So, welcome to our year three of our WEF CNN Emerging Markets Roundtable. As you can see, we have a splendid representation from countries big and small, from Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, and superb insight from the corporate world in Carlos Combe, from Renaud-Nissan, and two of the best in terms of economic analysis with a keen eye towards the emerging markets, and Nouriel Rubini and Minjou of the International Monetary Fund, and before that, of course, from the Bank of China. So, in the past few years here in Davos, we've often talked about the two-speed Europe, the northern half of Europe accelerating and growing, while the southern half of Europe struggles and the core growing below historical norms. Is that what we're seeing for the first time in the emerging markets after a decade of blistering growth? In Far East Asia, China is expected to grow 7.5%, 7.7% this year. In Africa, Nigeria, according to the World Bank, is 6.7%, and in Southeast Asia, the Philippines growing during the rebuilding phase after the horrible natural disaster at 6.5%. Then we see large countries such as Brazil growing about a third of where it was three years ago, Russia, half of its recent run rate. So those who have not reformed enough before the U.S. Federal Reserve began talking about tapering in May of 2013 paid a huge price for that. The $64 billion of capital pulled out of emerging markets between May and August of 2013. So where does that leave us today after a phenomenal start to the century interrupted by a Western-led financial crisis? As we sit down tonight, we saw the Argentinian peso hitting a new 12-year low. The currency in Turkey, the lira has been under pressure for the last 10 trading sessions as well. As many of these countries move into the middle class income status, where can they generate growth in the future? So all this success has led to a rise in per capita income, and as we found out over the course of the last 12 months, they're not shy about hitting the streets and protesting if they don't think that their governments are doing enough. So I think a good place to start is with the news that we're seeing today. Let's start with Nuriel Rubini, if we may, and tell us what you think the sell-off that we've witnessed quite severely in the last 24, 48 hours in Argentina is telling us about the economic fundamentals and how the market is evaluating certain emerging markets vis-a-vis others. Well, it has been a confluence of a number of factors. First of all, Argentina has wrong macro policies that are bleeding reserves. They finally let the currency move downward. That happened the same day when the China numbers about manufacturing activity became weaker, and we've had now elements of political unrest to different degrees from places like Ukraine to Thailand or even in Turkey. So it's like a perfect mini storm, but I think the broader picture is one in which China is slowing down. The Fed is tapering. The commodity supercycle is over. Many of these emerging markets did not do structural reforms in the last decade, and a number of these emerging markets had slippages of monitoring fiscal and credit policy when money was cheap at zero policy rates and was going into emerging markets, and now the market pressures are emerging. Now longer term, the fundamental might be sound, but we've realized that there are also fragilities within the emerging market world. Minjoo, from the International Monetary Fund, there's an obvious question here. Do you step in to assist Argentina at this juncture? This is not an economy that's been or a leadership very cooperative with the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank. Are we at the crisis point, would you suggest? Well, we were more than happy to help, and this is very clear, but as you know, we don't have official dialogue since year 2004. We haven't done any Article 4 consultation with Argentina now, things like that. So we will firmly rely to enhance our official dialogues with the authority to help us to understand the situation better and also help them. Of course, we monitor the situation very closely and we are very careful to assess the situation as well. What would you suggest is the key lesson learned here, though, if you didn't reform over the last decade and there's not that easy money that's left over anymore, that you pay a huge price? I think Noria made this very clear. There are two things that happen if the emerging market is key important. The first issue is external environment has changed. The advancing economy do change the growth rates and also the liquidity market, the easy financial flow is changing now. So you have to think about how do you balance your external financing and internal need. The second issue is after quite a year, the strong growth in many emerging markets, you have an internal structure issue now. In some countries, the loans well is too strong and the structure issues is there too. And you have to carry on the reform. This is very clear. If you don't do that, you will run into a very difficult situation. That's very true. Deputy Prime Minister Babajan, the Turkish leader has been under pressure for the last 10 trading sessions hitting a new record low. There's always been that vulnerability with Turkey because of its current account deficit. Are we tumbling into a crisis that's going to keep the pressure on Turkey in your view? Well, what's happening in Turkey mostly is a repricing process. Not only just because of the Fed's tapering, but also the recent political events has triggered some market volatility. But when you actually look at the capital flows, there has not been a capital outflow whatsoever. It is mostly capital markets, bond markets. There's trading going on, revaluation is going on. But people who have been investing in Turkey are actually keeping their investments, which is, I think, an important difference from other cases. What we have been doing, especially since 2011, was attracting long-term capital but giving some intended volatility so that the short-term capital was not attracted to the country anyway. So that, I think, is now playing a very important role that people who have already long trust in the country is still there and they have a long-term view, which is important for us. After what you see in Argentina and the pressure on your currency, what action do you take immediately to try to stop a contagion effect? First of all, it's a floating exchange rate. So we don't have any committed exchange level or whatsoever. And our central bank is doing whatever is needed, especially during times of volatility. And they have instruments in their hands and they are using these instruments in an independent way to do what is necessary when it is necessary. Min, you wanted to follow up on the comments on Argentina? No, I think on Turkish issues. And I think the key issue is, as Vice Prime Minister explains, Turkish has a flexible exchange rates, which has served the economy very well in the past few years. So the market is just adjusting. This is the process. I think that the key issue matters today is whether the monetary policy have to take into the situation, particularly on de-inflation of the inflation side in the near future issues. I think that's the key issue. Otherwise, the market works. Yeah, this is just a adjusted process. My name is Spinisher, I'm most of EC. Europe's been in the doldrums and is starting to come back along with the rest of the global economy. What are your perceptions of what we see in the emerging markets now? We entered a new normal where they're still growing, over 5% in 2014. But investors need to be more discerning about where they put their money as a result of some of them not reforming and slowing down. It's true that I was in another panel last year. It was about Europe being the problem. Now, the view on Europe is more positive. But when I look at emerging markets, of course I see a slowdown and I see also structural factors and the need for reform. And obviously, there are also the consequences of the tappering. But still, I believe that there are structural changes which lead us to optimism in the long run. And especially the emergence of, I would say, a new middle class. Our treasuries say that if you look at 2030, the number of people who live with more than $30 a day per day will be about 2 million. And this will change also the habits, the way of consumption. And it will offer also new opportunities for jobs and high-quality goods. So, well, we've got to face the situation. We've got to go on with reforms. But, well, still, there is there a source of growth for the rest of the world and for the emerging countries themselves. Carlos Ghosn, you have plants in at least a dozen emerging markets. You're not looking short-term with some of the volatility. Does it concern you that some markets have opened up dramatically and this doesn't alarm you that we see the slowdown and the BRICS economies in particular? No, not at all. I mean, there is no developing market, no emerging market which has been growing constantly with no surprise. You have to be ready when you invest in the emerging market to ups and downs. What is important is not the next three months or the crisis of yesterday or the volatility of next week. We invest for the next 20 or 30 years and you assess the potential of the country where you are investing based on the fundamentals of the country. And the main fundamentals for us from one side is how far are you from a similar country in terms of motorization? And from the other side, is policy or whoever is in power or can be in power taking some fundamental steps, particularly in terms of infrastructure and education, which are obviously the two most important elements. I can give you a very simple example happening today. You take Nigeria. It happens that I met with the president of Nigeria yesterday and you take Nigeria, 170 million people. And if you have to compare Nigeria, its size, its wealth, its resources to another emerging market, I would compare it to Brazil. Or I look at Nigeria, I see Brazil maybe 20 years ago. In Brazil today, you have 200 million people and the car market is 3.6 million cars. 3.6 million cars. And it's far from its potential because you have 200 cars per 1,000 residents in Brazil. While in average European country, you have 500 cars per 1,000 residents. When Nigeria today, in 2013, sold 52,000 cars. 52,000 cars compared to 3.6 million.  So I think, yes, we have to be very careful about the volatility on the short term.  