Thanks, Annela. So just a quick introduction of myself. My name is Mike Andrews. I'm a GIS research assistant with SDGs today. Part of my work is supporting the data development on Annela's and programmatic work on bearings and, but I also assist in the development of new methods and research opportunities at SDGs today. So I'm very excited today to be sharing our first in-house data set looking at school locations. So in July of this year, SDGs today launched the My School Today call to action. This call to action in support of SDG 4 utilizes a bottom up crowd sourcing approach to geo-referencing schools across Africa. And in addition to the call to action itself, which aims to improve the data, we've also launched the first in-house data set mapping school locations which utilizes this data to explore population demographics as it relates to travel time to various school locations. So we have several goals with the My School Today call to action. Primarily, we want to support policymakers and other SDG stakeholders with timely data on school locations and timely is really the key there. And we want that data to be locally informed. So that's where we decided to take a bottom up approach and utilize crowd sourcing in order to gather and solidify the data. So that's where our goal is to engage local communities and organizations in efforts to geo-reference their schools. So the idea is this data is coming from the people who know it best. And we also want to provide students with educational resources and GIS training lessons. So the majority of the call to action is actually targeted at student mappers so that they can gain experience in geo-referencing and a core skill to GIS. As well as being educational resources and how to utilize the data once it's available. So we also develop shared learn lessons, step-by-step mapping guides and several other products to help support students in learning of GIS skills to this call to action. And so in collaboration in concert with the My School Today call to action is also mapping school locations. And so as a data set, mapping school locations aims to utilize the My School Today location data in order to estimate walking only travel time for students to currently OSM recorded schools. And so this is a data set that is constantly improving as my school today, school location data improves. So it's one there to exist as a use case of the data itself, but it's also there to highlight a really important aspect of achieving SDG4, which is school access. And in this case we wanted to use the spatial lens in order to get a better understanding of physical, physical access to schools. And I'll go ahead and actually run through how we move from school location data provided by My School Today to the mapping school locations data set. So we begin with the school locations and within for those of you who are familiar with OpenStreetMap, OpenStreetMap can record schools in two different ways. One is as amenities, which typically outline the school grounds or is just a point feature to show the school itself and then there's also school buildings. And they can work in concert with each other. In our case, we're only utilizing school buildings because we thought that that was a better approach to providing the geo-referencing skills. And it also can work in concert with future potential collaboration with machine learning method methodologies. But we first extract school locations using those school building features convert them to points. And then those are used as source locations when we calculate our travel time isochrones, which I'll explain here in a second. So travel time isochrone is essentially a single isochrone, a polygon that represents a certain amount of time. It's a measure of time within a spatial context. And so constructing an isochrone data set allows us to create a depiction of travel time from any given source point to any given other point. On a map. So in the case on this map to the right, the red dots themselves are the actual school locations and then each of those different colors are different travel times. In this case, that would be 30 minutes, 30 to 60 minutes and 60 plus where 30 minutes is yellow and 60 plus is the red. And so isochrone construction also requires a cost raster. And a cost raster basically provides the information of how difficult it is to move across any given space on a map. And so we utilize a walking only surface friction raster that was developed by West of all in 2018. And this friction raster is fantastic because in addition to accounting to physical features, such as the difficulty of the terrain physical barrier such as as waterways it also accounts for geopolitical elements as well including including political boundaries. So that cost raster is inutilized to provide the idea of how long does each, in this case, sell of movement cost for a student to walk across from to a given school location. So we constructed our isochrones, we then have to construct an idea of the school age population.  We use their constrained demographic population images for for 2020 in this case. And what this does is that this provides us different bands of images of raster images that each provide different population counts for people for males and females aged one to five, five to 10, 10 to 15 so on and so forth. And so we extract each of those for male and female between the ages of five and 20, and then aggregate those into age bin groups, so that we end up with two, two images. One of females aged five to 20 and one of males aged five to 20. And this is on the right here is a depiction of what that population data actually ends up looking like. It's one of my favorite data sets to work with this. It looks so fantastic. But once we have the school age population raster images, we can then overlay that with our isochrones travel time, travel time layers in order to get isochronal population counts. So the population raster images are masked by the travel time isochrome to create six gender specific image outputs. So within a 30 minute walk time between 3060 minutes over 60 minutes in the same group emails as well. And so that masking is essentially, we are removing all for any given image, any given population image we're removing all data that does not exist within a specific isochrone time time grouping so within 30 minute walk time. And so that the population greater than 30 minutes away is essentially removed from that first image and then we utilize zonal statistics in order to count all of the cells that each provide population counts for the specific demographics that we're looking at. So that we end up with counts by travel time for males and females within first level country administration. And this ultimately ends up resulting in our final data set. I will go ahead and give you an example here. So like in Ella highlighted before, once we have our in house data set assembled, we can go about sharing sharing relevant information and statistics using dashboards are very powerful visualization tools and Ella demonstrated earlier. So here we have our isochrone population counts that are counted by first, first level administration within all the countries in Africa. And here you can get an idea of counts within each of those first level administration so the female population within 30 minutes of recording school we have 8504, and so on and so forth. There are certain limitations to the data as it exists now due to the underlying data still being in development. So typically we're assuming that most of these numbers that are greater than 30 minutes away are going to be higher than they are in reality but this is to demonstrate that use case and this will improve over time. And then, you know, with the goal of my school today, this should reach a point where we can get very accurate population counts for each of these, each of these areas. And then we can also aggregate those into statistics and focus down into specific countries. So basically we wanted to look at the name. We can see that, based off of our data, 59% of students live within over 60 minutes from recorded school, and we can get time specific and demographic specific population breakdowns and counts for each of those. And we can also share kind of like the ongoing work at my school today and explore how many schools are getting mapped and where there's where they're getting mapped and you can focus down in specific countries. And we can get very fine geographic resolutions in the school location data. And we can even track the ongoing development of the data set, both for Africa as a whole and for specific countries. So for example, down here on the bottom we have a graph that shows essentially the number of schools Africa wide that have been added since the launch of my school today. And so, there have been a good number of schools added. The good news is that this is really showing that this is like a constantly improving data set, because there's a very active open street map community and online mapping community. And very, very strong local, very amazing and strong local OSM communities and organizations and colleges and universities as well as just volunteer mappers that continually improve this data set so we can see that the data is improving. And we hope to continue to contribute that with my school today. And so that's that's mapping school locations data set. And then just some tools that we have at our disposal for improving school location both that we've already implemented that we will be implementing soon and that we have plans for in the longer one open street map on street map forms the basis of the my school today. Call the action as well as the mapping so locations data set. And it's a very powerful open source open source and crowdsource data set that allows anyone to geo reference schools. Anyone, students, teachers, academics, policymakers, any SDG stakeholder can go in and they can map schools in their area as well as any other public facilities that they they wish to include. And they can add additional details as they fit or they can have it as simple as just starting down a point. And in addition to it being openly available for anyone to contribute there's also an extremely large and extremely active mapping community within open street map that continue continually runs through all of the data and improves it runs various challenges to work for errors can support the efforts with machine learning. So it's a really amazing crowdsourcing tool that we're that can be used to continue, continue to improve education data for us to do for. And so we have developed our own step by step mapping guides that are available on our website that are multilingual currently available in English French Portuguese and Arabic. In order to provide a step by step run through of how a student could hop in and add their school within within the data set. And it's realistically something that shouldn't take much more than 10 minutes but there's also some great GIS lessons that are just a part of that. And then for groups and organizations that want to go much more in depth and to improving your location data than just adding one or two schools. The humanitarian open street map team that we've been working with also has a fantastic resource in the hot toolbox online that provides skills for skills and guidelines for doing really deep dive mapping challenges and map and engaging local communities and local members in order to improve the data set, wherever, wherever the user is. And then outside of open street map. There's also as raise RGS survey 123 and for individuals that may not have access to open street map or desktop open street map. We developed a survey within RGS survey 123 that any individual can do literally just on their phone. And we basically run them through a guided data submission process in which they can geo references and satellite imagery available and as we space maps to draw a border around their school geo references school and then submit it to us at which point we can then upload that data into open street map. As well as gaining potentially supplementary data such as average student class size number of females, female teachers, etc. So we'll be continuing to develop that survey it is currently live, we will be adding more questions and creating more comprehensive survey out of there. And then finally there are mapping challenges which is a very exciting component of being a part of the online mapping community. And so this, this is focused on the online community engagement and the real advantage of mapping challenges data quality improvements. So websites like map roulette can be used to feed users a series of tasks one task at a time so we can complete as many as they'd like they can hop on complete one hop off and essentially feed them. This is a school location. When you know that it's it is because it's labeled as an amenity but we want to get an idea of the school buildings. If you see if you don't see a school building here and go ahead and draw a boundary around it. Under the within the amenity. And so we can use this for data quality improvement and to kind of like bring together the fact that the school location data can exist in like multiple formats. And in the future, we can use it to one actually add new schools that are not mapped as amenities or school buildings. And there's also some some great potential there to be utilized with a machine learning in order to take schools that are that are mapped based off of machine learning criteria, and then bring in these mapping challenges to providing human element to check each those those outputs and ensure. Yes, that does appear to be a school or to fix like any any boundaries or all corners that might not be lined up correctly. So these are just some some opportunities that come with our bottom up crowdsourcing approach. And really exciting opportunities to improve education data. So I believe that's it for me and I'll be passing it back to Mary and so she can discuss storytelling tools and resources.


