I had always thought that I would develop heart disease at young age because both my dad and grandpa had heart attacks. I was taught that they were genetic, but their heart attacks probably had less to do with genes and more to do with their diets high in meat. Meatloaf, pork loin, steak, on your recipe list, are you kidding me? It's like this menu is trying to give people heart attacks. The data is crystal clear, that you can stop and reverse heart disease with plant-based diets, scientifically shown, I've seen it in my own patients. People who adopt low-fat plant-based diets can actually reverse their heart disease, and that literally means watching the plaque start to go away, something they didn't think could happen. My experience with patients and those studies show that when people adopt a fully plant-based diet, their cholesterol levels plummet within a few days. And if you do blood tests in a couple of weeks, you'll see dramatic improvements. And so the data's been out there for quite a while. If you want to improve the blood flow to your heart, reduce the amount of stenosis and improve the small arteries, the endothelial function, you need to do a whole food plant-based diet.  You are summoning up bacteria that eat carnitine, and those bacteria will turn that carnitine into a molecule called trimethylamine. Your liver then turns that into trimethylamine oxide.  That molecule drives cholesterol into the artery walls, and the people who are consuming this flesh-based diet are contributing to plaque building up. They may lose weight on this diet, and that's good. But what's happening inside your arteries, paleo friends? What's happening is that plaque is building up, and these are the folks who dropped dead at the gym at 39. Boy, he was lean, and he looked really good. But where is that cholesterol going? It's going to your artery walls. In a groundbreaking study published by Dr. Esselstyn, following patients suffering from cardiovascular disease, 99.4% were able to avoid major cardiac events by going plant-based. Yes, your numbers are going to look great within a week or two. Your cholesterol can come crashing down.  Like, the side effect is not having to take drugs. Diets are really high in these protein. Create diabetes, create heart disease, create cancer. Create the diseases that I'm treating on a daily basis. Could you possibly need statins, even if you're on a plant-based diet? Yes. In fact, I may need a statin. My latest LDL is up. My cardiac heart scan looks great, but I've got a familial hypercluster olemia, and I'm very comfortable with the fact that the data shows that I would be better off on it as statin, even though I follow about a healthy diet as a human being can follow.


Welcome.  This is partnering with Latino audiences for the Eclipse and Beyond, and I'm going to do some introductions and we'll get started with our amazing panel lineup. Let me first just kind of tell you a little bit about why we're doing this. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific received a grant from the American Astronomical Society. It's a mini grant in honor of Juliana Steinheider Duncombe. She was this incredible astronomer and educator who started the US's first school lunch program to make sure that every child could come to school ready to learn and with a full belly. So she was a real social justice pioneer and this mini grant was in her honor. So we're thrilled to be one of the 31 institutions that received one of these grants and the grant name is the Astronomy Clubs Preparing Latino Audiences for the Eclipse. They're designed specifically to reach out to audiences that may not have been reached out to before. So you can look, there's a link here if you just go to bit.ly slash Spanish Eclipse that has all the information about the program on it and links to the actual WAS site with even more information. Great. So what our mini grant did was to partner with the NIES network of museums who generously offered their Spanish language eclipse materials to us and this gave us the opportunity to supply banners and handouts and flyers and eclipse glasses both in Spanish and in English to clubs that volunteered to get the word out to their local Latino and Spanish speaking audiences about the eclipse. So here I've got the 22 Night Sky Network Astronomy Clubs who received the materials in Spanish and English. I imagine we have a lot of you on here today. If you want to come and say hi and represent your club, feel free to put that in the chat window. So also anyone can access these materials online. They are freely available. You can print them yourselves at the same web URL. I listed it again here at the bottom and this webinar is a part of that grant and it serves to prepare clubs to do great outreach for the eclipse and beyond and it's going to be archived on the Night Sky Network if you want to reach that later or if you want to share it with other people who might not have made it tonight. Today's panel is not actually going to focus on specific eclipse activities but it's going to focus on clubs forming relationships with your local Latino communities around astronomy outreach. You can find links to any kind of specific activities in both Spanish and English on that URL so if you want to look up the yardstick eclipse and have a Spanish description of that we have that as well. So I think first I would like to do a quick poll to see what kind of experience the people who are on this call already have with doing specifically reaching out to their Latino audiences in their local city. So Brian could you start the first poll for me? Excellent. So go with there for a second. Go ahead. Okay great.  We have some of our astronomy ambassadors from the double AS and park rangers as well joining us tonight. So not just amateur astronomy clubs we have a good mix of people. Hi to Mike, hi to Andy. Great to see you there. Okay we'll leave that poll open for just a second while I talk about why we're here at all. So it's really this is a quote here from Dr. Frida Kapoor Klein. She is one of the co-founders of the level playing field Institute here in Oakland and it's Hispanic and Latino representation in the STEM community that science technology engineering and math in the workforce is really disproportionately low. You'll see from the bars on the right hand side to see what a low percentage that is currently and astronomy space astronomy and space science in particular are at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to diversity in STEM fields. I was really really bummed to see that when I was doing research and you know as well as I do that's not because space science is more interesting to white or Asian people. This is you know space sparks our imagination of almost everyone you meet. So there are a whole lot of factors at play here but one part of this issue that we can address as amateur astronomers and astronomy people doing astronomy outreach is access right. So here is where we're going to be able to come and hopefully make a little bit of a difference. The amateur astronomy club members and other science communicators can come in here excuse me. So let's take a look at the results from that poll Brian can you bring that up? Great so yeah some people have done this once or twice a few never and a couple all the time or many times. So if you close that down Brian I think that will help with the slides progressing. Okay great thanks. Alright so excellent so there are a lot of people here have had some outreach experience with Latino audiences and we're going to talk a little bit about well actually let's do one more poll. Let's see who's on the webinar today and how we identify ourselves. This is completely anonymous. I should mention too that you can put questions in the Q&A section completely anonymously as well if you have questions you feel embarrassed to ask or just want to say without your name attached feel free to put those in there. I want to talk a little bit about astronomy clubs as you know in this country there's a huge Hispanic population but astronomy clubs as a whole don't have a lot of Latino members so reaching out to you directly to your local Latino audiences can provide opportunities to these communities that might not otherwise get a chance to maybe look through a telescope or touch a meteorite and it's going to have broader effects as well it's going to breathe new life into our graying astronomy clubs hopefully and larger than that it's going to eventually help change those numbers we were just looking at this we're absolutely not the first people to address this issue and this webinar isn't going to solve all of the larger issues in our society but I really believe that this is an important conversation to have and I am so excited to be having it with you today okay let's see the poll results Brian if you would open that one up all right yeah so a lot of these results are similar to what we would find in an astronomy club in most places in the country so I want to invite those of you who have experience in reaching out to Latino communities to chime in through the chat and especially those of you who identify as Hispanic or Latino we are eager to hear from you and hear about your experiences because we recognize that the Latino community is really diverse and it's going to have many voices and perspectives so please feel free to chime in here and now what do you do when you have questions about the best ways to reach out to a new group well you ask the experts and that's who we brought on here so if you aren't already sharing your screen I just want to encourage you to share your screen these four generous panelists have stepped up to help guide us as we do this work together first I want to introduce Dr. Isabel Hawkins who is one of my heroes she has worked in astronomy and education research for more than 20 years she has a passion for reaching underserved communities specifically Latinos in STEM education she does it just an amazing job encouraging both the youth and elders of Latin American descent to bring the entirety of their cultural identity to bear and the learning of science and I admire her greatly also here with us tonight is Dr. Brian Mendez he's a professor of physics and astronomy he also develops programs for the web and museums among many many hats he wears you might know him from the Cosmic Serpent way back in 2012 believe he strives to foster diverse perspectives in his work with teachers students and the public and he's also a sci-fi geek and a saxophonist and he happens to have two of the cutest twins in all of the cosmos so I you happen to be a friend of mine too thank you so much for joining us Brian I appreciate that Alex Quinones works at the Sam Academy with many migrant parents and English language learners helping guide them to better understanding science he was just telling me about how he'd work with NASA programs and he got teachers and students involved in doing bringing authentic science research into the classroom he's also a huge Pittsburgh sports fan I hear congratulations Alex on the Stanley Cup I am from Nashville so we can't talk about that anymore but it's a really good thing you're an amateur astronomer because we'll have lots of other things to talk about really congratulations that was great and Jose Sandoval last but not least his reach is absolutely enormous the community science workshop network where he works provides opportunities for youth to tinker and make