And the trend in all the emerging market is really very positive. President Kagami, your small economy in eastern Africa averaging growth of 7% for the better part of the last decade. Now, how do you get the next wave of growth in east Africa? We're lowering barriers amongst countries where you can sustain that level of growth and see a new trade block emerge from the eastern half of the continent. We have been able to grow and there are prospects for continued growth, not only for what is happening in the country itself, but to leverage the scale in terms of regional integration. We have the east African community which has 135 million people. And we have already formed a customs union. We have a common market. We are moving towards a monetary union and we're even looking at a political federation. So this plays to the advantage of what even Rwanda as a country on its own is able to achieve within this larger community. A question for the panel, Min, before I pick up here, but I want to put a question for the whole group and I'd love you just to chime in right across the board here. Nouriel, you can start us off. Would you suggest that we've entered a new normal for emerging markets? So we have to lower the bar in expectations for the next decade? Not necessarily. There has been a slowdown of growth in emerging markets because of some of the macroeconomic imbalances. But this was true that the last decade has not seen significant structural reform in many of these emerging markets. And now there is evidence that the potential growth of this emerging market may have fallen from 6% towards 5% or below. But if there are gonna be structural reforms then productivity growth can rise. You have still the demographic dividend and the growth can actually accelerate again. So medium term I would say you still have countries positively that are urbanizing, they're industrializing, there is a catch up of per capita income growth. There is a rise of middle class and a consumer society. Those are positives, but there are also some caveats. Many of these emerging markets reach middle income level but then they get stuck in a middle income trap. And paradoxically, these middle classes become restless. In these emerging markets, those who are protesting in the street in Brazil are not the poor people in the favelas, is the middle class. Same thing in Turkey, same thing in India, same thing in Indonesia or Chile or Colombia. So once you reach a certain level of income but there is a middle income trap and reform do not occur, actually middle classes become politically restless and that's something of a new phenomenon. It's not the proletarians who are in the streets, is the middle class wants better services, more economic opportunity, more education, more public services. Deputy Prime Minister Babajan, this has been very pronounced in Turkey over the last year. It's not an easy place to govern anymore. People are demanding more from the government after all the growth and the doubling of the GDP of the last decade. Well, in Turkey actually what has been happening is not only our per capita GDP has been increasing very fast and it's now more than $17,000 PPP adjusted. It is half of Japan, 56% of the EU average. But also income distribution has become better and better. Our Gini coefficient has been dropping and across OECD we are the country which has the fastest Gini coefficient rate. And also fighting with poverty also helped a lot. So what actually our people would like to have is not just the basic needs and last year's protests for example were not because of people were poor. Most of the people on the streets actually were educated, young people, professionals and they have aspirations for different levels of needs. And I think that's an important test for our democracy and also recently we are also going through some tests for our rule of law. But we have also a very strong anchor which is the EU process. We're a member of Council of Europe and a candidate country to the EU and take the reference of the norms and the standards of the EU for our democracy, for freedoms and for rule of law. And that is helping us a lot and all these tests I think are important and we are just going to emerge as a stronger democracy and as a stronger country with a true rule of law. I think in emerging countries these are probably expected more or less but then if we are careful about what we want to do for the country and what we target for the long term these tests will be passed in a successful way. There's some that believe that the leadership has become out of touch with the people after all this growth in Turkey perhaps they've been in power too long and it's time for a change. You know the argument. Well, the current public opinion polls show that even after the most recent events show that still 47 to 48% of the people support the ruling party and the government. I think we are doing something right probably. That's why people still have that big of a support but of course we are the government of the other 52% of the population as well. We are aware of it and we are trying to be more and more inclusive and just try to understand the needs, aspirations, maybe fears, worries of every segment of the society and appeal to every segment of the society. Of course now that we have elections coming up just two months later we have the local elections then in July we have the presidential elections. Next year in June we are going to have the general elections. I think it is okay to expect some political noise throughout this process and a lot of what's happening actually recently I think has a lot to do with the approaching elections but still as long as I think we are able to communicate what we really intend and what we are really doing it will be quite okay. And also I think we are learning a lot from what is happening. Learning and also shifting our policies if necessary when necessary. Carlos, it would be good to get your response and share your candor with the audience. You have a plant in a country for example in Brazil. When you see protests what do you do as a chief executive? What's your response? Well I mean you don't have to respond to this because it's obviously not our area of concern. The fact that you have from time to time political instability doesn't mean it's bad for the economy. That means we've seen it in our sectors in many countries where political instability meant from time to time that the sales of cars were going up. Let me give you an example. Argentina has a record year of sales of cars in 2013 even though as you know there have been a lot of instability even economically. But if I would like to make a comment because you mentioned the new normal and maybe there is a new normal on emerging market but the new normal doesn't mean that your perspective goes down. In certain case your perspective goes up. Let me give you one example which has been taking place for the last 10 years is about China.  And particularly for the car market. 2013 car market went up in China 14%. Not only it's the largest market in the world but it continue by far to be the engine of growth for our industry. So from time to time the new normal means we have to revise our vision of the potential of some of the emerging markets up not only down. Interesting. Finance Minister Mussavisi, can you share your thoughts on where France would like to see its bilateral trade and partnerships grow in the emerging markets? You have a history in Africa of course in the francophone countries but where do you see the opportunity for France in the emerging markets today? Of course everywhere. But you just mentioned Trinam is to go on just a minute ago obviously for the car industry and there are strong car industries in France. They are the future of this industry but also I'm convinced that Africa is a fantastic opportunity for the future and that the markets there will grow as fast and the population will grow. And this is a continent with more than 5% growth a year and we have very important reasons to believe that this will go on and that the potential for the future. You mentioned Nigeria versus Brazil is absolutely huge and this is why we call for our companies to invest there. There is no risk. Well there is a risk but it's a calculated risk. There is a huge opportunity. We must believe in the future of Africa. I believe in the future of Africa. In December there was a summit organized in Paris between France and Africa. Not only the Francophone Africa, all Africa and it was not only about security. We're involved in security. Mali, Republic of South Africa but also development and growth. And when I organized in Bursi our ministry a side event with 900 firms it was absolutely considerable. So there is a future there and we must be very confident. New normal, I don't know, but there are changes. But last word, it's important that there are reforms too in order to develop particularly communication, infrastructures and transport because it's the key also for going on with growth. Just to add a few sentences to what Pierre has said. Also South-South trade and South-South cross-investment is growing. In 2008, Turkey had only 12 embassies in Africa. Today we have 35 embassies. And our exports to Africa plus Middle East is now almost as high as our exports to the European Union as a whole. So that is also a new trend going on. So developing countries, trading and doing more with developing countries which is I think a huge potential which will grow. Who's showing interest in Rwanda President Kagami? Who are your number one investors? Who's knocking on your door now Mr. President to come into Rwanda in that eastern half of Africa would you suggest? We have many investors coming from the continent itself. We have a number of companies from South Africa, actually others from Nigeria, but now we are seeing many from Europe. It's United States. So it's across the globe that even from Asia, China has been also investing in Rwanda. But it may take this opportunity to say there are a number of things that are playing in the favor of the continent, especially I talked about integration, but there are also opportunities in the demographic structures as they exist. And coupled with continued reforms, we are seeing a future where Africa continues to grow. And of course, South-South cooperation as was said, but to more so intra-African trade which has been at a very low base at the moment is also playing out in favor of possible continued growth on the continent. Before I come to you Finance Minister, I'd like to pose a new question to the panel here. And so if we're gonna look at 2014 and start to categorize the greatest risk, how would you put them? Hariyal, to the emerging markets. Well, some risks are external and one is whether China is gonna slow down more, whether the Federal Reserve is gonna make a mistake by exiting QE or raising rates too soon, or whether maybe the correction of commodity prices is gonna become stronger than otherwise. And some of the risks are internal. I mean the fragile five India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa have in common current account fiscal deficits, slowing growth, rising inflation, but also they've in common now election, parliament or presidential this year. Now elections are good because it has signed these are old country that were not democracies and now they are. That's very good news. And sometimes political change in the regime is for better policies, sometimes for worse policies, sometimes ruling party were doing well, are gonna be reelected. If you look at the spectrum of these countries, in India and Indonesia, maybe there'll be government change, maybe not in Turkey, Brazil and South Africa. In Turkey the current government has done many reforms, maybe the same powers, good news, and maybe in other parts of emerging market, regime change will be actually useful and it's not gonna occur in some of these countries. So I think that's another element of uncertainty, the political and the policy uncertainty. If you come to Davos 2015 men, what would you qualify or quantify as the biggest risk to the emerging markets? Well, I think we'll probably see both side stories. The first story is the emerging market still grows strongly. I think we'll start with discussion for this panel talk about the market volatility in Turkey and Argentina. But I think we should see the overall picture. Really the growth has been stabilized on the emerging market take proper policies and we forecast this year the growth risk for whole emerging market were 5.1% which is stronger than 4.7%. And this year the advancing economy grows rather strong from 1.1% last year to 2.3% which will help the export industry for the emerging market. And the domestic supply and investments also rather strong and they still have a space. So I would say overall the emerging market still have a great potential to grow. I think that's very important. And also although the emerging market growth is having slowed down, but the emerging market today still account 65% of global growth contributions. I think this is also very important.  