principle even for mathematicians or people interested in doing rigorous work. There's a lot of space to try to give more rigorous mathematical ground to this physical observation. And there's another interesting problem. Interesting process on network is that is that of cooperation. So cooperation is a very well studied process. There's actually already a paradigmatic game for games of many people, which is the public goods game, which basically works in the following way. There are some players, which can either decide to cooperate with a coin or the fact, and all the coins are then put together, multiplied by some game parameter, the so called synergy factor. And eventually split equally among the players of our population, no matter the initial strategy. So it's clear that in this case deciding to cooperate was not a very good decision right these guys started with a full coin and now they are back just with 80% of this coin. And indeed, unless we are in the trivial case where the synergy factor is greater than the group size. So in this case we are basically just multiplying money in the in the opposite case, which is the interesting case from a rational point of view, in order to maximize your individual payoffs and individuals should actually be able to should always defect. The problem is that if I defect if everybody defects there will be no money in the pool to be multiplied, and the system will eventually fall into the so called tragedy of the comments. And this is indeed what happens in in well mixed population, where if we plot the fraction of cooperators as a function of the synergy factor, the multiplication parameter. We have an abrupt transition, which separates the faction, full defection from full cooperation. Of course, we know that people cannot only play in a well mixed scenario, they can play in a network, for instance. And what is interesting is that in this case, actually something something new happens. So first of all, the transition changes order. So it goes from an abrupt first order transition to a smooth second order transition from an evolutionary point of view. What's interesting is that actually cooperators start emerging into the system much earlier than before. And this is basically the transposition to this particular game, the public good game of the work by Nova can make in the early 90s about network reciprocity. Now, what is the problem with the traditional way in which we implement the public good game on on on networks. It's actually in the way we define groups. So, typically we let our agent tie play with all its neighbors. And this is the group in which it is the focal node, but we also let I play in all the groups where the neighbors are the focal the focal members. And of course what we know now with this language of either graphs is that, well, that is not exactly the correct way to represent the group interactions so we can do better than this. And so what we try to do with a group of colleagues and that will recently publish is that we try to analyze the evolutionary dynamics of this system. Very much in the same spirit of the model which for which I showed you the social contagion phenomena. And what we do is that not only we provide okay we provide them in field description of these evolutionary dynamics. We see that higher order interactions can boost cooperation. We also see that for the first time, actually, the game or you need for my paragraphs corresponds to the replicator dynamics in the well mix in the well mixed limit. And this is, as I showed you before, this is not something that happens in a in a simple networks. So, I thought that this was actually quite quite a nice result. Very last thing. And this is I think where higher order networks really take life and become alive is to consider what I like to call topological dynamical process. So, typically we consider processes and networks where we have a dynamics of the nodes and we have interactions mediated by the links. But with higher order networks, not only we can have higher order interactions, but we can also place dynamics on top of simplices and higher order edges. And in this way higher order dynamical systems transforms static interactions into active agents. So think for instance of the case where the state of an edge, for instance, can influence the state of the nodes, which are at the two extremes, something like this. And this is also a very interesting case, which has been, for instance, tackled by Ginestra, Bianconi and collaborators in these explosive higher order paramoto dynamics, where you can have oscillators which are placed not only on the nodes but also on the edges, possibly on the triangles. And also here, very cool things can happen because with these higher order laplacian matrices, which I mentioned at the beginning of the talk actually, you can see analytically some very strange things like for instance that the dynamics on on the edges may display synchronization transition, which however is only revealed when projected onto simplices of higher or lower dimension. So I think that also for these topological dynamical processes, we are just at the beginning. And, and there's a lot of research to be done. A final some some final words, I think, so I've been talking a lot about higher order networks and interacting complex systems. Of course, higher order also means more memory to store the data, more complicated algorithms to look at the system, possibly slower analysis. So very big question very important question that we always have to ask for ourselves is, do we really need to preserve all this information to understand and describe interacting systems. And I hope that I was able to show you that list some good examples that both from the structural point of view but also in terms of new dynamics and new physics. Actually, there's a lot of a lot of new interesting things to be done a lot of new developments, which I believe will occur in the next years. And I think in particular for statistical physicists. This is a very, very promising area of research. And this is of course not only my research topic. So this is a research topic, which a lot of people are working. And this is a non exhaustive list of key contributors. And if you're interested in this topic, together with Ginestra Bianconi we are gestating gestating a focus collection in communication physics, which aims to collect the most relevant work in in this area. And together with Giovanni Petri, we have an upcoming book as editors, which will appear on the springer series understanding complex systems, which I was very happy because this is a nice series where we have these nice books on temporal networks, multi layer networks, adaptive networks or these things. And finally, some of these ideas, which I shared with you today will eventually appear in some upcoming perspective article, which they, they told me I should not, I should not advertise much. Last thing. Simplicial complexes, hypergraphs, they are not a new thing. They are an old thing. At least from for the mathematicians. So why, why did it take us so long. Well, I think it took us so long, because it's actually hard. It's hard, very hard, and we knew this from already from from classical mechanics, we could say, but at the same time I think that after considering all these degree of additional complexity, it's now time for statistical physicists and network scientists, trying to understand a little bit more the physics of networks beyond the pair wise interactions. And thank you very much for staying with me until the end. Thank you again for the early career award. Thank you very much for the reason for very nice talks. You have a little late but one or two questions. Yeah, Christian. Thank you very much for this brilliant talk. My question is really for applications. I mean, I can very well understand in a social network that you do have these complicated higher order interactions. But what about natural systems like a biological system? Is it relevant there as well? Did nature choose to have higher order interactions or not? So I'm less of an expert of this is a wonderful question, very good question. I'm less of an expert of biological and chemical networks, but I believe there's a lot of experimental data about for instance chemical reactions where the elements like to interact in groups of three but not necessarily in groups of two, for instance. And however, if we forget about the higher order representation of the systems, what we end up doing is decomposing these group interactions into a collection of dietic interactions. And these might provide us with an inaccurate description of the system. Similarly, I think also these are also in ecological systems. I think it's very important to consider simultaneous interactions of different species. Here in Trieste there is a Jacopo, Jacopo Griglio has done some very interesting work in this direction. Of course we need more data. So I hope in the future years we will have more data also in natural systems. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. The next prize winner, Katerina de Paco. And again, of course we were going to hear about networks, statistical inference in network, please. Can you hear me well? Great. So, I just want to start by saying thanks for giving me the opportunity to win this award. So in particular, I want to thank the division of statistical and non-linear physics for nominating me for this award. And also some credit I really need to give to the people that contributed to having me here today, who are my previous advisor, the two PhD advisors, Silvio Franz and Satya Majundar, and the postdoc advisor, Chris Moore. So I really have to say a big thank to them because without them I wouldn't be here today. And with no further ado, I just want to start straight with the talk. It's the last talk of the day so I'll try to be on time, hopefully. So today I want to talk about finding patterns in network using statistical inference. In particular, I want to talk to you about finding patterns in networks when we have different types of information beyond the classical ones you are used to have in networks. So I just as a disclaimer, the running example for today would be a particular application that I have in mind that I've been working in the recent years, which is that of analyzing social support networks. So because I like to start working usually developing the idea from concrete application. I think this is a very stimulating application that provides rich opportunities for developing theoretical grounded theoretical models. In particular for this type of work, I work in close contacts with social scientists who do the hard job of collecting the actual data, and then it's up to us, providing powerful methods and theoretically grounded methods that are able to support the analysis of such rich data sets. So typically networks are represented as a powerful tool, first of all, to represent the interactive system, and the basic type of information you can store is a binary type of information. So you, sorry. So you can have. Let's see. The basic type of information you can have is a binary type of information. So whether an edge exists or not, which between two nodes, and this is usually collected in a matrix so called the JCC matrix. However, in real data, the things are much richer than that. So these sets contain much more information than just whether an edge exists or not. And that's the case of social support networks, the one collected by my colleagues