Hey, welcome to Stand on the Energy Man on Friday on my lunch hour, Stan Osterman here. And I'd like to start the show off by saying thanks to the Hawaii Air National Guard folks at Headquarters Hang for hosting me and my wife back at the headquarters for a drill weekend Sunday afternoon and making it a real special afternoon for us. That was great, so thanks a lot. And congratulations to Woody Woodrow and Mongo Sakai for the great change of command earlier in the morning. And some good speeches. I thought I was really impressed. Mongo went long as usual, but it was a really great speech, Mongo, so good job. I'm wearing my shirt, my patriotic shirt, just to commemorate my weekend. I had a great patriotic weekend with my guard buddies, so thanks a lot. Today's show's a little bit different. We're going to talk about hydrogen, surprise, surprise, my favorite subject. And we're going to talk a little bit about safety and start off by talking a little bit about hydrogen's characteristics, because I keep running into people that, the first words out of their mouth when I say hydrogen is they say Hindenburg, or they say H-bomb, and we start off on that discussion. And it's people from all walks of life, and I'm not just saying that they're like silly people, but I mean some senior military people. That's the first thing they say is, well, hydrogen's not safe. It's explosive and things like that. And those things are true, but so is gasoline, and so is dynamite, so is a lot of things. When you're dealing with high energy storage items, whether they're batteries or whether they're gasoline or whether there are any other kind of fuel, you've got to treat them with respect, put them in the right kind of containers and handle them safely, and hydrogen is no different. But when we trained the fire department here at the city and county, and also the federal firefighters, because we had to, with the vehicles we were driving around city streets and on the bases, when we trained them about hydrogen, they were really comfortable with it, because basically if you have a vehicle fire in a hydrogen vehicle, you're either going to have a fire or not have a fire, in which case, even though it's a very hard flame to see in the daylight, it shows up easily on a thermal imager, so you put a thermal imager and aim it at the car and say, okay, it's on fire or it's not. If it's on fire, you let it burn. If it's not on fire, you let the gas go. When you're all done, there's nothing even to hose down, because the hydrogen goes into the air and eventually turns back into clouds and rain, because it's a natural element. So hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. It's like 74% of all the atoms in the entire universe, and that goes past our planet, by the way, our hydrogen atoms, and they are almost always found connected to some other atom to make a compound or a molecule. So the most common one that we have here in Hawaii is water. We have a lot of water around us, and people say, well, how much water does it take to make hydrogen? And we're going to talk a little bit about the equipment we just installed at our station downtown on Cook Street, and we've been making hydrogen all week long, and we've gone through five gallons of water. So we're making quite a bit of hydrogen, and it doesn't take a whole lot of water. And when we're done putting it back in a fuel cell, it turns back into water. But what are some of the other characteristics about hydrogen that people have kind of misnomer is about? Number one, it is very hard to see in daylight, but when you're inside in an indoor scenario, it shows up as a blue flame, much like propane. People say, if you can't see it, you could walk into the flame accidentally or something or the fire department could run into a burning car. Well, we have a lot of hydrogen experience, and venting hydrogen is very noisy. So you have more than one sense. You have more than just your sense of sight. You have the sense of sound, and you also have heat waves that would come off if it was burning, and you would see those even if you didn't see a flame. People say hydrogen is very explosive. If you mix it with an oxidizer, it is. Just like anything else, if you mix gasoline in air or jet fuel in air and you ignite it, it's going to light, and it can do that. And hydrogen has a very wide range. It's 4% to 74% by volume with air, and it can ignite. But the reality is it's very hard to ignite because when hydrogen is being released, it's also going straight up at 45 miles an hour. And it doesn't have much chance to mix with air unless you contain it and give it a chance to start mixing with the ambient air. So really to get a volatile mixture is kind of difficult. You have to kind of confine it into a space and then have an ignition source. So again, when we train the firefighters, by the time they're finished, they're actually more comfortable with hydrogen than they are gasoline. So just a little bit about hydrogen and hydrogen safety. You want to not contain it. If you have tanks and storage, you have to have them outside. You don't want to have hydrogen around any kind of chlorine because it will also spontaneously ignite, and you don't want to have that happen so you don't go mixing chlorine or having chlorine out where you have hydrogen.  You don't want to have an open flame and things like that. You don't want to have electromagnetic things or anything that can set off a spark. So you just handle it safely and you're good to go. What I'd like to do now is take you through a little tour of our new station that we're just standing up in downtown Kaka'ako and make it a little bit of hydrogen. And this is the Millennium Rain Unit that was basically, this is fresh off the truck we just unloaded at the day before, and it's basically the size of a large pallet. It's forkliftable. It weighs just under 3,000 pounds for the front unit. And then I ordered extra storage. So normally the unit there on the right, the main stainless steel unit, comes with 2 kilograms of storage at 5,000 PSI. I ordered 6 extra 1 kilogram containers. So we can actually store 8 kilograms of hydrogen at 5,000 PSI and dispense it. Now what does that mean in practical terms? That's about four half car fills for a new Toyota Mirai because we only dispense at 5,000 PSI. And most of the passenger cars, they like to have 10,000 PSI. So because we're dealing with a gas, unlike a liquid, we can only give a Mirai a half a tank of gas when we fill it up because we can only go to 5,000 PSI, which is half the pressure of their system. So here's another view of the Millennium Rain. It's very sleek, very self-contained, but inside there, to put it in really, really frank terms, this is your oil field, your oil pipeline, your oil tanker, your oil refinery, and your gasoline truck that comes to your station and drops everything off, all of those functions go on right in this machine before you put the hydrogen into a fuel cell car or truck and let it go. So when you think about the business principles of what pencils out and what doesn't, if you eliminated all that transportation that's associated with taking oil from a field and bringing it to a refinery and then refining it and then taking that refined material and shipping it to a point to dispense, even if you just eliminated that, you're getting rid of a whole lot of costs that are not necessary. Most hydrogen can be produced right on site with water and electricity. Now, electricity in Hawaii is pretty expensive, but what are we having problems with in Hawaii? Well, we've got people with photovoltaics and they love to use all the electricity they can, but they usually have extra during the day that the eco can't take back. It's called curtail power. If you take that curtail power and make your hydrogen, at least you're making something rather than throwing away electricity. So that's kind of the way we're looking at it. And I'd like to say right now too, if any of you want to call in, we have a call in number here,<PHONE_NUMBER>. And you can call in and ask some questions. If you have any questions, we'll be glad to talk to you. What we've done here is on this photo is we open up the cabinet. And this is the main part of the whole Millennium Rain Unit. That white looking box on the bottom is actually the cell stack that makes the hydrogen. And what's done is we bring AC, 240 volt AC power into this box, the gray box above. And it has an inverter that takes it to DC power. And it sends it to that unit, the white unit down below, as a positive terminal on one side, a negative terminal on the other side. And basically starts applying that to all the cell stacks inside. And it starts splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen. If you notice