I think that's the first issues. And after one year, how do we see that? I would say it depends on whether the emerging market will take the proper policy to do the reform, to do the adjustments. I think a few things are important to watch particularly this year. And first things you have to watch tapering, right? And I think tapering have a few different dimensions. The first dimension is the Fed, I believe would do a good job in terms of gradually move the liquidity out of the market in line with the growth and job and do the good communication is fine. But the second issue is we want to make sure the market will respond to the Fed policy. The main events tell us the market may not respond in the proper way to the Fed policy. So the emerging market have to watch carefully because particularly for the emerging market depends on the external captures. I think that's very important. The third issues were Fed doing the tapering, the interest rates were increased and we found the passing through rates is more than 100%. So the emerging market will feel the pressures in the second half. So they will increase their refinancing costs will transfer in some degree into the budgets. So I think the first issue is you have to look at tapering. If you do well, it should be okay for the year 2015. Number two, you should carry on the structure before. Rebuild the buffer's policy space. I think the issues Norio mentions are mentioned. It is what define who will be the champion for 2015 and who will not be there. I think this is a reform, adjustments and transform himself into the next stage is absolutely important for emerging market. I don't think this is a new norm. I think it's absolutely normal. It's normal because by definition, the emerging market is the process of learning as the Prime Minister says, a process of adjustments, a process of reform. So in that time, if external environment change as we see today, internal macro situation you have to do reform. A slow down growth is a good thing for emerging market because that's positioning yourself for the future to take off. At the end of the day, in per capita levels, in emerging market, per capita GDP ratio still only 24 to 25% use as per capita GDP level. So the gap is huge. The catch up is huge. The growth potential is huge. Absolutely on Carlos's side. How do you see it, Carlos, for 2014? Do you need to quantify any risks for Renault-Nissan in the emerging markets? No, frankly, I think the biggest risk for us is too much fluctuation on exchange rates because obviously when exchange rates fluctuate you have to adjust your own balance of operations. Let's take the example of Turkey. Well, in Turkey, we're producer in Turkey and we are, so we produce cars in Turkey, we import cars to Turkey and we export cars from Turkey. So if our balance is that imports and export are about the same amount, in a certain way we don't care about the fluctuation about the pound. If we are net importer or net exporter, well, obviously the strong volatility is gonna have an impact on us. So there are some countries where we are still unbalanced. So the biggest risk for us coming from emerging markets is the fact that we still did not find a balance and in this case, fluctuation on exchange rates can hit us in term of profits, that's it. But in fact, this is a temporary situation because you never wanna be in a situation where you depend on the fluctuation of a currency. That's why we're always looking for an opportunity to have a balance between imports and export and have as much as possible local production. Let's focus your question to Turkey or let me focus my question on Turkey. What's your greatest internal risk for 2014 which you suggest, Deputy Prime Minister? Well, first of all, maybe just few sentences about the overall developing markets and then Turkey. Now, since Federal Reserve announced its tapering process there was some talk about the developing countries going through somewhat like the Asian crisis that we lived through in 1990s. But compared to the 1990s, developing countries right now has much stronger banking systems, on average lower public debt, and again on average much higher reserves and also a better and more sophisticated macroeconomic management overall. So the next 10 years probably we are going to see lower growth rates with the developing countries compared to the past 10 years. But still on average, the developing countries will be growing much faster than the developed countries. And for Turkey, last four years, despite we are highly linked with the Eurozone, with European Union in terms of trade and investments, still we had quite high growth rates. And last four years, the total employment in Turkey increased by 6 million. That is more than the number of jobs lost in the EU total. And it seems that this job creation will continue for years to come. In terms of Turkey specific 2014, of course we have two elections, so it is okay to expect some political noise. But since we have already timely protected the balance sheet of the government against interest rates and also exchange rate risks, so public net debt in Turkey, when you look at the composition, it is only lira, the net public debt. We don't have any effects debt as the government. Our banks balance sheets are very well hedged against currency movements and interest rate movements. Also, all the consumer loans in Turkey are all in Turkish lira. We don't allow household loans to the banks in any other currency, but only in lira. So the balance sheet of the government, the banks, and the households are quite well protected against market volatility. Our corporates have some external debts, but as we experienced in 2006 and also 2009, our corporates also learned a lot about how to manage the effects risk also. So overall for 2014, we expect a growth rate of around 4% or so, and we expect our current accounts deficit to go down. Our budget deficit last year was only 1.1% of GDP. Our EU defined public debt stock is only 35% of GDP. So strong public finances, strong banking system, current accounts deficit, yes, but also taking short-term measures and more structural reforms, how to deal with that for the longer term. How do we explain the pressure under your currency right now? Right now, in Turkey, who is mostly on the buying side for dollars or euros, actually Turkish corporates, not consumers, not foreign investors, but Turkish corporates. Those Turkish corporates who have either foreign debt or who are importing companies, because of especially the local political events, they think that it is better for them to buy dollars or euros right now rather than waiting. So on the buying side, mostly we have observed Turkish corporates and not really other buyers. So the pressure on the price is mostly coming from that side and nowhere else. Okay, Finance Minister, I haven't talked to you for a little bit of time here, but I'd love to have you weigh in on the debate of the greatest risk for 2014 as you see the emerging markets. So as you explore these different countries to have France, Inc. go into, what would you classify as the greatest risk? Well, I wouldn't say anything geographical, but obviously the threats come from the Fed tappering and also from national weaknesses here or there which are not the same everywhere. Meaning that, as I said, you need to have structural reforms and you need to develop communication, you need to develop infrastructures, especially of transport, and you've got also to strengthen the macro prudential framework. I think this is absolutely necessary and this is also linked to what I said about the tappering. And also the fact that if there is a slowdown in growth and if there is still a middle class going on, there will be a tendency to have more debt and we must be very careful about that. So we must keep the pressure on that. But I wanted to react a few minutes ago on what Mr. Kagame said. I believe that the future of our economies is also linked to regional integration. It's obvious in Africa and I think there is a potential for more growth in Africa with regional integration and there are several regions of course in Africa. And it's also the case with the Arizona and its neighbors. And obviously we need to go on having very strong relationship with Turkey. It's a long run, the long way for Turkey to join the EU. But it's still perspective that we must not forget. And even without the accession of Turkey immediately, we must still cooperate. Turkey is a country friend nearby Europe and a candidate to European Union accession. And this is probably what my president, Mr. Alon, will say when he moves to Turkey next week. We absolutely must strengthen the links between as well Turkey and the EU and France and the EU and also again Africa. Good, in Africa President Kagame, if we could mark 2013 is when the terrorists reared their ugly head in a number of different countries. Is that the biggest threat to Africa going forward that in the poorer countries that this is a fervent environment for terrorism?  If you look at the situation starting with Somalia, you go to Mali, there have been signs that there is a spread of that. If you look at Northern Nigeria, the tendency is terrorists. Activities will take advantage of certain weaknesses that exist in structures of governance on the continent of Africa. And certainly this has a tendency to affect business, to affect economic growth, not only of what is happening there in the very countries and the continent, but also the perception it creates for the like investors who would want to come to Africa. So it's one thing that we are focused on and want to cooperate on as Africans as well as Africa cooperates with the rest of the world to deal with that. I want to open the floor to questions so we can get the lights on, have the microphones ready, that would be terrific. Before I do it, they overused the phrase and description of you of Dr. Doom in the past, but look into your crystal ball for the final thoughts on the panel. If we're sitting in these same chairs this time in 2015, is there any surprise that we should be watching out for, Nuryal, that implodes in the emerging markets that brings us back down again? There are risks, but the results are gonna depend on structure reform and macro policy adjustments. I think this is gonna be delicate because the fragile countries should be tightening monitoring fiscal policy as a way of dealing with budget deficit and external balance and excessive inflation above target. But in the short run, if you tighten monitoring fiscal policy, your growth is gonna slow down. The balance sheets of banks and corporates is gonna weaken and all of them are facing election. So having a slowdown of growth is not popular. On the other side, if you don't take the tough decision you have to take on tightening, the risk is that one, your currency goes into a free fall. That leads to imported inflation and inflation's already high becomes even higher. And finally, who's gonna finance your external deficits or the fiscal deficit if your interest rates are too low and you have easy monetary policy? So the trade off is that in some sense, them if you do and them if you don't, my suggestion will be take the bitter pill of doing the adjustment sooner because it will stabilize your economy and next year is gonna be better here. But if you don't take the bitter pill of doing structure reform, monitoring fiscal tightening and regaining credibility, next year could be actually worse