Good evening, everybody. How's everybody doing? For those of you who haven't yet met me, I'm Michael Barr. I'm the Joan and Sanford Wildein of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. It's a real pleasure to see you all here, alumni, students, new friends of the school, old friends of the school. I really look forward to this event every year. It's a great chance for our alums in DC and our students to get together. And I know that the main event for most of you is going to happen at 7 when we have a reception and a little wine and a lot of good company and a chance to network. But between now and then, I'm going to say a little bit about how the Ford School is doing. I'm going to introduce our wonderful speaker, who I will in just a moment. I'm a little befuddled about this week. I've been in North Carolina and Florida. I was on the road from Sunday until now. So did something happen this week? Is there anything in the news? It's been a busy week at all. So I'm glad you're all here. Let me just say with thanks to many of the alumni who are in the room tonight and to others who've participated in this trip. You've done a great job helping us put together a wonderful event. And of course, under the leadership of Jennifer Nyggemeyer and Peter Vashier, Casey Sullins, Claire Davidson, you've put together a couple jam-packed days of career exploration and networking for about 60 of our Ford School Master's students on this annual trip, which I think, is that a record? It's certainly very high. OK, I'm getting the nod. It is, in fact, a record. So thank you, Jennifer, and your team, and all of our alums, for all your hard work. Before I introduce John, and he talks seriously about substantive topics, I'm going to just give you a few updates on what has been going on at the Ford School. Those of you who are here in time saw a wonderful slideshow of some of the great events that have been happening at the Ford School. Many of those have been associated with John Cicciari's work at the new Weiser Diplomacy Center, established last year with a $10 million gift from Ambassador and U of M Regent Ron Weiser and his wife Eileen Weiser. And we formally launched the Center in the fall. And it's been, I think, modestly a big hit. You can ask the students later. And really thanks to John and Susanna Weisley and the other folks working in the Weiser Diplomacy Center, we hosted an incredible series of visits this fall. We had Hillary Clinton, we had Condi Rice, Samantha Power, Steve Hadley, Steve Began, and many more. Susan Rice just came last month. We have, in the following month, Dennis McDonough. And the month after that, former Secretary of State and Treasury Jim Baker will be coming to campus. So it's just a crazy, extraordinary lineup of public talks. But even more importantly, each of these speakers has been incredibly generous with their time and spent time behind the scenes with our faculty and, more importantly, with our students talking to them about their careers and their advice. The Weiser Diplomacy Center is really, in many ways, just getting started. John and our colleagues are recruiting for professors of practice in international diplomacy. They're hosting policy simulations. And again, I think more importantly, establishing generous new fellowships and internships opportunities for our students, as well as the chance for our students to develop their own ideas for what they want to do in the world and get funding from the Weiser Diplomacy Center to go out and do them. From doing human rights work in Guatemala to analyzing how to reduce civilian casualties in Afghanistan, really all over the world and all different kinds of projects. And we're able to do that because of the Weiser Diplomacy Center. And I think it's something I'm very proud of. And I hope that all of you, alumni and friends of the school, are very proud of. In other exciting news, we had our first cohort of our new Masters of Public Affairs students arrive on campus. These are advanced students further along in their career, some of them in the room today joining for this great trip. And I encourage all of our alumni to connect with them, as well as with our MPPs, during the reception. They're really an accomplished and inspiring group. And we're really excited to see what they're going to be doing at the Ford School and beyond. One faculty highlight from this last year came in the form of Sue Dynarski, being named one of nine of the inaugural university professors for recognize for their distinguished careers and contributions to diversity and social transformation. So Sue is one of the nine first professors at the University of Michigan, recognized for her work. And as many of you know, Sue is best known for her work, reducing inequality and inequity in higher education. And I think this recognition is going to really allow her to continue that work. We've also had other donors re-engage with the Ford School to a great positive effect. Sandy and Joan Weil, who are very important in founding Weil Hall and in naming the deanship of the Ford School have re-engaged with Ford. And recently, this fall, gave us a $5 million gift. Half of that gift is going to deepen our relationship at the Ford School with working with high school students in Detroit and in surrounding communities, helping them with career readiness and advancement and career and technical education as well as college preparation. And then half the gift is going to support the Ford School's contribution to the Rackham Merit Awards. This is one of our premier scholarships that helps us support our Ford School graduate students. And I'm really grateful for them for that. We had a lot of fun at our alumni reunion. How many of you were able to make it to the alumni reunion? All right, we had a handful of people. I think they had fun. They're nodding their heads. They had fun. I had fun at the reunion. We had a couple hundred alumni come back to Ann Arbor for the celebration, which marked three separate anniversaries, 10 years since our first BA students graduated, 20 years since we were named for President Ford, and 50 years since our very first Master of Public Policy students entered the then Institute of Public Policy Studies. Let me also say this year, we're putting a lot of effort into a new leadership initiative at the Ford School that I'm really excited about. Jennifer Nigramire and Associate Dean Paula Lance are taking the lead together in shaping this initiative at the Ford School. We're building the capacity to equip our graduates with the skills they need, obviously not only analytical skills, but also communication and leadership skills needed to be the best in their careers, to lead institutions and communities, their teams all across the country. When Hillary Clinton came to visit in the fall, she spent an hour in a closed door group with our Ford School students, a packed discussion at the Annenberg Auditorium, a conversation in which she was really focused on leadership being interviewed by Associate Dean Paula Lance, and she really shared a lifetime of leadership lessons. I will not repeat verbatim what Sue Dynarski's daughter asked her, but those of you who wanna go back and ask what she said was really quite fun. Not words I can say. Speaking of leaders, the Ford School remains a destination for some of our country's great policy makers through our Towsley Foundation and a public policy program. Javid Ali, who I think will be here later tonight, former NSC and FBI staffers, been teaching counterterrorism and cybersecurity policy for us and will return next year to do the same. One of those is a joint class with the College of Engineering, which has been a really great fun experience for us, taught up on North Campus, a joint College of Engineering and Ford School students and a joint teaching between Javid and a College of Engineering professor. We have other Towsley policy makers and residents coming. We're here, financial tech expert, Adrienne Harris, Phyllis Meadows, who's a senior fellow at the Kresge Foundation and the healthcare field. Sandy Levin, former Congressman Levin, has joined our faculty as a professor of practice and a Towsley policymaker and residence and has been mentoring and teaching in our school. Broderick Johnson, President Obama's cabinet secretary is coming to teach a course on mass incarceration in the fall that I'm very excited about. And Ken Lieberthal, some of you may know, you're alumni in the crowd is a former Michigan faculty member and a member of the National Security Council be coming back in the fall to teach a course on US-Chinese relations, a reasonably important topic in today's environment. Other news from Ann Arbor, we're launching a new minor in public policy. How about that? So we have 10 years, we've had the BA major and we've decided to add a minor in public policy, getting a broader range of, here's Javed walking in the back now. Javed, you've been recently acknowledged. Thank you for being here. BA minor will let us reach more students, more undergraduate students on campus and I'm really excited about that. We've got a new exciting time planned for this fall hosting the presidential debates. So the University of Michigan was chosen by the Commission on Presidential Debates to be the second of three presidential debates being held this year, October 15th, 2020. The Ford School has been taking a lead on organizing this debate campus-wide. John Chichari and the Wiser Diplomacy Center are gonna be taking a lead on an aspect of that involving a collaboration with the Commission on Presidential Debates and the National Democratic Institute, bringing 80 leaders from around the world who are election experts, democracy experts, debate experts, to share their own ideas with each other and with us, with our community for the whole week of the debate. There are gonna be 3,000 or so reporters on campus for about a week, opportunities for thousands of student volunteers to get engaged in the process and we're doing a whole theme semester of programming on democracy and debate. Again, not just at the Ford School, but university-wide. So I think it'll be a great learning opportunity for everybody and we just decided last week the Dean of LSNA and the Dean of School of Information and I, that we're gonna do a joint class across the three schools called Discerning Truth, which is a topic that I think is in heavy demand right now. So let me just close my welcome remarks with a message in particular to our alumni. We're grateful for all the ways that you engage in the school. You help us recruit students, dozens of you made calls to admitted students last spring, making a personal connection and encouraging them to choose the Ford School and it really helps. It really makes a difference to attracting the best and the brightest students to come to the University of Michigan. You also hire our students. Jennifer always admonishes me not to say that she places students anywhere, she doesn't, but all of you alumni hire our students into wonderful jobs and I'm deeply grateful for you taking the time and attention to talk with our students to give them advice and to hire them. Many of you have served or do serve on our alumni board and you share your advice and connections when you come back to Ann Arbor. If you are not doing any of those things yet, go see Jennifer after this during the reception and sign yourself up because we really need you and it's a great service to the school. If you have other ways that you want to engage that I haven't listed, please feel free to reach out to Jennifer or to Elizabeth or to the team. Let me focus on one particular way that I'd like to ask you to help and that's through financial contributions. Now I know not everybody is in the same place being able to contribute financially to the school and I don't have any expectation that all of our alumni will give in anything like equal amounts. But I would really appreciate it if every alumni and all of you in the room who are alums and those of you who are students can get started now. Any amount, any amount is appreciated. If you want to make a $5 contribution as a student to get in the habit of contributing back to the Ford School, we deeply appreciate it. And right now we're midway through a major effort to build our alumni giving a network and we have a generous match on the table from some of our alumni. So our goal is to reach 500 alumni donors, again making gifts of any size. And once we hit that 500 mark, we'll unlock $50,000 in additional contributions to the school. And right now we're a little bit past halfway. So more than 250 alums have contributed. We've unlocked the first $25,000 in additional matching funds. And I would love it if we could hit that second target both because it provides more resources to the school and because it's an indication of the connection that you have to our community.  