hackathon a couple of years ago that was the first ever in Austin. And out of that we had about 40%, 40% persons of color to 60% white person folks. And I think it was about 60 40 male female too, which was kind of huge in 2017 actually. And I actually think that there's a huge space inside of the VR field right now. It's really recent. I keep saying that in the last four years but it's still really really recent. We are building a brand new technology and we're building, it's a paradigm shift. A lot of people talk about it like it's just a media tool. It's not. It's a whole shift and it's a 3D spatial computing shift which is not how we see things right now. And that's going to really shift everything. It's going to shift how we consume media, how we create media. And so some of the biggest obstacles we saw early on was that people never tried VR and if they had they tried it with Google Cardboard and had horrible experience. They never wanted to do it again or native nauseous. And that's what happened to me. And then I saw the Syrian Gabo's Beast from the United Nations which was an amazing beast that showed a young woman 12 years old in a Syrian refugee camp. She was Syrian but she was in a French refugee camp and I took the headset off and I was in tears. And I had no idea it was going to be rude or so. But it was because that sense of presence was so strong but I didn't have access to an HSC vibe or it was ripped at that time. I just happened to go to a conference. So we're still even four years now that we've been doing this work. We're still finding that a large percentage of the population has not had access to VR and they have instead of bad experience. And we are trying to spread that across the country by working with arts and cultural organizations to help them. We train trainers. We teach them how to fish. We don't want to be the renderer. We want them to be powered or have the power to create programs on their own and be able to bring VR to their communities.  My kind of sense there, the Port of Pac was the first publicly accessible video camera that was huge and regular average people didn't have access to that and public access television made that accessible so that citizens could go out and document stories that were having in their community and then actually help their government officials accountable because they were able to report local, hyper-local way on stories. And I think we're really trying to do that in the VR aerospace. We have about 15 centers around the country that have taken that on and have started moving. They're expanding the mission into that VR aerospace. But we can only reach so many. So I think the other obstacle is that philanthropists aren't giving yet to VR because the technology is still really new. Just in Boston and that ecosystem just last two months we've seen one foundation just get started. And we're very excited. We have a VR scholarship fund. It's the first in the world I think it's definitely in the country that we're going to be providing to four-year college students higher education so that they can start getting these skills early on that we're building in our job training program and that's a challenge too because philanthropists aren't giving money to those programs as they don't really understand the art yet. So I have to take this headset to Sundance and stand in line and talk to people about what VR is, how you can use it, how it's going to change the world. Get them to maybe believe me a little bit and then see if we can get funding. But that funding trail right now is not following where we need the resources which is at the grassroots levels. It was really held support to not have access to a lab at MIT now so that they can start creating and playing and practicing and making mistakes just like we did in traditional media and in the tech world. Those are some great points and one that I'll sit with is to be quite honest with you VR is a 1% technology. It is designed in for the 1% so far. And it probably will stay that way just giving cost displays to actually putting the HMD ahead and not display the actual headset that's the HMD. So they probably will stay cost but I think discussing affordability without discussing usability is just as important. And I think that there is, in my opinion, there are really just two active groups in virtual reality right now. We have the enterprise group that use virtual reality for things such as training, staff, I think UPS, Walmart or even the way they're in any other community which most of our users are dropping on the game and can win the community. And for individuals like that there aren't any hurdles because they already are in the next paradigm of the meeting. Our average user spends about 25 hours a week inside of his, and I say his because most of our users are predominantly white males, inside of the set set. And once again because of that there aren't any hurdles. I can actually go forward to pre-order to do Oculus quests that will be released right this week. But typically affordability and usability I think they aren't as mutually exclusive as people think they are because I get to meet someone like an obviously normal individual right. To say like I want to go back to what the art experience because I can't move throughout the day without my phone. But you can move throughout the day without your VR as said for most people. I'm sorry, I just want to