So ladies and gentlemen, I'm very pleased to introduce you now the next speaker is Professor Jérôme Noir from the Institute of Geophysics of Zurich and he will take us to a trip to the center of the earth. I think also shows us that science is always a little bit of cooking and he speaks on the contributions of Henri Poincaré to the modern geophysics from the internal structure of the earth to the geodynamic. Thank you very much. So first of all I should say that I was very honoured to be invited to this colloc and I think it's interesting because I'm not a mathematician at all. I'm an experimentalist and it's interesting to see that Poincaré had a great influence on people like the community of the dynamo and the dynamic of the core of the planet which is quite far from what could consider as his main point of interest. And first I would like to acknowledge a colleague, David Sebron, who is doing a postdoc in my lab with whom I had an endless discussion about this topic because when Jacques Lascar invited me I thought he would be rather straightforward to put together a talk and the contribution of Poincaré to modern geophysics but rather quickly I realised that it seems so rich that I should have been given a day to go through all the contribution of Poincaré direct and indirect. So I will first present the geophysical context at the end of the 19th century to give you the main motivation of the mathematician at that time. Then I will try to outline how people came with the idea that we could probe the Earth's interior by looking at astronomical observation. Then I will briefly summarise the work of Poincaré of 1910 which is the last of a long series of studies on this topic by many brilliant people and then I will go through basically the 20th century and show you how what Poincaré has done at the end of the 19th century became during mostly the second half of the 20th century and hopefully by the end of this talk I will show you that it is not the end of the story and that we might not know everything about what Poincaré has started. So to start with this is the vision of our planet that we have in 2012. So it doesn't like it. Thank you. It doesn't like the pointer for some reason. I don't know if there is a reason. We're going to take that old screw. It's a heavy one. So basically we live on the crust. We have the atmosphere, the ocean. We live on the crust. We have the Earth's mantle which is a solid on a hundred to thousand timescale but is a very viscous fluid as you go to our geological timescale of million years and about 3,000 kilometres below our feet. You will find a transition from this rock mantle to a liquid part which is called the outer core. It's made mostly out of liquid iron which is a conductive material and some light elements and at the very centre we have a solid almost single crystal of iron that is about 1,300 kilometres of radius and what we know is that these crystallise because of the condition at the centre of the Earth which leads to a release of Latin heat at the interface which we believe is a source or part of the source of the convection that's going on in the liquid part of the Earth and these convective motions are believed by interaction with the magnetic field to participate in what we call the dynamo process which is a self-regenerating process that maintains the Earth's magnetic field. So that's basically our understanding. I didn't talk about the plate tectonics and all the things but that's the structure of the Earth and that's what we think is the fundamental mechanism that produces a magnetic field. However, if we... it doesn't like it at all. Can we get the next one? Excuse me, I'm going to leave it here. Voilà! So... Now I'm going to... So if we go back in time the discovery of the solid inner core is due to Ingeleman in 36 by looking at the propagation of the seismic waves that could be emitted by an earthquake somewhere at the surface of the Earth and by recording the incoming wave at the surface of the Earth one can see that you have a region here that deflects the waves and after some extremely complicated analysis you can determine that this should be a solid of roughly 1,300 km using roughly the same approach so how Dreyfress in 26 definitely refuted the assumption of a purely solid Earth he demonstrated the existence of this liquid core to make it short you have basically two types of waves that propagate inside the Earth you have the pressure wave which corresponds to a compression of the media and you have the shear waves and the shear waves do not propagate inside the liquid and you can easily do this experiment in your bathtub you try to move the surface of the bathtub and you will see that this motion of the surface does not propagate through the bottom on the other hand if you had some tracers like some T particle you could push on the surface and you would see that the wave will propagate so using this kind of arguments Dreyfress and before him Gutenberg basically suggested and Dreyfress definitely demonstrated that the center here is liquid in 1919 it is Larmor who first proposed that the magnetic field of the Earth and actually he was thinking first about the Sun that the magnetic field in planets and stars could be produced by the motion of a conductive liquid in a background magnetic field and finally the first evidence that the center of the Earth might be liquid as I say was due to Gutenberg and so by the time at the end of the 19th century when people were debating about the internal structure of the Earth very little was known and many many different models were outside the first one was a favorite model of the geologist because geologists were most concerned about volcanism and the easiest way to explain volcanism was to have a huge liquid interior and a very thin crust across which fluid could percolate and produce the eruption on the other end of the spectra somebody like William Thompson Lord Kelvin sorry would have considered the Earth to be completely solid because otherwise it was impossible to account for some astronomical observation and then in between we could find a huge variety of models going from a thick shell with a liquid interior to a thin subsurface ocean and even to something that is actually not too far from what we know now a day however there was very little argument to support any of those models actually except maybe for that one and though the question at the end of the 19th century the great challenge in geophysics was can we use some external observation to constrain the internal structures of the Earth or any other planets and the first the first person who proposed this kind of approach is Mr. Hopkins who was a tutor at Cambridge University and he was the first one to propose that a planet with a solid interior and a planet with a liquid interior should respond in different ways when a gravitational torque applied to it and in particular you were thinking about the amplitude of the procession and nutation that would be very different whether you have a liquid or a solid planet you probably, I'm sure you have seen this experiment but to convince yourself that those two objects should behave very differently I have two eggs one is raw and one is a boiled so the boiled one is solid and the raw egg has a liquid interior so if you have a rotating object I'll do it again that's egg number one and that's egg number two I apply about the same amount of force to those two objects and as you can see one would keep rotating forever the other one will very quickly dissipate if I had a bit more space I would have done a more spectacular experiment where you can actually rotate along the long axis but I've been told that the hardwood floor is quite old so I think you can do it at home you would be free to do a mess and what you would realize is that yes indeed a raw egg and a boiled egg can behave very very differently but the same would be true for a planet and I think that's probably the only experiment they had in hand to try to ascertain this statement another interesting thing about Hopkins besides the fact that he proposed that is that he was a tutor at Cambridge and Cambridge has his long tradition that has been lost through time of what we call the Wranglers which are the first and second of each year and Mr. Hopkins has been tutoring about something like 200 students or so and among those people it's interesting to see that you will find Mr. Stokes Mr. Thompson, Alias Lord Kelvin, Maxwell and many others that later on became some of the most famous scientists of the beginning of the 20th century and he was actually known as a Wrangler machine or something like that but he produced a lot of these people and the person who actually really acknowledged him for this idea was Kelvin in 63 and I got that from a paper by Malker that if you have a chance to read it it's extremely interesting where Thompson used to say that from Hopkins to whom he used to use of thus learning the physical condition of the entire from phenomena of rotary motion presented by the surface so now I would like to introduce what we mean by precession and enutation so I think the easiest way to visualize that is imagine you have a gyroscope and so the gyroscope rotates along this axis and you tilt a little bit the axis of the gyroscope because of the local gravity you will have a torque which tends to tilt even more your gyroscope and in response to that torque the gyroscope will start to describe the conical motion around a vertical axis that's what we call the precession and when we look at the Earth the same phenomena will occur the Earth is not spherical it's slightly flattened so you have a little bit excess of mass on the equator and the equator of the Earth is slightly tilted compared to the ecliptic plane since most of the planets lie the orbit lies near to the ecliptic plane at the consequence you have a torque that tries to realign the equator of the Earth with the ecliptic plane and exactly like the gravitational torques try to tilt this gyroscope the Earth will start to precess along a conical surface in about 26,000 years and the difference between those two objects is that in one case we try to realign the axis of rotation with the perpendicular to the ecliptic which produce a precession in a direction opposite to the rotation whereas the gyroscope because of the direction of the torque will start to precess in the same direction now I told you that most of the planets lie in the ecliptic plane not exactly and therefore there is a time variation of this torque that applies to the equator of the Earth and as a result of this time variation you also have small perturbation oscillatory perturbation of the direction of rotation of the mantle on this conical surface and those small departures from the pure precessing motion are called the nutation and so the proposition of Hopkins is to say that if I apply a fixed torque to this object whether it has a liquid interior or a solid interior it would produce different amplitudes of this motion the other very important discovery at the end of the 19th century that motivated a lot of scientists is due to Chandler who in 1991 observed that the rotation axis of the mantle so on the surface basically if you want on the crust the rotation axis that you observe through the stars does not coincide at all time with the symmetry axis that we would call for simplicity is a north-south direction which is the axis of symmetry of the Earth the Earth is almost spherical except it is slightly flattened it is of symmetry of revolution around this north-south axis and what Chandler has observed is that the axis of rotation does not coincide with the axis of inertia and it does actually describe some small circular motion around that this with a period of 433 days which is now known as Chandler wobble on the other hand earlier in 1758 discovered that if you take a solid