Hi, welcome. My name's Robert Allen. I'm from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I'm suspecting most of you haven't heard of us or don't know who we are, but we're a global publisher. Some of our works that you might be familiar with are, let's see, Lord of the Rings, All the Tolkien Works. I'm pretty sure most of us are familiar with those, Life of Pi and several others. We're about a 185 year old publishing company, which in itself brings a lot of challenges. Besides the trade, the publishing of books and such, we work heavily in K through 12 education assessments, formative education, formative assessments. We have a large staff of learning architects. We deliver a lot of high stakes assessments, things like that. We also do a lot of research. We work with schools to develop practices on various types of education, aspects like intervention, so students fall behind, things like that, or accelerated students. That's where the professional services come in. We provide a lot of data to schools, comprehensive assessments, etc. A few years ago, I guess about three years ago, we came into a crisis. The market's changing in education. I'm sure a lot of you have noticed that. A lot of different companies coming into it. Innovation, accelerating in various areas. We found ourselves having difficulty with innovating the products, developing the products. That led us to recognize that we had a problem. A large group of people weren't really sure what that problem was. Some people ignored the problem. Some people didn't. We had a lot of trouble getting consensus on what those problems were. About three years ago, we started looking at that and trying to understand how do we get these products delivered. Nothing was really getting delivered to the customers that needed to be. We ended up recognizing that we have a portfolio of about 900 different applications. Most of them are different. However, almost all of them share about 60% of the same functionality. Because we have a pool between 400 and 600 engineers, which is a lot of teams, a lot of people building the same thing, different things. We recognized that almost all of the development time was being spent doing the same thing every time. When that happens, we couldn't get anything done. We also had situations where the operations at what we call the technology group, they couldn't get infrastructure delivered. I say months, but in some cases, it was years. They would have a product that we needed to develop. We would need infrastructure to build those development cycles in. We couldn't even get access to it for over a year. Around this time is when I joined the company. I was asked to look at it from a much smaller perspective, more from one or two teams instead of the five or 600 engineers. I had come from a telecommunications background. I had already been looking at mesos at the time, but it was very new. There was a lot of things missing, like containers. I think it was version .1 or something. It was pretty clear to me at the time that that was the direction we needed to go to orchestrate all these different applications. All these monolithic applications, they all shared the different things like authentication, logging. In most cases, they didn't even have time to develop metrics where they could monitor it properly.  It would go into legacy, into support mode, and someone else had to deal with it. There was this culture of really just running away from that problem and just give it to somebody else. Contractors in some case that were responsible for the health state of it once it was delivered. It led to a lot of upset customers. It led to a lot of things just really not, it wasn't good. It was bad. There's a few here that can attest to that. I say up to six months. There were literally cases that went as much as 18 months. By the time you would get the infrastructure, the products already moved on. You're gone. You've lost your opportunity. Other things, like I said, the logging, just all of these different aspects, it was clear that if we could narrow that down and let our engineers focus on what's core to the business, infrastructure and operations, we're not an infrastructure and operations company. We're an education company. What we needed to do was let all of those engineers, those hundreds of engineers out there and those teams really focus on what was core to the business, which is just building the application. Not worrying about necessarily the security, the authentication, logging, the metrics, and really define what that was. We came up with a series of goals. There was a process. We spent six months really talking about what we wanted to do. We wanted engineers to be empowered. To do that, they needed to own it from concept all the way to legacy. If you develop it and you don't develop it right, you're the one that's going to get woke up at night. You've got to fix it. We started enforcing that. That took a cultural shift. We had to really get people to understand that you can't make bad decisions. You have to really think about what you're doing. We wanted continuous delivery. The release cycle on some of these apps that we were delivering to the customers were months or years. The fear was that the students or the teachers and the educators that were consuming these products couldn't handle change. The culture, we had to really help people understand that there are ways to continually deliver product without imposing mass change on the consumers. We had to stop preventing failure. We had pools, and we still do in some cases. We had pools of people. Their responsibility is to prevent things from changing. It's hard to deliver a product when you've got a whole team of people saying you can't do that. We had to change that. We had to get people thinking that it's better to have small change sets, lots of them. When you do that, you're imposing a lot or you're imposing less change and less potential failure. If you do a change set with thousands of change sets in it and you deliver that, potentially you have a thousand problems. What we wanted to get to, and we're still working that direction, is having one or two changes going in maybe two or three times in a day. In some places we have that, in some places we don't. We wanted to decompose these services into segregation and responsibility. One service handles the authentication, authorization, and all these different things. Again, let those teams focus on that product and that product alone. November 2015, my team was chartered to solve this problem. The catch was, we had to deliver a solution in six months or less. The only way, that was another crisis moment. As a startup, which is where I come from in the background, startup, it's sort of easy to green field solutions like this when you don't necessarily have a lot of customers. We have millions of students. We have a lot of constraints around data. There's all sorts of regulations around the data that we deal with, the handling of that data, geographic restrictions on where that data can be handled or stored or processed and all these things. We had to step back, we had to look for ways, how can we solve this problem. The team was formed, what we now call Bedrock Technical Services. The entire package of ideas, goals, et cetera, we call Bedrock. It's an okay name, but it probably could have been better. It's good, it works. We're currently a team of five people. At the time, it was challenging in the early months to say the least. We knew that technology alone can't solve this problem. We knew that we had to have a grassroots understanding throughout the company that this is the direction we're going, these are the problems we're going to solve and we need to do this together. This is not something, and it never will be something that you can solve from a command level. You can't tell 600 engineers and 50 or 60 teams of developers that you're going to do it this way. It has to be done this way. You have to get a consensus or at least an understanding of all these people that this is the direction we're going, we're going to take these steps. You have to be pragmatic about it all. The pragmatism is that I can't or we can't come