So welcome to the Biaxcel webinar. The webinar of today is on non-bonded libraries, and BLIP, a performance portable library for computing force and energy of multi-particle systems. The presenter of today are Joe Jordan from the Royal Institute of Technology, as Sebastian Keller from CSCS Lugano. I'm Alessandra from the Royal Institute of Technology, hosting this webinar together with Julian Singh from the University of Edinburgh. Today's presenter are Joe Jordan. So Joe Jordan got his PhD in biochemistry and molecular biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania, and he moved to Sweden in 2018 to work in Stockholm in the group of Erin Lindl. He was doing a postdoc of a driving molecular simulation with his experimental data. Then he moved to the Computer Centre of the Royal Institute of Technology in 2019, PEDESSE, and his actual position is a research and software engineering. Sebastian got his PhD in theoretical chemistry at age in Zurich, Switzerland. Then in 2018 also he moved, but he moved to Stranford University for a postdoc on GPU-accelerated electronic structure simulation. Then in 2019 he went back to Switzerland and he started to work at CSCS Lugano. So now I will give the word to Joe so he can start the webinar. Okay, so today we're going to be talking about INB-Lib, a performance API for force calculations. So, okay, there we go. First, I will say who are the people who have been working on this project. So myself and Sebastian have already been introduced, but in addition, there is Prashant Kanduri at CSCS in Zurich, Victor Holanda, who is also at CSCS in Lugano, where Sebastian is, and Artem Zemirov, who is at PDC, the Computer Centre of the Royal Technical Institute of Sweden, as I am. Okay, so the outline of the talk looks like this. I'll talk for just a few minutes about what INB-Lib is. Then I'll give a little bit of background that'll hopefully make the talk a little easier to understand. And I'll start talking a little bit about the implementation, but Sebastian will do most of the talking there. And then at the end, it'll come back to me and I'll go through some example workflows that hopefully will be used cases that people are interested in. Okay, so what are the objectives of the INB-Lib project? So I've highlighted the most important one, the one that requires most of the work, and that's to implement an API that permits existing performance portable grommacks non-bonded force calculation routines to be called as a library. So there's another number of sub-goals or sort of related goals, like being able to have nice C++ on Python code. We currently don't have Python, although we may in the future, and to make the code easy to get your hands on. So in terms of it being easy to get your hands on, it's a version of INB-Lib is actually shipped with Gromax 2021. So you should be able to use it on compute clusters that you have access to. But I should go back for a second and talk a little bit about what Gromax is just so we're all on the same page. So Gromax is one of the most popular codes that are run on high-performance computers, counting for about 5% actually a lot of plots on HPC system. And it's a code for performing molecular dynamics and it's been developed for a long time, almost 30 years and a lot of effort goes into making sure that it's high-performance, but until fairly recently, not so much effort has gone into making it easy to use the code. And so there hasn't really been much of an API and so that's why the INB-Lib project exists. Okay, so another reason why it is relevant especially now to have a project to try to expose the performance aspects of Gromax is because we're moving rapidly into a situation where there's a massive proliferation of different kinds of hardware that are coming online or have recently come online. It's in the high-performance computing world. And this is a good thing if you're a scientist because more competition means that the computers theoretically can be cheaper and that there can also be more competition over speed. But if you are the person programming these computers to try to get the maximum performance, then you have a little bit more work to do because these different machines that I have listed here have different CPU and GPU architectures and this can be very challenging because for instance, you can have to write an entirely different back end for each GPU type as an example. And so again, this makes something like INB-Lib very important because then you can imagine instead of having to go and try to for each new machine, figure out how to get the best performance, you can just say, oh, well, there's some other people who have already put a lot of work into getting the best performance for this particular type of operation. I'll just call their code as a library and focus on the sort of scientific things that I'm actually interested in as opposed to the low level performance details. Okay, so now I'll give a little bit of background. So hopefully we're all on the same page at this talk on what a molecular dynamics simulation is. But basically, you have a bunch of particles or molecules and you compute the forces of those particles or molecules and use that to update the positions and basically do that over and over again to get a dynamic picture of how the positions evolve over time. And so what are the types of forces in a molecular dynamic simulation?  And so the reason that the project is called in-belive is because it is a non-bonded library. And so when we say non-bonded, we typically mean the van der Waals attraction. And to a lesser extent, you could also imagine non-bonded refers to electrostatic repulsion, obviously. And then you've got bonds, you know, other kinds of forces. But the van der Waals interactions are the most computationally intensive. And so the Leonard Jones interaction is basically one way to compute the potential of van der Waals forces. So it looks, you know, the equation for the potential looks like this. So then you have this graph which I've taken straight from the Gromax manual. So at the lowest point on the line on the graph is the energy minima. So that's, you know, where the particles are sort of happiest to be. If they move too close together, they'll get a high force. And as particles move farther apart, the force will actually go to zero, basically. And the fact that the forces go to zero is important because, you know, if you've got a big system and you need to compute all the non-bonded interaction, if the forces didn't go to zero at some relatively fast pace, actually this would be an in squared problem and it would be computationally very challenging to make much headway. But fortunately, it's not really in squared in the total number of particles but only in the particles within the radius. So you can actually sort of divide up, divide and conquer, so to speak, the non-bonded interaction. So what does that look like?  And this is basically why Gromax gets a very good performance is because a lot of effort over many years has been put into developing this algorithm and also making sure that it runs efficiently on a wide variety of hardware. So really what we're trying to do is to expose that work that's already gone on. And so now I'll move to actually talking a little bit about how we've made it possible to access this performance. Okay, so, excuse me. All right, so in order to do a simulation, you need some particles. And so we actually define a topology API that you can use. And so particles have a name and a mass and these are the only two parameters that particles have. So you can imagine the particles being atoms or if you do coarse-grained simulation beads or, you know, some other thing depending on your domain of application. But so in the example we're gonna talk about today to sort of walk through the implementation. What we're actually gonna be building is a system with methanol and water. So here's the particles in water. You know, you've got an oxygen and a hydrogen. Not so surprising. And here are the particles in methanol. You've got the methyl oxygen and the methyl carbon. And in this case, we're using a United Atom methyl carbon. So there's no hydrogens explicitly attached to the carbon in this scheme. Okay, so the non-bunded interactions are flexible. You can define different kinds of interactions between the different particles in your system. And so in order to do that, you need something called a combination rule. And so this is actually sort of the last background that I'll show. So remembering the formula we had for the potential, the Leonard Jones potential between two particles. The geometric combination rule is exactly what it sounds like at the geometric average of the C6 parameters of your particles and the C12 parameters of your particles. So that's all we mean by a geometric combination rule. So, well, what do you do? You take this particle type interactions object and you add the particles in your system to it. So first here, we're adding the oxygen in the water and giving it C6 and C12 parameters. And we're also adding the hydrogen and actually giving it zero for C6 and C12 parameters. And you can do the same thing for the methanol, oxygen and carbon with, as you can see, different parameters that are from some force field or from some experimental validation that causes you to trust that these numbers are correct to your specifications, to your needs of the problem domain. And so in addition to being able to, so for here, we're basically showing how do you define the generic things that will show what the interaction of particle I and particle J will be for arbitrary particle I and J. So the combination rule is just telling you how to combine the C6 for, for instance, the oxygen in the water and the oxygen in the methyl. But you actually might not want to use the oxygen in the water and the oxygen in the methylgeometric combination rule. You might have some more experimental data that basically says that there's some other number that is gonna give you a more accurate interaction potential. And so if you want in the INB-Lib interaction, API specification, you can do that. You can add explicitly non-self interactions. Okay, so now we have some particles and we have some interactions between our particles. So the interactions, again, are for computing the non-bonded interactions, which is the performance-sensitive ones that we really care about. And so we're gonna add our particles to some molecules. So we're gonna build a water molecule and particles in a molecule must have a name and they may have a charge and a residue name. So in the case of water, we're adding our particles and giving them name, you know, oxygen H1 and H2, sort of obvious names for a water, and we're giving partial charges, which again are coming from a force field, you know, some kind of experimental validation. And then you're just adding as the last parameter the actual particle. And you can do the same thing for methanol. And the one interesting thing that I'll note here is since the particles are themselves kind of uncoupled, you know, they're independent objects, you can actually add, you know, your hydrogen particle to both your water molecule and your methanol molecule. So this is the hydrogen on the oxygen in your methanol. And you can use the same one, but just for the different partial charge. And now you have the different, you know, now you have your two molecules basically. Great. So another thing that is useful to add is, you know, in these kinds of simulations, there's something called intramolecular exclusion. So if anyone is not familiar with what this is, this is basically a performance optimization. So this is saying, you know, in a minute, I'm gonna show you how you add bonds. And so anything, any two particles that are connected directly or, you know, closely at least by bonds, the force from the bonds are gonna be much higher than the forces from the non-bonded interaction. So using exclusions, you can actually say, exclude particle i and particle j from the non-bonded calculation because it's a waste of time to calculate that force. And so this is what that looks like for water. You know, it looks pretty similar for methanol. So all you need to do is keep track of the gains of the particles in the molecule that you're adding the exclusion to. Oh, and I should mention that these self-exclusions are added automatically. So yeah, it doesn't try to compute non-bonded forces with itself. Okay, so as I mentioned, you probably