and explore their world through science and underserved communities across California so I just want to thank you all so much for taking the time to join us and help us become more inclusive and effective in our outreach I have quite a few questions for you all but I wanted to start quickly with a quote by Jose when we were emailing back and forth he was speaking to the benefits of exposing students to science and I wanted to just take this as a call to the amateur astronomers online here he said just provide them the opportunity the tools and the experience and they will be empowered and inspired as they take on an identity of a contributor a producer a scientist and an astronomer I just thought it was beautiful so thanks today so I know the club members on this call are interested in reaching out to Latino audiences I wanted to ask the panel this first question and then I'm going to stop sharing my screen and you guys can just take it from there so question being for club members who are new to reaching out to their local Latino audiences can you all suggest how they can get started and who and how and where definitely it's reaching out your your your community you need to go out and not be afraid to go and talk to parents and students and that's that's the problem with trying to go get Latino people to come into astronomy or any of the sciences is that you know they don't want to do it so if you go out there you go knock on their door I think that's one way we can get them involved very important I like to add this is about for example if you go to your local voice and girls clubs or any of the after-school programs that might be serving your local schools and if your local school is not serving a Latino audience then figure out in your geography you know where the Latinos live and that's where the kids are going to be going to school and then go to the after school programs and work with those coordinators or other community based organizations that would support Latino families and I think that's a great way to reach out yeah and to that I would add community colleges can be a great resource as well so you know find the community college that maybe has a large population of Latinos there get to know the faculty see if you can do some kind of presentation and when the astronomy or physics classes and let the students get to know about your club and invite them to you know come to meetings and become involved with the club I think you know one of the one of the most important strategies in trying to reach out to a community is trying to form a partnership with the community right it's not it's a when you when you're trying to make these connections it's a human interaction and so you want to do the kind of thing whenever you would reach out to make a new friend that's the kind of that that's what you're doing right you're trying to make new friends so think in along those those lines yeah that's great I know I from the logs of the night sky network that that there are a lot of clubs who are doing active outreach in churches too and certainly in schools and community centers so that's great that's a really good lot of good feedback there I wanted to see if you all had experience with partnerships that you really felt worked super well and what made those partnerships between like a science professional or a science team and a Latino community what made those successful why did they why did they work so well who's gonna go first I'll go first break the ice the examples that I can think of and I guess it actually just will pick up on my last thoughts the most successful programs I have seen are ones where people spent a lot of time getting to know someone in the community that they were wanting to to work with and forming a relationship getting to understand that community as well as they possibly could and then creating programming with that those partners that they've made right so rather than having some notion of I have this program that I want to bring to you it's what program can we together create that's going to that's going to be something that the community will will appreciate and enjoy and so I the the programs that have done that they take that time to build that relationship and and it takes time it's it's not fast you know you can't expect it to just you show up at you know one after-school program and next thing you know you're gonna you know be getting calls from all kinds of different community organizations that you show up with your telescopes even you've got if you've got to take some time get to know people and and work on those relationships okay I can I can say something in 2011 I started a club and a college really college and there was no science clubs and I started called Space which stands for the Society of Physics Astronomy Chemistry and Engineering and the goal was to get to do outreach for students there and not just STEM majors but students that were doing other majors I wanted to get involved with you know anything science like like astronomy and it started really small but it got really big and it still exists so it's something like that where you get other people from other types of majors to come in and do science and do some astronomy before I you know graduated I was a business major like in you know science and you don't have to be just a scientist to to love astronomy and you know to get other people to get involved and we had a lot of Latinos and in our club and it was really popular and just the you know the the community the community that that we had there really went a long way and it's still going strong today so today I just wanted to I mean I think that one of our strongest partnerships and I think Brian Mendez from UC Berkeley and also I said the Exploratorium have benefited from this partnership has been with Maya communities local Maya communities who have either their own grassroots organizations for community outreach or they hold ongoing festivities that may have something to do for example with equinox which is very important to the Maya community because of Chichinita and kind of the descent of the feather serpent on the pyramid and things like that so try to find a cultural link from the astronomy or other types of science to the community it's really important and and those links are usually very explicit if you start talking with the grandparents because they're the ones that remember how to observe the stars and how their communities still use the stars and constellations and the movement of the Sun in the horizon to time agricultural cycles that is still going on today so I think that what I want to harken to what all of our other panelists have said which is developing that close relationship de amistad de confianza cierto so this respect there's there's a friendship that that goes into issues of trust and sustainability you know how long you actually stay together with that community it's really important and I think that again involving the elders in the community or the leaders it's really a good way and if you can identify a group that's already organized so that you can be strategic and work together to do some co-development and they themselves can then invite their communities to events that the community is already coming to and then you add a layer of astronomy or science activities or space activities that have been co-developed with those community members that's really powerful yeah in fact I see that Andy Ketchy from Salinas chimed in with the same notion of they did a very similar type of events and I think some members of our group showed up to one of their events before it those are very it's you know that's a really smart thing to do and the other thing is don't do don't think of just science or astronomy you might you might think of steam you know adding arts or adding performing arts or anything that gets the community together to begin with and then you kind of tag on to that activity that's always very very powerful and astronomy of course has everything to do with food right how do you grow food has everything to do with the seasons and agricultural cycles and so if you can tie in the astronomy and the relationship between the sun moon and the earth to food or to traditional home building or other kinds of activities that would resonate with a community then that's a win-win that's fabulous using all of your five senses to to really incorporate astronomy into it that's great yeah working with them there are some resources I'll present at the end in some parts of from side girls and others who have done research on reaching out to Latino communities and they really emphasize doing or having your events have access to the whole family because often the whole an entire family from grandparents down to the grandchildren will come so as opposed to just having an event just for children make sure to include the whole family in that I heard when I was reading up on it that was one of the big recommendations yeah I mean one of the things that I often say when people you know ask about you know how do I reach out to let you know you know first I'll say well what the females because the Latino is the overly large label and you know you got to know your community a little bit better but there are a few general things that are true and one is that family the family unit is is framed in the community and so if you're gonna have an event you should expect that a whole family will show and that's one of the reasons why having some programming that's bilingual or having you know translator someone who could be there is useful because well kids are often bilingual and they'll understand what's going on in English you know maybe the older generations may not so much and you want to engage them as much as you want to engage the kids so it's really it's really important to to have someone who can you know if you don't have anyone in your group who speaks Spanish you know make the connection with someone in the community who can do the translation and you can work on that ahead of time with them so that you can do things in a bilingual way so and I'll say for me for example I'm you know I have Mexican heritage but I was raised in Michigan and I don't speak I don't speak Spanish very well so I always partner with someone who can speak it and and we make sure that we do things in a bilingual way I find it also sometimes gives younger children and elders a chance to have their own areas of expertise where sometimes the younger children can do some of the translating and a lot of times the elders will have the stories like Isabella's talking about that there's that they both see the relevance in each other's knowledge in a neat way around astronomy I've seen that a couple of times is doing outreach that's great I just want to encourage our audience to feel free to add questions to the Q&A as we go we've got a couple more before we open it up but feel free to add any questions to the Q&A so we don't lose them in the chat window I wanted to take it in the other direction for just a minute and ask you if there are any stumbling blocks or common mistakes that people make when first reaching out to first connecting with a Latino community I know that there you know there's lots of room for mistakes and sometimes we make them and need to course correct but I I was wondering if there were some common ones that you see happening with when people are good intention but maybe aren't thinking things all the way