object a solid object that rotates one of the mode possible solution of this system is a small circular motion with the axis of rotation in other words when I'm saying that if you try to rotate this egg it could rotate around its axis of symmetry or it could rotate like this so the rotation axis is fixed but it is tilted compared to the plane of symmetry of the planet however if you calculate the period of earlier for a solid Earth you will find about 304 days and so people use this argument to say that there might be a liquid region inside the planet that lengthens the period of the free earlier mode of the planet when you look at who worked on that topic it's pretty impressive the beginning was Hopkins fighting with Deloane that's England against France then independently half in the US started to work on this problem and did actually a major piece of work that for some reason is not connected to the other the study of the other people then later on the student of Hopkins Kelvin started to work on this problem while the successor of Deloane was at the National Observatory or the Bureau de la Titude in France I don't know exactly the successor was nobody else and Poincaré and so basically this debate between Hopkins and Deloane continued with a debate between Poincaré and Kelvin and among other people you find Love, Larmor, Rado and Slutsky who was a professor at the University of Moscow who that's a question for you if somebody knows whether Poincaré was aware of the work of Slutsky please let me know because I received the paper of Slutsky only yesterday so I tried to get it but I couldn't find a copy I got it yesterday and there is a strange similarity between the notation of Poincaré that is not fine anywhere else in any of those except in the paper of Slutsky in 1995 so about 15 years before the paper that we will be concerned about whether they believed in an inner core, liquid core or in a solid planet they all found as a conclusion that either the liquid will behave as if it was a solid and therefore there is no way to differentiate between a liquid interior and a solid interior of the notation or the lid is a conclusion that the earth is solid and has a rigidity of steel what's interesting is that we know it's wrong we know there is a liquid we know that from Jeffress 49 to 6253 we know that you can actually have the right amplitude of notation by taking into account the proper elasticity, rigidity of the fluid but what is rather striking is that we still use their model and as far as I'm concerned they remain valid so we did not improve much compared to what these people have done at the end of the 19th century with very little observation no numerical simulation to validate their model and no experiments that's really striking and as I said it's Lord Jeffress who finally validated those models by applying them to realistic notes that's a letter that I found that was sent by Kelvin to Poincare in response of a formal letter of Poincare to Kelvin in 1901 which are quite interesting the first statement of Kelvin which is ever since 1976, so look at the date 1976 when that statement was published I have been looking for time to go through the mathematical work again so I think it's basically legal to reuse that as an excuse for any of us if Kelvin state that you can tell your colleagues that you've been looking for the time to work again on this topic we're talking 76 to 1901 now more interesting is when you go through those letters is to see the respect that these people used to show to each other and how they were doing science at that time they were competitor but first of all they were kind of a generator and I like this statement by Kelvin that say I hope you will publish your own work with your correction to my errors where you could have published something and say I've done a mistake and put at the end of the paper acknowledgement Poincare but that's not what he did he asked Poincare to publish a paper and interestingly enough 10 years later so that gives you an idea of the time scale at that time 10 years later Poincare finally published in memory observation a paper called sur la précession des corps déformables and that's the last paper of a long series by all the people I've cited before and Kelvin is dead in 1910 so this is really the last paper that and Poincare acknowledge that it's just revisiting what people have done before but revisiting in such a way that it becomes probably the most elegant demonstration on some mathematical aspect of this problem and that's probably why people remember this paper and still use it in 2012 so the question at that time was knowing the gravitational torque that is acting in the equatorial bulge of the Earth that we can calculate with some with some uncertainties by looking at the orbits of the planet the question is can we predict the time variation so the mutation and precession and wobbles of the axis of rotation of the mantle which is the only thing we can observe you're sitting at the surface of the Earth the Earth rotates by looking at the stars you can deduce what is the orientation of the axis of rotation of the top of the Earth and the question is if we do a model with a pure solid Earth and a model with a solid mantle with a liquid entire can our prediction be compared to the observation and what can we conclude regarding the internal structure of the Earth I added this transparent because that's not the question that people ask when they reuse the work of Poincaré as you shall see later so here is kind of an it's almost like a summary slash overview of the paper of Poincaré so that's a solid Earth model that would be an Earth with a liquid entire and Poincaré does some assumption he suppose first the mantle to be rigid then it will reintroduce elasticity then for the fluid inside this cavity he will assume it's non-viscous and incompressible which for a fluid dynamicist is the first thing that you're going to do you don't want to have to deal with viscosity and you don't want to have to deal with compressibility but at that time I think they had absolutely no argument to make this kind of assumption but it proved to be correct and finally he will first assume that the core mantle boundary here and the mantle itself in both cases had the shape of an ellipsoid with three different axes A, B and C and very quickly in this paper he will he will suppose that it's an object of symmetry around the rotation axes by stating that A is equal to B different from C and he will apply some fundamental conservation laws such as the angular momentum the angular momentum is similar to the momentum of an object that moves linearly an object that moves linearly you can say that the mass of these objects times the velocity which is the momentum varies in time depending on the force that are applied to this system the momentum equation is slightly different what replace the velocity is the rotation rate and what replace the mass is the inertia and the inertia it is an information about the mass and how the mass is organized inside the solid and so the variation of this quantity the angular momentum must equate the torque that you apply to it so if you don't apply a torque you conserve the angular momentum if you start to apply a torque there will be a response of the system according to this equation and that's basically the gyroscope effect I was talking about that you also get if you rotate a bicycle wheel and you try to tilt it you will see that this torque that you apply produce a rotation a time variation of this angular momentum so you have two models in this model you have two layers if you have two layers the total angular momentum of this planet has a contribution from the liquid part in our core and a contribution from the mantle you cannot observe this but you can observe that so the first step in the work of Poincare is to see how can we determine the motion inside this liquid layer and how can we express omega as a function of capital omega the one of the mantle if you can do that then in principle by ranging in this equation you can write down an equation only for capital omega and if you can solve it then you can compare your prediction to the observation the beauty of the approach of Poincare is to say and I think that's what you said about change of coordinate system I know if he was that has been suggested this transformation of coordinate system has been somehow applied by Brian a couple of years before but Poincare doesn't mention him so I don't know if he came to the same my guess is that he developed this kind of approach before and Brian got inspired and basically Poincare reused his own approach extremely elegant you have actually leaps through it and believe me at the moment I'm trying to solve this equation directly to this object it's terrible and so Poincare said okay to each particle of the fluid in this object I can associate an artificial particle in a spherical domain by simply applying this geometrical transformation and since the velocity of the same particle is simply the time derivative of its position you can show that the velocity of a particle here translating to the velocity of the artificial particle in the sphere as so and now what he did is to solve this problem in this spherical domain with as a constraint that the fluid that moves inside the sphere cannot go out so that's a rigid body to represent your calm boundary so he did that with the assumption that the fluid is inviscid and something very important that I forgot to mention earlier he does an assumption on the nature of the flow that will be driven inside this liquid layer he says and he acknowledged that this has been that's where he's revisiting the work of Kelvin he knew a little bit about what was going on and he said that I'm going to look for the simple motion possible which is time independent and linear in the spatial coordinate and Slutsky that I was talking about instead of stating that says that I'm going to look for a velocity field that derive from a potential which is essentially saying the same thing so that's the assumption and what we're going to show is that if you have the mantle of the earth rotating along the blue axis which precess along the red axis so it moves on this conical surface the fluid inside the core takes a form of a solid body rotation so a global motion of all the particles plus a small component that we call the gradient flow simply because when you move from the sphere to the ellipse you still need to ensure that the fluid is not leaving the core that you have a solid boundary and that's an extremely elegant way to present it and in addition he now injected that basically in the fundamental equation of the hydrodynamic to determine how omega and the rotation of the mantle are related to each other due mostly only in that case to the pressure torque that comes from the ellipsoidal boundary and what he found that the direction of rotation of the core is fixed compared to the rotation of the mantle and the precession so all those three vectors first they are in the same plane and they are fixed relative to each other and the liquid rotates around an axis that is slightly tilted from the mantle very slightly so that at first order one could actually approximate this motion by a rotation along the blue axis plus a small component in a direction perpendicular to the axis of rotation of the mantle once he determined how the how the rotation of the liquid core can be expressed as a function of the rotation of the mantle its time derivative and the geometry of the system if in addition you you express the moment of inertia which depends only on the type of matter also the density the geometry of the system and of course the thickness of the mantle that you are considering and if and if you can't express how the time derivative of the angular moment of the inertia of the mantle depends on its rigidity