out with a whole bunch of solutions at one time and change everybody's world overnight. We needed a way to really provide a level of behavioral design in how the infrastructure is delivered. What we strive to do is to make the right things the easy thing. There are cases where you can't make the right thing easy, you have to make the wrong thing hard. It turns out that's not as difficult as it sounds because most of it's hard anyways. We run Mesa's Aurora pretty much exclusively for our job orchestration. Like I said before, we're currently a team of five people plus myself. I try not to contribute too much because I'm more of the chaos monkey in things. Frustrates the team from time to time. We run Mesa's Aurora. We have approximately 30 individual teams that are contributing to that today. They are all empowered to do their own deliveries, their own job definitions, etc. We do that with Aurora. It's an ongoing process because a lot of times engineers don't understand things. I wouldn't say understand. They don't always take into consideration what their decisions impact the entire cluster. My team's job is to make bedrock safe for engineers, not engineers safe for bedrock. When you accept that and you truly embrace that approach to it, it changes operations approach to everything. That means you have to put governance in place but not restrictive. You can't restrict what they're doing but you have to make it safe for them to go in and not impact other consumers of the cluster. That's not always easy. There's a lot of challenges around that. That's where we get into other aspects of the cluster. We also use LinkerD now. We originally started with Finagle. We do have Finagle in some places that we use because Aurora originates with Twitter and they develop Finagle to work with the zookeeper, the service discovery pattern or the group membership patterns and the server sets, etc. That was sort of a nice fit. As we started scaling out, we also ran into other issues with AWS. We're currently in AWS, which gets into the whole other crisis that the company had when they started doing the lift and shift. You guys familiar with what that does to a company? There was almost eight-figure panic that happened probably my second year at HMH. The budget was bad. It was a crisis. They had no idea what was coming because cloud providers are like banks. If you don't have a plan for your money, don't worry. They have one for you. They will clean your wallet out quick. The assumption going into it for a lot of the leadership at that time was that we go to the cloud. It's an automatic savings. But the reality is, and I think we all know this, that you can't just jump in the cloud without a plan. The cost saving comes in the ability to scale down and scale up. The way HMH did this at the time was, to some degree, we still do. Every environment, every app was copied seven times. So you have dev, cert, cert2, some cases cert3. So they had certifications environments for the certification environment and another certification environment. And then you might get the prod. And in some cases, you had two prod stacks. So when you repeat all of those things, your cost just grows. You can't control it. And so what we've done is, one of the main decisions, and this is what really upset a lot of people, was it was a conscious decision to go into this with Mesa and Aurora to only have one environment for the infrastructure. We have two, but nothing's ever truly deployed in the dev environment. So we test all of the infrastructure. To us, regardless of whether the app is dev or production, the infrastructure it runs on is production. And so that really helps us make decisions and keep things stable for them going through. Now, the old school mentality of you having to keep everything segregated and separate with networks and VLANs and all these things, there was a lot of panic around that. End containers, containers are bad. We can't do containers. It was a mess. Originally we started with cloud formation. It was great until it wasn't, which didn't take long to get to where it wasn't. Lots of issues, and as we scaled out, applying updates with cloud formation would cause all kinds of headaches because sometimes it would lock up. You would get the resource bound. You couldn't get the resource down. And in some parts of our stack, it would take days to get a change applied to that because we'd have to go through support. Somebody at AWS would have to kill it. And the whole, everything about it was bad. Terraform came about and we adopted that, which led to keeping secrets somewhere else, which we've now started going towards vault. And it's gotten much better. It's also opened the door for us to start looking at other providers to move some of these workloads to. And then finally, we used Jenkins. Now, the one thing I think is almost universal, maybe not quite, is that everybody hates Jenkins. It works, but because the team was so small, we accepted the fact that some things were just going to use because we don't have time to develop or work on another solution. Jenkins was that for us, as well as Datadog and some of the more expensive things. Those were conscious decisions early that, over time, we would start to work out. We originally started with one monolithic Jenkins deployment using Operation Center, et cetera, that everybody deployed their jobs to. But then the other problem with Jenkins cropped up where you have plug-in collisions, right? So then we realized that, well, with 30 teams, we can't have 30 teams doing this. Because everybody wanted a different plug-in, the plug-ins were in conflict, Jenkins was down like every hour, it was a nightmare. So we split it out. Now the teams manage their own Jenkins, and they manage it through Aurora. They run it just like another job, and they deploy everything there. That has been a great improvement for everything. Excuse me. So as we do this, we realize that there's a lot we have to watch. We have a lot of expectation. We have all these guidelines. So if you don't meet these guidelines, the certain patterns, health checks, monitoring formats, logging, et cetera, you can't run there. You can't run your app in bedrock, and you're stuck with the month or whatever trying to get infrastructure. That's making things harder, and that's the concept of behavioral design. So you want to run your app. If you want to do it now, you have to do these things. And so we spend a lot of time inspecting this. We inspect how the apps are being deployed, how they're running, that they're providing the metrics that they should, and for the most part, doing the right things. And it's important to realize that you have to constantly monitoring, watching, not just the performance, but just the entire environment, the culture. And so this led to really embracing the openness, being open about our failures, being open about what worked, what didn't. In a 200-year-old company, that's not an easy thing for people to do. A lot of people like to, it broke, but we're not going to tell anybody. So we had to embrace, really, well, my team had to act as an example of, you know, airing our laundry, so to speak. We have, we've made a lot of mistakes, but we've done a lot of things right, but we've always learned from our mistakes, I think. I say I think, because that's something that's not judged for months or years down the road. Getting teams to do that was, at first, difficult, but it's gotten much easier over time. We, Slack is, we use Slack, Slack is very good for that. When we have, you know, outages, we always publish an RFO, a reason for outage. We try to outline exactly why it happened, what mitigations we took, and what our plans are for the future, preventing that to happen. That whole communication chain is important. You know, you probably come in here thinking this is going to be an entirely technical talk, but it's not, because it's really, you know, technology, you know, everybody likes to present that the technology is a solution to all your problems, and while it's a major part of it, it's important to understand that if you don't have a plan and you don't have a culture that goes with those changes, you're not going