also want to have bonds. If you wanna simulate, you know, anything useful without bonds and angles and such, you can simulate things like argon, which is very interesting, but perhaps not interesting enough for everyone. And so, you know, you can add bonds. So what does that look like? So we have a harmonic bond type and the parameters are the distance in the fourth constant. And so you make your OH bond and you add this as interaction. So obviously in water, we need two bonds, one for each hydrogen. And that's what this looks like. And then now we have a similar setup for methanol. So we want a different OH bond, which I'm gonna call OH3, since it's the third H on the slide. And it has, yeah, whatever parameters it has. And so you add that interaction to your methanol and then you also add an O-methyl bond to your methanol. And so I'm not gonna walk through the addition of angles and dihedral because they look very similar to bonds. So now I'm actually gonna hand it over to Sebastian, who is gonna talk more about how to, you know, finish building the system and actually run using the, yeah. Right, does that look good? Okay. So I'm gonna pick it up right where Joe left it. So he described how you can create molecules from particles and bonds and angles. And before you can actually calculate forces, the remaining information that you need to supply as a user is how many molecules of each type you wanna have in your topology. And so we have a topology builder here that you need to instantiate and add those molecules. And it looks like this. So you add your molecules and you supplies a second argument here, how many of each you want. And the reason why we need this builder is because we cannot efficiently translate the string particle named to a sequence ID. So in order then to finally get the topology, you call topology builder dot build topology when everything has been added. And you also need to add the C6 and C12 parameters that Joe described earlier. And you also need coordinates and velocities which you might define in your program or read from an input file. And you need a buffer to hold the forces. And you need a box to specify the bounding, the coordinate bounds of your coordinate buffer that you just defined, right. And at this point, we basically have every information you might need about your topology and you're in principle now ready to call the force API. So it's perhaps useful to recapitulate quickly what the data flow looks like. So the particles and the bonded interactions, they only go into molecules and then the molecules, they go into the polity. And so what happens next now is that the polity prepares for you the actual inputs to our non-bonded force API. And so those inputs are the particle types. That's just an array of in teachers and then the non-bonded force parameters. So that's the C6 and C12 parameters for each type. And then an array of charges for each particle. And then there's an array of interaction flags, which specifies for each particle, whether the Coulomb electrostatic or the Fonderwall non-bonded interaction should actually be computed. And then there's another array, actually not a two array of in teachers describing what particles are excluded. And so what does that look like in actual code? You also need a small data structure with some options. It mostly has sensible defaults, but it for instance controls parameters such as pair list cutoffs. And just as the graphic illustrated before, you can now instantiate the non-bonded force calculator itself by requesting all the input data that it consumes from the topology. And then why is it actually an object? Why can't we just make a function? That's because the force calculator needs to have a pair list inside that determines which are the pairs of particles that actually are close enough to each other to have Fonderwall's interaction. And because it's actually fairly expensive to compute this pair list, this is done only every say 100 steps or so. And for this reason, you don't want to update this pair list each time you compute forces for a given set of coordinates. And so once you've updated the pair list, you can then finally call compute. You have to give the bounding box the coordinates and then you will obtain the forces. So the forces are going to be added in this buffer supplied here. And it's important to note that actually the whole topology API that Joe and me just described is actually completely optional. So if you're totally empty handed, it might be the easiest way to actually assemble the input data in order to be able to call the non-bonded force API. But for a lot of users that might not be the case. So you might already have a TPR file from another Gromax calculation and that TPR file already contains the exact same information such as the particle types and the non-bonded parameters, et cetera. And it also would also contain a coordinates. So the only thing you'd have to do is to use the TPR file reader and supply your TPR file and then you can directly use the data from there to call the non-bonded force API. And it's even worth mentioning that all of the input data that the non-bonded force API consumes are actually just elementary arrays of int and real or so this is float or double. So it's completely imaginable that you would actually be able to prepare this data yourself using a third-party molecular dynamics code and then you'd still be able to call the non-bonded forces from Gromax. And so that's what the alternate data source would look like in code. You'd create this TPR reader and give it your TPR file and then from there instead of the topology you'd be using this TPR reader to calculate to create the force calculator and the coordinate and force buffers. And then from there you'd be able to call compute and obtain the forces. We do also provide actually listed forces which is Gromax non-bonded for bonded forces. So that's everything from bonds angles to dihedral and the way that this works is exactly analogous to the non-bonded force calculator. You also construct the object with data that you can request from the topology and then the force calculator or the listed force calculator also offers the same the exact same compute signature. And at this point you're actually already in a position to write the complete simple MD loop. We do have a very simple leapfrog integrator but you can of course provide your own two and then you can just simply write a for loop over all the integration steps. Then you then start with computing the non-bonded forces. I mean, this is assuming that here the apology box coordinates and forces has been set up as illustrated before. And then you can add a second call to compute the bonded forces on top. And here in this example, if I call it like this the bonded forces just get added on top and then you can use those forces to move particles ahead in time by one time step. Here in this setup I'd actually have to zero the forces between every step because both the bonded and non-bonded force calculator add forces on top. And you might of course imagine all the stuff that you're doing to the system in between such as add your own kind of forces on top or whatever else you might imagine. And with that, I'd like to hand back to Joe who's going to cover some example workflows in more detail to illustrate cases where the capability that we just described might be useful. Yes, so I'm gonna talk about some example workflows. So the first one I'll talk about is about computing a subset of interaction. And so there are a number of cases where this would be interesting. So I'll go over one that looks a little bit like drug docking and sort of give an idea hopefully of what it would look like to do multiple time-set bangers or quantum mechanics, molecular mechanics, hybrid. And then after that I'll give an example about multiple states. Okay, so for computing a subset of interactions, what would that look like? Okay, so for this example, imagine you have two polymers called in polymer one and polymer two and you have some water and you've already added your particles and your fusions and your interactions. And so now you can build a topology which represents your full system. So for this example, you can say that the full system has one molecule each of polymer one and two and 100 water molecules. And you can also imagine having a system which is just the two polymers. And then you can build each of those topologies respectively the full system and the polymer only system. Okay, and so while you set up your non-bounded fourth calculator and your listed fourth calculator and your leapfrog integrator and that looks similar to the way Sebastian describes or won't belabor the point. And then you again, as Sebastian described basically do some steps. So you can imagine basically if this is a drug docking scenario that you have some other method maybe some other program that gives you trial coordinates basically that you think are going to be relevant for computing the interaction energy between these two polymers or for some other kind of system basically. And so once you've, but it might be the case that you don't trust this other software completely and you kind of wanna relax the system a little bit give it a chance to move around. And then after you've done some a few time steps with your full system now you actually only wanna get the forces for your polymer system because you've updated the coordinates a little bit to your specification. And again, you don't have to use the leapfrog integrator you could implement your own stochastic gradient descent minimization integrator for instance, but at the end of the day you want to only get the forces or perhaps the energies between the polymers that we're interested in here. So right now work is ongoing to actually expose the energy as part of the non-bonded API. But okay, so just sticking with this example just for a moment. So this is an example of how you could do a sort of docking thing where you wanna compute the interaction energy between two particles which are a subset of your whole system. But we also have multiple time stepping and QM in them which are examples of subsets of interaction. So for multiple time stepping instead of having one topology which is the full system and one which is some sets that you're interested in the interactions then you might for instance, divide up your system between everything that's not hydrogens and a topology that's just for hydrogens and then you could actually have a double loop where you integrate the hydrogens a few times and then have a longer time step than you might otherwise be able to for the rest of the system basically. And for QM in simulation that actually kind of like is this example but turned inside out. So in a quantum mechanics, molecular mechanics simulation generally you have some other program CB2K for instance that generates forces for the quantum particles. And so basically what you would do there is instead of defining your system to instead of basically defining two systems one of which is the full and one of which is the only part you would have one system of which one part actually has all zero interaction parameters. And then in between the force calculation and the integration steps you would just add the forces from your other program for instance, CB2K and through this method you can get a decent quantum mechanics, molecular mechanics hybrid simulation. Okay, so now we'll talk about using NBlib to do a workflow with multiple states. So there are a number of types of workflows that involve multiple states. So I'll show an example which actually encompasses both forms of trajectory or replica exchange. And then I'll just kind of describe what it would look like to change the topology during a simulation. Okay, so in multiple states in this case we actually just pretend that you have your topology builder as we've illustrated it before and that you wanna actually build the same system twice. And so I'm gonna call these systems first and second. It might actually be more canonical to call them state A and state B but when reading code state A and state B are a little too close together. So I thought that the example was clear with first and second. But in this example that I'm showing you're actually the same topology. And so what do you do? Well, you get your coordinates and your velocities for your first system and you get your coordinates and velocities for your second system. If they could be the same coordinates they could be