so in other words its capacity to be deformed then in principle now you can inject all that in your angular momentum equation and solving for omega you can derive an expression for omega as a function of time or d omega as a function of time that you can then compare to your observation and so that's it's a very sketchy summary of the work of Poincaré but as far as I am concerned it's sufficient to ascertain his contribution during the 20th century so I'm not going to go into the mathematical details of the derivation so the first and most important statement is that the fluid in the core essentially rotates along an axis that is only slightly different from that of the mantle then the next conclusion which is quite obvious is that if the core mantle boundary is spherical the fluid because its inviscid is completely decapable from the mantle and the system will act as if only the crust was subject to this gravitational torque and because of the low inertia of the upper part of the planet you should expect huge amplitude of mutation which is not what is observed so one can reject a thin crust model with a spherical boundary if the boundary is spherical what Poincaré found is that for very low frequency perturbation so long period perturbation such as the precession for instance the interior really behave as a pure solid and the solid I mean this liquid that move as a whole almost like the mantle it's exactly the same as saying that the planet is completely solid you can't really tell the difference between the two however if you apply a higher frequency perturbation in the gravitational torque then a liquid that is rapidly rotating can exhibit free oscillation and this free oscillation together with the natural free oscillation of a rotating solid body will lead to some particular frequency for which depending on the actual internal structure for which you could get a resonance in the system so just to I'm going to try to do an experiment to show you that indeed a rapidly rotating fluid exactly like the string of a guitar or of a laser cavity can also exhibit free oscillatory modes so a typical experiment for that is to you take water you put T particle the T particle fall at the bottom and now you put this system in rotation are you going to have to be very quick because the viscous effect will damp the phenomena that I'm trying to show but if you look at the center you will see that the T particle collapse at the center but you will see some form of a breathing of the system let's see if we can observe it if you look at the center you see that they spiral to the center then they go outside spiral to the center then go outside and so on with a frequency that if you look carefully is typically of the order of the frequency of rotation of the fluid inside there is another striking thing here which is that the T particles that you see are sitting at the bottom if they sit at the bottom that means they are denser than the fluid if they are denser than the fluid as you rotate they should be centrifuge out and in fact what you see is that they collapse at the center and that's an effect that I would have liked to avoid which is the effect of the viscosity in a rapidly rotating fluid which is very different from what you would observe if this system was not in rotation so that's what we call an effect of what we now call the Eckman pumping so I don't know if you've seen that you really have to know what you are looking for if the container was twice the size it would be obvious but I think you can see a little bit of that at the center that tends to collapse and then they get moved out and so on and that's one of those that's one of those free mode and a free mode if you were to excite this system at the frequency that corresponds to this free mode it will resonate and its amplitude will become extremely large it will grow exponentially the same thing applied to this and this planet if you excite the system at the frequency of one of the free modes you should expect a resonance and it's not clear to me what point can I conclude from that because at the very beginning of his paper he says in principle I agree with Kelvin that say that the Earth is either solid or we cannot make the difference and at the end it tells you that depending on the structure of the planet there could be some oscillation that would lead to resonance but you don't see any resonance or you don't see any very large mutation amplitude so either you conclude that it's a total it's a rigid planet or for which you get a resonance are not that of the Earth so Poincaré died in 1912 and unfortunately about a year before Gutenberg presented the first suggestion that there might be a liquid core inside the Earth I don't know whether Poincaré was aware of the discovery of Gutenberg my guess is yes but I couldn't find any letters that they exchanged the next major piece of work on that topic due to Harold Jeffress who applied those models to a realistic Earth Harold Jeffress was a precursor of seismology and so he had the right rigidity and elasticity of the mantle which allowed him to derive the right the right value of the mutation amplitude and over the 20th century the major question has shifted toward the following what creates a magnetic field of the Earth what is the source of motion that produce a magnetic field of the Earth and how much dissipation would be associated to the motion inside the liquid of the Earth in other words how much heat could be produced and that is very important if you want to build a thermal history in all of the planet to ascertain its age basically so the question that we were asking we as the community is slightly different we know the size and shape of the liquid core within some reasonable uncertainties and we know the drift of the mantle so we know the motion of the axis of rotation of the mantle from astronomical observation so that is no longer an output it's an input of the problem and now the question that we are asking is what is this motion of the mantle producing inside the liquid core if you try to solve this problem you very quickly find something that is difficult to identify in the work of Poincare which is that if the fluid is inviscid and the cavity is a symmetry of revolution there is actually an infinite number of solutions for the rotation of the fluid and so if this fluid moves as a solid and rotates you don't actually know this speed of rotation however in a planetary application because the rotation is only slightly different from that of the mantle I told you you can do the assumption that along the rotation of axis of the mantle the core rotates at the same speed and develops a small equatorial component so if you add this condition another condition then you do a unique solution so what Poincare tells us is that if you ask me that question I will tell you that the fluid mostly rotates around an axis slightly different and by applying this ad hoc condition I can give you the direction and rate of rotation now there are two remaining questions one is what is the effect of the viscosity of the liquid and the second is the solid body rotation is that stable or can that collapse to some turbulence turbulence means dissipation and so those two questions are related to the two problems I told you about with the third one which is that unfortunately I'm not sure Poincare would have been very happy about that but after the second world where the geopolitical situation was such that people started to consider sending rockets from one end to the world to the other side of the world and you stabilize the subject by rapidly rotating them around their long axis and as they travel around the Earth they basically precess and so if you use a liquid fuel then you have the same question as the people who care about the thermal history of the planet to some extent as far as the viscosity of the fluid is concerned there are a couple of contributions through the 20th century I'm going to focus on the last one by Fritz Busse in 68 who basically assumes small ellipticity small viscous effect and start with the inviscid form of the solution of Poincare so he will start with that at the equation of hydrodynamics including the viscous friction and find that in that case there is a unique solution to the equation so you don't need this ad hoc condition it naturally appears in the equation that it's replaced by this solvability condition which it's only slightly different and I'm not I don't want to comment about it what I've done is in the last few weeks I've carried out some numerical simulation in a spheroid basically to ascertain the efficiency of the Busse model and how it compares to the Poincare model and so Poincare is in red it's inviscid so you have this resonance and I might go back to that resonance later that is in gray Busse and what you see is that for a moderate so significant effect of the viscosity in a small ellipticity regime yes Busse does a good work in maximum amplitude near the resonance while Poincare has the amplitude wrong but it's almost correct at first order when you increase the ellipticity however Busse which does this assumption fail to reproduce your numerical simulation whereas Poincare which does a very simple and drastic approximation does reproduce quite well the frequency at which you expect the resonance and outside of the resonance even the amplitude of the flow when you apply those resonance to the Earth so you have about 45 pages of equation to end up with this estimate of the equatorial component of rotation and here you have about 20 lines of equation to end up with this solution so I let you appreciate the progress that we've made I'm a big fan of Fritz Busse he was in my PhD jury I like the guy but it's a lot of work for the reader to understand something that only produce such a small deviation from this elegant solution of Poincare now to ascertain the stability of the flow that's something that Poincare could not even consider at that time to use experiments because numerically it's extremely difficult especially 20 years ago and so people started to build experiment this is the one I built during my PhD it's not that I want to show you what I do it's just that all the people who worked never published a picture of their experiment which is a shame but they're all built in the same way so you have a container on the outside but elliptical on the inside that rotates rapidly around an axis and you impose a small rotation of this turntable that will force the precision so here you have to be careful that this system has an infinite source of momentum through the torque applied by the motor to the bottom table and there was a series of experiments that were conducted between the early 60s until basically this year the pioneer work is due to Malkus who doing such an experiment in a slightly ellipsoidal container showed that the fluid for low precision rate behaves almost as a solid with some structure inside that remains organized along the axis of rotation of the tank and as you increase the rate of precision so the rate of rotation of the turntable you end up with a system that will exhibit turbulence and turbulence must be associated to small scales and therefore dissipation however Malkus did not actually look at the solid body response of the fluid which is truly what Poincare is giving you and so during my PhD the first thing I did was to see whether there was a solid body solution in this system so by putting some small light elements inside you can visualize the axis of low pressure which is your axis of rotation and in fact as long as the precision is small it is slightly tilted compared to the axis of rotation of the container that is here as you start to increase this you find a resonance of the solid body rotation mode which appears to be exactly a free mode of the system and what you see that as you path through this resonance