in the equipment there, one of the safety things that we use as a standard is, you notice that the hydrogen tanks are all painted red. And if you look to the left and you look carefully, you'll see some red lines. The red lines are hydrogen lines. The green lines are oxygen lines. So we know which lines have what in them because they're red or green. And those are low pressure lines, so they're usually going to vents. The high pressure lines are all stainless steel with very sophisticated fittings that literally you have to get certified to do the plumbing on. The gray box above the white box is the main power unit, has a battery inside, has the PLC, the computer control on top. The number 30.9 there is telling you that's how many amps it's drawing at 240 volts. That's telling you how many amps that the stack is using. The number 144 there in that one gauge is telling you what the temperature is in the stack. And normally if the temperature goes up, the amperage goes up and you're making more hydrogen. And then we have what we call Hobbes meter on an airplane. Basically, the gauge on the right tells us how many hours we have on the stack there, so we can track the hours and how long the stack's been running continually. So the next photo we've got coming up, again, looks at above that main unit is the compressor unit where the two white gauges are up on top in that white panel. And that's how we tell how much pressure is coming out of the electrolyzer and how much pressure is going into those red tanks. So what will happen is the hydrogen, electrolyzer will make hydrogen, we'll send it over to that gray box that was on the left of the cabinet and that gray box shifts it over to the next section and I'll talk about that section where it's basically cooled down and also starts to be purified, goes into the red tanks and then dispensed. This section of the equipment right here is the section that does the cooling of the hydrogen and also gets it ready for purification. This is where the gas comes up, obviously you've got oxygen on the right with the safety label there and hydrogen on the left and we have some sight glasses in the middle and there's actually cooling coils that run down the middle of these tanks and a cooling system that helps keep the hydrogen, the water in the electrolyzer cool so we can get more production out of the electrolyzer. It likes to operate right around 140 or 150 degrees is kind of the sweet spot for the electrolyzer to operate and this helps keep the temperature right in that area. The gauge up there on the left is, it looks like it just flipped there, the gauge on the left there is the pressure gauge of what the system is putting out and it's showing about 80 pounds per square inch so we get about 80 pounds of pressure right off of the electrolyzer and then that pressure pushes it through some cleaning equipment that'll come up in the back there and I'll talk about that right after the break but that scrubbing equipment helps take any more, any of the contaminants out of the hydrogen that are still left in there after the electrolysis. So we're coming up on a quick break here, I'm gonna take a short one and get you, get you some more information on ThinkTech and then we'll come back and talk about the backside of the system. Hi, my name is Aaron Wills, you are watching ThinkTechHawaii.com. I am the host of the show Rehabilitation Coming Soon. You can catch us live on ThinkTechHawaii.com at 11 a.m. on Tuesdays. I will see you there. Hi, I'm Ray Starling and I am co-host for Hawaii's Wednesday afternoon. State of clean energy and with me today is Leslie Cole Brooks and she's gonna tell you what's happening this month with our shows. Hi everybody, I'm Leslie Cole Brooks, the executive director of the Distributed Energy Resources Council and this month is the focus on Distributed Energy Resources. We just had a great show on smart grid technologies and the rest of the month we're going to discuss storage, different strategies, micro grids and then we're gonna have live man and woman on the street from Verge. So it's really exciting, very informative, lively and just worth doing. So see you next Wednesday. Hi. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man here, Stan Osterman on my lunch hour. And we were talking about my Millennium Rain Unit that just got delivered to HCAT over on Cook Street and starting to make some hydrogen for us and talking about how neat a little system it is. You know, a lot of times we focus on the industrial scale production of hydrogen, a large scale and really we're trying to get the transportation sector to grow. But we also understand that there's a lot of interest at home with people who have their own solar and who have, you know, and want to either be off the grid or have some kind of solution where they can have that choice to be off the grid. And so we also talk to them about combining hydrogen as part of their energy storage with their battery system for a longer term, survivability or operations. If there's solar is down for a couple days or a couple weeks, having hydrogen is a backup energy source to store energy with. And that's really cool, especially if you have a hydrogen fuel cell car, which are gonna start coming and you'll start seeing more and more of on the road as we move into the next decade here. So let's get back to my unit and I'll show you the magic that happens. I'd almost like to tell you a whole lot of details about this scrubber unit because it's really slick, but I'm afraid I'd get into some proprietary stuff that Chris McQuinney probably wouldn't be happy with me describing. But what this is is the two bigger canisters and their purpose built, those have a desiccant inside that is made to absorb any kind of moisture that comes through the system. Now, I mentioned earlier that what we store is pure hydrogen. What the industry demands on the car side for their fuel cell vehicles is 99.999% pure hydrogen. So that's extremely pure hydrogen. In fact, it's so pure, it's really hard to measure. So what the system does in the back of the unit, we call it the scrubber.  And those things actually start to take the hydrogen and run it through some electrical systems that will take any oxygen that was not separated out in the first stage where we separate the gases and takes any oxygen and recombines it with any of the hydrogen moving through the system to make water and then eject the water out. So we have two chambers there. They're linked in series with two different technologies that basically take all the hydrogen that at this point is over 93 or 95% pure. And it takes that hydrogen and any oxygen that's still left in there, it'll react and turn into water and then it gets ejected out the bottom. Now, after it comes out of those two cylinders, it goes into one of the desiccant tubes and goes through a drying process. And then it goes from that desiccant tube to the second desiccant tube and so it goes through a double drying process. So by the time the hydrogen comes out of the system, it's virtually 99.99% pure. It's virtually pure hydrogen. It's pretty amazing. So right there what you see is the extra storage I bought, the extra tanks. And also you see the water jug in the bottom. Right now we haven't set up our reverse osmosis supply yet. So we're using distilled water to run into our system. And what you see there is a three gallon jug that by the end of the day, it'll go from full down to about one gallon left in there and we'll top it back off the next day and run it down. So it's taken in about two gallons a day and turning the two gallons into hydrogen. And then you see the stack there. And another safety piece, we haven't adopted a safety standard in Hawaii yet, but we're trying to work with the legislature to adopt what we call NFPA2 or fire protection standards too that deals specifically with hydrogen. And what it would do on those tanks is we're actually going to have to secure those tanks to the pad below using some brackets and bolts and rebar, not rebar, i-bar or i-beams to hold it down for any kind of seismic protection so they don't tip over. We have to also do some similar things, isolate the electrical and things like that. We have to make sure we have the right setback from buildings. On this shot here it just gives you an idea of the quality of the kind of work that you need to do with the hydrogen system. That's a real close-up of the, the Swedgelock is the commercial brand of the fittings, but that shows you how precise the fittings have to be and how it fits in the tanks. So literally we can manually open and close all the tanks and use all of them or just use some of them and you'd say, well, why would you do that? Well, when you're dealing with a gas instead