follow up and say the Russians are really important because they're working in the browser space. Once that becomes out there where you can, now you go to a website and see all this great stuff. So you can go there and see that website VR. That's a pretty powerful thing. In terms of accessibility and barriers it's interesting because money is not so much a barrier anymore. It used to be to have the kind of experience that you had that made you cry both for everything that made you cry. It was really too grand. I mean it was what it was. And that's not going to get in the many classroom. The Oculus Go and that's what we both have up here. These are under $200. That's now in a donor's choose model for a classroom teacher. So these are starting to bring meaningful experiences closer. You can always get the, this was way, the first session was on 3D print. You could 3D print these little guys and you can have them. And it's not the power that's great. So you say you can have them. It's pretty good. What do you need for all these things though? For this and for these is internet connectivity. And I've got stuff I've downloaded here. We were playing with it earlier. You can see the California wildfires.  That's because I downloaded it at a good height. If we're going to do this at schools, if I'm going to be able to have this and be able to check it out so you're going to go home and have your submarine experience where it's going to be, you're going to have bandwidth at home. And that's important. These things, the lower price heads, it's all work with cell phones. How do you have cell phones? There you go. So if you're going to download a VR experience though, you're going to need a height that will let you do without killing your data plan. You've got to have open Wi-Fi to be able to do that. And once open Wi-Fi happens, then we've got that whole new level of greater, like you said. So this is a VR camera. So all day I'm making video pictures of this. Getting this through security was interesting in my mind. What is this? I said it's a VR and they explained to me, what time is the panel? So if the security guards are coming, I think it's a very big sign. But with this, and these are under $200 to, I could show the experience of moving from this panel to where we have lunch, right? Because the school kids were filling up the cafeteria so we had to keep walking. But I can demonstrate this and use a free tool from Google. Thank you Google for sponsoring this. Stitch it all together and you can walk in my shoes to have lunch. Or a kid can take, use this and show how to go from their front door to the school where they attend. Or what their cafeteria is like. And I can stitch all those together with free tool. So the money is not so much the issue anymore. But you've got to have the bandwidth. And the bandwidth has to be there for everybody. Everybody has to be in access. I do want to say you can actually watch all of your content offline. So you do have to download it. But you can watch it offline. We took three HTC vibes to Nairobi, Kenya to do a project with the United Nations on a three-dimensional globe where we put all of a particulate matter for 35 years, mapped it onto the growth globe and then showed world leaders how you can use VR to tell stories in a three-dimensional way. And even though we didn't have these at the time, and I would have rather taken these than the 50 pounds and trying to get it through customers like my other HTC vibes work, it's still, I have to say, I really do think that having a full system that allows you volumetric VR, which this does, but having a full Oculus Rift, well, and Quest, and we have two that just came out this week, and the HTC five having a 15 by 15 foot space, when I go to the senior center and do demos for seniors, and they can throw sticks for a robot dog and have them jump up and rub his belly and have them jump for sticks, I have to watch out that they don't run through the brick wall in my building. Because it is so real, but it's also physical. We did a part of recreation class on fitness inside of the HTC vibe. You can't really do that with this. So I do want to just differentiate that there are many different headsets. We can do two hours on all of the different technologies and do you make something in 360, do you make something in Unity or Unreal or A-Frame, which works on the web, in a web browser and is a really accessible free open-source solution by Mozilla, there are so many different ways that you can create VR content, and I think that's one of the challenges to get back to your question around accessibility is also the fact that we're so young as an industry that we don't have standards. There's very little standards around cameras, there's very little standards. There was only three years ago an editing program, you know, Premiere took on editing into the 60 event. There are new programs coming out every day that will allow you to do things easier and easier. We haven't quite found the dream weaver of VR yet, but we're getting there. So you guys teed up my next question nicely, because Paul talked about broadband access, and in public knowledge we care a lot about making sure that every neighborhood and everyone has access to broadband, high-speed quality broadband. So you said that's really important for VR but you also said that you need to, sometimes you can download things about having internet. If you're