through I can think of one that actually I had when I was thinking of these questions beforehand this one hadn't popped into my head until just now so hey let's me it's good right but one thing I have seen happen that I think is you know is something to be careful of as if you're doing an event and you're highlighting some cultural aspects that was mentioned which is a really powerful thing to do be careful that you are respectful of those those cultural cultural knowledge pieces one of the probably worst things I ever saw someone do I won't name any names because actually I don't remember the name so I can't but you know I saw a co-presentation by Latina storyteller she was telling a story about the character one of the one of the gods associated with the Sun she was telling this story about a Mishika legend about the Sun and she told that story and then the amateur astronomer came up to then tell his his story and what what he started off by saying is okay now I'm here to tell you about the real Sun and you know I was just like what's not real about the story that was just told you know this idea that that reality is only you know the scientific scientific truth is the only form of reality that there is you know stories are an important way that we transmit cultural knowledge and there's much reality in a story as there is in an equation and so I would say you know think about that think about the you know what you're saying don't don't put down someone's culture when you're trying to reach out to them that's the service way to make sure they never show up again well I'm making a connection back to the previous point that was made be sure to make to build a relationship with community before you simply walk in there with your telescope at nine o'clock at night thinking you're gonna have people show up to watch the stars with some of the communities that I work with I spent two years in Watsonville and the relationship that was built with that community was built over 15 years so there was some sort of event that was coming up and we were the ones hosting it they knew that it was the place to be and then they trusted us and respected us and we're willing to go along with anything that he would roll out but at times I had seen some organizations coming from surrounding communities offering some sort of event or service and simply dropped in and it wasn't accepted at all for whatever reason they may be but yes take the time to make a connection to the community whether it I think probably the best way would be finding organizations of course that are already doing the work for example reaching out to the CSW's not just shooting her own horn but find the people that are already doing the work and pass on that knowledge pass on the tools to them so they can then implement them in their communities great thank you guys I find museums often will know who to connect with as well if you can't think of anyone off the head of the museum is sometimes a place to connect thanks you guys so much I there are a few questions that came through and Isabel you were answering one so well about translation and it when you use a PowerPoint to use for example when you want to use a bilingual PowerPoint to for example use follow red for Spanish and purple for English for example but and then you mentioned that the fewer PowerPoints the better hands on is the way to go so did you want to talk about how you do bilingual events a little bit you had answered it some in there but I'd be curious what you had to say you're asking me yeah I think definitely you know the more that you can have Latinas outdoors and and everyone outdoors right I mean what works from one human being will work for the other and I think that when you're talking about astronomy it's great to be able to go out and prepare people for looking at the sky and observing the sky and I would say that probably one of the best times to talk about eclipse is right after sunset when the moon is on a waxing crescent because you'll you'll be looking toward the western horizon and the sun will just have sat and hopefully you will see a tiny little crescent moon and the lit part of the moon will be pointing toward the whole be you know but illuminated by the light coming up from that horizon and so basically that gives you that teaching moment that talks about when you have a total solar eclipse that you have the new moon in front of the Sun and that you would have to have the moon and the Sun aligned from your perspective here on Earth to be able to see the eclipse so I would say is that yes you know give some basic information like that map that we saw to begin with you know a map with a path of totality or whatever but I think even describing what is the path of totality you know it's really an oval or or a circle about a hundred miles wide that is going to be traveling across the surface of the earth you know going very very fast and I mean I think that given those images of what's happening to create that picture that you're showing in the in the PowerPoint it's very important so I would say you know the main thing is just to take your your family's outdoors and have them look at the sky of course you also have to immediately talk about safety if you are in the path of totality so that you don't look at the Sun at any time without protection like eclipse glasses or some kind of specialized filter especially during the partial phases but also that gives you the good opportunity to talk about how you project you know the image of of the eclipse using things like your cross fingers or leaves from a tree to pinhole cameras all sorts of different ways in which you can appreciate the partial phases of an eclipse and then you know that kind of takes you into that experience of what people would see either through an online webcast if you're not in the path of totality or within that path but I think that you know beyond eclipse I think our greater goal is to get people looking up at the sky and appreciating the cosmos more broadly and to make the sky your friend so I think that if we can do that and boy when you you know you can just imagine in your mind's eye right when you're out looking at the western horizon and then the sky is beautifully red and then you have maybe Venus and maybe the crust moon there or you can hook somebody just through that opportunity right there I hope that answers the way you describe things Isabel it's fabulous thank you yeah it absolutely did and then something thanks I just have a question here from Jose Aguilar he says I speak fluent Spanish but don't have a fluent vocabulary for the technical terms in astronomy and physics which I'm interested in other than other than online dictionary translators are there other methods for building a technical and science vocabulary in Spanish I'd like to use Spanish terms that are actually used by a scientist I run into the same problem all the time and and I often have to ask participants in my programs how do you say that word I have no idea that was not in any of my learning do you guys know anywhere that's besides the translator that are there classes online where you can learn these terms or a great dictionary because often the astronomy terms are not organized in one place although sometimes they're the same which is nice I think actually Wikipedia in Spanish is not too bad but but you know but but you kind of you know the more fleshed out the article as usually that means that you know but if it's like two words or whatever it's hard to trust but what I did at one time I had to go teach in Spain that was a long time ago but I have to go teaching astronomy course in Spain for like three weeks and let me tell you how do you say coronal mass ejection and you know solar flare and things like that in Spanish I had no clue and so I actually bought some technical books published in Spain or Latin America you can just go and find those those books online and just buy a technical astronomy book a general but technical astronomy book written in Spanish and published by a Spanish or Latin American publishing company and that gives you your terminology the other thing is encyclopedias in Spanish that have a special book in astronomy that those are also really good sorry I guess someone had muted me usually I lean on Isabelle or or another colleague you know who who had some training in Latin America in the sciences because I mean one of the it's maybe not as big of an issue because you know most people who you're going to encounter will have not had an academic training in Spanish in those terms and so whether you use the word in Spanish or use it in English it's a new word right it's just a new vocabulary word in either language that they're going to learn so it's maybe not as big of a deal when it comes to the technical terminology yeah good point a couple of people just said I have an idea let's get the ASP to publish a bilingual glossary for all those tough terms and then we would have to update it every six months resource yeah yeah we just have it online I would that's a great idea okay cool maybe if that comes out of this I'd be thrilled thanks Andy and Teresa does anybody else have any other questions or if you guys panelists have anything you want to share with the amateur astronomy community I'm we're all ears and really excited to learn from you yeah great you guys otherwise I want to share a couple more resources with everybody let's see if that works all right yeah so at that same site that I was showing you earlier there are some more resources including videos and pamphlets and handouts in Spanish and English and some really great engagement strategies from PsyGirls and PBS they're just like one page handouts for engaging diverse audiences and this double AS resources on diversity is a link on that page as well and I tell you what I was blown away by everything that they included on that it's a really incredible resource if you want to kind of take this discussion further and work on unconscious bias and understanding privilege and what to do when you make a mistake things like that that you will encounter the more work you do so I encourage you to take a look at all of those resources on there I really really want to thank you panelists for sharing your time and your knowledge with us I can't thank you enough for being here with us today and I really hope that this is just the beginning of many more conversations that the amateur astronomy community will have around equity and inclusion I know that here at the astronomical society the Pacific were really dedicated to better serving diverse audiences and we've been working for example with Girl Scouts on how amateur astronomy clubs can better serve girls and so I know we're going to be talking about this and I really hope that this is just the beginning of your conversation as well you can reach out to me anytime feel free to email me or find us through the night sky network and oh I there's a message here that says the nice network is producing a series of earth and space activity toolkits over the next several years and all of their materials they make in English and Spanish that's where we got quite a few of these materials for the grant and I can't recommend those enough as well so thank you for that and let's see how do you oh there is a question one more question here for you guys before we go how do you dress misconceptions people have without being exclusionary that's kind of a general question