different coordinates. You know, it's up to your imagination and the specific type of workflow that you're interested in what this would mean. And so while you define your in B force calculator your non-bonded force calculator as before and your integrator as before and I'll leave out the listed force calculator for reasons of space because it doesn't really add anything in terms of clarity I think to the example. So you do that for your first system and you do likewise for your second system. And so now you can write a loop just like the loops we've been talking about over however many steps you're interested in doing and basically you compute your forces for system first and system second and then you integrate system first and system second. And this is actually already a sort of swarms of trajectories type of workflow right here. So you don't have to limit yourself to two. You can go so wild and do as many as you would like and you can even imagine using MPI to run each one of these actually on a different rank on a supercomputer and get that embarrassing parallelism that you don't have to do much work in order to actually get so that you could more quickly explore phase space since you're interested in by basically running in copies of that system in parallel as opposed to running them one after the other. And so what does it look like to do replica exchange? Well, all you basically need to do is add a little bit of code that gives you in this example every 10 steps lets you swap the velocities. And so, well, why do people like to do this? One example is that you might have different temperatures and that's different velocities for your two systems. And you might want to periodically switch them because you're interested in the statistics at a lower temperature, but you want to increase the exploration of phase space. And so you occasionally swap the velocities with coordinates of your system in order to facilitate this. Okay, and so just to give some idea of how the last type of workflow that involves multiple states, which as I mentioned is having different topologies. Well, how would that work? Let's go back. So changing the topology during the simulation would be as simple as basically building first and second and then having this loop and then after a first and second in this case were actually different and not the same topology twice. You could imagine doing, instead of every 10th step swapping the velocities you could actually write a different loop which was 10 steps of system A and then build a whole new calculator and 10 steps of system B or system second. Okay, so those are the examples that I wanted to talk about. Hopefully they were at least somewhat clear. So I'll talk a little bit about what our future goals are. So one of our main goals is this talk and one of the things we're really hoping to be able to do going forward is to find some users. So we have a pretty good idea of the things we can build and we have what we hope are good ideas about what people will find useful, but the only real way to know what people will find useful is to have users reach out to us and basically say, hey, we're interested in this use case. Can you prioritize getting such and such feature in? And so we are quite open to this. Our emails I guess should be shared as part of this talk and if anyone is interested in reaching out and having a conversation with us about some kind of workflow or some kind of features that they would need for workflows that are very interested in, these are conversations we're really excited to have. So please do reach out in this regard. Okay, and so other things that we're sort of already working on and thinking about are mostly about performance. And so one thing we haven't mentioned is actually the non-binary for stuff that are actually already works on GPUs, which is nice because since Gromax already has basically backends for all the different kinds of GPUs, whatever kind of system you have, you should just, it should just work and you should just be able to run on whatever sort of CPU, GPU setup you have. But one thing we don't currently have is domain decomposition, which is what you would need in order to have a coupled parallel simulation. So I mentioned how you can easily get an embarrassingly parallel simulation where you just run one simulation per MPI rank or per node, whatever. But if you actually wanna run one simulation across nodes, you need domain decomposition. And so this is a little more complex and so this is something we're actively working on. So another performance aspect that's fairly important is actually having nice handles for the data transfer. And so what I mean by that is both from the CPU to a device to GPU and also sort of at the API boundaries because as a user, you may wanna add your own forces or get in the middle of the steps of coordinates back and to do some other kind of thing. For instance, check if you are at a stopping point. And so we need to come up with, yeah, we just need to do more work there. And so this again is a place where hearing from users is extremely useful so we can have an idea of basically which things to optimize. And one sort of longer term goal that we're looking at is task scheduling. So we've been showing kind of naive simulation loops where you just compute one thing and compute another thing. But in principle, this may not be the best possible performance. And so we're hoping to extend our various APIs in order to allow you to overlap these various tasks in order to actually be able to play around on whatever kind of hardware you have in order to try to write a custom schedule to give you the best performance. So that's all we have to say today. So I'd really like to thank Bear Kess who is one of the original developers of Gromax and is in Stockholm at KTH as well and has really been very helpful, sort of pointing the way and helping us understand some of the algorithms that were necessary in order to expose the in the API that we've talked about today. And then in addition to all the people on the IndyLib team that I mentioned at the beginning, we've had a lot of productive discussions with other Gromax developers, namely Christian Blau, Eric Gurgeng, Eric Lindahl, Mark Abraham, Paul Bauer, and Suede Paul. And yeah, so now I guess we'll go to a session and answer session. And I really wanna thank everyone for taking us on to listen to our talk. Thank you, Joe and Sebastian for the very interesting talk. Lucy's asked a couple of quick questions. So the first of those quick questions is, can other integrators be used besides LeapFrog? The integrator is totally independent from the fourth API and you're able to use whatever you can imagine there here. Yeah, Chris, this is one of the things that makes the API so powerful actually is that any kind of workflow you can imagine since the components are completely decoupled and all you need is that the data have some certain sort of minimal amount of data, you can do whatever you want. You can even imagine getting an integrator from some other MD code if you wanted to do that. Great, thank you very much. The other question that Lucy had asked was kind of function be included within a loop to view partial results or is not possible? Partial results as in a subset of the forces or? I can take a guess at what is meant here. But yeah, I mean, so this is what I was saying about data transfer basically. So with all the loops we've shown, if you wanted, you could, put in a prompt that allows you to enter in some extra data or allows you to do some other kind of check. And if the check succeeds, do one thing and if the check doesn't succeed, do another. I mean, so you can look at the forces now and you can look at the coordinates now. The only real caveat is that if you are using a GPU, there is some cost of moving the data back from the device to the host and you have to manage that yourself. But other than that, there's only performance limitations and not limitations in terms of like when you can look at the data or what you can do with it. Great, thank you very much for that answer. The next question we have is from Patricio Barletta. Patricio, I have unmuted your mic if you would like to ask the question you're more than welcome to, otherwise I can read it for you. Cool, thanks. Can you hear me? Yes. Sorry, thanks for the talk. Actually, you have just answered my first question about uploading to the GPU. So it is available, so that's cool. I was also wondering, it's a very specific question. Do I have access that the API exposed the Gromax cell list for the current frame? Oh, be nice. So the Gromax, what for the current frame? The cell list, you know, for the add-ons? Yes, no, it does not. So I'm very curious to hear what your use case is for wanting to look at the pair list. No machine learning kind of force field. Okay, yeah, very interesting. So this is something we've considered and we've even looked at some grant applications that, you know, for writing follow-up projects. So this is an area that we're very interested in. So I would be very interested to talk to you about specifically what you think, you know, would be needed there. But in principle, we can expose any kind of data in practice, it may not be so useful because the data structures, you know, are some more and some less sort of human interactable and intelligible. So it really requires some further specification of like what data is useful, basically. But I'd be happy to talk more about it. Right, yeah, it's a very specific use case. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much for that answer. The next question is from Henry Whitler, whose microphone unfortunately doesn't work. Henry says, interesting work, thank you very much. Can one use NB-Lib test to make molecular specificity, for example, binding affinity in joules or to quantify the force in Newton of a binding interface for EG protein ligand interactions? Yeah, so this is kind of what I was trying to get out with the first example where, you know, in that case, we were just computing the forces between two polymers. But, you know, if you imagine polymer one is a ligand or small molecule and polymer two is a protein, then you're already basically in the situation that I think is being described by the questioner. Great, thank you very much. And our final question for today comes from Jonathan Barneau. Jonathan, I do not seem to be able to unmute your microphone, so I'll ask your question in your stead. Jonathan asks, are virtual sites supported? Virtual sites are not currently supported. We do not have it on our roadmap to support virtual sites, although in principle, they could be, it's just that virtual sites are a lot of extra overhead, and especially since multiple time stepping is, you know, easily facilitated by the API we have outlined and, you know, furthermore is like, I don't wanna say more correct because actually in testing, it has some instabilities because some of the force fields have not been developed for multiple time stepping, but you can imagine as force fields evolve that basically just integrating the fast interaction as much as needed for one period of slower interaction that this would mean that virtual sites can go away. So unless there's a really compelling case, I don't think that at any point in the two near future, we would investigate virtual sites, but I'd be interested to hear what the specific use cases that Jonathan would think are enabled. So Jonathan replied saying that virtual sites are heavily used in the Martini force field. Ah, yeah, of course. Yeah, no, I should have known. Yeah, all right. So it's something we can look into. Yeah, we would have to revisit our topology API in order to figure out what it would take to support this, but it could in principle be compatible. Great, thank you very much for that answer. So with that, we come to the end of our webinar. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Sebastian and Joe, for coming and giving this very interesting talk and answering all of the questions. Thank you also to all of our attendees for coming to this talk. And I wanted to finish by mentioning that there is another BioXL webinar happening on Tuesday the 30th of March titled Applying the Accelerated Weight Histogram Method to Alchemical Transformation, which will be given by Birk Hess and Mathis Ludborg. It should be a really interesting webinar and we hope to see as many of you there as can come. Thank you very much, everyone. Have a good day.