going to, from a good example of this, it doesn't work for bandwidth, it's Google or VR which won't work on the other ones, it won't work on the big ones. If you have a good pipe, and I have a pretty good pipe in my house but I still hardwired for that, you can look around, this way you can like fly over Paris and go down to the street and you look around and take a little walk. If you're waiting for the image to load, it's kind of like that old movie in Session, right, when you're building slow, if you're on a good bandwidth you can really explore lots of different things and that's it. It's got to be the good one but without bandwidth, Google or, which is really somewhere out right now really won't do it. So there's a lot of stuff I download. Right, and there are a lot of policy makers in the room, so I'm curious if you want to talk about why broadband access is important and if there should be policies what they should look like to increase access in the climate. Yes, so this is... Anyway, it's... Look at this one because in terms of VR and AR I mean I go to Beijing once a recorder and some of the technologies that I'm seeing over there are moving a lot faster because of the vibe change that I'm trying to do and they have help. So in terms of like being in a policy, I mean I feel like it's one of those things where we need to make mistakes first and that policy makers will kind of come in and govern us or can we govern ourselves before we can get there and I'm not sure if we can and in my opinion I think that policy makers are going to need to allow us as creators and developers of the platform to really mess up to do things that we probably should not have done that are slightly unethical. So we can actually figure out where those issues are because right now it's still rather early to say like okay I'm not sure that everyone has a problem or they have access. And let me just say that discovery education is moving us into education because it really works really effective in a lot of ways for a lot of subject areas that otherwise aren't as effectively delivered but in terms of policy, YouTube are a new industry I mean we're going to start with schools and hopefully go out and home but if we want this industry to grow like the video business grew, like software business grew then you've got to have the highway use that. It's 1% but I think your stuff could be 10% but usually everybody has access. Oh without a doubt. Because I mean I think a lot of in terms of technology works as 5G right now. So one of the biggest issues right there is the latency, right? So when you talk about latency you're talking about the responsiveness of how it can actually work. So you're so deep in the heart of it. Yes, yes. And because of that, typically I think they'd say anything under the latency. And right now that's for like post real lives. For VR and AR you need to like below 20% and you can't even get it because 5G isn't there. So you can't have shared AR experiences yet as well because of that lack of technology and that's what we just don't have right now. I share some of your thoughts about that but I'm also really concerned about getting the industry total power right now and letting them mess up with my data. I'm not okay with that. I think that we need to be asking the hard questions now about VR and not make some of the mistakes that we've made with social media and other privacy issues. For example, Facebook owns this. You have to log into Facebook to do anything on this device. And so it's not just the examples you brought up. Imagine if you have this headset on in Facebook or any other company is looking everywhere you look and creating heat mounts like YouTube already does with all of your videos. You can watch heat mounts of where people are looking at 360 videos right now. You can see how effective your 360 videos are on those heat mounts. But what it also tells you is where people's focus is. And as a developer and as a creator I'm very excited about that because it helps me make better content. However, as a private person I'm very concerned about who's going to know where I'm looking and making certain assumptions about that. And what are we going to assume about people's sexual orientation? What are we going to assume about people culturally? What are we going to assume about people politically, economically? All of these issues are going to impact us if they have the data they will be able to make these assumptions about us. And I think that is cause for concern. Early on we have the ability to create standards for this industry that we did with other technologies that went really, really rapidly into where they're at now. And then on the broadband issue I was a VTAP recipient out in California. I worked in Latino communities, mostly migrant communities on broadband adoption. And you have to have, I mean I think the bottom line is in order to experiment and play and create and learn with a group, which this generation really loves to do and I think it's really important that we cultivate and support that, you've got to have everybody online and you've got to enable them to all have their own device. My mom was actually, I just went and saw Senator King today and thanked him because he worked on the main laptop initiative with my mom who is the head of the main teachers in English 15, 20, 20 years ago I think now. They gave every fifth grader a laptop in the state