to be successful. And it literally took two years just to get in a large company like this to really get the momentum going to make these changes, because had it not been for that crisis, you know, that not being able to deliver any applications that needed to be delivered for that year, that school year, you know, we'd probably still be doing the same thing, and, you know, I might be somewhere else by now. I don't know, but it's, it's been quite a learning experience. And so the philosophical aspects of this is really, you know, you can't, you have to empower the engineers, you have to set those engagements, you have to have accountability, and really all of these things come together, and then celebrating the successes, the failures, and recognizing what is and isn't working, because they're all equally important. Thank you. So really, I wanted to get through this quick, so there would be time for questions, because we have a lot to share about this, but it really depends, you know, I'm interested in, you know, what are you interested in, and what can we share with you in more detail beyond this. Now, I'm very hard of hearing, so bear with me. Yeah, so you've mentioned that it took like around two years to actually do the whole kind of grassroots change and stuff like that. The question is though, being a 200-year-old company, I suppose that you went from this kind of like Ponzi scheme and management structure to maybe something else.  So did something else change in that department? So that's a great question. Yes, there was a lot of change in management, and I would say it's safe to say that it was involuntary change for those managers. Yes, a lot of change, a lot of restructuring in the management. It really wasn't until the new management got in place that we started getting momentum for this. So while this was something that, at the time, it was, you know, Ryan and I, just the two of us doing this, and we were trying to get, you know, adoption momentum, there was no acceptance of it. In fact, there was a lot of resistance, and in some cases, you know, institutional resistance to it. It wasn't until management changed and management knew that there was nothing sustainable there and there was nothing that could really be saved. You had to throw it all out and start over, and we've done that. Now, we still have, because we are a 200-year-old company, we still have silos of different business units that have their own engineering groups, right? But I think management has continued to change up until recently in some ways we still have a lot of change going on in that. And it's through that, I think, that we'll see much more openness. Now, we've actually gone out as a team and sold what we're doing to internal business units to get them interested in it, and that's sort of where the marketing aspect, you know, the bedrock, you know, we created logos and, you know, things like that to sort of help sell it internally. And that's an important part. And I think that, you know, we also want the other teams to be developing products internally that externally our customers don't really know that it's called ORCID or whatever name we call it, but internally it's important to know that, you know, these services are available for other parts of the business unit and how they can adopt that. And so that was a big part of that. Very similar question to the person before. So we are undertaking a similar, very similar, actually journey. And so I'm wondering how did you manage to convince the product teams how we call them to really, you build it, you run it, right? So that is what we are currently struggling a lot with. So product teams still try to, I mean, they want to have the benefits, right? So they want to be on the platform, they want to be agile, but on the other hand to take the full ownership and also support their applications and own it to legacy. That's what I found really interesting on the slide. So if you can have some words on that. So where this, how we really managed to improve that was there was one team that was in, they were all working probably 80 hours a week trying to get their product out. And it's the identity team, which is not an easy problem. Identity and authorizations and all that. And they'd already gone through this a whole year. And that's where this whole crisis started. And so what we did, we actually went as a team and we were traveling to Dublin and we would go in and we'd sit down with them and we would work with them and we would help them through the learning hurdles of it all. I think that one of the things you'll find is that most of your resistance comes from fear of change and fear of change is derived from not having a full understanding of the solution. And so what we managed to do was to go out there, work with them, show them how their life gets simpler doing this. And it's just persistence, it really is. And you have to start with one small, you know, start with one team or a small group of people and really get them on board, get them to fully understand it, and then let them be the agents of change. So that's where your grassroots level comes from, right? So we worked with them. We got, you know, we trained them. We helped them understand the benefits of what they're doing. You know, once they understood that if you develop better software, you have less support issues and so then it becomes, well, maybe the supporting it through the full life cycle is not as bad as we thought. And, but that takes time because first you have to clean out all the old problems that were always there.  It's not just, you know, this is one of these things. It's not just a one thing fits all.    So it's a matter of just iterating, working with them. In some cases we learned that what we thought was a good solution wasn't and so we have to listen to them. So to us there are customers and so we support them through that. It's not, you know, it's not adversarial, it can't be. And oftentimes I think that in, there's a culture in operations going way back of adversarial and it just, it's not good. You have to throw all of that out, you know, and you have to also work with the team that's doing this in some ways. You have to teach the people that you're working with yourself that you have to change how you approach it. You have to, you know, you have to work on your people skills. You have to, you know, it's just, there's a lot of things to it. It's not, like I said, it's philosophical and technical, but in reality the technical facets of solving these problems are very minimal. It's almost all a people problem. So you have to keep that in mind going forward. That answer your question? Hi, short question. How did you solve your database problem? Short question, short answer. We didn't. But no, seriously, we were very deliberate in what we do and don't do, and we do use RDS for a lot of the databases right now. It's not optimal, it's not great, and it's expensive. It really is, especially when they want to run, you know, four or five node Aurora clusters and, not Mesa's Aurora, but Amazon Aurora, things like that. It gets expensive, but it's a trade-off. You know, we use Terraform. We, the engineers, the engineer teams are expected to create their own Terraform pull request. We review the request, we deploy their database, and then the accounting's done with cost tags, et cetera. That's how we solve that problem. At this time, I don't want to take on putting databases in Aurora.  You know, you see a lot of these presentations, oh yeah, you can spin up an elastic search cluster in Mesa's. Well, it's not that simple, not at scale.  We deal with a lot of problems with that. You know, it's mostly shards. You know, some of the, we have over 50,000 shards in our elastic search database right now. That creates a nightmare. It's all the time when it's trying to rebalance it. So it's not a problem I want to take on, not yet. And so in the, in the interim, for now, it's, we will continue using RDS or what other, you know, external to Mesa's database solutions there are. So he did a follow-up question to my aunt. I'm doing a follow-up question to his because that's how inception works. So regarding the culture change, I have an interesting situation. And this is actually a question about education as well.  