than this year. So it's gonna all depend on the policy actions. Great, let's take some questions from the floor. Because of time, we have about 10 minutes, we can direct it to a person on the panel, please there and then we'll have the microphone to the gentleman and also here. We have a second microphone would be terrific there. Yeah, thanks, please. Peter Vanhamen, emerging markets journalist. One of the most interesting comments I heard was brought forward by Robini, Professor Robini, sorry, who talked about the middle income trap then afterwards paradoxically the middle income, sorry, the middle class is getting restless. This is a paradox indeed. And could you explain that paradox and can we expect more of that going forward? Is this the threat that we see in emerging markets? So it's a restless middle class is what you're suggesting? Well, certainly that's one of the aspects of democracy. You have democracy, you have middle classes that are engaged in the political process. There is now social media that allows, like in Brazil recently, flash mobs or other people getting organized. Even the Arab Spring Revolver due to the internet. There is an element of it that I think it's positive, an element of it of political instability, but it implies that government have to be more reactive to the needs of both the poor and the middle classes in terms of sound economic policies, providing economic opportunities, providing public services and the quality of it, fighting corruption and so on. So I would say on the net is a positive if the policy response in the right direction. If it's not then it's gonna lead to more political and policy and stability electoral and maybe damaging, but on net I think is a positive. I had a question here. Evening. My name is Bonola Ramukhele, a global shaper from the Johannesburg hub in South Africa. My question is directed to the honorable President, Paul Kagan. Taking cognizant of the fact that each and every country in Africa is different and there are security issues, but when will we have a situation whereby we've got a visa less Africa and we can be able to move from one country to the next and be able to trade? Because one of the issues is that trade amongst Africa is quite low because the infrastructure and being able to move from one country to the next is near impossible. And being able to import or export from one country to the next, some of the inhibitors are quite artificial. Paper work at borders and so forth is just too cumbersome to actually get things done. Thank you. Thank you. I was much worse 10 years ago, disaster 20 years ago, but do we need to accelerate the lowering of trade barriers and the free movement of people in Africa? That's the heart of the question. Yes. One of the things we are doing and concentrating on when I talked about customs union we have created in the East African region and common market protocol that has been put in place is about facilitation of movement of people, of goods and services. And as we do that, we cooperate on other issues. We are not just allowing business to freely move across borders. We're also continuing with kinds of political efforts and in that regard that should allow there for this. Of course, there are botanics. We have to keep working at that every time. It doesn't mean that we are at the same level as we want to cooperate across the continent whether it is in the East African community or other parts of the continent. Some people want to and are able to do it faster. Some of the requirements are put in place faster than others are able to do it. So there is a lot of effort going on but some realism also and the patients have got to step in. Min, just to get your thoughts on Africa here to conclude, it's extraordinary because we kept on saying that Africa was living below its potential for years and years and years. And then about five years ago, the light switch seemed to have gone on and it's shining brightly right now. What was the turning point for Africa that nobody really seems to focus on today? I think there are a few things. The growth has been very strong. Loss is 5%. This year we see 6%. So it is very good. I think a few things change and the governance is really getting better and the macro stability has improved because the macro policy in the field is much better now today. And the capital flow helps on infrastructure investments and all other things driving domestic demand from consumers inside and investments are also lifted up. So whole Africa region, particularly South Sahara Africa region really pick it up. I think this is a very good news, fantastic news since we have observed and we are very positive for the region to continue the growth in next year. Great. Gentlemen, thanks very much for the attention and the round table. I appreciate it. A nice round of applause please if we can. And thanks for the questions from the floor. Thanks very much.


Welcome to this episode of the structural engineering channel podcast, a podcast focused on helping structural engineering professionals stay up-to-date on technical trends in the field and to help them succeed in their careers and lives. I'm your co-host Matt Picardle, I'm a licensed engineer at DCI Engineers practicing on structural projects in California with an undergraduate degree from Cal Poly Pomona and a master's in structural engineering from UC San Diego. And I'm your co-host Alexis Clark. I work in Hilties North American headquarters as the product manager of our chemical anchoring portfolio in the U.S. and Canada. I'm a licensed professional engineer in Texas, received my bachelor's in civil engineering from UT Austin and I'm currently an MBA candidate at Auburn. In this episode we talk to Dr. Badri Hiryer, Vice President and Director of Artificial Intelligence at Thornton Thomas City about the applications of AI and machine learning in the AEC industry. In his current position, Dr. Hiryer leads to the core.ai research and development group focused on developing applications that leverage machine learning and AI to transform various workflows and processes within the AEC center. He is also the founder and CEO of T2D2.ai, a technology startup providing cloud-based asset management that uses computer vision to detect and map deterioration and damage in structures using drone or mobile camera feeds. Prior to establishing core.ai at Thornton Thomas City, Dr. Hiryer spent several years as a computational scientist in the company's applied sciences practice where he developed high performance computing software used by the Navy for computational fluid dynamics simulations. Dr. Hiryer has a master's degree from John Hopkins University and a PhD from Columbia University. Now let's jump into our conversation with Badri. Badri, welcome to the structural engineering channel podcast. Thanks so much for being here. Could you tell our listeners, you know, just a little bit about your career journey, how you got to where you're at and ultimately what you do at Thornton Thomas City? Yes, certainly. Thank you very much for having me. It's great to be here. So yeah, so right now I'm a VP and director of AI at Thornton Thomas City. So I've been in this position for about eight years now. But going back to the beginning, I moved to this country back in 2001. I came here as a fresh graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. I got my undergrad degree in civil engineering. And then I got my master's in 2003 and then worked for a couple of years, a few years in Chicago, Midwest area, and then moved to the Bay area. I was working in industry product development research and testing positions. One was Clark Detrick was a metal framing company and then Simpson Strong Tie, which many of your listeners might be familiar with. They're a big manufacturer of structural connectors and so on. So back in 2008, I decided to actually go back to grad school to pursue my PhD in computational mechanics because that was a strong interest of mine. I wanted to get back more deep into that subject. So I went to Columbia University. I spent three and a half years there and I graduated in 2012. I worked with Sandia Labs during that time, working on high performance computing software for tractor mechanics. And then after my graduation, I joined this company called Widelinger Associates. Widelinger merged with Thornton Thomas in 2015. So I've been with this combined firm for about eight years now. So I was an applied scientist or a computational scientist, you know, developing software for the US Navy on computational fluid dynamics and high performance computing and so on. But over the past three to four years, I've been working on machine learning and artificial intelligence applications. And so that led me to my current role as the director of AI. And some of the projects that I have led have turned into separate products. And then, you know, so in my current role, I work on leading R&D efforts, especially in the AI and ML area and bringing about these new technologies into applications in the AEC industry. So that is my full time job. My second full time job is actually as the founder and CEO of T2D2, which I will get to hopefully later during the show. I want to first mention my third full time job as the father of two sweet little kids. Exactly, very impressive. I know that's that's another full time job like you were saying. That's really interesting. And what's really fascinating to me, you know, just to get into the bulk of this is, you know, a lot of people, you know, the industry is always asking, hey, how do we, what's the future going to look like with AI and stuff? It's kind of cool that, you know, your effects, your directly effect, like shaping it. So that's what's really cool. And that's how we, we found you, you know, we found this article in AISC magazine and a really interesting article. I think what impressed me was you, so let me just read this correctly. So Thornton Thomasetti's core studio developed an application called Asterik, which is basically a web based software package that allows you to do concept level schematic design level designs on building structures. Like, so you're using like data analytics rather than engineering analysis. So it's basically AI, correct me if I'm wrong, but could you tell us something a little more about that? Because that just seems really interesting. And I know the industry is really interested in things like that too. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, there are definitely a lot of applications for AI. And I'll get to that. We can probably also talk about the definition of AI and the distinction between narrow AI and general AI. But coming back to your question about Asterisk, yes, it's a great tool.  