Just have a seat, feel comfortable. And so it would mean a lot to me if we could even try and get closer to that number tonight. If you want to make a contribution tonight, you can find Elizabeth or really any other staffer and they'll tell you how. There are multiple ways you can give right now. We have a laptop set up if you wanna do it online right now. We have paper forms. You could make your gift from your seat on your phone while I'm talking, not during John's talk, but during my talk you can give right now. And remember this gift is about participation. It's not about the amount. So alumni gifts of any amount would really be very much appreciated. So now to the main event. So tonight we're really fortunate to be joined by Professor John Cicciari, one of the Ford School's I think very best teachers, scholars and leaders. He's an associate professor of public policy. He's the faculty director of the International Policy Center and the Wiser Diplomacy Center. He teaches courses on politics, political institutions, post-conflict law and transition. John has an undergraduate and a law degree from Harvard, a master's degree and PhD in international relations from the University of Oxford. As I mentioned in connection with the presidential debate this fall, John and the Ford School team will be hosting an NDI symposium on democracy around the world. I think John is really one of the real leaders at the Ford School, always bringing that extra ounce of effort to the table to help not only in his own work, but community-wide to make the Ford School a stronger, better, more vibrant and exciting place. And those of you who are students and alumni who have worked with John know that he is always there for his students. And so I'm deeply grateful to John and please join me in welcoming him to the podium. Thank you sir. Thank you. It's wonderful to see so many of you whom I haven't seen for years and everything Michael said about how much we appreciate the alumni contributions to this school I'd like to echo. I'm gonna talk about a path forward in Afghanistan, there we go. It's not the most upbeat topic I could have chosen for your reunion address, but it's very important and that's the reason why as part of our development of programming around the Wiser Diplomacy Center, Java and I worked with Phil Potter, a former Ford School professor now at UVA and Captain Ryan Van Wee, who's an excellent Ford School MPP candidate now to put together a forum on defense and diplomacy in Afghanistan a few months ago here in Washington. And a lot of the thoughts that I'm gonna share a draw from that and from a few pieces that Java and I published with Phil and Ryan after the forum. There's a mood right now of frustration, distrust, exhaustion with Afghanistan, many Americans and many of its political leaders wanna pull the plug on what's been a long and difficult operation. And we started with a little turn toward history and we've seen this pattern before. We saw it in the mid-1970s, the iconic shot of the last helicopter flying away from Saigon and the quick collapse of the US-backed governments in Vietnam and Cambodia when the USC support for those administrations in 1975. Now the fear that we have about what's happening surrounding Afghanistan now is that developments in that country could look a lot like what happened next door to Vietnam in Cambodia when in April 17th of 1975 Khmer Rouge revolutionary streamed into the capital city and exacted a very harrowing retribution on their Civil War adversaries. And so the subject of my talk is going to be not so much the question of whether the United States should be in the mode of trying to phase out of Afghanistan or not, but how that transition can be conducted responsibly to minimize the risk of this type of conflagration. So I'll say a few brief things about how we got there for those of you who aren't as familiar with the history of Afghanistan. A few comments on the dangers of what Javed and I have referred to as a precipitous withdrawal, meaning a very quick cessation of military and economic support and then a few possible paths forward. Most of you who aren't familiar with the region may not know that Afghanistan was actually an oasis of peace, a place where people traveled for exotic tourism in the 60s and 70s where traditional values coexisted on the streets of Kabul with Western forms of modernity. And you may also know that in the 1970s a communist regime took over in that country and when it began to waver, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to prop it up. The presence of atheistic communist troops in a country that is predominantly comprised of developed Muslims elicited a mix of reactions, some of which were violent resistance, most notably in the form of the Mujahideen who organized around the mountainous areas on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and waged a decade long resistance to the Soviets. In a lot of ways, this was the sort of the cradle for the modern terror movements that we see disseminating around the world and also a cradle for some of the groups that later would become the Taliban. The US government, the Saudis, the Pakistanis and others supported the Mujahideen to bleed the Soviets in the 1980s as part of the Second Cold War. But at the end of that war, when the Soviet tanks turned around and left in defeat, the United States and its partners dumped Afghanistan unceremoniously and it left a vacuum that several different warring factions, including what later became known as parties to the Northern Alliance as well as radical jihadist groups associated with what would later be the Taliban, fought to fill that vacuum. This is Kabul in the mid 1990s and it was in that context in the Civil War that the Taliban rose under the shadowy leadership of Mullah Omar. Omar and his colleagues presented the Taliban as a way to restore order and reassert traditional values in a country that had been utterly torn apart. You all know what happened when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. There were tremendous human rights abuses, suppression of women's liberties in particular and also a hosting of al-Qaeda and subsequently a refusal to assist the United States in locating or capturing Osama bin Laden after 9-11. And so the U.S. launched Operation Enduring Freedom in the fall of 2001. In the background of this photo, you see the plumes from the bombs falling from US B-52s. This is the Battle of Toribora in December of 2001, an iconic photo of the battle in which Osama bin Laden reportedly slipped through the grasp of the coalition forces across the border into Pakistan where he would remain for years thereafter. The geography of the conflict helps us understand why it's been so difficult for the US and coalition partners to be effective on the battlefield but also why it's so challenging politically. The green area is the area occupied primarily by ethnic Pashtuns. That's the ethnic community from which the Taliban grew. And other shades, red for Hazara, yellow for Uzbek, brown for Tajik, represent the other major ethnic factions in Afghanistan, ethnic groups in Afghanistan. Notice that that red line dividing Afghanistan-Pakistan, the so-called Durand Line, negotiated in 1892 between the emir of Afghanistan and a diplomat from British India, cuts right through the heartland of the Pashtun community. And therefore, the Pashtun, the Taliban warriors have been able to use areas in Pakistan throughout the conflict as a way to shield themselves from allied forces. But you also notice how many other countries in Central Asia, the Middle East, and even South Asia are sort of implicated in this by their proximity to Afghanistan and by the fact that they have co-ethnics living on either side of the border. We'll come back to that. In the early phases of the conflict, there was a sense that, although the U.S. entered Afghanistan saying it wasn't going to engage in expansive nation-building, it quickly came to the view that that was a necessity, that if the coalition was gonna be successful in its goals, that it would have to engage in strengthening institutions, setting up democratic structures, rebuilding the economy, promoting human and women's rights and other rights. And this was sort of emblematic of the high point in that effort. Karzai dropping his envelope into the ballot box in 2004 when he was elected president. I worked down the street at the Treasury Department at that time and covered Afghanistan. And there was a sense at that period that things were headed in a largely positive direction. The government was controlling more territory. The Taliban seemed to be fading at least to some extent as a military and political force inside of Afghanistan. But as you all know, the slog got harder over the years. A drumbeat of suicide bombings like this and other attacks led to increased number of casualties. And to date, there have been more than 2,400 U.S. service personnel killed in the 18-year war, more than 1,000 coalition partners. About 160,000 Afghans, including 43,000 civilians, have died during this grueling 18-year conflict. And it's taken its toll. There have also, of course, been mounting costs. By most reasonable estimates, the U.S. has spent over a trillion dollars on the conflict in Afghanistan. And the number grows further if we think about the long-term costs of things like veterans care that will follow. About 10 years ago, the Congress set up a special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction, John Sopko, who's pictured here, to report on the use of U.S. reconstruction assistance because of mounting concerns of corruption, mismanagement, and misuse. And as you know, if you've been following the news and the recent release by the Washington Post of the so-called Afghanistan Papers, there's plenty of evidence that significant shares of those trillion dollars have in fact been either poorly used or the outcomes of projects have been reported back as being more positive than they were in fact. And it has contributed to the sense that many Americans are simply ready to pull the plug. The president has said, more or less, that that is what he wishes to do. Here he is in Thanksgiving, visiting American troops in Kabul. You see President Ghani to his right from where you're sitting. And the president has said when he was campaigning, has said repeatedly through his administration he has got a goal of bringing the troops home. He repeated that in the State of the Union a few days ago, as you heard. And if you've been listening to what the Democrats are saying in foreign policy portions of the debates on the campaign trail, there's a fair amount of support for the same course of action within the Democratic Party. There's also support for it within the general public where more than half of Americans now oppose a prolonged continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan. So all of the winds are pushing in that direction. But it's very dangerous for the United States to withdraw quickly. When Javed Nye and others talked about this at the forum, we identified at least three core interests that the United States and Afghanistan. One is macro stability within the country and in the surrounding region. Remember that there are a lot of powder keg surrounding Afghanistan, whether it's in Iran, India, Pakistan, Western China, Central Asia. So one of the goals is stability. And although the U.S. effort in Afghanistan has certainly not been fully successful in stabilizing