Well, you have taken a somewhat of a Stolman approach. Of course, everyone should use them. So the question was, and it is actually, so you have these very junior engineers coming into the team, engineers who are not taught to think about distributed systems, who are not taught to think about, you know, what will happen in the long-term, who do not know, who do not understand why they should log things and what are the differences log levels because this is something that, you know, why you just send everything to SED out. So the question here is, how do you, how do you kind of like prepare these very junior engineers to think in this more of a kind of distributed system failure that will always happen mindset rather than, oh yeah, you know what, I just like, I do something and know JS and it like runs and it's like so awesome. So yeah. So one of the things we do is, so mostly my team's in Chicago, right, the majority of our engineers are in Dublin. So every quarter we go to Dublin for two weeks and we do two-hour sessions twice a day for two weeks and we cover things that are bedrock specific, we cover development practices, you know, we talk with the teams about cap theory and all these different things. It's something that you just have to reinforce. But probably one of the biggest things that we've done is we've moved away from primarily contractors, you know, coming in and doing a lot of the engineering and so we're out recruiting, this is my plug now, but we're out recruiting, you know, senior engineers, staff level engineers to actually come into these teams and act as mentors and, you know, provide guidance to the teams. I don't know if many of you have, you know, gone through the whole recruiting cycle on the hiring side of things, it's not easy, you know, and so, but we've made progress in that, right? So we've got a lot of really good engineers that are in teams now and they're providing that guidance and that has made a huge improvement. You know, you have to, you just have to keep reinforcing it and when we do see things that, you know, are sort of sideways with what we expect, that's where the, you know, that's where our pull request, everything that goes in, you know, we review, whether it's ourselves or the engineers and we provide that ongoing feedback and that's really how you have to do it. Part of the bedrock principles that we applied is that everything goes through, you know, code review now. That wasn't always the case, which to me seems extremely odd, but that's just the way it was, you know, they were committing to the master branch or actually subversion at the time. But you can imagine, yeah. That's really it. I mean, you just have to keep putting strong people on the teams to act as those mentors and guides. So how did you get there in the first place? Because you strike me as a very progressive vanguard technologist voluntarily signing up with a 200-year-old dinosaur of a company and that's the disconnect for me. Good question. So four years ago or so, maybe five years ago, and this is an interesting story, but my previous boss at the last place I worked in a startup, he ended up there. I think mostly because it was close to his home. It took him almost a year and a half to get me hired to go through the 200-year-old company process of hiring. Yeah, but he was persistent and he and I are good friends and I liked working with him as a boss and that's really what helped get me in there. Had it been anyone else, there's no way it would have happened. I wouldn't have, and I'm not, I don't know about you guys, but the whole interview process, doing the resume and all that, it's just not my thing.  It's a huge pain. So that sort of made it easy. Yeah, it worked out, but had it been anyone else, no, I wouldn't be there. I probably left Chicago, which is okay. I'm from Texas, so Chicago is not my home place. I probably would have gone west or something. I don't know, but yeah, it worked out. That's how I got there. Now, it's important to note that whole year and a half thing has gone away. It's not perfect. You know, there's still a bit of a lead time and we have trouble competing with the startups where they're much quicker at executing, you know, hiring than we are, but we're working to improve that. We've also, you know, the jobs, the way we hire for jobs now has changed quite a bit, you know. So if you look at, if you're interested, and you look at careers.hmco.com, you'll see that, you may see that, you know, there's some, well, modern looking, you know, job descriptions in there. Four of which are for my team, if anybody's interested. But anyway, yeah. So what were those wrong things that you made it harder to do for the teams? The first one that comes to mind is we started trying to use Graphite to collect all of our metrics. It was very difficult for a small team to manage at that scale. That's when we sort of just pulled the plug and we went to Datadog. Datadog is kind of pricey at scale though, right? So now we're running InfluxDB and Capacitor and we're actually working now. We're close, I'm hoping Q1 will be off of that and will completely, you know, be self-monitored and alerting. Some of the other things, we didn't start out with containers per se. We tried to run a lot of the JVM things, native, you know, using the basic Mesa containerizer. That didn't work out so well because all the teams have like different requirements for their JVM, heat management, all that. It's just, it wasn't working too well and it was hard for us to support, you know, a small team, again, all these different engineers trying to support all the different requirements natively to the Mesa agents was impossible. That's when we really adopted containers. So everything that goes in has to go in some form of a container and it has to manage its own requirements, which then led to the other problem, the wrong thing, was, you know, how do you take a lot of people that have no ops experience, even at the container level, right? You still have to have some understanding of operations and putting the right packages and security and all these different things. So that's gotten much better. What we ended up doing was creating base containers that everybody uses to sort of take that, you know, to simplify that for them and provide constraints around that. The other thing is relying on our EC2 profiles for credentials, et cetera, without having some form of segregation of those credentials. And so we ended up, that's where Vault has come in for us to manage those credentials better. And in some cases, we just, we ended up segregating, you know, based on auto-scaling groups. That's helped a lot. And then finally, probably the biggest one was thinking that we could attach 300-plus load balancers to a single auto-scaling group in EC2. Turns out they have a soft limit of, like, 50. So anything more than 50 ELBs on an auto-scaling group, they don't usually do. We've managed to twist the arm because we spend money to give us more. We're at, like, 300, but they're not giving us anymore, which is why we're throwing all the ELBs out. Probably very soon, actually, Patrick's been working on that a lot with LinkerD, HAProxy. So, which turns out, it's going to save us, you know, a few thousand dollars a year, just in itself. So, and we'll get a lot more performance out of it. But don't assume, you know, the AWS limitations are infinite. They're not, or any other provider for that matter. That was probably the biggest one. That one's actually got us in a pinch now, because we're limited at 300, and I think we're at, like, 295 or something, you know. And we're always pulling older apps out, so that we can make room for production apps until we can get our LinkerD solution in place. That's about all we have time for questions. We have a break outside, so you guys can chat further. So, several of the team are here, and, you know, if you have any other questions, feel free to ask them. Could you guys, yeah, so Sampa, Ryan, Patrick, and myself. So, if you see us, feel free to stop by, ask us, and we'll be happy to talk about it. Thank you.


