Kentucky Blood Center and Tennessee MEDIC is having a competition big blue crush. It lasts from Monday through Friday November 18th at the 22nd. We've been going now for 32 years. It's our 32nd annual. Kentucky has won 17 of those. MEDIC has won 13 and last year MEDIC did take our eight-year winning streak away. Our goal is 3100 sticks this year. So far within the past three days we've had over 1700 sticks. So we we're almost to our goal and you can come in and receive a big blue crush t-shirt and McDonald's coupon and each donor is registered to win a four-pack ticket to Kentucky and Louisville football game that they will play on November the 30th. So you do have to be at least 16 years old. 16 has to have a parental consent and it takes about 30 minutes the entire process. You come in you're out of here within 30 to 35 minutes. Within that time frame the one unit of blood that you donate can save up to three lives. Personally me working here I feel like I'm giving back to the community not only by helping people by taking their blood and helping patients but I've also given 67 times and knowing that within those 67 donations how many lives that I've saved. I've done what I feel like I needed to do in case you never know when you're gonna need blood yourself. We just encourage everyone to come out and donate blood and help us beat medic this year but most importantly we just want everyone to get involved.


From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, of course, this year, instead of all gathering together in San Francisco, we're getting to talk to Red Hat executives, their partners, and their customers, where they are around the globe. I'm your host Stu Miniman and happy to welcome to the program, Nick Parsett, who is a senior director of technology strategy at Red Hat. He happens to be on a boat in the Bahamas. So Nick, thanks so much for joining us. Hey, thank you for inviting me. It's a great pleasure to be here and it's a great pleasure to work for a company that has always dealt with remote people. So it's really easy for us to do this kind of thing. Yeah, Nick, you know, it's interesting. I've been saying probably for the last 10 years that the challenge of our time is really distributed systems. You know, from a software standpoint, that's what we talk about. And even more so today, number one, of course, the current situation with the global pandemic. But number two, the topic we're going to talk to you about is Edge and 5G. It's obviously gotten a lot of hype. So before we get into that, my understanding, Nick, you know, you came into Red Hat through an acquisition. So give us a little bit about your background and what you work on for Red Hat. About five years ago, a company I was working for in advance that acquired by Red Hat and I've been very lucky in that acquisition where I found a perfect home to express my talent. I've been a free software advocate for the past 20 some years. Always been working in free software for the past 20 years. And Red Hat is really wonderful for that. Yeah, it's interesting, Nick. Yeah, I remember back in the early days we used to talk about free software. Now we don't talk free. It's open source is what we talk about. Free is a piece of what we're doing. But let's talk about, you know, you know, Vons, I absolutely remember they were a partner of Red Hat. Talked to them a lot at some of the open stack shows. So I'm guessing when we're talking about Edge, these are kind of the pieces coming together of what Red Hat had done for years with open stack and with NFB. So what's the solution set you're talking about? Bring us inside how you're helping your customers with these types of solutions. Well, clearly the solution we are trying to put together as to combine what people already have with where they want to go. Our vision for the future is a vision where OpenShift is delivering a common service on any platform including hardware at the far edge on a model where both VMs and containers can be hosted on the same machine. However, there is a long road to get there. And until we can fulfill all the needs, we are going to be using combination of OpenShift, OpenStack and many other product that we have in our portfolio to fulfill the needs of our customer. We've seen, for example, Verizon starting with OpenStack quite a few years ago now going with us with OpenShift that they're going to place on top of OpenStack or directly on their metal. We've seen other big telcos use that in very successful to deploy their 5G networks. There is great capabilities in the existing portfolio. We are just expanding that, simplifying it because when we are talking about the edge, we are talking about managing thousands if not millions of device and simplicity is key if you do not want to have your management increase. Excellent. So you talked a lot about the service providers. Obviously 5G is a big wave coming, a lot of promise as to what it will enable both for the service providers as well as the end users. Help us understand where that is today and what we should expect to see in the coming year or so. So in respect of 5G, there is two reason why 5G is important. One, it is important in terms of edge strategy because any person deploying 5G will need to deploy compute resources much closer to the antenna if they want to be able to deliver the promise of 5G and the promise of very low latency. The second reason it is important is because it allows to build a network of things which do not need to be interconnected other than through a 5G connection. And this simplifies a lot some of the edge application that we are going to see where sensors need to provide data in a way where you're not necessarily always connected to a physical network and maintaining a Wi-Fi connection is really complex and costly. Yeah, Nick, a lot of pieces that sometimes get confused or conflated. Want you to help us connect the dots between what you're talking about for edge and what's happened in the telcos and the broader conversation about hybrid cloud or Red Hat calls at the open hybrid cloud because there were some articles that were like, edge is going to kill the cloud. I think we all know in IT, nothing ever dies, everything is all additive. So how do these pieces all go together? So for us at Red Hat, it's very important to build the edge as an extension of our open hybrid cloud strategy. Clearly what we are trying to build is an environment where developers can develop workloads once and then can the administrator that needs to deploy a workload or the business night that needs to deploy a workload can do it on any footprint. And the edge is just one of these footprints as is the cloud, as is a private environment. So really having a single way to administer all these footprints, having a single way to define the workloads running on it is really what we are achieving today and making better and better in the years to come. The reality of the process of data as close as possible to where the data is being consumed or generated. So you have new footprints to let's say summarize or simplify or analyze the data where it is being used. And then you can limit the traffic to a more central site to only the essential of it. It is clear that with the current growth of data, there won't be enough capacity to have all the data going directly to the central cloud. And this is what the edge is about making sure we have intermediary points of processing. Yeah, absolutely. So Nick, you talked about OpenStack and OpenShift. Of course, there's OpenSource project with OpenStack and OpenShift, the big piece of that is Kubernetes. When it comes to edge, are there other OpenSource projects but parts of the foundations out there that we should highlight when looking at these edge solutions? Oh, there's a tremendous amount of projects that are pertaining to the edge. Red Hat carries many of these projects in its portfolio. The middleware components, for example, Quarkus or our AMQ mechanism, Kaka are very important components. We've got storage solutions that are super important also when you're talking about storing or handling data. You've got in our management portfolio two very key tool, one called Ansible that allows to configure remotely components that is super handy when you need to reconfigure firewall in mass. You've got another tool that is a central piece of our strategy, which is called ACM, Red Hat. I forgot the name of the product now. We are using the acronym all the time, which is our central management mechanism, just delivered to us through IBM. So this is a portfolio wide we are making and I forgot the important one, which is Rail, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is delivering very soon a new version that is going to enable easier management at the edge. Yeah, well, of course, we know that Rail is the core foundational piece, fits with most of the solution in their portfolio. That's really interesting how you laid that out though, as some people on the outside look and say, okay, Red Hat's got a really big portfolio. How does it all fit together? You just discussed that all of these pieces become really important when they come together for the edge. So maybe one of the things when we get together at Summit, of course, we get to hear a lot from your customers. So any customers you can talk about that might be a good proof point for these solutions that you're talking about today. So right now, most of the proof points are in the telco industry because these are the first one that have made the investment in the edge. And when we are talking about Verizon, we are talking about very large investments that is reinforced in their edge strategy. We've got customers in telco all over the world that are starting to use our products to deploy their 5G networks. And we've got lots of customer starting to work with us on creating their edge strategy for in other vertical, particularly in the industrial and manufacturing sector, which is our next endeavor after telco yet. Yeah, well, absolutely. Verizon, a customer I'm well familiar with when it comes to what they've been used with Red Hat. I'd interviewed them at OpenStack a few years back when they talked about those NFV type solutions. You brought up manufacturing. So that brings up one of the concerns when you talk about edge or specifically about IoT environment. When we did some original research looking at the industrial internet, the boundaries between the IT group and the OT, which heavily lives in manufacturing, they don't necessarily talk or work together. So how's Red Hat helping to make sure that customers, go through these transitions, bust through those silos and can take advantage of these sorts of new technologies? Well, obviously you have to look at a problem in your entirety. You've got to look at the change management aspect. And for this, you need to understand how people interact together if you intend on modifying the way they work together. You also need to ensure that the requirements of one are not impeding the other. An environment of a manufacturer is really important, especially when we are talking about dealing with IoT sensors, which have very limited security capabilities. So you need to add in the appropriate security layers to make what is not secure secure. And if you don't do that, you're going to introduce a friction. And you also need to ensure that you can delegate administration of the component to the right people. You cannot say, oh, from now on, all of what you used to be controlling on a manufacturer floor is now controlled centrally and you have to go through this form in order to have anything modified. So having the flexibility in our tooling to enable the respect of the existing organization and handle a change management the appropriate way is our way to answer this problem. Great, Nick, last thing for you, obviously this is a maturing space, lots of change happening. So give us a little bit of a look forward as to what users should be affecting and what pieces will the industry and Red Hat be working on to bring full value out of the Edge and 5D solution? So as always, any such changes are driven by the applications. And what we are seeing is in terms of application a very large predominance of requirements for AI, ML and data processing capability. So reinforcing all the components around this environment is one of our key addition that we are making as we speak. You can see Chris keynote, which is going to demonstrate how we are enabling a manufacturer to process the signal sent from multiple sensors through an AI and doing early failure detection. You can also expect us to enable more and more complex use case in terms of footprint. Right now we can do very small data center that are residing on three machines. Tomorrow we'll be able to handle remote worker nodes that are on the single machine. Further along we'll be able to deal with disconnected node, a single machine acting as a cluster. All these are elements that are going to allow us to go further and further in the complication of the use cases. It's not the same thing when you have to connect a manufacturer that is on solid grounds with fiber access, or when you have to connect an oil rig for example, or a boat and talk about that too. Well, Nick, thank you so much for all of the updates. I know there's some really good breakouts. I'm sure there's lots on the Red Hat website to find out more about Edge in 5B. So Nick Barsett, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. All right, back with lots more covered from Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks always for watching theCUBE.


