don't lose that wonder because if you lose that wonder and you lose that ability to hope and to you know think of what the possibilities are you lose the creativity and you could lose the passion of the desire to be able to do beyond just one thing or beyond what you do in your day to day and I think that's the worst thing that could happen to a human being. Cindy Chen is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Cindy is an entrepreneur, venture strategist and cultural ambassador of the arts and sciences. As CEO of CLC Advisors she is an advisor and board member to founding startup teams, a subject matter expert in frontier technologies, Opportunity Scout for VC and LP partners, a global strategic thought leader and a sought after speaker. She recently co-founded and became the COO of Clipper, a video analysis and management VAM platform using AI and machine learning to help you users quickly identify key moments within video content enabling them to organize, search, interact and share with ease and efficiency. She is also a NASA data knot an open data innovation program to promote data science coding and gender diversity that operates within the office of the CIO at NASA headquarters. She is a mentor in the Google for startups accelerator a visiting professor at FH Salzburg University of Applied Sciences teaching about deep data in deep space and a RSA Royal Society for encouragement of the arts manufacturers and commerce fellow. She was a co-founder of women on the block the artificial intelligence and machine learning program curator for the Digital League conference and Expo in Cologne and a member of the faculty of the startup executive academy of Silicon castles also in Salzburg Austria. In 2018 she was named as one of the entrepreneur magazine's 50 most daring entrepreneurs in 2018 along with leaders including SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, General Motors CEO Mary Barra, chief celebrity chef and founder of the world's central kitchen Jose Andres, crazy rich Asians author Kevin Kwan, chance the rapper academy awards winning actress and founder of Hello Sunshine's Reese Witherspoon and IBM CEO Jeanie Romeri. Just for my listeners, I want them to know we know each other through M-Love, through a mutual friend of ours Harold Knighthart and then later tinnternet and many many other events and have not had as many opportunities that we would like to see each other in person but enough to make it good and build some lasting memories. When I very first heard you speak, it was in the Hamburg Hoffman at the future city campus at Harrell's and it was in one of the containers and you were speaking about data nautics and a lot of your work on space and NASA and your ties and the bigger picture of things. And what really struck a chord one, you're originally a concert pianist or a musician so gifted in the arts and talents of piano and music but the most eloquent speaker who empowers women and girls and people about data and the future of humanity where we're going on and so I was starstruck and snuck up to you after you got done speaking and said hey can I have some NASA stickers and you you gladly gave me some but I am excited to get into some deep dives with you today and and hope you remember that time. Can you tell me a little bit because of all this experience you've had, what you've talked about, you're talking about space which is future, you're talking about data, emerging technologies in the future. Has any of that prepared you for the craziness that we've gone through these past 12 months, you know, Black Lives Matter, COVID, Belarus, the inauguration, you know all the other crazy enormous things that have been going on the world. Have you been prepared or were you also taken into the funnel of darkness with things? Well Mark, thanks so much for bringing us back to memory lane. That was a very special moment and I have to thank Harold for asking me to come and talk in Hamburg at Unlove and give that keynote. I remember being kind of understruck myself because it was the container full of people that I'd never met before and you know you never get used to it and thank you for being there as well and I do remember you came up for the stickers who we talked for a while. It was a very special memory. It's very cold that day, but it was a very special memory and I was speaking about Mars and how important it was to think a little further ahead and into the future and not so stuck in the way that things are currently being done now and I, you know, everybody's in Europe is talking about moon shots. We're far beyond that now. We're about to land our second rover on Mars in eight days' time. So, you know, we need to think a little more forward and be more brave and be more daring and be more courageous in order to do that. As far as what's prepared for what has happened in the last year, I was prepared. Like you, I traveled a lot extensively and my work took us remotely and so we would be used to being on a digital screen and conducting working calls and it was because the NASA that I learned of Zoom and was using that with the data knots program there. That's how we primarily communicated and met with NASA scientists or subject matter experts from companies like NVIDIA or other locations that NASA aims and we would talk about data and some of the projects that NASA has available. So, I was already prepared and quite frankly kind of happy to have a little bit of home time because it does, you do get very tired or not. I learned something about this pandemic time is that I'm not very good at time math anymore. It does the calculations between the U.S. and Europe or U.S. and Singapore. Multiple time zones, the time that just I can't do it anymore. I need to have the five clocks on the wall or the five clocks or whatever is on your screen so I know what time it is because otherwise we're jumping all over the place now with all these wonderful video competency technologies. So, yeah, but here we are in still in a pandemic and some places are locked down and I have to say I'm quite used to it. Now, besides the digital transformation or preparedness where you weren't at Costco buying all the toilet paper and water up, were you prepared in other physical realms or ways as well besides the digital realm? It is quite kind of scary because I live in New York City and New York City was the first place to kind of get the large, large numbers aside from in China especially at Wuhan. It was kind of scary to see empty shells down there. I don't have a Costco membership but my mother does and she readily provides for any of those things safely. Should I need it? And yes, I do have a stack here just in case. That's another thing too. You advocate and I talk about climate change and sustainability as well. It's just like you think about the inventions from history and how intelligent the Italians were to invent of the day and how perfect it was for this kind of time frame. We can talk about that as well, but yeah, it did spur some certain behaviors and for me it was more about having food because I didn't want to go food shopping too much in a really large metropolitan city and where it's really crowded. So I kind of stocked up in the freezer and made sure I had flour so I can participate in the yeast and bread baking like a lot of our friends. Yeah, a lot more homemade meals. That's for sure. We're going to go deep right away. I just can't hold off on it because it's so important. So you and I are both Carl Sagan fans and I had his daughter Sasa Sagan on the show as well when her new book came out. But Carl Sagan has said many wonderful things and one of them is we are all star stuff with the basic elements of life and those are made up in the elements of our body are made in the interiors of collapsing stars and we are all star stuff and all star dust and you've heard me probably say this before but it eyes us intrinsically deeply to our earth and what's going on here on this planet as well as to the bacteria and other microorganisms on our world and I say first of all really what we need is to connect ourselves to our home to our planet to realize that we're an integral part of this eco bigger ecosystem on spaceship earth which is which is fabulous but then Carl Sagan goes on a little bit further and he says there's this this growing idea that of consciousness of awareness that the earth is seen as a single organism and and a single organism divided amongst itself is doomed and and really that is so true what we're seeing during this pandemic where we're pointing fingers to other places for the pandemic and we're divided on political beliefs and the civilization framework just doesn't seem to quite be working for us how do you feel about those things that Carl Sagan said although he was always an outer space he was always thinking but his deep love for our planet and and where we're at do you have some things you can try and relate to that at all absolutely I think Sagan was a wonderful educator and so eloquent in how he presented his perspectives and I loved his work and I still love it and you know we talked about you know the span of things and how we do so much right and and you know where you and I talk about the future all the time but when you look at it from the context of science and time I'm going to geek out because you want to go deep if you look at it from the span of science and time time is not a linear path time is curved you know there's much better scientists and physicists out there who can explain it than I can it's not a linear path it's curved and there are times when when pun intended there are moments when the time gets warped or you see fissures in there and we're looking into space for that science right and for the mathematics that proves those theories some of the some of which have been proven and in terms of how we are as human beings in an organ in a single organism going around in earth in that analogy we're also molecules made out of different things right one of the most in kind of posts that really moved me up late in the last week or so was this picture of the big bang right it's a it's not a real photograph because we didn't have cameras back then but it is kind of an illustration of it and it goes to say our solar system was once a swirling disc of gas and dust right the weird thing is that 4.6 billion years ago um and now that's still the case and it's still here except for we're just organized in human beings chairs glasses coffee cups plants um you know all this other stuff that we've created so everything you have is from that and everything that is for tomorrow right so you talk about the way our our ideologies right and politics occur or molecules we're constantly moving