Live from New York, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering RapidMiner Wisdom 2016, brought to you by RapidMiner. Now, your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Brick. Welcome back to New York City, everybody. We're here at the RapidMiner Wisdom Conference. This is theCUBE. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Elion Karsonad is here. He's the founder of Nam Store. Elion, welcome to theCUBE. Welcome to America. Well, thank you, Dave. Hi, Jeff. Welcome. Pleasure to be here. Pleasure seeing you. So, tell us Nam Store, Nam Store, sorry. What's the company do? What are you guys all about? Linguistics, all kinds of interesting things you're doing. Tell us. Yeah, simple answer, Nam Store, salt names. We look at personal names, and we try to infer any information like, for example, gender or likely origin. In a city like New York, that's so diverse, you can use this information, for example, to revise the patterns of segregation in the city, to analyze what's the gender gap, for example, in data science. How many men and women are here today at RapidMiner? All this information you can typically infer from the names. So, you take a corpus of data into your system, and then it presents you with all kinds of information outputs about that data. Is that right, or? Exactly, Dave. And in a very simply, simple form, you can import data that has a name, but doesn't have, for example, any information about gender or origin, and you can add those variables. So, the way we've integrated, for example, in RapidMiner, was to add an extension that adds operators like passing names, extracting gender and origin, and that will take a data set as input and add columns with those new variables, which then you can correlate to other elements or input in a decision tree, or then, of course, project with other variables, like geography, like job type, lots of different things. So, let's get to it. How are people using your product and take us through an example or two? Well, the simplest example is we've partnered with a lady, Elena Rossini, to launch a website called GenderGapGrader, where we analyze the gender gap in wide industries, like, for example, the film industry, or airline pilots, or VCN business angels, and we produce research on what's the gender gap compared now, for example, compared to 10 years ago. And this is a very practical example of how data mining can also help resolve some of the social issues. But also, if you take the example of marketing or sentiment analysis, the same technology can be used, for example, to analyze what is the sentiment on Twitter or LinkedIn, social networks that have a lot of information, a lot of content, but do not contain any information about gender. So, you have to infer it some way, for example, from the name. And many large US companies in the digital world in the digital sector don't actually have gender information on their client because to optimize the acquisition of new customers and new leads, they minimize the amount of information that their user have to input when they register. So usually they would just register with the first name and the last name, perhaps an email address, and initially that's what they have. As for the topic of origin, our additional social demographics about the origin of names, we've done a few projects with, for example, in the field of economic development, helping countries reconnect with their diaspora, for example, to attract foreign direct investments to their country. Actually, the best example of countries doing that is Ireland. They've attracted billions of dollars through their diaspora using connection, family links, already in the 80s, to attract big companies to Ireland, and even today, of course, there is also tax incentives for US companies in the digital sector to establish their headquarters in Ireland, but also, IDR Ireland is very proactive at connecting with people of Irish heritage who have a strong position in a US company. So some other countries have started to do that. We've actually worked, for example, with Investly Thuénia in the field of foreign direct investments, and also with my country, my own country, France. And not only it's important for countries to reconnect with their diaspora for investment, but more and more so for talents, innovation, education. Of course, for countries that are in developing mode, this is even more important. If we think of countries like some African countries, they have sometimes even health problems because they don't have enough doctors, they went away. So the more the world is open, the more people move around in the planet, the more at the same time it creates opportunities to reconnect these communities, advanced scientists, innovators with their home country so they can give back in a way through talents, through investment and so on. So this is another example. So take us through, so how does the product work? And take us through how it goes from sort of name sorting into what you just described as attracting people to Ireland or that's a, it feels like a big leap. Yeah, there is a leap. But what happens is usually those countries, for example, lost track of their diaspora. So big organizations like the IOM, you know the International Organization of Migration or even organizations like US-8 or the French AFD and so on, would typically launch diaspora mapping exercise to try to find who are those people, where are they and how they can help their home country, for example, overcome a big crisis. So what we can do, for example, is connect, let's say through RapidMiner, for example, to a very large database of senior executives in Western Europe or the US, for example, and filter names that are very likely originally from those countries. And so we just accelerate this diaspora mapping exercise. And of course then the investment promotion agency can reconnect with those people in a very proactive way. For example, inviting them to an event to promote investment in the home country. Another example, and this is how home countries can benefit from their diaspora through investment or skills. But more recently we've participated to a conference in Canada. It was called the Canada Science Policy Conference and Canada is really interested conversely to attract more talents to Canada in science, but also to create more international collaboration with universities in emerging countries. So in that case it's really win-win because people originally from those countries of course they can contribute. They don't really necessarily have to go back to their home country to contribute. They can have a position in the university. They can participate to conferences. They can remotely tutor students. So there's a wide range of collaboration that can happen. Talk about the product. So you have a platform, obviously. You've got APIs I'm sure. Exactly, the product really is an API that take as an input a name and gives as an output gender or origin. And all that is integrated nicely within RapidMiner so that you have these operators that can be part of a more integrated business process. Like from data acquisition, data enrichment, maybe also predictive analytics and so on. We've had a few projects in the US. Actually one of our clients is here. We presented today also one pilot project with Boston City to analyze the geodemographics of the city and to prepare a very interesting map of the different regions of the city. And for today's presentation, we've done that also for New York. So we've looked at a database called ACRIS or ACRIS, which is a real estate database who owns New York in the different districts. And we've looked at that from the data mining perspective. We are of course extremely excited to work with an organization that already use RapidMiner for typically customer segmentation, predictive analytics, and especially in sectors like banking, typically remittances where money flows cross-border between the very mature countries and the emerging countries. Also the travel industry and also geodemographics, which is how to understand territories and segregation patterns. So I was gonna say, I'm curious. So did you have a solution that then you had to go find problems, which you found a lot that you can apply it to? Or did you come at it really from the problem set that they needed a better way to get this demographic information? And then kind of build the ontology to figure that out. Because it sounds like the variety of applications is huge for what is a relatively specialized application. Yes, exactly. So it's a bit of both. So we started to build this product in three years ago. We didn't have a clear business plan or understanding, let's say of what could be the problem this technology would solve. But we were sure we would bring a new angle of analysis that would be interesting. And then it's a bit by chance that we started to understand how that could be useful. So for example, for the gender gap, it's really meeting Elena at OECD conference that triggered this application of measuring the gender gap and promoting gender equality in organizations. And we did an initial project, which at the time was to look at the gender gap in the film industry. And that was during the Cannes Festival. So there are little infographics we did when kind of viral and that triggered interest. As for the topic of origin, this is a topic that is very sensitive in France. So we were always extremely careful about what type of projects we could do. And initially we decided to work with governments and universities. And gradually they came with ideas of how that could be useful. As for, for example, the city of Boston, they found us through some of the blog posts we had made about Irish diaspora and so on. And we are very excited about doing more interesting projects with them. Because of course, those who really know what the use cases are are in the end, the cities, the companies, the organizations that have a problem to solve. When I imagine if you had the time element too, where the data is probably even easier to analyze, take Boston, not only the moment today, but roll it back every 10 years for the last 200. A whole nother way to see changes, migrations. But I'm curious to know, how far do you think you can go? How many columns of data do you think you can extract value for beyond gender and origin? Well, we've started really focusing on personal names and of course, there is a limit to how much information we can extract from that. But the first thing is that varies a lot by country. And just to give an example, India is a country where you have maybe six or seven scripts to write the names because it's different states, different languages and out of 1.5 billion people you can already allocate the names to about 30 regions and different social groups. So there is a wealth of information there that is totally different to what you could extract from, for example, names in Mexico. Same thing with regions like Africa where countries are absolutely arbitrary in terms of geography. So the human population, the culture, the language is something that goes beyond the borders. And there is a lot of work that we can still do with anthropologies and so on to understand all that. And we do plan also to expand what we've started to, what we've done on personal names to other types of proper names like company names, branding and so on. We're out of time, but last question, the company, self-funded, you have a venture backed, bootstrapped, give us the update and where are you headed? So we're self-funded, we're profitable and we work a lot through a network, network in terms of sale and network in terms of collaboration in the academia sector to improve the software for different regions. So we're a small private company and we are quite excited to have this opportunity to be part of a larger platform like RapidMiner to expand worldwide in a wide range of markets. Yeah, well it's a global community with some really smart data scientists and that's great. Congratulations on your progress and thanks for coming in and sharing your story with theCUBE. Thank you Dave, thank you Jeff. Great to meet you. All right, keep right there everybody. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back. RapidMiner Wisdom 16, New York City, right back.