who performs field studies, asking questions, bonding with people in rural villages to wonder about the relationship between them. These networks are networks where people are the nodes and edges are relationship between them. Relationship can be of different types in this particular network that I plot here which represent a village in rural India. We have 12 different types of relationship ranging from financial relationship social relationship advice, powerful relationship and so on worship. And now that they collect question to each single individual so the networks are directed because people can reply and have different opinions about the same type of relationship. So often you don't even have consistency in between disagreement between what two people say about the same edge. And then, of course they collect also all sorts of information about the individuals themselves. Of course you can think of them as attributes, and they can also be of different types. Okay, so what do we do with this. Well, first of all, let me say that this particular type of network that have been lucky to have access to is not the only type of network that exists out there of this type. It's actually part of a bigger effort that in particular anthropologists are running to collect the same type of network but on 30 different rural places located around the world, which is a work in progress right now. So in the next few years we will have at least 30 of them collected at two different time step. So there are a lot of questions that one can ask about this type of rich data set. The particular focus of this program so called the endowed program is about modeling how finding connection between how the structure of the network so the topology of the network can explain can help explain health wealth inequality between different individuals in a village. It's a pretty broad questions, but my point is, we need the powerful methods to be able to tackle this and all the subsequent questions that have been asked. So let's start with a simple a simpler question is actually not simple question but at least formally one can define it properly. We want to find patterns behind this rich data sets. So that's the first question that our colleagues was asking handing out the data set let's first find some pop and some commonalities that we can distinguish the different here in these different villages. And that asks for a very, a very powerful approach. Actually, you can let me say with this straight there are many approaches you can take to model this type of data sets, but to answer this type of question I really find powerful. The formalism of statistical inference, and more generally of proper probabilistic models. And that's because it's a principled framework. So you can drive actual math, do it in a proper way in a rigorous way, and then modeling probability distribution allows you in general, if you're able to do it efficiently to answer several types of question, in particular those that go beyond the one you originally started with. So for instance, in this case the original question was, how do we find patterns, some macroscopic patterns behind this network, but then having access to the probability distribution. We could answer several other questions as I will show you in a bit. And finally, these types of model rely on a simple principle that is that of latent variables. So variables that you do not observe, but you model them, you select the probability distribution that depends on them, and they can effectively capture the dependencies between the data. And one very nice thing about latent variables is that you can interpret them. So they are not parameters black box parameter type that you just infer them they have values you don't have any meaning, you can give them to the social scientists, which can then be interpreted using their domain knowledge. And one particular type of interpretation one can use the one that I would use in the next part of the top is that of community structure. So you might have already heard several times about community structure, but this is one of the flavor the flavors you can think of communities as latent variables that represent how nodes are grouped are clustered in a network. So these can determine the probability that they also interact. So I will start now with showing how we can tackle the original question which is how do we find patterns in in this type of rich data sets, and I will add one layer of difficulty one layer of information, which is that of having multi layer So the original question the original data sets that we received was this set of 12 questionnaires so 12 different type of interaction that people interact so who do you talk to who do you borrow money from. And the goal is to find this hidden patterns. So in particular, as I was saying we will give them interpretation as communities. So, I just want to say that the running example is a social network but social support network but this particular application is broader than that. So for instance multi layer networks you can think you can see them in transportation system in biological networks and so on. And just quickly defined so that we are all on the same page, what what I mean by multi layer network multi layer network is a network where the set of nodes is the same, but the set of edges changes between between different types between different layers. So for instance in our running example. If you ask question about who do you talk to this defines one layer. So it has one set of edges. And then you can have a borrow layer or who do you borrow money from, which is a different type of interaction, and it has a different layer, but the people are the same. Now, what is the main problem about working with these different types of information represented by having different interaction. Well, the main, the main, the main challenge is to effectively incorporate the different type of information while trying not to lose important information. So let me tell you how this is happening with a simple example. I plot here one layer one possible layer of two layer network. And you can clearly distinguish here that there are two groups. And you can also clearly distinguish that the structure of these two groups is so called assortative, meaning there are many more edges between groups than a cross group or homophilic type of interaction. So this is one structure in one layer, but then let's assume we have a second layer where the structure is completely different, or let's call it this assortative. So there are many more edges across groups than with within group. So you can already see now that we have a two layer network where the two layers are completely structurally different. So if we take a naive approach where we aggregate the two layers together because we have so many nice methods for single layer network is just bump the two layer network into an aggregated one, so that we can use our method. We will completely lose the individual information contained in the two layers. It's important for us to be able to find these patterns by effectively using the two different types of information coming from the two different layer without losing the fact that the structure of each individual layers can be completely different. So how do we do this in practice. So one way to do it is using probabilistic model with latent variables. And we start by treating. First of all, let me say that now that we have multi-layer networks, the adjacency metric is not enough we need to define a tensor, a three-way tensor. So this quantity here, a ij alpha, where the third index here denotes the layer, so alpha here. So because we are using probabilistic inference, we start by treating this these entries as random variables. So we assign a distribution to them. And just because typically these entries are positive and discrete, we assume that this is Poisson distributed. So the whole point of the model is to define how the parameter of the Poisson distribution is defined. So this M ij alpha. So the main assumption, and I want to just pause here for a second, is that we want to parameterize the mean of this distribution, the parameter of the Poisson using a tensor product where the tensor product is made of these three latent variables. Sorry, I don't know why I keep pushing the laser but it goes up. The tensor product is made of these three latent variables u, v, and w, where u and v are our interpretable latent variable, the communities, and they tend to the extent to which each node i or j belong to a group k. So you can think of as nodes people divided in groups. And we have two different u and v just because we have a direct network so we need two different ones for this practical reason. And then finally we have this w matrix here. W alpha matrix that captured the density of connection between nodes that are in group k and group L. So the main point that I want to make here is that this u and v these latent variables do not depend on the layer. So they are shared across layers. So we have a shared community structure, while the w matrix as a alpha here dependent so it depends on the layer. So that means that the structure of each individual layer can change a lot. So once again, the community structure is shared, but we can still have very different topologies across layers by tuning this parameter w. So this, this, this was the main model assumption and it allows you to capture the situation I was giving you before in that simple two layer network where we can have two different layers while having a share pattern in this case in the community. So we can model rich multi layer nettles arbitrarily. And here I just want to briefly mention that. Now we need to perform inference of the parameters because these are late and you don't observe them, you only observe the data, and you can set up a straightforward inference approach to update them in a pretty efficient way. So let me just say, because this audience maybe would appreciate the analogy you can always treat this as a maximization problem here we forgot to say we use a maximum likelihood estimation. You can always treat this as a Baltimore distribution with a particular energy function. And if you do this you will notice that maximizing the likelihood is equivalent also to more from a statistical physics perspective of minimizing a free energy of this particular system. But the bottom line is that you can have your close format dates for the parameter in a efficient way. The main idea here is that the physics formula I don't want you to focus on the formula but just on the fact that they depend on the numerator on the entrance of this tensor. And you should keep in mind that typically these systems are very sparse. So there are the most of the entries are zero. You cannot count in these updates. So in other words, you can perform this optimization in an efficient way. And this is a scalable algorithm up to millions of nodes. So it can handle large system, which in practical application makes a huge difference. So, okay, so now we do that we know how to set up the model how it works and how to perform inference. So what do we get. So this is the main results you can get. And that's where I insisted a lot that we need parameters that are interpretable. And that's what you get if you interpret now the communities. So this k dimensional vectors, we plot here on the top, the real network and the colors are the cast. So this is not something that we use in as an input in the data, but we have that information, a posteriori to to to give an interpretation to the community. And then on the bottom we have the four groups that the model is able to infer color coded by the intensity of the entry of your latent variables telling how much you belong to each group. So I suppose that there is some kind of correlation with the cast information, and then our colleagues was also saying with gender and geography. So there is some, some meaning behind this, this community structure. Okay, but now our colleague was not completely satisfied or actually she was satisfied but she was also more eager to learn something more. She said I also have other types of question like the following on. So typically I know what people worship together who they worship together so I know this information, but people are much more reluctant to talk about their financial situation. So can I learn something about how they exchange money together.  