The mysteries of Islam fascinate us time and time again. This is no different from the life story of the Prophet. Who was Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wa alihi wasallam? An illiterate dozen merchant who one day stumbled upon amazing Arabic rhetoric. Or was he the creation of Allah's greatest light, sent down to earth to pull man out of ignorance and bring them to the purest of truths? I, Ali Burji, am on a journey to discover the real story behind the Prophet, the real story behind our religion, the roots, the beginning, the cradle of civilization. I seek refuge with Allah from the devil. In the name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful, the Merciful. Ustad al Aziz, doctor, so with regards to the early days of Islam, so we've discussed that the Quraysh have made numerous attempts to stop the Holy Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, either by bribing and when they saw bribing would not help either by force. Now, Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, slowly, slowly, the numbers of the Muslims kept increasing, people would come and embrace Islam because they would listen to him and what he had to say and nothing of what he said contradicted logic and reason. Now, what I'd like to know is in detail with regards to the persecution of the Muslims and the struggles and the hardships they had to go before Hijrah, before the migration to Medina, those years in those dark and difficult years for Rasulullah, the Muslims in general, but also for Benny Hashem, where now what happened is that Quraysh tried to block everything from the Muslims. What were the events occurring at that time in history? I seek refuge with Allah from the accursed Satan. In the name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful. All praise is due to Allah, Lord of all the worlds. May the peace, mercy, and blessings of Allah be upon him. Yes, when Quraysh saw that few people, more and more people gathering, they weren't great, many people. What numbers do you think? Probably you're talking about between 100, 150, according to some narrations, no more than 200, no more than 200. So that's within the first 10 years? The first 10 years, yes, until they were in Makkah. You're talking about that sort of number. Okay. But at the outset, when they saw more and more people are coming, they started using threat and harassment, even going as far as torture and killing, the Muslims. And most notable are the parents of Ammar, Ammar ibn Yasir. They were tortured and killed. Were they the first martyrs? They were the first who were, you know, tortured, if you like, and killed. Yes, the first. So there were intense persecution started. The Quraysh waged against the Muslims and the followers of the Prophet. They could not accommodate this new religion, because obviously they thought that it undermines everything they stood for. Of course, the values that they stood for were nothing to be proud of, worshipping idols, and the fact that women had no right or no value indeed. They had known that some people, or at least took place frequently, that if a female was born, they would consider that as a disgrace, and they would kill her or bury her alive. And so these are the sort of values which they had. And of course it's known that, for example, Ammar says that he buried his daughter alive as part of that culture. And the Prophet was against, yes, against that culture and against the sort of religion that they had. But Quraysh was having none of that, and they used extreme methods in order to persecute the Muslims. Their property and wealth were being confiscated. To the extent that it became so hard that the Prophet, peace be upon him, ordered some of the Muslims under the leadership of Ja'far al-Tayyar, what became of Ja'far ibn Abi Talib, the elder brother of Imam Ali, peace be upon him, to migrate to Ethiopia. He said there is a just Christian king who rules that country, and you will find safe refuge there.  Of course we'll come and talk about that, inshallah, in a future episode, in a bit more detail as to what happened, and it can be very interesting. So here we're trying to concentrate on the issue of the persecution that the early Muslims faced while in Mecca and the Prophet faced. This persecution continued until it got so bad that they were surrounded, if you like, in the valley of Abu Talib, peace be upon him. So they pushed all the Muslims, did they force them to all live together? Yes, in the valley of Abu Talib, peace be upon him, there was an official boycott embargo just so I can understand the Muslims and the Prophet. Geographically, do we know where was the valley of Abu Talib? Yes, it's well known. If you go and ask in Mecca, it's still there. Would be outskirts? No, it's in the city of Mecca, and they would point you to it, and you can, people go and visit it. And while as part of that embargo, the sanction against the early Muslims and the Prophet, peace be upon him, no one was allowed to trade with the Muslims, and no one was allowed to even talk to them, no one was allowed to marry them. So they blocked them completely from society. Was their intention to force them to leave Mecca, or they just wanted to slowly just kill them? They wanted to force them to give up on this religion. To abandon Islam and go back to their traditions of their forefathers. So they wanted them to have nothing to do with Islam. This is their aim. They didn't want them to expel them from Mecca. They didn't want them to leave Mecca, because basically they are mostly towards this religion and its followers. And probably they thought that if they leave Mecca, they go somewhere else, then they will spare that religion over there. So yes, no trade, no marriage, no, if you like, social economic clique with the people, with the Muslims. And there was a round there, because of that embargo, people couldn't get enough food to eat, of course, with the money that, say, the Khadija, peace be upon her, had given to the Prophet, her entire wealth, had given to the Prophet, peace be upon her, they used that money to buy secretly, if you like, goods and food, foodstuff for the Muslims in this valley of Abu Talib, peace be upon him. Were they now able to plant in the valley? No, no. And they used to buy them, of course, secretly, and of course, the foods that they used to buy were highly overpriced, because of the situation. But despite that, the Prophet, peace be upon him, used the wealth of Khadija, peace be upon him, to buy whatever foods they could and distribute amongst the Muslims secretly, amongst the Muslims in the valley. But despite that, they couldn't get enough food. Many Muslims died, and they were buried in that valley. And notable amongst them was Sayyeda Khadija and Abu Talib. So, first Abu Talib died, and then Sayyeda Khadija died. And this was a massive blow to the Prophet, peace be upon him. One of his biggest supporters from one side of Abu Talib, and then from the other, his wife, Sayyeda Khadija, passing away, Abu Talib was, if you like, a shield for the Prophet, peace be upon him, against Quraish. No one cared for the Prophet, peace be upon him, in terms of his protection and his proactive endeavor to make sure the Prophet is saved like Abu Talib did. It is well known that while in the valley, in the valley of Abu Talib, they spent very long time there, years. And at night, Abu Talib was concerned that the Prophet may be harmed or even killed by assassins during the night when he is asleep. So he used to keep vigil, Abu Talib, and he used to get his sons to sleep in the place of the Prophet, peace be upon him. So the famous incident with Amir al-Mu'mineen, No, we'll come to that. Okay, so it's been repeated in the past? Yes, if you like. Abu Talib, peace be upon him, used to place his sons. Which was how important the Holy Prophet, peace be upon him, was. Make them sleep in the place. For example, for a couple of hours, the Prophet was sleeping. Then the Prophet, he would wake up the Prophet, make someone else, one of his sons to sleep in his place. So that if they are monitoring the Prophet, peace be upon him, and if they want to do any harm, at least the harm will come to his sons rather than to the Prophet, peace be upon him. This was Abu Talib, peace be upon him. And that on a daily basis or nightly basis, the Prophet, Abu Talib, peace be upon him, was very concerned for the well-being of the Prophet, peace be upon him. The Prophet died. Sorry, the Abu Talib died. And then 45 days later, Abu Talib is said to have died on the 26th of Rajab. And of year 10 after Mab'ath. And Sayyid al-Khadija died on the 10th of Ramadhan, year 10, on the same year. Abu Talib, 26, of Rajab. And Sayyid al-Khadija, 10th of Ramadhan, that makes it about 45 days, plus one day, makes it about 45 days after the death of Abu Talib. Sayyid al-Khadija, peace be upon him, dies. And this was a huge blow for the Prophet, peace be upon him. Not only emotionally, he loved them both dearly, but also in terms of support. They were the most loyal of the people around him, alongside people like Imam Ali, peace be upon him. And he was very saddened to the extent that people were worried about the well-being of the Prophet, given the sadness that he showed. That's why they called the Am Al-Hus, the Year of Sorrows, in the year that the Prophet lost his loyal uncle and his loyal wife, peace be upon him. So this was a big blow. And of course, it was later on, the Muslims, as I said, many other Muslims had died in the valley of Abu Talib. And they were buried there. The graves are people, when they reside in Fatiha, if you like, when they visit the valley, the She'ab of Abu Talib, peace be upon him. After this, it comes to the stage when Archangel Gabriel descends on the Prophet, peace be upon him, and says that your protector and loyal supporter, Abu Talib and your devout supporter, Sayyid al-Khalij, they have died. You've lost your supporters here. It's time for you to migrate to Medina. Before we can mention this, as part of, while they were, before this boycott and also afterwards, the Prophet, peace be upon him, met people from Medina who had embraced Islam, and they had invited him, they would show him support if he goes there. So I'm being very briefed in here. So the Prophet, peace be upon him, on instruction from Allah, planned for his departure of, his plan to depart Mecca and head for Medina. Which, inshallah, we'll talk about the Hijra, at least from the time that he left Medina, he left Mecca for Medina.  Inshallah, we'll talk about this in the next episode, inshallah. And we have Hadith from the Prophet, peace be upon him, who says that Jafar ibn Abi Talib, he is engaged in jihad in the land of Habash, doing jihad for Allah in the land of Abyssinia. He was conveying the teachings of Islam to them, the message of Islam to them, and inviting them to embrace Islam, in which he was very successful.