We're ready to, it's about time. I'm ThinkTech from the downtown studio at the core of Honolulu. I'm your host, Becky Sampson. I'm a professional speaker, author, and coach. So sometimes we can get overwhelmed with all the information being thrown at us in the media regarding being healthy. If it's not one diet, it's another diet. Food to avoid and not to avoid. What time of the day is best to eat and how much to eat? If you struggle at all with your health or your weight, you might be able to relate. I've learned after losing 130 pounds myself and having that kept that off for nine and a half years, what it takes to be healthy and what the most important aspects are to having a fulfilling life. Today, it's about time. We're going to talk about the fact of what do you do and not do to be healthy one day at a time. Joining me on the show today is Bianca Ekmek. T.O. Lu. A fitness trainer and wellness advocate. And you're at what studio? What local studio are you in? For my, oh, Honolulu Club. Honolulu Club, yes. Sorry. All right, perfect. And we're going to talk about health and wellness. And yeah, so welcome to the show. Thank you. It's great to be here. No, it's all good. It's great. Bianca has such an interesting last name that I'm like, oh, shoot. You're stressing. It's OK. Everyone stresses over that last name. OK, so how do you say it again? Ekmek G.O. Lu. Ekmek G.O. Lu. Perfect. OK, I should have started practicing that yesterday. Maybe a year ago. OK, maybe a year ago. Because you were just mentioning too that you did some work in Los Angeles. Yeah, I actually moved out to LA for about seven years. And in that seven year time, I got to work out and work at a high-end facility, Sports Club LA. I worked at Equinox. I got to manage a great slew of trainers. They were under my management. And when it was exciting, it was fun. And I learned so much there. I mean, that's the mecca of fitness, right? Yeah, yeah. It was the experience was priceless. So tell everybody kind of where you came from. You've been in the industry for 30 years, fitness and health and wellness. So tell us kind of rewind a little bit and tell us what your story is and what makes you passionate. I'll try to keep it short for everybody. Yeah, 30 years ago, I fell in love. That was my first and only love. I walked into a gym and that was it. And I started to work on the ground up and became a trainer after I competed in the National Fitness Show. Prior to that, I did the Reeboks aerobic championship. It was kind of gymnastics. I know we've got a picture, right, to show. Oh, yeah. Yeah, let's show Reeboks. See what you look like back in 1997. Oh, my God. Yeah, 1990s. Yeah, I was an old kid. We won gold, which was amazing. My first competition. So what got you into that? You know, I've always been an athlete of sport. You know, as a kid, we used to do the Summer Olympics for brother and I. And so that competition was just exciting to me. And to get to that level of where you're able to compete against top athletes was also a process that I enjoyed. So, you know, you can see my first trainer was my brother. You know, he taught me how to get disciplined to the goals that I had. Did you grow up being disciplined? I grew up being disciplined. Yeah, you know, that was my environment. And I wanted to share that with people. And I guess that's what made me so attracted to the gym industry at such a young age. So when I walked through the doors, I was like, ah, you know, this was it. And I never left. I grew into the positions that I'm in now. I'm able to mentor now and coach others to become those trainers to other people. What kind of education did you go? Get your education in fitness? Oh, yeah.  I was starting to be a pre-med. I decided calculus wasn't my thing. So I went over to kinesiology and physiology. So I majored in those. And, you know, then I got into the certification of the groups, NASM, BCSM. Now I actually certify trainers with NCEP. So that's not National College of Exercise Professionals. But it's a holistic approach to training. So we're looking at you as a complete person. What do you do at home? What is your support system? What are the foods you eat? How does that affect you?  Everything. What do you find, I mean, obviously, when people's first start, it's a little overwhelming. I'm just going to speak for myself. When I was somebody, I actually remember Body for Life like all those years ago. I did that when I was, I think, 19 years old, trying to get healthy and fit and everything. But I struggled with the food part of it. So I mean, when you're working with somebody, obviously, and if they've had issues with obesity or a binge disorder or any of those kind of things, what are some of the things that you first, I mean, we talked about it a little bit on the phone yesterday like really doing an assessment and facing where you're at, like that being the first kind of thing. Where are you just accepting that? Well, you know, like we talked about yesterday briefly is it's got to click with you first. You've got to make that choice, right? Yeah. Because it's really hard as a trainer or as a nutrition coach or what have you to get somebody from point A to point C if they're not willing. So that has to be your decision. And the second thing as a professional is that you've got to understand the person's been living a certain life slot for a very long time and change them overnight is virtually impossible. So the 2080 rule is always where I go. I change your lifestyle maybe 20%, get you adjusted to that and eventually get you up to 40%, maybe 50% and eventually you'll be living that lifestyle that you want. So it takes a process and the other part is also forgiving yourself for getting off the wagon so to speak if you do start a program because we are gonna make mistakes and we are gonna go back to old habits sometimes and it just takes that bit of time of step by step and then you'll eventually get there. I mean, it is a process, right? Yeah. It's not an overnight thing, right? No, it's not an overnight. I remember one of the things, I didn't tell you this story yesterday but when I wanted to lose weight I ended up hiring a personal trainer. I worked with her for two years, twice a week at 266 pounds. Wow. That's great. And I never lost a pound. And it wasn't until I got to the end of that two and a half years that my trainer and she was an Olympic trainer. I mean, I was doing 450 pounds on my legs and she was like, holy cow girl, what are you doing? And she goes, but why are you not losing weight? And it was because I don't know if you've experienced this with what you've done is I would go and work out and then I'd go home and binge. Right. So I was just counterproductive with, I was willing to go to the gym because I didn't want to give up on that and I was willing to pay her all that money but if you've ever come across that where people really work hard in the gym but then they don't get the results because of what they're doing at home. It's also lack of education. I think trainers are not legally bounded to help you with nutrition. They can suggest what you should do but it's very difficult when someone is that overweight. There's also health risks that come along with it too. So we want to make sure that whatever you do is very specific to your body's health. That's very important but the idea of going home and eating whatever, that is basically you're allowing yourself to say it's okay, I went to the gym, I can now eat this. Yeah, it is really destructive to your efforts and that could eventually affect you psychologically too and that's another part of being a trainer too and a fitness professional is that you're dealing with someone else's psychosis. They're dealing with all their baggages and all their hiccups and everything that they have going on and you're trying to help them within an hour, twice a week, it's really difficult. So it's really important to kind of sit down with your client ahead of time and really understand what's going on so that you can guide them outside of the gym and say look, when you go home, it's really imperative that the calories you consume initially is really important, again the 2080 rule. Let's take these things out but you can still have these and eventually guide them to that lifestyle that we're trying to get you to. So yeah, and it's also the forgiveness factor is really big because- Forgiving yourself. Yeah, absolutely, because we're all gonna make those mistakes. Yeah, I know we really wanna focus on education is because we believe, I mean we talked just about how important it is that when you're more educated, you make better choices, right? So I know as you've done some competitions and stuff, is that kind of, when you got more educated about the whole thing, you just kind of went full in for yourself, right? When I competed, it wasn't for me to get famous, it was more for me to see, like you, I'm coming from a background culturally where I was a bit more heftier or figured, let's say, and I really wanted to get healthy at 18 and I thought the only way I'm gonna be able to do this is through diet, but I really had to learn. How many calories was this, how much fat was this, and if I consumed four meals or three meals or two meals or one meal a day, how would that affect my body? So you have to understand somewhat of how the body works. I don't expect my clients to know what I know, but when they're with me, I try to teach them what I'm trying to get them to understand for their lifestyle. So breakfast is important, why? Because you haven't eaten for eight hours, your body's starving. But what you first put in your body is also important. First thing in the morning, yeah. Well, these are the types of things, they're not very difficult, and I try not to make it too difficult, or they're not gonna keep up with it, right? So I try to encourage and I try to get them excited about the program and make it fun so that they actually wanna come back and continue. You find that most people come to you because of fitness, like they want to be like, like a bodybuilder or do that kind of thing, or they just looking to lose weight. Well, today's society has changed. I mean, we still have the body beautiful people that want to look good in their clothes, or not, no clothes. Or no clothes. But with all the IG. Especially in Hawaii. Yeah, I know if you look at Instagram, all the, everyone's half naked. But it's important, yeah, in Hawaii. It's really important to understand that, when they come to me, they come to me for more specifics. They have this functioning system. Their muscles are not working the way they should. Some people have ailments, they might have to be diabetic, or they may have other health conditions that they wanna get healthy for. So there are more specific types of workouts now that we created for those types of people, because everyone is becoming more, the population is becoming more dysfunctional. Why do you think that is? Like in your opinion, yeah, okay, we're sitting more. We're sitting more, we're on the computer more, everything's digital, we don't move as much. And like I said yesterday on the phone, you just gotta keep moving.  