Afghanistan, one can make a reasonable case that it's avoided some of the worst possible deterioration of security in the country. Number two is to deny terrorists a safe haven. Afghanistan has become a very difficult place for ISIS, al-Qaeda, and their affiliates to do business. If the U.S. pulls out quickly, that will change. Doesn't necessarily mean that terror groups will successfully reassert themselves, but it certainly is a high possibility. And thirdly, rights. There are a lot of brave Americans who have sacrificed parts of their lives or their lives to promote democracy and rights and development in Afghanistan with all the problems that that's encountered. It's important to remember that there are also many, many Afghans who have stood shoulder to shoulder with them in defense of things like women's rights and democracy and free speech. Those communities are in grave danger if the United States withdraws quickly from Afghanistan. Several months ago, the U.S. government stopped reporting on areas of the country that were under Taliban control or government control, and there are some legitimate reasons for that. It's very difficult to calculate exactly what counts. Is it who controls it by day or night? Is it who controls the town or the surrounding countryside? But by most reasonable estimates by military analysts, the government only controls a fraction of the districts and towns in the country, in white. In red, you see the Taliban controlling many others and in gray, there are an awful lot that are contested. There's a real possibility that this could go swiftly in a negative direction if the U.S. were not there to support Afghan forces. So what are some paths forward? Here's Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-American diplomat who's leading the negotiations in Doha, and he's trying to negotiate a deal with the Taliban. And coming back to another thing that Javed and I have discussed, the deal needs to have a number of features for it to be workable from a U.S. and Afghan government perspective. It needs to have a durable ceasefire in place. It needs to involve some kind of political power sharing. It probably will necessitate some form of constitutional reform to reflect the demands of the Taliban for changes to what is a highly progressive constitution in some respects. It will certainly require renunciation of terror links by the Taliban, and it will require a really difficult process of security sector reform, trying to create an integrated national security force out of erstwhile adversaries. All of this is a really, really tall order. And they all depend on the Afghan government, which right now is deadlocked in an electoral dispute between the incumbent President Ghani and his frenemy, Abdullah Abdullah, who has alternately cooperated with and contested with him for political power for many years. It's difficult to know exactly who in going forward is going to be speaking for the Afghan government, but it's vital that they have a voice because as you heard me going through what a peace deal would need to include, most of that is not a matter of Americans in the Taliban. It's a settlement between the Afghan parties. Of course, a deal also depends on the Taliban being willing to engage in some kind of pluralistic political process. Here's the Taliban leader, Mullah Baradar, and there's really no indication that I've seen, no reason to believe that the Taliban are in fact committed to sharing power to engaging in a democratic process. One indication of that is the Taliban's insistence that the United States complete its troop withdrawal before they commence talks with the Afghan government. For all these reasons, there's probably not going to be a good deal on the table soon. And in that sense, the fact that we're entering a campaign season in the US, a period when it's harder to make compromises on things like this might be a blessing in disguise. It might actually provide a sort of a forced elongation of the process, which as I'll explain, I think is necessary for this transition to occur responsibly. It's a real problem that the US government has signaled repeatedly to the Taliban that it intends to withdraw forces with or without a deal. The US government has said that in different forums in the recent past. Imagine the kind of implications that has for bargaining leverage. Since in fact that's the main lever that the US has as its disposal. So what needs to happen during this process of negotiations which inevitably are going to be very difficult. One is to come up with a manner of sustained or sustainable military engagement. At its peak, the US had 100,000 troops and coalition partners had about 70 or 90,000 in Afghanistan. Now the US is down to 12,000 and plans to go to eight and a half. President Ghani says that that's okay that Afghanistan can work with that and the motivation for that is quite clear. He's trying to make this cost on the US bearable so that the US doesn't withdraw more drastically or cut a hasty deal with the Taliban that sells out the government. Other NATO allies are concerned. They're wondering whether they too should be drawing down forces and in particular both the Afghan government and the NATO partners are concerned not so much about the numbers of US troops but the nature of US support for military operations. Things like medical evacuation teams, transport aircraft, maintenance troops, intelligence, satellite imagery and so forth and of course air power. All of those things the US provides are vital to the Afghan forces and coalition partners to be able to fight. By the way, the Afghan army also needs the Americans money. Its budget every year is $5 billion. That's twice the country's annual revenue. The ANA, the Afghan National Army has about 180,000 troops on the books but in practice in terms of whose field that it's considerably smaller and the Pentagon recently released a report saying that the attrition is outpacing recruitment. 50,000 Afghan soldiers have been killed since 2014 and a good number of additional troops have retired or left their posts and recruitment has been tough. For all of these reasons experts doubt that the Afghan security forces would last very long in a fight with the Taliban which has similar numbers but which has a higher degree of cohesion and in some respects fighting capacity. So the US needs to be there to support Afghanistan in a way that's sustainable militarily. Ideally with a shrinking footprint over time that focuses almost exclusively on training, support functions and counter-terror operations but a presence nonetheless. If this is a deal breaker in terms of a peace agreement with the Taliban, so be it. Development assistance. Afghanistan and the foreseeable future is going to be heavily, heavily reliant on foreign assistance. Its annual budget is $11 billion. Its annual revenues are $2.5 billion. Corruption is a huge problem and so there's no getting around the fact that this is gonna be frustrating and difficult to provide continued reconstruction assistance. There's a good reason why folks on Capitol Hill are exasperated about the use of reconstruction assistance. And so of course there need to be redoubled efforts to monitor assistance, to cut off agencies or projects where there's clear evidence of waste, to try to force adjustment by moving money away from some bloated sectors of the government toward other sectors that are more in need of resources to channel funds toward NGOs as a way of policing the government rather than to fund a government agencies that are the officials of which are lining their pockets. But despite all the frustration, the US can't cut off Afghanistan entirely. There also needs to be an effort to, because the government would quickly collapse. There also needs to be an effort to enfranchise communities in the south and east of the country where the Taliban are strong and that's why I have an image of this pipeline, the so-called TAPI pipeline. The Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India pipeline. That is an unlikely grouping of countries to be engaged in a joint development project, but everybody's interested in trying to get the immense reserves of natural gas from Turkmenistan to energy-needy cities in South Asia, including in India. And projects like this hold out at least the prospect of aligning incentives around stability in Taliban-controlled areas. None of those four governments involves including Pakistan, which is often properly regarded as the Taliban's supporter in some respects. None of them wants to see this thing blown up by Taliban units. None of them wants to see more generally the kind of insecurity that would make this kind of project impossible to pursue in the future. And so what it means is, this isn't a photo of America's best friends in foreign policy, but it is a group of people whom the United States is going to have to figure out how to work with pragmatically because if we go back to a map of Afghanistan and we look at the situation that it occupies geographically, we can try to identify some common interests that these players may have with the United States. Iran is concerned about the Taliban resurgence and radical Sunni extremism. It's also concerned about the drug flow through Harat and other cities in Western Afghanistan. Turkmenistan and the other Central Asian states are concerned about the treatment of their co-ethnics in Afghanistan. They're also concerned about things like those energy projects and they're concerned about general stability in the region. China is concerned about the implications of extremism for its rest of Western provinces and it's also concerned about the implications of instability in Afghanistan for its Belt and Road project in its east-west corridor. Pakistan traditionally has looked at the Taliban as a more or less tolerable force in Afghanistan because it provides strategic depth vis-a-vis India. But that logic doesn't work if there's a war in Afghanistan that is demanding Pakistan's attention and that is also causing flare-ups between Pakistani Taliban and the government. The Pakistani government wants to focus on its larger historical adversary of India in strategic terms and therefore also has an incentive to promote some degree of stability in Afghanistan. Naturally, India is also interested in stability for a variety of reasons in Afghanistan. And so there's no concert of powers that's going to happen here but there are ways to think about convergent interests and to be able to try to build pillars that support the conditions for peace in Afghanistan so that the United States can be less central as support for Afghan security and development going forward. One example is that the World Bank issued a recent report on Afghanistan and we noticed that the word China wasn't in it. That's a problem, that needs to change. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is exactly the kind of vehicle that U.S. officials should be trying to link to in an Afghan context, not only because it mobilizes resources and because it helps to develop an interest on the part of China and others to promote Afghan stability but because multilateral institutions provide a much easier on-ramp for the engagement of India, for example. Normally a bilateral engagement with India causes all kinds of stress in the relations between Washington and Islamabad. Doing these things through multilateral vehicles can be a way to get around that. And so linking to the BRI and the AIB is one area we identified as a possible promise. And more generally, there's a broader shift needed in the foreign policy orientation toward Afghanistan. The president has made it clear over the last few years that his preference is to deal transactionally and bilaterally in handling a lot of sensitive diplomatic issues. This is not, I can't think of a way that this approach is going to facilitate a smooth and responsible transition in Afghanistan. It is not possible to cut a deal with the Taliban bilaterally that would lead to a sustainable peace in Afghanistan nor is it possible to deal bilaterally with any single partner on its periphery to develop the kind of balance of influence that could help to sustain peace in the country. This is going to require a different kind of approach so that there are pillars supporting Afghan peace. The last thing I'll say before we take your questions is that it's a good example of something a number of our visitors have told us who've come to the diplomacy center in the last year. The diplomacy isn't so much, at least in many cases, it's not so much about resolving problems as managing them. Or another way of putting this is diplomats do work that's every bit as important when they help mitigate downside risks as when they appear to receive an award for having signed a peace deal. In this case in Afghanistan, it's unlikely that any approach including the one I've just outlined is going to yield near term shining successes but there's still a tremendous difference between the best realistic outcome and the worst. And so with that, thanks for your attention. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Hi, John. How are you? Good, been a long time. So you started the beginning talking about the Vietnam War and the U.S. pullout of Vietnam. The way you described the shrinking U.S. footprint being part of the plan for turning things back over to Afghanistan and building some kind of sustainable framework. How do you avoid creating a sort of, I think for lack of a better term, like a reverse Dien Bien Phu where you have some stake in the country and you get drawn back in because suddenly the Taliban or some other force ends up targeting U.S. personnel or U.S. troops and then you wind up rejoining a conflict that you were just in the process out of and how do you also avoid losing your bargaining position because if you've already said that you're going to draw down troops, you've given up some semblance. How do you, I guess show you're not, you're willing to come back without actually coming back? Good question, very, very good question. So I'll take the second one first. I think that in speaking with the Taliban about the troop withdrawal, it has to be based on conditions not on dates. Now, that does set up the possibility and I know that some people in the groom are probably thinking, but doesn't that lend itself to just an open-ended commitment that we don't want to make? There's no way around that risk. If you want negotiating leverage with the Taliban, it has to be a conditional withdrawal. It cannot be a set timetable because the Taliban will wait it out. The tougher of the two questions in my view is the question about how does the United States have a limited security role in the country and a relatively light footprint that is stable in the sense that it doesn't require large-scale, another surge, for example, when Americans are attacked. Nobody wants to see additional U.S. or allied service personnel die in this effort. Nobody wants to see innocent Afghans die and either of those could be a cause for reintroducing more forces. That's more of a game between the United States military and the Afghan security forces to try to, obviously, training is important. The more that the Afghan National Army is able to handle, the less likely it is that there will be this perceived need to re-engage large-scale. But I also think it's important for this to be politically sustainable. I mean, we have to take political feasibility into account. The American public is not interested in 100,000 boots on the ground in the foreseeable future in Afghanistan. The nature of the mission, the objectives, have to be the type that are commensurate with the level of commitment that the U.S. is willing to have. Counter-terror is probably at the core of that and protection of what are perceived to be vital interests and populations in the country would be another. More generally, would there have to be some tolerance of some insecurity in outlying areas of the country? The answer would be yes, because I don't think that with 8,500 or 4,000 or 2,000 troops in the country that the United States can exclude that possibility. Thank you, John. That was terrific. I work with a lot of retired four-star, three-star generals who would agree with exactly the direction you're talking about, who really believe in, this is about mitigating a much more serious national security issue for us and that we have to invest in this way. I also work though also with a lot of international development groups that are very frustrated that the storyline is all about what isn't working and that there is also not getting out in the news about some of the real successes that have had about the health of the citizens of Afghanistan and the life expectancy. And can you talk about what you have seen in terms of some of the positive impact of American engagement in Afghanistan over that 18-year period that never, that storyline never really gets told and what happens is that there isn't a much of an appetite for America to stay engaged, but what happens also on that end if we disengage? Yeah, I think it's a district by district story to some extent. In areas of Afghanistan, if I were to go back to the map, areas that are shaded white or certain of the areas that are gray that are contested, but particularly in this part of the country, if we were to look at health, education, childhood mortality, particularly girls access to education and employment, it has gone up significantly. If we were to look at local infrastructure so that people can bring their food to market to sell, it's improved significantly. Even if we look at the issue of corruption itself, there's a joint commission, an anti-corruption commission called the Modering and Evaluation Committee in Afghanistan that has been unable to tackle the biggest fish but has written hundreds of reports that have resulted in disciplinary action against mid-level and lower-level officials. So even in the area that is the subject of so much frustration, there are pockets of progress. There also are micro-economies in Afghanistan that have done quite well, but all the averages nationwide are dragged down by what's going on in these spaces where there is very little capacity to be able to act. One of the biggest frustrations, and this goes back to the time when I worked at the Treasury, is how does one think about, as an American, how does one think about trying to do development projects here? There was an experiment with provincial reconstruction teams for a number of years where development experts would go with the military to try to have an envelope of security so they could create the conditions that I was describing in this part of the map. And it, in a few cases, produced decent projects, but it was more challenging. In other cases, there simply wasn't a local counterpart to work with. Why I mentioned that the downside, even though you asked about the positive examples, is that I think it illustrates the argument that I've been making, that when security conditions are reasonably good, there are a lot of success stories to talk about in development. But when security conditions are very, very poor in the country, there's almost no uptake of development and reconstruction assistance. It's one reason why it's essential, if, in other words, one cannot say, as the next step in our engagement with Afghanistan, let's get out of the business of security and just do development. Won't work. But if the country has areas that remain reasonably secure, then as you say, health outcomes, education, local economies, infrastructure, there's plenty of good things to write home about. Hi, I'm Vic Miller, 72. I've had some international experience in Oasia for a decade anyway. And I've been to places like Peshawar and Guetta and talked to the regional parliaments, impressed by how little law there was and how little respect for the law did exist, there was. But respect for law is the only way that some of this, I think, is resolvable. Is it possible to have a different legal structure and different parts of Afghanistan? It's, I would say that right now in a de facto sense that there are different laws that apply. Of course, a lot of them are meted out informally or through local traditional structures rather than the state. It's an interesting question to think about and Java and I raised this with a guy named Hamid Khan who was a visiting scholar, an Afghan American who came to the University of Michigan Law School who's an expert in the topics about Islamic law and Afghanistan. And we talked a little bit about what would it look like to have a power sharing arrangement or a constitutional reform in Afghanistan? And one possibility is that there would be some devolution to localities to be able to orient their legal, organize their legal system somewhat distinctly. That's happened in other countries. Of course, you have the example in the region that you mentioned in Indonesia with Ocha. There was a discussion about the Achaanese having a Sharia law components that the central government recognized. It's conceivable that that could be one part of a package in Afghanistan. I think that the bottom line for the Afghan government and its international partners should be the respect for certain basic human rights. And obviously there's disagreement on exactly where the contours of that line go. But it is a possibility. And I think that if one were to imagine that talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government going well, I'm quite certain that there would be questions raised about the possibility of local variation in the legal system. Okay, maybe just one more. Hi, I'm Claudia Munoz. I am MPP 09. And I've worked in the office of the Secretary of Defense with mostly security cooperation, but I've also supported the Afghanistan office, mostly focused on the Train, Advise, and Assist mission that you had mentioned, and training advisors to work in Afghanistan. And you had mentioned that the, first the SEGAR reports that, I mean there have been many, many SEGAR reports that have shown that DOD assistance to Afghanistan has been extremely wasteful. Many of the TA, Train, Advise, and Assist investments were without long-term planning. The advisors weren't appropriately trained. It was extremely wasteful. So how do you, what would you recommend that could be done in Afghanistan to ensure that in the future, TAA efforts are more effective and that they're not as wasteful that because in the past they have been extremely wasteful. I hope that the transparency, the SEGAR reports and so forth helps, at least within the United States to, within the Beltway to have greater accountability about where the money's going and greater responsiveness. It's a hard question to answer. I mean, there will be forces on the other side that have very different incentives on how to use money and how to protect themselves and their families. This is not an easily soluble problem at all. One thing that has been done in the recent past is to try to focus assistance on units that seem to be performing well and where there is for a mix of reasons a genuine interest in carrying out a public service mission rather than engaging in corruption. So some amount of selectivity, some amount of transparency and ultimately, I think in the longer term, an effort to move toward a model of security provision in Afghanistan that is more fiscally sustainable. When I was at Treasury and even as early as 2004, we were doing reports in the National Security Council process about fiscal sustainability. You can't give somebody who's got revenues of $2.5 billion a year, a military that costs $5 billion a year. And so there needs to be a rationalization in terms of the kinds of training, the kinds of support. If the training and the supporter are big dollar type approaches, then the incentives to engage in corruption goes up. And I think that there needs to be serious reflection put into a more sustainable training model for Afghanistan. It's not gonna be an army that looks like ours, but hopefully it'll be an army that looks like a good version of what's possible and sustainable in Afghanistan. Please burn me and thank you. Thank you. In issue areas, if you'd like to congregate around that, or feel free to mix and make a little and talk to people as you go, I can't. But thanks a lot to you all for being here.