So that was actually an interesting question and we thought about how to formalize it mathematically using what we just learned about exploiting the common community structure that we were saying. So we define this layer interdependence problem where you try to learn one layer by knowing another layer, more in detail. So the idea is to answer to question like the one I wrote before so you will you can perform this as a link prediction task where you set up a so called cross validation routine where you have your data sets divided in layers, but certain layers you only observe a little. So for instance, the financial layers, you hide the part of it as if you keep to capture the idea that typically you don't know all of this information, but then you give an input one extra layer or two extra layer or all of the other extra layer. And you try to see whether you are able to boost prediction of the missing connection in the financial layer. And the idea is that if there is a common community structure across the layers, in particular, between the one that you were hiding like the financial layer and the others, you should be able to boost prediction indeed. In fact, this is what we saw for this particular network and this is a crowded picture but I wanted to focus on the rectangle here on the dashed rectangle, where we have here the top layer, which is the one we hide we have partial information of what people who people talk to. And then on the y-axis we have a measure for link prediction, so the higher the better we are in reconstructing the missing top connection. And then the points here of different colors are how many layers we give in input in order to integrate information and recover who do you talk to. So if you see here, the red dots here represent the best performance that we can get and we can get it if we give in input all the 11 layers. So all the information about all the other type of relationship that these people have. Whereas if you only give the top layer partially you do basically like random chance you cannot predict much about that. So there is a big boost in prediction and that signals that there is indeed actually a common community structure, these latent variables that explain the dependencies between the different types of interaction that connect people. But that's actually not the case in general, because we now took another system, a completely different system, this is a network of malaria parasite where nodes are sub sequences in gene, different genes, and the layers are different position in the gene sequence. So the idea is that if you give me only the information about one position in the sub sequence, can I help reconstructing the sequence in a different position in space. And actually here the answer is no, you heard the reconstruction so you actually do worse, if you give me information about different parts of the sequence. So here that the best performance is obtained if you only use that sub sequence, so that layer, and it decreases, if you give me input out. So now the bottom line of this is, it's a negative result, but it's not, I wouldn't say a negative results in terms of the model, but actually it's a negative results in terms of the information you have. So this is a take away lesson that not all the multi layer network should be treated as a multi layer network. In this case, it's much better to treat them as the individual nine in this case, single layer network. Because their structure their common community structure is completely independent. And then of course you can go beyond that we saw one type of extra information which is having layers of different time but we can also ask. Okay, but I also had collected all this data about the cast about the wealth of an individual the age the gender. We can also use that. Remember that before the groups we got, we didn't use any information so the colors here are used the posteriori using the cast. So of course then it's a matter of how do you formalize this mathematically using this extra information. And this can be contained in a matrix so called the design matrix, this X here, which tells me the value of an attribute Z of node I. And if you do that well, it turns out that you can actually use the same type of idea so having some common community structure that couples together two systems. One is the network structure and the other is the design metrics to find again dependencies between these two data sets. And if you do this then you can obtain that the common community structure can be better inferred. If you have some correlated information between network and attributes on those. So here are results on synthetic net us we're on the left side here, you have the ground truth partition is just two simple groups, and then we increase the probability that the colors here the groups are correlated with one even just one attribute on the nodes, and there's a possibility of recovering the ground truth partition. So if you see here, you get better and better reconstruction performance as you use effectively the information on the notes. qualitatively of course you can ask yeah but how does the community structure change if I am also influenced by some attributes in this case cast so we use casting formation to drive the discovery of communities. Here is the main results qualitatively so you can see that there are some communities that are still the same as before not changes, but these two communities hide highlighted here. They change they are they are too smaller communities that are split in one case and are together in another case. And then once we had this that we handed this over to our colleague anthropologist, she was able to give an explanation that these are actually two groups belonging to two minor cast that had a fight one day. And now they don't talk to each other much, much often anymore. So there is a, if you use this cast information you're actually able to separate these two smaller groups and distinguish them. So this is an example of what qualitatively, what type of results qualitative if you also integrate this information. And then of course you can ask a similar question we had before, which is a question that she was asking of course. So, now, let me tell you that it's very costly for me to collect it. I actually spent two years of her PhD in doing a field study, because if you have to collect 12 questions for several hundreds if not 1000 of individuals it gets long. So can I avoid asking that many questions now and instead collecting some more not information. Because if I tell you a bit more about cast gender of individuals, can this help me predict also the probability that they interact. So maybe next time instead of asking 12% I can ask five and save time and ask many more people instead. And while it turns out that with this type of probability distribution, you can assign probability distribution to a network, if you observe also the design matrix so the attributes. So we run this experiment on her data sets and here on the, the gray axis here you have the four different villages, and on the, and the red axis, what type of extra information we were using input, and the numbers represent again some prediction performance in predicting the missing connection, and the higher the better. So here 0.8 is pretty high. The next line here is the light blue one where we do not use any extra information except just interaction we observe, and we only observe partially. So 80% of them. And you see that if you give an input cast information we boost a lot performance in predicting the missing connection. The answer to her original question is yes, if you're able to give me for instance the cast information you can probably ask a bit fewer questions, and I will able to predict better if they interact or not. But that's not true in general, actually, for instance here these three other types of information can decrease prediction performance, because maybe the partition the community structure is not very correlated with age gender or religion. So people behave differently than what is explained by age, for instance.  So again, that's a negative results, not in terms of the model but in terms of the data. So it also probably teaches us that it's not always the case that the more the better. We also need to select what information to store and this can greatly improve, but we also need to understand what information we should remove, because it can actually decrease performance. And then you can generalize these two even more types of information for instance here we were also trying with different types of attributes not categorical like age or gender that you have four or five different types in total. And you can also have some continuous numbers like Gaussian distributed values and also on edges because edges also it's a different type of you can also have information for instance where they live so you can calculate the physical distance in kilometers where they live or capacity if you want. And here is a diagram where on the X and the Y axis we have increasing difficulty. One is noise in terms of how the community structure is a sort of versus this sort of thing. So the higher the noise the more difficult inferences the construction of pattern is. And on the X axis we have the degree so the number of connection the average number of connection so the fewer the harder prediction inference and going from left to right we have an increasing amount of good information so information that helps increasing. And here the colors are the brighter the better. So you can see that there is a clear pattern going from left to right of how much we can improve inference passing in different hardness regime based on how much of the good information we have. And we don't have such a picture also on the other way around but I'm sure we can get it how much you can decrease recovery if you give me the wrong type of information. Okay, so so far we saw very nice properties several types of question that we can ask, but let me conclude this this talk to you with you today saying okay but what can possibly go wrong. I found out very simple problem with everything can feel terribly actually. And that was again coming from my colleague social scientists but because one of the properties of this type of model they are called generative models for a reason is that you can generate new data. Once you learn the parameters. So in particular you get the community structure and now you sample networks that hopefully have a similar topological structure than the only one you could