of Maine with my home date. And having a device in your home that you can then play with and not have to share with somebody else, that's actually as important I think as having the broadband that goes with that because we've got to give people an opportunity to play with different devices and I wouldn't say that $250 is necessarily means that money is not an issue anymore. It's also having access to the cultural reference points of technology. Technology people speak a different language. My husband's always like, we need to talk more like a normal person because I'm not talking about eFrame and I'm talking about this and I'm talking about latency and it's true. You need to break down the, you don't need to make those assumptions about what people know in the room. You just break down these definitions because people can feel really excluded by that language as well if they haven't been exposed to it or they haven't been in a community that is as tech savvy. So, you know, don't assume you know what it is. So I'm going to ask a couple more questions and then take a few questions from the audience and start thinking of your questions.   I won't make that a history. But in general I wanted to talk about the importance of diversity in this space and I'm curious if you think that the VR space, and this is for everyone, but if you think that VR is a diverse field in the sense of the content creators, developers and users, and if not how can diversity in VR be improved? Well, that's a great question. So, we've been working on Drop 4, we're four and a half years old now, but oh gosh, we're almost going on five cents. And since then, have completely developed myself and myself in the industry. And one thing that you will notice, whether you go to GDC, a game developer conference that happens every year in March, whether you go to things such as the augmented World Expo, to the augmented reality VR conference in San Francisco as well, is that oftentimes the majority of us are male, post or older more than likely white male as well. You will see very few women, and it's very great that you can see most people of color. Like I know, for example, with GDC Microsoft Post, a Blacks and King beat up just during GDC. And something I've seen in terms of developers and users just over the past four and a half years is that I would say in the last two years, you now have women in XR fun. So you're seeing more women who are actually building in XR and VR at the moment in terms of the diversity of the developers as well. I get a lot of calls from friends who work in living in Los Angeles, who are content creators, and who are from underworked communities, and they're interested in figuring out like, okay, how do I build this AR conspiracy to an AR kid? So I'm starting to see folks outside of the space, like artists, and storytellers, and creators who are like, oh no, I kind of want to see what this tool can actually lead into. So I think the last two years have been quite interesting. But I think during the early days, it was like very hard. Yeah, it was very hard to find people who, you know, kind of look like us, you know, around us. It's very hard. So yeah, I would say that diversity is slightly improved. I would agree. I think there's, in Boston, we have a really awesome ecosystem and a very diverse ecosystem. So we've had we've had diversity right from the beginning in Boston. Boston VR if you go, you'll see, you'll look out in the crowd, it's very diverse. Which surprised me actually when I first went because I thought I'd be the only woman, and it would be all white guys, and it wasn't. And so I think partly Boston has 16 universities, one of the biggest, you know, school town in the world, I guess. So there are a lot of students, and there's a lot of international students, and there's a lot of diversity in that way. There's also some women leaders. I do, we have women in next realities that we started in Boston a couple of years ago. There's a women meetup in New York City. I definitely encourage you to look into if there's women meetups in San Francisco, which I know there are. The only reason I'm on Facebook now is because of the women in VR groups. They are constantly posting jobs and holding each other out. I mean it is not uncommon for women, at least women in our field, to have 50 people post on, hey, what kind of curriculum can I use for this project I'm doing? Or, hey, does anybody know any projects in Berlin? Or, hey, can I find a unity developer to do this? So there's a lot of helping each other that reminds me a lot of 1999, which was, you know, I was a web developer in 1999 and we were all helping each other out, and there were computer using groups, and we meet and we'd all like help each other. And that's really, VRLA came out of that. Actually VRLA came out of a meetup, and it was one of the biggest tech expos for VR over the same years, and it had that community vibe really strongly. And so I do think that there are a lot of spaces in VR that did not see in even the early days of the Internet, South High Valley, that are very conducive to diversity and inclusion. I think, generationally, I mean, most people that I work with are, could be my daughters and son. So, you know, they're 25 years old and they've already started. One of our participants, it was her first event, she's from DC, Morgan Mercer. She came up to Boston for our eco hackathon in April of 2017. She