Welcome back to our lecture series linear algebra done openly. As usual, I'll be your professor today, Dr. Andrew Mistledine. In section 4.5, we're going to talk about orthogonal projections. What does that mean? We've talked about the idea of a projection, a projection of these linear transformations that when you compose them together, the second time doesn't do anything new. It says if you have some type of vector space, and then a vector living in said vector space, maybe not inside the field or not inside the planar subspace, I should say, in which case, then we can project that the shadow of that vector into the space. Well, orthogonal as we've learned means something to do with right angles, and so the orthogonal projection will be a projection of a vector into a space so that a right angle is formed between the projection and the normal vector of the space. That's going to be our goal here. Before we get into that, let me first talk about the so-called Parseval's identity. We have a set of vectors, S which contains p many vectors, v1, v2 up to vp living inside of our vector space, fn, and let's claim that this is an orthogonal set. The pair given any pair of vectors inside of S their dot product or formation product will equal 0. We know that let's say that y is a linear combination of the vectors from S. There are coefficients c1, c2, up to cp, so y equals c1, v1 plus c2, v2 plus c3, v3 all the way up to cp, cp, vp. In other words, y is contained inside the span of this set of vectors S right here, and so that's our subspace w in consideration right here. What Parseval's identity says is that because the spanning set here is orthogonal, we can actually compute the coefficients using dot products or formation products. We can use the inner product to compute this. The coefficients are going to look like vi dot y over vi dot vi, and these are commonly referred to as the foyer coefficients of this combination. Now, I wanted to mention this in contrast. In the past, when we wanted to decide is a vector y inside the span of a set of vectors, we would have to set up basically a linear system of equations where the columns in the coefficient matrix will be the vectors from the set S, and then we would augment with y and then we have the row reduce it until you get the identity or something close to the identity. You get some echelon form right there, and then you get your answer in this final column. We usually have to row reduce these things in order to get the coefficients. Which row reduction, although it's a nice algorithm, it is a fast algorithm, it's not the simplest algorithm, right? There could be simpler procedures. It turns out when your spanning set is orthogonal, you actually get a very simpler calculation. We don't have to solve any linear systems, we can actually compute the coefficients from the inner product. And so why does this work? So the idea is let's take this linear combination right here. If we take y is equal to c1v1 plus c2v2, all the way down to cpvp, and let's be careful we pay attention to who's a vector and who's a scalar. So what I wanna do is I'm gonna take the inner product of vi on both sides. So take the inner product vi dot y on the left, vi dot, well, this linear combination on the right. Well, the inner product, it's like other multiplications, will distribute over vector addition. We can also pull out scalars from the right factor. So this would look like vi dot y. And we're gonna end up with vi dot c1v1 all the way down to vi dot cpvp. Now, when you're working with these inner products here, we have to be very careful when you work with complex matrices because of the conjugate transpose that comes into play here. We do have to take conjugates of scalars at times. So you have to be very careful. So when I wrote this formula for Percival's identity, the Fourier coefficients, I should say, notice I put the vector in question on the right, that is necessary if you want this form to work for complex vectors. With real vectors, we can be a little bit more careless because with complex, with the Hermitian product, right? We have the property that scalars can come out of the right factor. If we pull them out of the left factor, it does require we take conjugates. So the left-hand side is vi dot y. The right-hand side, we're gonna get c1 times vi dot v1. And then the next one will look like c2 times vi dot v2 all the way down till the end. We'd end up with cp times vi dot vp. And so this is where the assumption of orthology comes into play. Look, we have all these dot products, all these Hermitian products between the vectors from S. And so these should all be zero with one important exception. These are all gonna turn out to be zero with the exception of vi position. Ci is gonna look like vi dot vi. Since it's an inner product, the inner product of a vector with itself is never gonna equal zero.  Divide both sides, divide both sides by vi dot vi. Like I said, that's never gonna equal zero because we have an inner product. The positive definite condition forbids such a thing. And so then you solve for c and you get the formula that we had just right here. So vi dot y over vi dot vi. So that's the argument that justifies Parseval's identity. Let's see it in practice. Consider the following set, v1, v2, v3, v1 as one, two, three, v2 as one, one, negative one and v3 is negative five, four, negative one. You can very quickly see that this is an orthogonal set of vectors. Notice, if you take v1 dot v2, you're gonna end up with one plus two minus three, that's a zero. If you take v1 dot v3, that equals negative five plus eight minus three, which is zero. And lastly, v2 dot v3 is equal to negative five plus four plus one, which is equal to zero. This is an orthogonal set. And so in fact, if we call s the orthogonal set, since it's orthogonal, it's gonna be linearly independent. Right? Every linearly, every orthogonal set is linearly independent. And then furthermore, since these are vectors that live inside of R3, we have an independent set inside of R3. This is actually a basis. One could call this an orthogonal basis. Orthogonal basis for R3. Okay. So why is that important? Well, let's consider the vector y right here, negative four, eight and 10. Well, since this is a vector in R3, and since our basis, the set s is a basis for R3, we know that y can be spanned by the vectors in s. Okay, there's some linear combination of v1, v2, v3 that will produce this vector y right here. What are the coefficients? Well, we could do this. We could calculate this by looking at the matrix, one, two, three, one, one, negative one, negative five, four, negative one, augment negative four, eight and 10. We could solve this system of equations, right? Get the identity and you get, well, you'd get the coordinate vector of y with respect to s-coordinates. This is what we could do. That's sort of the old way of doing it. What I wanna argue now is that I can actually compute this using the inner product. Okay? That is Fourier's coefficients. So what would that look like? So we're supposed to take the inner product of v1.y divided by v1.v1 and times that by v1. So if we actually see what that looks like, we're gonna take, oh, you can't see it. If you take v1.y, I'm also gonna scooch this over here to the side so we have some space. So if you take the dot product between v1 and y, you end up with negative four. Two times eight is 16 plus 30. So then if you take 16 minus four, that's equal to 12 plus 30 is 42. And if you take one plus four plus nine, that's equal to 14, like so. And 14 goes into 42 three times, right? Three times 14 is 42. So then we were gonna repeat this for the other one. So we're gonna take v2.y. So that's gonna look like negative four plus eight minus 10 above v2.v2, which look like one plus one plus one times that by v2. And so again, simplifying this, negative four plus eight is four minus 10 is a negative six. One plus one plus one is a three and negative six divided by three is a negative two. And then finally, if we take v3.y, you're gonna end up with 20 plus 32 plus or minus 10 right there. And then that'll sit on top of 25 plus 16 plus one. And so simplifying that.  And that sits above 25 plus 16 plus one, which also equals 42, which case then it simplifies just to be one. Great. So then from there, we'll actually plug in the definitions of v1, v2, v3. So now we're gonna plug in v1, v2, v3 into the formula right here. So we're gonna take three times v1 times negative two times v2 times plus one times v3. So looking there, you're gonna get three minus two minus five, that's a negative four. You take three times two minus two plus four, that's an eight. And then lastly, you get nine plus two minus one, which is gonna give us 10. Which you'll notice this was the original vector y that we were starting off with. So this is in fact the legit linear combination. So this in fact gives us the coordinate vector of y with respect to s coordinates here. It's simply gonna be three, negative two and one. And so we were able to find this out without using any systems of equations. We did this entirely with the inner product here. It's a lot slicker, it's really nice. But we're only able to do that because we had this orthogonal spanning set.