observe. So in their case she said it's very powerful because typically I get one instance of a network, but I may want to generate many more to get some statistical properties on them. So if I'm able to use this generative model to do that now I'm going to calculate some nice quantity on this network and hopefully they will be similar to the one I expect to see. So that's the case for a very simple quantity that is property that is called reciprocity, which is simply stated as the tendency of two nodes to form mutual connection. In both of the direction. So for instance here on the top on top you see that you observe an edge in one direction, and then you may wonder, can this help me predict the probability that also I observe that in the opposite direction. And we can have the two different types of situation, either we have that edge reciprocated or not. It's very simple. So reciprocity is the number of reciprocated edges in a network. So if you now try to do this and try to generate sample from this nice generative models with community structure, and then you measure the amount of reciprocity here on the y axis, you get these results on inside this green green shape. Now the labelings here just keep in mind that these are networks generated with variants of this latent variable models, and the reciprocity obtain is terribly low compare in particular to the one on the real data that you fit the parameter on which is on the with with red markets. There's something fundamentally going wrong here because you're able to do all the to classify all these very nice prediction tasks recover all the missing information well, but then when it's time to find the to generate a network that has the value of reciprocity that you expect, you cannot do this. So we were wondering why and looking at the math behind that we were thinking that maybe there is a problem in a main fundamental assumption that people with these models may, which is that of conditional independence between engines.  And then you assume that given some latent variable theta, I am able to factorize them in fully factorize way edge by edge, given these latent variables. And I just want to put here as a reference the classic stochastic model is one of these, where you have fully factorize distribution on edges. And there are to say also theoretical grounding why this is the case there are these nice theorem that say yes, if you do this if you make this assumption and you effectively come in for some latent variables, you can actually capture very well this joint distribution. So you don't really need to more complex model you just have a fully factorize one. However, if you want to model reciprocity, this assumption is broken, you don't you cannot. It's not it may not be valid anymore, because it's not enough to model this fully factorize distribution, you may need to have a much less factorize this little less factorize distribution, which is one where you still have factorization between edges involving different pairs of nodes, but you keep this joint distribution between pairs. So you want to see both of the edges at the same time. And then if you model now your latent variable model with this type of factorization slightly modified, then you, and then you replicate the task we had before we generate data synthetic data with community structure, but and then you model you you you calculate the reciprocity, you are able to boost the reciprocity values going very close to what was the real data. And that made me wonder that all these nice models actually are very good, but they still contain a lot of limits, and that's a nice ground for me to say that probably we need to go beyond them. And in particular, we fix the problem for reciprocity but then if you count for higher order like triple triangle transitivity properties, we are still doing better. So we are still getting very low numbers. And there is also recent nice theoretical paper showing why in this models with latent variables, you try you will probably never going to be able to find higher order properties while keeping the sparsity load. So my idea now is that we need somehow to introduce some sort of linearities. So we have to think about this, and perhaps we can use also the tools we saw in the previous talk also high orders to tackle this type of problems. So with that, with this open questions and future challenge. I want to finish here my talk, and thank first of all the collaborators during this for this works that I presented to you. And this year is the person who collected all these nice data sets and will will be also in the future so a particular thing to her, but also then increase. And then let me finish thanking also all the group that have been able to start recently Max Planck, because they are all very nice young student motivated. And it's really a pleasure to go to work with them everyday. One question getting late. It's very, it's very late in the afternoon so we won't ask a technical question. I will instead ask a moral and ethical question. These kind of data that you discuss must be available to governments and to commercial organizations of all kinds. Can you say something about the moral implications of the research. That's a very good question. I'm glad you asked because usually this question are not asked in a we talked about models but then there are probably more important things. So I have to say I'm very concerned about this. In this particular case that we always have to sign. Sorry, there is some. We always have to sign some paperwork so these are not given away like that. So she's giving only to three or four people that are able to model them. I don't think that she's giving it to the government but her funding is also funded by the US government so probably they have the right to do that. Beyond that, that's a constant conversation I have with them about anonymizing at least the data, but it's an open question because you can anonymize and actually the data is anonymized. There is no personal information she doesn't give me the coordinate GPS or anything, but learning what how much we can learn cross matching all this information. It's really easy I think to de anonymize this data sets. So the problem the fundamental problem here is that the method to improve prediction and so on grow so quickly and so fastly that the method for having something that keeps the information anonymous and preserve the privacy of the people are not catching up with that. So I don't know if we should stop and going slowing down modeling to allow people to also first think about the ethical implication, or we should boost the people that work on ethical but mathematically because here we really need a mathematical to solve a mathematical problem how to learn some different parameters while not being able to reconstruct the gender of a person for instance. So, I think that's a huge problem but we may be able to solve only if we put focus on that. So before asking me can you predict the gender of this person. Why don't you ask me, can you find a way for me not to be able to predict the gender of a person if I tell you who they work with, for instance. So I think we need to start asking a different types of question and stimulate models that can answer this type of questions. So I'm really glad you asked that, because I'm, I'm also aware that is a tricky and sensitive issue, but I think it was a very good question to end on. Thanks a lot Katarina and let's thank all the price windows. I'm told that all the invited speakers should come here so we plan the dinner. Right, just come up here and so we know how many and transport and things.


Hello, I'm Mike McKee, the Bishop of the North Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church. Soon we will celebrate the birth of the Christ child. Hundreds, no thousands of people will be worshiping in our churches on Christmas Eve to celebrate that birth. Holding a lighted candle as we sing Silent Night or any other expressions that remind you of what it means to celebrate this birth. Not only brings good memories to us, but also reminds us about the hope of the world, this Christ child. Whatever is happening in your life, whatever has happened in your life, whatever troubles you or whatever brings you joy, may you find the experience of the birth of the Christ child on this Christmas to be one that will renew who you are and create a new way for you to open your life and your spirit to the work of God and may it work not only in your spirit but in all of ours. May you have a blessed Christmas and a day of great joy. God bless you.


Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of The Big Bosses. Today we are at Koda Volkswagen and we have a very special guest with us, Mr. Piyush Arora, managing director of Koda Volkswagen India. So let's begin. Okay, I think let me start by talking a little bit about 2022 and then I come to 2023. Our group started off with India 2.0 program and started launching the cars just one and a half years back. And I think, driven by the momentum, what we got with the new product, what we exclusively developed in India for the Indian market, the response was extremely positive from the customers for both the brands, for Koda as well as VW, and also for both the type of cars, SUVs as well as the Notch bank. So last year we had a pretty good year. We saw almost a growth of 86% for the complete group. We had sold more than 100,000 cars in the Indian market, including exports. We had a record of 130,000 plus cars last year. So we had a very good foundation and start for the last year. Now, built on those foundations, we want to take the momentum to this year. It's been up and down right, beginning of this year so far. But we are expecting that overall, we will have a high single digit or double digit growth this year over last year. And that is what we are aiming for and we are on track for that. Yes, the data shows that the numbers are a little lesser because of course we are looking at the numbers over the full period of the year. It also depends on what kind of product availability we have. As you know that the last few years have been challenging from the supply chain point of view for the complete auto industry. Also for us, while I must state that our group has handled the situation of semiconductors pretty well. But at the same time, we have had certain options and certain products which have not been available. So the supply chain is getting better and we expect that in the second half we will be able to do much better than what we did in the first half. Yeah, if you look at the last year, we ended up on the higher side of 2.5% to be precise, 2.67% market share driven of course by the India 2.0 cars for the complete group. And our aspiration is that by 2025 we want to achieve gradually 5% market share for the group. And we are moving in that direction, right? I think most of the automotive companies including us have been faced with this challenge of the semiconductor supplies coming out of the COVID years. But I think the short term measures what we installed were very clearly prioritizing the supply chains with the global suppliers. Setting up task forces, having a very clear indication of what availability do we have so that we can align our rest of the supply chain and our production processes. And also make them available in the marketplace so that the customer knows exactly what they can expect. Having said this, in the long term it is very clear that there are engineering options