had never done anything with VR at all. And Morgan, she's African American, she is entrepreneurial, she's super smart. She basically now has a $10 million company with contracts with all kinds of tech companies, and it's a VR product that's all about sexual harassment training. And I just think that's amazing because of how young the industry is, and because of the inclusivity that I think a lot of us have felt. A lot of things are possible right now. The other two folks I want to mention is just Kamala Sinclair, who's done a lot of work with the Ford Foundation. She has an awesome series, I guess, of a blog and reports on making a new reality about how VR is conducive to diversity and inclusion and how we can do more about that. Especially in this story that we tell, if you have women creators and people of color creators, you're going to have stories that are really different than some of those algorithms that are built on the web that when you look for CEO, for women CEO, you get a picture of CEO Barbie. Still, still the first page in the first search forms, right? So we have an opportunity to build something different now, and I think I'm excited about it as you can probably tell. I think there's a lot of opportunities for us to bake that in now. But I think we have to do it in a really conscious way. We have to talk about privacy and we have to talk about inclusion now. I would agree with that. One of the things we got to do over the last Saturday is post the 53 year old California Student Media Festival. They're all projects from kindergarten through 12th grade. I've been looking at it for 20 years, and then we just did it last Saturday. Lots of women, lots of people of color, they're all there. They can all make this stuff, and right now we don't have a vision of what a VR creator looks like. I mean, you know it's a lot of white males, but no one else really does. What does it look like? We can change what people look like, and therefore change the way kids guide. To do that, when you start, that's why it's not a lunch counter thing. It's getting us kids to do this. So when we talked about barrier, I was talking about school, so $250 is three textbooks, really two textbooks. That's it. If I can get this and this, it's equivalent of four textbooks into the hands of the kids we're talking about to create their experiences. This isn't owned by the old guard anymore. This is owned by the new guard. We can do that, celebrate them, and create festivals for that, and lots of stuff will change. So that was absolutely the time to start moving this stuff, modeling this stuff in the kindergarten to 12th grade space. That's why our conversation was so good. That's great. Thanks. So we're running a long time, and I'm wondering if there's a couple quick questions from the audience. Wow. Wait for one of the other panelists. Remember my role? We're asking questions with not giving long monologues. Thank you all for a great panel on this subject. Antonio White behind that news group. You all talked about the diversity inclusion issue, and it seems as though we haven't understood your responses. The only way to sort of combat that is from a grassroots approach, but what we know from diversity inclusion practice is unless it's centered at the highest platforms, and the executives aren't supporting people for those issues, it's hard to move the needle. So understanding how intellectual and economic capital flows through these big companies, what can companies be doing to make sure that there are more people of color from disadvantaged backgrounds who are able to help create and shape those experiences so that if you're trying to build compassion and empathy, those of AR, VR actually reflect the reality. And then the second part is I've been doing some work with the Berklee Klein Center at Harvard on misinformation, particularly through social media and how it impacts people of color. Do you all foresee with the future of AR, VR us needing to have a public education about how you perceive this AR experience so that it's not a developer or person with a certain perspective on how they want you to see the world, but it is actually authentic and true and based in real information and honest information. So I know it's a two-part question, but please respond anyway. Thank you again. I would love to touch on your first question, which is the responsibility that companies have. So something I've looked at is one day on the record, I was looking at the team and I realized that everyone on our team at drop has gone into a top engineering program and more than likely he or she is either a white male or Asian, for example. And I bring this up as a very personal start when I thought about it. And the reason I was like, why is it that all of our engineering talent pretty much looks the same and has very similar lived experiences. And I realized that when I looked at the makeup, the team is at the team's ex Sony PlayStation VR. The team is, you know, ex Google Adrian. And the reason that we were, the reason that when they were at drop was when we hired the best is that oftentimes when you look at these larger companies, I have noticed that there are not a lot of women and people of color on a bright spot of teams where they can give the experience that they need to mention to a startup. So for example, I was looking and I was saying, I would love to hire a female computer vision engineer. And