Something that's gonna get the blood flow going, get your heart rate going. That's really important as we get older too. So, is that something that you usually ask people when you're working with them is like, what kind of things do you like to do? Because I think to stay motivated, at least for me, I have to, like for instance, somebody invited me to go paddling, is that what that's called here? Yeah, yay, yay, I'm getting the terminology. The paddling, and I guess paddling is the rowing type of thing. And I was like, oh, that would be, I'm not one that, I'm not really a gym person to go into the gym, but that would be really fun for me to be able to go out there and just work hard and get an exercise, get moving doing something that I love to do, or hiking. I mean, you're outside, and you're in Hawaii doing that outside, that's even better. You know, anything that you can do that's physically active, let me stand at the paddle board, you've got the surf, you can do the paddling that you're talking about, you can go hiking. I mean, that's not easy. You've got an even, unstable situation and you've got to recruit all those small muscles and to stabilize you, it's great. And then you get to see nature. Yeah, so pick something that they love so that they can stay motivated doing it. Yeah, I mean, throwing what you think is important as a fitness professional, but definitely for the client, they gotta have fun. No one wants to do something they're not enjoying, right? Yeah. I know one of the things that we talk a lot about on this show is having the right support team. So how important do you think that is in being able to get healthy versus trying to do it on your own? Yeah, it's really, when you're starting out, it's really hard because you don't know what you're doing quite yet. And when you don't have a loving family or you don't have friends to support you or an organization that you can belong to to help you through it, because you're gonna have these hills and valleys.  What's going on? You need those encouragements, outside of the gym. I'm there for you two hours or three hours out of the week. The family structure is really important. And I do ask those questions. When I do an assessment, I do ask them. What's your support? Yeah, what's your support system? Who do you go to when you need to talk to someone? Because it is partially psychological. Is it a decision or it's a discipline. Practice makes you into that person, but if you're not that person yet, you definitely need that support system, I think. And get in there, I'm sure. Just get started, yeah. I know, get started. Well, we're gonna go to a break real quick. And then when we come back, we're gonna talk more about educating yourself really on losing weight, getting healthy. How, where do we start? What are the things that we're gonna deal with? So, thanks. We'll be right back here on Think Tech Hawaii. And my name is Becky Samson. Hi guys, I'm your host, Lillian Cumick, from Lillian's Vegan World. I come to you live every second Friday from 3 p.m. And this is the show where I talk about the plant-based lifestyle and veganism. So we go through recipes, some upcoming events, information about health, regarding your health, and just some ideas on how you can have a better lifestyle, eat healthier and have fun at the same time. So, do join me, I look forward to seeing you. And Aloha. Aloha, my name is Victoria and I'm a host at The Adventures in Small Business. This is a collaboration between U.S. Small Business Administration, Hawaii District Office, and its partners, where we showcase the stories of local entrepreneurs and small businesses, talk about how to start a business, talk about great tips for small business owners. Please join us every Thursday, 11 a.m. at Think Tech Hawaii, see you soon. Mahalo. Hi, we're back. I'm Becky Sampson and this is It's About Time. I'm talking to Bianca Ekmeiolu, and we're talking about health and education and empowerment. So before we kind of went to the break, we talked about this idea that, sorry, this idea that there's things that we need to do to get started, right? And really looking at where you're at in your life and being able to get real. Like, that's one of the things I love about this show. It's called It's About Time. It's about time to get real. About time to really take your health in place. And I've been thinking about this a lot lately as I've had friends in my life where their health is declining. How important do you think it is right now? No matter where they are, what age? I mean, they could be young or they could be older to start taking their health seriously now. Yeah, you're never too young and you're never too old to start.  I mean, cancer is not prejudice. It hits everybody. And so health is one of those things where it's probably the most valuable asset that we have in our life. When you don't have your health, you have nothing. You can have all the money in the world. It doesn't mean anything. And so for me, I'm like you, I'm an advocate now on wellness and health because I suffer myself with fibromyalgia and or the symptoms of such because we still don't know what fibromyalgia is but it's a neurological disorder where you have pain constantly. So you can imagine me as a trainer, I get to work out and there's a flare up and that pain feels like I tore something. It's a weird sensation. So that's health related. So how do you stop that from becoming further, more increasingly worse for you? Again, education. So I dove in, I went in, I talked to a lot of doctors, I talked to medical professionals, what's going on, what do I need to do? So we talked about diet. Diet is crucial. Yeah, absolutely. It could be allergic to foods. You don't know about. Food allergy is important. Do you know before I started losing my weight, I found that I was allergic to 97% of all food. And I was like, what the, I had no idea. And actually I'll bring this up just because it's coming to me is there was a, the guy said to me, he says, if you have children that have rage problems and that have issues with emotional stability, it usually is a food allergy. And I never even knew that. And so when he brought that up I was going, wow, that makes sense why we have a lot of these. And of course, I mean, we can talk, you and I were very passionate about like the whole like the food thing and the doctors and the education. Where do we really go to get the right answers? So if you're, I categorize medicine now because I've gone into so many different realms. There's integrative medicine, there's functional medicine, there's holistic medicine, and there's naturopathic medicine. So I found for me, there is doctors that are naturopathic, Western medicine mix.  And then they come back with some allergy responses.  But you know, your allergies change too. And that's what I was gonna say is I tested now that I'm not allergic to it. You're not allergic to it anymore, isn't that crazy? Yeah, your body can change. So people think that, oh, I'm this way and I'm gonna be this way forever. No, talk about why that's true. So you know, if you eat the same types of foods, they're saying your body eventually builds an immunity to it and it starts to become allergic to it. So that's why they say you should always change your proteins, lunch, you should have chicken, maybe you know, dinner you should have like fish or something like that. It's true. So if you keep eating the same types of food every day for months and months and months, you will develop a certain type of allergy towards it. Now when you stop eating it, all of a sudden your body does what it's supposed to do. It recovers and then it's no longer allergic to it. And I always told people, if you give the body what it needs, it does what it's supposed to. It's a miraculous machine. I always say that. I always say that. It works. Because when I was going through, and you don't know my story much about it, but I had every single condition that people that struggle with obesity and that sort of thing, from sleep apnea to skin problems to diabetes to all of that. And I was able to completely reverse it. I had PCOS, Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, which they told me I never could reverse it. And I reversed it. And I always say that same thing, is that what you put into your body, when you give the body the proper nutrients, it does what it's supposed to do. And so, but it is, it's difficult, unless you're educated, to know what it is that you need to put in that body so that that body can, because what is it, every two years? Every two or three years, yeah. Yeah, every cell is regenerated. Right, and it's like when your birthday comes, you're a whole new person, literally. Like, it's crazy. Based on what you eat. Based on what, oh yeah. And with all the chemicals that are out there, I never understood what GMOs were back, way back when, or a Montecito type of thing. And I don't want to get political here, it's not my place. It's like your body doesn't understand certain chemicals that you put in. Like preservatives and things like that. Sometimes it doesn't know what it is. So your liver has a big job to process fats and things like that. So if it doesn't recognize those chemicals, whatever its root is attached to it, it stores it. It doesn't use it as energy, which is one vessel that it sends to, it stores it as storage. So then you start accumulating fat. Even though you're eating healthy, you're thinking I'm eating healthy, but if your body doesn't understand what you're eating, it starts storing it as a depot, like a fat reserve. Well, that's not good, is it?  Well, these are common basic things that people will need to learn because you're eating foods that may not be productive to their system. The body can't absorb it. Well, and oftentimes you look at somebody that's overweight and you think, oh, they've got a lot of, they've just eaten a lot of food, but it may not be nutritious food, obviously because the body's not able to, it's storing it and not letting it. Yeah, it's assimilating. Like you said, assimilating. Yeah, it's crazy, yeah.  And this is why I'm like to do your shows like this, because it gives us an opportunity to really express to everyone who's listening, look, it's not just you, it's just the lack of information that you may not have. And once you have this information, it's gonna empower you to do more for yourself.  How do you personally, because I get this question all the time, Becky, what was that moment that changed your life forever? But how do you personally, when you work with someone, take them from unwilling to willing? What are your kind of your tips? You really got to connect with your people.  They're inviting me into a space that not too many people are allowed in. I agree. So they're talking to me about things that they may not even talk to their spouses, and because they're vulnerable. And I take that very seriously. So when they express to me their desires and what they want for themselves, like a health coach or a lifestyle coach, you want to sit there and really listen to what they're asking. And once they trust you, and they believe that you are that person to help them get there, it's a lot more easier for me to get them to listen to what I advise to. They'll follow through with it. They'll process it better. They won't fight me on it, which is great. And the end result is they reach their goal. And I love that that's something that is building the trust, because it is a really, this is a touchy subject. I mean, some people are open to it, and some people are not to talk about their health, their issues, and I'm sorry, but there is just a lot of shame around being obese or overweight or struggling with, we may look at somebody and think that they don't struggle internally. They're just like happy and you see them smiling. But at nighttime, there is a real doubting of ourselves, and we've failed so many times, then why would this work? And when we do have a personal trainer, I remember it is very vulnerable to put somebody in that space and having them help them paint a picture. That's one thing I love that when they paint a picture and saying, look, you can make it, you can do it. I know you can and we'll just do it one workout at a time, one day at a time. What are your specific challenges? And I like that you brought that up is that you personalize it to them and not just go, okay, this is just who you are and we're gonna lump you into big, because that's just objectifying people and that's, so we have too much of that in society anyway.   