which are available where you can look at alternates. But this is normally a high lead time process. But at the same time also engaging with the semiconductor suppliers and our critical suppliers for a long term commitment of how we can make it better. I think so our focus has been very clearly on both these segments. As you know that NotchPak segment in India was not doing so well, but I think both the products as well as Slavia really rejuvenated that segment. And they are very confident that that segment, while will not grow at the pace at which SUV segment is growing, SUV body styling is becoming really popular, not only in India but globally as well. But having said this, our focus will continue to be on both the segments of SUV as well as NotchPak. Product driven market, new launch driven market, India had not seen too many NotchPak new product introductions in the country. That could have been one of the reasons. But of course, the general preference of the customers moving towards SUV body styling overall globally as well as in India was also adding to that. But a new product introduction really showed us a good product, a product fascinating to drive. A comfortable product, safe product, definitely can lure some customers to the NotchPak segment. We have launched the program in the market in the last one and a half years. And I think our present focus is very clearly to consolidate the position that these four products in the Indian market make them successful. But at the same time, we do realize that the MQB A0 iron platform is a highly flexible platform. And we would definitely look at opportunities on that platform if we can bring some more products. I think in the growing market, we have to also look actively at the product portfolio. And we are confident that the way Indian market is growing both in ICE as well as BEF segment, we have opportunities from our global product portfolio or specific Indian product to bring in more products. And as we bring in more products, I'm sure that we will have a need to expand the capacity. I think India is a highly product driven market like many other markets. And of course, we are looking at our product portfolio expansion both in the ICE segment as well as BEB because we do believe that both in Indian automotive market, passenger vehicle market will come from BEF as well as ICE market. So as we will expand our product portfolio, I'm sure that there will be a need for us to expand our capacities. So right from engineering capabilities, which we have developed for developing this product in India, as well as supplier development, making the suppliers partners of our overall product development, utilizing the Indian more and more capabilities in engineering has been our focus. And we have developed this product very clearly not only for the Indian market, but also for export. Today, we are extensively exporting the VW brand to Mexico, some of the South American markets, as well as some of the South or South African market. Having said this, we are also looking at now Skoda brand to export. We have started exporting the cars to push up to Middle East and we are looking at Far East. And as part of our study in Far East, we will be entering the Vietnam market very soon next year. First with the partner who will manufacture the cars developed in India and the parts being supplied out of India. And then they will also import cars out of Europe for the other product varieties. Vietnam model might be for us a model which we can utilize even going forward for other markets, where we can utilize sending parts and assembling the cars. And we are very bullish about the overall development also of the Southeast Asian market. I think we believe that very clearly that Indian growth story in the automotive will come both from ICE and the electric vehicle segment. Volkswagen Group is the largest EV manufacturer and seller in Europe and we have a very extensive product portfolio available globally for us. But at the same time, we want to also develop a specific Indian entry bev car. Our strategy has been so far top-down. We have entered the market with our Audi brand as well as our Porsche van, Porsche Taycan and Audi e-tron have been very well received in the Indian market and very successful. But at the same time, for both Škoda and Volkswagen, we are now in the stage of looking at what product should we bring in from our global portfolio as well as what can we develop in India for the Indian customer. Right, so we have brought in Škoda ENIAC as well as VW ID4 for experimental drives in the country and we are in the process of finalizing when should we bring that car into the Indian market. I think initially when the electrification in India started, of course, there was some apprehension about whether the customer acceptability, range anxiety would deter customers from buying the electric vehicle because of course India being a big country, the electric vehicle charging infrastructure will take a while. But many of us have been surprised the way the electric vehicle acceptability amongst the customers and I think these are going forward overall as the market will develop, overall size will develop, the cost structures will start getting better, the affordability will start getting better and I think that would aid the penetration of electric vehicle in the country. I think all the regulations which are in place in India and globally definitely make electric vehicles extremely safe and from that point of view I think the government of India and the regulations which are put in place would make sure that the customer is never disadvantage. Overall market dynamics will define when the price steps are taken, the cost measures, I think increasing cost also is stronger for an exchange in terms of zero and dollar, add to the overall cost structure of any car manufacturer also us. But having said this, I think the price is driven from the market dynamics and of course you look at the appropriate time when the price has to be passed on to the customers. My point of view, I think in an organization you need empowerment and also entrepreneurship amongst your managers which can drive that. Finally, at the end of the day a diversified group like ours to steer that you have to depend on the skills of individuals who are driving their respective business, empower them and make sure that they are able to deliver based on the targets and overall group objectives.


6 30 p.m. Well, let's call this meeting to order a motion to accept the agenda There a second second seconded Okay I Mutano and shoot bar. Thank you. Any discussion on the agenda? Nope, okay Except that through the agenda All right is the is anyone in the room for public forum Of course, okay, Rob. Can you take care of whoever is on mine further? Thank you Rob Kelly divine I'm the executive director of the Burlington Business Association Here to speak about the memo Related to parking changes first. I want to thank Chapin and Jackie for taking the time to meet with me I thought it was a very productive conversation If some as some of you may know we worked very collaboratively on parking, you know up till a couple of years ago And I always found that collaboration to be really productive I have reviewed the memo that that Jackie submitted and I Have to say that while I don't have particularly a I'm not here to speak out against the rate changes. We did work together. I think and come up with Something that makes sense in the short term and also that you know, they did alert the hotels As well, I just wanted to take an opportunity to say that I think that What we're seeing in parking is really indicative of the fact that People are not coming downtown and people that previously were working downtown aren't coming back to Those parking passes that were in the garage Pre-pandemic the parking fund was in really good shape financially Then the pandemic hit. I know that while it wasn't necessarily DPW's policy decision when you know, we're operating a parking system, but we didn't we kept the staff on it really did Draw down the fund pretty substantially. I know that that's been backfilled by ARPA funds But I do think that going forward that While I'm I'm excited to continue to work with the DPW team to try to come up with some creative solutions to this I don't think that the solution really Necessarily Lies with rates as I've told Chapin and Jackie I think people have a lot of reasons not to come downtown now and you know when people aren't using your product You don't usually go up on the price. So I think we need to get creative on how we Use parking among other tools to provide an incentive for people to visit Burlington to continue to have office space in Burlington and We have had some really productive conversations that I hope when they're presented the Commission will consider Relative to coming up with some more parking permit tools or options that fit this new reality of Office workers in town now not a lot of people anymore are coming in five days a week You know every every week of the month people's habits have changed substantially And I think you're seeing that in the memo there with that, you know over seven hundred thousand dollar shortfall in parking permits So I want to I want to be able to work together with you with you guys and with the team on that I'm excited to do that. Jackie's been great. I'm very open to it and So that's my sort of general opinion on more specificity When I looked at the memo and the ordinance change the one suggested change that I would have is I think in the marketplace garage to go from, you know charging a gradated rate up to seven hours and then and then jumping to fourteen dollars It's in I don't know that I have a version here that has numbered lines like you see at City Council, but It talks about it being eight dollars up to six hours nine dollars up to seven hours And then it jumps to 14 and I would ask that the Commission consider something similar to what's in the language above for the Lakeview garage, which is you know, you're charging for that a different rate for that eight Eighth hour in that ninth hour and then over 10 hours you get to $14 Because I think for someone from nine to seven that's going to be kind of shocking I'll add one more thing. I'm Myself and Business folks downtown are supportive of consideration of a future discussion about charging on Sundays Thank you Thank you Kelly for those comments anyone else That's all that's in queue Reach then we will go ahead and close the book forum Right now we have the consent agenda a motion to approve the consent agenda with the updated note that came in this afternoon with the items the modification of line 245 and line 35 that were noted in the amended piece on the IAA parking So moved Is there a second a second Great. Thank you Bar and Hogan Any discussion? No All in favor say hi All right. Hi Any extensions or thanks Ornace, no All right, the consent agenda passed All right eight out of five off-street parking rate changes The presentation from Jackie and Chapin on this That's correct. Thank you so much chair O'Neill Vavanko Chapin Spencer director of public works and I'm joined here with Jackie asperity who has a short presentation kind of modified a bit from last month and then You know, she and I are receptive to the comments that That Ms. Devine has made from the Burlington business association So Jackie will have some revised proposal language Good evening So we wanted to talk about some off-street