I was like, it would be better if she was, you know, a woman of color. And one of my friends, she needs a very prominent MA, a machine learning team at startup. And she said, where are you going to find her? Because they're probably only a handful most probably of research institutions. So when I look at larger companies, something I would like to see is that when they're recruiting engineering, specifically when they're recruiting engineering talent, to put them on the right product teams, the ones that actually truly matter would actually give the experience that they can then take that knowledge capital and then bring it to a company like DROP. Other organizations, because that's the issue that I'm recurrent in not even I, but I've talked to other founders as well that we're seeing right now is where it's like why don't these folks have the knowledge capital? Because if you think about it right, if you look at, you know, I know we've been talking about like HBCUs for example, and something I've seen is that oftentimes a lot of HBCU graduates who then go take on engineering jobs at large companies, they aren't on the right product teams. They are working on engineering problems where I'm like we can have, you know, someone who just went out of program yesterday actually fix that. But imagine if that HBCU graduate now works on a Siri team at Apple, and then he leaves and goes start some machine learning startup. That's a completely different trajectory compared to working at Apple on, you know, Apple music picks and bugs because, you know, the user couldn't get the next screen to work. So I think that the long-winded response to your answer is that I would love to see other companies put engineers and folks who kind of hold the knowledge and technical capital in the right positions. Because I think that right now, I mean, tech is a major wealth generator. I mean, let's not ignore that. And a lot of that wealth generation can only happen by people who have the knowledge capital in the war. So who will leave their company? I want to address the other thing we brought up. Two things. One, yes, that's true with companies and companies. I think one of the things very specifically that they can do to attract diverse talent is to pay people to come to hackathons. So I saw Vos do this recently, and I thought this was awesome. So, you know, one of my staff people was able to get paid $1,000 to do a three-day product hackathon. Because those companies, when you go to a hackathon, they're using your ideas. You're selling them something when they realize it or not, and you're usually doing it for free. So if they want to make sure that they're attracting diverse folks, they're going to get more people from different backgrounds if they're paying them for in exchange for that. Secondly, the grassroots diversity thing for me, we have 1,500 community media centers around the country. We're under attack right now. One of the there's an FCC order from Folds Rulemaking that could really produce 0531, I believe. They can take away half of our funding. We have been for 35 years providing training to anyone in the community who wants to come in and make content, and we're doing the same thing in VR. I'd like to see us be protected so that we can continue to do this work. And also we work with libraries and arts organizations and film festivals. Those folks are all doing that work, and they're attracting a really diverse group of creators and majors to their spaces. And lastly, building a network. So one of the best things if you I think for getting more diversity inclusion is to give access to your networks. So that's what I see a lot of women doing for each other is that we're giving each other access to our networks. I do not even hesitate a minute if a woman reaches out to me on Facebook and says hey, I'm a woman in VR, do you have time for a 30 minute call? Yep, absolutely. So I think all of us who have talent and who have interest in nurturing the field, we should all be doing that right now. No matter what age, you know, I have 25-year-olds mentoring 50-year-olds, and we have a lot of women who are coming in and creating, and sometimes they get sidelined to marketing teams or communications teams or taking the notes for the meeting teams. And I want to put them into positions where they're the engineer, they're doing all the product, not only the design, but actually doing the coding. So we need to, as allies, make sure that women are getting put into positions where they can have opportunity to learn some of those skills, because that's why the white guys just stand up and do it and sometimes we don't, and so we need help. And so I think helping each other will be that. Sorry, that wasn't short. One of the things that we do is to discover education very seriously. One of the things, and Charmaine could talk about this better than I could, but we work with companies like Toyota to do content creation and that's where you see every kind of person come up and do the last Toyota Challenge runs, I think, were two high school girls of color. And if you can tata the consulting firm who has a computational thinking site that's all free, all of them are free as in English as in Spanish, those things are really important, and we can get them started before they get out of high school, then when they hear you and talk to you, you can pull them in a direction, have the skills and the effort