We've got everyone that we are thinking of having in our room number one. Okay, so if you agree, we might tell one or two sentences about us to know each other, you know, where we are from and, and what sort of experience do you have so let me start with myself. So I am from a communal scientific and industrial research organization, headquartered in Canberra, the capital of Australia where I'm now. And it's, it's night outside. So, you know, the time difference. And Catherine has very kindly spoke about my work and, and the mission that I have shared with you that I'm currently involved with. That's me. If Nure, if you say about you a little bit. Hello. My name is Nure, I'm from Turkey, Istanbul. I work for Turkish Water Institute, which is under the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. It's the governmental Institute, but it is like a think tank. I'm an environmental engineer and I'm complete beginner for Earth observations that I've been using hydrological models for 10 years. So it is, it is really important to learn Earth observations to get some data for models, but still I'm a little bit anxious about how correct data from satellites. But I'm trying to learn about, learn more about Earth observations and how I can use them in my current work. So, thank you very much. You for this beautiful event. Thank you. Thank you, Nure. I think we know a little bit about Catherine, but if Catherine if you want to, if you want to say anything, please. Yeah, I guess in some of the other work that I'm doing with the Australian Water Partnership, which is with the MRC, the Mekong River Commission Regional Flood and Drought Management Center. They are particularly interested in using information from something called Mekong Dam Monitor, which is developed by Stimpson, which is a US based organization. And, but yeah, it's interesting because they're using basically the Mekong Dam Monitor is looking at levels of storage levels in dams across the Mekong, including upstream in China. So there are geopolitical sensitivities in addition to the science. So it's, so this is just something interesting that I just thought I'd share because it's an additional element because the data is important because the countries are not sharing data with each other. But at the same time there's this geopolitical sensitivities. So it's mostly quantity, Catherine. Yeah, that's focusing on quantity. Yeah. Okay. Let me go to Philip. Good morning. Good evening, everybody. My name is Philip de Souza. I'm from a small company called the Monty Management. We're based on in the Western Cape of Southern Africa of South Africa. Yeah, I experienced around, you know, Earth observation data is more around almost the kind of practical application thereof. And we have, you know, we do a lot of work on things like water safety planning. So kind of risk management for water supply and wastewater sanitation systems. And now looking at the impact of climate variability and change on those systems. So, you know, it's almost not like the kind of like nuts and bolts interface that we've been seeing today but almost like trying to understand, you know, what tools are available for our water service authorities which are largely municipalities to try and access so that they can draw quick and easy conclusions. We all know that, you know, there's uncertainty within these models and so forth. But the whole point is that, you know, some information should be better than no information. And so we want to, you know, get our utilities, in essence, on the right path to make sure that they are considering climate variability and change and building that into, you know, the way they operate the infrastructure, infrastructure, the way they design and build new infrastructure. So it's just trying to change their way of thinking. Yeah, so obviously interested in trying to, you know, there's so many models and systems out there and we're always looking at, you know, what is useful, what is easy for people to kind of absorb and get to those conclusions. And I think that's the tricky thing is, is the so what it's like all these fancy models and that looks wonderful but so what how do I use this. And that's the, the question we continue to ask ourselves and try to answer. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for a bit so powerful message. Any model is as good as it has got data to validate. In many countries as you are aware that we don't have a good storehouse of data. There are people that lack data but I guess the earth observation has such a powerful opportunity I would say, even though we know that there are not much good data available but it's still as information that will help, as you say it really decision maker, you know, to start somewhere with, rather than without having any information so thank you very much.  Yes. Hello everyone. Yes, my name is, is last boy Hansen I'm, I'm with DHI, an international consultancy company. I'm mainly known for for their developments on on modeling software. Yes, there's a brand called Mike, but there are different numerical models across a number of teams, urban environment, water resources, wastewater treatment and so on marine and all that. And I really like the comments raised so far about the, the linkage between data and models, because that's that's basically why my department was established within DHI. We were established 22 years ago. There was an early recognition that there's a lot of potential in the use of birth observation. So this, my, my department was established to sort of try and extract as much information of this new back then data source and try and see if we could link it to to the modeling community. And I should say the first 15 years. This was a slow process. But I think there's since, I don't know, 2015 or something a lot has really happened. There's a side on the capability side and so on so so now we see a huge move towards this integration of different data types and and sensors and so on. And for me that's a really big point in in in a combination of different types because well it's true that all data have flaws, you could say that by combining it. And this that you get a much more complete picture of the reality. So yeah, I mean concretely we've been working a lot with the European Space Agency over the past 20 years. We've run a few flagship projects. Recently, we were priming the earth observation for sustainable development project on on water resources. We are running the wetland Africa initiative. And we are currently running the world water initiative through the European Space Agency. Yeah, I think that was. Thank you. Thank you so much, Lars. We'll talk later because we do buy software from you guys in CSIRO.  But you get a lot of value for your money also. We'll talk about this from outside this meeting. Hi, and I'll go to Mariano. Sorry to interrupt. I would just like to point out that these five more minutes left for part one of the session. Fantastic, I think we have the last speaker, Mariano to share some I know please tell about yourself and share your work that you think is kind of linked to today's workshop. Me, sorry, I don't understand. Yes, yes. I don't understand what everybody and Mariano Brecciani and researcher in National Research Council in Italy. I'm ecologist expert in remote sensing. I collaborate with the IWA in a different age 2020 project. One of this is a prime water. Particularly mentioned by Catherine. Inside of prime water, we use different type of data in order to better acknowledge the status of different water in Lake and Reservoir. In particular, I'm expert in the passive satellite data, Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3 and new hyperspectral data. And I think it's very important to have the possibility to integrate satellite and modeling data, obviously within situ data, in order to expand the information in terms of vertical information from in situ and modeling. Special information from remote sensing data and with a frequent revisiting time, both with new in situ technology such as the CSIRO hyperspectral instrument that we have similar in Italian lakes and with the high frequency of satellite data. Respect to previously mentioned by Philippe in this period, different companies, different researchers create different tools in order to use satellite data. I think it's very important that the possibility to use this big amount of data provided by NASA, ISA and other space agency to have important knowledge of our font of life that is the water. And some of these is completely free. For example, from an Italian, from a European space agency, we have the possibility to use SNAP. It's a very easy interface to processing satellite data such as Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3, but Landsat, for example. NASA provides different products, some years ago, working remote sensing because it's all level one, it's all radiances and complicated data. In these years we have reflectances, we have chlorophyllate products, total suspended matter products. It's very easy to access and use. Sometimes the product is not perfect because sometimes it happens that they use global algorithms and non-specific regional algorithm that is most accurate for the different case studies, but I think it's a good start to use satellite data. In South Africa, for example, I know and I have a contact with some researcher, for example, Mark Matthews or Bernard, that is one of the leaders of EOCCG, and many information was obtained from satellite data for the different case studies. For my point of view, apart the prime motor, we are in my institute and we are involved in the CCI project. It's a very important project from ESA, and one of the project is related to the lakes. And provide products for completely free, for more or less 2,000 lakes in the world. For different parameters inside of CCI lakes, the parameter is not only obtained with passive satellite, but include active satellite. The product is chlorophyllate, turbidity, surface temperature, altimetry, and size, the highest present. At the moment we are in the phase two of the project and a part of the option activities for the different case studies, one of that is strictly related to the Africa, in order to understand the changing with a long time series of the water quality in Africa due to the climate change. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mariano. I think we almost ran out of our allotted time. May I now request our last but not the least person, Nabila, to introduce yourself please. Hi, my name is Nabila Karim. Sorry, I didn't realize my video wasn't on. Hi everyone. My name is Nabila and I am from Cape Town, South Africa. I work at Satori in the water treatment department. And it's my first year. So I've only been here for a few months. I don't have much experience, but hope I can learn a lot from all of you. Indeed, now that's very nice of you, Nabila, and thank you for helping me out in this conversation. So I would suggest that we have Nabila to take our comments, our experience, and we will further discuss them in the general session. So if, if you guys are happy for me to close this session, we'd like to close and move to the general session. Tapas, I think that there's a second question because we still have a few more minutes. Is that correct? Yes, yes, we have 15 minutes for part two, which is do you have any suggestions on what you can contribute to the COP? How can the COP further share information such as webinars, white paper, podcasts, and can you volunteer? So we have 15 minutes for that, and then we're going to leave the breakout room. Yeah, I think I think we have probably eight minutes now. Well, yeah, yeah, we don't, we don't, we don't have that many minutes. Okay, so. So I can give a bit of insight because I helped think of these questions. So the idea behind it is, so we have this community of practice, but and we have such a breadth of experience. So the idea is, if you yourselves or if you think of things that other people could do in terms of contributing to be able to further share information. So, for example, in other groups that we have on digital water, there's development of white papers, or it could be webinars on specific topics, or it could be another discussion like this but on something specific. So that that was the idea behind it, just to give you some context. Yeah, and, and thank you. And I think on the top of that. We, I mean I came to know yesterday that there are about 260 glass people registered and I'm guessing that perhaps half of them in this session and the another half will be at the next session that will start my midnight. However, I would also request you to let others know I mean you know in terms of circulation of email or information exchange program. We can get other people aware of this community of practice. And then, you know, they can join they can suggest well, we want to know more about particular aspect of art observation, sort of thing, and then I w a COP will be able to assist you with with that sort of information but also as Catherine said that yep, if you would like to organize a webinar, or a special if there is a special workshop or seminar happening. If there is an event going on, and you know it's relevant to what this community of practice is all about. And then by all means, please let us know so that you know we, we are more informed sort of things and I think, we do have quite a bit of training program and information session that I do get email. It's not relevant to what we're talking about but but definitely some of them are relevant to this this particular group so you may because you are on the on the executive committee you would like to share them. What do you call it that go in the same way a lot, or any sort of things and they can then circulate to us. Certainly and I'll be happy to do that. Of course we need to find the balance on information overflow. We all get tired of all these promotional emails also so you need to find the proper balance and that's that's maybe something I would like a bit of feedback on from from from the general group here. What's the, how often do you want to get disturbed or I mean, what's when does it go from being informative to to annoying.  