we're constantly in flux and we're constantly bouncing after each other and there'll be collisions and there'll be fissures and yet there's also some sort of symmetry too so does it make sense from a scientific perspective that we think our politics are divided of course if you think of it from a scientific better that is going to happen you always have positive and negative fields out there um that's proven it's it's not something that Cindy had said it's really something people have proven it in physics and won Nobel prizes for it but they will have positive medias and you will have opposing opinions because we're just a collection of all this star stuff as you want to call it or all this dust coming together and trying to find a form in order to settle so from a scientific perspective if you look at it that way and more say than like and you look at it from the you know 200,000 mile or plus right perspective yes from here down in climate earth in our own little containers that we have that we called our minds it's a little harder to kind of see that so he also said something else that was what he said I mean all his books cosmos a series and and he had things but he said you know human beings we are a way for the cosmos the universe to know itself and I find it so so true as someone you know it's no secret environmentalist climate big on climate action but my whole journey has been as a futurist as yours because I I need to look at that future and I need to understand the futures that we're going towards and the plans of what's coming up because it truly helps me to understand what we're experiencing now and what we need to change or do to reach those positive futures and you know a lot of people are really almost bitchy and moaning about the space going to Mars going to the moon and says you know we need to fix our planet in some respects I agree but no the only reason we know about any of our environmental problems about the the pulse the life flood the heartbeat of our earth is because we took that moonshot because we went to outer space with emerging technologies with innovations but it's not just emerging technologies and innovations what it is it's foresight and visions of the future that is a time clock that is warped because you're already planning you know for for for Mars maybe six months or you're planning months ahead of what needs to do when that launch occurs and what the trajectories and the math and the path is to get there and if we had not had those technologies and to look back at our earth we wouldn't have you know the the pale blue dot we wouldn't have um earth rise and and the blue marble and many of those wonderful things that change our view and gave us this overview effect or perspective and so the future pays a big role in both of our our our lives our work and what we do and you're also working as coo as a you know the future of using ai and and things of of media and videos which is is absolutely fabulous um this year this past or this 2020 to now as you just said what six more days until the next uh mission to mars but those are all not predictions pretty accurate of what's coming in the future and plans and and and things but boy did what don't you think it was absolutely amazing what we experienced in 2020 Elon musk and blue origin and and Jeff Bezos and all the launches and stuff during a pandemic where everybody's in lockdown it was a historical time indeed it was a historical time you know when the conversation about should we do this should or should we go um focus on our planet or should we go to space I think you know I have to challenge that and just say why can't we do both right why can't we do both what is keeping us is it money is it resources is it talent I don't think so we've proven as a species that we're quite intelligent and we're quite able to create economies and to create markets and cities and and initiatives etc we can organize and you know human beings are really good at organizing we're also good at disorder and chaos as well but we're really good at that so why can't we do both who says that we can't so I have to challenge that thinking and you're right I do agree with you it's more than just the discovery of pale blue you know the pale blue thought and the earthwise those are very aspirational and beautiful and certainly much needed to be reflect upon but it's also advancements in in healthcare it's advancements in materials that we're wearing it's advancement in you know how we're using our devices as well you know and what's coming in the future and as far as yes it is you know is an extraordinary time in 2020 before these rocket lodges and and you know new technologies and new spacecraft and already get astronauts to the space station etc but if you look back and rewind even a few years ago that was also not it was not planned it's not you can't the outcome is not planned right the predict it was a prediction it was still a lot of risk it was still unknown you know it's still unknown too in eight days time when perseverance lands on Mars but think of all the years they carried that emotion in itself but they persisted nevertheless they kept going right the scientists kept going and I think that that's probably something that's worthwhile to mention to people when they go into that is you know you talk we talk about the future but at the same time people like sagan people like you know the post that I saw really tells us that this particular moment in time right now present that I'm speaking to you over a digital screen is quite wondrous as well and don't lose that wonder because if you lose that wonder and you lose that ability to hope and to you know think of what the possibilities are you lose the creativity and you could lose the passion of the desire to be able to do beyond just one thing or beyond what you do in your day to day and I think that's the worst thing that could happen to a human being so before we move on to another topic besides Mars was the was it called the inceptor was the last Mars Mars probe that landed it was insight insight I know it was in something insight and it got there and it drilled down did the probe was successful and then did it did it that was it that was that was kind of a dead or did it did it continue to function for a little while after that oh oh yeah those things function I'm not I haven't actually tapped in in fact and looked back at the research from insight but it's still functioning I believe it's still a Mars I don't we haven't figured out the retrieval process and I don't think it was intended to be retrieved right if there's a talk of of science you know they're they're looking for life or what was life on on Mars water water you know signs of life actually not like the signs of life there's also discussions on ethics as well as we don't want to contaminate the planet because we know you know human beings are quite imperfect and we're we're also like you know we are the pathogens now right if we if we go into another planet it's just like we carry bacteria we carry all the all these other things we're quite dirty in a space in a space lab if you want to talk it in a lab sense we're not you know sterile in that sense where it's like things can be contained so you know there's all these wonderful discussions that are occurring and you can jump in on them quite yeah that's for sure I mean the reason I bring up insight is because on the way I mean I watched the I kind of lost track after it landed and and did the probe but on the way there were several I mean it was something like a six month journey or quite a few months journey and then in the process there were a few adjustment moments where they had a fire and adjust the the trajectory and then right before landing again address the trajectory for the landing and so it's it's basically planning well out into the future of the path of course it's a lot of it's a lot of foresight yeah a lot of math a lot of math and so yeah a lot of people kind of think it's magic it's hocus pocus and there's a lot involved in that whole aspect that I just really like but this is where I want to ask you explain a day data not to us and and what you what you do what you did how how that fits into the bigger picture and how moving forward what what are you doing what are you working on in terms of you talked about foresight and insight right in terms of that kind of framework the insight that I had at the time when the data knots program rolled out it was because my daughter was learning how to code in school in elementary school at the time and as in 2016 at the state of women's summit at the white house actually Michelle Obama rolled out this summit about women's goals and women's initiatives and kind of a score card of how the world was doing right and NASA rolled out this program called the data knots they had noticed that the hackathon that they have every year called space apps is an international hackathon it gets over 250,000 participants around the world it's the largest hackathon on the planet actually and they solve for challenges like sustainability you know material science you know what are the next things that we need for astronaut suits they even had a COVID-19 challenge last year which I was participating in as an ambassador for the program as well and they noticed that primarily the people who entered those challenges and competitions are really 85 men right or boys and so they realized you can't live and operate it never was an agency any of the space agencies are you know you need all sort of diverse sets of thinking life people etc right experiences and so they created this program in order to promote data science there's over 32,000 open data source sets there ESA has a ton of data as well through their portals that are available to people to use and kind of kind of play with and come up with solutions or ideas and innovations on that you know I was just researching that the other day to for talk and it's what that program is and so they the first cohort was in the spring of 2016 I think there was only about 20 25 women on that and then the second which was I where I came in was 50 and ever since then there's over 250 data knots around the world now and we do you know projects or we have discussions kind of like these webinars with NASA scientists we have them with you know chief knowledge officer at J.F. Johnson Space Center David Mesa he's now at headquarters he's a senior scientist now at NASA his role has changed as well as from time to time an astronaut at different site centers and then subject matter experts so it's really to teach people about data science there's a lot of days already data scientists there too that can really get in tactically into the data