that I think is a is a tough one no matter who you're sharing this with but do you guys have any suggestions for that I'm going to stop sharing the screen I think I've probably acknowledged that everybody has those misconceptions you know I mean most people will have these misconceptions because we are here on on the earth and we observe the sky so we have a very much a geocentric perspective and I think that's another thing that professional astronomers come on very very hard kind of telling you that you're wrong and is the heliocentric perspective that we can only you know acknowledge us correct on the other hand we're all here observing using terminology of sunrise sunset I mean even all of our language so I think acknowledging the fact that we live in a geocentric environment and experience and that we also know that there is a heliocentric explanation but not completely negating or invalidating the actual real experience that you're having yourself as you're explaining an eclipse or sunrise or sunset yeah I agree and I would also add that it's just to clarify whether it's a misconception or a different conception because you know oh it's just a different conception then maybe just leave that alone but you know if it's something about you know when the seasons occur or how the how the phases of the moon are connected to to the location of the sun or the season or something like that then you know I think it's for me the the way to always try to correct a misconception is to provide people with some evidence right to actually have them look at something and see you know people don't realize that the moon is visible in the daytime sky like every day except for one and maybe two right and you know the easiest way to combat that one is you know point that hey there it is in the daytime sky voila so I'm just you know providing people with with evidence you know and if you can't do that because you know the object or whatever is not up or it's a long term thing pointing to people the resources or doing some hands-on activities that help them you know understand things so doing hands-on activities about the seasons or the phases of the moon you know you should be doing that anyway at your events right so those are those are great you know important ways to help people understand some of these concepts which are really you know they require a fair bit of you know three-dimensional abstraction which is kind of unnatural for most people so you got to let people you know grapple with those those things um Vivian is there time for me to add a little one more or are we please tell me everything okay um I was just just like this conversation got me I don't know uh motivated but um I would say that also like when you talk to elders especially from rural communities um in Latin America they will say oh you know uh we our community my parents would ask us to go out and bang pots and pans during an eclipse you know just because you know we wanted the moon to go away and let the sun come back to us you know so there's this kind of tension between a tradition or perhaps I don't know if it would be called a misconception or maybe a myth or or a belief um but even like using the word myth you know makes it look as if it's unscientific right um there are other communities in which the parents would be um concerned about the children looking at at the eclipse at all and so they would go indoors and not allow them to look at the eclipse and some of these um customs or traditions I think that we shouldn't place our own values on them and say oh how silly you know that you don't let you know people come out and look at the eclipse even with appropriate protection of your eyes because sometimes these traditions come from a very very long time and maybe the depths of the tradition is not understood by us and at times maybe some people don't even want us to understand it's not for us to understand so I think that being very respectful of anything that we might at first value call like a myth or a misconception just and I think that that's when you develop the relationship um with people like Jose and Alex we're talking about and Brian when you develop the relations you think you can try and understand where does that come from you know and a lot of times I think especially when when people have had long-standing relationships with a particular place like have lived in the same area for many many generations then their knowledge is deep-seated in that place and when they come and tell you about one of their traditions a lot of times that kind of always lights a light bulb in my mind that that tradition probably has some kind of a scientific basis because it's kept that community alive for so many generations so there's probably a very sustainable track of science in there somewhere embedded in there and it's all conflated with belief systems and storytelling and you know different perceptions of what's real or what's what is observable or what is correct for your community so these are very complex things so I would say you know be careful and develop a relationship ask many questions and go in and with a position of humility and and also invite some of the elders to be co-presenters with you oh my goodness if you do that you know by developing an activity together and then you invite the elder to co-present so and at the same time that you're not that you're doing your your demonstration of what have you then you ask these community members and maybe it's not another maybe someone else a teacher or someone who has their own knowledge and you put them in a position of authority that's incredibly validating and important yeah that's a really excellent point I remember doing outreach down in San Jose at the lunata and often they I would I heard many times over and over well back in Mexico we could see the stars and and then it would begin a discussion of of their of the sky stories that they would tell from when they lived in a place that had much less light pollution in San Jose for example yeah no these are these are really important stories I wanted along those same lines to mention on that web page we also have another resource put out by the lunar planetary institute that's called the vanishing sun and it's eclipse tales from around the world that are told by people from those audiences so I I just want to thank you all so much for being here tonight and really excellent information so we'll have this webinar archived and you can access it at any time thank you thank you thank you um let's see there were oh there's another question that came in at the last minute lots of uh yeah so these were just some more suggestions and we'll include those um places to reach out to uh Latino audiences by finding out what your club's demographics are and including spouses and children's children um boys and girls clubs yamca and ywca um so thank you thank you to all of the panelists thanks to everyone who's listening in I appreciate all of you and it's been an honor to talk with you tonight thank you thank you


to the second day of the ICT Peace Hitchhiker's Guide to Condense Matter and Statistical Physics that is dedicated to machine learning in condensed matter. So before today's lecture, by Bing Ching Chang from University of Cambridge, I'd just like to remind you that we will have next two appointments on the next two Wednesdays. But in particular, our next Wednesday on 27th of January, we will start earlier. So 12.30 European time. So just check on the program to be sure that you're here. And then the final lecture on the first February will be by Juan Garasquilla that will start in the regular time at 2 PM. So that's it for me. And today, I leave the floor to Alex Rodriguez, who will introduce Bing Ching Chang and the discussion. So Alex, please. Good to everybody. First of all, thank you, Bing Ching, for being here. Well, let me introduce Bing Ching. She is now a, and please, Bing Ching, correct me if I do something wrong. She's now at Cambridge. She's now a fellow in Cambridge. I don't know which, an early career fellow. It's exactly your position, I think so. Yeah. And today, she's gone. She has done a lot of work on machine learning on atomic systems. And we are going to listen some of her work and some kind of before an introduction. And then the Q&A for this session will be, I think, Bing Ching will stop every quarter of hour or something like that. And she will replay your questions. I will remind you to write it in the Q&A box, please, because in this way, we can check it. That's all from my side, please. Thanks, Alex, for the introduction. So let me share my screen first. So as Alex mentioned, I'll talk about machine learning. But more importantly, the application of machine learning to materials modeling. And as Alex also mentioned, I'll stop every 15 minutes to answer questions. So the first hour of the lecture is about basic notions. So that's the fundamentals. And during the second hour, I'll talk a little bit about more applications, which are basically my own work. I think I actually estimate the first part is a little bit longer than the second part, but that's OK. We can move a little bit to the second part as well. I think the fundamentals are, in any case, more important than the recent work I have done. OK, so let's get started. So let's start from the very beginning, like what is a first principle calculations? What is app-initial methods? So the app-initial methods in this context means that we predict material properties that we predict the motion of electrons and nuclei starting from the Schrodinger equation. Now, the significance of quantum mechanics and the Schrodinger's equation can be reflected by this quote from Paul Dirac. The rest is chemistry. And what he means is not something dismissive towards chemistry, because what he really means is that the fundamental laws and equations that are necessary for material property prediction are completely known. But the difficulty is that these equations are just too complex to be solved. So what is the solution? According to Dirac, we can develop proximate practical methods so that we can make the salvation of quantum mechanics trackable. Now with that in mind, let's look at the methods that we have. So we have the Schrodinger's equation that cannot be solved exactly except for the simpler system, such as a hydrogen atom. And then we have reference methods, such as quantum Monte Carlo or coupled cluster methods. And then the workhorse of the field is the so-called density functional theory with different levels of approximations as well. So typically, we are able to model a system with hundreds of atoms on a timescale of 10 to the minus 12 seconds using density functional theory. And then we can model the system using empirical force fields, meaning that we just assume two atoms would interact to each other via sort of empirical or simple analytic functional form. But the empirical methods, they lack the quantitative accuracy. Now so with that in mind, with this preliminary slides in mind, now what we are going to talk about during the first hour of the lecture, we'll first talk a little bit about the fundamentals of statistical mechanics as well as its mystic modeling. And then we will change gears slightly to go to the machine learning part. So David and co-workers gave some talk about the basics of machine learning. But here we are going to focus on how do we translate our physical systems? How do we translate the