Welcome to this session of A World on the Move, where we invite migrants and refugee advocates in particular to join a global conversation on key issues. And remember, we're talking ahead of the UN Summit on Refugees and Migrants, which is on the 19th of September. And we're going to continue this conversation, hopefully, with you guys as we go forward. Now, I'm going to talk to Motion. So, Motion, you were born in Kuwait, but you're Syrian. You've been educated in India. And now you're in the Netherlands. And you're having trouble getting even a bank account opened. Although I understand that you've done some extraordinary things. You once jumped into a freezing river and rescued some people. So what's going on when it comes to integration? Yeah, I moved to another land like two and a half years back. On 25th of December last year, I was in Amsterdam. And I saw one drone, old Dutch man. Then I just jumped and picked him up. And that gave me a positive feedback in the name of refugees. Everybody welcomed my action. But till today, I did not get the bank account. Then I was like, why? And I had no answer. He said, sorry, you cannot open account for you because you are refugees. In general, refugees are educated and refugees, they just need a chance. They just give a chance to them. Like for me, I got a chance in Amsterdam. I saved somebody's life from different religion, from different language, from different concept culture. But I just saved him or I helped him. So just give us a chance and we will show you who we are. So that's a very unfortunate situation that you had to go through, especially given that you have this strong educational background. Fadumo, I see you were a refugee in Kenya. And I've worked in several camps in the dub in particular. In your case in Germany, how has it been dealing with integration issues? I don't like to use the word refugee because that word is taking us into a very vulnerable position. Basically, giving us number plates. Only the word refugee should only be used in legal procedures, in official offices, but not in the social environment because this discriminates and this gives a lot of people the opportunity to attack us. Go ahead, Shaker. I just want to disagree with that we shouldn't use the word refugee. I'm a Palestinian refugee. I was born a refugee. You know, there's a journey behind that. There's a story behind, you know, my journey and the journey of over 50 million people. It's a result of circumstances that we passed through. There's a strength in there and we want to make sure that that stigma is the associated from the word refugee and use it to empower, not to hide behind. One last year, Esquire, man of the year, that was the most important thing for me is to say and this is for the general assembly too, that any person, a politician, an organization, a presidential nominee that wants to go on media and stigmatized refugees should be held accountable today because this is what is calling for hatred. This is what's calling for problems. This is what's making our world today worse, not better. When we get someone speaking to 300 million American citizens today about let's build walls and kick refugees out, this should not be okay. Even when we talk in Europe, Europe should look back into the history. There were a refugee crisis among Europeans just a few decades ago. So let's not have a short-term memory when it comes to humanity and to this subject. So we'd like to turn to Taffan if we could now. You have an extraordinary story. I know you're in Sweden and you've been a social entrepreneur. You've offered a lot. Tell us a little bit about your history and try and reflect on what you've heard already from people who've gone through very difficult circumstances as forced migrants. I came to Europe when I was a toddler. I was two, three years old. I'm Kurdish. Hundreds and thousands of men and women and children were executed. Until my parents decided we have to leave. My father stayed in the military and me and my mom and my sister eventually came to Sweden just the way that people do today. Life was great for me at that time. I didn't know much. But as I was growing up, there was something about just simply being Kurdish. You're Kurdish. You don't have a country. You're stateless. You don't belong anywhere. Go back to where you came from, wherever that is. And I felt isolated. This is a very, very important topic to discuss. Just recently, I was attacked by two ethnically Swedish men here in Sweden as I was taking a walk an evening. And it was, I guess, because I was simply not Swedish enough for them, which is absolutely ridiculous because I see myself more Swedish. I know that I'm everything that Europe and Sweden stands for. And there are people just like me who are extremely grateful for everything they've been given. I wish that the kind of help that I hope to give people and children today in Sweden, that that kind of help was around when I was younger. I am a first generation Iranian-American. My parents had to, well, my mother's family fled Iran. This is the Iranian Revolution. My parents' life was turned upside down and they've done everything they can to give us the opportunities to be educated and find employment. A lot of refugees leave conflict zones. They all have different levels of education and skill, but we need to develop long-term sustainable solutions for their integration. In Europe, there is a major employment gap and an aging population. So there needs to be a more sustained effort to match up jobs with people who can fill them. But at the same time, we've talked a lot about employability and integration in the country of destination. But what about at the root cause of it all? What needs to be done to prevent the number of refugees rising and forced displacement in general? I think there is this notion that unless there is, until there is conflict, until there is armed conflict, you know, nations are at peace. These countries have been unstable for many years. More and more you saw lack of education and lack of jobs being created and increased poverty. When someone came in 1990 to Liberia to say, right, we're coming to liberate you, people, you know, before you had the situation where you were forcing child soldiers, people were willing to fight for freedom.  What contributes to children becoming child soldiers in the first place and how do you think we can get them out of this situation? My first encounter with a short soldier was at the age of four. My mum and I were already arrested and at that point they could have taken me, but he did not have enough space in his car, which is why I got left. So it's not something that you kind of plan for, it just happens. What do you do now in terms of now that we know how child soldiers come into being, how they're lured into rebel groups and so on? We're seeing that Sierra Leone has been deemed as one of the countries that are on the trend of the African rising narrative before Ebola. We had double digit GDP growth. For us, we're building a nation is investing in people so that they're able to take part in the national development. So that's our focus is education. We run schools, vocational training. We've given training young people to engage in farming. We're working with farmers. This year we're working with about 100 farmers. Great PJ, that's really inspirational and you've been a terrific guest. I mean, everybody on the program has been today, but I think your story really has sent shivers down the spine of everybody. They're really terrifying and very realistic and the way you've taken it forward will be a very important message for the UN summit as well, I think, and it's one of the way forwards. What message would you like to pass on to the General Assembly summit in September? What I want to ask to the General Assembly is to have a plan to find a long-term solution. The second step is we need to find a way to protect these people in this transit country. Only this year we lost around 3,000 people who lost life in the Mediterranean Sea. Most of them are women with children. Why? Because lack of humanitarian visa, a family reunification visa, so we need to facilitate all this legal way to reach Europe or other place to ask asylum and to get protection. I think the responsibility is on all sides, but you absolutely are right. There needs to be certainly more humanitarian protection because we have an arc of instability, as is often said, reaching all the way from the Himalayas to West Africa, and that's where the forced migration is most seen. We thank you very much for joining us. It's been a really terrific discussion today, and your messages to the UN summit will be heard loud and clear. I know that. Thanks for joining us. Come back again, and please encourage your friends and others to put their profiles on the I'm a migrant, I'm a refugee platform because that is the way we get your stories out, and that is how we have you here on the program today. Thank you all very much and all the best.


Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE, covering Polygon 18, brought to you by Polymath. We are live here with theCUBE's exclusive coverage at Polygon 18, it's a securitized token conference, but really it's about cryptography, cryptocurrency, blockchain, token economics, the whole community's here, investors, entrepreneurs, and startups. We have two great guests here from Crypto Chicks, Natalia Hearn and Natalia Amaline, pioneers in the industry doing something really compelling of the first ever blockchain hackathon coming up in April, it's historic, it's the first. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining me. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us. So I love the t-shirts, Crypto Chicks, I want one, a few, if I'm buying, can I buy them on the website, can I get a maid? I want my daughters to have those immediately, so people in our community know that theCUBE's really been, we love women in tech because there are so many smart women out there, and it's awesome to showcase. But beyond that, it's this real technology being innovated. Talk about what you guys are doing, you have a really important mission, had great success with Crypto Chicks, because this is like a movement inside this community, but it's also happening all around the world. You guys have big plans, take a minute to explain the group, how you guys are operating, how it's going, and talk about this big event. We started this group because we realized that women are underrepresented in the space, and you don't need to go far, look at what's going on at this conference, right? Even though we are pleased with the increase in turnaround of women in events like this, but we still have ways to improve. So we started this group Crypto Chicks with the sole mission to improve gender balance and increase participation of women in the community. And we're doing it in a variety of ways, but largely what we're trying to do is we try to create an environment where it's women feel safe to learn. It's small classes where women come in, they can ask questions, they can feel at ease, and I think it's very important because I guess not everyone feels comfortable getting up in a big crowd and asking questions, and I think what we do really help for a lot of women this way. It's very inspiring, also you guys as co-founders, Natalia, we were talking about you as a professor, and education's a big part of it, but also human nature, right? So talk about the dynamic and how you guys approach that because there's different styles, both men and women, and we got to kind of get it going together. I mean, you just got to get critical mass. Now the good news is people are talking about it and it's happening, and... Absolutely, I think kind of knowledge, people hear stuff.   Right, so stuff like this, right? So if you go to meetups, you would have, out of in a room of 100, maybe one or two women, and then they'll go, well, what's a wallet? Like, what is all this about? Just even the basic baby stepping through the system. And then I think we're focusing on only one part of it. The other part of it is that we're creating a really new level of democracy. And that element, I think we don't, that's why we need the education, right? And education probably, well, women is great, but we got to start a little earlier. The interest should come at least in the high school level where you go, well, what is debt? What is value? How do you define currency? Actually, all the stuff would actually do with the conference here in terms of securities. Is it a security or is it not a security? What, how do you define? So all of that starts early on. I've been having conversations at many levels about this. At Sundance and at Film Festival, we talked about the role of technology. So it used to be, you know, the boys club, that's now changing, which is great, but also there's a trend of multi-disciplinary things. You mentioned economics and all these things. So the world now is becoming integrated. So math, for instance, there's a lot of math geeks out there, male and female. You don't have to be a coder per se, right? You can, there's certainly more coding opportunities for women, but it's not just one thing. You can do anything. This is the 50% of the population is women. If this is going to change the world, which it is, 50% of it is going to be impacted too. So they have to have a role in what's going on in the community. So it's natural this should happen. Absolutely, and actually one of the reasons, the hackathon, the women should, the reason it's the first all women hackathon in blockchain, and we actually have two streams. And one stream is for hackers who are like, you are into the nitty gritty of the sort of coding part and we actually have support for them as well in terms of learning. And then we also have the business track where if you have an idea and you think blockchain would be a really good avenue to take that idea so you could pitch your idea during the hackathon as well. And just to clarify, this is the up and coming hackathon that you guys are doing. All women, what's the date? Share the details, share the details. So it's going to be actually a conference in hackathon. They're going to run in Peramo. Conference will start on the 6th of April and going through the 8th of April and the hackathon will happen at the same time. And where is the conference? So the conference is taking place in Toronto. It's going to be, we're partnering with our venue partner, Mars Discovery District. So it's absolutely amazing venue in Toronto. And also our partner Mars has a history of, you know, promoting the women in technology. So it's a good partnership for us. And it's going to be, the hackathon is going to run about 30 hours and hopefully it's going to be a lot of good connections coming out of it. I think one of the things that we want to accomplish in this hackathon for women is to make it easier for them to get opportunities. So most importantly, we want to connect them with employers. And that's a great venue for that. Because we, you know, when we travel, we have a lot of the times owners of the companies will approach us and say, you know, we're really looking to diversify our team. Can you help us? Because women just don't apply. I think that's another way we're trying to really infuse more women in the community. Open up channels of opportunities, not just how to be like a job interview. Exactly. Working, demonstrating skills, style. Are you guys seeing the formula that works with people, with women? Because we see different conversations around this, you know, take a certain approach, posture this way, be different.  And some say, I just want to wear high heels and I want to, I'm a fashion person. That's who I am. And why would I want to change that? Just because I'm a woman. I mean, so there's different views on this. Is there any pattern or formula that you would suggest or observe? You know, I think we live in a really fortunate part of the globe where we can actually do what we want to do. There aren't too many places like that in the world. And I think that we got to be really thankful for that. And then it really is, you know, we are empowered to create opportunities. And you know, in this space, it's a really young space. I mean, it's really fundamental. Some people say, well, it's been in it for 10 years. Really, most of the people have been in it for, you know, a couple of years. So don't think, women shouldn't think that, well, there's all these guys and they know what they're doing. They also don't know what they're doing. They're also, everything is changing. I mean, every wallet and every structure that is being created today is going to be a little different tomorrow. It's a process. So you jump. I was trying to go to the side about that. If you say you're an expert at something here, then you're really a pretender because everyone's always learning. And the real pros are humble about that. So that's one observation. But the other one is, and I got to get your reaction to this because I go to a lot of events, especially in tech, where a lot of mail dominated, you know, enterprise here and there. This community is very mission oriented and I don't see any signs of lack of inclusion. So I think the door is open, at least my perspective. And certainly we've been covering the blog and space and Bitcoin since 2010 and crypto and everything else. But being here, I see open doors. I can say the other verticals, not so much. Here, it seems open. Do you guys agree with that? What's good about that? If you do agree, how do people walk through those doors? If it's not, what needs to happen? What's your observation? I think it depends on the personalities a lot. I find that some personalities, the door is open. I'll just walk in.  And I think it's like this everywhere. I think in this space, I mostly see that it's friendly space, I'm pretty happy with it. But I also think there could be some improvements because, you know, quite frankly, sometimes the culture is not necessarily that welcoming. For example, you know, you go to the chat rooms on Facebook as an example. Somebody, a woman makes a comment and after that you'll see lines of guys responding. And what are you doing here? And why did you say that? Yeah, it's very common. It's IRC kind of culture, really. So it's, you know, some women are perfectly fine about that, right? And for me, it's like, okay, you know, everybody's entitled to opinion, right? But some are just next time will not comment, right? And I don't know, maybe guys have a little bit thicker skin and they take some ridicule better. I don't know. But I think there's still ways to make the culture a little bit more open and more, I guess, comfortable. Nathalia, do you agree with that? What's your take on that? I think it really starts with upbringing again and how we raise our children. I have three sons. So, you know, I raise them in a way that the way I'd want to be treated in an environment. I'm an engineer, so I've worked with men all my life and this is not unusual for me. It's I've gone to conference all my life, thousands of people, 20 women. Like, Alyssa, that's really- Yeah, you guys have thick skin.  You've seen it. And you know, in a way, yeah. And it takes guts, like you said before, to wear high heels and a skirt and really stand out already when you're already standing out.  You know what? And you walk into that room. Be yourself, right? But don't be afraid. I guess what you're saying is you can have whatever posture you want to have. Just be proud, keep your chin up, as they say. All right, so let's talk about, you mentioned you guys are moms. So like, I have four kids, two daughters. David Volante also has four as well, same. They're growing, these kids that are born now are growing with digital natives. Some are kind of pre-post Facebook, pre-Instagram, Snapchat, they're ranged in the spectrum. Certainly gaming has been a big part of the culture with the youth. So people who are digital natives and who have come on with the connected social world it is, they are doing things differently. So I want to get your thoughts as a parent.  What should I do? What's good, what's bad? There's no data other than kind of anecdotal or vision. I personally believe in gaming is a good future of work scenario as long as you don't OD on it and it overdoes on too much gaming. I think coding's the same. And so I think this is going to be the tooling of the future. What do you guys think as parents about the exposure of technology? How do you do it? Is there a diet? Is there a recipe? I mean, what do you guys think? I think personally it's great. I think the younger kids get exposed to technology. The more comfortable they feel about it and the more likely they are to become next, you know, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, et cetera. And I think it's our society whether some people like it or not. It's moving in a direction where we're becoming more and more technology addicted and dependent on it. We, technology is everywhere. We don't even realize that it's there.  You may like it or not, but that's the lifestyle these days, right? So I think for me, with kids, we need to give them freedom and we need to observe. Because I think kids are intuitive. They know what they're interested in. And we need to help them nurture their interests so that they grow up and they don't need to go to the job that they hate. Instead, they do what they love and that's how we become a more productive society. And the learning online too is an opportunity to go nonlinear, learn things at scale, you don't have to wait for class or semester. Your thoughts on this, Natalia? Absolutely, I think every child has a gift and I think it's parents' responsibility to discover that gift instead of shoving your ideas into or your things that you didn't achieve in life into your children's. That's called a snow cloud parent or helicopter parenting. Yeah. So absolutely and we are technology-driven society and I've introduced an engineer, so I'm techie, so I've introduced my sons to a lot of things, but you know what? They've introduced me and actually they kept me in this sector. I think the observational thing is really important. Freedom with observation. That's not monitoring and surveillance or helicoptering. It's really like let them play, let them explore, let them have good time, understand it, but be mindful of what you're observing and that's key. And yeah, too much of anything is not good. You know what I mean? You have to balance your sleep patterns and all this kind of stuff. All of that has to come into a child's life. Yeah, maybe intervention is required at some point.  I always say to women in tech, we're moms, like man, you have it so easy now because you know how hard it is to raise children. Being a parent is super hard and a lot of people look at that, need to understand how hard it is. It's really a wonderful thing. So thanks for sharing. Looking forward to following CryptoChicks and covering the hackathon. So let us know how it goes. Is there going to be any live feeds or Twitter handles or hashtag? What's going on? They will be and we'll let you know. Thank you for that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for sharing CryptoChicks here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, live coverage continuing day two of SiliconANGLE Media's CUBE exclusive coverage of Polygon 18. We'll be right back.