then you lose your axis of rotation and slowly you move toward a system that exhibit less and less rotation and more and more turbulence which again suggests that I have dissipation and complexion of motion to produce a magnetic field the underlying mechanism of the stability of the Poincare flow is due to Richard Kersuel in 93 who discovered that in an ellipsoid if you have a rotation that is slightly tilted you have two effect one effect is that if you look at the streamline of the rotation because of the ellipticity when you want to tilt the rotation you have to shear the streamline so by tilting the axis of rotation of the fluid you induce a shear of the streamline and because you now no longer rotates around the symmetry axis of the container you have elliptical streamline and what Kersuel showed is that both of those effect can couple together three modes of a rapidly rotating cavity so you have two free modes that are coupled together one of those phenomena leading to exponential growth of the kinetic energy which ultimately turn into turbulence and so the question was are those instability what we call dynamogen are they capable of produce a dynamo so a dynamo process in few words it's simply it was proposed by Larmor is that you have motion negative liquid so kinetic energy input in the presence of an existing magnetic field by the Faraday's law it tells you that you're going to produce electrical current and the electrical currents by the Emperor's law will produce an induced magnetic field and if the induced magnetic field is parallel to the imposed magnetic field then you basically reinforce the original magnetic field that would otherwise disappear and in the case of the Earth it would disappear in 15 15,000 years whereas we know that we have a magnetic field of about 4 billion years and so the key question now is does the motion have the right topology to produce an induced field that is parallel to the original field and so Malkius based on those observation suggested that maybe the precession of the Earth but of other planets could drive the dynamo and I don't want to get into the detail but there was a debate it was more than a debate actually it was a fight, a true fight regarding do we have enough kinetic energy and it's a in 96 who finally put an end to that discussion but if you don't have the correct topology of the velocity field then it won't be a regenerative process you will create a magnetic field that may be a 90 degree from the imposed one in which case you have no chance to build up a self sustained magnetic field the actual proof that the flow driven by precession could indeed produce a dynamo is due to Andreas Tigner in 2005 who using numerical simulation showed that what he called the laminar flow which is nothing else and the solution proposed by Poincareer 100 years before can indeed produce a dynamo however this mechanism because it rely on strong viscous effect is certainly not dominant for a planet and he showed that the instability that have been observed in the experiment can indeed drive a dynamo process and yes and even more important that it is likely to happen in planet like the Earth I'm not saying that the dynamo of the Earth is due to the precession, don't get me wrong I don't want to get into trouble but for some planets that we know for sure that cannot convict it is a possibility and I think that it's not a tribute to Poincareer it gives you an idea of how far how deep inside our community the influence of Poincareer has been because all those research that have been conducted on that topic leads to the idea that the precession which was clearly first studied by Poincareer could produce a dynamo and I have colleagues in Dresden that are creating this totally crazy object which is a giant gyroscope of 1 meter by 2 meter filled with a very good conductor which is liquid sodium which is extremely dangerous and they are going to preset this object so it's very similar to the experiment I showed you except for the torque and the field that is of about 1 million Newton meter but aside from that it's the same object and what they aim is to demonstrate that experimentally that the precession can indeed have a homogenous dynamo in a similar way to what you can find in the Earth's core so basically Poincareer and others it must be acknowledged that there are many contributors to this problem they have developed a framework that has been used over the 20th century by many geophysicists to ascertain the question of the core inside, sorry the flow inside the core of the planet and the model presented in 1910 and earlier are still valid as far as I am concerned if you do not ask the question what is the unstable flow in the system if you ask the question where is the core rotating those models are perfectly valid as I was preparing this talk if I can have two more minutes is that okay? very, very quickly I was preparing this talk and some colleagues of mine have produced a paper regarding the moon and the possibility that the early magnetic field of the moon would be due to the flow driven by the precession at that time however the moon is not an axisymmetric planet the moon has B, B and A so it's more like a rugby ball and I was a bit skeptical that you could just apply Poincare as they did in such an object and the main reason is that if you remember what I told you what Poincare is telling you is that the planet rotates around the blue axis and the core would rotate around the green axis which is essentially the blue plus a small component here and all those are fixed in space so if you were to look in that direction over time this object moves around so if you look at the cross section here what you see is a circular shape then an ellipse then a circular shape, then an ellipse what that tells you is that the moment of inertia in that direction is changing in time moment of inertia, high moment of inertia low, high in a similar way to an ice skater and an ice skater is spinning fast when the moment of inertia is small spinning slow when the moment of inertia is large in virtue of conservation of angular momentum which we might not have in this system we might not have conservation of the angular momentum but it looks similar enough so that you can ask yourself whether the solution of the system will be stationary as claimed by Poincare or not and if you do a numerical simulation in such a system the first thing that you see is that no, the the direction of rotation of the liquid core is not stationary and so there is some form of a paradox here and you do see that you have low rotation when you have high inertia when you have low inertia and I think what is interesting here is that we are now about 102 years after the publication of Poincare and this problem has not been looked at before and it seems to challenge I say it seems it seems to challenge the fundamental hypothesis of Poincare that the flow is stationary and I will end with that because I don't know the answer to this problem Thank you very much Professor Noir for this beautiful lecture which I think reveals maybe less known aspects of Poincare's contribution There is time for maybe one more question Sosinai What is the quarter of magnitude of the distance between the axis of rotation and the axis in ellipsoid of inertia how much a couple of meters it's not kilometers it's very small very small and the second question can you comment a little bit on the models which describe the dynamics of the axis of rotation as a random process governed by some number of fundamental parameters you mean the fact that you don't have a unique solution you have a unique solution but it has random force which produces the motion random force which depends on the motion of atmosphere around the Earth the distance of such small scale then the wind for example in Africa can just have the influence to the trajectory of this axis Okay, so I guess what you're talking about is the Schamler wobble and the effect of the atmosphere and ocean on this apparent motion of the axis there is indeed a very interesting paper that was published that shows that the lengthening of the of the earlier period due to the core is not dominant in this system so that the effect of the ocean of the atmosphere is crucial to reproduce correctly the observation of Schamler and at the core I think we looked at that with Nikolai what 50 days 50 days is the contribution of the core to these 100 days but what is interesting is that if you take into account the elasticity you would go way over the period of Schamler and it's the additional effect of the ocean and the atmosphere that will bring it back and then the core and so it's a rather complicated series of contribution okay I don't call that random but I see what you mean now by random and none of those were known to any of the scientists that work on that problem we have to remember that the absolute beauty of this work is that it's valid it's been used in addition to modelisation of the atmosphere and ocean but these people had no way to validate or even test the model and so when you look at the complexity of how the atmosphere and the ocean contribute it's not surprising that they couldn't use this information to constrain the presence of the core I have a small question I think we should leave the discussion but just I want to thank Jérôme for the way he took his assignment and making it so working so hard that he even made a publication out of it soon soon soon but I had a question about the inner core in that in Poincaré flow how does it contribute for an inner core of the size of the Earth it's a small contribution because well it's not clear I will not give you a personal argument but the argument of Andreas Tigner that is to show that and it's correct that if you do numerical simulation what you see is that it has very little influence on the resonance of frequency so at which frequency you might get a resonance between the precession or the nutation and this mode in terms of the amplitude of the rotation so the kinetic energy it seems to be simply related to the ratio of volume of the liquid core minus the inner core there is no evidence that it will drastically change your view of the problem as long as the ellipticity remains small so thank you very much you're welcome