There is Geo, there is Asian Geo, there is European Commission and, and then American NASA Space Center so you know often you're right lures I think this is a good point that we don't, you know, get fatigued by information. Right. Anyone has any other experience or opinion that you would like to share. I think we still have probably another five minutes. There's two minutes left for this session. I think it might run a bit longer because it started late, but yeah we'll see how it goes. Thank you. Let me see if others would like to share anything else. I can just from my other work I think. Yeah, I guess maybe just like for example we had presentations today on different examples of application of Earth observation I think that's quite helpful to understand how Earth observation is being used in different places. Through different tools. I think understanding how yeah observation for example is used in modeling and forecasting, but also how ground data is used to verify Earth observation and you know, kind of what is your, how can I explain like if you have gaps you know data, how much can, how much you rely on Earth observation versus ground data and that mix like how does that mix work. That's something I would be interested in learning about more for example. Yes, and I'm with you. This is one difficulties that we have had ground truth. There are lots of, you know, quote, claimed analysis ready data and quote, but I don't know how much of that is properly calibrated and particularly for water quality and this is one thing. That I do see people are claiming that they can do dissolve phosphorus in water they can do heavy metals in water. And gee, I mean, you know, those are the things we need to be careful of selling the idea that that we can only do certain things, but as of now we cannot do certain things. Yeah, I think understanding that difference is important when you're never getting this see we're going to end in about 30 seconds. That's right. I came. So let me take this opportunity to thank you for all your experience sharing and your opinion and your contribution I very much appreciate. Thank you so much, Victor. We have just a smaller as exercise to make it more interactive. Since we cannot speak at the same time. I've put a small link on the chat. It's small jumbo which helps us to like share experiences. Otherwise, so that we don't miss out these important projects that you might have or collaboration opportunities, which will be shared in the plenary with everybody. So as you can see from my screen is just a link that it's anonymous. You can put your elephant project or any project or any stuff that you might know. Then you can start putting it on these particular board as well. Also the world for the purposes of introduction. I see we have. I have myself kind of a bear from Detroit, Africa. I'm joined by Victor busu and someone later from a w a. Then also I'm joined by Andre Linda Santiago and Isabella. For example, Andrea can start with a small introduction about where he works and the amazing stuff is doing. Yeah, just one second. I'm trying to do the jumpboard in the same time. So well thank you as Linda said we are part of the same organization which is called those places foundation in the Netherlands, and then we're presently involved with two projects focusing on water. One is water force, which is a coordinate the sport action horizon 1020 project, which the topic is setting up the next company could services for inland water. We finished the first word package of the project where we look at policies, but also a business opportunities with Europe in the world, and then we came across with a lot of tools but also we come across a lot of ways that that policies and those businesses they are supporting at observation data to be used for water resources or what the quality. And also we recently started another project, which is another European project which is called idiot, which is the digital twin of the ocean. It's not quite fresh, but the ambition is to set up a digital kid of the ocean which will stem into the next digital twin of Europe, which is called destination art. And I think in the same order, your colleague will talk. Yeah, so my name is Nina, my camera doesn't, my weapon doesn't work. Yeah, also built space foundation Netherlands. In addition to what Andre already said, it's an open innovation network and platform. Maybe you can do it. Honestly, you know, put the ground station on space. Yes, so we have a platform where we give space to remote sensing initiative. This is our own project, but also articles. So, if any of you say well I'd like to post something about the work I'm doing, and we're happy to do that in our kind of our open innovation open collaboration platform. We are our objective is to unlock the market for remote sensing applications. This is what Lisa was asked and we recognize fully that the ability in getting users to trust and work with earth observation data is big hurdles. It's not just the technology but it's the visualization. That's why I'm sorry, I really like your digital earth initiative because I think, making a person visible and actionable for decision makers who are not experts in earth observation is, is really critical to stimulate the uptake and with more uptake come more, come more requirements and therefore also more investment into new sensors, new data applications. There's nothing else we tried to do and we do it by giving platform to stories or to projects or to use cases, and we do it by developing projects, such as, or taking part in projects so we do like space for smart cities. So, I think we should raise one of our important topics because we're based in the Netherlands, and water here is critical. Thank you so much Linda, and we appreciate the great work from H220 Copernicus program, and also we are aware of the 2035 programming is coming. So these are quite some work from Europe. So Santiago and CNS in France can introduce himself. Hi everyone. So I'm Santiago and in the French Space Agency called CNES and here I am in a team developing new applications for around hydrology. In a historic way, CNES always work just on the instruments and new new sensors. And this time we're working for the SWAT satellite which we change a little bit with new data for hydrology. It will be a satellite capable of providing water elevations, but in a global way up to now we had like navier altimetry, which was quite limited in coverage for, but it was still quite useful. We have all the JSON satellite Sentinel-3 and so on, but SWAT satellite will be able to provide a global coverage for all rivers and lakes around the world every 21 days, new measurements to three times, depending on the latitude. So we're developing new products that will be provided also with SWAT data. So we have also water surfaces. We're working in new algorithms for water quality. So we have different teams and we have, we're working especially with French laboratories to develop such products. So just to remember the way the portal that we will have will be called HydroWebNext. We have already one HydroWeb based on navier altimetry. The idea will be to have the next generation, which is called this HydroWebNext. Thank you so much Santiago. I also have a person from DWS in South Africa, Nyamande. Hi, thank you very much for the opportunity. In South Africa, actually within the department, we are busy with the development of the national electrification strategy to be specific. That's the way my interest is and we are, we need to venture into F observation, eutrophication monitoring program. So currently we are still doing the grape sample, kind of manual water quality sample. We take that to the laboratory for analysis. So we realize that we are actually missing time lag in between. By the time we are driving to the site, a lot could have happened compared to the observation of which the piloting was done already by Mark. That's where we are. Thanks. Thank you so much. Just as a context, I know it's quite pains and gains of doing manual testing and maybe you don't even know where to test. So at least at observation, like you using the central end to, you can just have an assessment of where you need to go to the ground and do further testing and also from the colleagues in the call who might have some programs on the same. Anyone else would be left out, Samuela? No, I think everyone, everyone had the opportunity to talk. Thank you, Kenneth. Yep. I like to talk as well, because also you are a practitioner. Yes, so thank you. So in, I just added a little sticker of the prime water European project, and the prime water European project that looks at the heart observation for water quality and quantity management. So you are, you're welcome to go to the website and check what the project is about. Thank you so much, Samuela. And I think the group is doing very well. So with the guidance of the group, I wish to ask for suggestions for this first call. For example, I put some sticker, a webinar, white paper, would you also like a mailing list, for example, how Samuela like us to continue with her guidance. So the idea of the second part of this preco-trume is to see what do you think the COP should go? Well, how can you contribute to the COP or what do you think the COP should do? So considering that we want to share information on the heart observation of different type of heart observation data and technology, so what do you think could be useful for that for the rest of the members? And then, so any suggestions on any product that you would like to see, for example, a blood series or a blog series or a podcast series. So what do you think could be useful in this COP? And I actually like the idea of the board, Kenneth, thank you for that. Don't worry, Samuela, we've been in this online for a while, actually worked the last three years by Tony, so this is just a blast because previously I was working for the UN Foundation now working through the Geoscience Australia. We really have to work remotely to reach our users as much as possible. And then also for colleagues in from Europe, I am aware there is a lot of Copernicus STGs and I know maybe it might have had so I think also through IWA it is that we already have a lot of segments just IWA is trying to bring us together because the positions, even I had a colleague from join from the UNEP, World Water Quality Alliance, which I sent a message around to know some of the staff around and they normally provide some ground data based on what has been provided by the member states. So just a question to go around the room. Do you think these meetings, these kind of meetings work? Do you have any feedback on this? Do you see the COP doing more of these meetings? Any ideas from the room? So I'm also typing in some sticky notes. Yeah, most definitely. I mean, we came, we found this one through our Water Force project, so the Horizon 2020 project we're part of. And they're always looking out for what related events and sort of last minute decided to join it and luckily also André and Nina who's in a different group and it just exposes you to a whole new community because we're very European based. I recognize this and so your viewpoint is very European and you just don't know what's going on in the rest of the world, not enough because there's so much going on that we're not aware of and this helps tremendously. And also just to say that we started also a community of users or stakeholders ourselves and then I think it's also maybe good to connect at this level as well because this community actually brings a lot of experience and knowledge to scientific areas but also worldwide representation. Yeah, yeah. So from most program perspectives, this is what we encountered as a challenge in the continent was, as my colleague from South Africa said, most of them have to do manual testing, for example, the case of water quality, and it's based on information. So the citizens will complain, oh, we have a lot of algae, we've seen this lake as nothing is happening. So there's an element