changes post our meeting from last month Just some information prior to COVID that budget 265 which covers the garages and the lots Had a fund balance and there's a deficit now Rates these rates have not been changed since July of 2014. We are controlling expenses as much as possible But we have had to increase things such as security Just as an example from ninety thousand dollars to three hundred thousand for fiscal year 24 This is just an overview of the funds the lots and the two garages are a part of this one and This is forty five percent through the fiscal year the outlook of Revenues if it were to continue as it is now Not not looking great And so changes from the last time we took out some of the proposals based on some feedback that we received And so we're looking to adjust the max daily rate at both garages downtown garage would move from eight dollars to $12 and marketplace would move from ten dollars to fourteen and Adjusting the monthly permit rates. We're looking to increase by four dollars per permit at the downtown garage, which is $80 to 84 for the five-day permits and 96 to 100 for the six-day permits and Marketplace garage. We're looking to increase that from 96 to 120 The reason for that is because we do have a long wait list that lot is full. We have a wait list We know that that's really premium parking. So that's why we're looking to increase that one more Engagement and feedback. So we I reached out to all of the permit holders in both of the garages via email two times we put banners on the websites that we have DPW and Park Burlington. I also emailed some of the Key stakeholders so all three of the sorry two of the hotels which would be directly affected by this and like Kelly said We we met and spoke about how some of the other businesses would take this We are looking at other options with either Park Mall or the AIM system that we have for kind of a hybrid work schedule, so as You know punch card sort of option instead of five days a week because a lot of people do work Tuesday through Saturday or something different or only three days a week. So we're looking into those options And I did email you a short while ago the one piece of feedback that we received from one of the hotels a Little bit of pushback, but they they do understand we meet with them often every quarter Regarding the security in the garage. So this is something that I think they were expecting But I didn't have the opportunity to sit down with them So we're looking to implement these changes as early as in 2024 as possible We do plan to I know a lot of the feedback that we received last meeting was on-street changes So we're collecting data on that first before we implement any changes or propose any So coming soon. What was the increase in security that we increased from 90,000 to 300,000 And I guess we did take from what Kelly said. It's definitely a good idea for the Kind of implementing different hours. I'd like to change in Section 19 be nine increasing from nine dollars Up to seven hours and just implement two dollar increases. So eleven dollars for eight hours $13 for nine hours, and then the $14 would be ten hours plus. That's for the marketplace garage Sorry, I missed last week or last month. So if the demand is not there at what point do you Think about other uses for the that space or those buildings Yeah, that's a good question Commissioner Sears, I think at this point we are looking at a multitude of strategies from as Kelly divine had suggested a more flexible product We're also looking at overnight products for area residential Uses in marketplace right now. We're limited to only parking for up to 24 hours or 48 48 in marketplace. So that really limits someone who might have a residential unit nearby and You know it's gone for the weekend. We shouldn't be Wholesale preventing Residential overnight use when we have capacity the problem is Residential folks do park throughout the day many days of the week if they're retired or they don't use their car a lot So we don't want to just give away the marketplace, which is our most highest demand garage to Storing of cars long-term So we're gonna have to figure out the proper balance of how to Accept in these residential uses, but we are looking at new products new offerings so that we can better utilize our structures Okay Commissioner Mutano, what do you have any questions? Where to start I mean I support the amendment actually expanding it out to 10 hours before kind of capping it at the max rate Keeping it as linear as we can That said there's still certainly a lot of people driving into Burlington each day I know every time I'm walking down Main Street right about five o'clock. There is a ton of people still, you know coming into Burlington for regular working hours and As we're looking forward more on the time scale of years right looking ahead especially since Some of these parking lots are reaching or garages are reaching the end of their lifespan That we really consider how we're gonna be using these spaces because this is still like a Modern American city like the way the way like traffic is flowing is such that well, there's a lot of people driving and One way that we in the future might be discouraging that when there are viable alternatives is Raising the rate at which it costs to park But I know it's a lot of work to actually really implement those alternatives and as a commissioner definitely thinking through how the actual parking fund right the parking division as well as other aspects of public works and public transportation all Come together to really serve the city best is it's certainly something that I Want us to be doing really as far as a Place right Church Street Marketplace is a world-class destination. There are people traveling Really long distances to come here and visit and stay in those hotels and catch the view of the sunset and shop On Church Street and really just be there in the place. So I'm not I'm not against raising the rate At all. I mean, it's it's really really really minor Yeah, really as the Main Street sort of Kind of corridor really comes in and we're welcoming more people coming by train as well That that certainly could alleviate some of the people that are kind of parking in that lot and staying in the hotels Really, they're gonna be getting a very different vantage Of the city at that point, but in short I have no issue raising the rates of parking as I don't know kind of a vice tax Driving and this is a little bit of a vice That's all. Thank you Commissioner bar any comments on parking? Oh Yeah, sure. I always have comments on parking and I understand Coming from my experience that having the income from the parking is extremely important and with the downturn of People coming in and getting less money to be able to offer the same services. We do need to increase it So I'm supportive of that Normally and I agree with Commissioner Patano that Using parking rates as a TDM measure to try and reduce cars and promote Transportation and use of public transit is one of the best things you can do when there's such a high demand and Unfortunately, now there's not such a high demand So we're stuck between a rock and hard place here I don't want to lose sight of the fact that hopefully Burlington is going to turn around and things are going to come back And there are going to be people that need to come in and people that do need to park Not everybody needs to drive but those that do need to park will come in and hopefully we won't be raising rates again on them As soon as we get them back But other than I support the the amendment that you made If you could when it comes time Give give the verbiage for it Thanks Great, thank you Commissioner box A few not nothing wild Yeah, I'll just add I'm really glad to hear that the department is working With Ames and Park mobile on the new new parking products as you stated because I think you know with all this parking tech that we have there's definitely a way to Make products that are more appealing to hybrid workers, right? So that maybe it can be an option where they pay as they go. So they're only Paying right like for the days that they're coming into park at the garage and then they're not paying one of both price for the permit I don't know. So I'm just you know, I'm supportive of that creative thinking generally. So happy to hear that and then yeah, I We went over a lot of the details of this at our last meeting and you know, I'm generally supportive of the rate change And I think that's it. Thank you commissioner Fox I'm just gonna circle back to commissioners here because You had a question early on but then I didn't circle back to see if you had finished Thanks. Um Yeah, I finished I think it's worth keeping an eye on I don't know how long we want to subsidize our parking garages in this city So I don't know if you want a timeline on that or just looking ahead. It seems like Some contingency plan is needed Thank you commissioner Sears. Yes, we do expect to be back in the next few months Once we've done the off-street and on-street data collection to really understand trends and have more time to work with the clerk Treasurer's office the parking facilities fund thanks to our work to improve the garages has about three million two and a half million dollars of debt and so We have had to bring that debt in-house Held by the city because we could not meet debt coverage ratios With the depleted fund balance and the lack of revenue coming in so We have debt that's being held by the city. We do have an income problem Or at least a revenue problem. We're trying to trim expenses as well but we are going to be back likely with some additional rate adjustments new product and Hopefully, you know some Planning that you all can see about how we are going to get the ship back on firm financial ground This is not where we wanted to be I spent the first seven years of my Tenure here rebuilding the fund balance as it was depleted when I came in we were doing fine until we hit covid And then we lost it. So We now have to rebuild Thank you Commissioner Hogan any comments the evening could you clarify for me the when you say that the security Budget piece has gone up from 90,000 to I Got 270,000 down before you mentioned 300,000 roughly is that in the last year or since 2014 the last time the rates That's budgeted fiscal year 24 So that's what our budget expenses expense is for this fiscal year when was the last time it was 90,000 Yeah, I will need to go back and look it's possible that we budgeted Last year for you know the 90 but spent, you know 120 I don't have the actuals in front of me. It is a significant increase. We are trying to be responsive to the downtown community during this time We do have three different structures two of which are co-joined many levels We're trying to be as visible as possible. Yeah Appreciate I think that would be a welcomes Expensive investment And a question on the on the comments from Hotel Vermont regarding the Had some pain points with the existing permit structure Could you speak to I know you've been mentioning that you're considering other like more flexible Products is some of that like this is a known Unknown problem or is that some of the flexibility of considering Hans had Had we at our last meeting he spoke about that because they do have some employees that work the Tuesday through Saturday or You know Monday through Friday some week. So we're working on that, you know with them in mind They They pay four dollars So they pay