Hi, everyone. Morning. I hope you all can see us here. Hi, Nick. I just met Nick last week, or the week before last. And so as Gabb said, I'm Jane Gavronsky. I joined Finos about five months ago. And Nick is even newer to AIR, I think. Yeah, just a couple of weeks in. So I was formerly the director of innovation at the Financial Conducts Authority. But recently joined the Alliance for Innovative Regulation a couple of weeks ago. So I'm new to this space. So forgive my ignorance, I'm here learning today. No, that's very exciting. And I spent my career working in banks delivering technology. So we have kind of two different views of the regulatory and the regulatory tour. And we thought it might be interesting to engage in a discussion. So please, I have a lot of questions for Nick. We're probably going to run out of time. But I'd rather hear your questions as well. So please raise your hands and participate as soon as you can. So my first question to you, Nick, is, as I said, I came from a bank and on the delivery of compliance to regulators, I experienced that banks try to do a really, really good job. But sometimes regulators tell us, well, you didn't quite reach the goal. And there is criticism.  So there is this mystery. And sometimes we use consultancies to help us bridge the gap. What does it feel like from the regulator perspective? What are some of the somatic alignment across the regulations that could help banks be more compliant right away? Yeah, so I think the last couple of speakers touched on this with the reference to some nuts and bolts and standardization or a bit of a shout out to The Box, a really powerful book talking about the role that standardization plays in innovation and drive-in progress. Regulation has not been developed in that way. It has grown up over decades. If you look at UK regulation, it's also the product of multiple mergers of regulators over the years. And there isn't a common underlying taxonomy or set of standards to underpin even regulation in a domestic market, let alone between regulators in different markets. So that just wasn't the method, if you like, of developing regulation, which means that the regulation that exists is largely written in fairly detailed legal form. It is the product of serious intellectual capital in the legal and policy space, not the technology space. And so ultimately ends up with a product that was written in legal prose that then needs to be implemented into code. And so there is that misinterpretation gap that is a real challenge. I think regulators have been a bit blind to it or have perhaps historically just said, well, it's your responsibility as the regulator institutions to find a way through this complexity. But I think increasingly regulators are seeing two things. One, regulation in that form doesn't deliver the outcomes they really care about when it comes to consumer protection, financial crime, resiliency of the system. So they're not getting the outcomes that they really care about. And secondly, the cost of delivering whatever outcome is being achieved is just too high. So the duplication costs, the amount of replication that occurs across the industry, it's just driving cost into the whole system. And what does that mean for a regulator? It means barriers to entry, means lack of competition in certain markets. It means a lack of choice and service for certain customer groups. So I think regulators are starting to see that the form and structure and format of regulation has direct impact on the kind of market that they then oversee. And if they want a more efficient, more open market, they're gonna need to think about the standards and the way in which they constitute regulation. So, excuse me, that's very interesting because that directly to me logically means that, excuse me, that regulated entities should collaborate. Right. So how do the regulators then look at collaboration? With, again, with some caution, I think. Sorry, this is not supposed to be a negative speech, but I guess the reality is they do get a little bit nervous regulators when they see, what tends to happen is they tend to see large incumbents talking about collaborating. And you see that even on the conversations this morning. And the worry that regulators have there is of the sort of antitrust, anti-competitive cartel-like risk that that might lead to. They also have real concerns about liability. And again, the previous speakers have mentioned this. Regulated systems need clear accountability and responsibility.  So who ultimately do we hold to account? And these are some mountable issues of governance and clarity. But I think regulators do worry about that cartel behavior and that question about liability. But I think increasingly regulators are seeing that without collaboration, without community endeavors, without more interagency collaboration, both private and private public, regulators will not get the kind of outcomes that they want in the market. So they will have to find ways of supporting this collaboration and innovation. And so speaking of innovation, what does that mean? How do they look at innovation and what potential for innovation? Have you experienced or what's coming? So I think they probably look at it in three ways. And it's a challenge to lump all regulators into a single bucket. Regulators are very different in their cultures, but also very different in terms of their size, their resourcing, and in some cases, their mandates. But I think what you initially saw predominantly was regulators trying to find ways to foster desirable innovation in the markets that they supervise. So trying to find ways to save the market, you can do new things to serve new customers to provide new product. And so that's where sandboxes and hackathons and opening up regulators to innovators, that's where that came from, was to try and to inject new products, new competition in the market. I think what you then see is a lot of regulators start to see these predominantly FinTech type innovations and think, well, what is the application of that technology into compliance itself? And so regulators start to get into the reg tech space and looking at how technology can deliver more efficient or more effective compliance. And then regulators start to think about, well, at what point do we not only encourage and incite innovation, but do we actually start to innovate and modernize our own way of delivering on our mandate? And again, listening to speakers here, the maturity of regulators on things like open source is woefully low. At the moment, many regulators are just starting to get their own data house in order. They're not even thinking about the technology of the future or the technology to deliver what they need going forward. They just start to think about, how do we come more data-led, more digitally led, more digitally native, and they have a long way to go. But I think they tend to bucket it into those three blocks. What can we do to support innovation in the market? How do we understand how technology can play a role in compliance and then how do we use technology to reform the way we perform our own role and different regulators at different stages on that journey? So what would you suggest then for the regulated entities? How should they think about innovation, knowing or being slightly exposed to what the regulators might be thinking? I think there's a few things. I think one of the things that helps regulators overcome resistance to collaboration and change is understanding genuinely the issues of today in a more granular manner. By which I mean, it's very easy to say we'll stick with the status quo if you've not actually assessed how effective the status quo is. Financial crime is probably one of the strongest examples here where for all the money that is spent by regulated institutions and regulators and law enforcement, there are still trillions of dollars laundered through financial markets. There are still massive drug smuggling rings that launder their money through markets. There are still human trafficking operations that launder their money through regulated markets. So the societal harm still exists. It's not very well-sized. It isn't very well assessed. And there's a moral hazard of anyone individually saying our own systems are not very good at picking this up. But as an industry at large, I think we could do better to evaluate the effectiveness of our own technology implementations and our own way of meeting regulatory requirements. So I think the industry collectively can start to speak truth to powers, probably the wrong phrase, but just be a bit clearer on the downside risks of today's approaches and then call out that actually the industry is keen to mutualize areas of non-competitive advantage and really start to push conversation regulators on that specific point. What will you let us mutualize? What is the downside risk of us standardizing if we do it in an open source manner? Will you be more open to this? And just start to ask those more pointed direct questions of regulators. Most regulators will not have policy answers to that, but they need to be forced to start to develop them. And then I think proving the art of the possible regulators struggle, like most of us, to conceptualize a future where I've seen regulators get on board and be a bit more engaged is where they can start to get their hands dirty. So working in collaborative environments, exploring specific technologies, collaborating with different participants. And perhaps adding others into the mix as well. So I think sometimes just the regulated to regulator relationship can be difficult. You add in some academics, you add in some technology partners. It's a slightly different community. And I think regulators sometimes find those bigger consortia a little bit easier to connect with. So that leads perfectly into my favorite question, which is what can we do, Finneaus and AIR, and how can we help this group to bring this to the fore with the regulators? I think education is a big part of it. I know it might not be the most exciting part, but helping regulators understand actually what is open source, both in terms of the community aspects, the development of shared code, how you as an open source community have thought about managing some of the risks of collaboration, how you have thought about governing the quality of the product, getting regulators to just understand how you use open source in your day to day. Russ's comments really powerful. You know, we use open source everywhere. I don't think that's very well understood to regulators, to be honest. I think they assume open source is a new thing rather than what's new is probably the contribution, the participation, the code development, but the exploitation is not new. But most regulators I think are a bit unfamiliar with that. Regulators will need some help thinking through what their role is in open source. And again, you guys can have some thoughts on that. You know, where do you need an independent regulatory participation? What does that look like? And then I think as you do under Finos anyway, the demonstration through product approved projects is the way to help them. So getting out of the concept into the practicalities, seeing market participants lending and providing assets into the community is a really powerful signal as well of just how the regulated market is thinking about this issue. So I think a lot of it is education, involvement and probably a bit of patience, frankly, because I think this is gonna be quite a challenging journey for a lot of regulators. One thing they might do is associate open source with decentralized finance. You know, they've got similar underpinnings of communities and disintermediation and shared solutions and sort of federated infrastructures. And there is a bit of a regulatory backlash against DeFi generally at the moment, particularly in the crypto space. So I think differentiating open source from decentralized finance is probably also a helpful thing to do. So it's quite a list, isn't it? No, I wanna remind everybody if you have questions, please speak up. Go ahead. Hi, Nick, I'm James. Hi, James. So coming up, folks, myself from Sousa, we're having a conversation yesterday about how engineers in dispell the myths around what can and can't be done. And, you know, because certainly from my experience of working in bank and engineering teams, you know, the reason why things can't be done is often down to the regulators, but people don't know what the regulation is that's stopping it. It's something that's being passed down through the chains of authority from one person to the next. So do you think that there's an appetite for people within the regulators themselves to come together with people from the open source community or within other banks to kind of have a Q and A and kind of discussion, do podcasts or webinars, you know, to ask some questions, like are we actually about to do this type of stuff? To just blow away the grass roots kind of like cobwebs. So I think, yes, is the short answer. There is a growing community of regulators that are prepared to have those conversations, but they're quite finite in number. I think that's part of the challenge is there is just not that many people currently working within regulatory agencies who understand these topics in the kind of detail that you might need in order to have a properly informed debate and discussion. So regulators instead have tried to