system of materials and molecules into the mathematical language that machine learning model can use? How do we translate the physical problem into a design matrix? And then finally, I'll talk a little bit about machine learning potentials using machine learning methods to approximate the interactions between atoms. So let's start with a little bit of thermodynamics. So from a thermodynamic point of view, the Gibbs free energy of a system has two compositions. We have an enthalpy contribution, and then we have an entropic contribution. So as the simplest example, when we have a solid and liquid and with the free energy, it can both be expressed in these terms. When a temperature is low, the free energy of the solid is lower, so the system stays solid. But when the temperature increases, the entropic contribution becomes more and more important. So the solid will melt, and the stable phase will become the liquid phase. Now from a statistical point of view, the free energy is actually a measure of probability. So the free energy difference between the solid and liquid can be expressed in terms of the log of the probability of observing the liquid divided by the probability of observing the solid. This is a very simple expression, but however, bear in mind that the probability of observing the liquid or the solid means the probability of observing all the possible configurations that belong to the liquid state. And there are many, many of them. And they all look similar, but they all differ by where the atoms actually are. Now the founding father of statistical mechanics, the Boltzmann. So the Boltzmann has an expression of the entropy on his grave and reads, the entropy of the system is the Boltzmann's constant times the log of the number of microstates. A microstate is just a snapshot that I have been showing before. It's a specific realization of the coordinates and velocity of all the particles. Now this expression engraved on the tombstone is actually not correct because the correct expression, not only we have to consider, just consider the number of microstates, but we also have to weigh them properly using the Boltzmann's distribution. So the entropic term can be expressed in terms of the weighted sum. So by far, you might have noticed we already have a conflict. So in a sense, when we are computing the energy of the system, we have a whole spectrum of quantum mechanical methods with different level of accuracy as well as costs. So to compute energy accurately, we want to go to the more expensive and more accurate methods. But however, to sample the microstates in a satisfactory, in a comprehensive manner, then we want the methods to be cheaper. So there's a conflict there. And during this talk, I'll explain how can machine learning resolve this conflict. So just some very fundamental and very important information on how do we actually sample the microstates. Because in no circumstances, we want to enumerate the microstates because it's a very high dimensional object if we have n atoms in our system. So we will be sampling the six times n dimensional space. And that is not trackable. So there are two pathway forward. And the first one is the Monte Carlo sampling. So the end game is that we always want to sample from the Boltzmann distribution. So omega is the microstate. And the microstates are populated according to the Boltzmann distribution weighted by the enthalpy of each microstate. Now, so the fundamental principle of Monte Carlo sampling, the important sampling, is that instead of sample generate uncorrelated microstates, we have a sequence of correlated states. So I start from a certain point in my phase space. And I make a move from, let's say, omega to omega prime with a certain probability. Now, it can be shown that if the probability p of omega is invariant under this move, then we eventually will be end up sampling the correct Boltzmann distribution. However, this integral here is quite difficult to implement in practice. So in reality, when we do the sampling, we often impose a stronger condition, which is called detailed balance. So in the detailed balance, we are saying that we have to, let's say, if we have to microstate p of omega and p of omega prime, the move back, the move from omega to omega prime and the move backwards, the ratio of them should be equal to the ratio of the probability of omega and omega prime themselves. Now, the one possible option of sampling also according to this detailed balance is the famous metropolis sampling. So it is saying that if so typically, we have a diagonal matrix. And when we are saying that the probability of, if the probability of omega prime is higher than p of omega, we always accept this move. And otherwise, we accept the move with a certain probability that is equal to the ratio between the probability of these two microstates. To show this graphically, so this is a very simple scenario effect in 2D with limited number of particles. So each time we propose a move, if the energy of the system goes down, meaning that if the probability goes up, we always accept the move. But otherwise, we accept it conditionally, depending on the energy increase of this move. So this is the one way of sampling our microstates. But honestly, like Monte Carlo is not that common these days. But the underlying principle is very nice. Now, the other method to sample the system is to use molecular dynamics, which in fact is relying on Newtonian mechanics. So what we are doing is that it is a very simple picture. We compute the force on each particle. And then we propagate this trajectory just using the classical Newton's equation of motion. And we also have to do some additional tricks to control the system's temperature as well as pressure. And the Bible for this type of sampling is the Don Frankel and the Baron Smith's book on the sunny and molecular simulation. So there's a, however, that is not the whole picture. And the reason for that is typically when we do molecular dynamics simulations, the time scale is fairly short. And if the system has to minimum in its free energy profile, so back to this example of solid and liquid. And solid and liquid can be understood as two equilibrium states on a free energy profile. And what would happen if we just do a cultural molecular dynamics is that when we start from the liquid state and do the molecular dynamics, the system would remain in the liquid state. And if we start from the solid, the system will also trap in the solid state. This is because the thermal fluctuation is often not enough to overcome this very high activation barrier. So to overcome this, there's a method that is called a meta-dynamics that is developed by Exondro Lio and Michele Palinero. And I would like to use a high-kindness summary to explain how this works. So can you see which mountain is this? So this is the Matterhorn. And I think this can also be viewed from Italians, both the Italian side as well as the Swiss side. So the profile of the mountain can be likened to a free energy profile. And the valleys are the equilibrium states. And the peak is similar to the activation barrier. If we want to travel from A to B, we have to spend a lot of energy to climb up the peak and wait for a very long time. However, there's an alternative, which is to hiking. Now, what if I travel on this landscape and I deposit a heap of sand whenever I go? So imagine if you do this long enough, what will eventually happen is that we will even up this free energy landscape and make it flat so the system can go back and forth without much resistance. And another nice aspect of the method is at the end of the simulation, just by checking how much sand is deposited at each spot, and we take the inverse of that. And then we take the negative of that, then we recover the actual free energy profile. So there's an alternative method for performing free energy calculation. And that is called thermodynamic integration. So the idea there is that we have, so let's start from a slightly easier approximation. So we can use the minimum potential energy at 0 Kelvin. We can neglect the entropic contribution altogether at low temperature and just use the minimum potential energy as the proxy for our free energy. Or we can assume that our system behave like a harmonic oscillator and we take the harmonic approximation and add the harmonic contribution of the free energy. And then there's also the option of doing everything properly and taking into account of n-harmonicity as well. So in that picture, we perform a thermodynamic integration. The idea is that this is a very general concept. So the idea there is that if we have two systems and somehow I can connect them using a reversible thermodynamic path. Then the free energy, sorry, here I flipped the sign, should be from B to A. Now the difference in free energy between these two systems can be just expressed as the integral of the finite difference when we go along this path. So that's a very general idea. And this path in particular can be anything. It can be a path along thermodynamic variable like temperature, pressure, or other things. Or it can be a switching parameter between different Hamiltonians. So in practice, we usually do a switching between a harmonic system and our actual system because the harmonic system has analytic free energy that we can express very easily. So in practice, we typically follow a recipe. We start from a harmonic reference and then we integrate to a real crystal and then we can choose to go up in the temperature or go between different pressure. So this is the recipe that I would always use with some justifications because we have to do the switching between harmonic to a harmonic at the relatively low temperature because when temperature is high, this integral becomes divergent. This is because at high temperature, like diffusive behavior happens to make the system very non-harmonic. And another thing that we often do is that we typically do, if we want to compute the Gibbs free energy, we first start from an MVT isombo. We start from a constant pressure and temperature isombo. This is because the pressure is not well defined for the reference harmonic system. So we cannot place a harmonic system under the MPT, the constant pressure isombo. So there are typically also some number of tricks that we can play, but in the interest of time, I will not go through them. So I just want to point out that some time ago, we have returned a tutorial style paper to explain the tricks as well as the fundamentals of computing Gibbs free energy using thermodynamic integration. And this is accompanied by the Python notebooks for data analysis as well as sample input files. And I'll just quickly show a couple of examples to show why this accurate free energy estimation is important. Then I'll try to answer a couple of questions. Now the example here I'm showing the free energy of the vacancy formation in BCC iron. So we have the approximation that is just using a potential energy difference. And then that is the black line here. We have the ones that use a harmonic approximation. And then we have the accurate estimation taking into account of n-harmonicity using thermodynamic integration. And low temperature, they are very similar. But however, as the temperature goes high, even the harmonic from estimation is not sufficient enough to capture the accurate vacancy formation free energy. So here's a similar example that computes the stacking for free energy in FCC