to love that something they want to do. So start young, go to your school, see if they're doing that, that they're not just doing my test scores, I know test scores are important, but say are you giving kids in this school the chance to create material for this? Because they can do that. That personalized experience question, by the way, that you asked about VR, all media is edited, right? And so the best thing we can do is teach young people to have really awesome critical thinking skills, and I have to say I work with a lot of young people who don't seem to have that as a priority, and we really need to help them make that a priority, because whatever media form we move to, if they're not thinking critically about both their role as a creator and their role as a consumer, we've lost everything. Alright, so we're going to combine two questions here. So I need these questions to just be 30 seconds or less. I need the responses to be 45 seconds or less. I have a question about how you all are approaching policy makers and regulators with VR. Either what County just talked about with the FCC regulations, but more importantly how the nonprofit groups and other or maybe not more importantly, but how other groups are utilizing VR technologies to make, to present their case for whatever it is that they're doing at the policy level. Because in my experience, we are going to find the VR and experience the VR as general public as policy makers as people needing to be entertained in gaming. So what is that looking like and what can that look like? Thank you. Let's go ahead and get this question in and thank you guys. Thanks more about and I think I might have the best answer for this, but I'm a neuroscientist by training I'm just curious, in parallel is there a body of research that's looking at the cognitive, you've talked a lot about cognitive immersion to the point that I was like, huh thinking about cognitive immersion in the different communities. So my question is where are things that I know everything's very nice and right now, but where is it at in terms of understanding what does that immersion actually do to us in terms of our conversation and how we're experiencing that. That may not be a quick question, but it's not a quick answer just to find the answer. That too? Yeah. Do you want to answer while you're getting somebody else? Yeah, I'm giving myself a timer. On the cognitive neuroscience, I can put you in touch with some people because there's a lot being done, but there's a lot going on. We're actually organizing with a number of friends on Twitter and different folks at different universities, a white paper, research paper on seniors in VR, for example. There hasn't been one yet. So even to answer your question, you know, how are folks using VR for policy change we're not entirely there yet. I think the best use case has been Planned Parenthood, frankly, who came out really early on and worked with Maddie D'Alepena, who is one of the, I think, least unsunk heroes of VR. She's the godmother of VR. She did a piece with them called Across the Line that you can download and watch. And it gives you an embodied experience with what it would be like to walk across a line of protesters. She used real audio from outside of reverse clinics, whatever you want to call them, clinics. And that audio is very intense. And so when you're, it's being directed at you inside of that VR experience it's pretty impactful. And so they had a whole kit and a guidebook. We have a project on immigration and migration storytelling that we're using as a policy and a facilitating community dialogue conversation. I can tell people more about it if you come and talk to me. And we'll be up to you at the thing tonight too. In terms of the research, I'll just say that there is some research that's growing. Ted, the congressman started off talking about how it's being used in VA hospitals now for post-traumatic stress syndrome and how effective that is. I've seen studies that reduces the pain of childbirth. So there is some stuff there. The experience, especially against this level, can do wonderful things. But the research is just growing. I just saw a study just this week, actually, that they compared VR and other pain users. And VR was like the best. Because it actually had no drugs at all. So there was a study, there was something I saw this week I think it was an article about the opioid crisis and how might we use VR to move people out of addiction. Which is an interesting idea and again we have to do more research on that. And I'll just quickly say check out Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. They do some really impressive white papers on presence, immersion, cognitive understanding of VR. Great, unfortunately we have to wrap up but thank you so much to our panelists, it was wonderful. At least it will be a closing remarks. All righty well thank you so much to coming to emerging tech for social change today. You are invited to our reception and showcase which takes place at the Google office, which is located at 25 Massachusetts Avenue. You can either walk there, it's about a 15 minute walk or so. Or if it's really hot outside as I said at the beginning over or at lift. So I hope that you guys can join us there and make sure that you interact with our panelists. And let's give a round of applause for all the panelists. And be sure to use hashtag tech for change. Thank you.