of a liquid, if I had a car that came in and I wanted to give it the most pressure I could, what I would do is I would only open one tank and put as much of that as I could in the vehicle and then the vehicle would have like 2,500 pounds of pressure in it. Then I would open a second tank and that would get me up to about 3,000 or 3,200 pounds of pressure. Then I would open a third tank and it would get me to 4,000 or 4,200 pounds of pressure. By the time I got to the fourth or fifth tank, I'd be at 5,000 psi and I'd still have two tanks left with 5,000 psi in it. Whereas if I just opened all the tanks at one time, I would fill the car up to about maybe 4,800 or 4,700 pounds per square inch and my whole system would only have 4,700 pounds per square inch. So we call it a cascade fill or a way to fill the vehicle up and get it to the max pressure by stepping it through the tanks and only filling, you know, emptying one tank and then using the next tank to get it higher and higher and higher. And with our system, we could get all the way to 5,000 psi. So that's just a little bit about how we run the system, how it looks in the back. When you're the user, when you're coming up to fill at our station, if you had a vehicle, this is the part you would see and it's pretty self-explanatory. When you put the key in the fueling key start key slot and turn it, it unlocks the door on the right hand side of the unit and it opens it up so that you can dispense to your car and then there's a little screen that tells you what to do. When you open the right hand side, this is what you see.  That pressure gauge reads how much pressure there is on the system. It's a little harder to see but below that gauge is a gold colored filter, a filtration system that takes out any particulates that aren't oxygen or water. So dust particles or things like that that may contaminate the vehicle. And there's also two little, one is red and one is white. It's really hard to see on the photo but there are actually little fill gauges and relief gauges or switches. And what this system is kind of nice, unlike other refueling systems that we have on our big stations, you can actually depressurize the hose when you're done refueling. So what we do is before we would use this to fuel a vehicle, we would push the switch on the left side and what it'll do is it'll pressurize the hose to 5,000 psi and then we connect to the car and dispense into the car. And when we're all done, we put the dust cap back on the dispenser, hang it up inside and push the right switch and the right switch depressurizes our hose. So we're trying to not stress our hose out and take the pressure off the hose so that it only has 100 psi in it or so and it lasts longer. Another thing is the reason there's a door over it, it's not just safety and security, but also so that the UV light doesn't deteriorate the hoses. Unlike the stations outside that we've seen, a lot of them have the hoses hanging outside and the UV is gonna eventually start to wear those down. So this unit is kind of nice because it actually protects the equipment too and helps things last longer. So it's a nice safe piece of equipment, it has hydrogen sensors in the top, it's designed so that if you have a leak inside, the leak will not go into any electrical components. There's fans and stuff that are positive pressure that keep hydrogen from ever going into an electrical component. And then there's sensors in the top of the unit that will shut the whole system down if it senses a hydrogen leak. There's temperature sensors and things that if you over temp the unit, it'll shut itself down and shutting it down, you've got an emergency, you saw in the last picture where the key went in, you also saw an emergency stop, you can hit that thing right there if something doesn't sound right and it'll shut the whole unit down and it would be like if you had, if all of a sudden you heard a leak coming from somewhere from inside the station or if you heard a bang or something that you didn't expect, you could hit that and it would just shut everything down and call one of us to come out, we could reset the system and check and see what went wrong. But there's a lot of great safety features built into that system. And really the neat thing is that whole system, as you saw it right there with the extra storage and everything was about $120,000, which is not chicken feed, it's not something you'd put in your carport. But when you talk about an entire hydrogen production dispensing station, that's really pretty reasonable. Just the dispensing nozzle, that little silver nozzle at the end of the hose there on the hose, you're probably talking $5,000 or $6,000 just for that piece by itself. So it's really pretty reasonably priced considering what you're getting out of it. And how long will it last? Well, I tell most people that most of the hydrogen equipment that we work with, other than compressors, compressors need a lot of maintenance. They're probably the Achilles heel of any of this equipment. But most of the electrolyzers and most of the fuel cells in the vehicles, they're probably gonna last 10 or 15 years because they have very few moving parts. And as long as they're just kept maintained properly and not abused, they just keep on ticking. They're like the old Timex watch. It just takes a licking and keeps on ticking. And most of the equipment that we've had out here has just lasted really long time. In fact, it usually becomes obsolete before it'll, it'll break down. And we have a lot of old equipment sitting in the shop that is really quite usable, but it's just outdated. The next photo we have is coming up is kind of fun, I think. I asked our staff if they would like to have custom plates. So our whole staff has custom plates. I think Christine is the only one that doesn't. So here's some of our custom plates that we have. High on H2, H2 Energy, and there's mine, H2 Guru. And we think that's kind of fun and we take our hydrogen seriously. We take our hydrogen safety seriously. And we really look forward to Hawaii moving forward in renewable fuels and the transportation side. And we think hydrogen's a good way to do that. We also think that hydrogen's a great way to help balance the grid out and help the transportation folks move ahead by giving the grid folks a way to store energy over and above battery storage. So we're really high on hydrogen and we like what we're able to do with it. We're looking at promoting the safety and we're looking at better ways to store. Like I say, compression and storage are probably the weak points that I see in the hydrogen system now. But there's other ways to store. I was talking to Ian before the show today that nanofibers and nanocarbon, when you start to put hydrogen into those kind of technologies, you get more hydrogen density than even liquid hydrogen, which is very hard to work with because it's so cold. So the storage and the compression issues, those technologies are coming along pretty rapidly with hydride storage and nanofibers, nanocarbon, tubes and things like that. So I'm really bullish on hydrogen. Toyota's definitely bullish on hydrogen. They've already got cars in the market, so does Hyundai. All the major manufacturers are going into production. Ford and GM tell me they're gonna be out in 2020 with production vehicles. And in the meantime, I would encourage folks to really consider hybrid vehicles. Hybrid vehicle is an electric vehicle, but it also has a gasoline generator and a gasoline driven generator in it. And it's a great way to start moving towards a cleaner transportation sector because your fuel economy will go way up. You'll get in this average passenger vehicle 40 to 45 miles per gallon instead of 20 or 25 miles per gallon. And that's really awesome. So I would say, while you're waiting for hydrogen vehicles to roll in and the first ones are probably gonna be expensive just like everything else, hey, start looking at those hybrid vehicles. They're a good way to go and help Hawaii get a lot cleaner on their transportation side. So the more we can do and improve our grades so the blue planet doesn't give us a D minus anymore in transportation, the more you can do the better off we all are. So there's a little primer on hydrogen and what it's like a little bit more safety. You can always get in contact with us at Hawaii Center for Rans Transportation Technologies, HCAT down on Cook Street if you have questions about hydrogen. And next week, I'm hoping to have State Senator Kai Kaheli on the show and we'll talk about what's going on in the Big Island and what he sees happening in energy on the Big Island, especially transportation energy. So until next week, aloha, and we'll see you with the standard energy man, aloha.