of ground science, or also bring in some interest to politicians who've been in parliament and they're not talking about the issues in the ground. So the people have been empowered to communicate more to report. And from that, agencies can actually go and try to collect. The other side of the platforms like many we use in our observation is, there's another scope of scientists like my colleagues from GeoSense Australia. The algorithms they've developed to be used using our observation. So it depends on how many of them are open to the public to be used so there's another question for IWA to look at those areas. So we also had those of our side at NASA where there's a scientist who developed this algorithm for ocean. And he was not very keen to share some of the algorithms to go to the open data cube. So those are the people in the silos and we understand they are funded by different programs and as much they can share from what we provide. So we provide from what is available open and free to first support the governments and from there they can talk to projects like CNS, what they're doing to be supported further. Well, there's another point on those co-meetings. We are still lacking maybe those future potential users and this is quite difficult to convince and to have like a huge community behind because they have so many other inputs coming from others. Institutions or lobbies or everything. So maybe I see all the time that we are always like data providers or algorithm providers or people trying to cope with this death valley of use of special data. I see now I discovered this new platforms that are for instance this Digital Earth Africa. I discovered it today and I think it's incredible. This is huge quantity of information well displayed and and it has a really big potential but still is. I don't know. I still see that it's quite difficult to have all those institutions here supporting us and trying to do asking or begging for more data and what we see is like as Linda said, there is a big space for maybe private companies ready to the style of this data to provide the right answer the right indicator, especially for each of those public institutions so the policymakers and so on. So this is just an observation now new US ideas, but I think I discovered today this new community and we will try to with our colleagues from hardware web and so on from CNES will try to to be more present about that in the past was a listen roll, which was in the community. Thank you Santiago and so any other ideas I see here link with not European water initiative and then calls to action to politics. Yes. Yeah, I don't know if it would be. Maybe it's a bit outside the scope of this community but what we find here in Europe in the public sector, which should be a big customer for certain companies. We know that we know that they work with research organizations but we have this slogan, which we call from innovation to operation sites. It's all very well to have something new like earth observation and to have new products being developed by Research Institute. But until you get it into an operational environment, it remains too, too busy to ad hoc. But we also know that public authorities. I guess everywhere but certainly here in Europe, they have to adhere to quite strict procurement rules so we have the European procurement directive, which dictates how public authorities by services or or products or data. And that everyone has their routine so in your organization you come into a routine, and it's comfortable you know how to do it. And then if someone comes along with something new, you go like yeah I'm busy. How is it going to help me what's it going to cost. So even the effort of finding out about it is is often too much. You need some kind of open minded people in organization to even want to know about it. And then they have to be able to write it into their technical specifications or current specifications to able to buy it on a routine basis. I think those days for me believe that until we get it into real operational services. We are, we are in this technology push here where we keep saying to people yeah this is amazing. It's going to really help you. So for us procurement and making those buyers understand not just what they can buy but also how they can buy it. So through like a buyer groups is also very, very important to really get the market uptake going. So here, because I think the lady from DWS, which I think is a government organization in South Africa, how, how it's how it works in in your country to have something similar where you have certain procurement rules to follow how willing people to to write something new. I mean typically you have already specifications of what you want to buy, and it's easier to reuse what you have them to spend time in creating something new. Can you say a little bit about how that works in South Africa. Can I say, it's actually working the same in terms of community of practice, we do have a strategic water networks, we do have a cooperative governance in terms of private public partnership as well. So, I think it's also embedded in the legislation that we really need to focus on citizen science as well, bringing all the civil society into decision making kind of a thing. So it's actually the same to an extent that every technical project we embark on. So we have the duty to include a community of practice. So we have different levels of engagement you'll ever have a little bit of a technical like a project steering committee, then you have public meetings you have a case management forum meetings, depending on how you pitch your technical information into to filter through the different communities. So we pitch as well as the tools we are taking to the people. In terms of the presentation, then we will also have to scale it down to the common language kind of understanding. So it's the same principle. Maybe the question will be, how far are we in terms of percentages in terms of the, you know, a future target. Okay, we have about the four minutes remaining. So if you have any other input that you would like to share. Kenneth, I don't know if you want to share some some thoughts about this or any other ideas. Please, this is the time. I think from everyone who has spoken ideas are good. So the other issue will be how the barriers like if it's a webinar how often, and do you allow for translation for example, my colleague from CNS, at least he's speaking both languages. For example, we had guys from another continent. So it's becoming quite a real challenge for connecting with other persons, like the case in Africa where we have Francophone and Anglophone. Yes. So for some countries we are very lucky, like with my sister in South Africa was big English, but in other countries like in the West, French and Central Africa now it's even a different kind of French which Santiago will be laughing all through. Yes, so we are using this translation now more and more often, especially during the pandemic when we went completely remote, we had to learn. So this is something that we can do. I saw people in the chat that we're really interested in your, Kenneth in your automatic translation. So any information also that you can provide on that I think will be more than useful for us and for future meetings. I'm not sure if this can be done just in presentation mode, I guess, just when you present. I think there's a feature for Zoom, but it's quite an issue on up and some license. Yes, yes, this this we do in the webinars but in the meetings in the presentation I've never seen it so I think it's very useful. Okay, so I'll I think we have discussed a lot. Thank you all for your contribution. I'll ask when we go back into the main session, Kenneth and Nabila if you want to provide a bit of a summary of what happened during this breakout room. But I'll bring you all into the main session now. So just just stay there. I'll do it automatically. Is anyone saving the chat function. I think they'll also save, but also if you want the link to this. Yeah, it's anonymous link that you can actually copy and export from anywhere you are. Yeah, I saved it now I see now I need to find out how I find it again. The other time so the translation was very interesting Kenneth I'd like to know more, because this is this is something we also heard in our project, just English is not good enough. Yeah, it's a feature in the office, because also, like, things are really changing. Okay, so maybe we just get started so on committee, what do we have is it half an hour we've got. Could you just keep an eye on the time. Yes we have 30 minutes and 15 minutes in each session. Okay, thanks. Yeah so welcome again, Nina. Is it carlit and say now. So yeah so really the the the objective of the breakout rooms, as this is discussing a community of practice is to get some input from from all of you as well. We'd really like to hear about your experiences on projects initiatives related to the topic so related to understanding different types applications of Earth observation data. How have you use them how do you plan to use them. Yeah, and I think you'd like to share would be really useful and you can either do that in the chat or if you'd like to just talk to us and then that's also great. And we'll just be, yeah, we're recording the session and we'll just be taking notes as well so that we can add up all into the, the general community of practice information. And so, as anyone got anything they'd like to share it in terms of experience projects programs. What does anyone want to get us going because I'm sure the reason why you're all part of the community of practices because you do, you do have experiences or interests or needs. So, yeah, who wants to start or should I just ask someone to start I can go for it Nina. I can raise my hand virtually or that's fine. I can see you. Okay. Yeah, my background is a bit different. I'm not a water practitioner per se. What I've been doing is I've been doing consultancy for an EU project called water force, which is looking into the link between Copernicus, the Copernicus program, and water users, if I can put them all together in a big box. So, yeah, my interest is at the moment, I mean, sort of our initial initial analysis is sowing that sort of especially the inland water sector is very badly represented represented in the Copernicus program. I mean it's always been, it's always tagged on to some other Copernicus service or it's part of the land service and closely linked to agriculture. Or it's part of the, you know, marine service as well as where coastal issues come into so I mean there's nothing. There's no strong initiative just for and this this project is looking particularly inland waters. And so, you know, we're trying to understand why and what's missing and what can be done. That's why I'm attending this to just to try and see, you know, pick up hints and tips and see if we missing anything. Yeah, okay, interesting. And are you looking globally or you're focusing as is the Copernicus program on Europe. I'm not going to point Europe. I'm hearing this sort of moves a foot, I think to extend from Europe also to include Africa. But I don't think that wasn't part of the initial project so I don't know how it will be incorporated. It's really interesting because, you know, to me, coming from from the water sector, it always seems like such an obvious place to to in better integrate observation and especially the higher resolution data. And I guess, I mean, yeah, we always have agriculture as an entry point. So it's, it's often not the focus of often isn't water as such. So partly, a lot of that challenge just becomes comes from the fact that it's a resource that moves. It's, you know, it's not as easy to to assess as your landscape elements are. But why could I just ask you what what you found is you said you're looking at why that is, do you have you got to the stage of having any answers as to why, why it is that there isn't that focus. I think, well, just, but this is my personal opinion. This is not an analysis. I think the problem has been that, well, in my view, the water sector has to rely heavily on on complimentary in situ data. I don't want just be an initiative from the EO side, because this observation just cannot meet all the information requirements of water managers. So I think that's why because the Copernicus program is very much been pushed from the EO side. So my, my view is it's because EO is not. I wouldn't say it's never 100% capable in any field, but it's not, you know, it doesn't have the capability to to really meet the needs of the water sector on its own. That's that's been kind of like just ignored a little bit, but that's that's just a personal opinion. I don't know if anybody can substantiate that or agree with that or find a solution to that. I mean, I would, I would completely agree with that, you know, it's, it's, it is a challenge. And if you compare, you know, like I was saying some of the terrestrial things, so forests, for example, are an obvious resource to assess through Earth observation, whereas water is more challenging. And it's also because you're never going to have a comprehensive assessment of water from Earth observation. Yes, you might be able to do surface water like Ken has showed us or you might be able to look at water related ecosystems, but trying to look at that entire moving source is, it's, it is hugely challenging and you need the institute data, like you said. So, yeah, and I guess that's why we always end up in this position of, of having water assessing individual sectors such as agriculture. I want to just, yeah, if any of our other participants have any challenges that they face themselves in the use of Earth observation data from water or, yeah, please, Rabia, do you want to unmute and just join in the discussion there's just a few of us so yeah please go ahead. Hello, how are you all? Hi, hi. Apologies for joining in late, but I'm a doctoral student I'm working on inland water quality monitoring using multi-source Earth observation data. So what I find difficult is, you know, the different characteristics of the lakes, you know how they differ in terms of quality or elbow bloom production or the climatic variations.  