and create things but it really does take teens or to put things together and to move them forward and one of the projects that I wanted to work on and started writing a paper about was a simulation with the data tools that we have now on the friendship seven mission which John Glenn did his you know time up in space and it was documented in pre pre pre apollo 11 and the Gemini missions it was documented in the hidden figures movie right and I thought oh you know in our many years many decades forward let's solve it using data tools and what would that look like and then I wanted to do a Mars one projection you know with the team that we haven't gotten to that but so that's what the data knots does we go around some are you know incredible people in fact I want to give her a plug if it's okay it's like figure Riley is a data nut but she also worked in data too and she's been a wonderful STEM ambassador and spokesperson she was just finished her reign as the Miss Universe Ireland as well and now is on CBS unstoppable so like you know she's a public figure out there really amplifying her spotlight I'm doing it from a tech standpoint and business standpoint and then you have people like Karen Lopez who's a Microsoft you know guru and it comes to data and then an ambassador for that in her work right so you know we're all over the place in and in TJ Rich who's a who's also in at the BBC and she does amazing things with sound right and data and and all that stuff so the program's out there it's men and women now which is great and it's a it's a wonderful way to get people engaged you you had during the 2020 and during the pandemic time you had a lot of watch parties launch party watches and and things and I I I was watching as well and abated breath and it's amazing how futurist innovators those entrepreneurs out there who are really in this new space race and thinking about the future and the new sustainable transitions what you know what renewables what energies what built materials we need that the the things that they're doing in that even though a lockdown comes even though these shutdowns come the timelines the the things keep happening because it's not futuristic it's innovative it has social distancing space distancing it's it's their clean environments their different operating systems so that they can they're automated they're mechanized that those things can keep functioning but there are also bigger projections on the progress of human intelligence and and and innovations that some of those tools that even though they're using them to get to it to mars or the outer space and things that they're very much applicable to things that we could use here on this earth because it proves in it stands the test of that resilience test and the harsh conditions of outer space what would you say was your biggest moments of joy or some things or did you have multiple ones during during this time with what transpired and tell us why you were so excited about it so again in the framework that you presented a foresight and insight one of the insights that I had was you know I said we were traveling too much and we you and me because we're collectively say that I know you traveled a lot more but I was glad to be at home and simply I just wanted to sit still and and do my yoga classes and meditation which really keeps me grounded and really present in this moment so that's insight so that I can go out and later on and do other things and that insight for me was very helpful because then I did get to connect on that level and you know I have a bunch of plants here that I had gotten prior to the pandemic and they're these plants are natural air filters you can get them at your grocery store or at Trader Joe's right and people don't realize that they do filter out things like formaldehyde and carbon dioxide and stuff like that and they're part of nature right so connecting with nature on that level and being wondrous and it really became like my own little lab it's my own space station and that's what I had said and you know even on social media I was like this is your chance if you ever wanted to go to outer space your psychology is incredibly important your mental health is because it's an isolated closed environment right you you don't you're not going outside you're not going food shopping you're not going to the yoga studio you're not going you know to the store and window shopping or the coffee shop or anything that you're really at home in the closed environment with the minimal amount of things that you have because you can't carry too much weight is a problem right when you go on these rocket launches so that really kind of acknowledgement really is helpful and I think you know there's a lot of people who are struggling out there right now and they're not alone right we have our moments as well and it concerned me and so you know I decided to host the zoom calls with our internet friends daily because I knew that that isolation can be a problem for a lot of people especially who are very extroverted and used to jumping out of the place on the plane and whatnot and so I wanted it to be a landing page for them to feel like they're home so to speak right so that was another acknowledgement on that and lastly you know speaking of which I think people are so afraid about the outcomes and there's a lot of unfortunate decisions that occurred especially in the US you know I really feel it very personally because I saw you know I heard and I saw I was living in a city when you know 20,000 22,000 people passed away right and that's in itself is like two-thirds of a town sometimes in the middle of some European country or even in a village somewhere right so that kind of perspective and really understanding that you're a part of an ecosystem and not just the world revolves around you really changes your framework right I've already lived that way already that's just who I am but I think it really hit home to a lot of folks but one thing I want to say to people who kind of you know they told me this is the best thing they've heard this entire year is that we are going to have some of the most extraordinary astronauts from this time period and it's because of all the kids who are doing remote learning out there and I want to give a shout out to them and their parents who've had to raise them at home it's not easy to have a screaming child and whatnot but you're going to have one of the most extraordinary astronauts out there because they're going to know what these closed isolated environments are like they're going to keep themselves occupied they're going to know that it they'll come out of it right so and they're going to know like there's something on the other side waiting for them you know to be on that other shore as Sagan calls it right so so keep that in mind and and I hope that helps people out there when you think about it I definitely know that that will help people and that's beautiful it's also nice to you know whether you know not only this is our these homes have become our human zoos during the lockdown but as you so nicely said it they're kind of our new test of our own our own spaceship is it is it designed in such a way that it's healthy for us that we can survive for a little bit in this confined space and come clear with our thoughts there's a good friend of mine his name's Alexander Maria Fassbender and he's actually a space coach he he trains people in the psychological aspects of being an astronaut going out to outer space can you handle confined spaces can you handle being alone can you handle all the the things of that and mainly the mental and psychological aspects of having to figure out what you're going to do with yourself are you going to do with your time to be efficient and not crawl up in a ball and go into a coma or depression with the time and so a lot that was a big struggle for a lot of people especially when we were seeing the things like black lives matter we're seeing the things like the inauguration we're seeing the things with Belarus and and other craziness going on in the world and we're like what you know what's going on in our world so we really were like it's a fear that comes over I don't know if you have any more to say to that but it really I've said it many times it's such a horrible thing that we've gone through and it's been a wake up call shown the microscope on all our problems and the problems of bubble to the surface so now we definitely know how to fix them and we should move forward to fix them but on the flip side not only has it been better for you and I some fabulous things really happened for you during this time CEO of Clipper and you started this something new and other things so I would like you to go into both of those if you if you have some more. Sure so three things one to close our conversation on our little environments right is we also learned things like we don't need to consume as much less consumption and in what do we need the toilet paper do we need as much toilet paper no the solve was it is a bidet if you have one available to you right or you use less because there's not as much so less consumption that's also tells us that we have more resources than than we need right and can those resources also be divided across to people who really do need them as well and that kind of thinking the empathy and the compassion out there is really necessary in an environment where there's chaos and disorder and those movements Black Lives Matter etc there's a lot of people out there who are afraid they may not have a home they may not have food on their table and so I think of them and I try to support especially artists too who are out there struggling I try to support them if I can and you know whatever the circumstances are I think we just need to hear more about those so that we can people who have the means can help them right second whenever there's any advancements in in science especially in space travel there's always been some sort of civil disorder right and you think about the last time we went to the moon we had the civil rights movements in the United States you saw reflections of that now because of technology and social media you're going to see a greater ripple effect or a greater you know interpretation of that because the access to information is so much easier and that fingertips right it's literally in our cell phones and so that's not surprising because they're seeing what's happening they're asking these questions that we kind of talked about this today on why is it important to do this we are struggling here we don't have these rights and they're seeing certain countries do have them and they want that people want that I mean think about this new social media