piggy-in-hole almost those conversations into environments where they have some semblance of control and where they can resource them appropriately. So they've tended to do that through direct engagement, through sandbox experimentation, through specific hackathons on themes that the regulators care about. They're still useful environments to surface exactly the conversation that you're talking about. I think where regulators are probably not quite necessarily is to give a policy pronouncement on things like the security of a certain technology approach, solution, model, method over today's solutions, models and methods, in part because they don't currently assess the effectiveness and capability of today's. So I think, yes, there is an appetite. Many regulators are tiny. So they don't have many folks who can have that conversation, but there is a growing cultural desire to do so. But again, I think the educational piece can really be really important. And regulators are starting to reform their own human resources and capabilities. So it will become easier, but I think there's appetite, but not that many spaces to do it right now. Yeah, I keep thinking about what Liz said about the fact that there were no standards for nuts and bolts in the late 18th century, so. Yeah, exactly. It took a while. We've only got a couple of hundred years to catch up. So I know it's early days for you, Nick, at AIR, but what are some of your thoughts around what you want to do to continue that education process and create the collaborative environments? Yeah, so there's a few bits we want to do. So our ultimate mission is to try and support regulators to become more sort of digitally native in their approach, so to move away from the really manual, analogue approaches of regulators of the past. And to do that, we sort of see both a role for us to play in stimulating and supporting individual regulators to become more conversant, more knowledgeable, more understanding of innovation trends and how to embrace them positively. But then we also see a space for, as has been discussed already, the conversation and development of shared solutions for regulators. Much like the industry has a common need to comply with regulation, many regulators have common requirements in terms of supervising their markets understanding and measuring harm and risk, just working through their own data, aggregation, combination and analytics challenges. There's a whole standardization piece that's missing within regulators. So we want to try and look at working out where the common infrastructure layer needs to exist across international regulation and to start to catalyze communities to help build out those assets. I think there is a space, particularly in emerging markets, for the development of shared solutions. I think more, did I say developed or developing markets? Developing. Developing markets. I think in more developed markets, regulators are nervous about sharing technology and code solutions. But we want to try and push that. So I think there will be some of the spaces, like looking at the common standard infrastructure, be that data standards, be that API standards, be that thinking about the way in which the regulatory system is codified. So you've got projects like the regulatory genome project, they're in that space. You've got pieces looking at the red tech taxonomy and how to codify regulation. So I think there's definitely some work there. We at the FCA had a passion and desire to look at moving all the way to sort of machine executable law. And I still think there's some space to explore there about how do you move from the current expression of policy and law into an ambiguous machine readable, machine coded form, and then potentially for certain areas of regulation, like reporting, could you move to a fully executable form of code being expressed by regulators? There's still a lot of research to be done there. So there's some of the things we want to look at. But at the same time, we'll just be playing a big role in trying to catalyze innovation efforts in different markets. We will run hackathons and projects and programs to try and lift regulators capabilities there as well. See, we had a question over here. Hand gone down. There it is. Yeah. You were just talking about it, but we had something. Yeah, so how far along are we? Bizarrely, a long way along and haven't got very far. So I think the FCA's been looking at it with the Bank of England for a couple of years. I think the challenge has been two or three-fold. Historically, the challenge was there weren't sufficient taxonomies and models to be exploited for a very context-specific scenario like regulation. That has changed as the vendor community has worked to both build applications but also underlying taxonomy standards. So I think we're kind of moving further to having something that could be exploited. I think the challenge still though is that regulators don't know the path to move from their implementations today to a version of the future that looks more machine coded and more machine readable. So I actually think there's probably work to do in communities like this to help regulators know how to make that transformation step, whereas most are looking at machine coded regulation only for new regs at the moment, which is good. Might reduce cost of change, but how do we also sort of retrofit to the existing? I don't think many regulators have really worked out a strategy to do that yet. So again, some of the thoughts you guys have had about how to implement and how to transform and how to move forward with these open source models would be really helpful. So there's still quite a way to go. The FCA Bazaar is a principle-based regulator with 10,000 rules. So there's a bit of a dichotomy there between are you genuinely principles-based or rules-based? Other regulatory systems have even more rules that don't overlap or interact with one another. So there's a lot to be done to codify these specific requirements, but it does feel like an area of great opportunity where we to kind of seize it. But I think retrofit into today is one of the big challenges, knowing how you do that, I think it's still to be worked through. Yeah, so yes, I think is the answer. That feels like the obvious sort of routine is to start standardizing on form, like the language use, the words use lexicon. What we started to find though was that, I have to be careful how I say this, even regulators don't have a common interpretation of what a requirement actually means. And so to codify that in an ambiguous lexicon is quite difficult. Partly that's because the regulation has grown up over decades and the original intent behind it has perhaps got a bit lost in the detail over time. Partly it was, frankly, it was written by an army of lawyers and policymakers who weren't necessarily thinking about the unintended consequences of the draft and when they wrote it. So to get to kind of an unambiguous interpretation is tricky, but if it's tricky for regulators, it's certainly tricky for the industry. So you've got a regulation that's embodied as maybe a thousand rules, as you mentioned. Yeah. And they're not machine executable. They're not machine executable. How for the likes of Deutsche Bank, you must be submitting millions of records that must adhere to these rules. How can you be sure that the rules are being followed if they're not machine executable unless you've got an army of people that are reading the rules and ticking each row? I mean, how does it actually work? Well, precisely. It's far easier for you to say that in those terms than... Was that a question? I mean, that's the reality, isn't it? You've got thousands of rules being implemented by thousands of entities through millions of people codified into thousands of systems, all of which are built bespoke. So what is the likelihood that all of those things together are achieving the things you actually care about? Seems pretty unlikely, doesn't it? See a comment above about anti-money laundering and human trafficking. So how do you... Standards to start with, but potentially even implementations of those standards. Do you see that as a potential step forward for the regulators at least to use some of those standards? They don't have to necessarily endorse them. They don't necessarily make public statements about it, but do you see them comfortable or can that be a way to sort of at least kind of meet in the middle? Yeah, I think it is a way or the way to move the dial forward. I think until you had communities like this that had buy-in and obvious buying and participation of large institutions in the financial markets, until such a community existed, very hard to sort of lean into a standard like that. But I think when they come out of communities like this, then it feels obvious the regulators should embrace them. I think regulators got a little bit stung with the promise of standards in the past.  So, you know, there's a long way to go from LEI to usable data or technology standards to underpin the genuine transformation of financial markets.  Yeah. So my last question is for the reg techs who are participating in the space, I think in our audience, it's probably banks and fintechs, reg techs. How can the reg techs participate? How can the banks work with the reg techs and create this collaboration? Of course, through Finno's and Error, but, you know, to move the ball along. Yeah. So, I mean, the reg tech industry has struggled, I think, to kind of achieve the scale and impact that it probably can and will. And I think that's partly because of the proliferation of very small players in the reg tech market, which have developed niche solutions that don't obviously plug into the existing infrastructure of a large incumbent. I think there's something about reg techs probably partnering up or hunting. I think I said to you on the phone before, hunting impacts to offer a more holistic solution to the large incumbents to make it worthwhile to go through the procurement, security, IT integration challenges. It still feels like reg tech is one of those industries where there needs to be a sort of platformization somewhere, an interoperable layer built somewhere, because at the moment, they're just all of these individual, largely cloud native, largely API driven solutions, but there's no simple way of integrating those into many of the large institutions existing stacks. So, is there a play, sort of a middleware play, where I'm just going to, I'm not a technologically stomach accountant. Sort of Lego blocks.  I think there's still a gap in some of the reg tech firms in demonstrating values. There's a lot of promise and concept proving, there isn't a lot of value proof. In part, that's because they can't connect with the large institutions to access the underlying data to show the solution. So, you're seeing a lot of accelerators and indeed regulators now looking at, what is the role of synthetic data to prove the efficacy of a technology solution. You're seeing more digital sort of sandboxing and testing environments for the industry and reg techs to come together in a safe space that isn't on the institution's own stack and start to play with the tools a bit more. But I still think, I think the reg tech industry is probably going to go through a pretty substantial merger and acquisition process to try and deliver more potent, sizable institutions that the big incumbents can work with. But yeah, I think standards will play a role, but it's probably more technology and data standards that underpin reg tech solutions. Again, comment over the back earlier. There isn't a common lexicon, there isn't a common taxonomy for reg tech at the moment. That makes connections quite tricky. So I think there's probably some work to do there as well. That sounds like a lot of potential. I'll see you later, work. Thank you. Thank you, Nick.