With institute data availability, I feel like we need a lot of climatic variables to, you know, sort of like define the reasons behind those values and if you're just fitting a model with only chlorophyll A value that won't be that much accurate in my opinion. Thanks, Rabia. I'm afraid water quality is not my field at all. So it's, yeah, it's interesting to hear that you also have the challenges. I think more so because for water quality you're working at a much higher resolution and much more context specific than the broader assessments. Where are you working? Where's your research based? I'm a PhD candidate at State University of New York, Syracuse. You can say like upstate New York, USA. Sorry, I meant which inland water bodies, which lakes? Finger lakes primarily. Sorry, which ones? I didn't catch that. Finger lakes, you know, they're part of the great lakes, yeah. Okay, so I guess, yeah, I mean, to me, you're actually, so you possibly have even better access to in situ data than in other parts of the world in the Great Lakes area. True, yes. Great. Even with the data availability, there can be like, you know, calibration issues across various sensors and things like that. Yeah, sure. Can I ask other two participants, say now, or Hassan, if you have any examples of how you've used an observation data for any water related assessments, any projects, initiatives, programs you want to share with us. Sorry, is it Hassan or Kasri? I can see you but I can't see if you were trying to talk if you're unmuted. So in that case, maybe we can move on to the next question. Which is, do you have any suggestions for this community of practice, anything you'd like to see coming out of it, what would be useful, and is there any aspect of that that you would be interested in participating in, whether that's blogs or webinars, podcasts, is there anything of particular interest to you at any areas that you would be interested in contributing to. So, Rabia, as a doctoral student, I mean, I guess something like the community of practice might be useful for you to link up with others working in the same field. And is there any particular aspect of the community of practice that you think would be particularly useful? I'm not sure like if my answer really like 100% aligned with your question but I feel like in this field standardization is like one thing we could work on. Like even if we have the data, it's collected in so many different ways that you cannot really compare the results across different water bodies. Like it's either for even for the management of water quality, like I think there is need for standardization and that can like, you know, we as researchers, we can come up with those guidelines. Yeah, it's an interesting point because especially the water quality assessments are currently very context specific. Exactly. Yeah. And we cannot make any deductions, you know, without cross comparisons. Like if all the research is based on region specific sites, then it is not easy to deduce like what's what is really going on. Right. Yeah. So I guess one of the one of the challenges is at the moment with assessments of water quality not being so automated, you're always going to be very reliant on having that in situ data. In terms of standardizing it and designing approach that is applicable applicable across different types of lakes and water bodies, you'd need to first have access to quite a lot of in situ data to parameterize the approach. And so maybe something like a community of practice could help in bringing together people working on different water bodies as a way to do that. And then you can have like webinars and you know come up with ways where everyone is, you know, comfortable, because definitely if I think loop like very high end product like very expensive radiometers or reflectometers, then obviously not everyone or every researcher in every country across the globe cannot afford that that matters as well. You know, access to the equipment, the reliable equipment. Yes. No, that is a challenge. Yeah, it's not, it's not something that we can be that we can address, for example, through, you know, through some simple crowd sourcing. Yeah. But we can definitely do data sharing, so that you know we can develop a database which can be helpful for researchers across the world. I mean personally I think that's it's an important part of the community of practices is seeing how we can build on each other's experiences to strengthen and operationalize. Yeah, the more local applications and Nina what about you. Is there anything in particular that you would like to get out of the community of practice or are you just listening into some of the presentations today in relation to the project. Yeah, I mean it's more that way around although I mean maybe the community of practice would be a good source of, you know, information as far as we can carry out a survey or interviews or something like that. It depends what the profile of the members are, you know, because of our focus that's mainly on Europe at the moment. We have to keep that in mind. So I think we've made our way through our, yeah, the questions that were set out to us, say now I'm going to give you one last chance in case you had anything you wanted to add to any parts of the conversation or any experiences you wanted to share, and you don't have to talk. If that's a challenge you can just put it in the chat but we'd be really interested in hearing from you. And then on Kabed say, is there anything else we need to do here, how do we do we just do we leave or do we get put back. We get put back. Okay, then everyone can get take five, I guess we've got about five minutes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Is there anything else that you need on Kabed say for the reporting back or is that okay. No, I am good. I was able to capture the points. Okay. Okay, thanks Nina. Thanks, yeah. Thank you. Thank you just a housekeeping question so will the recording be available for the session. Yes, it will be available. Everything has been recorded and it will be available. Welcome to break out for I'm Eunice Bonba just what I'm a research manager with the water research commission in South Africa I'm also really for heavily involved in Earth observation based projects for water quality monitoring in South Africa and in Southern Africa so like Erin said, we do want to share our experiences for the first part of this breakout session. We would just like for you to share your experiences on some of the earth observation projects or work that you're involved in. And I think because we're quite an, not a big group, maybe what we could do is just do a quick round of introductions and then we can start that first part of the session if that's okay with everyone. Santos, my pronouncing that well. Hi, good morning. My name is Santos Balnero. I'm the head of no Asian of Spanish utility, and we have a million clients, more or less. We haven't started with Earth observation, but we are looking for, for an opportunity to, to look into our lakes into our reservoirs and for information about cyanobacteria or, or other, or other rooms. Thank you for that. Jody. Yeah, good morning. Jody. Yeah, Jody is the castle and kitchen of George. Good morning. I'm from the Spanish company call a data we developed automation and control systems for water quality monitoring. We are making a trial of a project with a head observation system and a water quality profiler in them to view the utility or the use of intelligent artificial, artificial, artificial intelligence to evaluate the quality. Thanks to space observation and online monitoring of water in them. Thank you so much. And then we have jumpy. Hi, everyone. So I'm from Japan. I'm a Japanese startup company. So we are developing a small. Right. And also my, my personal back story is a high quality and high dynamic. So that's why I'm interested. Thank you so much jumpy and then Arjun. Hello, everyone. Good day to good evening to everyone. My name is Arjun Yadav completed my masters in water and wastewater engineering, having a decade of experience from defense tech aviation and water and wastewater industry. Seven years I've worked significantly from design, operation commissioning and water and wastewater industry itself before coming to United Kingdom. Thanks. Thank you so much, Arjun. And then we have Aziza. Hello, everyone. My name is Aziza. I'm researcher at hydrosystem engineering research unit at the University of all of Finland. We are studying alteration of river regime and its effect on estuarine wetlands and on land like locked lakes and direct lakes in the Middle East and Central Asia. And we also using earth observation data and also in situ data and these two regions lack some in situ data. So we have issues with this, especially hydrological data. I think I missed the last part Aziza. I think she mentioned hydrological data and then. Yeah, she finished hydrological data. Did you, did you get it? Did you hear it, Eunice? No. Okay, so we have an issue with the in situ hydrological data. So this data is not openly shared and the remote sensing data is not good enough to be used instead of the in situ data. Okay, all right. Okay, thank you so much Aziza for that. Okay, so I think then maybe we can jump in then to share more specifics around maybe some of the projects that have caused some challenges. I like the variety of kind of water resources we're dealing with. We've got wetlands, dams, different applications both from an academic point of view and more of a utilities point of view in terms of also that research transfer. I think Catherine touched on to it how Earth observation is always at least I think it was Lisa who said that Earth observation is a growing domain but really translating it to utilities for them to use it and see it as a as a valid way for water quality management is a little bit difficult and it's also something we are struggling with here in South Africa, although it's working. We do know, obviously there are problems with data collection sometimes, whether you're going to use Sentinel what you know, in terms of cost as well financial implications but I think if we probably have some ideas how to overcome that, that we that we could share among each other that would be good to help the community of practice in general. So don't know who wants to start off first, maybe jump in because I think I like the angle that you're coming from when you introduced yourself. Yeah, actually, so I don't have this specific project, but my personal backstory is the Hadamacar one so I do I use a demo testing for the water surface area estimation for dams. So estimating what the one so we can estimate the water levels for each dam so and also we are using the insert technology so land slide. Can hear calls the sedimentation so we approach that so integrated approach for the dam management. So it's not totally to the topic but I just have such a project actually. Thank you anyone else. If you want I try to explain my project and my problem. I can say, during many years we have been developing monitoring real time online monitoring systems for water quality. One of our clients is public administrations that manage dams that are used for drinking water. The problem is that is dam is very big you cannot measure everything everywhere at the time. So, finally what we joined it with the public administration decided to monitor the profile of the water quality, near the intake of the water to the drinking water treatment. So we have in some places more than 10 years of profiles. In general, every four times per day, because we have seen that it's not necessarily to have more information. There's no pollution in the water quality. So fast in a dam, please in the Spanish dams. But the problem is that we just can monitor one place that is near the out the intake to the water treatment. So we are trying to see if thanks to the satellite observation we are able to make forecast of all the quality all around the dam. We know there are some problems because one of the