Thank you, Arpit. Hello, everyone. My name is Shahraman and I'm one of the engineering leads at the Meta Connectivity Group. And I'm very glad to be here to talk about Metaverse and Metaverse Ready Networks. All right, so let me just go back a little bit in time and talk about when Meta used to be Facebook. It started about two decades ago. Basically, most of the text that I mean, most of the contents that people shared were mostly text. And over the last decade, what we saw is that a lot of the contents moved from text-based expressions to a much more photo based and image-based expressions. Right this minute or the last couple of years, it is a lot more video-based sharing. We're sharing all sorts of videos, different forms, shapes, and and fidelity. We believe going forward, people are going to share a lot more immersive contents like AR and VR contents. And that's going to happen over the next few years. And that is precisely the path to Metaverse from our perspective. So let's see what exactly is Metaverse. Metaverse is a set of digital spaces where people can come together and do things together, regardless of their physical distance. And it can allow you to do things in a very interactive and immersive way, whether you play games or have meetings, like we are having this one on Zoom, per se. And we're all looking at it from different places on the planet, whereas you could probably have the feeling of doing this together. You can play games, you can do fitness, you can learn things, you can do lots of different things together. And when you do those, it might feel that okay, does it mean it's an alternative to our physical presence or things we do physically? Absolutely not. It's a lot more about what we already do online better and much more meaningful way. For example, you could actually teleport a friend or a family member right into your living room and have a conversation as if the person was here. In reality, the person could be actually on the other side of the planet. So that is the vision of Metaverse. So towards that vision, what are we doing at Metaverse today? There are so many different things that we're doing, for sure, but I'm just going to go ahead and highlight a few things that should show us how we are progressing towards that vision. Starting with the left-hand side, we have the horizon world. The horizon is, I would say, Meta's first iteration or release of what Metaverse is going to look like. It's a place where we can create things, you can meet with strangers with lots of personal boundary and other features so that your avatars are really safe in that space and you can really be in a world, create your own world, create lots of different things in that world. So that's like a horizon stories. We have the Raven stories, which is more of a smart glass, a pair of glasses basically that we launched with Raven last year, and this is where you can take photos, videos, you can take phone calls, you can listen to music and do some of these things that were previously not possible without just something like a phone, for example. So that's Raven stories. We have avatars. We have now been creating photorealistic avatars for the last couple of years and we released the set of that last year, which is basically the number of combinations that can have with the various parts and the pieces of yourself, which is a much more expressive, is basically quintillion or one and 18 zeros following that. So I can't even imagine how many the number is to be frank. So that's kind of bested avatars. It really helps us express better and represent us in a digital world. Last but not the least, we have Oculus Quest and this is the virtual reality headset that Meta has been building for many years and Quest 2 release went out last year. It provides you the ability to fully immerse yourself into a virtual world with six degrees of freedom and controls that does not require a PC or anything else. It's a standalone VR headset device. So there's really a lot of different things, but these are four things that we're highlighting that are already out there and playing the role of what a Metaverse would look like over the next few years. So moving along, that's Metaverse. I would like to talk about, which is a lot more relevant to this crowd, is the Metaverse for the networks, for the concept of the Metaverse for the networks. What exactly is that? Now, this is sort of like where we are today and majority of the global cellular traffic, excuse my slides now for there, today is pretty comfortably can achieve what we see on the left hand side, which is today's video calling. So the expectation for today's video calls stand at about five Mbps and 150 millisecond end to end latency and that works fine with the current network today. From there, when we move to the tomorrow's cloud VR, which requires less than 30 millisecond and 20 Mbps of bandwidth, we start to see a problem. And the problem is that this network that was sort of like most of the networks, I should say around the globe, has been built and has been upgraded and much more optimized towards greater speed and greater bandwidth for going with that evolution of the content that we saw. And suddenly, when we start needing a lot higher quality of experience, lot higher service level objectives for as a low and that demands the network in unprecedented ways. And this is where these are just the two use cases per se. And when we think about some of the more demanding use cases, you know, mobile cloud gaming, desktop cloud gaming, VR meetings, it just becomes very obvious that it is going to be quite challenging and the networks are going to need quite some upgrade to get there. And since 2013, metaconnectivity has been partnering with the industry and partnerships with several infrastructure investments, network analytics, and we have improved the state of connectivity together for more than 300 million people around the globe. In order to support more immersive experiences and be able to really deliver on the promises of the metaverse, we will continue to provide the tools, shared equipment, identify customer and geographic segments with the highest needs. Our mission is to accelerate the evolution of connectivity in order to help bring metaverse to life. Okay. So, and we firmly believe that better connectivity is going to be a key across, you know, key enabler of metaverse across the physical world, augmented reality, and virtual reality. I'd like to share to that note our vision of the future networks. We should be a continuous evolution rather than adoption, rather than, I would say, the generational advancement that we have seen, a good part of the, you know, for the past couple of decades, if you've paired that up with the evolution we're seeing on the content and the people experience aside. Right. And as we think about different technologies, whether they're Wi-Fi, 5G, fiber, cable, or satellite, first and foremost, we believe open and open source technologies, there should be only increased usage and adoption of those technologies where Linux Foundation plays an important role in the industry, especially with several projects such as LF Network and LF Edge that are helping and would be, would be sort of very important for our mission. Next, we need to evolve the network architecture to support private and decentralized networks. And then we have, we are seeing that movement of many network operations and back into the cloud. We're seeing more network services move closer to the edge and application of AI ML techniques, better management operations and other aspects of the network and a variety of key features, spectrum innovation, support for network slicing, scalable low latency, network protocols, improved quality of service, better condition control, buffer management and active queue management, rendering of, of graphics from the, from the cloud and so on. Quite a long list to be, to be frank. Last but not the least, it'll be awesome to have standardized ways to measure quality of experience and service level objectives for immersive experiences as the industry that we believe that creating the ecosystem to come together is gonna, is gonna help us innovate better. To that end, we would like to establish a shared network readiness vision, define the new approach to QE and SLO and then really spark a flurry of network innovation on the ecosystem. So at the end, as with the internet, no one company will own or operate Metaverse. Rather, it must be built on the foundation of openness and interoperability and be accessible to as many people as possible. Metaverse will demand a fundamental shift in how the networks are architected deployed today. Open and open source technology will play a very important role in this evolution. We need to more stronger, more secure, robust, scalable open source projects up and down the stack across the network. As Meta, we are a long-time advocate of open source technologies and continue to work with LF communities as RP pointed out one like EVPF. We've been a very strong component and participant of that. Presto, Magma already are in the community and we many more should follow. We would love to see many other companies participate, contribute and support projects that we believe will be critical elements on our path to Metaverse. We're excited to collaborate with the industry in solving these connectivity challenges and we highly value our partnership with Linux formation. We look forward to working with you on establishing that shared network vision for network readiness for Metaverse, defining new measurements IEQV and SLO with standardized APIs to access those, measure those, share those and finally filling innovation in the open source ecosystem. With that, my call to action is to come build with us. Thank you everyone, back to our Pete. Oh, that was great. Okay, perfect, perfect. Thank you very much. That was like a very, very good vision of what you have done. And I think the implications because people have been hearing Metaverse, Metaverse, right? Like it's again, there's the marketing aspect of it, but then there is the actual, what does it mean to the connectivity and the network? So, you know, really excited about, about you translating that into kind of real projects, the dependency on open source. And again, we thank you for the leadership. Now, there are some questions. The one that has come in is, what is the lowest latency you have achieved in your tests so far?  But what are you seeing from a latency perspective? That's an excellent question. And before I, before I get to that, Pete, it's, I just wanted to at least start off by sharing that. Yeah, there could be a lot of marketing hype and buzz around Metaverse in the industry. And that's totally understandable. When it comes to what we're doing at Meta, for us, Metaverse is very, very real. We're working on a number of different initiatives that you're seeing that have already come out, and they're just going to be more and more coming out later this year and going forward. So that's the first, first part. Now, coming to that specific question about the latency, it really depends on a couple of things. One is that what is the use case and the specific application that we're looking at, as different applications are different latency requirements. And, and the other thing is that the networks around the world are really built in different ways. We see different results, different depending on where we're running the test for those applications. So if we take the combination of, let's say, cloud gaming experience with the, with the plot in the North American networks, we can probably get to 80 to 100 millisecond range pretty comfortably. And those tend to work pretty well. You take the same, same sort of experience in other parts of the world, where we have cloud gaming enabled, we start to see a lot higher latencies, like start going out over 100, 200 to 250 milliseconds. And that starts impacting the, the services quite a bit. Then when it comes to cloud, let's say, meeting experiences, is a similar story. There are cases that we have reached this achieved close to 50 millisecond. And, and that has, but that's outside to specific to the question that's probably as low as we have gone. And to help us with that, what we started doing is that started segmenting the network according to the latency needs, whether they're, you know, they can tolerate higher levels of latency. There are places, there are applications that they can tolerate higher levels of latencies, where there are others who are a bit of a mid-range, and then they're the, really the lowest latency that are, that we're looking for. The short answer is that it's around 50 millisecond from as far as I know, this test are very ongoing. And, and depending on in what scenario you test them, you might go to for some, some 50 second, we'll say, some 50 millisecond as well. I'll stop. Okay. And, and I think I hope that answered the question. Yeah, no, I think it did very well. And I think the dependency, if, if, if I may, I think the, the, these applications and, and these real use cases are just going to accelerate, you know, technologies like 5G, which drags latency down, accelerate technologies like Edge Compute, which again, closer, you know, giving resources closer to the applications, and, and just the adoption of kind of more open source, because these things are being built on it. So I really appreciate the insights there. And again, there's one final question before we wrap, but what does networking look like among edge data centers versus centralized distant data centers? Do you use IP multicast? I know this is fairly technical. If you can answer in short, that'll be fine. Yeah, I can just share a very quick insight on that. So our edge networks and, and our data centers obviously have the, what we call our backbone network are, are running and they're there. The short answer is that I'm not a word that we use IP multicast today. And I'm not sure, but if it actually makes sense to connect, you know, edge data centers with our, with our main data centers. It is really just a, just a pretty traditional backbone with a lot of innovation that we have built at Meta. For example, it's all, it's all IPv6. It goes over our own fiber for most parts that are, that are some cases that we leverage public fiber as well. So yeah, that's the short answer. Yeah. And we have seen at least here in US, there's tremendous push for fiber all the way. So, you know, that will also help. I think, I think it's great to bring technologies, networks and applications all together. And I think this is a great vision. So thank you very much for, for covering this. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks.