You want to be loved or cared for by people and I think the position that we're in and now I'm still mentoring trainers when I have my one-on-ones with them, I always express them, listen, this isn't about you, this is about them and really imperative that we take that time, the initial two training assessments that we do at the Holocaust, I set the stage, the precedents and my trainers follow through with it, they actually spend a good two hours with a client and they really get to know who they are before they even start talking about, this is the type of training we're gonna do. It's important, that time spent is important. Now, how do people find you, if they want to get more information about what you do or you're at the Honolulu? I'm at the Honolulu Club, I'm the fitness manager there, I'm also in charge of the education factor there as well. How do you do that? Do classes or workshops? Yeah, so when I do my certifications and it's a two-day weekend course, it doesn't make you a trainer but it does get you the opportunity to go to a facility and get mentored by experienced professionals. And I'm also, you can reach me there, you can reach me, I have an email that people can reach out to, it's be.bfitnumberfourhealth at gmail.com and if they have any questions, concerns or thoughts, I'm happy to help, yeah, for sure. And they'll always remember your last name, right? Yeah, you can't forget that. I mean, like I was telling you, I was famous in LA for that. I got all these celebrities, big time celebrities, look at my name, I go, what the heck is this? I know. It was awesome. I know, and you're probably gonna be like, I'll always remember you and your name and the struggle that I have with it because I really, again, this kind of goes back to what we just talked about is it is really important to me to have people's names right, right?  You're not just another person and whether it's a difficult name or not, it's important to take the time to get to say it correctly. So thank you so much for being on the show. Oh my God, it was a pleasure. Thank you for doing the work that you do and helping people because what you do is you help them feel better from the inside out, right? And that's really where massive change happens and educating them and empowering people. That's all about what it is. So thank you so much for being on the show. Oh my God, thank you, it was my pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Well, thanks you guys, we're out of time. So we'll have to wrap up. So my name is Becky Sampson and I am with It's About Time on the Think Tech Live Streaming Network series. We've been talking to Bianca Ekmec-Giolu about health, education, and empowerment. Thanks again for joining us today and thanks to our broadcast engineer, our floor manager, and to Jay Fidel, our executive producer who makes this show possible. And of course, I'll see you on Wednesdays for more of It's About Time on Think Tech, Hawaii. I'm Becky Sampson, mahalo everyone.


Five, wait what is the bird's name? Five, four, three, two, so I'm guessing a lot of you guys already know what's about to happen just from the title but we are doing the 100 layers challenge basically we're gonna be buying 102 liter bottles of coke and a thousand mentoses and we're gonna be putting all of that in our bathtub we're gonna pour the coke in there first and then we're adding the mentos and then we're gonna see what happens if you guys are excited to see the outcome of this video then be sure to get the video like let's try to get it to 50,000 likes no hundred thousand likes yeah so yeah let's get started all right Alan what do we have here just give me some chicken breasts okay that's not funny okay so we just got the target and we're gonna get a lot of coke and a lot of mentos and we're gonna do a little experiment in our bathtub okay so this was this was literally all the mentos that target had so now we're gonna get some coke a lot of it all right Alan okay so look I did some research an average bathtub can hold 302 liters which means we need 150 of these that's a lot we're spending a lot of money oh my gosh I didn't even spend like a few hundred dollars huh I thought we're filming one of those I bought every banana yeah yeah I feel we're filming one of those videos I bought every coke at target which we are doing we're buying every single coke this shopping cart actually broke shopping cart you don't even know how to pick someone up yeah that was bad so look oh yeah we cleared every single place there's no no more coke right not 168 $168 so probably not to borrow the shopping cart like stuff in the back of our car because there's no way I'm gonna like take all of this out put it in my car what if it doesn't fit yeah yeah I have to do it like this yeah apparently there's like I didn't know this was a real thing but like some shopping carts have it's more like if it like exit the store but then like a certain number of feet it locks like the wheels are locked brown it will not move how are we gonna fit this in our car now oh my gosh what are we gonna do guys we're in a bad situation now it's coming harder and harder is that pushing oh yeah I think we got it we got it we got it okay this will not fit in the car oh this is not going to fit in the car okay so we just got back from target and we left everything in the car because we're just too lazy to grab everything by ourselves so we're gonna try to get some of our friends to come over all right cool okay so right now we're calling one of our friends and making it seem like we want to hang out but in reality we just need them to carry in our coke hey what are you like are you busy you want to come over yeah yeah help to ask me be here you want to like yeah do you want to meet me by my car we'll be well I'll just see you like behind my trunk right by the trunk the trunk by coming over to hang out yeah okay so now we have all the coke and the Mentos in the restroom and all we have to do now is wrap all the Mentos and pour it all in here and then dump all the coke in the bathtub so like yeah say we just get started yeah why am I here again if we're not gonna hang out it's a cool way to sleep Mark we need you to like clean up yeah would you mind like cleaning up afterwards because it's gonna get my get messy so we need you to clean up okay so now all we have to do is just unwrap the rest of the Mentos it's more of that box so we can dump it in the bathtub all at once so yeah let's get started okay so one hour later we are finally down to our last pack which means we are about to get started all right let me just get in a bathtub you guys just pour all the coke in me so yeah let's get this started wow first bottle of coke here we go right oh it's cold yes it's cold put in a microwave or some microwave all of these real yeah dang why is it so cold I think we got too much coke I'm probably gonna throw the shirt away yeah Mark has to clean it up cuz he made the best I can feel it visit on my back it's like something's biting my back really yeah okay so we're about at the halfway point and we just wait what happens by the peak like we be able to tell cuz we're gonna turn like yellow I know about the poop it's like kind of camouflage yeah oh my gosh it feels like I'm being stung by bees right now okay so we just got them pouring 100 bottles of coke in the bathtub and we're about to pour 1000 Mentos in the bathroom as well let's see what happens I'm nervous get over with all right I'm counting down three no okay yeah fine I say start around with your hand to see if anything happens I like keep starting around so bad what was that the part that I'm just gonna go get a walk outside then call the janitor and he doesn't know what this is not like we can't fix it well obviously this thing guys plan guys but hopefully you guys enjoyed this and a good laugh out of it I want to try this at home because it's a really good way to ruin your bathroom I mean I don't know what we're gonna do now it's like this is gonna take days to clean and it's like 3 am right now anyways if you enjoyed the video be sure to give it a like remember and go for this video is 100,000 likes and yeah that being said we'll see you guys next time


Welcome in to a go Mustang sports minute Paul Taylor joined my men's ice hockey head coach Dominic Dawes As the Mustangs beat to Nazareth tonight 3-0 coach It was a team that beat you guys five to two in the first half you come back I thought it was a really solid full 60 minutes hockey for me guys I mean I that was probably our most complete full 60 minutes of of the year I thought we play you know right from the get go We wanted to make sure that we got on top of them started on time and and got going we did that You know I thought they battled back in the second which you'd which you'd expect But I thought we handled that pretty well, and I thought we stayed pretty disciplined for the most part So with with getting the first or second shorthanded goal of the year for you guys It kind of was that was the the one-two punch there with that fast start for you guys Yeah, I mean I obviously anytime you get a shorthanded goal that's it's gonna gonna help you out But no, I just thought it was it was good Panellies were like 3-1 so I think for the most part both teams are disciplined the refs let us play And I think that's the type of game we need especially down here down the stretch Riley gets a second shot out of the year was solid for you on the back end Yeah I mean he made a couple big saves when he when he had to and kind of I think that kind of helped that helped the momentum So no, I like I said I thought it was our best complete team effort of the year still one more to go on the weekend But temporarily at least you guys back in playoff hunt, but you were just talking to me before the interview there The mantra is yeah, it doesn't matter. I mean we left the rink last week You know kind of heartbroken at Manhattanville and we said turn the page on to on to tonight And I just told him the locker room for that. I mean it's on to tomorrow tonight doesn't matter Everything's been kind of going back and forth.  We'll talk to you post game Thank you Mustangs beat Nazar three nothing on Friday night They'll take on Utica tomorrow afternoon at 3 o'clock for coach Dawes. I'm ball Taylor for go Mustang sports calm