Welcome back to another FNA and today I want to talk about the best audio site for animators. Now that's a very clickbaity statement, but let me give you a preview of what I mean. So I want to talk about the site called Yarn. It's getyarn.io and you can just search by word or phrase for TV, movies and music clips. So basically if I look for I like chocolate, it's going to look through everything that has that. You can see the genres here, decades, rated titles, people and you see this here. Yes, I like them chocolate. I don't like chocolate. It's all about chocolate. So if you want to start an animation shop, but you don't quite know the line yet and need to find it somewhere, this is the site for you. Now, before I continue showing you all the details and some of those upcoming potential features, spoilers, where am I? I do animation kind of tips and tricks like these. I do animation lectures. I do animation analysis clips. I do acting analysis clips. I do rig reviews and prog reviews, all kinds of stuff. If you're watching my clip, you know this is the beginning pitch for YouTube. Basically, check out my channel. There's a bunch of stuff on there. If you like it, subscribe. If you don't like it, don't subscribe. But if you do subscribe, it helps my channel grow and that is that for the pitch. So feel free to browse around. Let's go and browse through the website. So let's get back to the site. So basically the main idea is that you can find different phrases and it finds you very, very short clips. You can see this here 2.6 seconds, 1.4 and so on. I can show you a little bit trick to expand this later on. Basically the search result across all of this on the right, which you can modify. And the idea is that you create a story stitched together, short phrases that are part of different movies and TV shows, like I said. So what I'm using this site for is not its original intention. I'm not there to create a story based on all the short little snippets. I found this site because I wanted to animate something where someone is saying, stop this or let go or why would you do that? Something like that. And I couldn't find a movie that had that specific line. Then I just googled it and this site came up. And I thought this is really, really handy. It's a very targeted thing of I want to animate something where someone says, I like chocolate. So if I click on this first clip. You can see how short that is. And you can see up here all the information. This is from Kirby Enthusiasm, The Rat Dog, This Is Season, the episodes, very specific. You can really find exactly what you need. And you can go to the sorts video. So if you click here, it gives you more information and you have more clips of that show as well. So it's really not a guessing game in terms of what you're trying to find. Now, if that's too short, there's a feature, I'm not sure when it's coming out yet, but I was talking to the site owner and they have this here. You see that little hand, you can click on that here and you can see nudge clip. So you can see the end time, you can see the start time and you start nudging it. You can see a bit more, a bit less. So you can do this here. It will start nudging. And this is just by a very short amount. And you have to refresh the site at this point. This is going to be tweaked in the future. But then when you play it, you can see that it's just a tiny bit longer. Now, again, you can click here and you can keep on nudging to make it longer. Now, this is not a substitute in terms of, Oh, I found the line that I wanted, but I want to animate like a five second clip. You won't have five seconds on it. So it's not the full substitute of finding an audit clip and then ripping the audit to work for your animation clip. But it's great in terms of finding a specific line or potential sentence. And then you can see exactly where that is from, find that and then rip a longer piece for your animation shop. And if you don't know exactly what to look for here, I want to do animation, but I don't know quite no yet. Let me browse around. Well, you have certain areas here. Let me show you. So when you go down here, you can see kisses, growl, please crying. There's all kinds of stuff there. So I want to say, all right, growl. What is that? You click on that. And here are all of your grounds. So I'm going to click on this. And that's your route. Now, it's going to be very short. It's going to be always looped. So be mindful of headphones or speakers. But then you can also go to the next clip here. Actually, I'm going to skip that one because this is also across all kinds of movies, including file language and not appropriate visuals. So I'm going to cut that one out. I want to keep clicking. Maybe growl was not the right choice, but let me, let me do something else. So let's say I'm going to look for a sentence, what, what is going on? So here it's going to give you everything that's there. So if I say, I want to do this one, I'm going to pause this. If you click next clip, it's not the next one in terms of what is going on, which would be really cool to me. It feels like that would be a better way to browse. But if you click next clip, it's the next one in terms of the show and not what you were looking for. So if you have this, what is going on, you will have to scroll down and then you get the rest. So first you have some general topics and then you're going to continue here with what is going on. So if you really want to look for things, you can just kind of do a tab opening. You don't see this here because I am opening up tasks, but that's your tab right there. That's that. That's a longer one. And so on. So as you can see, when you look around for this, it's going to show you a really wide selection of everything that's out there, in terms of movies, TV shows, like it said here, with what is going on. So if you're deciding, I don't want to animate something where someone says what is going on in the very panicky way with all of this there in terms of your search results, you're going to find something that's exactly that because there's such a huge selection. It's almost impossible not to find what you're looking for. And there are different options of finding something that we're talking about way back and I just tested it. It's actually, they implemented it already is that if you go into the search and you say the example that I was given here was hello, but then you say across all Star Wars and you search for that, you will see hello and everything that is Star Wars related. Next page and so on. There's a ton apparently where someone says hello in Star Wars. So let's say I'm going to click on the first one that's Clone Wars here. Again, that's your clip that says hello. And of course you don't have to use it the way I'm using this, but you have your like, your embed, your give, the story. This is that is the actual thing that the site is intended for us to create a story. You can share this in all these platforms. I'm going to say I like this. And if I go to my account, you can see favorites. There you go. So if you're using this in terms of animation, the way I'm explaining it here, you can have your whole selection like this. Then you have your basically your bookmark section of all the clips that you're going to either use now or you're going to use in the future. Or maybe you're going to even use something where you can create a sentence or almost a sequence with different lines from different people from different movies, how the background sound is going to sync. That's kind of a tricky thing. Or maybe you find something where it's fairly quiet and it just has a sentence or a word. And then you could put all that stuff together to create your own custom track in a way. I think that's pretty cool. So as a whole, I think this has really huge potential in terms of animation search capabilities. If you're going to animate a lip sync piece. So yes, this site is not built for that. But I think you can hijack this and make it work for you. Speaking of making work, if you want me to send, if you want, if you want to send me your work and I'm grasping at segues again, but if you want to send the work to me and you want me to help you with audio pieces, finding something or helping you with lip sync in general, I have workshops, you know the pitch, you can sign up at any time, link in description with all the information. And that is that for this clip. If you like this, don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss any of my future uploads. And as always, if you watch this at the very end, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. And I will see you in my next clip.