app that you and I have discovered and I won't say their name but you know China has closed its doors on them you know it's within a few days but during the few days time it was written about in the New York Times you know you have a bunch of Chinese citizens who are on it who are eager to have these conversations that you and I are having without censor and without recourse right so the dialogue and the discussion is necessary that's what's been missing in our contained environments you're going to see an amplification because we're we're hungry for news it's like you know when you think about the wars in the in the beginning of the 19th century or so people are hungry to hear anything on the radio right we're hungry to hear anything so on our radios that become our screens on our laptops who's become our twitter feeds and whatnot so we're hungry for knowledge we're curious and I don't know the ways of men as greatly as I'd like to and it's it's a it's a grand task and the people who are out there who are servicing that you know are I'm thankful for them to do that it's hard to be in those kind of leadership positions but you know to be controversial or not I do believe that in order for things to kind of move towards the future there needs to be a transfer of power to the younger generations there needs to be a transfer of wealth to more you know equitable circumstances so that basic needs are being met people are being heard um and that may be contrary and to um some of my more conservative friends but there is an absolute need for that and that's a much deeper discussion that that could occur it better I think in a round table than just one person off that but there is those are necessarily well when I speak to people at the United Nations or the World Economic Forum about what are the biggest things that we can do to draw down the human suffering problems we have on this earth or environmental problems you know most people don't know about Paul Hawkins book the drawdown and now it's in the drawdown review and we've got some new tools available but even the consensus with the United Nations and the World Economic Forum you ask 10 different people you get 10 different answers because there's not like this unified knowledge of what it is but there the real unified knowledge just to break it down very simple is um a global food reform it's the basic needs of humanities during this pandemic we've seen that everybody scrambled towards food but we've also realized our food systems was disrupted you know no more restaurants no more um uh fresh food and a farm disruption migrant workers all all sorts of things in that respect a huge food waste but that the second and third biggest way to fix human suffering and to draw down our human suffering and environmental problems is to empower women and girls and I see you as a strong advocate for women and girls and as an example not only in in the future of emerging technologies and coding but also as a voice of how do we get that a quality and how do we do that so I mean at this point in time for me is um I know it's just us but could you give us some some wisdoms of what you do to empower women and girls and and what your messages are and you know whether it's multiple messages uh probably also very indigenous and local to whoever you're speaking to your audience is and and and what their needs are but what are some of the messages that you deliver to help women and girls um I've been very fortunate in my entire career and even in my younger years um as a youth to have had mentorship I've had people advocate for me um complete strangers who don't even look like me um open up opportunities and and I kind of will see almost every one of their faces in that because those are moments that really um touched me as a as a person and as a as an impressionable young person too right so I I have that I carry that with me and part of the things is that um in the last few decades I spent the time mentoring young women and and also men of color right um in order to help them with their careers because I realized how important it was for me and just the knowledge and even the security and knowing that I'm seen and recognized is is is um at that time right it is important for someone else is to be recognized and seen and if you don't see it you won't have representation and that's exactly what you're talking about in terms of the SDG goals and what people talk about at the World Economic Forum if there's not any representation there then people can't see that future right and you can't just build and do it yourself sorry um so that's very important and I'm just one of many people who are doing that out there the second thing is um education is incredibly important you know I spent time both on the tech side and as well as on the academic side in opening those opportunities up when somebody comes to me and and say you know would you consider this I really seriously do consider it even if I've never met them before um one of the things I'm really excited about is you know uh Google came over um Dan Feld who's also from internet um came over a few years ago and said would you be interested in doing we're launching this startup accelerator would you be interested in being mentors like sure it's no problem it's kind of what I've been doing before it's just you know now with a fancy name attached to it and you know so I became of that and because of that um this professor um Amy Yaboa from Howard University came over to me and said I found you on the database I'm building an AI data lab at Howard University would you help me you know be my mentor and I said absolutely what do you need like literally she didn't even have to explain it and I was like yes absolutely right when you talk about what has happened in the current events you know what are the things in the data that's not there right and I said this absolutely needs to be done because you know society is is is saying it's screaming it's yelling it's protesting it's demonstrating and illustrating that um this is needed and so you know I she's now going to be funded by a major American foundation um to build this lab at Howard and and I am very fortunate and you see potential when you see potential in town like that and drive it makes what you do very easy and you're just long for the ride I'm along for the ride because she's an extraordinary and exceptional person and she's an educator as well right so you know she takes off a lot of boxes in my in my book um and she's going to affect future generations right in in what they do and what they want to learn about data science or they want to participate more because she is that representation and and you know people when they hear it they think of the other university next to a river in New England right and I said no no no this is the one in Washington DC it's not it sounds like it but it's not that and and they immediately go for the prestige and I was like no you need to understand that this public university or this private university is important as just as an equally important you know I've been in rooms where there are a bunch of heads of states in there and diplomats and you get tired of telling them who you are right and and my answer is that when I go in those moments I'll say to them I'm here as a private citizen and if anything across the world in the last four years five years right the private citizen's voice is equally in their vote is equally as important as a celebrity or a head of state right so those kind of moments are are quite exceptional and Howard University is the the school and alma mater of the vice president of the United States now Kamala Harris and um also um the uh respectful and in wrestling peace you know chat with those men who was Black Panther and Wakanda so extraordinary people um as well and some people may not have seen they're known so here you go that's beautiful we skipped over a little bit but that's okay because we're in a circle back I want to know more about your new position as CEO of Clipper I want to know more about Clipper and uh also some pretty cool things happened during this crazy time for Clipper so tell us about that yes Clipper that we were that was the third thing that we were in talking about but we you and I will go down these down these paths I love that I love it um Clipper is um you know I talked about having those Zoom calls every day and during those Zoom calls in New York is pretty scary right um we I wanted to know what the uh information about what the coronavirus is going to be any public policy you know discussions or any um announcements from the CDC or Dr Fauci here in the US and then at the same time I really wanted to know what the global economy was like because it's going to affect our work and and our positions right on a on a financial level and whether or not companies would be salient and be able to survive and so um you know it was a based on a need of meeting to be at multiple Zoom or WebEx or teams meetings in these wonderful media companies like Bloomberg and Axios and Politico you know politics was a very big deal back then it still is a very big deal now and all these discussions and you just can't be in the same place at once anymore right because we're all confined to one screen that's what this pandemic has done or one thing at a time and so I wanted to have a library that I could go back to as you're in the Trinity Library and those media meetings that have been recorded um and be able to go back to them at a much quieter time when there wasn't a lot of noise happening and really kind of focus and pay attention on those those moments um and so Clipper what what we've done is we are creating um the AI and the machine learning technology in order to help people with the meetings that they missed right and kind of condense that conversation to only the snippets that you really need you can still view the whole entire meeting but it really just cuts down to those moments so um in the context of our talk today if you just wanted to hear in the beginning our discussion about Mars you know you could just click on a button and it would just go to that point in Mars but if you decide you want to come to here at this discussion we're talking about Clipper you can do that as well right so the entire video is still intact and and that's what we're doing and it's very super exciting and we're learning a lot about how people talk and be at meetings and really helping save time so they can focus in the moments that matter I absolutely love it so you're fortunate enough to let me in on a beta of it and we'll try it out on this call actually yeah but there's some tons of neat functionality and probably more to come where it's not