I am Jarad, I am accountable for the user experience of Calidus Cloud Marketing Automation Platform. What we are going to look at today is, emphatic testing, the context of design thinking. So, before we get into that I want you to take a moment and look into an incident in your life, where you were really trying to communicate something to someone and that communication was, and the other person could just not get your communication or could not get how you felt, right? So, could you just take a couple of minutes to think about that incident in your life? Okay. Great. So, I want you to keep this incident in mind as we go through this presentation, okay? Yeah. So, often what happens is that we are talking about empathy in design thinking, but empathy is very different from sympathy, right? And it is very important to distinguish these two first, right? Now, empathy is feeling for someone. It is a feeling of pity for someone else's misfortune, right? It is something like, if someone says, I have lost my dream job, you just say that I am sorry to hear about that, right? It does not require us to have any emotional connect with the person who is sharing, right? Whereas an empathic response would be more like, I am sorry to hear that. I understand that you really love the job and it must be heartbreaking. You want to talk more about it, okay? So, empathy is feeling as someone and it is really the world ability to understand someone else's feeling, right? By placing yourself in that person's shoes and looking at the world through their eyes, right? I wanted to show this small video that was produced by RSA Shots on the difference between empathy and sympathy. So, what is empathy and why is it very different from sympathy? Empathy fuels connection. Sympathy drives disconnection. Empathy, it's very interesting. Teresa Weizmann is a nursing scholar who studied professions, very diverse professions where empathy is relevant and came up with four qualities of empathy. Perspective taking, the ability to take the perspective of another person or recognize their perspective as their truth, staying out of judgment, not easy when you enjoy it as much as most of us do, recognizing emotion in other people and then communicating that. Empathy is feeling with people. And to me, I always think that empathy is this kind of sacred space where someone's kind of in a deep hole and they shout out from the bottom and they say, I'm stuck, it's dark, I'm overwhelmed. And then, we look and we say, hey, calm down, I know what it's like down here and you're not alone. Sympathy is, it's bad, uh-huh? Uh, no, you want to see much? Um, empathy is a choice and it's a vulnerable choice because in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling rarely if ever because an empathic response begin with at least. I had a, yeah. And we do it all the time because you know what, someone just shared something with us, it's incredibly painful and we're trying to silver line the mix. I don't think that's a verb, but I'm using it as one. We're trying to put the silver line around it, so I had a miscarriage. At least you know you can get pregnant. I think my marriage is falling apart. At least you have a marriage. John's getting kicked out of school. At least Sarah is an A student. But one of the things we do sometimes in the face of very difficult conversations is we try to make things better. If I share something with you that's very difficult, I'd rather you say, I don't even know what to say right now, I'm just surprised you told me. Because the truth is, rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is connection. So what we're looking into right now is empathy. So as we all know that design thinking starts with empathy, it's one of the core principles of design thinking. And why is it important to have empathy to design? Now in most instances we really don't know who our users are. And to know, and to design for someone we don't know, we need to know who they are, what they are up to, and what matters to them the most. And for that we need to create empathy. Now in design thinking there are a couple of ways where you create empathy and empathy is the first step in design thinking. So we use observing or engaging with the users to create that kind of empathy. So when we are engaging and observing with users, we get insights into what matters to them. And these insights give us a direction into creating innovative solutions. And one important factor that you can call it a factor that we use empathy listening during these two phases, like observing and engaging, to create these insights. But here's the thing, when we're listening, or when we're observing or engaging, we listen to our users. But the thing is, as designers, we don't get present to these insights because we don't listen. And it's just not about designers. As humans we don't listen. We are born with the ability to hear but not to listen. And for that we need to get trained. Now according to research 75% of a day we spend communicating. And 45% of the day we are listening. But the thing with listening here is, we don't just listen when someone talks. We are always listening through opinions that keep forming in our mind. So what are these opinions? These opinions are about whether that conversation is right or wrong, whether it should or should not have happened, whether it's invalidating, or whether it's good or bad. But the thing is we can't do anything about it. As humans we are non-stop forming these opinions at every conversation at every point of time in our life. And we can't do anything about it. But what we can do is to be present with these opinions and just letting it go. Now this is how our responses would be if we don't have empathy. Our responses will be to judge. We start changing the subject in our conversation. We start to advise. We will question your authenticity. Do you really mean what you are saying? Then we start assuring without basis. We start doing psychoanalysis of the conversation. And we start to tell our own story. It happens a lot during user research. I have been part of user research where they are asking me questions but they are giving the answers for me. And you just can't find any insight if you want to have that kind of a conversation so soon. And I know better. Now there are steps like I said for listening we need to get trained in it. And these are few steps that you could use to get trained. The first one is you have to have the willingness to really want to know the person. Now without that willingness you cannot create any empathy by listening. Now this is not like a linear process that you do this, next, next, next. It's not like that. In a conversation you are present to the kind of opinions that are getting formed. So when you get present to these are opinions that are forming and judging this person. Let me drop that. Let me listen to what really that person is feeling. The second is to be present to your opinions about what the other person is feeling and just letting it go. The third is to consider the emotional state of that person. What happens is humans lose out in communicating the feelings. They might say a lot of things, like a lot of words but the feeling is something that always misses out from communication. Either from the person of saying or the way we listen. Like a person would be really yelling but we won't get what they are feeling. We will be stuck in our own conversation saying that that person is yelling and happens a lot in our relationships. The fourth is listening carefully for the verbal and non-verbal message. One of the things when I was designing a user interface I was getting some user tests done and this lady was giving me feedback on the UI and saying that this works, this doesn't work I wasn't happy with a few features and that was good. I got all the information that I wanted to but I was too busy writing those notes and capturing whatever she's saying and I looked up and I saw her, she was testing