half of the daily rate for their Overnight customers. So for one overnight if you were saying Tuesday to Wednesday They pay four dollars for your vehicle to be there for both days So their rates on that would go up Does that answer your question I think so and it seems like the nature that the concern was regarding employee parking Yeah, I think it seemed like both when when in his email The top part was the 50 increase four dollars to six dollars for that and then the bottom Yes, so we had spoke about that in November So hopefully we can implement working with park mobile to implement something and then further down the road We hope to do something a little bit better with aims. Yeah Okay. Oh, thank you for that. Thank you for your work on it and what's what's obvious is the partnership with The business community and other stakeholders in town. It's clearly that we are Yeah, we need we need that partnership Thank you My comments most everyone has Um Said what I probably was going to say anyway. Um, I do support the rate increase. Um, I feel like we do we do Burlington is If we're going to recover from this moment in time the moment in time being coveted compounded by A lot of the drug and crime that's going on right now But I think the investment in the increased security in the garages is really important And charging, um, you know updating the rates From 2014 is important that said I I agree with the comments on moving away from the one size solution and looking into What are the what are the hybrid options? How can we really maximize That it's really valuable real estate downtown So how do we have that dynamic movement of? vehicles while also perhaps as director Spencer Mentioned not just warehousing residential vehicles but allowing You know some creative solutions to provide Parking for those In the downtown area who don't have access to some parking um And I think you know a concern we talked about last month is you know concerned about the hourly workers making sure that those staff folks who are working have Access to If they have to drive access to safe parking in this this time period that we're in right now and a flexible enough free structure that they can afford To park there and earn a living so I appreciate that flexibility and again I am supportive of The rate increase so that's it on my end Um, all right any comments from the public So are you here for this agenda item? No, okay Okay, all right, so We have an action to approve this rate change However, I'm wondering If we can if you can either put it on the slide or read the modification that came in That you mentioned at the at the start of the slideshow Yes, so In under marketplace garage section nine I'll read from kind of halfway down. It says six dollars up to four hours seven dollars up to five hours Eight dollars up to six hours nine dollars up to seven hours We would amend and add 11 dollars up to eight hours 13 dollars up to nine hours And maximum daily rate of 14 dollars after 10 hours okay So it's a still the maximum rate, but just that um, it's a little bit more gradual Over the time period Correct, correct. Okay All right, um commissioners is that Is that all clear? Okay, so a motion to approve staff recommendation for the off-street parking rate changes With the amended language important clarification Go ahead So this actual resolution that is attached to this agenda item that we have Friendly amended right now is going to be referred to city council to actually enact So really our action is to refer this item to city council if I understand correctly And we are we are essentially the sponsor as the commission of The department of public works. This is seeking your action This does not need City council action. This is in appendix c of the ordinance which is able to be adjusted by You all right, so essentially we are enacting this appendix c change By this action by approving the staff's recommendation with the amendments that we Just approved here. Thank you. All right. Okay. Just just like clarifying like for Everyone. Yeah, I know it's all it's all in the charter somewhere exactly where this falls in but uh, yeah, that's fantastic. Thank you So the language that uh, we have in the packet is move to adopt The city of berlington ordinance changes related to adjusted rates in the city's municipal garages as detail in the attached document So we're referring to the detail That was actually communicated verbally in this presentation Precisely right. Okay. I I move exactly that Is there a second a second Seconded Okay. Thank you. Commissioner mutano and commissioner bar Any discussion Approval all in favor Aye. Aye. Aye. Any nays No Okay, I for myself that motion approves unanimously Thank you very much Okay, thank you All right that piece is closed. Thank you all Thank you jackie for your time And then on to director's report All right, thank you Let's see. There were a number of items in the packet One of them as progressed since I wrote this which is the engineering standards on monday night Were approved by the city council unanimously and I just want to thank staff Both in tech services as well as water resources as well as other departments who Engaged in this activity Engineering standards are helpful for the city in a number of ways Making sure that investments either made by developers or by the city Or even homeowners working on their water or sewer laterals are replacing assets To the city standard to make sure that our streets and rights of way are well maintained It's also going to be helpful and this is likely going to be an item that will come to you in subsequent months Is that we have a number of streets in the city of brollington that are unaccepted These are private streets. These are streets that Are maintained by the properties along them And uh, there has been interest in some of these streets to have them accepted by the city With these engineering standards, we now have the foundation on which to say that you need to Reconstruct or prove to us that the streets are built to standard Before the city will take them over to make sure that the city is not taking over a liability For the rest of the Tax payers so we will be talking about this in coming months, but a big success There's updates on the north plant siphon repair and we are all Holding our breath to make sure that this high water flood event Does not damage our recently repaired siphon under the woonewski river so far so good and In the back of my director's report is the detail on the north woonewski avenue survey that the city council Transpacient energy utilities committee asked us to complete In our mind its staff's mind it indicates that there's a general understanding that the new configuration Is functional and safer than The previous design and we will continue to work with the community health center on off street parking And we also had at the two meeting last night transportation energy and utilities committee meeting A good presentation on the woonewski river bridge project Which we are really excited to work with the city of woonewski v trans And our federal partners to construct in a way that will add much more robust bike and pedestrian facilities As well as a bridge that will last another hundred years as this current bridge is A relic of the 1927 flood replaced soon after so Those are my updates. Happy to answer any questions now. We're in the uh commissioner section. Thank you Sorry, thank you Any any questions Commissioner Mutano, let's start with you Any questions on the director's report? Yeah, i'm i'm actually kind of interested in that private street to public street conversion Is that something that any That is going on is that some like At this point, obviously the city can't impel The property owners to maintain their private property to the standard But is anyone Interested in giving up their their right of way to the city and and how does that Happen really right? There is a dedication and acceptance process where the the private entity That owns it whether it's a collection of property owners or one property owner On which the the land was subdivided Would need to dedicate and the city then would need to accept Pending our agreement that the street is up to standard We have had many conversations over time. We have the most recently accepted street was franklin square, which was maybe two years ago There have been ongoing discussions about Chittenden Drive and iranistan, which are Interconnected streets on the south end We Do for plowing purposes? Uh plow those streets because they are part of the grid and are more helpful for us to use them To reach other streets So it is a complicated situation where there are private streets in the city And yet there may be some level of Public maintenance activities on them. So this is an area that needs renewed attention and is a decades old issue That now with the engineering standards we can more clearly address so Then there are Private streets that are not explicitly marked as as private like iranistan avenue, for example That is a compliant, you know street sign. That is it appears to be a public street like Yeah, but um, so how many miles do you reckon all together are private private streets in the city? Uh, I don't have that number on hand, but uh, my About a mile like is that we have approximately two dozen streets in the city that are Unaccepted Okay, cool. Thank you for that. Most of which are cul-de-sac dead end streets. Yeah Cool. Thank you for that. Yeah Thank you Commissioners Sears any questions? No, thank you for the report. I appreciated The survey results those are so interesting to read Yeah, thanks for including that. Yeah Thank you. Do I should know bar Thank you I just have one question and it also pertains to the private streets. Um It will one of the standards be that it must be paved I'm just curious because there are some private Lanes that are still gravel Yes, um That is a good question If the rest of the infrastructure, I would need to check with the city engineer clearly for Pape streets are much easier for us to maintain But there are some very low traffic streets I know we spend uh an inordinate amount of resource trying to maintain the few dirt roads that we have in the city Interveil road, uh north avenue extension so My understanding is our strong preference, uh, is that we want to accept streets that are paved and are built to city standard Okay, thanks. Yeah, that's it. Thank you commissioner box Yeah, thanks for the report. Um, thank you. I wanted to bring up was the great streets main streets main street project just because At our november meeting you're still sort of like reviewing The bids and um, so I guess I'm just wondering if you could Walk us through briefly sort of like what what happened and now it's being phased So You know, what's the plan to get phase two actually implemented? Are there any like creative cost savings Or like alternative infrastructure ideas for phase two to make it less expensive Um, yeah, just because all of that happened super quickly and it was during Thanksgiving holiday time and so Yeah, just if you could just provide a little more of an update on that would be great Oh, thank you. Uh, very much commissioner fox happy to talk about that and I did uh gloss over that one And there's been a lot of work over the last month So when we received the bids for the great streets main street project the low Bid came in 50 percent higher than the engineers estimate Which uh, unfortunately is Not Been unusual I