Come on dude.  I just want to be free How's it going everybody dato do it here with another round of dragon ball fighters ranked matches And since we played GT Goku for that entire week I decided I wanted to go back to the original spirit bomb and just see what we could get done not gonna lie Part of me still finds base Goku to be a very fun character. I know he has some bad stuff But you know, I just got to admire the classics. Yeah, I'm just dragon rushing Another way we did me and this guy have played a couple times usually he's oh Oh, there we go a nice opening hit It's weird whenever I play mid-afternoon. I usually get the same four people Here we go dragon rush to get it nice and poppin. I think this is where we're gonna go for the cheese No, he actually got away. I can't believe it. I was on the hunt. Um, no wait That's supposed to be in the X counter. Damn.  I think I might just This is not what I wanted to do. I had a different plan, but whatever This is actually the preferred option. This may try to cross me up again. Okay, he did Airplay I did it. I did say it If you would have checked the instructions, you would have seen that at the last page specifically said ask your teacher before completing any assignments and That was the catch, but I don't think he cared. I think he's still passing the class with flying colors Oh, it was the EX version that allowed you to do that. Wow, ace goku knowledge slipping. Also, I got to get back that um I got to get back that um spear bomb charge that I completely threw away there Yeah, am I really gonna about to do this again, am I really about to do this though? No, your boy is good with it. Oh my god Let me take out a loan for six million dollars because you know, I'm good for that.  What's up? Oh You try to hit a button that's crash at a level one Airplay fair play. I definitely could have gotten the knockout if I wasn't bad at the game But I am so that this is currently where we are in the relationship. Oh You tried it. There's a super dash. Click it Click the click the super dash, but that wouldn't happen if you click the super dash button Just saying just saying you could have clicked any button Get it back off me Vegeta. Yeah guys. I purposely didn't knock him down This is what we call being a g Very bad at the game. Let's not let's not mess around Mmm, we are just you know, I feel like I'm playing pretty good dragon ball fighters for the state. I'm in Okay, that was pretty bad It's not mess around that was really bad and then he just boom perfectly nails that vanish We are looking real dead by the way No amount of healing is going to stop this man from just absolutely knocking our lights out Okay This is where it gets hard because our sparking is probably gonna run out at about the same time as his That's the difference And now he's now he's the super dash button extraordinaire, huh?  Oh my god. He just won. No, he didn't know he didn't Why are you giving him two bars? I don't think you won.  Why did he use that? I did not over on the edge of the motion I feel like oh I feel like I should have gotten that knock. Yeah. I did mess up there Hello leg I go by Datsudoi on the internet mr. Lag.  That was that this is so bad. No No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this isn't happening.  No, no, you didn't you didn't touch me Get that happen bro because it didn't please. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Don't test me, bro Okay, well, this is not the greatest, but I will absolutely take this I Time by time with the spearball. How did this super dash end up putting me in the quarter? That was so bad at least year and got most of his health back. That was really what I was worried about Number one. I mean, don't get me wrong. This isn't a great spot to be in regardless But imagine if you're a dad didn't have those of his health back. What would I be doing? Oh? Big bang attack is such it's not a great this big bang attack is not a good move But against me it's S tier it might as well be the best move in the game. Am I dead? Oh? Wait, you might be dead. Okay. No, we're good out of my face. All right good I think the proper thing to do here is to switch out You know, we got to save all the characters we can like that. Okay. I don't know what the point of looking for that dragon rush is At this point Jiren is pretty much dead. Eventually. That's just the eventuality of it all back dash He's looking to put on that pressure. Oh, I can't believe he didn't punish me for that But there we go. Now we're getting our just desserts. Come on This is such a hard comeback to make but It's one that I really don't have a choice. I Got to make it. He's going nuts. I Oh back dash clean with it. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh, please It was risky He just did that am I dead? Oh, we missed it. Let's go. But what are you doing? Jerry, why didn't you throw out the jab was my mother was my left thumb really doing all that? My left thumb was break dance and I get I get kicked out of the match I can't even get my run back. My left thumb must have been break dancing How many lights do I click? Oh? We're still doing combos. Oh, let's get it.   It looks like a dream I've actually never seen frames that low. Wow. We just ran up and hit that hit the ankles. I can respect it. I Can respect it, but I can't expect it. Why overhead there we go. All right. He didn't oh, no I dropped switch out. Yep switch out was absolutely necessary. Let me go ahead and get this It's a Napa real quick. You know, we got a force a couple slides in my day. Oh, give me that nice get him to the sky. Oh I really overestimated my lights there. That was a big mistake on my part. Also Napa just collapsed me You tried it is the side been still there. Nice. He's dead. Yep. Yep I don't know if the side man was still technically there or not since I hit him But but we'll just count it as a blessing since he Let's go. I'm getting back out of living legend boys. Oh the 2m. He I knew I trusted in that one I trusted that to have dude. Oh man the faith I put in that move was crazy. He's gonna touch the ground I'm just sweeping. Hi. Where's the Super Dash? There it is Another Super Dash is coming our way Nice Hey, Jerome will have to come out Dp. I didn't see it coming. I was I was letting them fly. Oh Nicely done the late it just long enough so that down heavy wouldn't connect. Oh, there you go If he up I was looking for it Okay, now we go ahead and switch out in the Goku here So keep the corner. Also, we can read the sparking. Oh Through the keep that was sick. I bet he I thought that cube blast was gonna hit Because I did I was like, yeah, here we go Nice though. We actually get a win. All right, let's see if we can't cop another one Hopefully, it'll be a win. But who knows maybe he's made those adjustments. Are you a Vegeta blue player? All right, you are but not really Back in respect. Oh god. That was really sick On his part not mine. Let's let's not get those confused Waiting for my chance there Super Dash. Yup. Okay. I'm feeling it dude. I got it back We kind of lost the mojo there, but we're back.  