the UI and I saw her, her face was showing a lot of frustration working on the UI and that kind of really bothered me. I was like this is not the kind of expression I want my users to be having while working on my product. Then I inquired more into what's happening, why are you looking so frustrated? When I inquired further on, I actually got way more insights and future updates into what she actually wants. Whatever was there was great but what she really wants was not what I was doing. These are few steps that you could implement. Like I said it's not like linear but you have to in a conversation keep seeing what works and what doesn't work in the conversation. The point is to actually listen to them and create an empathy to be able to feel and feel what they think, say and do. I actually had a practice but since there's no time I think I'm going to skip that but I came across this Mandarin character. This is the character for listen in Mandarin. It has four components, the ears, eyes, attention and an open heart. What this essentially means is this is a Chinese translation for the word to listen which is I give you my ears, my eyes, my full attention and my open heart and this pretty much sums up what listening is and it's like the best definition I've ever heard. Do we have time for a practice? It's a quick one. Another very few but could you just choose a partner please? We just do this very quickly so that we can at least I'll leave you with something to take away from this. Choose A and B and I want A to share with B. Your experience in this conference till now and B I don't want you to do anything. I just want you to get present to the opinions that are getting formed while A is sharing with you. And if possible drop that and listen to what A is feeling right now. Please start. If A is done now we can share and we can listen. Why are you cracking up? Okay so how many of you guys could actually get present to the opinions that you were forming while the other person was talking? But don't be shy everyone does that. I'm expecting all the hands to go up. Otherwise I'm coming to get some training from you guys. There's nothing wrong. This is just a starting point. Like I said it's not like I figured it out so it's done. You need to have ongoing practice day in and day out with every person you meet in your life. It's just not empathy. It's just not about the kind of designs that we are doing or having the client meetings or whatever. It's creating empathy at every point in your life with everyone that you touch. Thanks for listening.


You know, for me, as I've gotten older, I realized that happiness and success, they're not synonymous. They don't mean the same thing, but they're very directly correlated. And for me, a big portion of my definition of success is the happiness and fulfillment that I have. So, what I would say, if you're really passionate about something, but you're not very good at it, it doesn't mean you need to give up on it. It might not be your prime vocation, but it could still be a hobby. It could still be something that you do during the unseen hours because you enjoy it so much. Now, if you're really talented at something, but you can't stand doing it, I just don't think that's sustainable. I think that's something that people call the grind, which as you know, I'm opposed to, which is, I'm just doing this because I'm good at it, but boy, I don't enjoy it. And for me, that's just kind of a hollow way to go through life. I don't want to go through life doing things that I don't enjoy. Now I am a realist. I'm not implying that every moment of every day of my life is not puppy dogs and ice cream. But the vast majority of what I get an opportunity to do are things that fill my bucket and I love to do. And my goal is to design a life where I'm doing most of those things, most of the time. And so I think when we look at those four quadrants, we should all be working feverishly to stay in that quadrant of what we love and what we're good at. And for some people, you can find a dream job where you work for someone else and you're in that sweet spot. And that's awesome. Other people, that's what leads them to being freelancers and entrepreneurs is they want to have control over being in their strength zone. So they just go out and start their own thing. And that's another path as well. But I firmly believe to be the best version of yourself and to live the happiest and most fulfilling life you can. You need to spend as much time in that quadrant as possible. I was a decent player in Montgomery County, Maryland. I wasn't an all state player. I certainly wasn't an all American. I was a decent player, played at a very small school down in North Carolina, Elon, but had a mediocre and that would be generous career at Elon. Which I'm not diminishing that. Just the fact that I played college basketball does put me in kind of an upper tier, but was very mediocre by college basketball standards. And yet you can see the wall behind me. I've had an opportunity to work with Kobe Bryant and LeBron James and Stefan Curry and Kevin Durant. So even though I was not an exceptional player by any stretch, I've had an opportunity to do what I love with people that are the absolute best of all time. So yeah, let's make sure that we're not limiting ourselves and limiting our future with what we can do based on where we are at the present. And I love you bringing up the concept of role player, because I do believe one of the most coveted skills in the world right now, aside from leadership and good communication, is someone that is a great teammate. Someone that understands that they might not be the best on the team, but they can be the best for the team. That they have the selflessness to say I'm going to do everything I can to make those around me better and to make our team better. And that is really hard to find those types of people. So I can certainly attest that you are the consummate role player. But I think anyone that has that mindset, you're gonna have a very, very bright future if you embrace it instead of trying to resist it.


Hi, I am Ajigna Kapadia, CEO of Vishwa Guidance. We have got some complaints that we have to accept the file, being a CISC member, the owner of Vishwa Guidance, Dr. Siddharth Kapadia, he is a registered CISC member. So, we have got complaints from clients. Don't complain us, we don't have to accept your file, that your CRS score, which is being drawn, if it doesn't even come nearby, then you have to accept the file.  So, we didn't get this done, that we don't have any involvement, we can just check your CRS score, for an example, you have 35 marks in your 12th, which you have passed, and for admission, 80%, if you see such marks, then you will get admission. Don't take our file, don't accept it. The only idea is, that accepting your file for the past 2 years, we didn't get the money. We didn't get the success, that we have always taken the file. Yes, but there is a satisfaction, that Vishwa Guidance, at least for the MNMAT, our success ratio is around 70-80%. But we are satisfied, that we are 100% for our client, we have a 20% rejection ratio, and we always have the file, that we can do our work. So, whatever you have come to our office, and you didn't get to do your work, you didn't get to do it in any business, but there is a reason, that we didn't get it. So, don't feel bad, and a calculation, that your consultant, who is ready to accept your file, for the past 2 years, won't be able to do it in real, and won't be able to get the score, I will give you an example, that you have got the score, that you have got the score in SINP, so it means, that you have got the marks, and you have got the score, of 878-882, that you have got the score, that you have got, that you have got the PNP, so don't spoil your money, and time, and everything, you have got the calculation, that you have got the consultant, that you have got the result, that you have got the result, thank you very much.