And she'll probably tell you that, okay, you know, she's worked on the, you know, engineering tall buildings for decades, maybe 20, 30 years, and she can say, oh, based on my experience, I think that member size looks good. Okay, for that particular profile, but maybe over here, you know, this member size looks too light, maybe you should go back and recheck your calculations and so on. So how is she able to do that, you know, just based on your experience? It's because she's seen so many buildings, she's designed so many beams and columns and base, she knows this from experience. Now, the idea behind Asterisk is that we wanted to encapsulate that same experiential knowledge in a software program. And so we wanted to train a system that has seen thousands of designs and has captured, okay, what are the features, what are the parameters that lead to certain design decisions and so on. With Asterisk, you can take a, what your input is basically, like a very simple geometry, a massing, you know, height profile and so on. Just with that input, it first goes through a geometry service which breaks down into, you know, different base and columns and so on. And that goes to the core learn piece, which is the central brain behind designing the structure. You know, when I say brain, it's actually just what has seen before. It's just a supervised learning system that has seen lots of different designs before. So you have a beam designer, a column designer, a bay designer and so on. So these are the various components within it. And just based on the parameters that are input, it is going to give out, okay, these are most likely the members for these profiles. So because this is an inference service, it happens very quickly. So that means that, you know, you can quickly come up with like a first order design, you know, it's not something that has gone through a stability check or a strength check or a serviceability check. But, you know, it's a first order design. You know, it's most likely these member sizes are appropriate for this particular design that can also lead to computations of okay, this is the total amount of tonnage for this building. This is the amount of embodied carbon, because that's also an important consideration these days with, you know, carbon neutrality being a strong focus in the coming few, you know, coming decades. So, you know, these are questions that you can answer at, you know, the snap of a finger instead of having to go through like a very detailed design that might take, you know, hours or weeks. So it's a great tool for early stage optioning, as we call it. You want to evaluate maybe three or four different designs. You can quickly come up with a massing and a design and you can say, okay, this one, the tonnage is so much, this is the concrete tonnage, this is the embodied carbon involved. You change the parameters, you change the design, and you quickly come up with a new estimate. And so you can quickly evaluate a bunch of different, you know, designs and compare them across different parameters of interest. So I think it's a great tool, machine learning engine that is running the design service. Yeah, so important too. And, you know, especially during the early phases where the clients are always, could we do this? Can we do this? Or what if we do this? How do we optimize this? And you don't always have to keep going back and be running, I don't know, like an eTabs model or whatever. I just wanted to ask too, because I think you made a good point. Can you just do like a quick rundown of the differences between, you know, AI and machine learning? I get confused between that too, like, what's the difference? Is there a difference? Can you just do a quick definition of that? Certainly. So I mean, just in terms of AI in general, so how do you differentiate between AI and automation? In many cases, you know, you can automate a lot of things using computer programming. You know, how is AI different if you're automating something? The only difference is that, let's say for example, you want to go from A to E.  If B, then go to C. If not, go to D. And then go to E. So that is a procedural rule that you write down. And if you write it down, procedurally, then that's just, you know, normal automation. But if you just show a bunch of examples to a program that show the program how to go, these are the cases where you go from A to E. And the program learns all the rules, all the internal rules by itself, that I would say is artificial intelligence. And if, you know, machine learning, I think, can be used interchangeably with artificial intelligence in this context. If you have a machine that is learning all of the rules, all of the internal rules, you know, to achieve a certain objective, then it's artificial intelligence. But I would also like to make the distinction between artificial general intelligence and artificial narrow intelligence, or narrow AI and general AI. Because a lot of times I think these, especially with all this buzz about AI, people tend to conflict AI with, you know, general artificial intelligence about robots having some sort of consciousness and having their own agenda and so on. But that's very different from narrow AI. I mean, the actual technological advances that we've seen today and the various applications that we see in AI is all right now, at least in narrow AI. So if you take the narrow functions of, let's say, visual recognition or audio recognition, natural language understanding, data analytics, so these are narrow functions, which can be, you know, certainly optimized or automated through AI. And this is where I think we see a lot of applications. So general AI is probably a few years or maybe even a few decades away, but, you know, we already see a lot of potential for narrow AI in various applications. I love it. I think you gave us such a great definition. So thank you for breaking that down, Matt. Great question. Because I was like, man, you know, I learned about this a little bit, but it's always good to have a refresher. As soon as you said general AI and narrow AI, I understand what you're speaking about. If any of our audiences ever watched the TV show Person of Interest, that is general AI. That is an all-knowing machine being of sorts, right? Is that kind of what we would define general AI as, Padri? Yes, certainly. You see, I mean, I think most of the instances that you see in popular media and in various movies and shows, you know, you see basically a general AI that, you know, that does a lot of different functions that can do natural language understanding, visual recognition, and that can take decisions and so on that, you know, so that's still a few years ago, although a lot of companies, I believe many big tech companies are working towards that goal, but absolutely. Yeah, what we are dealing with is narrow AI. Yes, perfect. Yeah, we're not dealing with Watson here. We're working with something very focused and with a specific need, which brings me to my next question, which you set me up for so nicely, which is, what are some of those most important applications of AI in structural engineering? Yes, certainly.  So one is visual recognition, there is natural language understanding, there is audio recognition, data analytics, and so on.  And in general, in the engineering and construction world, there are applications on the construction side and there are applications on the engineer's desk.  There are any anomalies being able to quickly identify those anomalies, or, you know, being able to quantify trends across different, you know, across different quantities of interest, and so on. So that's, you know, that's just from a drawing perspective. And then from a natural language understanding perspective, I think you can have, you can imagine various systems that can help make the engineer's job a lot easier.  You can ask a lot of these questions instead of having to go to a reference, you know, you can have a system that can understand the query and go to the specific database and find the answer and come back to you. So a lot of these everyday applications, you know, that has more than just, you know, consumer applications that has, that could be specifically trained to serve an engineer's needs. On the construction side, you have, of course, various applications, you know, you have applications for robotics, you have applications for visual understanding that can identify, okay, if the job, you know, on track, what is the current status? It can automatically recognize if, you know, if there's a truck that came in that contained, you know, the steel, the steel members that were going to be used. What is the level of progress of construction? If there are maybe safety conditions that are being violated and so on. So there's just tons of applications on the construction side, there are applications on the engineering side. And then beyond just engineering and construction, if you think about the maintenance and the lifetime of the building, you know, you have tons of applications over there as well. For example, T2D2, one of, you know, the tool that I mentioned before. So that involves visual recognition of facade damage, for example. So over the lifetime of a building, you want to identify the deterioration or damage conditions on a facade, on a roof, or a structural member. You can do that visual recognition using a tool like T2D2. So, you know, just over the lifetime of a building, right, from inception all the way to, you know, to the end of life of building, I think there are just tons of applications for AI. And I didn't even mention data analytics, which has, you know, applications across all of the whole spectrum of engineering. Absolutely. Absolutely. So you've really given me a lot to think about here. And you did such a great job of breaking down all of these different facets that can affect not only, you know, conceptual design from actually, you know, cranking out calculations for beam sizing and all of these different small executions that we already do, as well as the impact on construction in the long run. I guess I have a couple of questions here. So you used this term earlier called optioneering, which I'm a huge fan of. I love that. And we kind of get this buzz in the engineering, structural engineering industry right now, about how do we put power back in the SES hands? How do we differentiate ourselves? How do we increase scope? How do we demand higher fees? And how do we become the prime on the project? And this seems like such a great opportunity for us to be able to take power back and to demonstrate our engineering expertise using this tool to show ourselves as a greater partner in conceptual phase to the client, to the eventual owner. Do you agree with that? Yeah, I certainly agree with that. I think, you know, that this can be... So I, you know, if you think about AI as, you know, as just transforming a certain section of the current process, that's probably a very limited view. I think the use of tools like this, the use of technology can actually transform the entire process, you know, instead of an engineer being involved only after the, you know, the whole, you know, architecture and the design has been, you know, has been finalized, you can have the engineer come in at a much earlier stage and be involved in the optioning or the, you know, the conceptual design stages as well. So I think, yes, there are definitely, you know, various applications of AI that can transform the entire process. Perfect, perfect. And the flip side of that coin is instead of this, you know, big industry topic right now, I want to focus, I want to shift really quickly to a focus of something that impacts all of us, regardless of really what industry we're in, which is spent, you know, being as effective as we can, as productive as we can in the office, and then getting to spend the rest of our weekdays spending time on things that we'd like to do, which is being at home with our families or spending hobbies or, you know, being active. And that is you keep mentioning how so many of these processes outside of the conceptual phase when we're actually executing different calculations and design iterations can make us much more efficient and much more effective in our work. So I'm also seeing that there's an opportunity to use these kind of tools to derive greater profit for the actual engineering firm by being able to demand the same amount of scope to do the same amount of work, but be able to get off maybe a couple of hours early, get seven hours of work done in five hours and then get home and do whatever you need to get done. Yeah, absolutely. So actually on that topic, you might there's actually there's a McKinsey