just kind of the the clips and the chaptering and and and getting it into uh the cliff notes or the highlights uh highlight reel but there's a lot of a lot of other things around that also for live where people can make comments and interact and and do some really nice things with it so I wish you tons of luck and I'm excited to to be let in on it and and and be part of it and we'll we'll get inside ideas uploaded and and hopefully you guys will be able to develop more and we'll be able to improve our long drawn out deep dives the kind the kind of reason for that I mean I guess this is uh important to bring this in is you have decades of experience knowledge and education and work that's gone in this and to to break that down into ted talk into the quick elevator pitch it just doesn't do it justice um for all for all your years of work of that and most of the people I have on the show they've written books and thick books thin books and you know studied and done years of research and then say oh just give me the cliff note version you know I I want people to get uh let's remove the bias let's get into the sense making and let's do a deep dive about who you are why what's the journey because there's a bigger story a humane story this humane technology uh technological revolution that we've kind of got to get on to out of this uh bashing and negativity or division that we kind of make technology humane and also work better for us and so I see so many beautiful things with clipper that could happen and do and not only in academia but also in just the media that we disseminate how we do that more efficiently and and get the concise use of that and so uh on a deep dive long discussion where mark talks too long this clippers probably fabulous and maybe not I think it is um first of all mark you're wonderful and you make anybody shine and and even feel more and look more intelligent which is wonderful and then the second thank you so much for saying that about clipper and uh in those kind words um I want to make I want to also make sure that other people can have access to it too so if they want to have access to it and and you know play with it for free we're offering five hours of processing for everybody you can go to apps dot clipper dot a i a p p dot clipper cl i p r dot a i and sign up for an account and upload a couple of videos to see what we're doing with that so um yeah in a nutshell I just love to learn and love to read so that's who I am and in that shell and that's what my body of work and professional life has been so you know it's a lead and to quote um our mutual friend Yossi Vardy right who talks about uh he's a venture capitalist in in Israel um to quote him is like you should be planning for your life to be working to probably your 70s now before it was what 55 I think or 59 was the retirement age 65 in Germany now we should be planning our work lives to be 70 plus and when you do that you realize there's a lot of time yeah depending on where you are to do things and so are you going to be doing something you know you're lucky if you're doing something for 60 years right uh and whatnot but if you're going to be doing something like what it what is it that you want to do and so take that take seize seize that opportunity card to be in right yeah make it efficient yeah make it make it worth it you know don't don't waste those moments and that you know that goes back to Carl Sagan and many others as Neil DeGrasse Tyson says it so well as well trillions of trillions of trillions likelihood that we were able to be here on this earth to be born it's uh such a wonderful gift and unlikelihood uh chance that we have and we should make the most of it you know and even greats like um Steve Jobs you know live every day like it was your last and you know really make the best and most use out of it and part of that is the tools of the future the emerging technologies the data the to use them effectively instead of e-junk or e-smog or e you know e-waste that we really figure out how to get concise and get into the things that we need and and uh it's a different form not only now knowledge platform but um of this collective intelligence that uh is combined and gives you a real-time update of of human collective intelligent that gives us that springboard off into these great futures and and can get us on that exponential path that we need to be to keep up with our exponentially growing world so I mean we could go deeper and deeper like crazy but I have this hard hard question it's the only one I'm going to give you today um and it's the burning question WTF but it's not the swear word although you probably said that maybe once this past 12 months uh it's what's the futures what's the futures for me yeah oh gosh for me it's really hard when you're a yoga yogi and you live in the present right um if you're anxious you're fear the future right and if you're fable and whatnot you know things will work out so you have to decide which one of those that you're going to be and I've kind of laid my path and I've now been on this path for 12 years and a path with clipper now and a path as a mother a path as a data not you know there's all these different paths and somehow they go kind of in that same direction on on this ocean that I'm living in that's that's my world and so the future is really to continue this journey and to continue connecting people to continue to talk about these things and really listen right my my future is all about listening right now and understanding what is it that people want and people need and they made those opportunities will come so I'm at on the boat where it says it'll all work out somehow and you know I don't want to be too naive you know those are very big problems that you deal with with food insecurity and climate change and we can talk offline on how we how people can get involved etc and I'll play my part do my part that's it pretty simple we'll definitely put in the show notes so all your websites and all your links the clipper link that you mentioned we'll put in the show description so that people can easily get to those that that's just a given and it's so true I mean the not only at the beginning of our call we kind of talked how we met and how we know each other but the last time we saw each other physically a person person was at DLD with Yossi Vardi who you mentioned and many other greats of our our friends at the DLD conference in in Munich and we went out a wonderful dinner and then later kind of moseyed on down to the world economic form and in Davos and you know and then just things went crazy but we were started out the decade with the decade of action of bang I mean there was so many smiles and wonderful things going on and being discussed and I see that that what what's occurred now is there's been a laser focus of what we're doing we're saying we're not going to waste our time on this unimportant things anymore or not get muddled up but we've got this focus of where we need to go in the future but also what are the new operating systems what are the new models for the future and so when I ask you that question you know what's what's the what's the future what's the futures because it's really plural without those plans without those goals without knowing us we're you know we're the ship without a rudder we're the a boat without any direction or spaceship without any direction of where we're going and I I believe that the people I speak to on the show and you who are doing fabulous things are people who have a vision of the future they have that foresight which is a roadmap and a plan for me the plan and we can you know we'll talk about it offline obviously but it is the sustainable development goals and the Green New Deal and donut economics and and planetary boundaries those big plans that are taking us to these resilient more desirable futures and I only have really three questions left for you before we end our call today and they're very selfish questions for my listeners because I want to give them something that empowers them that uplifts them that they can say that's something I can apply to my life and so if there was one message that you could depart to my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that has the power to truly change their life what would it be your message oh yes I have two things there's no better time than the present to start to get to get started there's no better time right you're in a lockdown so you're not going to the bars mostly you aren't going to the bars and stuff like that there's no better time to get started and start figuring out what those plans are for the futures it's kind of pretty obvious where my future is going to be pointing towards it's you know I hold a title of NASA data not that kind of tells you one and then the second which I love and I've said it before in other podcasts is innovation is where the crazy people have stature think about that I love it absolutely I love Joseph Campbell I used to run a Joseph Campbell group I think what what we called it is so long ago it's over 20 years ago but just the hero's journey and and all the follow your bliss Joseph Campbell is great but I've got a question for you and it's really for the young young innovators that are in your field looking at towards space looking towards data and emerging technologies those who are even close to the field that you're in what what are things that they should be looking for are ways that they can make a real impact where would you say do your focus or these are ways that you can truly make big impacts in our day and age today well first of all I I do have to gently correct you that was Bill Campbell not just Bill Campbell not Joseph Campbell right Bill Campbell was the he's the Silicon Valley expert and coach he was the coach of the UCLA basketball team and whatnot and he was extraordinary so that's Bill Campbell and then the young innovators is people talk about with with care I think there's a little bit of controversy sometimes they talk about passion right it's like find something that you're passionate about and what you mean by passion it is not just that you you think about it all the time you put your energy and efforts into it so it's really a question about energy it's like where do you put your attention that's energy what do you use your words that's energy because you're expending it you're using it you're spending energy in order to talk about it what are you writing about what are you reading about that's a level of energy so you know find what it is that that passion is and it will change and that's okay but when you're excited about it you can hear it in one person's voice you can hear it in their face they're smiling you can see it