The question that we're all addressing today is how skill smart city's considered, how does that happen, how do we skill smart city's? I suppose one of the key ways is authorities or similar bodies investing in infrastructure and new services and Bristol's very fortunate. We have incredibly good connectivity infrastructure in the Bristol, in open architecture in Bristol. Not every city has that advantage. Perhaps the next way that smart city scale is that they grow as people start to use the services and share the benefits amongst their network and groups. The more people start to use it. The third way I think that that smart cities will scale in the future is as people use the infrastructure of smart cities themselves to create their own services and to share their own data, their own personal sensors into that data pool. So really it's the second and third of those I'm going to try and cover briefly today just how we involve citizens and communities in our smart cities in order to scale them. Oh, technology is baffling me. Right, there we go. So where do I start from? I'm starting from this sort of potential statement, know thyself. I think it's really important to recognise that one size won't fit all for smart cities. London's very different from Bristol's, very different from Manchester's, very different from Leeds, very different from Birmingham. So those attributes that go to make your city, I think we need to be very familiar with those things in order to be able to move forward with a successful smart city vision. Just put some in this patchwork, put some things about Bristol in terms of our infrastructure. We do have world class infrastructure which has been very heavily invested in in Bristol. We've got the Socrata open data platform and we also partner with Transport API to hold their data set. We've got a great history of innovation being the home to Brunel and Cliffs and Suspension Bridge, SS Great Britain, Concord, very creative place Bristol. Obviously the trip hop scene, also the Wersels and Wallace and Gromit and Banksy and the chap with the red trousers is just under the massive attack LP cover is George Ferguson. He's our mayor and I think he's a critical component of our smart city. He holds a single vision for Bristol's progress toward being a smart city. I think that's been extremely important as well as our progress in being a smart city also to helping us to gain the European Green Capital Award 2015. So why would we bother to involve citizens is much easier to run projects without citizen support. I know that I've been running tech projects for a long time and as soon as you involve citizens they get complex and hard. So why would we want to do that? I think the first thing to acknowledge is that smart city projects are not technology projects really. They're projects about how you make your city more efficient or more livable or better placed to be. So the technology is a component of it but really the outcomes are about people's lives so you need people to have some input to that. And citizens really understand the problem space, the things that we're trying to address fundamentally well. They live in those communities, they live with the transport in Bristol for instance or the air quality in parts of Bristol every single day and they can help to inform us so that we get a very granular view of what those problems are. And really critically I think is that you genuinely need support and buy-in from your communities in order for these things to work. My experience of working in Bristol is that the people of Bristol can be very vocal, they can be disruptive, they can be resistant to things that they don't want to happen. Practical examples are Mayor decided that he wanted to expand the residential parking zones and the activists of Bristol decided that they were going to bring a tank and park it in front of the council house to make sure that he got the message that they didn't want that. So I had to think about what is it that makes Smart City successful in this context? First of all they do need to be useful, they've got to respond to a genuine user needs, they've got to address something that people have some pain with and make it better. Usable is critical this and I think we can take some great leadership from Apple and others who put usability at the top of their technology tree to be able to interact with the city seamlessly and without additional complexity is going to be really important I think for getting uptake of new services. Accessible cities are going to be extremely important to both from the perspective of people who have disabilities but also making the infrastructure, making the architecture, making the data accessible to people and to communities so they can interact with it and they can use it for their own purposes. And this last element of it being acceptable, these are feelings that people might have about seeing their city transformed. It needs to be secure, safe, enabling, benign, trustworthy. People don't always trust city councils and I'll talk a little bit more about that later on. So I think those are critical elements that we have to address in order to get people to uptake Smart City services at scale and finally the tech definitely has to work. With a lot of these projects if you deploy technology and it's faulty or it's flawed in some way you've lost those participants for good and I know that through my own experience of tech projects in the past. So in involving citizens what are our challenges? Well in Bristol we've got 440,000 people and I don't have the time to talk to every single one of them so we have to find a way to do that to segment our societies to talk to representatives. The concepts around Smart City are probably okay for most of us in this room because we deal with this often but the idea of internet of things and ubiquitous connectivity and sensors to people who don't do this for a living are quite difficult to get across and you have to find a way to use language that informs in a general way. And also this access to hard to reach citizens, I hate to use them hard to reach, they're not hard to reach, they don't want to talk to us but we need to find a new way to do that. And I think the reason that there is this hard to reach group is because people have existing relationships with authorities and authorities present themselves in particular ways. And people's relationships and previous experiences not always being great. Sometimes you know as a city council we might have taken somebody's children away or even if it's something very trivial like we didn't collect they've been people have a certain view of city councils and often they don't necessarily want to interact with us in something as trivial as a Smart City project. So the way that in Bristol we've got around that resistance in the past is to use these third parties, trusted third party intermediaries who've got that local credibility. I have to say in Bristol's communities I have very little credibility, I don't even have a Bristol accent from Newcastle. And if I sort of wander in in my suit and my council badge and my Gioria accent I'm not going to get very far but there are those who can work on our behalf and will make a lot more progress. So how do we go about engaging people productively in the development of our Smart Cities? We have a couple of principles and the first comes from our mayor from George Ferguson, this is an idea of using the city as a test bed. He's very publicly stated that he wants Bristol to be viewed as a place where people can come and experiment with new technologies to try and improve the way that city works. And also we have the idea of a living lab, we have a designated area within Bristol where we work one-to-one with residents deploying technologies and iteratively developing those technologies based on the feedback from those citizens, in order to co-produce a solution that's usable, accessible, acceptable, all of those elements. The local partners who we work with in order to do the engagement work, we have them do long-term regular support and intervention, it's not just about getting people to be involved in your project and then them disappearing. Often we want to talk to people over a period of a year about things which are happening with the technology within their homes, so we need that long-term intervention, so we need to plan for a long-term support by our engagement partners. And just from our experience, we've used the living lab approach for about seven years and it's generally gone very well, there's a few experiences that have had it been quite painful but generally it's gone very well. And our plans at the moment is to extend that living lab network geographically, so moving to different areas of Bristol. But also our living lab works around a project basis, so we have a project, we have a certain technology we want to develop and we work with the living lab on that. But I wanted to set up a digital citizens panel where we can perhaps float new ideas that are not project based, perhaps not very formed and just get some feedback there from a panel of people who are representative of our demographics. And the last element there is a new thing which I'm taking to our senior leadership team in Bristol City Council. As we're moving into these new areas and we've got new sorts of data available and the opportunity to combine data with other organisations, I'm proposing that we should have some sort of citywide ethics security and privacy board where we have experts but also we have citizens, we have representatives from different authorities who are able to just discuss whether is it okay to tag somebody with dementia because I say it's for their own good or are they broader questions we need to ask about that. So here are my conclusions. There's this idea, I showed that montage at the start to demonstrate that Bristol is a unique city, it's dynamic, it's characterful, it's patchwork and lots of different things happening, lots of different ideas and neighbourhoods and communities all working collaboratively which doesn't make a neat and tidy pattern. So there probably isn't an opportunity to sort of helicopter in a smart city and drop it on the top of any area because it's not going to work probably, it's not going to be accepted in the same way. I think one of the critical things we need to look at is making sure, and that's what such a great job the ODI is doing, ensuring that the infrastructure, the systems, the data are all flexible enough to deliver the things that we want to reverse the city council and also to create the opportunity for citizens and for communities to build their own services, to add their own data and it creates this thing, this kind of idea of an open programmable city. And finally, if we don't do that then there is the danger that we will end up knowing the location of everything but the value of nothing. So thank you very much.


hat capacity. So I think there's been a lot of food for thought as we move forward, as we seek to hear what EPA and then the federal family is going to be putting forward for those regulations. I think there will be a lot more conversation on this important topic. I think from EDF's perspective, and I think I can speak for CSIS and this as well, that we look forward to continuing that conversation with these group of stakeholders and others as we try to tackle this important issue. So thank you very much. And again, thank you to CIS for hosting this wonderful event. Join me in thanking our panel. Thank you so much.