So exclaims the main character in the A.A. Abbot's 1884 novel, Flatland, when he's transported out of his two-dimensional world into a world with a third dimension and so must both intellectualize and make a leap of faith in order to visualize and come to terms with a new reality. A situation not dissimilar, I think, to what universities, libraries, publishers, faculty, researchers, and our students face as we continue to move from an analog into an increasingly digital world, and is on one level an existential crisis we've been facing. Who are we? What is this world? What are we doing? Our libraries and our profession itself is operating in a new reality in which social, political, economic, and intellectual and educational structures are redefined and reshaped by technology and globalization. Libraries must be multifaceted and nimble in this fluid environment in order to most effectively meet the needs of the diversity of our user groups as a transition to a global digital knowledge economy becomes ever more pervasive. Established methods of working and learning have been eroded and continue to erode opening up new and hitherto unimagined spaces and opportunities for research libraries to have meaningful impacts on our citizens' lives. Increasingly our parent institutions are looking to existing and potential new partnerships and collaborations within and outside of the higher education sector to meet institutional missions and mandates as they relate to creating positive change for people and the planet. The manifestation of long held values of excellence, ethical and intellectual integrity, freedom of inquiry and speech, and equity, diversity and inclusion are increasingly made explicit in furthering our institution's active engagement and integration with the myriad of communities we serve or should serve. We will be called, I think in our libraries, if we haven't already been to go beyond our walls, operate outside of local and traditional environments to fully align ourselves with the vision and mission of our institutions, the life cycle of teaching, research and learning that drives the academy and the expectations of our citizens and funding bodies. So my argument this afternoon will be simply that we need to reflect more deeply on our collaborations, to seek out community in the broadest sense of the term, to work increasingly and intentionally across sectors, to open ourselves and our business practices to the advantages of meaningful and sustained partnerships and to realize that in so doing, we will be reaffirming the core values upon which our profession is based. How do we define community and a role within it? The image you see here is a visualization of sustainable community based on the work of Fritschof Capra, the Austrian born American physicist and systems theorist whose work I think has implications for how we might think of collaboration. Evolution, Capra writes, is no longer seen as a competitive struggle for existence, but rather a cooperative dance in which creativity and the constant emergence of novelty are the driving forces. So too, organizations need not be viewed as atomized, siloed and tightly managed machines. More they need to be viewed as vibrant living organisms interacting with within emergent and self-regulating and self-organizing ecosystems. The nimbleness and openness Capra challenges us to consider is, of course, not necessarily easy as it's imbued with ambiguity and paradox, the need to relinquish and share control to explore more radical forms of partnership. And so doing this will strengthen our organization's collective ability to operate in a global and digital environment, an environment that compels us to collaborate and compels our libraries to reposition themselves lest we ossify and become irrelevant to our users. So what do we do? Well, whoop, I've got, well, what do we do? There we go. We relax. This one's for you Caroline, whatever you are. We relax. We stay calm. We reflect on our values. This incidentally is my daughter who made me pay $5 for a single use. So it's a little bit concerning, but yeah. Libraries are institutions that tell us about ourselves. They tell us what we know, what we do not know, what we value, what we need. We contribute to the individual's knowledge, enjoyment and inspiration, cultural values, lifelong learning, economic prosperity and social equality. And we're so good at this. Indeed, at its best, our profession in the words of the mid-20th century American writer and university librarian at UCLA, Lawrence Clark Powell, ours is an artful craft and a crafty art, to be practiced with a trinity of talents, hands, head and heart. What better skill set is there to bring to the art of cross-sectoral collaboration? Librarians should be the world's experts in this regard. Indeed, I firmly believe that contrary to some ill-informed media narratives, and even if some of us in our profession have yet to realize it, our libraries and librarianship and particularly I think research libraries have entered a new golden age, in which as physical and virtual spaces, as organizations that can model partnership and collaboration, as individuals who have the skills and tools to navigate the digital paradigm shifts and who will be called upon as key partners with researchers, we'll have never more profound and fundamental impact on the social, intellectual and economic well-being of citizens and the vibrancy of our educational institutions and our communities. So that's all precursor to what I really came here to talk about, namely how we're beginning to frame our thinking about cross-sectoral collaboration in Canada. And I hope you'll see both in the national and provincial frameworks, as well as a couple of local examples, if you'll indulge me, how this helps to articulate the value of research libraries within the research mission of our institutions, as well as the civic and community engagement missions of our universities. And so I'm going to spend, I think, my remaining time outlining the emerging national discussion that began just around a year and a half ago with the Ottawa Declaration, as well as drawing attention to some interesting developments then in my region of British Columbia and provide a few examples of local initiatives that might inspire you to reflect broadly on the advantages of collaboration. And then if I have time, perhaps leave you with a challenge to bring forward into your own professional context. In December 2016, the Library and Archives Canada organized a two-day summit to explore the social and economic value of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums, the so-called GLAMs, to share research and to discuss ideas for further collaboration, future collaboration, innovation and partnership. There are about 300 attendees who hail from a wide variety of backgrounds, including a member of parliament, deputy ministers, CEOs, presidents, executive directors, librarians, curators, archivists, artists, writers, economists, actors, and many others. The impetus was that GLAM organizations were felt not to be significantly involved in the national conversation on the future of the culture in the digital age. The goal was to recognize our collective responsibility across sectors to make certain that the powers that be and the general public themselves understood the important critical role that GLAMs continue to play in society. Consider, for instance, that one of the most misunderstood roles of GLAM institutions is the demonstrable link between our activities and economic prosperity. The British Library estimates that for every pound of public funding it receives annually, £4.90 is generated for the UK economy. And that five-to-one ratio is similar in Canada, according to recent studies, both at the Toronto Public Library and the Ottawa Public Library. So through the discussions, presenters emphasize how collaboration can generate a multitude of serendipitous opportunities. It became quickly apparent that to foster innovation and to meet the demands of users, memory institutions can no longer go it alone. Partnership and collaboration between GLAMs as well as nontraditional partners are key and in a world that is constantly evolving, it was emphasized that GLAMs, like all public-facing institutions, should not wait for perfect circumstances. Rather, they should seize opportunities when they present themselves before change is forced upon them. The mood was best summarized by my colleague, Maureen Salah, who's the CEO of the Greater Victoria Public Library, who noted at the summit that the objective, and I quote, was not to do more with less, it's to do more with more, more partnerships, more collaborations. And from this, Guy Bertium, the librarian and archivist of Canada, proposed what has now been dubbed the Ottawa Declaration, which has provided the framework for ongoing cross-sectoral thinking and discussion. It calls for members of GLAM communities to commit to find new ways of working together to increase the visibility and impact of memory institutions in order to, I quote again, continually adapt and reinvent our institutions and promote the full value of libraries, archives, and museums to Canadians. So just over six weeks ago, a follow-up summit was held in Toronto, like the first summit with the support of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, and in collaboration with the Canadian Museums Association. And building on last year's summit, the discussion drew on four themes and a related set of questions. First, communities. How can collaborative relationships among GLAMs benefit local communities, as well as provide greater opportunities for building links and fostering community identity? Secondly, Indigenous Peoples, which is a particular discussion going on in Canada, which we'll come back to. How can GLAMs work more closely with Indigenous Peoples to renew relationships that are based on mutual understanding and respect? The private sector. How can GLAMs work with the private sector to encourage greater innovation? And, of course, government priorities. How can GLAMs advance their interests via various levels of government? The need for a supporting narrative that demonstrates the relevance and value, and the breadth of the social and economic benefits of GLAMs to these four communities emerged as a core learning from the summit. Throughout the course of this year, it's anticipated that Library and Archives Canada will continue to take a leadership role in helping to facilitate and to broaden ongoing discussions at the national level to keep focus on the importance of cross-sectoral collaboration and ideally act as a catalyst to action. Already a third summit is being planned by the Ottawa Declaration Working Group, which has also undertaken a comparative environmental scan of cultural policies of Canada, Italy, Spain, France, and the UK as a need to and to provide data for national cultural policy development in Canada. Concurrent to the developments at the national level, a year ago in March, just almost exactly a year ago, the British Columbia Museums Association, the BC Library Association, and the Archives Association of BC signed a memorandum of understanding that explicates a set of shared values and strategies to work together. Here on the slide you see representatives from the associations at the time, the Minister of Community Sport and Cultural Development in the province. This new partnership is a first among Canadian provinces and formalizes cooperation amongst the province's GLAM sector with an overarching objective to encourage member participation and activities that will enhance learning opportunities and knowledge transfer amongst professionals and institutions. This includes sharing professional expertise and knowledge to strengthen the capacity of all parties to advance their respective missions, exploring collaborative research projects, exploring public outreach opportunities to spark community engagement with knowledge and ideas, identifying joint funding ventures for projects of mutual interest and benefit in the areas of knowledge curation and public education, identifying opportunities for new membership categories within the associations to welcome allied professionals, which is an interesting development, providing member rates at the various conferences amongst the associations, and considering new awards to acknowledge and recognize and celebrate exceptional work in collaboration. Currently the MOU partners are working on what they're calling a toolkit, which is meant to be a practical assembly of models and processes and tools such as asset mapping, grant writing templates, press release templates to assist particularly small or very small GLAMs and community organizations to be able to strengthen the process of engagement and