problems is the frequency of the image. You don't have so much frequency you just have one image every if everything goes well every five days. If there are clouds or there are rains then you have less demand. The second problem is the depth of the image you get in general you just can get the image from the surface of the water, not of the underground water. So these two things is that we are trying to see if thanks to the artificial intelligence we can join with the online real time profile to see if we can predict these alga blooms. In the previous presentation they have they have said that this is not a problem in Europe. It's a problem in Europe, at least in the south of Europe where we have a heat weather or so we have this problem. And this is what we are trying to do at this moment. As I have said we have the profiler installed it in a lot of dams in Spain, and we are starting to make the analysis of the image. Fortunately we have history of image and data from profilers so now we are seeing if there's possibility to make this forecast or this provision of problems in that. Thank you Jordi. I think for us here in South Africa also we have a lot of issues with our dams. Eutrophication is a big problem obviously because we do have a lot of agricultural activities and there's also been the whole upstream story so upstream management to change policy there. It's difficult so now we are trying to sort of solve a solution from the once it has happened, you know, instead of really dealing with emissions and you know, water quality from that point of view you know what comes out at your point and source point so for eutrophication we do also have, we started this Sino Lakes. It's an app that we a mobile app that we've been successfully been able to use to monitor eutrophication in quite a number of our large dams but like you said the surface area is in resolution is where the problem is so the bigger dams it's much easier to do. And when you do obviously it's you to monitoring it correlates nicely with what we're seeing on the app and this is also web based app, I'm sorry, a computer based application as well. But your smaller dams where it's managed by farmers in, you know, especially where they are involved in export production then it becomes a problem so you find that yes what utilities can use it nicely, because they have quite large dams but when it comes to smaller dams and the resolution is not as great and obviously it's also a paid service. So then the financial costs comes into play as well but at least we do have something that we've been able to translate nicely where even for recreational use you know if you wanted to go and swim somewhere you could also download it on your phone and can give you a health risk level basically to say okay it's safe to swim in the water today or maybe to roll if you wanted or fish but yeah so we're still struggling as well but at least we are making movements when it comes to eutrophication I think for us it's the other words of quality parameters that we're still struggling with, especially with maybe some of our emerging contaminants and things like that. Thank you for that. I don't know Arjun Santos Aziza. Hello, yeah. Thanks for all your insights. See with regards to utilizing the satellites and processing the data. To be honest I didn't get an appropriate answer in the session which I asked the question. When you're having loads of data coming in and what I heard from Maria that it has not been done on regular basis, you're not annual basis. That's what I heard but I didn't really quite get it. If you're accumulating so much of data and you're filtering out annually it won't make any good desired output you have to keep on regularly cleaning up filtering and targeting those data which is essential. Those which are not required, let's say 80 to 90% you should immediately delete it so it's not essential. So you have to keep those things which are most essential one. So that has to be processed in milliseconds every now and then. So I really don't know how it has been done annually it's quite not clear. This one thing. Second thing is when you're accessing the data from the ground to the satellite. So it's only one direct link I don't think it will be sufficient enough to get their objectives. You have to keep separate segregated stations let's say underground sensors, drones, aerial drones for certain surface water for let's say on surface water on surfacing aerial drones for your contaminants underground water at certain level underground drones with sensors for XYZ contaminants. And let's say for buoys, let's say like you can install buoys in this river beds and where the, let's say when it before reaches the treatment plants, 10 kilometers in the river basins of buoys floating buoys where they can really observe all the contaminants. So these data process and the aerial drones will collect it and that will send to the satellite so by this each and every step by step there'll be a segregated transformation and data storage and data cleaning method and overall it can be accumulated in satellite and give a proper output. So I don't think it's going to be only one cent less you cannot get everything so me being having an experience in operating the plants looking at the SCADA data it was not that easy. So as and when you decentralize it as and when you look into it thoroughly, then only things will go better. And according to different geographical trends you need particular sensors you cannot have one sensor you have to customize a lot, and you have to customize with its coding programming and you have to calibrated precise levels, what, what, what contaminants you're targeting at what level it should be calibrated so there's a lot of stuff. So, yeah, and this needs too much involvement. We need many people together skilled professions to involve those who worked in the site while the experience and field work. I think those people should come in forward to promote this in a bigger way because it's really a fantastic technology and futuristic as well by implementing this you will get rid of all the chemical based testing and the huge laborious method that is involved. So I'm really support great supporter of this deck and also I am strongly advocating that AI should be fully implemented in water and wastewater and water is at its highest level. And I'm happy to help anyone on one hundred basis or on internship basis and looking forward for any opportunity. Thank you so much, and actually that was quite a nice lead up then to the second part of our breakout, which basically we want to find out from our participants, what you can contribute to the community of practice, whether it's through maybe webinars. I've also mentioned the experiences and training that you can provide. Then there's also podcast series, white papers. So just different ways of, of contributing to the community of practice addressing these kinds of issues that we've picked up because I think just from our small group here we can see that different countries are at different stages with regard to application of Earth observation so you don't need to have to walk the same road that maybe another geographic location has worked you can just leapfrog and maybe know how to better data like Adjunis saying or how Jordy gave his example of maybe starting off first with just one, looking at one intake building your data for a very long time so that you already know how your models look like before you transit to Earth observation so I think if we can maybe have if you have any suggestions on how you think you can contribute to the corp that would be useful and obviously that information will then be made available to everybody who is part of this community. Maybe we can start with Santos. Hi again. I'm just for the moment I'm just listening because we don't have any progress. What Adjun has said is very, very interesting because it's it gives us a lot of ideas because we have now a contract where we go to our recipients to our dams to take samples of the water to know if we have alga balloons or whatever and that takes us a lot of people to go there. There are security risks there to go with a boat and we want to avoid that but with all the contributions that you have made at the moment. What I have learned is that we have to work in parallel with this continuing taking samples and at the same time taking this data from Earth observation or drones or the boys to take the sample and to work in parallel so to know that this data taken from Earth observation are feasible are reliable so to us it's very, very interesting. Maybe Santos I don't know how you guys will document that are you are you publishing or are you reporting it somewhere that everyone can have access to because I think maybe quite a number of people in this community will also be at the starting stage you know. The question please. So I was saying that are you how are you guys documenting this process of you, you guys getting involved into transitioning from your traditional monitoring methods to Earth observation is that a way is there was somewhere you're reporting it. Not for the moment we are thinking how to do it and we are just we are attending at this kind of events so to learn and to do it for in a better way. Okay, alright, okay. Good. And then a Caesar maybe I just wanted to follow up with the work that you've been doing around wetlands. I think also that's quite nice. I mean that those are the kinds of boundaries we deal with in terms of water resource quality. So it's not necessarily your water but it's an important issue when it comes to obviously water quality regulation. I wanted to talk about other projects that they have. It's on urban lakes. In Oulu we have two small lakes that are mainly used for recreational purposes. And we also have algae blooms there. And one of my projects that I'm just waiting for the grant to implement, but I started some monitoring already. We want to make a digital twin. So this lakes. I think all of you know this concept. And we placed a sensors. Now only we had a budget for the dissolved oxygen sensors. So basically those sensors take information every 10 minutes. But I can't directly get this information from the sensors. Like I placed it in November and now I will take them out after the ice breaks in April, and then I can collect the information. So it's not basically a digital twin because in the digital twin technologies you have immediate data like constant flow of data. With remote sensing it's better but also we don't have the like satellites flowing through this like above those lakes every day or like every hour. So we have to combine all this data, in-situ data, so sensor data. And we also need to use these 5G, 6G technologies and artificial intelligence to combine all the data. And not doing it manually or like collecting and filtering it manually, but to make it like a process that is constant and automatic. But we are just starting this process. Okay, and with you guys also are you going to be reporting it somewhere or are you documenting the process somewhere? Is there like a website maybe for the project? We are going to make an app for the city because these lakes are used for the swimming. So we will share this data with the city and with residents. We also made a survey among the residents to find out their opinion and they already told us that they can absorb algae blooms. There was a fish death events as well. So there is a problem with water quality. But people also are mainly concerned on the color of water because in these northern lakes and rivers, we have the brown water issue in Finland. Yeah, so there are many issues that we have to look at it. And also the satellites can be quite useful in this case. Thank you.  Thanks Aziza for bringing your information. See what I like to bring up on my experiences. When you're addressing, when you're utilizing the sensors and targeting any measurements, it also depends upon how are you talking and why are you targeting. Let's say that you're targeting contaminants, organic or not contaminants or microbial contaminants. Let's say you're targeting crypto or algae, the size of the crypto. What's this heat signature? What's this dimension? Whether you're going related to heat signature based sensors or optical imaging based sensors? So let's say you're going for an EIML algorithm. So you have to feed that proper data to the algorithm that what is the crypto? What is the size of it? How does it seem? What is the density? What is the measurement? Based on that, it will start collecting as a plan. You have to calibrate as per that. So it's not like just put a sensor and get everything. So it also depends upon what data feed that you're giving into those algorithms that the sensors will detect and as you calibrate it, it will verify it properly. So there is some, I think we should be more deep and more specific in how we address our issues rather than being generic. So that's what I would like to bring in. Thank you so much, everybody. We're going to be taking back to the main room right now, but I think the discussions that we had were really good. Thank you.