What's going on mobile creators and welcome back to another awesome video today. I'm gonna show you how to create a cinematic urban B-roll using simply just your iPhone. And we're gonna have a lot of fun today. I'm gonna walk around the city and just capture some moments with my phone. And while doing that, I'm gonna give you five easy tips that you can easily implement for yourself to capture better videos. And if you stick till the end, we're gonna put all the shots together to create the final edit so that you guys can see how I created that video and have a better understanding.  It's a beautiful day and let's not waste any time. So one easy tip I have for you guys is to simply use the default camera app on your iPhone. It's just simple to use and I can access it really quickly. When I unlock my screen, I have the camera icon on the bottom right that I can press and it will right away bring me to the camera app which allows me to capture moments much more easily. And I also find the interface very intuitive to use. Now, there are certainly other third-party apps out there like Filmic Pro, but I mostly use those professional camera apps for commercial use or if I need more control over my camera. Now, by using the default camera app, you really don't overcomplicate things and can really focus on telling your story and capturing the shots you need. Now, one thing to mention before you start recording your video is to lock the focus and exposure. This way, no changes will happen during your recording. And this is probably the biggest reason why most people don't get it right in camera is that they don't lock their exposure before they start recording. So to really show you what I mean, let's open up the camera app and once I'm in it, I make sure to set my resolution to 4K which gives me the highest quality possible and the frame rate to 60 frames per second which allows me to slow down the footage and also helps make the shakes less apparent. Now, the next thing you wanna do before you start recording your video is to tap hold on the screen until AEAF lock appears. And this means that your auto exposure and auto focus is locked. This way, no changes will happen and you will have a consistent look in your video. As you can see, if I put my hand in front, it still looks the same. But as soon as I unlock it, you'll see that the focus changes as well as the exposure and we don't want that. And it's quite surprising that not many people know about this feature, but it really makes a huge difference. It really allows you to create a professional look in your video. Now, there's much more to learn about the default camera apps. You have, for example, different shooting modes, cinematic mode, time lapse mode, slow motion. You can also adjust the exposure. You can shoot in a pro res. You have the exposure value tool. You have action mode and so on that you can also use creatively in your videos. But in this video, we won't dive into all of these features, but if you want to master the default camera app and learn everything about it, I do have a mini course that will walk you through each of the settings. I will talk more about it later in this video. All right guys, so my next simple tip is to shoot with different focal length, especially if you have three lenses on the back. You can make use of the ultra wide angle lens, the wide angle lens and telephoto lens. This way you get a variation of shots that look more interesting and will make your scene look more complete. Now, if you only have one lens on the back of your phone, don't worry, you can simply move closer in order to create a variety of different shots. I will take a little bit more work, but it's definitely worth the effort. Now, you can be as creative as you want. You can also use the macro lens to get really detailed shots. So remember to create three different shot variations to establish the scene and then simply move on to the next one. And I call this the three shot rule. So my next simple tip is to follow the subject with your camera. So we have lots of birds flying around here. So I'm gonna use the 3X to zoom in and I'm just gonna follow that bird. And because you have something happening in front of the camera, your viewers will feel much more engaged. And this doesn't only have to be a bird, it can also be a person riding a bike or a person crossing the road or even cars passing by. Any kind of action that could be interesting for your viewers. So the next thing you should include in your video is a time-lapse. And this is really easy because you already have the time-lapse function in the default camera app. So the only thing you need to do is to find a night's composition, lock the focus and exposure and then simply let it record like I'm doing right now. Whoop. And I really liked the composition but didn't have anything to place my phone onto an uneven surface. So what I did is I simply used my shoe as a tripod and it works surprisingly well.  What I care about is how the time-lapse looks in the end. And that's really the fun thing of not using any accessories.  And if you really want something, you'll find a way to get that shot. So the next easy tip I have for you guys is to include a hyperlapse in your video. A hyperlapse is basically a moving time-lapse. And you can use the time-lapse mode on the default camera app to create that hyperlapse. Now it was a bit hard to create the hyperlapse on this bridge since cars were passing by so it took me a couple of tries. Now for me, it's easier to create a steady hyperlapse using a gimbal but the time-lapse mode actually does a great job at stabilizing the footage. And to best create a hyperlapse, make sure to choose a focal point. I like to use the ultra wide angle lens. Before I start recording, I simply lock the focus and exposure as I have more in the frame and the movement will be more apparent. Then I slowly walk towards it in a constant speed while keeping the object centered in the frame. Now it's always cool to add transitions to your video and one of the easiest transition is the whip transition. And it's really easy to create. Just make sure you move in the same direction for each shot. I'm gonna start over here and then what I'm gonna do is simply lock the focus and exposure and then I'm gonna create a slide shot and then whip from left to right. Okay, so let's do that. And action. So now for the last shot, I'm simply going to whip from left to right like we did in the first shot but this time I'm gonna speed up and then slow down. And that will look really nice. So let's do that. I'm gonna simply lock the focus and exposure and then I'm gonna start recording and go. All right. And then in the edit, you can put both of the clips together to create this transition. Now, as a bonus tip, I also recommend you try out a slow motion. On the iPhone 40 Pro, you can shoot up to 240 frames per second to create that slow motion effect. And I captured this bird drinking from a well, which I think looked really cool, refreshing. All right, folks. Now that we have all of our shots, let's put them together to create the final edit. I'm also gonna include the behind the scenes so that you guys can see how I shot each video. All right, folks. There you have it. That is how you shoot a cinematic urban B-roll with your iPhone. No other accessories needed. Just simply using the default camera app, you can create some amazing shots. Now, if you guys want to learn more on how to master the default camera app, I actually have a mini course, with 24 available lessons where we will dive into all of the different settings as well as the different shooting modes so that you can use it creatively in your videos. On top of that, you'll also receive my premium mobile luts that you can instantly apply to your videos to make them look cinematic. Now, if you want to learn more, make sure to check out the link in the video description below and take advantage of that offer. Other than that, guys, thank you so much for watching. If you have any questions, make sure to leave a comment below. I think I'm gonna head back. It's getting really hot here. And take care.


Income tax 2023-2024. Itemized deductions, state and local real estate taxes. Get ready and some coffee so we can recognize the code cracks when doing income tax preparation 2023-2024. Most of this information can be found in the instructions for Schedule A Tax Share 2023 which you can find on the IRS website at irs.gov irs.gov looking at the income tax formula we're focused on what I would call the below the line deductions more specifically the itemized deductions remembering the first half of the income tax formula is basically a funny income statement most income statements having income minus expenses resulting in net income here having income minus various deductions resulting in taxable income noting for taxes deductions good therefore we're looking for more of them the difference between the above the line deductions or adjustments to income and the below the line deductions include the fact that the adjustments to income do not have to clear a hurdle such as the standard deduction before we get a benefit from them whereas when we're looking at the itemized deductions they do typically have to clear the hurdle of the standard deduction before they benefit us as taxpayers looking at the first page of the form 1040 we're focused on line number 12 standard deduction or itemized deduction we're focused on the itemized deduction which we would take if it's greater than the standard deduction and if that were the case we would include the schedule a the schedule a is the itemized deduction