Welcome to The Advocate, where topical issues are discussed in a no-holds-bad manner. In other words, we call a spade by its name. My advocacy today is on the clammers of separationists from different facets of the country and the arrest of its leaders. Peter is back after a while and is talking on issues of food security in the country. Kulila Waal wants to explain to us what he means by a democratic coup. Sit back, the panelists are here to present your Sunday dose of provoking thoughts with no-holds-bad after this break. Sunday Buhu, Unam Di Cano, and the separatist movements So, till Sunday Buhu has been arrested, this makes it the second separatist leader to be arrested by this government. And this is bad. It is human rights violation. It discredits and disunites the already fragmented nation. As a people, we would not take this sitting down or standing, not even lying down. Though full on ease and their love for power, how can a full-on-eaman be arousing ebos and urbans? Well, this is the narrative we are made to believe. But is this entirely true? I hear people say Sunday Buhu's arrest would not have happened in a civilized nation. And I just did laugh. If you like to see me never hear of the Catalonia separatist movement before me, read about Calais-Poyjimons, read about Charles-Komi Kudogi, and the Western Togoland battle in neighboring Ghana. Many elites and poorly informed middle class talk about Pakistan and India. We refer to the unbundling of USSR to justify our demand for the European nation of Biafra. Have we ever taken time out to read about the journey of this secessionist movement? Do we know the struggle that went through? Is this what we want for Nigerians who are already stressed? Killings, harassment, oppression, violation of human rights, etc. Secession movement is not easy. It never comes easy. Are we ready for this? If you are a secessionist leader and you have the perceived support of your people, be careful because no one really has your back. Like Inam Bikanu and Sunday Buhu, you will be left to hang. Secession is not easy. And a Nigeria's case is secession what we need. Well, we will discuss that on another day. But for now, let me ask you these questions. Have you heard of Hawaiian Sovereignty Advisory Commission? What about Larry Cicid Kilgoe? The first, of course, is a commission established to achieve the secession plan of Hawaii. Larry Kilgoe, formerly famously called Larry Cicid Kilgoe, is one of the most popular faces currently fighting for the liberation of Texas from USA. Yes, Texas wants to secede from the USA. Texas is an oil producing state, a rich oil state unlike Nigeria Delta region, yet they want out of America. My point is this. It is not until you are oppressed that you have a right to demand for secession. You have a right to demand for secession wherever. But there are processes and procedures. The government should not oppress the people and the people should not be seen as challenging the stability of the nation. The first thing is to have the buying of the entire region that you want to pull out of a union, a nation, in our case Nigeria. You need the buying of power brokers of your region. Secession is an intellectual process, not a violent one. Violence makes it gory. Many needless lives are lost. I'm not justifying these brutal acts, but I'm saying it is a universal script that will play out in any country in the world, if approached the same way we are. For Nigeria to change, we need to understand the process and address each bit of it tactically, not emotionally. Emotions do not win cases. It empowers the politicians that we all have acts to grind with. It fractionalizes and weakens the masses. God bless Nigeria. Wow. You know how they say something about processes and procedures. Intellectual processes, ideological procedures. And I think that's what is missing. We, I mean, the secessionists, like you said, they approach this without any lay down processes. There are no procedures. And just before we got on this program, you know, Kunle was asking something about, so you want to succeed. What's your, what's the developmental plan for the new nation you want? And you know, the moment he said that, I just said to myself, I think both the secessionists and their supporters are really not ready. Most of the time it's greed. It's a personal vested interest, you know, trying to play out. But we define them, use this secession as a cover for it. I don't know about Hawaii and the other ones you quoted, but honestly, this really calls for sober reflection. I'm of the point of view that whenever this secessionists talk about dividing Nigeria, they divide Nigeria on a parameter that is permissible to them. They're not permissible to the minority units also functioning within them. So I have the belief that if we divide Nigeria across the three major borders, which we are thinking of, we still will have minority groups in the east, in the west, and in the north that will not agree with those composition or units they are planning to create. And one quick thing I always ask, I noticed something common. Why is it whenever easterners and westerners are referring to northerners, they see Fulani. Fulani don't even make up to 40% of the entire population of the north. So I don't even understand what exactly, when they talk about Fulani power, I like the question mark it put at the end, and that's all we think. So really, that's all we think. For me, when I was putting this piece together, it was a very lengthy one. I needed to remove so many things, just summarize it, because at the end of the day, you realize that, yes, I don't have any problem with anybody wanting out. And that's why I gave examples of countries. People want out in different countries, in America, Texas, they have all the oil, they have everything. They are rich, they are very, I mean, they have everything, yet they want out. But you see, there are processes. Anywhere you rise up against a government, the government, you've given the government a reason to oppress you. And that is what, and no matter, no amount of emotion can stop that. If you call the UN, call anybody. Listen, when the guys, when they organized a referendum in Catalonia, because they wanted out, these were lawmakers. Spain, other came from Spain, they chased after them. I think Calais or a few of them ran away to Belgium or Netherlands. And international warrants of arrest was issued, and they went and brought them back. They were in prison, but they've been given a pardon, I think sometime in June, after two or three years. So, you see, it is a script that exists. And that's why, as youth, as Nigerians, we need to understand these things. If really we want to change. And for me, the question I asked, which I really couldn't address was, is this the session we need? I would agree, and I would stop my friends there, okay, whether you're Robas or Igboz, or anybody that wants to succeed, you have a right to. But I will support you to succeed. If you can prove to me that in your entire region, you are more developed than Nigeria, then we all will agree that Nigeria is holding you back. Which region in Nigeria is developed? That's the first question. Is it the north? Where we say they've been holding power for so long, the people are suffering. If you see, I see some of these kidnap cases, you see model schools, and this is the model school. And what is this? Is this the north, where we say all the power and all the money is going to? In the south, we say we're educated, but we say, I developed, we could be better than this. In the east, we see a lot of Igbo guys that are making money, they are successful, but apart from the beautiful lush houses, how our roads, what's the health sector like? So it's not a session, we need to first of all get our people, our leaders, regional leaders, to think and act on a behalf. Then it will be okay. And I think there's a part we seem to mostly forget. Every country has a right to defend its sovereignty and its constitution. That is first and foremost to any threat. So when you're going to start a session, if you are not playing on the games or within the parameters of the national assembly, you are not going to have any normal peaceful response.  That's what is simply- That's the processes and procedures. Processes are procedures. Do it the wrong way.  Now that I was talking about people that are already oppressed.  The oppressors. You cannot win this battle anyway. I think you're right.  Very, very key phrase there. You know, Kulei brought up something that I actually have been, I've always believed. So when you say you want to separate the East, you know, you talked about the three regional lines. They are no longer three. You know, I don't understand. You know, in those days, we used to say middle belt. You don't call a Delta man a middle belt again. South has become a very strong force. Yes. You don't come out to South-South. That's true. To the East or- Exactly. So I think the border lines have become polarized right now. So when you talk about East, East is not what it used to be 20 years ago. True. I don't know about the North. I don't know about- But I know the East. You can call it- East, there's no middle belt again. They've become a big- True. Bones- Colossals themselves. Yeah. They've become so mighty. They've become power brokers. They have become power brokers. So you can call them middle belts. They are not the minority again. Well, we keep talking. Yeah. And we pray that, of course, we ask for, what's it called, the rights of those who have been arrested should not be trampled on. Absolutely. Fair justice for them, and that is very key. Peter is next. He's giving us a lecture on food crisis in Nigeria.


Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Women in Data Science Worldwide Conference WIDS 2022. I'm Lisa Martin coming to you from Stanford University at the Ariyaga Alumni Center, and I'm pleased to welcome my next guest. Hannah Sperling joins me, Business Process Intelligence or BPI, Academic and Research Alliances at SAP. Hannah, welcome to the program. Hi, thank you so much for having me. So you just flew in from Germany. I did last week, yeah, long way away. Very excited to be here. But before we get started, I would like to say that I feel very fortunate to be able to be here and that my heart and wishes still goes out to people that might be in more difficult situations right now. I agree. It's such a, it's one of my favorite things about WIDS is the community that it's grown into. There's gonna be about 100,000 people that will be involved annually in WIDS, but you walk into the Ariyaga Alumni Center and you feel this energy from all the women here, from what Margo and team started seven years ago to what it has become. I was, it happened to be able to be listening to one of the panels this morning. They were talking about something that's just so important for everyone to hear, not just women, the importance of mentors and sponsors. And being able to kind of build your own personal board of directors. Talk to me about some of the mentors that you've had in the past and some of the ones that you have at SAP now. Yeah, thank you. That's actually a great starting point to maybe talk a bit about how I got involved in tech. So SAP is a global software company, but I actually studied business and I was hired directly from university around four years ago and that was to join SAP's analytics department. And I've always had a weird thing for databases even when I was in my undergrad, I did enjoy working with data and so working in analytics with those teams and some people mentoring me, I got into database modeling and eventually ventured even further into development, was working in analytics development for a couple of years and yeah, still am with a global software provider now which brought me to women in data science because now I'm also involved in research again. Okay. Yeah, some reason couldn't get enough of that. So maybe learn about the stuff that I didn't do in my undergrad and post-grad now researching at university and yeah, one big part in at least European data science efforts is the topic of sensitive data and data privacy considerations. And this is also a topic very close to my heart because you can only manage what you measure, right? But if everybody is afraid to touch certain pieces of sensitive data, I think we might not get to where we wanna be as fast as we possibly could be. And so I've been really getting into data anonymization procedures because I think if we could render more workforce data usable, especially when it comes to increasing diversity in STEM or in technology jobs, we should really be letting the data speak. Yeah. Letting the data speak, I like that. One of the things they were talking about this morning was the bias in data, the challenges that presents and I've had some interesting conversations on theCUBE today about data in healthcare, data in transportation equity. Yeah. Where do you think, if we think of International Women's Day, which is tomorrow, the breaking the bias is the theme. Where do you think we are from your perspective on breaking the bias that's across all these different data sets? Right. So I guess as somebody working with data on a daily basis, I'm sometimes amazed at how many people still seem to think that data can be unbiased. And this is actually touched upon also in the first keynote that I very much enjoyed, talking about human-centered data science. People that believe that you can take the human factor out of any effort related to analysis are definitely on the wrong path. So I feel like the sooner that we realize that we need to take into account certain biases that will definitely be there because data is humanly generated, the closer we're gonna get to something that represents reality better and might help us to change reality for the better as well because we don't wanna stick with the status quo. And anytime you look at data, it's definitely gonna be a backward-looking effort. So I think the first step is to be aware of that and not to strive for complete objectivity but understanding and coming to terms with a fact just as it was mentioned in the equity panel that that is logically impossible. Right, that's an important, you bring up a really important point. It's important to understand that that is not possible but what can we work with? What is possible? What can we get to? Where do you think we are on the journey of being able to get there? I think that initiatives like WIDs are playing an important role in making that better and increasing that awareness. There is a big trend around explainability, interpretability, and AI that you see not just in Europe but worldwide because I think the awareness around those topics is increasing and that will then also show you the blind spots that you may still have no matter how much you think about the context. One thing that we still need to get a lot better at though is including everybody in these types of projects because otherwise you're always going to have a certain selection bias in terms of perspectives that you're getting in. Right, that thought diversity, there's so much value in thought diversity, that's something that I think I first started talking about thought diversity at a WIDs conference a few years ago and really understanding the impact there that that can make to every industry. Totally, and I love this example of, I think it was a soap dispenser, one of these really early examples of how technology if you don't watch out for these human-centered considerations, how technology can go wrong and just perpetuate bias. So a soap dispenser that would only recognize the hand whether it was a certain light skin type that would be placed underneath it. So it's simple examples like that that I think beautifully illustrate what we need to watch out for when we design automatic decision aids, for example, because anywhere where you don't have a human checking what's ultimately decided upon, you might end up with much more, yeah, grave examples. Right, no it's, I agree, Cecilia Aragon gave the talk this morning on the human-centered AI. Exactly. I was able to interview her a couple of weeks ago for WIDs and a very inspiring woman in and of herself. But she brought up a great point about it's the humans and the AI working together. You can't ditch the humans completely to your point. There are things that will go wrong. I think that sends a good message that it's not gonna be AI taking jobs, but we have to have those two components working better together. Yeah, and maybe to also refer to the panel discussion we heard on equity. I very much like Professor Bull's point and how she emphasized that we're never gonna get to this perfectly objective state. And then also during that panel, a data scientist said that 80% of her work is still cleaning the data most likely because I feel sometimes there is this almost mysticism around the role of a data scientist that sounds really catchy and cool, but there's so many different aspects of working data science that I feel it's hard to put that all in a nutshell, narrow down to one role. I think in the end if you enjoy working with data and maybe you can even combine that with a certain domain that you're particularly interested in, be it sustainability or urban planning, whatever, that is the perfect match. It is and having that passion that goes along with that also can be very impactful. So you loved data, you talked about that, you said you had a strange love for databases. Where do you wanna go from where you are now? How much more deeply are you gonna dive into the world of data? That's a good question. Cause I would at this point definitely not consider myself a data scientist, but I feel like taking baby steps, I'm maybe on a path to becoming one in the future. And so being at university again gives me the opportunity to dive back into certain courses and I've done smaller data science projects and I was actually amazed at, and this was touched on in a panel as well earlier, how outdated so many really frequently used data sets are in the realm of research, AI, machine learning research, all these models that you feed with these super outdated data sets. And that's happened to me, like something I can relate to.  So I could see myself keeping on working on that, the whole data privacy and analytics, both topics that are very close to my heart and I think can be combined. They're not opposites. That is something I would definitely stay true to. Data privacy is a really interesting topic. We're seeing so many, GDPR was how many years into a few years old that is now. And we've got other countries and states within the United States. For example, there's California has CCPA, which will become CPRA next year. And it's expanding the definition of what private sensitive data is. So companies have to be sensitive to that, but it's a huge challenge to do so because there's so much potential that can come from the data. Yet we've got that personal aspect, that sensitive aspect that has to be aware of, otherwise there's huge fines. Totally. Where do you think we are with that in terms of kind of compliance? So I think in the past years, we've seen quite a few rather shocking examples in the United States, for instance, where personal data was used or proxies that led to detrimental outcomes. In Europe, thanks to the strong data regulations, I think we haven't had as many problems. But here the question remains, well, where do you draw the line? And how do you design this trade-off in between increasing efficiency and making business applications better? For example, in the case of SAP, while protecting the individual privacy rights of people. So I guess in one way, SAP has an easier position because we deal with business data. So anybody who doesn't wanna care about the human element maybe would like to try building models and machine-generated data first. I mean, at least I would feel much more comfortable because as soon as you look at personally identifiable data, you really need to watch out. There is, however, ways to make that happen. And I was touching upon these anonymization techniques that I think are going to be more and more important in the coming years. There is a proposal on the way by the European Commission and I was actually impressed by the sophisticatedness of legislation in that area. And the plan is for the future to tie the rules around the use of data science to the specific objectives of the project. And I think that's the only way to go because if the data's out there, it's gonna be used. We've sort of learned that. And true anonymization might not even be possible because of the amount of data that's out there. So I think this approach of trying to limit the projects in terms of looking at what do they wanna achieve, not just for an individual company, but also for us as a society, think that needs to play a much bigger role in any data-related project. Where are, you said, getting true anonymization isn't really feasible. Where are we, though, on the anonymization pathway, if you will? I mean, it's always the cost-benefit trade-off, right? Because if the question is not interesting enough, so if you're not gonna allocate enough resources in trying to reverse engineer, I don't know, the tie to an individual, for example, sticking true to this anonymization example, nobody's gonna do it, right? We live in a world where there's data everywhere. So I feel like that's not gonna be our problem. And that is why this approach of trying to look at the objectives of a project come in. Because sometimes maybe we're just lucky that it's not valuable enough to figure out certain details about our personal life so that nobody will try, because I am sure that if people, data scientists, tried hard enough, I wonder if there's challenges they wouldn't be able to solve. And there has been companies that have put out data sets that were supposedly anonymized, and then it wasn't actually that hard to make inferences. And in the panel on equity, one last thought about that, we heard Jessica speak about construction and how she was trying to use synthetic data because it's so hard to get the real data and the challenge of getting the synthetic data to sort of mimic the true data. And the question came up of sensors in the household and so on. That is obviously a huge opportunity, but for me as somebody who is very sensitive when it comes to privacy considerations, straight away I'm like, but what if we generate all this data and then somebody uses it for the wrong reasons, which might not be better urban planning for all different communities, but simple profit maximization. So this is something that's also very dear to my heart and I'm definitely going to go down that path further. Well, Hannah, it's been great having you on the program. Congratulations on being a Woods Ambassador. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of great lessons and experiences that you'll take back to Germany from here. Thank you so much. We appreciate your time. For Hannah Sperling, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage of Women in Data Science Conference 2022. Stick around, I'll be right back with my next guest.