Correction equals value. If someone's taking the time to correct you and help you, respect that, receive that, appreciate that. Always value someone passing on some wisdom to you, even if it's done imperfectly. Especially people that you know have been around the block a few times, have been in the trenches, have spent their time, done their apprenticeship, learned a lot. Be grateful that they bothered to waste their breath in your direction and help you with something. Receive value in you, or they wouldn't be trying to correct you. Correction equals value. Cheers.


Okay, we need a name for this country. It's somewhere in the Baltic, so I think something that ends with an IA would work. Slovakia? A real place. Slovenia. Also a real place. Sokovia. Isn't that Marvel? Genovia. Yeah, that's the princess diaries. Sudovia? Sudovia. I like that.  Is that what you were going for?


Everybody forced here ripping 2022 tops find a Star Wars hobby a box case number five random mini box style So I'm gonna open the box first and then pull the boxes out and then I'll show you how we're gonna do it And then we'll do the random for The young mini boxes Because last time the front were like turned around. I just want them all to be facing forward This time open it first. I'm gonna make sure all the boxes are facing the same way Towards me and then we'll show you how the order. It's gonna go Yes, I just want these turned around and realize it'd be like that there Back rows already facing that way put it right there empty box So similar to last time we're basically the exact same now Top cam here. I'm gonna go left to right and then many boxes one two three four five six seven eight 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 just like that Just like that now. Let's do the random Roll the dice first real nice Go six times Last six is for me Six times names six times numbers put them side by side. That's how we know what mini box you're getting One two three four five six Matt oh down to William s and six times on the numbers One two three four five six eight down to two finest case five I Was like that's not laying been one of those days Finest got here like when I started breaking There you go Matt oh eight Matthew s 7 Francis D 10 Andrew T 5 Tony and 12 William s 6 Luke s 9 Matthew m 4 Mike K 15 Craig G 16 Matthew m 1 William s 3 William s 13 Shigunori 14 Mike K 11 William s 2 Those results posted I'll get you a link And we'll get started so one of those week and a half's actually Here is the link for you for the results Let me just sort these for myself over here One sec I need a traffic. Yeah I'm a little Gonna fill the next one guys. Let's get it filled up We're at 14 to go.  So here's one and two again one is gonna be on the front. I wouldn't doubt it For sure, but probably locked in killer studio like likely Got a Admiral Rampart Vice Admiral Rampart got Luke Skywalker in search for the Mandalorian blue refractor Omega to 150 Tell your motto grievous got a casting and or refractor Mon Mothma Loading great storm blue to 150 CEO Bibble auto CEO Ken and Jarrus Gold Phoenix Shand the 50 Mandalorian insert Nice gold body Gallia refractor and black to 10 Toto 360 360 or 360 black to 10 Axe woes number two Got Lamasu bad batch insert Janna got Axe woes insert refractor may fell space bilber Got Geode Just the rock right there Fennec shand insert refractor auto old DACA to quality some nice color here Tava refractor Han Solo very nice That is the extended base. So the photo variation Nice Han Solo And refractor Imperial Stormtrooper. All right numbers three and four Front there Remember guys every spot purchase and national break gets you one spot in the national promo random These breaks are included.  I think his name is Orlando. I think those count as a case hit. That's what I've heard Die cuts pretty rare nice one there for mini box three Base pack with Anakin in it grow goo base refractor K2 SO and a gold Anakin skywalkers of 50 Heck yeah, 8 of 50 on the Anakin. What up sin Sam's here now And said nice gold Anakin great mini box Number four now. Don't worry sin Sam didn't touch the case I don't use in the break Sid bad batch Well some big just cursing my mail because I haven't gotten my break stuff yet grief Karga Getting very sad because I want to get my scourge one-on-one. It's a feud Mall got refractor Grand Inquisitor You know got a green to 99 Dryden boss or Paul bet me revision Admiral ackbar auto nice Tim rose admiral ackbar very famous for one line Jar Jar refractor Captain fazma from the animated there 105 that is extended base photo variation for short print or all the above refractor Dryden boss and Mando numbers five and six Five on the front there Helicopters like right about the shop Better than things exploding only last night Yeah, I don't know. I don't know we haven't turned on TV Adam. I'm afraid to turn on the TV I don't even think it works. Anyway Got cut lock lock Wayne Greene's a 99 K2 SO or a Phoebe Waller bridge God Mandalorian the armorer on the insert Teen base refractor a so katano nice a soka skier Lizard Jedi blue to 150 Koska Reeves and refractor auto Admiral ackbar Tim rose Fennec Fractor Paris Alfie and the Assaj error card number six Five Tim Roses gotta get a Tim rose super factor honestly put that rainbow together some victim a bolo and after a tie Valon Hess Mandalorian insert Stop Chris Chris J. Got a Count duke refractor Fennec shand book above a fat insert Anakin Vernesta row insane card Aqua auto out of Gallia to $1.99 ray refractor as a bridger and Vice-Admiral Lorder alright, so box four so you got mini boxes Seven on top here than eight Before I rip through seven here. Let me check squats on the next one green the 99 Emperor Palpatine very nice a Blue auto old DACA to 150 nice numbered Palpatine there the Neal I'd like so used like looking up in the TV Yoda refractor Yoda fractor. I keep doing that. We can like let me see what the news is It's going on quill Heck yeah, Mike G like money Mike, baby Hunter of Bad Batch Fennec Shandbo, Boba Fett Rache Babu Frick refractor. Heck. Yeah. Oh, gee a bastoon. I'm trying to see orders coming in here Mike is not the only person that just bought a spot either like grab a spot Let me check here guys It read nine to go. This is mini box eight maybe one sec Yes, nine to go you go tweet that out and get you guys link and chat a Lot of things are done over here Randy. We thought it was just a modem, but the TV wouldn't work yesterday either So we don't know Gotta get spectrum out here Nine to go on Star Wars find us next guys. Let's get it filled up last day time break Fractor Sith Trooper have to go a little bit quicker now guys Finish on a good time for Kenzie Saw Gerrera Fennec Shand Mandalorian insert Refractor Jyn Urso you got blue hunter to 150 Rekker Keith Trennus Gn General Leia, Organa very nice and refractor auto co-bibble Now a number that Leia is number 114. So photo variation there and here we go Nine and ten right here Talk about watching the entire break back So number nine, I've not been calling out names Luke S here Rekker bad batch insert clients blue Kylo renda 150 Nice Kylo R2 D2 refractor. I believe that's the variation. It is not Green wave auto princess Leia to 99 Julie Dolan as the Animated princess Leia from rebels. I believe nice hit there Supreme Leader Snoke It is not Bob Frick Saw Gerrera refractor green to 99 Cassian and or Guys own show coming up. Yeah, they just lose a trailer. I think yesterday Season number 10 gotta go watch it. I don't watch yesterday on accident Got Fennec Shand bad batch. Let's get Star Wars finest filled up guys nine to go Koska Reeves Refractor director Krennick Yeah, honestly R2D2 saves everybody's lives like numerous times really. Oh, yeah And the first one he repairs the the ship. They're escaping Naboo. Yeah, and then they can't escape the desk are without him Ramja Moran What we want can only would never got the the message. Yep also good point blue to 150 gore Koresh Yeah, it's like it's like numerous. He's the most important person in the entire trilogy Not the trilogy the the saga Koresh to 150 that's John Leguizamo, right? Score Koresh aqua auto to 199 Evan Peele Palpatine dark ray Biggest favorite character refractor Mace Windu Like I said that we need more 11 and 12 here 11 on top. Yeah frog lady They name literally it's weird. They name George George Lucas names literally every character ever that even did any one thing ever And then they get the frog lady refractor and sorry Nala say Baloo to 150 total 360 360 This Cad Bane's droid dog Cad Bane Boba Fett Come on now. Come on now. I refractored General Cadobby General Grievous. That's how he says it, right? C. O. Bibble. Yeah got wreath Silas refractor Finn That is that's the short print you got green grain inquisitor to 99 And refractor auto Valon Hess as Richard break is Valon Hess Doesn't bill Burr just shoot him pretty much there he is again Valon Hess refractor 12 right Can't count by twos man. It's no good Harrison Dula. What would be worse? buying um Richard's baby an a-rod jersey Or a car crashing into the shop I don't know because the a-rod jersey is a direct attack. Yeah, that's like may fell I've never talked about that. I was like, I would honestly that's just like straight disrespect Bill Burr should have autos in this. I wish he did same with you and Carlos Pizzo Zeborellios Which is weird because Esposito is in like every other product, right? Strange. I was really I was like, I would have bought into some of these got Drengear.  A lot of those in Florida Blue to 150 ray Nice ray That is true Stefan purple to 299 Seal bibble all over Davies auto See who's gonna say something. It's gonna be that this this make the classic game Fracture tech 13 and 14 now thinking about the entire day because it just keeps making me laugh because I'm apps with asthma be like I want to smoke like bro. You can barely handle oxygen I've just been thinking about it every like 10 minutes and giggling to myself The refractor lyre or so come on big hit. Come on. We got some gold coming up. There's Shamsen doula Gold karsen taeva to 50 13, right? Okay, 10 crease And again, you got an Obi-Wan refractor Carson is not ready for war. He's a pilot. He's fine About is that too far? He's not ready for a star war. That's for sure What is it in a Oh, we got red. Come on red cad bane I'm in the bad batch nice cad bane two out of five Boba insert and purple to 299 old DACA auto 14 Check the next one before we start flipping through 14 here guys. Let's get it filled up 7 to go 7 7 to go There's a sabine rend refractor. This is number 14 here. We've got echo frog lady friendship insurance refractor trudge orange bowmont's kind 25 lorna d friendship insurance Trudge and refractor the mandalorian very nice and a gold auto first-order stormtrooper 50 of 50 on the book and Dante brigands his first-order stormtrooper All right guys seven to go breaks right after this last one here last daytime break. I dropped two links. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to link spam You get time down SMH So this is 15 right here 16 on the back 15 refractor kylo ren a po dameron po definitely one of the top four teletubbies of all time Got a tech greens and 99 tech pelimoto really no Athletes really no argument you can make Refractor gore koresh so many emmies right i mean at least 20 minute highlighted. They have our chris Last one for number 15 got refractor count dooku lightning blue to 150 first-order stormtrooper and refractor auto evan pl Okay, look at trellis evan pl. All right, and lastly number 16 count dooku is the sp What is it? Thank you sam 107. Thank you sam. It's invicta short print dooku So i'm trying to speed up, but it cost me refractor mall Nice mall catch named after a condiment mandalorian insert of the mandalorian The catch. Oh, no, don't do this in victor. Oh boy Did you send the the noise to sam? Oh, yeah, I have a copied in my notes right now burger Blue grogu to 150 very nice Heck yeah, do a grogu the goat mandalorian would have died second episode of the whole thing Got a yoda younger yoda looks pretty pretty upset now last pack Is a green wave auto of general draven To 99 that is allister petri General draven to 99 And that will do it. Thank you very much everybody. We've got one more starware spine is coming up