study from maybe about five years ago. I see that in a lot of conferences and I'm sure you've seen that graphic too, that compares the level of productivity change across many industries over the past few years and decades. And there are lots of industries where they've seen like tremendous gains in productivity over the past few years. But construction was actually down at the very low end. The productivity was not very good over the past maybe what 50 years that the chart showed. I think with the new technologies that are coming into the picture now, I think that is going to change. I think you can have a significant productivity increase. These tools can help take away those hours doing mundane tasks and lots of repetitive tasks that can be automated and that can enhance the processes and give back some time to the engineers with the productivity gains. Badri, thanks for explaining that. I did want to get into, I know you mentioned this before, it's the T2D2, that's the Thornton-Thomasetti damage detector. That seemed really interesting just from the brief time that you mentioned it. Could you go more into that? That's something that I haven't heard of before, so it'd be really good to get into that. Yeah, definitely. Thank you. I'd love to get into that because as I mentioned, I'm also the founder and CEO of T2D2, which started off as like innovation project within Thornton-Thomasetti. But quickly because of the great potential, because of the great performance, turned into a product that could be spun off as its own startup. So now it's a startup that is part of the Twin Accelerator. So there's an internal TT accelerator that spun it off and right now it's a separate company. And just this morning, we had some great news because a DOB, the New York City Department of Buildings, had an innovation contest called Hack the Building Code Innovation Contest. So they were soliciting various new ideas to transform the building codes, the various prescriptive regulations that are in the building codes. How do we modernize building codes to use the latest and greatest technology? So T2D2 was one of the entries. It was among the finalists and then it was one of the winners. So we're very happy to announce that we're one of the winners of this novel contest. What T2D2 is, as the name mentioned, apart from an obvious nod to George Lucas and Star Wars, T2D2 stands for Thornton-Thomasetti Damage Detector. It uses computer vision to automatically detect deterioration and damage conditions in facade and building envelopes, facade structures and so on. And how do we do that? So because TT has been involved in renewal and forensics practices for many years, for decades actually. So we've been inspecting various buildings, bridges, tunnels and all of these structures and we have a large database of images that we've collected of various types of deterioration. We've used this vast data set. We've annotated them and we've trained advanced deep learning models and these are the same models that are used in image recognition, that could be for facial recognition, that could be for medical diagnosis. You should see various applications of image recognition, object detection and computer vision these days. So we use some of the same advanced state-of-the-art computer vision models. We've trained it on our large data sets that have been annotated for this purpose and we have a series of modules that does that task of identifying damage in structures using these models. And we've built a portal where you can actually visualize those results and we present sort of a digital twin to the client, to the end client that shows their asset and where all the conditions have been found and how they map to that structure. Especially with the use of drones, this can be if there's a really great technology. You can have a drone fly around a structure in a matter of a few hours instead of having to scaffold it in the building or have gondolas that are dropping down. It's a lot of expenses, a lot of time and a lot of effort. If you have a drone that captures all of the images, then we can quickly process them, identify all of the detections, have an engineer review those detections and present to the client like an overview of the state of their facade in a matter of a few hours. So that's I think a revolutionary technology. It's a great use of computer vision in our industry to manage the process of facade inspection. And that's not just for buildings that have applications in bridges, tunnels, nuclear reactors and endless opportunities there. Yeah, it sounds like definitely something of the future where you have a drone or kind of like those video games where it has those you're flying across and that it'll detect damage here, damage there. So that's pretty much what it's doing, right? You take a picture and it'll at least tell you based on all the data from all the subsets that you've given it before. It's like, oh, I've seen this type of damage before. This looks like it's corroding. And that's what the T2D2 will tell you will basically tell you analysis of what damage that it sees or doesn't see. Yeah, instead of yeah, instead of an engineer going through each and every picture, it'll already tell you once you take it. Yeah, it's crazy. That's correct. So it actually, so there are series of modules, like I said, so first it'll identify, okay, I'm looking at a brick masonry building. No, I'm looking at a stucco. I'm looking at concrete. And then depending on what material substrate it is, it's going to identify if it's a concrete building, it's, you know, you're seeing exposed rebar and corrosion, you're seeing spalling and so on. For a brick masonry building, it's going to identify these are the types of damage open mortar joints and cracked mortar joints and so on. So yeah, we have built like a sophisticated pipeline that can identify damage conditions for different types of materials. This could be really useful. We had a conversation, she's like a few episodes back at this point about actually it was our still bridge episode, that's what it was. We were talking about bridge inspection specifically. And that, you know, there is actually a huge talent drought right now in the inspection community because we have a large portion of our of our existing inspectors who are more tenured, we'll say, rather than than older, but they've been with us for a long time and they're within retirement age. And it's expected that some figure like 25 to 33% of the inspection community will retire within the next five to 10 years that there isn't a talent pool to backfill them effectively. And using this kind of intelligence in these kind of systems could could help offset the need for a human to be there. I guess I'm curious, what would the amount of capital take in order to substitute a human for a structure for to inspect and watch a structure you know, throughout its life cycle so that we can watch the damage that it may be going through? I think there are going to be tremendous cost savings, you know, if you replace an automated system like T2D2 compared to like a manual human based inspection, just in terms of the amount of time involved, you could say for setting up the scaffolding and the amount of time it would take to just visually observe all of the conditions on a structure on a typical building, it might take probably two to three days if you're allowed to fly drones and that can be done in the matter of two hours or less. And then if you had to process each of those images for a human that would take quite a bit of time and of course if you're just going through a bunch of images, there's also a lot of room for error, but our computer algorithms, our computer vision models, they never get tired and they never sleep. So they can process each of these images with the same amount of focus, you know, in a matter of seconds. So in terms of efficiency, I think it's going to be a very dramatic increase. Of course, is the performance of the model the same as a human inspector? Not yet. I think it's going to take some time. So right now we are having trained engineers and experts review the detections and make sure it marks the false policies and mark the false negatives. And I think eventually the models can get so good that the amount of human oversight needed would be much less. And at that point, I think it's going to make the inspector's job quite a bit easier. Yeah, instead of having to drop down from a scaffold or drop down from a rope axis, have a digital view of a building showing, okay, these are the areas that have potential damage. And maybe then it's, you know, I'm not saying that this will completely replace having to, you know, have a closer look and touch and feel the damage, you know, but you can quickly identify, okay, these are only the spots that I may need to go and take a closer look and probably feel, you know, touch the brick and see if it's, if it's okay or if there's a piece of facade that may be, that may be loose or something that's underneath that's not, you know, visual, it's not, that's not identifiable from the surface.  That's just a very inefficient way of inspection. Absolutely. And I think you, your description right there just so very nicely spelled out all of the different safety aspects that we have, and we talked about productivity, we've talked about business opportunities, but from the safety aspect and keeping our inspectors or structural engineers or forensic engineers safe on the job site, I mean, the value is huge. And I think you also made a great point that this isn't necessarily always that upfront caught capital. We have to think about the longevity of the structure, the lifetime of, you know, the amount of the scope of inspection or whatever that looks like. So I guess my question to you is, as a structural engineer, as if someone, if you could speak directly to our audience really quick and maybe help them understand how can we start to talk about this in our work today, how do we start to implement this in the projects that we're working on? If I'm a really excited listener right now and I'm like, man, I want to get my hands on this. I've got the perfect project for this kind of technology. What's the first step? How do they get to include that in the project scope? Do they bring it to the owner? Are there some benefits that they should, you know, be able to explain really eloquently? Give us a roadmap. Certainly.  It's T2D2.ai. There's a good description about our technology, about our service and, you know, what are the various features we have in our product. And of course, you know, we can, we were happy to answer any further questions, if there are technical point questions about how specifically it would apply to a certain building condition if it's, you know, we're certainly available to answer those questions. I would definitely encourage them to bring it up with the building owner, if this is a technology that I think that if this technology would be useful for that site. And, you know, we have plenty of resources on our website and we're available to answer any questions, you know, to identify for any specific project condition, if it is applicable or not. And, Badri, I had one more question. This is my last question. So with, you know, all this technology is great, right? And it's really interesting to see, but then now if you're thinking of it from a structural engineer or an engineer, like, is this thing going to replace my job? So do you have any, I guess, how do you see the future going in terms of for maybe roles shifting instead of maybe engineers doing all of the repetitive tasks? Maybe their role can be more into maybe checking the results or how do you see this going in the future and in terms of people that are afraid of like losing their jobs to AI in general? Yes, that's a great question. And I think you mentioned it, you know, in your question itself, I think it's not mainly about losing jobs. It's mainly about how the jobs are going to change. So right now, if they're engineers who are, you know, doing a lot of repetitive tasks to get to something that they can answer quickly, I think they're going to find this to be very useful, right? So right now, you should think of AI as like a calculator or like a toolkit that's in your pocket that can help you answer a lot of questions that can help you as an engineer do your work much more efficiently. And I think eventually, of course, the role might shift and it's not that with AI, with the introduction of AI, you're going to see a lot of disruptive changes right away. It's going to start happening very incrementally. So, you know, if people are open-minded, if they're welcome to accepting new technologies and new ways of doing their things, I think, you know, they're going to find this to be a very useful trend and a very useful development in the industry.  