Russia has effectively stopped the Black Sea grain deal by refusing to register incoming vessels, Ukraine's Reconstruction Ministry said on May 8. Ukrainian Black Sea ports were blockaded after Russia's invasion last year, but access to three of them was cleared last July under a deal between Moscow and Kiev that was brokered by the United Nations and Turkey. The Russian Federation once again effectively stopped the grain initiative by refusing to register incoming vessels and carry out their inspections. This approach contradicts the terms of the current agreement, the ministry said in a statement. It said that 90 ships, including 62 vessels for loading, were waiting in Turkey's territorial waters for approval to go to Ukrainian ports. The deal expires on May 18. Moscow has threatened to quit the agreement intended to help ease a global food crisis. Turkey and the United Nations are working to extend the deal.


Getting closer to being done. One, we tested it, it turns on. Now, then we determine lighting. Gotta get this figured out. And then cable management on this side is coming along fine.  And I think it might've been about 15 years ago. One of those big NEC multi-sync ones that were really popular if you could get your hands on one. Anyways, after building a lot of computers at the shop and we're just seeing so many people come in building some really high-end editing stations and a couple gaming rigs, and my kids being a little bit older, I said, okay, I'm gonna go ahead and build one for myself. And if you're gonna build one, I gotta build something pretty decent. So what I went with here was the Intel i5-6600K processor. It's the overclockable one. I just couldn't justify the i7. Did some performance reviews on the i5. It's really good. Now, I know a lot of people like myself are AMD fans. This is the first time I haven't bought an AMD. They still am rocking my eight-core AMD at my office computer. And it's really performing well with this Intel. AMD, I know the Zen's coming out pretty soon. Right now, it's December 2016. Zen is gonna be coming out in January, February, somewhere around there next year in 2017, but I just didn't wanna wait. So I went with the Corsair 600C Carbide ATX case. Now, this case is both quiet. It's kind of monolithic. It kind of fits into my decor. So to speak at my house. As you can notice with all the red around me, I'm at home right now. Yes, my living room's red. Maybe I'll post a photo or so. Anyways, if you're curious, you can find all this stuff on my Facebook. I'm pretty open about that. Anyways, so I also went with the GTX series. Now, I went right with the Asus Strix series card. Now, the Asus Strix really, really nice. I wanted something that was quiet. Now, a lot of what goes around this build to me is silence. It's the same thing I like at my shop. I can't record videos if I hear a lot of noise. I'm just kind of annoyed by hearing all the fan noise. Maybe it was cool when I was younger, as you hear all the fans roaring, you knew something was happening. Now that I'm older, I guess I just want to focus only on the games or whatever else I'm using it for, which might be some video editing too. So the GeForce GTX 1070 is a great card, the Strix version. Now, it does have the three fans on there. The fans are completely thermally controlled. Now, even playing Doom at Ultra mode, I am amazed at how the fans barely even spin. Matter of fact, between cut scenes, after you finish a level, they stop. It doesn't overheat at all. It doesn't get too hot. It's really, I don't keep it very warm in my house. I know that's a contributing factor, but I'm like, wow, this thing, you can't even really tell when it's on. My only regret, maybe we're not putting lights on tops because it's harder to see when the fans are spinning as I put the lights at the bottom of the case. Now this case is the style case that the motherboard mounts upside down in, which is why the radiator is at the bottom. The radiator went with the dual fan radiator, which is the H100IV2 by Corsair. Really happy with it. The processor, even with the most intense games, has not even gotten that radiator warm. Now, once again, it's at the bottom, so we have two fans at the bottom. Now, we could have put the fans on top of the radiator. We chose to put them on the bottom of the radiator. That way, if anything were to drop or I was to reach something in the case while that was on, I know it's a bad idea, but it would not end up causing a problem and something falling into the fans. Power supply, when with the Corsair? Mostly because it was on sale. I don't have any particular fondness of Corsair, but hey, it was on sale. It's their CMX series, CX50 650 watt. All's unrunning is the MSA2 drive, which is an Intel 512 MSA2 drive onboard tied to a gigabyte Z170 motherboard. Now, I didn't, I know there's better motherboards, so to speak. There's ones that are even higher end all for more of a clocking options. This, I just went with something simple and it gets the job done. I've got that paired with a pair of 16 gig ballistics DDR4 and the performance on this entire rig is really, really good. This system is completely silent. Even with the door open, the fans are so quiet, I'm sitting next to it. It just doesn't, it doesn't wear up, it's so quiet and that really, like I said, you know, maybe I'm old and older, but I really do like that a lot. So last piece is, what are you gonna view all this wonderful graphics on? So I went with the Asus VG8 27HV. It is a 144 refresh, 27 inch monitor. Now, one of the things I started learning a lot, it's been so long since I've looked at some of the monitors is not just the refresh rate, but of course they refer to it as the grade-to-gray time. This has a less than one millisecond response from the grade-to-gray time, which is how fast it can go between black to gray to white to back. Anyways, one of the things I learned is some of the monitors that claim a one millisecond response time actually have sub-processors that are slower within the monitor itself. That being said, you end up with a screen that is capable of that response time, but the processor behind the screen may not be. So I learned that there's a whole another level of it and of course you gotta try and work your way through all the marketing hype to try and find these things out. So a lot of research led me to this monitor. It has a very, very overall response time that still is the sub-one millisecond, one millisecond response time. Now at my office, I prefer the IPS displays because while I'm not gaming and not worried about any graphics tearing, I'm just editing videos and getting work done and doing a lot of support. So I do prefer an IPS display, but IPS displays with really, really fast response times are substantially more expensive than this monitor and not many of them. They're still, it's still harder to get the IPS, the in-plane switching monitors, which have the best pictures, in my opinion, but it's hard to get them at that refresh rate and speed because you'll just end up with some screen change. So that's my overall build for this. It's a pretty straightforward, like I said, I enjoy the fact that it's silent. Oh, and there's no speakers here because it's in my living room. And where it's at in living room is kind of out in the corner and I don't want to compete with the TV. The TV is actually, I'm pointing at it right now. And I kind of like high-end stereo stuff. So I've got a nice TA check so it's through in Vegas and a Pioneer Elite system. There's no competing with how loud the TV is. It's headphones only, not to mention I'm watching TV and my son's gonna be sitting here a lot playing it or my wife's watching TV and I'm playing it. Either way, we don't want any conflicts so I made sure I went with just headphones. Nothing high-end yet. I haven't really picked anything out for that. I just have the Logitech ones with the headset. They're basic, they're like the $35 ones. They work, they get the job done for now, but I am looking at it. I did choose an odd chair. I chose the IKEA. I think I want to call it a Nilsk. It's kind of a little thing. I'm gonna do a review on it after I sit in a while and wobbling at it right now. It's a chair with no back. It's kind of like a stool but it's got a wobble bottom on it and it keeps you sitting more upright and maybe will make me look less fat because it's supposed to work your core muscles better. I, so far, I like it. I really have a complaint but there's another chair sitting over here because the kids aren't super fond of it and neither is my wife but I'm still gonna keep trying it because I kind of like the way it forces me to have better posture and it lets me wiggle and that makes it kind of fun. I also haven't done anything other than grab a standard Dell keyboard that I happen to have and nothing special on the mouse either.  I don't know that I really need to upgrade. I think some people get real caught up in the moment for all those things and yeah, they don't really add a lot of value. So that's it for my build here and if people want to talk to me about building, I'm always interested to talk to them. We've done some custom ones for people. We don't mind, you know, helping make a few recommendations here and there or getting it assembled for you. Anyways, thank you for watching and if you like the content here, like and subscribe. I appreciate it.