Aside from all of Stewie's emojis, I don't know what's he doing. Stewie, come here, it's going to be ridiculous, Stewie. I hear Stewie the other day, and I never do this. And I was like, yo, it would be an incredible dynasty in New York City if you can. I don't think she's seen me yet, but they cooking up. You get the MVP, former MVP. You got Sabrina, obviously, and they cooking. And man, they doing their thing, bringing best talent to New York. They went and chipped here. It's going to be Barclays going to be jumping. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. It looks like Kevin Durant's vision is going to come true. He wanted to see WNBA superstar Brianna Stewart sign with the New York Liberty. And as soon as Free Agency opened for business this afternoon, the Syracuse native tweeted that she plans to sign with the team. First overall pick, the 2016 draft. Stewart had previously been with the Seattle Storm, leading that club to a pair of championships and winning the finals MVP award both times. She also won the league's MVP award in 2018. And if all goes according to plans, she will become the second former MVP to join the Liberty this offseason after the club traded for John Quill Jones a couple of weeks ago. And then right after Stewart made her intention known, Kevin Durant made a note on Twitter, told the world that his Liberty tickets will not be available this summer. Sounds like he plans to be a regular at Barclays Center where it looks like New York will have a powerhouse roster playing before KD and a lot of fans. And he said it, talking about a dynasty. It could be that way. Brianna Stewart's one of the biggest named players in the WNBA, one of the best women's player of all time. So accomplished on the collegiate level at UConn, she barely ever lost. She always went to the Final Four winning national championships with the national team as well. You get a big star like that in the New York market. Our good friend and colleague, Rebecca Lobo, she still might be our favorite Liberty player that went to UConn, but the best player that went to UConn, devil player for the Liberty is gonna suit up for them this season. Gonna have to keep an eye on Liberty here on yes.


Brendan Greene's life was in tatters. He was trapped, divorced, penniless, and alone in a foreign country, with no hope of escape. Bit by bit, he was saving up what little money he could in the hopes of one day making it back to his native island, but this goal still seemed like a long way away. In the meantime, the only thing that kept him busy on his long lonely nights was video gaming, but even this was getting boring. He'd played Call of Duty over and over and over, and was incredibly tired of experiencing the same repetitive online match formula time and time again. Spawn. Run. Shoot. Die. Respawn. There was no variety, no sense of exhilaration, no need for independent thought. If only there was a video game that forced the player to be more inventive, where the matches scenario would change endlessly so that no two games played the same. The kind of game where your life mattered, and you couldn't just instantly throw it away and try again, so that you had to plan strategically without running and gunning your way through encounters with opponents. As he sat there, bored out of his mind, desperate for some kind of escape, Brendan made a decision. If his idea of the perfect game didn't exist yet, then he'd make it. And so, just like that, Brendan invented Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. Brendan Green was an army brat. Born in Ballyshannon in Ireland, Brendan grew up at a military base called the Couricamp. His father would travel the world on assignments for the army, and would often come back with unique presence from his time away. One time, after a trip to Lebanon, Brendan's father brought the family back an Amiga 2600, and Brendan played happily. That said, as much as he enjoyed gaming, it wasn't ever a major part of his life. As the years went on, he played only a few rare games, every so often. He briefly tried the stealthy Metal Gear Solid, but this wasn't really his kind of thing. He preferred games that involved running and gunning, so put in his fair share of hours in Delta Force, Black Hawk Down, and America's Army, but ultimately lost interest in gaming altogether. For a while in university, he even dabbled with cyberpunk role-playing games, but this was always secondary to some of his other, more beloved hobbies. Brendan earned a degree in fine art, with the hopes of becoming a professional artist, but he soon learned that the Irish art market was fairly unforgiving for a newcomer. Instead, Brendan noticed the success that his girlfriend at the time was having in the field of graphic design, so he gave that a try. Freelancing as a photographer and a designer seemed to work pretty well for Brendan, so he kept working in an ad hoc manner for whatever clients he could find. He also had a deep love of music, which led him to set up a music studio with a friend, where he'd be in charge of band art work and videos. Brendan floated between creative projects, taking himself into whatever field seemed to offer promise. It wasn't the most secure way to earn a living, but he didn't really have any other idea what to do. He was just one person, all by himself. Eventually, Brendan fell in love with a woman from Brazil and followed her back to her home country in the hopes of getting married and starting a family. While all was well for a while, eventually their relationship broke down and Brendan found himself divorced and alone, living hand to mouth without much to aspire towards. This time was perhaps the lowest in Brendan's life. He was a nobody, an insignificant speck of a man who'd scraped by without truly living and without anyone nearby caring about him. He began saving money for a plane ticket to take him back to Ireland, but this was a long way off. As a foreigner without traditional employment, he was stuck watching the majority of his earnings disappearing into rent and bills as he wiled away his evenings without much to live for and so bereft of any other things to keep him busy. Brendan started playing video games. He embraced the latest Call of Duty and its quick-fire shooting matches although it never really felt like something that filled the hole that he was looking for. Eventually, a game called Armour 2 came out and this was better, but Brendan was having ideas about building a game of his own. He was inspired by the Japanese movie Battle Royale, as well as the more recent Hunger Games novels, both of which featured a plot where combatants fight the death as blood sport for the amusement of viewers. Brendan couldn't help but think of how much fun this kind of experience would be in a video game if matches went on for over 15 minutes and if players only got a single life.  The longer a player survived in a match, the more tense and exciting the game would become and the more they'd feel desperate to keep going longer without getting killed. In his daydreams, Brendan imagined his game playing out as an esport with a huge arena filled with spectators watching 50 or so players battling it out on rows of computers in the centre of the room. When each player was defeated, they'd have to stand up from their table and slowly make their way out of the room. It would bring the Hunger Games Battle Royale experience to life in the only way that could possibly be considered humane. As he dreamed of the possibilities, Brendan started to consider actually building his game. After all, what was to stop him? Mods existed across the internet that changed the rules of different games, so he could, in theory, build his deathmatch game as a mod for Armour 2. If nothing else, working on this mod gave him something to actually strive for, something he could achieve on his long lonely nights. And so, Brendan set to work, teaching himself modding from scratch. The process was slow, but he had all the time in the world to work on it. Before long, his Armour 2 mod, named Player Unknown's Battle Royale, was complete. Brendan had chosen to slap his online username, Player Unknown, on the front as a way to distinguish the mod as his own creation and in the hopes that it would feel like something of a unique brand name that would stand out from the original Battle Royale movie. Player Unknown's Battle Royale earned a respectable following within the Armour 2 modding community and Brendan had a lot of fun playing with online friends in his homemade creation. Everything at that point was paid for out of Brendan's own pocket, as he and a friend set up a server for fellow gamers to enjoy the game.  This setup was less than ideal, not least because Brendan's internet connection wasn't very stable and everyone's game progress would disappear periodically. Eventually, the small community surrounding Battle Royale breathed a sigh of relief as Brendan finally made his way back to Ireland on a one-way trip. Returning to his home country, Brendan was met with concern from his parents. They loved their son and following all the challenges he's suffered through recently, they were really worried about him. Not long after planting his feet on home soil, Brendan signed up for government welfare to keep himself afloat and dove back into running Battle Royale as a more solid experience. His games community was growing and he was passionate about helping to sustain its progress. His parents weren't sure that this was a good use of his time, especially after Brendan explained that there was no money in game mods and that his burgeoning player base weren't actually giving him any financial return for his investment of time and money. They were helpless to stop him, but they couldn't help but worry that if he carried on like this for much longer, Brendan would soon be out on the street, homeless and completely penniless. They needn't have worried. Before long, a big-name game developer was going to take notice of Brendan's progress in a big way and his life was about to change dramatically as Battle Royale got the full AAA gaming treatment. Unbeknownst to Brendan, his little mod was grabbing major attention from some of the higher-ups within the gaming industry. The Battle Royale idea felt so fresh and innovative that a lot of developers were eager to try and copy its premise, which led to employees for Daybreak Game Company, the creators of H1Z1, discussing the mod as part of some game development videos that the studio released online. When Brendan saw this, he was thrilled. These industry professionals were taking inspiration from his game. He sent them a jokie tweet, suggesting that they should throw some money his way to help make their Battle Royale idea into something real for their game. To Brendan's immense surprise, that's exactly what they did. John Smedley, then the president of Daybreak, sent Brendan a private message on Twitter asking to talk further. In no time at all, Brendan was boarding a plane again, this time on a journey to San Diego to start work on creating a Battle Royale mode for H1Z1. Brendan was incredibly grateful to the team at Daybreak for going to the trouble of including him in their design plans. In all fairness, there had been nothing to stop them simply stealing his idea for their own, and he really appreciated that the studio heads were principled enough to give credit where it was due. Finally, Brendan was a legitimate games developer, working for real money on the game that he'd been building and supporting for years. This was only the beginning. After the H1Z1 work was completed, Brendan was contacted by Blue Hole, a Korean games developer that wanted to take his idea and turn it into a fully fleshed out game in its own right. Brendan accepted and was soon on his way to Seoul to make what would eventually be named Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. Brendan decided on the name change as a way of differentiating this from his previous, which had all borne the Battle Royale moniker. Besides, he wanted this game to be distinct enough to avoid litigation, considering how heavily it borrowed from the Battle Royale movie. While the team of developers at Blue Hole were eager to build Brendan's dream game, friction arose very quickly as Brendan started sharing his ideas. Brendan wasn't a traditional developer. As he was entirely self-taught and not much of a gamer to begin with, his ideas often felt a little off-putting and challenging. The developers attempted to explain to Brendan that what he was looking for simply wasn't how game development was done, but nevertheless, they listened to him. After all, the fact that Brendan came from such a unique background was part of the reason why his game work thus far had felt so fresh and original. So estranged it might be to include some of his more unusual ideas, the team at Blue Hole couldn't help but agree that just because something broke the mould of game development, it didn't mean that it was inherently a bad idea. And so, finally, Player Unknown's Battleground was released. In an unfinished and very limited form, to Steam Greenlight. Despite all of the progress that Brendan had seen over the past few years, he was in no way prepared for the incredible success the game experienced in a matter of weeks. Even seasoned industry professionals were shocked. They'd been insisting to Brendan that a really good first year would see a player base of a couple of hundred thousand players. But as Player Unknown's Battlegrounds was downloaded by millions upon millions of gamers, it was clear that the momentum for this project wasn't going to slow down anytime soon. It didn't take long for Player Unknown's Battlegrounds to become the most popular game on Steam. The appeal was phenomenal, as Brendan quickly found himself transforming from a single, insignificant spec in a sea of people to one of the most in-demand stars of the gaming industry. For his part, Brendan enjoyed the new travel opportunities best. He could tour the world, visiting distant cities as part of his work. While there was plenty to do to complete Player Unknown's Battlegrounds, he was eager to take the opportunity to see far-off places and make friends in new locales. He'd done it. Somehow, against all odds, Brendan had risen from a position of complete obscurity, a literal unknown player, all the way to the top of the gaming industry. It had taken some ingenuity, some careful planning and willingness to move around, and an awful lot of luck. But somehow, he'd proven himself a winner. The moral of the story is that great success can come from anywhere. Anyone can achieve their dreams, no matter their origins or personal circumstances. Brendan Green wasn't an experienced, well-trained games developer. He wasn't particularly wealthy or noteworthy. And at one point, he felt like the smallest, least important person in the world. He was wrong. Brendan had a valuable contribution to make, and there were people who cared about what he wanted to say, even if they lived hundreds or thousands of miles away. You were the same. You were important, and you were special. You may not always feel like you matter, and you may never see the same phenomenal fame that Brendan Green has found thrust upon himself. But that doesn't make you any less worthwhile. Don't give up on yourself, and don't downplay your own capacity for greatness. As you work hard and try your best to find your voice, people around you will take notice, and they will appreciate hearing your unique view on the world. You matter, and you can succeed in your goals. Your eventual victory dinner will taste all the more delicious when you finally feel happy with yourself.