This paper examines the use of information and communication technologies, ICT, and tools in the organization of student independence study activities in higher education institutions. The authors identify three main types of independence study activities, individual, group, and collective. They also explore the role of ICTs and tools in supporting these activities, including online lectures, consultations, and non-formal education. The paper concludes by assessing the effectiveness of ICTs and tools in the process of organizing student independence study activities. This article was authored by Alina Olavrantiva, Lina M. Rubalco, Ola Otsays, and others.


Good morning. It's certainly a pleasure to be here. I'm Steven Chanick, and one of the co-directors of the Center for Cancer Genomics. And Lou Stout, the other acting director, will speak in just a few minutes. It's really a tremendous pleasure to be here and to be able to be part of this particular meeting in a very important juncture in the time of the lifespan of TCGA and what will come after that. And I want to talk about two things briefly today. One is the tremendous value of TCGA, particularly in the realm where I come from, which is more of germline and asking questions of the relationship between germline and somatic alterations. And I think Lou is going to give you some very exciting things that he's seen. And then I'm going to interspersed a few comments about what some of the discussions are right now, as we're going forward and thinking about exactly what kinds of things the NCI is going to support and in what ways we'd like to do it, and those discussions are very active at this time. So let me just start with a very exciting set of analyses that came out of one of the first TCGA analyses in the ovarian cancer analysis, where there was a paper in JAMA not so long ago where they were looking at not only the germline, but the somatic alterations, and particularly asking the question of BRCA1 and BRCA2. And these generated, what I think, are very important key preliminary findings. And this is really, to me, the tremendous value of TCGA in establishing hypotheses and establishing findings that then larger data sets will clearly go ahead and hopefully replicate and be able to extend and potentially push into clinical implications. And I think this is an example where the findings between the TCGA study and a follow-up study that I was very intimately involved in certainly suggests that as we look at BRCA1 germline status and probably also the somatic alterations as well, this may have a tremendous implication with respect to survivorship in ovarian cancer and may be a factor to consider in the design of studies and particularly certain kinds of trials that are going to potentially go forward. So I think this is a very nice paradigm of thinking about where TCGA goes from discovery to characterization to eventually some, you know, version of clinical implications. And we know that those clinical implications, as much as we like to say that that's where we want to go, those are hard and arduous. And they're going to take time and they're going to take a multitude of studies and various activities to really put those in place. So the first paper is this paper that came out in JAMA at the beginning of 2012 where many of the authors are sitting here. So it's a little embarrassing to present the data to those authors. But what they looked at basically was looking at the clinical data that was available and asking the question of survivorship. Did the initial BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation status have anything to do with separating those individuals on a survival curve compared to those individuals who don't have an underlying BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation? You could see an overall survival shift between brackeness and, so to speak, the individuals not having mutations there. Certainly progression free survival saw this same trend. And then the platinum free survival. And this raised some very interesting questions about mechanisms of platinum therapy itself and where the bracken genes and mutations in those genes may be important in a funny way in sort of protecting those individuals. They then went a step further and looked at some of the very interesting somatic alterations, asking the question of the expression of BRCA, particularly BRCA1 and the mRNA. And then they've also looked at looking at specifically signatures of expression and methylation. So this was in our minds a very exciting finding that another group that I'm part of, the OCAC, a large ovarian cancer association consortium, pulled out a much larger number of individuals as opposed to just less than 500, which had been the initial study. Now taking this study and looking across nearly 3,900 individuals where we had very good clinical information where we knew quite a bit about the clinical histories and the risk factors, and then to look, can we see those same curves in place? And in fact, when we went forward, we certainly could. And we could actually see a separation between BRCA1 and BRCA2, which the initial study was not quite well enough powered to do that. But in a subsequent larger study, we could see that separation. And these are things that had clearly been suggested in the literature before in very small underpowered studies. But here, the power of really larger team science, and this is the other key issue I want to really emphasize in moving from initial hypotheses and preliminary observations to going to large amalgamated data sets, were tremendously valuable in being able to start to separate these things. Because it's really those kind of agnostic statistical criteria that I think that we eventually want to achieve in looking at our large data sets. And if we look at the five-year overall survivorship by BRCA status, that was very impressive. When we go look at the Kaplan-Meyer curves, we again see the same separation. And interestingly enough, we could actually look and see that individuals who'd received platinum had a different degree of response compared to those who didn't, again, seen very similar findings to what we had seen in that first paper. And so I think these kinds of supersizing are really a very important message for us to consider in thinking about what we're going to do with our TCGA data, where we're going to take it, what kinds of ways we can grab on to, whether it's germline or somatic or interactions between those, and take them to additional data sets that would be the basis of new grants, new approaches, and most importantly, potentially clinical approaches towards specifically treating these diseases. And when we were able to look specifically at the types of mutations in BRCA-1 and BRCA-2, we could see in BRCA-1 that perhaps, and again, I use the word perhaps here, because I'm not sure the statistics here are quite strong enough to say that we can unequivocally say that the type of mutation you have in BRCA-1 and where it is may be important in determining this. And again, this now tells us as we get to a more granular level, we're going to need larger and larger studies as we really move forward. So really, I think the story here I've already sort of projected is that BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 carriers potentially, I mean, do show a substantially improved survivorship compared to non-carriers in ovarian cancer, okay? And this is using primarily retrospectively or collected case series and cohort studies. We see a slight distinct change in the clinical course between BRCA-1 and BRCA-2, and that there's some survivorship that may be very importantly mapping to the actual types of mutations in BRCA-1. So these are sort of the next hypotheses that this community is now going after, and I think TCGA was very important in empowering and sort of moving this to a very important step. And then, of course, the implications for this for clinical trials are things that won't be realized for two, three, or four years from now, as those studies have to be suitably designed, integrating this information, accumulated, and then most importantly, analyzed once we have those particular studies far enough along. So I sort of use this as a paradigm to where I think we're thinking about where we'd like to see the TCGA data going. And this, again, comes from where I'm much more comfortable in my world of germline, but I think there's a very important interaction here with the somatic alterations that clearly will be followed up. So when we think about this, we now need to sort of take a step back. We know TCGA is moving along as a spectacular train. As Kenna has, and others have clearly been able to move this along, they've been spectacular advances in really beginning to reach those milestones and develop the data sets that are extremely useful for applying the hypotheses and testing and analyzing in the ways in which we want. And it's really the center for cancer genomics that's relatively recently been established that Barbara Wald had really been instrumental in cementing within the NCI structure. And then now Lou and myself have the fun of sort of taking this over for a period of time to establish what's the vision, what are the next sets of studies that are going to come. And to do that really, you know, we have to think about what kind of mission we have. This is a slide that Barbara had initially developed that I think sort of characterizes where we see the center for cancer genomics going to, you know, to develop and apply these cutting-edge genomic scientific tools to improve cancer prevention, a very important thing, cancer care and cancer detection. And so these discoveries will then go in many different ways as suggested here on this particular graph. And clearly there'll be iterations and revisitations of these data. And these data should form really the nucleus of establishing new hypotheses and new studies that clearly are going to need to go forward. So the discovery really is a key element. And we know that we have to think about what comes next. And so in our minds, over the next three to six months, I think there's going to be a very active dialogue and a very active discussion of putting in place what kinds of studies are going to be lined up behind TCGA. Because we know TCGA is on track for 2013, 2014, you know, realizing the milestones and those goals. And we have to exhort everyone to meet those deadlines, get to where they need to get the samples there, get