But over at least in the next five years or the next 10 years, I think there's going to be lots of benefits to structural engineers to make their jobs a lot more easier. Awesome. So, Badri, leave us with the final note. What's happening in the future? What new projects are you working on? What's exciting that we should be aware of? Sure. You know, I think this is a great time. I mean, we're working on some fantastic new technologies. At Core AI, as the director of Core AI, I mean, we're working on a few fascinating things, including natural language processing, data analytics, computer division, and so on. You know, recently, we had an internal hackathon. We have those every once in a while. Recently, at one of the hackathons, we had, you know, prototyped a machine learning hub or a dashboard where we can host AI models that have been trained under the production ready that can serve the entire AAC industry for various applications. And this could be like a central warehouse for trained and production ready AI machine learning models. If there are application developers, if there are users of machine learning who do not know how to, for example, build a model, they can come to this marketplace, to this hub, and just connect their application to the model. So, this was an idea that we had internally brainstormed recently at the hackathon. We built a small prototype and we're working towards that. So, that's one of the cool things that we're working on these days, besides many applications, besides, you know, T2D2, ASTRS, and the various other projects that we're developing at Core. Yeah, thanks so much for that, Badri. It's really interesting. That seems like a lot of projects. And like I said before, it's really cool to see that you're actually having a hand in, you know, developing the future and you're actually making this stuff a reality. So, really, thank you for sharing with us your insights and what you're working on. And I know I learned a lot, and I'm sure our listeners learned a lot. So, thanks again for being on the show. Thank you so much for having me. It was great to, you know, to talk to you. And I know that these are really exciting topics and I'm happy to talk about these. Thank you for the opportunity.


Imagine having complete understanding of what's inside a building without ever having to step inside it, without ever having to open a window or open a door. That's the kind of thing that scientists and engineers at the U.S. Army's Research Laboratory are working on using research in low-frequency imaging sensors and supercomputers. Hi, I'm Dr. Phil Percanti, the Director of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Commands, Army Research Laboratory. Welcome to ARL, what we learned today. A podcast where we talk with Army scientists and engineers about the science and technology that will modernize the United States Army. Today we're going to talk with Dr. Ross Adelman, a computer scientist in the lab's sensors and electron devices directorate at our Adelphi Laboratory Center in Maryland. Ross, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Tell me a little bit about yourself. So I've been here for 13 years. I started as a high school intern and I worked here every summer and winter break through my schooling and after I finished my Ph.D. I joined ARL as a full-time employee. Well, that's really cool. So you've been exposed to the Army for a good long time. Yeah, a very long time. And you've been exposed to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, which is one of the things that the Army Research Laboratory does to promote science by working with high school students in the summer and on breaks to really not only get them interested in science, technology, engineering and math, but also expose them to the United States Army, the problems the Army faces, get some interaction with soldiers. So that one day when you graduate from university with a Ph.D., you'll come back and you'll work here full-time.  It's really cool. Where'd you go to college? I went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh for my undergrad and the University of Maryland College Park for my grad school. Oh, where'd you study at Carnegie Mellon? I studied electrical engineering and at Maryland I studied computer science. Now I wonder what you wrote on your college application to get accepted to Carnegie Mellon. Did you talk about the fact that you worked at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory at all? heavily. See that? I was just guessing. But I knew that was the case. That's awesome. That's really awesome because CMU is a great school. We have a wonderful partnership with them. And you said you went to University of Maryland as well. Of course, they're our neighbor. We have a very deep relationship, collaborative relationship with the University of Maryland on many technology areas. So it's great to see that that relationship is paying off as well. Tell me a little bit about what you studied for your Ph.D. So I studied scientific computing and high-performance computing. So using software to solve hard scientific problems. Specifically, I looked at simulating electric and magnetic fields and how they can be exploited to learn about an environment. Did you always think you would wind up working for the Army? I think so, yes. I've been with the same team leader, the same mentor my entire time here. And he's been excellent at helping me understand the problems the Army is facing and helping me at a personal level with schooling and that kind of thing. When I finished my schooling, it was basically an easy decision to come to work there. So Ross, tell me a little bit about what you're working on here at the Army Research Laboratory. So I use computer modeling and simulation running on high-performance computing assets like supercomputers to solve very large scientific problems that are interesting to the Army. Why do you need a supercomputer to solve the things you're working on? So the problems we're looking at are very complex. They involve a lot of different pieces with very complex shapes, material properties and to really accurately model and simulate the effects that these objects have. You need very large and detailed models. And these models take up a lot of space and solving them requires a lot of computational capability to solve. So you focus on the high-performance computing side. What's the physical side of the problem? Is it infrared sensing? Is it RF sensing? What kind of information are you developing models for on these supercomputers? So the team I work on looks at extremely low frequency and very low frequency electric and magnetic fields to understand the environment that soldiers are in. This includes looking into buildings, looking underground, looking into containers, using non-contact electric and magnetic field sensors. Okay, so now I can start to see the reason why you need a supercomputer to model this. So you've got a very dynamic environment like a building which has concrete and has metal infrastructure, perhaps, metal beams. It has wires running through it. It's got people inside the building. It's got walls. It's got furniture. It's got all of these components that make up what would naturally be inside a building. And you're trying to use a supercomputer to model that and then to really see what the electromagnetic footprint is within that building, whether it's people or machines maybe or some other piece of technology without having to look through a window. Yeah, the problems are very complex. And like you mentioned, there's a lot of features in these problems and to really accurately model them and to study their behaviors and then to ultimately exploit them with sensors, we need to model them with very high detail. Yeah, so people are working on what is called a through-wall radar. Those radars are contact radars. You have to actually go up to the building you're trying to see inside of and put the radar right up against the wall. Or as you go out, try to get any space between the radar and the building you try to see in that it becomes a signal problem and you can't get the penetration into the building with the further out you go and range. Your work, though, is in low-frequency RF. So that gives you the penetration depth, right? Yeah, there's always a trade-off depending on what frequencies you're using and a benefit of using very low-frequency electric and magnetic fields is that you lose some resolution but you can penetrate much deeper into the building. Potentially, you could see interior rooms, what people are doing inside those rooms even with thick metal walls. When you say you lose resolution, what that really says is that you may get a blurry image. Correct. You may get a blurry image but you can see more of the scene than other methods may provide. So you're developing a context of what's happening inside the building. You potentially could provide a situational understanding of what's going on inside a building and you probably would need to use another couple of sensors and combine those sensors in a way that makes sense to give a full sight picture, if you will, of all the activity in a building. Absolutely. This would only be one piece of the puzzle. There would be multiple sensor suites operating to give a complete picture of what's in the building so that when a soldier goes in to clear a building or clear a room, before they enter the room, because it's a very dangerous situation, they want to know how many people are in the room, what kind of weapons they might have, are there women and children who you don't want to engage with? What's really hard about this problem? The first is actually designing the numerical software. There's a lot of mathematical complexity in the software, designing the algorithms to scale well on supercomputers and use memory efficiently. The second part that's difficult is actually constructing the models that you want to simulate in the first place, collecting dimensional data of a building that you want to do run tests on, building the different pieces in the model, meshing these models to feed into these simulation software. This all requires a lot of manual effort and a lot of time on the part of these modelers. Something we're looking into is automating these steps so that you can automatically collect dimensional data from different sources, mash them together, automatically fit surfaces to these data, and create these models. To me that sounds like an engineering challenge, more than anything, right? You're collecting information about a