right so find what that is and then find somebody else who you admire and who you want to talk to and don't be afraid to reach out to them right and and say what you said has really moved me would you have 15 minutes to talk to me about this because I think sometimes that's often intimidating even still for me you know there's certain people that I want to talk to you and I just say you know what I'm just in the center where LinkedIn invite anyway and just explain who I am and why you know and I was like I really thought your comment today about the futures is a very interesting question Mark Buckley I'd really like to know more about your you and I said that in the beginning before we got on the call you're like Mark I want to be in a fireplace and just tell me about your childhood because you know we may have known each other you know somehow I don't know we may have known each other or we're similar childhoods did you play with dirt did you you know watch Sesame Street you know in those kind of things so you're looking for connection and that's that's the whole point of it right so passion and connection and then patience right give you patience is a very difficult thing for a lot of people especially young innovators right you feel like time is readily available to you and you need to grasp it and obviously which is true right but there's also with experience and that's a nicer way of saying age you see that yeah there are patterns sometimes and there's moments where it's just everything just falls into place and you just go right and that's what you're trying to learn when I say about patience just trying to find those moments that kind of just go go go go and then it becomes pretty easy and a lot of people like Oprah and whatnot have talked about it but that's that's what I want to say to the people out there who are starting their careers who are starting in school and and and wanting to be in space and all this other stuff it's just like continue to do that but also how can you affect the people around you because that's a very important component as well right so in a positive way right so let me be clear in a positive way and then you see and let the cards lie and see what happens that's beautiful yeah and that's so true I have a friend John P. Strelicki he wrote a bunch of great books The Big Five for Life and the White Cafe and he says it's very similar to you he says you know if you you know your purpose you know what you want to do there's you're you're saying I want to be like like Cindy or I want to do something similar in that direction then the most important thing is to find the who to find those who have done it who are already in that position who are already thinking in that direction reach out contact them read their books if you can't get in touch with them personally go out there and find out how you can kind of put yourself in their shoes by reading their books listening to their talks watching their videos so that you can get it straight from them how they made that journey most people that I know even to Elon Musk very open about telling you how they made that journey and how they have done that craziness and that's what I hear out of what you just departed and the bill thing I heard Joseph Campbell so my hearing is getting bad but I wouldn't known Bill Campbell because uh I've been honestly I've never heard of them I don't watch sports I'm a bad per I'm not the best then mark I have homework for you you need to read Billy a billion dollar coach that's his book it's about his life and it was written I believe Eric Schmidt was one of the writers and somebody else I forget I apologize for the second one but um read billion dollar coach it's about his life and he impacted a ton of people in Silicon Valley these are the people who built the technology futures that we're living in presently now and even state jobs he affected so you know it's uh he's an extraordinary person and um ton of people went to his funeral and you know it's where he's remarkable at least uh unless I'm having a get an Alzheimer's earlier uh he was you are general magic or anything on any of those teams right or uh original IBM or anything he was just a he was no I he was I forget which it was yeah then I might have might have heard but uh yeah I guess I'm getting early Alzheimer's sorry you're not yeah that's a positive thing no but if you did if you did if you thought that he was that into it and here's the thing like you knew that he was at some sort of big tech company somehow right and whatnot so you you've heard of them you just don't recall the context and that's not Alzheimer's it's just a matter of context so thank you you're so kind uh and and the last question um I have for you is really what have you experienced or learned and and your journey your professional journey so far that you would have loved to know from the start oh there's so many and I do I write letters to myself sometimes right and read them later um it's just the first and foremost I think is to be kind to yourself right that kindness is is a rare rare thing right now especially during times when people don't have their basic needs and whatnot is um that goes a really long way you know if you're not being heard if you're not part of a majority if you're not um that having that level of respect to be kind somebody uh to somebody is is really really important and and I wish that I could have said that to myself when I was younger because you know you have a drive you have something to accomplish you feel like you need to go to a certain school or you need to have this um it's it doesn't matter I'm still in the same room as he is I'm still in the same room as presidents of the United States I'm still talking on the screen with the amazing Mark Buckley you know it it really doesn't matter yeah you're seeing my head swell already well it's the Trinity library is a is a really big library so you've got lots of room to grow I've got lots of room to grow well that that's all I have for you today Cindy unless there's something that you didn't get to say or you'd like to say before we say goodbye that was that's all I have I I do um I do want to share one last thing and I had thought about this last night when I was thinking about what we were talking about today is one of my favorite pieces of work of art that I saw recently was Thomas Cole's um course of empire right it's a series of five extraordinary large paintings it's sort of like Turner-esque kind of landscapes you know which is not usually a genre that I gravitate towards but I was incredibly drawn to this I saw it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a couple years ago with my mother actually and it's it and this applies to you this is why I chose this to speak about this is that it talks about a very pastoral image is the first and that's um you know set in its savage state so it's just land trees nothing then you go into an Arcadian you know more I guess that's more pastoral where there's a farm there right and there's a landscape of that then you get into um consummation of the empire and when cities are starting to be developed and whatnot and there's like a lot of abundance and you think of like Rome in its heyday it was like a lot of things people had a lot of things and there was a lot of consumption right then it goes into kind of a destruction period where there's strife it's talking about the evolution of civilization right there's strife and then the last one is decay and destruction where the cities have tumbled you know it's the columns are no longer there that was in the heyday where people were partying and all this other stuff now it's just that you know what takes over nature it's now covered with the plants and stuff in nature and that's just the cycle of life and how our planet works and how you know nature will win in that and I thought the equalizer to humanity would have been cancer but I was wrong it was actually a little virus right um that has been an extraordinary equalizer to societies around the world and so uh and leave you with that to think about and for us to grab a drink and uh or sit by that fireplace and talk about because I really want to talk about those things with these paintings with you so I would I would love nothing more we're going to have to do that very soon yeah maybe maybe I'll be at the hatch uh like you said in September I'll have to in Montana yeah in Montana a lot of Montana big sky Montana and call up a yara and make sure get that in but taking um yeah because that's real close to my family too so I'll visit my I'm gonna go a four-time grandpa so uh all my kids are growing up and just became a fourth grandpa my is I got a new grand you're too young oh my god Soraya Soraya is her name and she's now I think four months old so uh boy yeah I need to go squeeze those and but that would be great to see you and have those discussions it is there is this big cycle of life and so I truly love how you you've wrapped that up because it's it's so wide on and we'll put the link to that maybe we can find something online where somebody absolutely absolutely I it's traveling it's going around and doing the tours but I'll absolutely send you the link so that you have that and can see exactly what I'm talking about they're extraordinary so and they're like the size of a wall and massive what we're we're gonna we're gonna build back uh something different and better and it's this great reset that's in harmony with uh with our biome with our symbiotic earth and nature so that we can really have that we've seen many collapses before it's there's been more than 20 civilization framework collapses on our planet and uh and uh very educated very civilized very uh super infrastructures and they're not here anymore but we're gonna beat that cycle and and uh and really create better worlds I really thank you so much Cindy it's been a sure pleasure have a wonderful day and we'll see each other on the ch uh and for sure a hat to call up yarrow thanks so much mark it's great to spend this time with you thank you take care bye everybody hi bye bye