All right, Napa. What does Napa usually start with? I think we back dash. Yo and Just kind of want to make sure we get him as far along in that corner as possible I'm expecting a bit down tech. Oh to him starter. That is it This dude is gone I can get the full Full special on that one. Oh, I meant to go out in the Jiren at the end somehow we messed it up But so about we messed up hitting two buttons. That's that has to be expected though Comcha, where's that super dash? Yep. Yep. Yep Just kind of get used to reading these things out DP for that. I Step for DP's boys. No super dash. Oh, there it is.  Oh And he caught the two and two. Wow the buttons are coming out extra fast. Oh Just like Vegeta blue. I'm having flashbacks We lost Goku really I thought Jiren would reach in time. Okay, and I'm really getting blown up trying to finish this fight Level three. That was a interesting decision for sure. Hmm. That might do him in That might be the end, I don't know. Yeah, that is That's gonna do it for him. I Don't I definitely think the level three would have been the best idea Devon bars. Oh, maybe he was going for Shenron.  Okay, we'll do one more match and then we'll move on all of the day If he gives us one more match Sure, we got enough to call this a video enough heartbreak to save at least But is it all is it over? Okay, we get the last match now It's all about what we can do here to get this win To cure the win You need these ranked points boys. Oh Always underestimate flex. I hit him too. Oh, no, I should have won with the 2s. Hey I'll just keep him in sliding for now. Really. I didn't block in time. Oh Snipe them This one doesn't have a DP so we're good on that run and Much damage to get oh a down one bar wonder Here I was thinking I was gonna have to expend a little uh, you know more cash Okay, that doesn't stop super dash. That was busted. I'm out of my way. Oh, he tried it again That was awesome. Love that move from Napa. This wasn't a smart move, but I Thought I saw myself get two bars there Nice. He didn't guard cancel. He waited for that opening and just threw some buns out. Okay. Okay, I Thought he was gonna want to save Napa again. I disagree with the call I'm not going for the super but it works out regardless Still though, I think getting Napa out would have been worth. That's just me though. That's just me There we go. He gets Napa out. Anyway, he pees the overhead BP again. Okay. I thought he was gonna try to throw out the light man. Oh, man I really want that Napa back. All right. We got him Napa is secure boys But the Napa in the bag. I probably tried to vanish there again. I've been letting those slide for far too long Damn Don't think we have to do anything too fancy here We did. Oh, and I don't get to reflect. Oh, no. Oh, no, that is bad at level three Come on, dude, you got to throw those out been cybermen get off of me. Oh, I just want to be free.  Well, I was holding down bad. I Think that's all I was doing. That is so bad for me. It actually clashed Oh, man, we've really messed up this game like this entire game level three. There we go There it is. Now we got to deal with the mix. He got those guard cancels punished By he I guess I mean me Damn, okay. We have another match. I didn't expect to I didn't see that one coming. Honestly I thought I had that in the bag and then I just kind of got sloppy trying to take out Napa All right. Well, let's try not to get sloppy. You're No, it doesn't connect Jita doesn't connect either though. So we're good on that front Time to keep the train moving On this that with a 2M. That's what we want to see If the hard knockdown with yoncha force him the block We got it. We got to see what he does on yoncha level three. We actually haven't hit him with at all game And I stood up. Oh, and I clicked a button to all too bad decisions back to back type and break me out. Ah Help me sidemen. I clicked too many buttons again Okay, you didn't get yoncha, but he can switch out doesn't though that was interesting That was really worth in my book. I'll take that every day Sparking the save a life. Hey, come on. Let me get that Vegeta back Nice cross him up there. That was the important part Let's keep going. Let's keep going baby. Yeah All right, we know he likes the block here actually wait. What do you DP? Is he that crazy? No, he's not that crazy. He is that crazy We're too far back. Please. Nope. I regret my choices of vanishing pretty fast. Oh Napa's punch hits low nice You do have to worry about that sparking blast He's holding back there because I see him. I see him holding it ran up on me Not interested in I'm not interested in optimal. Honestly optimal has no meaning to me right now I've never played off them only in my life The leg The leg of truth. No, why did I do that? This is not the mix. This is the mix He did a actually got hit by it. You weren't supposed to. Oh, no, you were supposed to block it. Oh No, oh No, no, no, no, no this oh god.  Anyway, I was so brave.  Here we go. Nice. Nice. Nice. Nice That'll wrap us up. That's three to one three one on an awful day for ranked for me But we just got to pack it up Hopefully you guys enjoyed it if you did make sure to go down below and hit me up with your greatest living legend tips and tricks Because we back boys we back other than that while you're down there Make sure to hit the like button and subscribe to the channel for more fighting game and Dragon Ball fighters content like this And I'll also have some videos up on your screen right now So if you want to check those out and feel free to as well other than that, I'm Dr. Once again, thanks for watching this specific video and I will see you in the next one