Who here has received childhood vaccinations? So everybody, all right, so your immune systems are enhanced, right? I mean every one of you is already a design space for for bioscience. The rate of technological evolution is accelerating perhaps far more rapidly than it ever has before because technology is auto-catalytic it feeds on itself and And so as we get more and more rapid evolution of technology there comes a point when psychologically and Institutionally we are incapable of keeping up with it many of the telecommunications and Information advances that we all take for granted occur because pornography drives the market Your ability to use charge cards As easily as you do on the internet comes from the fact that the porn people had to figure out how to get paid my boyfriend husband is addicted to online porn and You know it used to be that to get access to porn was not necessarily easy It was kind of embarrassing stealthy Plain brown wrappers etc.  I'm not as enhanced as the women he's obsessed with and You know I'm more baffled now How to answer that question the landscape is completely different and we have to accept that landscape and try to understand how to how to How to manage it rather than wishing that it would go away? We need to rise to a level of sophistication and trying to understand the human that we haven't begun to achieve in part because We're working with ideas that we're dragging out from the 18th and 17th centuries and they fail You know this is what makes the techno human relationship So complicated troubling exhilarating was a word Andreas used also scary And it destabilizes the very kind of ground that that were used for navigating That we use to navigate our way through society and through our days because Simple questions like what's ethical and what isn't what's human and what isn't? What's natural and what isn't are no longer things that we can make easy sense of and that are continually subject to change as a result of technological innovations You can't handle the future But it's coming anyway, and in fact It's already here


All right, let's kick off. Thank you everyone. We'll just go into the final wrap up now of the NFCOR hackathon. First off, I just wanted to say again a massive, massive thank you to everyone who has joined us these three days. I have had a really, really fun time, despite being quite busy. I've had a brilliant time. I hope everyone else also goes away feeling like they've had fun here and hopefully made some new friends and connected with some old ones. It's been a really bydwyd y gallu gweld ei gallwn. Mae'n ffeithio i gan gwrs-gwrdd, ond mae'n ffordd o'r rhaglen eu hwn. Fy fyddwch democrat eu hefyd.  Ond rwy'n gweinno fe wnaeth gyda'ch godi gweld ei fod yn falchnyddol, a'n dweud i digwydd i ymwyaf i gweithio ar y cynhyrch. Felly, mae'n gwaith bod ei fod yn iawn ymddangosio ar y gwyfod arall. Ac rwy'n gwych hynny mewn ffainter, wedyn ein bod nhw'n i'n bwysig wedi ei fod ni'n ei wneud addysgau i gwybr o'r pethu pwysig o'r f thirteen, Mae'n meddwl yw'r ysgol yma, dywedd ychydig yn ymweld. Mae'n meddwl a'r cyfnodau'r cyfeilio. Tere i'r Amylau gan yma i amdain i'r cyfnoddau neu ymddiadau yn ddiddordeb i ddweud o'r rhuniau ac yn y dddirnos yn ei gael ymddangos. Mae'n meddwl i'r cyfnoddau a'r ddodgfeydd a'r agfodol. Mae agfodol a'r agfodol yn ei gael eich gwybod yn wych. Mae'n meddwl i'r hoffa ar y cyfnoddau i chi. Felly, ddyn nhw'n ddim yn ddylch yn ddweud. Mynd i chi ddweud o'r fathion gyda'r community fathion, â y gweithio, a'r gweithio'n ddweud, a'r gweithio'n ddweud. Mae'n ddweud yma, a gennym y bydd i'n digwydd y fathion. Mae'r amser sy'n ddweud i'r hynny o'r fathion gweld. Mae'r gweithio'n ddweud i'r gweithio. Mae'n ddweud i'r gweithio, a'r ddweud i'r gweithio i'r gweithio. I'm sure I've forgotten someone as well, so thank you to everyone I've forgotten. Finally, thank you to AWS for sponsoring our dinner last night. That was a lot of fun. I want to quickly remind everyone about the NF Core Mentorships again, just in case you're tuning in now and missed this earlier. The NF Core Mentorships are a scheme we're running with our Chanzaugaberg initiative grant funding, where we're looking for pairs of mentors and mentees. We're really trying to push our inclusivity of the community. It's through our diversity and inclusivity grant through EOS programme with Chanzaugaberg. If that sounds at all interesting, if you want to be a mentor, it's a paid position. You're compensated for your time, it's free for mentees, and it's pretty relaxed. You can do it however you want, whatever works best for your pair, but it's about two hours a week for a few months. The things you can work on as a mentee are totally up to you, so it can be from very beginner stage setting up a config on your cluster right through to developing NF Core pipelines. We're really interested in bringing in people, especially who would find it difficult to attend events like this and things otherwise. If that sounds interesting, please do have a look, read the blog post about what everyone did in the first round. We have double the number of people this time, 10 pairs, so 20 people. Please do drop your name onto the application form at the bottom. I should also thank Chanzaugaberg for funding the hackathons as well. They fund lots of stuff and they also funded things like all of the nice mugs and the opons, which you guys are taking home. So don't forget them. Right, that's enough for me. I'm going to have a talk on Friday as part of the summit where I'll talk a little bit about the big picture metrics and stuff of some of the things we've done during a hackathon. But for now we're going to dig into the details of your groups and see what it is that you've been working on today. I think Chanzaugaberg is going to kick us off with the models team. I'm going to go and refresh the page. Yeah, thanks a lot. Exciting developments in the modules teams. First of all, we were working in the modules team for the ones that were not here following us until now. We were developing new modules, fixing modules tests and improving current modules in the NFCOR modules repository. We had about 30 people contributing to the modules teams so far. So many they don't fit in one but four different slides. So thanks to everybody that contributed. First of all, some quick stats. In the NFCOR module repository during the last three days we had 27 merge pull rip squares, 24 new open pull rip squares, 24 closed issues and 35 new issues. So lots of work done. We have to adhere that because sub-workflows are now also part of the NFCOR modules It's a bit of a mixture between the two teams but still worth mentioning this effort. General updates for today. Alison was reviewing some PRs and started triggering a discussion of the tasks.ex.arch that are used in modules. That was a wonderful example of a cross-team collaboration because then Jennifer updated the documentation to also add this part there. So if now you're wondering what's best practice to add past parameters with value channels or using these arcs, you can find this in the updated documentation. As for new modules, we've had a bunch of them. So we've had AMP Combi as a new module contribution, ABRA II, the ABRA II module, repeat scout module and several sub-modules of these two. Presto filter seek, Fulcrum genomics, FQG rep module and several modules fixes as well. Today FastQC fix to drop the end-on-ness check and several updates in the FastQC module and Falco and fixing the smooth container so that we can also use it in a module. Apart from that, also Christian runs some tests on how to run pipelines and modules with Docker containers in people that have the new M1 Apple chip. Here are the results of some of the tests that he did with the blast container that using this minus-minus platform Linux tag is a provisionally fix for this, but it comes with some performance degradation so it takes a bit longer to run, but it runs. Maybe it could be an intermediate solution on how to get this to run. Thanks everybody, that was a bit the update, and we can now continue with the updates of the sub-workflows team, if you like. Hello everyone, how are you feeling? Good? Tired? Want to drop on the floor? Want to do more? Want to stay for more? Now coming this afternoon and tomorrow. So sub-workflows was, as you guys know, one of the major themes of this hackathon. It's something we have been putting off for a while, mainly because we need to figure out how to implement sub-workflows. We've dealt with modules, they work, we know that. We've got lots of really cool tooling to help you deal and interact with modules, but sub-workflows was a completely different challenge because now you're not only dealing with modules, you have to now install a chain of modules. Then we need to build a tooling and all of this on top and attempt to standardize as much as possible at the same time so everyone else can start adding these sub-workflows and share them across pipelines. It's been an immense effort over this hackathon. My expectations for what we would achieve and what we actually have achieved have completely surpassed, and now I think we've got a really nice solid foundation for what we want to take forward with sub-workflows in the future. Thank you everyone for that. It's been amazing and the online guys as well. There's a number of people that have been contributing to sub-workflows on various fronts, some documentation, some on adding new sub-workflows, updating sub-workflows, and some also on the tooling as well. This was day one. Let's skip this. Here we go. Francesco was working on the UMI consensus sub-workflow. There's a bunch of stuff that he's been fixing, ironing out with that as well. He's just waiting, I believe, on some modules first to be merged, and then he's going to update that sub-workflow. Good progress on that front. Quentin fixed the FastQ-aligned Bowtide 2 sub-workflow. That was basically because it was breaking some downstream tests. The way that we're doing the CI test, I guess I should say also, is that what we want to make sure that everything on NFCOR modules is always working in terms of the tests, and it's quite important that whenever you change a module that you're also testing the sub-workflows downstream just to make sure that nothing is broken. Edmund is partly responsible for that. His awesomeness with PyTest and GitHub Actions has allowed us to add these additional tests to make sure that everything is always working. This was merged in because it was breaking something else downstream, so that's in now. Picard Mark duplicates, mammoth effort from David. We had to eventually also update the upstream module because we had to factor in input channels and change that because I believe David's now also added cram support to Picard Mark duplicates and for that we needed