metals. And it's the same idea. You can see at high temperature, the harmonic or the potential energy approximation, they are not only quantitatively inaccurate, but even the overall trend, it can even get the sign wrong. OK, I think now is a good time to stop to answer some questions. So there's a question from a question rower. Christian, do you want to speak up and ask the question yourself? Or are the students allowed to speak with the Zoom setup? OK, so Christian asked, will we only be dealing with equilibrium systems? I think this is mostly the case. Although strictly speaking, when we are using mind-high dynamics, the system is seeing a quasi-equilibrium. But yes, this is mostly the case. And Raj, do you want to speak up? So Raj asks, yes? I can allow Raj to speak if you want. Yeah, yeah, I think that's better. Hello, ma'am. I would like to ask, is a detailed balance and a metropolis sampling a link to each other? Or this detailed balance is applicable in all condition as it has a certain condition that when we are going from one microstate to another microstate, so it has the same probability of when we move from the second one to the first one. But it seems that this condition is not favorable for each of the experimental conditions. So you mentioned this experimental condition. Can you elaborate this a little bit more? So what does this mean? Like the probability of going from one of the phase, like a material goes from one phase to another phase, and he's not capable to recreate the same thing, come back to the same like material has two phases. One is in the low temperature phase, and one is in the high temperature phase. And material is such that when it's moved from low temperature to high temperature, its phase transition takes place. And in that case, there is a certain probability that it moves from one state to another state. But if reverse condition is not possible, so this detailed balance that we have applied, that you have said in my Montevallo sampling is strong condition of detail balance where we equate these two product of two probabilities. So that I doubted that that can be happen in those situations. So I want to clarify two things. So first of all, here we are talking about microstates. So a microstate is basically a list that can be understood as a list of factors of where atoms are and what their velocities are. So let's say the liquid phase. So a phase is a different concept. A phase would contain many, many such microstates. So the concept of detailed balance applies when we are talking about microstates. And it's also worth pointing out, like detailed balance is more like an assumption rather than what happens in reality. It's sort of an assumption that enable us to do sampling, particularly Montevallo sampling in an easy way. And so another thing like metropolis sampling is a special implementation of detailed balance. So there are many ways of design the moves that satisfy detailed balance. And metropolis sampling is a particular simple form. OK, thank you. Thank you. OK, so back to where we were. So so far I have talked about the classical system, the classical free energy. And the classical term here applies, refers to the fact that we are assuming that our particles or our nuclei are classical particles. They are point particles. And the point particles can be characterized by their center of mass in space. And that is sufficient. However, in reality, many nuclei that we have, especially the light ones such as hydrogen, helium, and lithium, they are sufficient like the classical particle treatment breaks down. And this is called the nuclear quantum effects. And the nuclear quantum effects many aspects of our system. So it affects the particle momentum distribution and isotope fractionation. So isotope fractionation means that in different, for example, in different phases of water, the equilibrium concentration of deuterium or oxygen 18 are different in different phases. It's different in gas phase, in the liquid phase, and the ice phases. It affects the pH, heat capacity, diffusivity, and many things. Nice and intuitive example of the differences that light water is perfectly drinkable, but heavy water is poisonous at high doses. And how do we take that into account in our simulation? So we use the path integral of formalism. I left this slide for reference. Also upload the slide to the website later. But this is just some gloss over them. But the essential idea is that because the nuclei, they are not classical particles. So the momentum and kinetic energy operator, they do not commute. So what do we do in practice? In order to compute the density of states, we have to decompose the system into separate replicas. And each replica would live in a much higher temperature. Because at the high temperature limit, the two operators becomes more commute. So in practice, what we do is that we use the ring polymer molecular dynamics formalism. It's, as I mentioned before, instead of having a nuclei as a classical particle, we represent each nuclei as many, many particles. And they are connected by the ring polymer, by a harmonic spring. So the total Hamiltonian of the system is the Hamiltonian of the individual replicas and the harmonic springs that connects the different replicas. Now, just to give an example of, and just to give us a more intuitive example, under the classical picture, we have the equi-partition theorem. So as we are saying, each degrees of freedom, we have a kinetic energy of kBt divided by half. But because of the quantum mechanical nature of our nuclei, this is not always true. So for example, in this water molecule, we have three modes for the hydrogen. We have the oxygen and we have the oxygen hydrogen and the bond vibration. And we have this sort of the breathing mode. And we have the out of plane vibration. And because of the nuclear quantum effects, because of the zero point energy and so on, that each more actually carries a kinetic energy that massively exceeds kBt half. And they are also different amount of quantum mechanical kinetic energy in each mode. Now, when we try to characterize the free energy difference between the classical system to the quantum mechanical system, we can still use the thermodynamic integration to perform a reversible switching between the classical and the quantum mechanical system. And in practice, when we write the expression down, this is equal to that the integrand is a function of this quantum mechanical kinetic energy, which we can compute from the ring polymer molecular dynamics. OK, I saw no question in the Q&A, so I'll continue. So so far we have talked about atomistic modeling as well as a little bit of statistical mechanics. So the next part is so so far, I think I have a pretty grim picture about atomistic modeling. There are many parts that needs to be taken to a consideration. And moreover, each step means a lot of computation. So thermodynamic integration is not cheap. Metodynamics simulation is not cheap. And if we want to consider nuclear quantum effects on top, because we need to not just simulate one system, but we need to simulate many copies, many replicas of the same system. And in there, we also increase the computational cost by 20 times. Now, so here comes the machine learning part in how can machine learning help in this case? So first, let's talk about representations. How do we represent our molecules? And we have many types of systems, right? So we have, let's say, a peptide, like a protein, or we can have a crystalline system with different arrangement, different symmetry groups. Or we can have also a box system with certain defects. It's a little bit difficult, so it's probably a dislocation somewhere. So usually, the starting point is that instead of looking at all the atoms, instead of looking at the box system, we first divide the system into a set of atomic environments.  And that is my atomic environment. And the reason why we want to do this is because imagine if you want to compare a true system with different number of atoms. And that is very difficult, right? So by decomposing the system into a set of atomic environments, then we can focus on representing the atomic environments instead of a system with varying number of atoms. And there are many popular representations which I will talk about. Now the idea is that we first do this decomposition. And then any observable of the system, like let's say, can be represented in terms of the local contributions. So let's say the phi here is the descriptor. It's the representation of the local environment. And then we can have observable associated with this local environment. And so for example, we can have an atomic energy that is characterized by the local environment. And the total energy of our system can be expressed as the sum from local contributions. So let's dig further about this local, how to represent local environment. So this picture doesn't just apply for to representing materials and molecules, but it's a very general idea in machine learning. So in machine learning, in the end of the day, we want a representation that tells us how similar our samples are. We can characterize the similarity in terms of the kernel matrix, the k, or we can have a distance measurement. So the things that are similar have a kernel matrix, have a kernel that is high, that is close to 1, and a distance. And they are very close in our distance space. And vice versa. So the idea is that we want to have this kernel or distance metric for our atomic environments. Now, let's look at these two atomic environments. And how do we compare them? So first of all, we can represent the atomic environment. Remember that the center is an atom. We are sitting on an atom now. So we can characterize the local environment as a list of displacement vectors. So basically a list of neighbors and the displacement vectors characterizing these neighbors. Now, so here's a question. So we have a list of neighbors. In this case, they are all hydrogen atoms. Imagine if I swap two hydrogen atoms. So the physical system doesn't change because the hydrogen atoms are indistinguishable to each other. However, if we look at this displacement vector, that changes when you permute two atoms. And we don't want that. So what we do is that instead of having this list of displacement vectors, we put smearing, we put a three-dimensional Gaussian distribution on top of each neighboring atom. So now instead of having a list of displacement vectors, now we have a density field. And the advantages now, it doesn't matter when we swap two atoms as long as they're of the same species. So now we can overlap these two density field. And then we compute a degree of overlap in order to characterize how similar these two atomic environments are. However, there's another problem. So if I rotate one of the molecules is still the same molecule, the physics doesn't change. But the integral would change. So how do we overcome that? How do we incorporate rotational environments? So the trick here is that we not only compute a degree of overlap for one particular orientation, but we do a rotation. And we compute the average degree of overlap on all possible orientations. So in this way, we remove the rotational degree of freedom as well. So and you might have guessed, this integral is quite unpleasant to evaluate for each pair of atomic environments. Suppose you have n atomic environments. Then computing this guy between each pair would have a quadratic scaling, and