building, you can do that today, it's well known how to do, it's just labor intensive. Correct. Where's the science? So in the first part, developing the solvers, there's a lot of theory behind actually writing the code. It's not just writing software code, it's actually organizing the math into a structure that you can then implement. This is to make it run efficiently on a supercomputer. Correct, so it's fundamental computer science problems of developing fast algorithms that are efficient on a supercomputer. Yeah, and we should say a little bit about what's different between a supercomputer and say the laptop on somebody's desk. Yeah, so the supercomputers we're using, for example I'm using Excalibur at the ARL Supercomputing Resource Center. What's the name of a computer? Excalibur is the name of the computer. Because we like having really cool names for our supercomputers and we like having acronyms for everything else. Yeah, we like to name supercomputers after old weapon systems. Or current weapon systems. Another computer we use is Centennial, which actually marks the 100th anniversary of Aberdeen Proving Ground, that's what they named it after. People should know that the first supercomputer of a kind was ENIAC that was developed at the US Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in the 1940s. Absolutely, they even have an old piece of ENIAC at the Supercomputer Resource Center. It's very, very cool. A lot of history at that building. But to give you an idea of how big these supercomputers are, a single computer that you might have next to your desk has between 8 and 32 CPU cores on them. Central processing units. The brain of any laptop or any desktop computer. Right, and maybe 8 to 32 gigabytes of main memory. A supercomputer like Excalibur has 100,000 of these central processing unit cores and many petabytes. A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, which is 1,000 gigabytes. So just an extraordinary amount of memory and computing power compared to a single desktop machine. And this is what allows us to solve these ginormous problems that you couldn't even think of solving on a desktop machine. Ginormous is a technical term. I got you. But the science here is that to make these, how many cores did you say? 100,000 cores. 100,000 cores work efficiently is really the key because you have to parallelize every operation, every add, multiply, subtract, divide operation that a computer makes. All has to be done in parallel across these 100,000 cores. And that's the trick, I think, is to get algorithms that run efficiently on these kinds of supercomputers. So are you on that side mainly or are you on the physics side? So I split my time 50-50 between these two problems. So on one hand, I'm doing what you just explained, which is taking algorithms that were developed for desktop machines that just run on one computer and rewriting their algorithms to function on thousands of computers simultaneously to trade information when necessary and to make use of all these cores simultaneously in a really nice way. The other half of my time is then using the software to actually solve the physics problem that we were talking about. Right, now that physics problem, if it requires a supercomputer today to use very low-frequency sensors either actively or passively, in other words, put a low-frequency into a building or try to sense the low frequencies that are coming out of a building. To use that information and to give it to soldiers in a way that's useful will require some art, I would say, to take this switcher working on on a supercomputer and actually get it into a piece of technology that a soldier can use, like a phone or some other very small computer, right? So to me, that seems like a real challenge. Let's talk a little bit about how you make the leap from a supercomputer to technology that a soldier can use either in his vehicle or even handheld. I would say it can be done in two different ways. The first is to use these extremely large models, extremely complex models to understand the underlying physics of the phenomenon that you're exploring. You wouldn't necessarily implement these numerical methods in a piece of hardware, but you'd rather use these algorithms, these numerical methods to understand the problem so that you can design algorithms that you then implement on the hardware that get deployed. The second is to use these very high-performance numerical methods and these very large models to develop simpler models that still represent the world accurately. So these models are very accurate, but they're extremely computationally intensive. Can we use the results from those models to build simpler methods that are computationally easy that can run on a smartphone or a microcontroller but still provide the accurate results or reasonable results you're looking for in a scenario? Right, so the state of the research is really understanding the problem from a very low frequency perspective. Really doing work to understand whether or not this capability is even viable. Absolutely. And we'll add an additional capability for our soldiers to be able to see inside buildings. Right.  We have to understand the physics of that problem before we ever take it to something that can be hand-held. So the timelines are longer, which is really what ARL is about. We are, as a corporate research laboratory for the Army, heavily focused on the longer term, I like to say 2035 and beyond. So it sounds like this technology is really well placed for that. What do you think about that? Do you think we can get it sooner? I think the knowledge we're producing with these large models can feed products that we're developing right now and that have a more immediate uses. But like you just said, there's potential for things much farther into the future. I think there are physical phenomenon that we want to explore now but don't have the computational capability to explore right now either because we don't have the solvers built for them or there's not even enough computational power even available today. So in that sense, there's still a lot of knowledge to obtain in the next 10 to 15 years that we don't have right now. That's really the fundamental piece of the science behind the research is to develop solvers that can be used on supercomputers that are coming because we haven't stopped these things so they have 100,000 cores in them every several years. The number of cores just keeps continuing as the microelectronics improves. And of course, we're adding to these central processing units. Now we're adding graphical processing units to them which are used for deep learning and other kinds of machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques. So that whole phenomenon, you have to wait, so to speak, to be able to take advantage of that kind of processing to solve your problem. Yes, but we can keep an eye towards the future as these developments are being made. We know that graphics processing units are improving other types of exotic hardware like FPGAs are being used. So programmable gate arrays. Yeah, other exotic hardware like that are being added to these computers and so we can keep track of what these supercomputers are going to have in the future so that we can start thinking about what kind of algorithms we need to design now to take advantage of them. Yeah, so the disruption really will occur in capability when the science that we're doing with regard to had an image in a whole environment using very low-frequency electromagnetic fields. How to have that fundamental scientific understanding write algorithms that can then be put onto computers or handheld devices and can be used in the field. That will be where the disruption and capability, warfighting capability is. But there's still a bit of disruption that needs to occur on the science piece for us to really understand how to accurately take advantage of these electromagnetic fields that you've described. Still excited about your work? Absolutely, yeah. What else gets you excited? Transition is very difficult.  That's something I wasn't expecting coming to Aero was how difficult it is to transition an idea to a usable product. Our team has had some successes in that regard and it's very exciting to see a PM or a PEO or another customer interested in our technology and that's very cool to see. We just used three acronyms that many of the people who might be listening to this won't have a clue but I will tell you that those are the acquisition that's the acquisition side of the Army. So it's very difficult to take an idea out of a laboratory and get it into what's known as a program of record and the Army is actually spending money to buy kit and that kit eventually goes to our war fighters and is a long process that has to occur before any idea is morphed into something tangible that can be put in the hands of a soldier. But the Army Futures Command has been set up to address these problems and I think that what you'll see in the future at least over your career will be the ability to accelerate ideas from the laboratory into war fighting concepts which would then become something of a requirement very quickly and then those requirements for new capability will quickly be resourced and funded and then fielded by the Army. All of that now is really under the auspices of Army Futures Command and General Murray is a strong advocate he's the commanding general of Futures Command a strong advocate for ARL's position in the longer term to ensure that beyond modernization priorities of today which are slated to be fielded in 2028 that ARL continues to look at the longer term needs for our war fighters. That's why it's so important for us to think about 2035 and how we can bring technologies like what you've described which still have a lot of open research questions around them but why we can start to begin to think about how to take advantage of what you're working on and ultimately get it into the hands of soldiers and get them to take advantage of that perhaps longer term and that's our goal as the Army's Corporate Research Lab. So Ross, thanks very much for speaking with me today. I really enjoyed it and I'm so glad that you're here working for the U.S. Army at the Army Research Laboratory and thanks to all of you for joining us for ARL what we learned today. In upcoming episodes we'll continue to discussion about the underpinning research that will build the Army of the Future. Please consider liking and subscribing. Science is a journey of discovery and we're glad you're along for the ride. For the Army Research Laboratory, I'm Dr. Phil Percot.


Former representative of Rivers South East Senatorial District, Senator Magnus Abe, has officially declared to run for the governorship seat in the state in 2023 under the All Progressives Party, APC. Abe made the declaration during the inauguration of Bola Medinubu Vangad in Gokana Local Government Area of Rivers State. He, however, said he would only support anyone who emerges APC's governorship candidates in the state under a free, fair and equitable contest, warning that anything short of that would be resisted. We don't need an upland candidate that is going to win, but what we need is a reverse candidate that is known to the river people, that has the capacity, that has the chart record, that has the integrity to be able to deliver the kind of way that river people expect. That I, Senator Magnus Abe, will not say that Senator Abe must be the candidate of the APC University. I have always said, and I will repeat, if you have a fair, free, equitable contest and somebody emerges from that process, I, Magnus, Ngei, Abe, will support whoever emerges from such a process. And that's what we need.