to have a FASTA file, the reference genome. He's updated the upstream module to take a FASTA file as input and also then reinstalled and added the logic to the sub-workflow to now test for cram as well. Camille was working on various things, loads of different sub-workflows, and so this one of these was, this came out of the chat we had yesterday about naming conventions, so sub-workflows naming them can get quite hairy because you're now chaining together loads of different modules, what's a sensible way to actually name these, and the format we eventually decided on was the first entry there, as you can see, is the file format, so whether it's BAM, VCF, FASQ, and so that way you can quite easily search for sub-workflows that take input standard files like that, then a list of operations separated by underscores, and at the end, potentially the tools that you're using in the sub-workflow, this will sort of be quite a nice way at least to start with to give us a bit of flexibility. The reason the tools was plugged on at the end is because you can have multiple tools to sort BAM files for example, and so that way you can still find, when you're searching, similar sub-workflows and just maybe change the name of the tool at the end that's doing this to make it easier to find other sub-workflows that you may want to use for this sort of thing, and yeah, we're going to build out functionality to make it easier to test the tags and stuff that we have in the Metayamo to find these sub-workflows potentially on the website. That's one for Matias, I believe. Yeah, so Camille added this, renamed this sub-workflow based on what we decided the naming convention. He also updated the Umi tools sub-workflow, and that got cut off, I believe. Yeah, so there were two more. Camille was very busy. I didn't do much coding. So this was probably my only contribution throughout the hackathon. This particular sub-workflow is quite a complex one because RCXE has lots of different tools that you can run, and this particular one will hopefully make it a lot easier, and is a good example of a sub-workflow in fact, because all of the various different tools and commands that you have in sub-workflows, for RCXE are now included as part of this sub-workflow. You can just switch out the ones you want to use by providing a list of the ones that you want to run, and it should just take care of it. But yeah, I apologise, my contributions have been dire and embarrassing. Edmunds added a new sub-workflow issue template as well to modules, right? So whenever you're submitting an issue for modules, then you should be prompted to fill in the appropriate details for that. We are also working with some other really cool stuff now. What we're trying to get to eventually, hopefully, is just testing as much as we can in any given workflow. At the moment we're mostly testing stuff on NFCOR modules, and then when you install that in the pipeline, you sort of have confidence that it works because it's been tested somewhere else.  We're not really testing at the level of the workflow properly yet. We're just seeing whether the workflow runs or not. But what would be nice is if we're able to then also maybe have MD5 sums and other logic to also list the full outputs of the workflow, and that way what you can do is you get two things. You can test whether the workflow is producing the same files at the end of the run, and also if you make changes to the way you're publishing the files or something like that, you can also make sure that when you make a change, that change is actually the right one to make. So you'll see a difference. A test will fail. You've changed a file, for example, maybe a bug. If that file is not existing when you re-run the tests, then you know something's wrong, and it allows you to fix it. At the moment this is all done manually, but it'd be really nice to eventually get to the point where we're testing at all of these different levels in the pipeline. I think there's some other cool stuff that we decided to implement where you only test what's changed rather than testing everything, just to be nicer to the planet basically and not run crap loads of actions for everything. That's a work in progress, but hopefully once we've got a prototype working in RNA-seq, we'll push it to the template and we can start adopting it everywhere else. One of the biggest things that has come out of this whole thing is these new really cool commands that we can use to now create sub-workflows to create the test jammer which was painstakingly done before. For sub-workflows that's even more complex because now a sub-workflow is a chain of modules that produce a load of output files. So what this create test jammer function or command does is that it will automatically create the MD5 sums and the test jammer you need for that sub-workflow based on whatever the output files are for that sub-workflow. So you don't have to manually go in and create this file. It will do that all automatically for you. So that's going to be a major plus as well. We can also now install sub-workflows in pipelines. It will update the modules JSON wherever it needs to and so that's working as well. We can list sub-workflows and we get info and slowly, slowly I think we'll start appending these but these were kind of the higher priority ones that will really allow us to start interacting with sub-workflows and we smashed it. So yeah, great work everyone, especially Julia. Thank you. I'm surprised you didn't tell me to do one at some point. And so yeah, we use the tooling to create all of these sub-workflows that I've been talking about before other than the existing ones and now we've also managed to install all of the sub-workflows that we had in the RNA-seq pipeline. We've pushed them all to NFCOR modules as part of this hackathon. We've also installed them all directly into the RNA-seq pipeline and so it's a really nice sort of finish and completing the circle in terms of what we've achieved at this hackathon. So that's still sort of, we're just still fixing the tests on that now but it works. And yeah, thank you. You guys have been amazing. It's been awesome sort of being around everyone rather than communicating via Slack and stuff. There's been funny little conversations and laughing here and there with everyone and yeah, an in-person event, you can't really beat it. And those of you that are online, you're just going to have to make an effort to come and see us at the next in-person one. So yeah, thank you everyone. And please don't be a stranger. We need you. All of this stuff is developing. It's ongoing work. I don't think we'll ever be out of a job. We're doing important work. Come and find us. Be around us on Slack. And yeah, we'd love to have you contributing and being a part of this community. It's just phenomenal how quickly we're growing and the work that we're doing. So yeah, thank you very much. Hello, everyone. So how are you guys feeling again? Well, especially after last night, I imagine this morning was tougher. So the documentation team, as you can imagine, was very productive. So I'll skip a couple of slides to reach the interesting ones. The hackathon summary is that we have 50-plus pull requests. We've 48 merged pull requests and three ready for review. The most important part is that the contribution was spread across various repositories, the website documentation, the tools documentation, configurations even. And of course, the GitHub readme that we have, like that's the basic introduction to anyone who comes to the GitHub page on the end of code. But more importantly, I would also like to highlight that people who have learned the skills by contributing in the documentations, they are venturing out and even starting to contribute to the main next-flow documentation. So I'll mention it briefly again. So we have a group key example. This is one of the more nuanced operators we have in next-flow. And I think an example was kind of, it should have been there, but for some reason, we kind of kept putting it forward. So we finally have it. It would be great if you can review the PR or even add suggestions there. This would be awesome. So moving on to individual contributions, Louie has made the biggest number of contributions, nine contributions. And it's important to highlight that he is not attending the hackathon in person, he's online. So the group had a good mixture of people in person as well as online. And we see a range of contributions from everyone. We have MLN, seven contributions. Margarita, you might recall the wonderful dance last night. So there are wonderful contributions on all fronts. And I'll move to other contributions. And Pauline, specifically here, is the one responsible for the group key example. So this is wonderful. Thank you Pauline. And then I'll hand it over to Marcel. Hello everyone. I hope you guys are still having fun. So I have three main ideas. We highlighted, I think it's important to mention about the documentation group. So I think it was very interesting to see that, I will not respect the order, but the increased confidence and the contributions throughout the days. So at the very beginning people that were still a bit uncomfortable using GitHub or with the documentation, they were kind of lost on what to do. And at the very beginning we helped them to start with some simple issues and do some simple PRs. But it was very nice to see that every attempt that every day they were doing more confidence on using GitHub, the command line, all the repositories, not only the website, and they kept progressing to the point that we had like contributions to issues that were created during the hackathon by all the groups. It was very nice to see this confidence growing throughout the days. The online and offline engagement was very, very good. One example is what Abnaf just said about Louis. So he was online and he managed to do a lot of contributions. So Get It Town helped in us to interact with everyone, which is also a lead of this group. She gave a talk at the beginning to try to motivate the people that were in the group and know how to use the project board on GitHub and all these things. So the engagement was very, very nice. In person, of course, it's bad. It's better just like how you said. You have to come next time to see the real experience. It's much better. It's very nice. It's much easier to know when someone needs help. So it was expected that we would have this by the end. But we were surprised that also people that were remote, they were able to do a lot of contributions. I think that what I'm going to say now is what Harshaud said and I think every leader is going to say it doesn't have to stop here. So I hope this confidence keeps growing and you feel more comfortable to contribute to other repositories, not only documentation but also