that is not ideal. However, Albert and Gabo and Rishi, they have a very nice formalism to show that one can actually express this. We can compute very efficiently this kernel, this similarity by expanding the individual role, this density field, in terms of spherical harmonics. And then computing the k here would amount to some simple operation using the spherical harmonics coefficients. Now so far, we are talking about the atomic environment, but eventually we are interested in bulk materials. So what happens there is that we need to combine the atomic descriptors into a global descriptor. And there are many ways of doing this. And the easiest is that, OK, I can just take the global descriptor, the global feature, by taking the average of the individual contribution from each atomic environment. So that's the simplest thing we can do. Obviously, there are many other choices available. OK, so now I think it's a good time to stop and answer some questions. OK, so Oscar asked, so the atomic environment is somehow like an application of the renormalization group, isn't it? I don't think so. But then I'm not an expert in renormalization group. There could be a way of expressing atomic environment as such. I do not know. And then there's a question, does local environment means up to nearest neighbors? Yeah, that's exactly right. The local environment is taking the nearest, it's taking, no, sorry, sorry. So depending on how you define nearest neighbor, so typically we take a cutoff. And usually you can go to the first neighbor shell. You can go to the second neighbor shell. It's really up to you. It doesn't have to be the first neighbor shell, but it is the nearest atoms within the certain cutoff. And then there's the sludge. OK, so there's an anonymous question here. So how large should be the variance of the Gaussian kernel associated with each particle? And this is a fantastic question because it actually is actually very deep. So intuitively, the sharper the Gaussian that you use, let's say the more sensitive your kernel matrix, your kernel measurement is for atomic environments. Imagine if two atomic environments differ very slightly, but if you use a very sharp Gaussian, then you are still not getting close to one when you compute the similarity. So intuitively, that would be a good thing because you want the measurement that is as accurate, as sensitive as possible. However, in reality, this is not the case because eventually we need to use our representations to do some machine learning, to do some regression. So in that way, we want to incorporate a little bit more smoothness into our representation. So it's a balance between the two. So there's another question about what about interactions between atomic environments? Symbol summing means they do not interact. And that would be a correct statement. However, when we come to machine learning potential, the architecture is actually more complicated, and we do consider interaction. OK, I think I'll stop now, stop the questions now in the interest of time and move forward. If there are other questions, we can also answer them. Other questions that are not addressed at the end of the talk will answer them during the last part. OK, so we talked about representation. Now we can use this representation. And there are many ways how we can use them. We can build a low dimensional map using dimensionality reduction so we can visualize our system. And we can do some pre-processing and sparsifying the data set. We can do clustering or we can do regression. So I'll talk about this dimensionality reduction. So the dimensionality reduction at its core is basically I have a high dimensional data. And I want to find a low dimensional representation that best preserve the relationship between the high dimensional data. Notice that the terminology I'm using here is kind of vague. And this is intentionally so because depending on how you define this, what kind of relationship you want to preserve, you basically ended up with different dimensionality reduction algorithm. So the more popular ones are PCA. And if you do it in the kernel matrix, this is called kernel PCA, like TISNI and UMAP is getting very popular these days. So I'll just talk about the PCA principle component analysis because it's really like sort of the mother of all the other dimensionality algorithm. And the principle are usually pretty similar. So the question is like, what is preserved? What is this relationship that I have talked about that is preserved during the PCA analysis? So in a simple example, I have two dimensional data. I found a principle component L1 and L2. And I project the data set onto this first principle component. Now in PCA, we first, we have the data in the high dimension. I have the data in the low dimension. So this is all about the covariance of the data. So I'm trying to preserve this covariance, which can be expressed by T transpose, sorry, x transpose times x in the high dimension and the same at the low dimension. Now mathematically, one can show that this can simply be done by finding the first the small d eigenvectors of the big C covariance matrix coming from the high dimensional data. And these eigenvectors are sorted like with a descending value of eigenvalues. So we are looking for the eigenvectors like the eigenvectors that are associated with the largest eigenvalues. And so this is just a little bit of derivation. And of course, we can find the eigenvalues and eigenvectors just by using the symbol linear algebra tricks by solving the determinant becomes 0. Now so graphically, let's look at this graphics again. So we are looking at L1 and L2 that preserves the covariance of our data. And this can be done, of course, can be done in higher dimension and just a simple illustration on how this happens in 3D, we take the two principal components and project it down. Now we have returned this simple Python package that does these analysis automatically. So this can be just because using a simple bash command line. So you use one bash command, and then you are able to generate a low dimensional map, as well as do some other analysis automatically. So these are the selected bash command that one might want to use. So here just show some examples. So here's a learning dipeptile. And typically, people try to visualize the system using the Raman-Chengen plot. So using two dihedral angles, far and short. We can also do this type of analysis automatically using the ASAP package. And then we can see we came up with something that is quite similar to the Raman-Chengen plot. So we have the principal component 1 and principal component 2. And but however, remember that we didn't know a priori dihedral angles are important. You don't need a prior knowledge to come up with such automated map. Here's another example. Here I'm showing this kind of map can distinguish a classical water and water that is from with nuclear quantum effects. And then there's also a projection of the Q&9 data set. And the map is able to distinguish small molecules with different compositions or like branch molecules or long carbon chain. OK, so wandering should. OK, there's still this last part of machine learning potential. And as I expected a lot. So this part is a little bit longer than the second part. So maybe I'll stop now and talk about machine learning potential during the second lecture. And now I'll answer any of the remaining questions for the first two parts. So Ebi asks a question. Ebi, do you want to ask this live? Hi, so I asked you which representation of molecules we should choose? On what basis do we choose the representation of molecules? So the soap representation that I introduced earlier has this advantage that it's completely general. You can use this for any. So these are all generated with the soap representation. And they are very different class of materials. So it's sort of applicable to many, many things. And we don't have to think. And of course, there's the option of handcraft representations. This is often done in the chem informatics community. The handcraft representations has the advantage that you can incorporate your prior physical understanding of the system. Because when we think about it, we can also think the dihedral angles find shine to be the representations of our system. And by using li-fi and psi, we are incorporating our prior knowledge about the peptides. We know that the dihedral angles are often important to characterize these systems. And we know the positional side chains are probably not as important. Does that answer your question? Yes, thank you. And the larvae also ask a question. I'll read it out instead. So how do we go about long-range order interaction in atomic environment case? And how do we incorporate it? So the answer is typically people do not incorporate it. So there are some ongoing work from Michele Cioriotti from York Baylor that they have a certain scheme of incorporating the long-range interaction. But as of today, this is not the norm. So typically, people do not, which is a little bit of a shame. But surprisingly, without accounting for long-range interaction, the machine learning framework seems to be rather accurate for many things. Hello. Yes? Yeah. So actually, I had a question. So while you were explaining about the PCA, about the data there, so I was just wondering if the data there has something to do with the information which you explained in the last slide about the atomic environment case, where we have this information about this displacement vector. And yeah, so is it somewhere related to this PCA data set, so that now in this PCA analysis, what we do is now we have this information of this atomic environment? Is it something like this? I just wanted to relate it with the previous slide. So which do you have a slide number that we can refer to? OK, so you were explaining about the PCA. OK, I actually didn't look it. Yeah, maybe before this one. Over? Yeah, I hear you talk about this data set, where and I think this data set you explained in the previous slide to this one. Yeah, so here you were explaining these data points. So I was wondering if these data points were somewhere related to this in the previous case to the information of the atomic environment? Right, so this depends on so let me explain this example. Let's say in this example, each point represents a particular alanine dipeptide configuration. So what actually happens is that we take each configuration of the molecule and then we compute the descriptor for each of its atomic environment. And from there, we compute the global descriptor for this small molecule, in this case by taking the average of the atomic contribution. Now I have a vector for each molecule in my data set. Right, now let's say I have 10,000 molecules in my data set. So now I have a 10,000 by the dimension nullity of the descriptor matrix. And then I project that matrix down into dimension. And that's what we see here. So each point represents the low dimensional representation, the 2D coordinate of the design matrix of the vector for a small molecule. OK, OK, OK. OK, thanks. Thank you. OK, I think we are a little bit over time. I think we can take the break now. And when we come back, I'll go through the machine learning potential as well as some applications. Yes, let's take how much do you want to break? So on the schedule, it says a 15 minute break, right? Maybe we come back at 2.15. Perfect, let's back to 2.15. Thank you. Thank you.