their ability to partner across sectors and with larger organizations including our research libraries. Like the Ottawa Declaration of Working Group, the MOU partners are also looking to map current cross-sexual research partnership activities and visualize those. And such mapping I think will be interesting and can reveal really a startling amount of activity and simply as a relational example, here you see a recent mapping by my university of its community engagement projects and we are quite surprised to find that we were distributed so far around the world. Sorry to those in Australia, cut off there. We are doing something there, I'm sure. I don't know, I'll have to look later. So this is all well and good, but what does cross-sectoral collaboration mean at the local level for a research library? We all, I'm sure, can think of examples. The first point I want to make, besides showing beautiful Victoria, the first point I want to make is that geography matters. Geography matters within our workplaces whose office is next to whose. For instance, in geography influences the shape of local collaboration as well, such as the knowledge quarter here in London or the Bloor Street Cultural Corridor in Toronto. Geography matters if you're situated on an island, which I hardly need to say in this room. But here I refer to Victoria, particularly on Vancouver Island, which is separated from the cultural gravitational forces of both Vancouver and Seattle, both short distances away via the waters of the Juan de Fuca Strait and hence the city, which is also the seat of provincial government, is blessed with an abundance of cultural institutions of significance, including the Royal BC Museum, the Provincial Archives, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the very highly regarded Pacific Opera Victoria, the Victoria Symphony, the University Art Collections, numerous well-established smaller museums, theatre groups and historic sites of significance to Canada's cultural heritage, as well as active and vibrant First Nations communities and not to mention, of course, the University of Victoria as well. So no, I'm afraid, no earth-shattering revelations here except to encourage you to think about your own geographies and look for the easy low-hanging fruit of cross-sectoral collaboration if you want to set yourself along this path. In the University of Victoria Libraries case, establishing a solid relationship with the local public library has been a key catalyst for both of our organizations and the development of innumerable partnerships, such as just thinking about low-hanging fruits, co-sponsored events like the one you see here on the right, which feature David Mao. Some of you may know that it was acting Librarian of Congress being interviewed by our chancellor at the University of Victoria and who's a national media personality, Sheila Rogers, on the stage of a local repertory theatre called the Belfry. So such a partnership is a simple way to access new event venues and extend the potential audiences for really all three of the organizations in this case. Digitization projects, of course, are also right for easy and creative partnerships. What you see on the left there is my colleague from Special Collections returning one of a number of 19th century police charge books and mugshot books that we digitize as part of a collaborative project between the Victoria Genealogical Society and the Victoria Police Historical Society, who knew that existed. And the library. At the completion of the project there, we gave copies of the images back to the Genealogical Society, which is crowdsourcing, indexing by their members and charge books were returned on via that historical police vehicle, which garnered a fair degree of interest and positive press coverage. And I'll just, as an aside, say that increasingly over the past six years, we in the libraries have viewed, begun to view these partnerships as key components integrated into our development and fundraising efforts, which have resulted, I believe, as a direct result of some of our collaborations and a more than doubling of both in-kind and monetary gifts to the library compared to the previous six-year period. So deeper collaboration. In 2013, UVic Libraries partnered with over a dozen community organizations to create what we call Shakespeare On-Stage, Off-Stage, a critical event that continues to have reverberations across Victoria, as it laid deeper foundations for arts and cultural collaborations in the region. The initial idea was to bring the only copy of the first and third folios in Canada, both of which are held at the University of Toronto, to Victoria to be displayed alongside the second and fourth folios, in an exhibit leading up to the Pacific Opera's hundredth performance, which was Verdi's fall staff. The initial collaboration between us and our art collections, which hosted the exhibition downtown in our city centre gallery, and the opera was built upon the libraries already established, strong relationship with the opera company, formed a couple of years before by one of those low-hanging fruit opportunities to partner around a separate event. It was also the first time, I think, in BC and possibly in Canada, at the four folios had ever been displayed together, had to convince people that anyone would come. To date, it's the highest attended exhibition that the art galleries have ever put on. The libraries then sought out additional collaborators and the event quickly caught the imagination of many, including the city council and the mayor, who were quick to join us and proclaim six weeks of Shakespeare days, leading up to the opera production. Eventually, we ended up with a multitude of partners, including local theatre groups, the Royal BC Museum, the provincial archives, the provincial legislative library, internet Shakespeare editions, which is a major digital humanities project based at UVic, local public schools where we work with teachers to create lesson plans, the craft brewery that brewed a false staff ale, faculty of course, and humanities and fine arts, the public library, and many others. These partners brought in the rate of events and learning opportunities, which really we in the libraries could never have even conceived of, and enriched programming, and what it really did was to build very strong personal relationships across a diversity of organizations that do not naturally work together. The experience helped establish a robust culture, I would say, of GLAM collaboration, one in which we now think of collaboration from the start and reach out to our colleagues across the region and across sectors continuously. It's difficult, of course, to sustain such connections over time, and so we have sought other ways to inculcate a local collaborative culture. The Vancouver Island Library Staff Conference is a key annual event that helps to foster trust and conversations across our organizations that lead to and make it easier to collaborate around projects and make partnerships. It's a one-day event initiated by UVic libraries to bring together the island's academic, public, and special libraries, and as of next year, is being extended to all of our GLAM partners across all sectors on the island. In part, that's possible because of the unexpected support, and on the right you can't see the names, but the financial support we suddenly started receiving from unions, local publishers, and bookstores, the Ministry of Education just started to flow. So it costs us very little and is only moderate effort, and it has, I think, great benefit to us. And it's based on the TRI Plus Conference, which I founded in Toronto now 13 or 14 years ago, which brings together the three major research libraries from the major institutions in Toronto for collaboration too, so worth considering. So I have the privilege to live and work on the traditional territories of the Laquungen-speaking peoples, specifically the Songhees, Esquimalt and Wasanic peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue very actively to this day. And Canada in recent years has begun to grapple more seriously with the legacy of its oftentimes devastating colonialist past through a process of what is termed truth and reconciliation with our Indigenous communities. And the Indigenous perspectives in which the concept of time is non-linear, in which the land itself is a living library, and in which knowledge is based on an oral tradition that requires attentiveness to Indigenous language revitalization are, as you can imagine, a challenge to incorporate into established research library processes and structures. Engagement requires sensitive and respectful relationship building with numerous individual communities. I think back to Kappa's conception of the complexity of community interaction and its impact on organizations. We're still early in this journey with our Indigenous brothers and sisters, but it's a process that I think we believe across research libraries in Canada, I think it's fair to say, process that will enrich the way we think about metadata, preservation, access, research data and partnership in the library and our spaces too, just to pick up on a point that was made earlier in the afternoon. It certainly led me to reflect personally more deeply over the past six years and what our partners give to us as much as what we give to our partners. At the risk of stating the obvious, our research libraries have a past, they have a present and we have a future, though I would say the three are patently not the same things. We have moved from being primarily repositories of the products of research to institutions that have a role throughout the entire research process, from creation to data management to access to preservation. Our future, I think in part, I believe will be an era of collaborative engagement in which we'll work increasingly in partnership across sectors, I think research data management for instance, to extend new and effective ways of developing, disseminating, applying and preserving knowledge for research and the public good. In being attentive to the connections between our research libraries and GLAM institutions and actively seeking opportunities for partnerships such, we open ourselves to a broad range of possibilities that leverage our strengths as well as embed us ever more firmly as institutions that play a critical, foundational and valuable role in scholarship, civic engagement and ultimately the democratic health of our countries. The architect of this wonderful library in which we gather, once commented that I quote, libraries are made of the stuff of myth. And so to every scholar, the library is a personal realm of secret topography. There are a few, if any, other institutions in our world that have such an intimate relationship with their communities and the sustained level of trust and respect of those communities as do our libraries, as our libraries have. We are unique as trusted sources of information and trusted connectors in our communities. And as such research libraries can and should be a guiding force that brings together partnerships to do more with more. In the passage from Abbott's Flatland, the response to the statement either this is madness or it is hell, is it is neither, it is knowledge. Just as in Flatland, the move from two to three dimensions brings new perspectives and an opportunity to reassess and expands one perception of reality. So too does the evolution from analog to digital. The evolution from repository to valued cross-sectoral partner provide the same opportunity for us. The passage from Flatland concludes, open your eyes once again and try to look steadily. I looked and behold, a new world. Thank you.