to modules or sub-workflows. There's a lot of work to do. So we are still going to be there. The distance is going to exist, but we're still going to be just talking to us, ask questions and email. So feel more than invited to keep contributing to NFCOR and NextFlow, to keep getting in touch with us, asking questions. It will always be a pleasure to help. In the next hackathon, I hope to see all you guys here again. Thank you. Let me skip the first slides. Okay. I'm going to summarise what we did for the Pipelines team. Is this still on? Okay. James compiled a couple of statistics somewhere. There we go. So we had in total 30 team members that worked on 16 different pipelines. So I think that's probably a quarter of the pipelines we currently have in NFCOR. And five of those were brand new and we merged something like 66 PRs. Or have ongoing PRs there. So lots of progress and lots of pipelines. Great work for everyone. For the brand new pipelines, I briefly introduced them yesterday, but I want to go over them again. So we have the differential abundance pipeline that Oscar started working on for differential expression analysis and apparently possibly now also pathway analysis. He kept working on the pipeline diagram and also started out with the actual pipeline creation and trying out modules. Which is great. And I think the NFCOR repository is now also already there. Then we have the light sheet recon pipeline. That's the pipeline for light sheet microscopy image reconstruction. And Conrad started working on the first sub-work flows and making everything NFCOR and of course the pipeline he has so far. Then we have the semi-seq pipeline. That's the pipeline to analyse the sequential analysis of macromolecule accessibility sequencing data. And Margarita is currently working on the first modules and starting the initial workflow. And then the last new pipeline I think is the tau typing pipeline. It's the identification of genes, genomic segments with genome-wide phylogenetic signals of an organism using canal tau rank correlation statistics. And Hanta Awun and Josh and Sam are working on it. Working on creating the first initial workflow. Working on the input parameters. And also started working on modules on sub-work flows. So sounds like a lot of collaboration with the groups here. Oh sorry. One more new pipeline, the viral integration pipeline that Alyssa is working on for finding viral integration sites in the human genome and she's working on extract chimeric genomic targets modules and documentation. Then we have one more pipeline currently being worked on to be converted to DSL2. So James and Jack are working on EGAR the genomics and metagenomics analysis pipeline for ancient DNA and working on samples modules here at the moment. And then we have all the rest of the pipelines and development. So first Zarek, the German enzymatic varying calling pipeline. My most important contribution today was winning the PR race against Maxime. So he has to deal with extract chimeric, so not me. And Susanna started implementing MSCI sensor for tumor only and Anders is continuing to work on the concatenation of ECF files. Then we have the liver city analysis pipeline that Luis, Aaron and Hanca are working on. It's the pipeline for quantitative image analysis of abdominal CT scans of HTC patients using deep learning and they are working on input syncing the template and then general pipeline set up steps and new functionality. There we have funk scan that is getting ready for the first release. So yay. Congratulations to all the developers there. And Jasmine, Annan and Luisa are working on the COM BGC module protocol and cleaning up results channels and AMP COM B and summarising this into a workflow. Next pipeline is the SM RNA seed pipeline for microRNA, small RNA seed analysis pipeline that Rob and Alex have been working on for known adapter sequence files auto detection of those and then lots of testing on real data text profiler that Vladimir, Sophia, James and Moritz are working on that's for paralyzed taxonomic profiling across multiple databases for shotgun meta genomics and they are working on a bunch of new modules and documentation for usage and output and I think also I've been involved in quite a few discussions with the modules team about the FASQC module. And then we have the single RNA seed pipeline for 10x genomics data Paul and Christian were merged a few PRs for new tests and new output formats and also made the output of the SC flow and the SC RNA seed pipeline compatible to each other and then we have I think the PR from Allison maybe about the expected cells and sequencing centres. They have the HGSEC pipeline for horizontal gene transfer and further work on documentation and then also preparing a PR to master so sounds like this pipeline might also be getting ready for release. Then we have protein the protein fold pipeline for protein structure prediction Athanasios and Lila working on it to provide alpha fold 2 or co-lop fold databases and parameters and then more modules and constitutional profiles to be added to NFCWAR then I think Gisella, Zaba and Azuzanne worked on the airflow pipeline for BNT cell sequencing analysis and been working on some new container issues and I think this is the last pipeline so Edmund also worked on the nascent pipeline for nascent transcript identification analysis and he merged PIN support for TSS identification so that's everything we did. I hope that not too many reviews are open I think the buddy system worked out somewhat well, I didn't see so many review requests but if there are any left keep posting them and if you see an open review be the reviewer you want to see and review it or add comments and make sure we get it all in. Yes, infrastructure we had actually our main goal for the hackathon of working more on the sub-workflow functionality which Hashell already covered, we did we also improved the test coverage the prototype with NF tests were started during the hackathon and also we had some bug fixes especially from the documentation team but also Sofia on the more website codeside were done on the website there so I think we filled all the things out we wanted to do for the hackathon but now more in detail what we did today Sofia was continuing to build these landing pages for the docs so we have nice grouping pages for the usage and the contributing sites Arran finished working on the code coverage of the sync and you can see with a 25% increase in code coverage which covers 100% so very nice, thank you very much for that he now switched over to cover the main file which is currently untested and therefore also the biggest gap in our coverage so it would be really nice if we covered that one Pion on the NFCore sub-workflows info command and also finished writing the test like I said yesterday he was working on the or finishing up the sub-workflows list command and now also the test so I just need to review it but this is for now will be the only way for you to find the all available sub-workflows so it's a very important command to have so thank you very much for that work Bruno added functionality to the NFPROF plugin to annotate each published file with the associated task and just now like really in the last bit Alex, Robert, Edmund and Phil added a custom runners for the NFCore CI for future events so we don't run into the problems with GitHub not liking us anymore but we can just run it spin up our own instance quickly and run the tests there and hopefully be there for a lot more productive we will get so much more things done Julia and especially Arthur and also with me continued working on the getting rid of code redundancy for the modules and sub-workflows command I won the hackathon and I also worked on the stats Paul thankfully based on I guess basically the command from yesterday from Phil that we should manually cancel tests when we see that we are published in one we can actually do that in the CI in the YAML files for the tests and he added that to the pipeline template so in the future this will be included for the pipelines and I also added it now in the modules repo so for that in future we should also reduce the amount of running CIs just by cancelling them automatically and this was it from the infrastructure group it was very nice to see some new faces joining into our fights to keep all these things going up and running so thank you very much for everybody who joined and put their effort into this right did I forget any groups today I think that's everybody yeah on that final note with the GitHub testing I'm kind of kicking myself that we didn't figure out that this would be possible before the event started and instead waited until the last hour to implement it but I think we've been fighting with the limit of concurrent running CI jobs for probably about two years now every time we have a hackathon it's a major blocker so I'm really excited that we managed to get that running now so in the future we'll be able to just spin up an AWS instance for a few days and anyone who is working just at the end of the day will have seen all their jobs sitting in queue and then when we got it to work suddenly everything started running at once so on infrastructure side I'm more excited about that than I should be just because it's been a thorn in our side for years great thank you everyone I think I've said thank you too many times now but thank you for being here that's all for the NFCOR hackathon we will we're basically finished up here now so the NFCOR the next flow summit will be kicking off this afternoon but all of the NFCOR summit is downstairs the same building but it's downstairs in the foyer and then one level down some stairs going down it will be very obvious later this afternoon so please wrap up now we need to clear out of these rooms in the next hour or so so please kind of take your things with you because we're not going to come back here in fact we won't be able to come back here the first talk for the next flow summit starts at 5pm Evan will be doing the welcome talk so you've got a few hours between now and then but of course registrations are already open now for the summit so feel free to kind of mill around if you've got posters you can put them up have a read of other people's posters have a chat but if you want to go home rest your legs for an hour or two and that's fine as well so really looking forward to seeing you all at the summit I hope you enjoy the next couple of days as we finish out the week I will talk briefly on Friday with some stats so you've got another day to finish up all requests and get those contributions that's maxed out and we'll also announce the winners of all the different competitions we've had then as well so keep your eye out for that alright thank you very much everyone and hope to see you at the next hackathon