What's up everybody? Ricky Kruth here. Welcome back to my channel. So today's video is very, very important for the past two to three weeks. I've been testing out Facebook ads to get Facebook leads, and I want to share with you the conclusion. Now, if you don't know, I've been selling real estate for 17 years and I've never bought leads. I tried Zilla leads out when they first came along. I did a three month package and immediately canceled that package as soon as it was over. I found that the leads were really low quality and very expensive. And this is when Zilla leads first came out. So you can imagine since then the quality has went down and prices have went up. So in today's world, the Zilla leads are even more expensive and even lesser of quality. So I'm definitely a pro-claimer of a non-buyer of internet leads for my real estate business. However, I'm also very big on adapting, trying new things, seeing what works, seeing what doesn't work. So that's why I wanted to try Facebook leads. I've never tried Facebook leads. I've only used social media and my real estate business to build brand and advertise my listings. Now on the flip side, I've spent nearly 200,000 on social media ads. That's Instagram, YouTube and Facebook for my coaching business. Okay. So nearly 200,000 I've spent on social media advertising for my real estate coaching business and I'm going to get into that subject on another video. So stay tuned for that. But I did want to dabble in this Facebook lead world and just see what happens. I wanted to dip my toe in for a second, see what I could do with it. You know, with all the experience I have with advertising on social media for my coaching business, I've learned a lot. So I wanted to take that knowledge and apply it to my real estate business for leads, okay, not just building brand, not just for advertising, but actually to acquire leads, people that might want to buy or sell a property. So I've been running ads to my area for the last three weeks, tried a bunch of different ads, a lot of different objectives, a lot of different ways to entice them to click, give me their information and allow me to follow up with them and see what in the world I can do to help them. I think the entire goal with any lead, I don't care where you get your lead from. I think at the end of the day, it's voice to voice is where the connection is really made. Okay. And then from there your intent has to be to genuinely want to help them and care about what they have going on. On one of my latest Instagram posts, someone commented, how do I not take it personal when someone doesn't buy for me or someone doesn't list for me? And my answer was that you don't care about it because you generally want to help them and you should generally want them to make the decision that's best for them. And if that decision that they made that they thought was best for them was to not work with you, then you should be happy for them and you should congratulate them on that. Meanwhile, moving on to more potential clients that we can help that will work with us. So back to the Facebook leads, I ran these ads and I was picking up leads for a dollar, $2, $3 a lead. So as I would get the lead, I would call them up. I would have a conversation with them. What can I do to help you? I saw you click my Facebook ad and I would have these conversations with the people that clicked on my ad. And what I realized was is that the people that were clicking on my ad were just regular random people in my market, which is what we want here. We're looking for people in our markets. Okay. But I came to the realization that these were just random people scattered across my market. There really wasn't any heads or tails of what was happening with who it was, what they own, what they were looking to do. Most all of them were not looking to buy or sell right now. They were just more curious about whatever the ad was or whatever I was advertising, the giveaway or whatever I was doing on the ad, I tried a bunch of different things. They were just curious in that. Maybe they were curious in more details on a listing. Maybe they were curious about this or that, whatever the case may be, they were just interested necessarily in the ad, maybe something I said in the ad, but they weren't really looking to buy or sell today. So this was very, very interesting to me because a light bulb went off and it clicked that what I'm teaching the world to do in terms of strategy to build your real estate business is absolutely hands down the very best most efficient, most effective way to build your real estate business. When I came to this realization and it clicked, I immediately turned all the Facebook ads off that were there to generate leads. And here's why. If I'm running ads on Facebook to generate leads, which leads on Facebook, let's face it, we're literally just collecting contact information from people on Facebook. They could be looking to buy. They could be looking to sell. They could be looking to buy or sell now. They could be looking to buy or sell in the future years down the road. Never. Who knows. It's random. Now I'm spending a dollar, $2, $3 lead, sometimes even $4 depending on what it is. Even if I'm spending 50 cents of Facebook lead, okay, what I'm literally doing is I'm spending money to get people's contact information so that I can then call them. And what's worst about that is I have to wait on the lead to come through. And then I realized everything, everything about Zilla leads, everything about online leads in general, what we're dealing with online leads is we're just getting random people's contact information in our market. Okay. What I do with my coaching program, what I do with RedX is it's two and a half cents for phone number, for address of targeted people. Okay. So let's take those two scenarios. Facebook ads, let's say you get a hundred leads. What's that going to cost you? $100, $200, $300. Depends on, you know, how much it is per lead. Let's say it's 50 cents a lead. That's $50. Okay. $50 for random people in your market, scattered around different properties. Some of them don't even own, they're renting, never going to buy, unqualified, whatever the case may be. Okay. Then you probably have some, you probably have a couple of high quality leads in there somewhere. Okay. So that's the Facebook side of this. Now let's look at the RedX side of this. Two and a half cents per phone number, two and a half cents versus the 50 cents. Okay. So huge difference here with RedX Geo leads. We're going to spend $2.50 for a hundred leads that are targeted, that own the type of property we want to sell, that are in the price range that we want to be in. Now I don't know if you can get Facebook leads for 50 cents a piece. I think it's more going to be like $1, $2, $3 per lead, probably like $2.50, even if it's 50 cents though. Okay. $50 versus $2.50. And these are concentrated targeted prospects. How much you spend on Facebook leads is going to fluctuate. Over here, it's exactly two and a half cents per lead. Also let's talk about the timeframe that we have to wait on the leads over here for Facebook, whereas over here on RedX, click of a mouse and you have your hundred leads. By the way, you can get as many leads as you want over here with RedX. You're not limited and it is unlimited because you can never call all the property owners in your market ever in your life. So I think this was crazy and I'm so glad that I did this and tested this out. And I gave it my hundred percent. I was fully committed. What I was thinking was is that what if I can run Facebook ads and just collect information, get the emails, put them on my weekly email. That's what I was thinking, you know, let's, let's get more people. Let's put them in my weekly email and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. They can start getting my weekly email and manifest into more business, more clients. I'm also going to call them. I'm also going to talk to them. I'm also going to have these incredible conversations and start these relationships that are going to last for the rest of my life. I'm going to get referrals, repeat business, referrals of referrals, the whole nine yards. I was thinking there's no way to lose. And I still don't think there's any way you can lose with Facebook leads. If you get Facebook leads for, say, $2 a piece, you get a hundred of them for $200, you know, there's a random people in your, in your area and everything. I still think that is an incredible bargain. Okay. Let me make that clear. I still think that is an incredible bargain because out of those hundred people, let's say you get, you know, 10, 15 of them that you have really good connection with long term. Okay. Even if you get five to 10 people out of that group that you have a really strong long term connection with, that's worth so much more than $200.  So don't get me wrong here. I still believe that any contact with people in your market is great. However, in this business, we have to be efficient.  We have to be extremely careful with how we're spending our time because days go by so fast. And if we're not productive doing the things that we need to do to succeed, then we're going to be in trouble pretty quickly. Our bills keep coming in, time goes by so fast. We need production right now. And that's why I don't want you to sit around waiting on Facebook leads, waiting on leads in general that cost you an arm and a leg. I would rather you spend minimal money and target the people, the exact people that you want to be your clients. And I want you to work on your communication skills. And I want you to build those relationships and develop those friendships. These are going to be friendships for the rest of your life. And this is where this is how this is why you build an incredibly large real estate business. If you decide to go the paid lead route, all you're doing is you're putting time because you have to wait on the leads and money because the leads are very expensive in between you and what you inevitably have to do anyway, which is make calls. As soon as you get the lead, you got to call them, but you're just waiting on the lead to come in so you can call. Why not spend minimal money and get leads of a targeted area right this second? No waiting. Let's get the leads. Let's call the leads right now. Well, what are we waiting for? Why are we spending all this money? Let's spend almost no money and let's call the targeted people right this second. Now, what I'm going to continue to use Facebook for is to advertise my listings and to build my brand. I'm going to continue marketing on Facebook and Instagram as hard as I can to my area, to my past clients, so on and so forth. I'm going to advertise listings. I'm going to advertise deals. I'm going to advertise information and I'm going to continue to brand myself on these platforms because I believe that that's the most efficient way that a real estate agent can use these platforms is by building brand and marketing your listings. Okay, guys. So that was my short-lived experience with Facebook leads. I hope you got a lot out of this. I just wanted to share my perspective and kind of what happened there. My coaching program is 100% free. It's the first completely free coaching program. That's at zero to diamond.com. There's almost 20,000 agents in the program right now to date. We're growing incredibly fast and we're helping so many agents. There's a 90 day action plan, full course, live training sessions and direct access to me. You also save $150 on RedX and I get you set up with all the tools that I personally use in my business. Also, I have a couple of events coming up. I'll be in Dallas in September 19th through the 21st. That's the WGR summit. Incredible lineup of speakers there. I'm also going to be in Birmingham, October 21st. That's going to be an all day workshop. There's going to be six hours of CE credits in the state of Alabama for anyone who comes to that. I'll also be in Charlotte. That's going to be October 24th and I'll be at the Hyperfast agent summit in DC. That's going to be November 11th and 12th. So if you're in any of those areas, I would love to see you shake your hand, take a picture, say what's up. If you haven't subscribed to this channel yet. What are you waiting for? Let me know what in the world I can do for you and let's go.