You have a treat in store. Marcus Ackser is going to talk to us today. Marcus did his PhD in architecture, physics, and then he did a postdoc in Geneva at CERN. And then he spent the last 10 years at Yilish Research Center working with Carl Zillis and Catherine Ammons, and now leads the fiber mapping group in Yilish. And he's going to talk about a wonderful technology called polarized light imaging, 3D polarized light imaging. The structural connectome goes microscopic. Marcus. Thank you very much, Ellen, for the nice introduction and for inviting me. Yeah. Let's go to neuroanatomy, and I would like to introduce you into a technology which we call 3D PLI or polarized light imaging. And I will tell you briefly what we can do with this technology and what we plan to do with this technology. And our general mission is, as follows, we would like to reveal the fiber architecture in postmortem brains based on whole brain processing, whole brain analysis, reconstruction at microscopic resolutions, which in the end means to us that we have to deal with terabyte to petabyte of data sets. Let me start with a wonderful example given by Ellen and his group by Catherine and her group a couple of years ago, three years ago. It's the big brain, and it's the only and the very first brain model which has been reconstructed completely from traditional histology, from traditional cytoo architecture based on seven and a half thousand single sections measured at a few micron resolution, and they were able to come up with a complete 3D volume at a level of something like 20 micron. And this is of course something we would like to go to also with respect to the fiber architecture. However, you will see during the talk that we need some few other ingredients than needed for this type of cytoo architecture. In general, of course, the key elements are quite simple, right? You need to know the right technique to section the brain. You have to deal with the imaging technology however it looks like for polarized light imaging. We need a very specific type of image analysis, and as you will see, this will be a very visual type of presentation. Visualization becomes more and more important, especially for the high resolution data set, but it's also getting more and more challenging to visualize all these details we are able to reveal. The next step after single section analysis is 3D reconstruction of course, and afterwards we can start the 3D type of fiber orientation analysis. So I will go through this type of workflow in the next few minutes. So just to let you know what we do with the brain, we cut it and we destroy it. And we have to do cryo-sectioning, which means we have to freeze the whole brain down to minus 80 degrees. It is put into a freezer and cut with a very large microtone. And you see everything is done by hand and you introduce for each section very individual deformations, cuts, whatever you can imagine. And this is really the main problem in reconstructing a whole human brain out of these deformed sections in the end. So to give you some numbers, we section at 60 micron thickness. The sections are not stained at all, so the technology utilizes the so-called birefringence of the tissue. And for this we don't need any staining. And we add up something like two and a half thousand, three thousand sections per human brain. We have to measure at one micron level. What we also do during the sectioning process is we take so-called block-face images. And you see here on the left hand side, it's just one of these images. You see here we have a barcode in the background. This barcode allows us to very precisely reconstruct later on all the single block-face images. We have for each single section. And the result is shown on the right side. The pixel or voxel sizes are in the order of 60 by 60 by 60 micron. And we use this type of dataset as a reference to later on reconstruct the deformed sections measured by polarized light imaging. So what is polarized light imaging and how did it all start? We found one publication from Cobinius Brodmann early 1900. He wrote in one of his publications, it wasn't in German, but I translated it for you, of course. So I stumbled upon the idea of formalin fixed tissue much later and realized with satisfaction that formalin fixation does not impair the birefringence of myelinated nerve fibers. Therefore we can study nerve fibers hardened and conserved in formalin with polarization microscopy. And this is exactly what we do in 3D polarized light imaging. Why we call it 3D will become clearer in the content of my talk. So we have set up in Yulish two different types of microscopes. One is called the large area polarimeter. And this guy is a one-shot imager, which means we can image a large human brain section with one imaging shot. This means we have a limited resolution of 64 micron pixel size. And each file size is quite small, so it's just 30 megabyte. On the other hand, we developed together with a small company close to Yulish a real microscope, which allows us to target 1.3 micron sized pixels. Which means each large human brain section will be composed of about 100,000 by 100,000 image pixels we have to deal with. And this also means we have 40 gigabyte of data per image. Which means times 2,500 sections we collect a lot of data just already in the imaging acquisition phase. So the large area polarimeter looks like this, so we have a tilting specimen stage. We put the unstained section into the setup and we rotate different optical filters around this setup. And if you have a look through this section, we start to see strong changes of intensity while rotating all these filters. And here's a movie how it looks like when we do the measurement. On the left side, you see the simple setup. This is composed of two polarizers. They have a very specific orientation. With respect to each other, we have a quarter wave retarder, which is also rotatable. And we have the tissue, which is lighted with an LED panel and we take all these situations with a CCD camera. And you see on the right side, especially in the white matter regions, you see very, very strong effects. Due to the fact that the myelin sheath of the axons is heavily birefringent. And I have put two monitors on three different points within the tissue and you see underneath here the measurement. In general, we measure some sinusoidal curves, but these curves, they are different in terms of amplitude and or phase. And this is exactly what we can use to infer different orientations of fiber tracks, of single fibers, depending on the size of the resolution. And to give you an example, when we measure one pixel, we see this sinusoidal curve here down here. We do a fitting in the analysis and the mean value of this sine curve is called transmittance, which is shown on the top left side. The transmittance is quite similar to things like myelin stained images. It's just an image of the light extinction in the setup. Then we have the face of this curve, which is called direction. It looks like the image in the middle and the amplitude defines the strength of the birefringence of the tissue and it is shown on the top right. It's called retardation. And based on direction and retardation, we try to infer the three-dimensional orientation, local orientation of the fiber structures within each single pixel. And you see I've already indicated that we assign specific orientations, fiber orientations to specific colors in our images. And that's the reason why the next images you will see look so very pretty and impressive. So this is an example of a result showing the 3D orientation of the fibers on the left-hand side. You see it's a visual system in a vervet monkey brain.  The left one has been taken with a microscope at 1.3 micron and you can immediately see and contrast single fibers inside the cortex into different layers of the cortex. And with a large area polarimeter 64 micron, we can have a look at the whole brain to see what's the long-distance connection between the different fibers. And in the end, and that's very important and this is different from most other microscopic technologies. With PLI, we can infer contrast without staining and we can give these contrast specific orientations. So you have more information within each thin section than we usually have with any kind of staining. So this type of analysis doing the fitting of the different sinusoidal curves is of course very compute intensive if you consider 2,000, 2,500 sections, millions, billions of pixels. So at some point we had to decide to utilize high-performance computing to utilize supercomputing environments. Unfortunately, we are very close directly next to us to the really supercomputing center. So it was about four or five years ago when we started to think about how to organize analysis workflows on the supercomputing. And everything currently starts at the lab. Of course, we collect a lot of information, metadata, just from the lab settings and we collect a lot of images. And these are currently all organized and managed in HDF5 file containers. So this really helps us to keep the metadata information and the imaging data together. Plus it helps us to very quickly access the data because parallel IO on HDF5 files is quite well established. So based on this lab data we can access from the supercomputing environment. In our case it's a Eureka multipurpose supercomputer in Jülich. We acquire the data and run the analysis section by section. And this analysis includes the fitting of the data, it includes cleaning of the data. For example, we apply independent component analysis to get rid of noise and dirt on the measurements. We have to do some automated kind of segmentation so we are not interested in having some background in our data. And at the end when we do the highest resolution measurements we measure them tile by tile which are overlapping. We have to do a kind of stitching to end up with a whole human brain without any hole. And to give you an example, so it's shown like this. In the end we would like to come up with this colorful fiber orientation map. Just to give you one example from the workflow, it's a segmentation algorithm. We have implemented a seeded region growing algorithm you see on the top left there. That's one tile of an image of a PLI measurement. And the green part above is the background and the tissue is now highlighted in red. And the algorithm tries to understand which pixel, which image pixel belongs to which. And in this context we tested different situations using just CPU based supercomputing or using CPU and GPU input. And we saw that we can easily get to a factor of 20 faster performance just using the GPUs for the metrics analysis of this region growing algorithm. So when we do all this in general it's not only interesting to have a look at the human brain. I mean this is always the main goal but usually you start with smaller brains as everybody does. And for us it's of course the red or the mouse brain, it's shown on the left. It is the monkey brain which is the next level of size and complexity for us. And of course the human brain. And all these brains they all exhibit this kind of birefringence. And that's pretty nice. So let me show you how a highest possible resolution human brain section looks like. It's a visualization used by MicroDraw. It's an open source project here