the analysis going, get the pan-cancer analyses, all these things that we know are going to be very fruitful. Because behind that we're already considering what are we going to line up. And we know that it takes time, as Kenna just showed, the timelines from the point of identifying a study, getting the permissions, getting everyone to buy in, getting samples analyzed. There are very specific, you know, time frames that have to be met. So we are now very actively thinking what is it that's going to be put into the TCGA-like pipeline and how that's going to be configured as something that's a very active discussion at this moment. And as we hear the exciting presentations and the discussions in the hall today, I think we'll be in a very good position to try and really develop those. And it's really going to be a dialogue between those of us in the NCI and in the NHGRI and the community as to really what makes sense and where the opportunities are right at hand for the next year, the next two years, the next four years. So these strategic lessons are really crucial in our mind. And capitalizing on these structures are really crucial. And as I already alluded to, there will clearly be a continued fruitful partnership between NCI and NHGRI as we clearly go forward. So we want to build upon these strengths of these pipelines, particularly for the processing and characterization. But also the analytic tools, we know the hardest part about this is really the analyzing of the data and having to revisit it and look at it new creative ways. And the data sharing challenges are really quite, quite interesting. And I think the TCGA team has done a spectacular job in getting the data out and making it available to people. And how and in what way the policies at the NIH are going to evolve to take into account new technical opportunities, et cetera, are clearly a very active discussion right now. We also, I think, foresee that the kinds of projects that will be supported will be both top down and clearly the value of bottom up. And I made that illusion earlier. I think the importance of taking the findings from these studies and generating R01s and generating institution or PI-specific grants is very important in sort of fitting in and building the larger analyses. And that's something that's clearly going to be very important in the NCI portfolio, and I'm sure in the NHGRI as well. We have a major transition towards wanting to be clinically important here. And that transition is really crucial. But we know that we've got to be very careful that this is very arduous. It's filled with landmines. It's not as easy as it is to say to actually do it. And at the same time, we know that really the next clinical opportunities are going to come out of very basic discoveries. And so we can't lose sight of the value of basic discovery and of looking at the data sets in the most effective, intelligent ways. So really what kinds of large-scale questions? Two or three more slides. Unraveling cancer biology in our minds is very important. Getting at this question of drivers and mutations, drivers and passengers, window passengers, change places with drivers, and the like. I mean, this temporal nature is something that's going to be very important, and we're going to need numbers. And we're going to need very clever studies to be able to put those kinds of things together. So developing a kind of somatic molecular epidemiology, larger studies clearly, and we're going to have to pace together different kinds of things, asking questions of clonality and progression, a very hot topic, and what kinds of coverages are necessary, and what kinds of study designs clearly are going to be very important. The value of epidemiology in germline, and now asking questions of susceptibility when we want to look at adenos, CA of the lung, and really in terms of understanding what kinds of smoking and other types of exposures in much more exquisite details to be able to understand questions of risk that are both individual and, very importantly, their public health questions of risk. And these are two very different venues. The contribution to somatic events and those relationships between germline drivers, so to speak, of cancer, and the treatment stratification in pharmacogenomics are certainly going to be there, particularly as we look at response, toxicity, and, of course, outcome. So we sort of think about genome-related trials. Now is genome-informed trials, where we're going to learn things from things that have been actually collected, the value of prospective collections going forward is going to be very important, but they won't be reaped for a period of time. But the question is, how and what do we do with future clinical trials, and how do we start to integrate those into these kinds of analyses? Genome-driven trials, there'll be a lot of discussion about those, about where we actually have very remarkable phenotypes, and what can we learn in genomic characterization there. And then certainly the genomic analysis, not as a part of a trial. Using the archive samples, and gene environment analyses, the epidemiologic studies, these are all things that are going to be part of, I think, portfolio that's going to have to be built. It's not going to be done in any one particular venue, but probably a cross-section of the kinds of things that I've just outlined. So let me finish by saying that our current TCGA goals are really, I think, very important. Achieving those milestones per cancer site with the timely publications is really essential. These are the coin of the realm that we have to be sure we keep up with, conducting the pan-cancer analyses. The technical pilots were all very charged up and excited about seeing these to their completion, and particularly to the thorough completion to know what the next steps are going to be. And then most importantly, the forging of new solutions related to the integration, storage, and sharing of data. Things that only become more difficult as we generate more information. And lastly, the fortification of the collaborative spirit, because I think there's a very great American president, Woodrow Wilson, who made a very important statement, and this is my final comment to the TCGA community, and it should be in the first-person plural. We not only use all the brains we have, but all that we can borrow. And so I think the idea of really collaborating and being able to count on and work with others is really a central component of not only TCGA, but what comes out of TCGA and what directions it goes in in terms of large top-down, as well as bottom-up studies.  Lou, do you have your computer over here?


Please take your spot. All right. OK. Hello, everybody. My name is Sanne Jansen. Today I'd like to talk about the OpenSmartGrid platform. Maybe you expected Jonas van de Boog had here, but he was sick. So I replaced him together with you. Like I said, I'd like to talk about the OpenSmartGrid platform. Why did we start the OpenSmartGrid platform? I work at a Dutch utility known as Allianter. And at Allianter, we're a power distribution company. So we provide electricity to the houses. We distribute electricity. And we see a changing landscape in the field of energy. Their energy is shifting from centralized production to a more decentralized production. And what we need is more insight in the grid to cope with this change. And one particular example where we needed the OpenSmartGrid platform was for switching the public lighting. What we have right now is a technology called ripple control technology, which basically is a big sender who sends out the poles over the 50 hertz grid. And then you have devices that pick up that signal and then switch on the street lights or switch them off. Not really intelligent. And also municipalities were banging us from a, we like to have more control over the street lights. So then colleagues were looking into a solution to control all those devices and build an app for municipalities. And they found that the existing vendors were very locked up. It was a silo yet high cost on a long term and a big vendor lock in. So therefore, colleagues decided to build our own. And part of that is the OpenSmartGrid platform. So OpenSmartGrid platform is a layered architecture and can be seen as an IoT gateway between applications and devices. So with an application, you can connect throughout the OpenSmartGrid platform to devices. And current use cases include smart lighting, like I said, for municipalities, smart metering. So you can read millions of smart meters, microgrids. We have an island in Amsterdam, which is its own microgrids, a small grid that balances itself. And it's using OpenSmartGrid platform to send out signals. We're also planning to use it in distribution automation, where we want to use it to get data out of the grid to prevent outages or to recover outages faster. Load management is a thing we're working on. That's especially relevant in Germany, where sometimes it's too much solar power. So the start worker, the utility wants to switch off certain solar panels. That could be done with the OpenSmartGrid platform as well. And the OpenSmartGrid platform also contains device management. So you can see which devices are connected. And right now, there are multiple protocols connected to the OpenSmartGrid platform. DLMS Cozen for smart metering, 61 in 50, and OpenStreetLight protocol for smart lighting. So a little bit more detail about the OpenSmartGrid platform. You get web services on top. And every web services fits to a certain domain, for example, smart metering. That domain checks if a command is allowed. Can this application, is this application allowed to access this kind of smart meters? Then you get a core layer, which reroutes the messages to the correct protocol adapters. You can have multiple protocol adapters within the same domain. And that core layer also incorporates all the generic functions, like time synchronization and keep track of all your devices, so a list of devices. And on below, you have the protocol layer, which talk directly to devices with different protocols. Key features of the platform is that it's fully scalable and high performance. We build it so you can scale out to millions of devices if you want to. Since we're a utility company, security is quite vital for us, because society expects us to keep the grid on. So there's state of the art security, and security is built in from the ground up. And there are a lot of security measurements. The platform is generic. I showed you some use cases from the smart grid field, but you can also add your own and make use of the generic framework, what we're having. And it's open source for them. And we try to use as much as open standards as possible, where we can find a good one. OK, so now it's time for a quick demo. Hello, my name is Joep. I work for CGI and part of the development team that helped developing this application. I'm going to give you a small technical demo. Just going to go through it quickly. We have different components through which the messages are sent. We use ActiveMQ to deliver those messages. Our small demo, we've built a device simulator for the OSLP protocol. So we can add devices here and just simulate the messages and the control of the devices. We also have a demo application. So we can see the devices over here. We can add them and control them as well. So I'm just going to add a device. So the device will be delivered to the platform. Now we can simulate the device actually being connected. So I'm going to add it just over here. So this simulates the device actually being connected to the platform. The platform picks it up, so it registers itself. I'm also going to confirm of register and then confirm. So the device is now added to the platform. So we can do stuff with it like this. What this actually does is it fetches the status of the device. So it asks the device, can you give me the status? And it syncs the message. This is my status. So in this case, the light is off. It has no value. What we can do is we turn on the light. It sends another request towards the platform in which it says, well, for this specific device, I want to have the lights on. So it gets delivered to the platform. It processes it. And as you can see in the simulator, the light is now on. OK, thank you for the demonstration. Now we take a look a little bit closer at how it works technically. You saw the demo application on the top and the device simulator below. So our message gets routed throughout the integration layer to the domain layer and to the core layer and then to the specific protocol adapter. To make the platform scalable, we use message cues between all those layers and that makes sure that multiple server instances can grab messages. One thing I'd like to point out is that the OpenSmartGrid platform is not a historian. So it doesn't store data. It just passes through commands. But it does store all the devices that are connected to the platform. So feel free to join the OpenSmartGrid platform, especially if your organization that manages a lot of devices. I think this could be an interesting project to look into and see if it's a feature or requirements. We try to be as open as possible. So we have extensive documentation. Feel free to connect your hardware or application and help to drive innovation. OK, thank you. Now it's time for questions. OK. What's it written in? It's written in Java. I'm interested in the protocol level of layer. Are you guys have multiple vendors, like multiple pieces of hardware? And are you writing individual drivers for each kind of device? Or do you have a box that you bring to your customers? Or how does that work? Can you reflect the question? OK, so the question is, how we do with protocol adapters? Because there are a lot of vendors out there. And how do we incorporate that? So for the public streetlight example, we did a tender for devices. And then a couple of device suppliers showed up. And then we had to adapt the protocol adapter to that specific device. But if you look at the smart metering, for example, and you take an implementation of the protocol as the protocol should be implemented, then it shouldn't be that hard to incorporate it in the platform. But for now, every device needs some attention, some adjustments to make it work. Are you going to open source any of that? There are some devices already. Can we open source the current implementation? We are already open sourced the ones that are available. How many devices do you imagine at the moment? And do you have the big server burn? And do you have all these devices? Currently, how many devices are connected to the platform right now? And do we use the platform? Yeah, we're still in the testing phase for that large rollout for the public street lights. And we're planning to have 20,000 devices connected. And I'm not so sure how many servers are needed for that. Do you know? No, no. But yeah, like I said, you can skill on. So if needed, then you can add more servers. Have you given any thought to providing data back to the owners at smart meters or the owners of elements in the grid? We will pose one question and a second question. Can you talk a bit about why you don't use the project in terms of this choice? OK, so the first question is, are we sharing data with other utilities or data consumers? Currently, at Leander, we have a program called Open Data. And that's a place where we share some information. All the information is shared with the market regulatory systems. So in the Netherlands, you have a power distribution operator that reads out all the smart meters. And you get a different party that produces and delivers the energy itself. So there's a mark mechanism in the Netherlands that makes sure that the data from that smart meter is going to that supplier or producer or consumer. The other question about the data historian, why is not a data historian part of the open smart grid platform? I think there are other solutions to store data and to process it and analyze it. And it really depends on the use case what's the best solution. So therefore, we did it included here. OK, yeah? You said the state of the art security. What does that mean? That was a clue. What does state of the art security mean? Well, we regularly test the implementation. We do certificates. We do signing. We have extensive user authorization model. So in case of the public lighting, we want to give a municipality access to a certain area. Of course, not somebody else there, municipality. And then that municipality can give access to a subcontractor. And that subcontractor can give access to another subcontractor. So there's a fine grain mechanism to authorize certain functions on certain devices. And whoever is running this software gets to control who gets which access. Or does it depend on the protocol to use who's actually kind of it? It depends who gets the side, who gets access. Is that something this software does? Or something that, as you say, for the smart meters, the utility decides and you haven't got any choice about that. So the question is, who makes the decision? Who's allowed to talk to which device? Well, it depends on the operator of the platform. In our case, we run it ourselves. But I hope so, so you can run your own. And then your own boss. If you decide to open source it, you mentioned innovation as a reason, how did that decision go in the company? So the question was, how did we open source it? And how did we convince the management to make it open source? Yeah, I'm personally one of the person that made that happen. So I was already a big fan of open source. So I thought, let's make it my work as well. So I started to give presentations to numerous departments about open source and why should you use it? I think we're owned by the society. We're a part of our government owned. And we have a monopoly. So in that sense, I think it's also fair to share our code, what we produce. And I also think it's a good way to collaborate with others. Because otherwise, you end up in a Vandalok in situation where the vendor kind of decides to a certain extent what you can do and what you can do. And that's not a world I see working well. And then specific to the open smart group platform, I noticed that the project was going on there. So I asked the guys, open smart group platform. I looked on GitHub, can't find it. So our open is open. And then they said, well, Sander, we need to talk. So I told them about open source and why you should do it, and et cetera. And then we went and attend OSCON. And then they said, OK, open source is the way to go and now we're here. Sorry to ask another question. You mentioned an island in the Netherlands where this is happening. What's it called? Pampus. It's a small island in the waters in Amsterdam. It used to be a German fort. And there's a restaurant on it. And they have their own solar panel and diesel generator. And that's kind of stuff. So they want to balance that out. So they got a programmable logic controller on that island. And this open smart group platform gives out precise access to that programmable logic controller. So it's just one controller. It's not like multiple houses, each with their own EMSs or something like that. Is there one controller in that specific island? Yes, yes, yeah, one controller. It's pretty small. More questions? Yeah, go ahead. I was wondering, OK, this is a system running on the server. This requires power. So what happens then, the power is installed immediately. Emergency sort of power gets to the system itself. Because we have some sort of a loop there, right? So the question is what happened if there's a power outage? Well, that's our business. So first of all, we got all the data senders, backups, et cetera, et cetera. We got our private telecommunication network with also some uptime. And if you take a look at the open street lights, for example, the devices are smart enough to load switching schemes on it. So if the platform goes down or the telecom network goes down, then municipalities are not able to ad hoc switch their street lights. But the built-in scheme is still working. And by that way, it should work. You do not manage batteries back up on the server. I know that there are plans for a portable type. They have really big batteries and stuff. I read something in a book, and they arrived something like this, made about storage with batteries from Toshiba. You don't manage also these things inside the not part of the... So the question is, do we manage battery storage? Yeah, the battery storage can be added to the platform as well. 61-850 is one of the ruling protocols in the quote-unquote smart grid field and also supports batteries. And that Island in Amsterdam, Pampus, has also its own battery. And it's connected throughout the RTU for programmable logic controller. How much bandwidth is in full? There's smart metering data. It's a sensor. Any limits, sir? So the question is, how many bandwidth is there with the smart metering? I don't know, but it's not that much. At Allianna, we bought our own frequency and we built our own telecom network, CDMA, but it doesn't have a lot of bandwidth. But most smart meters only read six times a year. So, yeah, that should work. But I'm not an expert in this. Is there any kind of like rules and genetics that you know that you can program alternative lights on at a certain time? Easy, like a console like that? You don't need to put a rule in to turn these lights on at this time or turn these lights on at the same time? So the question is, is there a rule engine inside the platform? I know that there's a limited rule engine in the domain layer, but I don't know exactly the details. But in terms of that switching schedule for public lighting, which is also kind of rule, that can be transferred to the device via this platform. You mentioned this platform being used in a small island. Can you imagine how the use of this platform can be still up in the end, because that's not an example? So the question is, how to scale the platform? Yeah, well, all the layers consist of multiple servers. And when the servers get too busy, then you can start a new one, a new one, a new one, and scale them vertically, horizontally, horizontally. OK, we can take one last question. Last question there. Did you audit the development of Scratch, or did you use any already existing platform or code which were already available? So the question is, did we start from Scratch, or did we use some other code? From the protocol layer, I know that we're using open source libraries built by the Fraunhofer Institute. And we also give them some tasks to improve those libraries. And from the development point of view, we use Tomcat and Spring Framework, and more libraries to make it work. All right, thanks a lot.