from the Pasteur University and from the Pasteur lab in Paris. And you see the incredible complexity of a single human brain section. The different colors again mean different orientations. When I switch the gray-valued images these are all the different modalities we can also extract. And this is what you have to deal with if you want to reconstruct the connectome at the level of a few microns. Or even better. So this is an example of the hippocampus if you want to address this. And you see all these single information you can get with polarized light imaging. You can even see in the preliminary image there were some dark dots in the measurement. This can be seen in this transmittance maps in this light extinction maps. And they show fiber bodies. So we can in principle infer both fiber bodies, cell bodies and nerve fibers with polarized light imaging without any kind of staining. So all this already takes a lot of computation time. But the next step is even worse. So we want to rebuild the brain again. And that means we have to take all these sections. We have to find corrections, non-linear corrections for the different sections. And there are many approaches on the market. One has been very nicely demonstrated on the big brain and is even improved. And I just want to show you yet another one. But this is not an approach you can just apply onto your measured images. You already have to have a quite good agreement between the adjacent sections when you want to apply this technique. And this technique is a global approach. And this global approach includes these block-face images. You've seen quite at the beginning of the presentation. And we have the PLI measurements. And these PLI measurements are optimized to their corresponding block-face images. But they are also optimized in the local neighborhood. And we do this procedure for all sections at the same time on the complete supercomputer. So that we have a global simultaneous kind of optimization process. The deformation model we use is a B-spline model. And you can see here in this movie what you can in principle do on single sections. And it's immediately clear we have to be careful where to move which pixel. Because we have to recover the anatomy. It's not that we just want to have a nice brain volume. It should be as realistic as possible. That's always an issue. And it's always important to have a neuroanatomist who are able to tell us if the reconstruction is more or less realistic. From whatever knowledge it can be said. But you see what you can really do. And the optimization process tries to optimize this single section to the corresponding block-face image. The optimizer has been realized here by means of a Markov random field approach. Because the optimization process has in principle so many free parameters that it is not computational. If we would do it by a simple one-to-one optimizing process. Here are some speed-up curves. Of course we have to go to the supercomputer. And we try different types of GPUs to solve the problem. And with nowadays GPUs we are able to reconstruct 180 sections within 18 minutes. Just do one optimization run. Which is fantastic. And usually you have to do many iterations on the reconstructions to come up with a proper result. So what do we gain after all these processing reconstructions? Here's an example of the red brain. So that's the coronal section. The fiber orientation map. As I told you visualization becomes more and more important for us. We realized that there are so many information inside a single section already. That it makes sense to think about reducing this information to the observer. And this kind of, we call it spotlight imaging, is quite interesting. So you can go to the data and you can manipulate by hand the lookup, the color code. And so you can project out your orientations you would like to see. So it's a kind of virtual tractography. So this is the first 3D volume reconstructed at the level of 60 micron voxel sizes. And this is a virtual sectioning through the reconstruction. And you can see we can already quite nicely reconstruct. For example the corpus callosum at a quite precise level. However you still see misalignments. So dealing with this post-mortem reconstruction means continuously improving the curacy of the setup. But at least it's the first time that we could make a kind of proof of principle to show that it is feasible to reconstruct the fibers. And the next step of course is as usual you always need a reference space to provide the data, to share the data and for the rodent brain it's clearly the voxel space. And this is a project in the framework of the human brain project. We are doing together with Oslo University and Jan Bjalli's group. And we managed to bring this PLI data set into the voxel space and applying in the next step some anatomical segmentations to the data sets. It's shown like this. So this is also a way of reducing the immense number of information you get. And this is the reconstructed red corpus callosum based on the segmentation in the voxel space. If you're interested in this type of work you should meet my colleague Nicole Schubert tomorrow at the poster. Next size, vervet monkey brain. It looks like this, right? You can identify many, many anatomical structures. And we were able to reconstruct a couple of weeks ago for the first time 60 sections at 1.3 micron resolution. And you see it here, it's a cut out in the basal ganglia region. And you can nicely see this is the reconstructing just of the amplitude of the birefringent signal. So there's no orientation in it, there's no tractography done. And you can already see that you can identify in some regions where the fibers are not too dense single fiber or small fiber tract. So clearly the last step is the human brain. For this we did the first measurements on 180 coronal sections and we reconstructed them. And what you can see in the next movie is in the back you see the retardation image which means the amplitude image of our PLI measurement. And here you can see the extracted orientation vectors, also color coded. And you see the next 10 consecutive orientation vectors in depth so that you can see how the orientation changes in depth. And we start with let's say MRI resolutions at 1 millimeter. And so we are going to one region, we increase the resolution because we do have the resolution to do that. And now we move into depth and you can nicely see how the extracted orientations they agree with an anatomical basis. But keep in mind these orientation vectors they are in 3D, it's just like a projection now within the image. And now you see the combination of the two measurements of the high resolution microscope and the lower resolution large area polarimeter. So we can go into the same section, do a much higher measurement and now you see within the sagittal stratum crossing fibers. It's usually it's a field with fibers coming out of the coronal section. But here you can still see crossing fibers within this region. So in principle with polarized light imaging we can really address this kind of the idea of Google brain in future. So high resolution is nice but how to integrate these data into well-known technologies such as diffusion MRI which is much, much coarser. And which needs in some cases, especially for tractography, some guidance. And we thought about this problem also and quite recently we came up with an idea that we can have a look into our high resolution data. This is a cut out here. You see a patch of fibers running in different directions, they are crossing. And what we can do is we can make statistics on single regions of interest. Statistics means we create orientation vector histograms on a sphere with the contents of the different orientations measured within for example this region here. And afterwards we fit this distribution with a circular harmonics. And so we end up with a very MRI like diffusion MRI like data set. And this will help us in the end to rescale to find similar features in the different modalities. So coming to the end it looks like as if we can fill a gap which is present between the MRI world and the really ultra high resolution world of small samples here with our PLI technology. And in far future of course we will add more modalities. Receptor architecture is quite interesting. We would like to combine cyto architecture, fiber architecture with receptor architecture into let's say multi-model, multi-scale brain models of different species. And with that I would like to thank you very much. Thank you to all my colleagues and my team in special. Thank you very much for listening. That was fascinating and so entertaining Marcus. Questions for Marcus? So is that giving you a way of seeing how much you lose when you're doing diffusion imaging? Is that like I'm trying to think of ways of using that as validation of or not validation of diffusion imaging. Given the recent papers on like with the tracers in the macaque. I think we get an idea what we lose if you would like to call it. But it's even more interesting to see the other way around. When you measure in diffusion MRI some kind of steric distribution of fibers. This might help us to understand why it is the case and why this is the case in the very specific region you are looking at. So it's really like a guidance and maybe understanding a bit more on the deep microstructure of the fibers. So you look as though you need a major increase in computing power. So is the extra scale, this is another major use of extra scale computing and guessing. Because you're simply not going to be able to do a whole human brain anytime soon given current computing technology. For the reconstruction it would be already possible to use the current setups. Currently it's more a limitation in measurement time. But of course if you in the end if you want to do a tractography on the high resolution data. That's the next step and for this you certainly need the next extra scale generation of supercomputers.  And the question has often come up could we do vessel tracking from slice to slice. And the issue is always those very very high resolution jaggies are very hard to get rid of unless you have massive local number name warping. Do you have the same issues in PLI with fiber tracking from slice to slice? Yes, if you want to do fiber tractography at the microscopic level we are still not precise enough for doing this registration. Maybe not at one micro micro? Yes, I think that is possible. At this level in specific regions or volumes of interest it might be possible soon. I'm convinced of this. And you can even use vessels from PLI measurements. You very nicely see them in these images so you can use them also as teachers. Thank you very much Marcus.