know wenewski when they bid their main street project came in I believe 30 plus percent over the engineers estimate the champlain parkway Came in I think 47 percent over engineers estimate with the inflationary environment Coming out of covet. We've been seeing a very tough bid environment so Staff had to work quickly and through a lot of negotiations with the contractor To come up with a phase to construction plan instead of the six blocks that we've previously discussed The plan is to deal with the ravine sewer, which is a critical foundational element to allow redevelopment along this corridor Uh And three blocks of main street from wenewski down to pine street That leaves the top block up by memorial the justification there is to wait for The redevelopment of memorial to make sure that the streetscape Well interfaces with the redevelopment of that Uh property or the renovation of that property if that's found to be feasible And then uh the bottom two blocks Uh Will also need to be Uh a second phase We are going to be applying for federal grants as they come up Uh The lower two blocks are in a census tract that has disadvantaged Households and such that we think we can get a potential 100 percent or 90 or 80 percent federal Grant which would minimize our local match And we are going to have to figure this out. It's it's suboptimal especially for the off street Bike network that we're developing as part of this project Uh, so we are trying to figure out how we would develop an interim con connection For the bike route, uh while we work to raise money for phase two So we did have a business meeting, uh two business meetings last week Uh on the 14th, I believe of december Thanks to the bba for helping to organize one of those and you know, there is concern here about Both the impact from construction and how we're going to get the full project done So we're not out of the woods, but I think we have a pragmatic path forward There are projects that are waiting and depending on this, uh the vermont The vfw project which is going to develop dozens of affordable housing units where the old vfw is on south wanouski The building and parking lot of that project are over the ravine sewer And in redeveloping that property It's not optimal to put a building over an active sewer, especially one that's a hundred and 40 50 years old and is built with bricks and rocks So, uh this project main street great streets is really a critical element of this type of redevelopment in the city Is that what you were looking for commissioner fox? Yes. Yes. Thank you. I think yeah I mean just a lot happened and it was really hard for me to even keep up with so Yeah, I was just looking for yeah that summary. So thank you and um, you know as um Disappointing as it is, right? Um, it's encouraging to hear that the department is looking at those federal grant opportunities and So, yeah, I mean it's sort of like having to take one step at a time and also A million steps. I don't know. Um, so yeah, thanks for just looking for an update On that piece of it. Um, yeah, that was the only question I had on this item Thank you I wish you had hogan There thank you. Well on the on the main streets Phasing in the in the top blocks there It hasn't occurred to me.  I was glad to see originally that the intersection with unions was in the plans, but correct No further leaving it, you know, it's really short of some key institutions at the elementary middle school uvm It's center. So like that's a good network wise. It was always going to Be kind of a dead end from the safe infrastructure heading east perspective Maybe there's an opportunity You know for In the conversations, I understand it's not going to be like tomorrow, right? We don't want that to wait 20 years to the magical pot of money to to do it, but in Maybe we can go further up the hill That's it's a great point that's bucket of money And it is a conversation that staff have had that tiff tax increment financing really limited Where we could improve main street and with federal funding we can potentially go Further uphill eastward, but also further westward They the tiff was limited to battery street and main street does continue down around union station down to college street And that last block really connects to the waterfront. So there's opportunities on both ends. Yeah Thank you The bright side here, um That's okay. I'm super excited to see the Middle section proceeding. We'll look forward to that I'm still digesting the musky survey results, but thanks for including that Just a quick Visualization comment off the bat here that high charts tend to be They tend to confuse the message and that you can't directly compare the values that are shown there For what it's worth, okay Yeah, you know, it's hard to sort of visually scan these things. There's no way to compare across We did uh notice that the pie charts the report In the packet had wonky formatting Wonky being the technical term. So we did uh post up on the website a cleaner version of the survey That may help a little bit, but I understand the other point you're making Yeah, I understand we're probably we're all working with limited uh any resources here Yeah, I look forward to giving that a Good look over later. Great. Nothing further. Thank you Thank you. Um, yeah, I like bars bars instead of pie charts, but Thanks for that Yeah, I mean, I think main street gray streets while it's really um, it is disappointing I like when you when you talk through Um the ravine and what we really need to do I think that is again infrastructure. It's like the hole in your sock You don't think about it until your toe is poking out And if we can address um that ravine Then we look at some other Um, you know, kind of future development pieces like memorial like the vfw site. Um, so I'm glad we're moving forward with that piece. Um And my I guess my only question right now is not related to that but on The north plant and the the the the high water I kept waiting To hear that we were going to have some Water issue So I probably checked my public works commission email more way more frequently in the past few hours during I mean the past few days with the flooding And happy to see that there were no alerts Um, do you have a sense if we are like Seem like we pressed it. Are we out of the woods? Um, will there be any testing? Um, or is there a way To to kind of click the box and see that we made it we made it through or the repair made it through Um, this, you know, kind of a horrible amount of rain Yes, thank you. Um, I do Want to amplify your message that uh staff worked over the weekend and and through Monday to operate a number of pump stations and and repair some pump stations during the storm To keep our wastewater running as it should and we had no Uh discharges during the storm and if you get the reports from around the state like I do there were 15 or 20 wastewater plants around the state all with experiences and issues or combined sewer overflows And uh, I cut my shower short on monday morning When the when the rain was really coming down because I happened to live in the pine street, uh, cso, uh sewer shed And, you know, I like to think that, you know, turning my shower off was the difference that saved the cso But we had no cso's during that storm event Which is a real feather in all of our caps as we build green infrastructure as we Clean our systems and really plan for a better future That said, we're not out of the woods yet on the high river water for the siphon and we'll continue to monitor that Uh, a small break, uh, will, uh, create A situation where we will notice volume differences at the plant very quickly. We have not noticed that yet We may do a dye test after the storm. We do do dye tests every Once or twice a year to make sure that the the siphon is is in good shape. So Thank you. I really feel like, you know, three five years ago. Um We would have really expected, um, some some discharge so kudos to you know, our rate payers, um, to the commission and certainly to, um, water division for, um, for the investments, um, that that, um, we kind of collectively have made In our infrastructure, um, I think moments like this are really telling, um, that Again, I know we're not out of the woods, but, um, that At least hopefully most of it's behind us So thanks All right, um, that that's director's report. Um, we'll close that out. Um, any commissioner communications? Commissioner bar Let's start with you. I'm sorry. I always have to say something. So, um, I just wanted to To say, and this is the city as a whole, not just Public works, but, um, the old east end part of Word one has been working hard to Redo our park and make it a more welcoming place. So We just put in a large kiosk And nobody got hurt So it was good as a 400 pounder, um, but it's in the ground So if you're going down Grove Street and patch and road, take a take a look towards the park and you can see it Um, and we are working through to get a nice rink up there too. So I just wanted to put that out there that Public parks and rec are going to help help with that maintaining of it. So But other than that, things are great and I'm just looking forward to a great winter I will say that the city council did just approve on Monday night the mo you with the old east end Organization that you all will buy the radar speed feedback sign with grant funds And that the city after a year will spread that resource around the rest of the city. Nice job. Thank you. Thanks Great. Thank you. Um, let's just move down on the table there. Um, commissioner hogan Thanks, um speaking of speed feedback signs still interested to learn more about the data on locus street Just saying that as a reminder to myself a lot of Follow-up by email afterwards I see obviously there's greater speed back so the one that's facing downhill is Pretty high up the hill and it's probably long forgotten by the time they're Going through more residential heavy zone In the park and stuff. Yeah, we did do some speed data collection there with tubes this year and can share that information with you That'd be great. Thanks Also, and the the storm the other day Reminded I had the hustle back for a meeting that I was tempted to I really wanted to go out with like a metal rake and clear out some Some storm drains, but just want to put a plug in again and try to get I don't know if that would be a good opportunity for High schoolers that are looking to put some volunteer hours on something to do Adopt a storm drain program Could be could be very useful for us I think I did see you city staff truck out sort of monitoring cleaning up some stuff as well, but it was uh There's a lot to deal with As you know, it brought you know, it brings out opportunities for improved drainage Localized flooding. Yeah Nothing further here. Thank you Thank you Commissioner Mutano Yeah, definitely kudos to all the city workers and everyone around here. That's actually doing the work that I know make this place work Um, yeah, I was kind of surprised uh Monday when I was walking down from lunch on north prospect street right at waterman there was quite a few inches of uh kind of Moving water and there was actually I'm kind of bubbling out of the storm drain So I'm glad to hear that there were no major issues As I mean move in at all all different all different parts of the city How was the pine street sort of section? I know a lot of times in the summer That's one place where it's actually difficult to get by on a bicycle on on a really rainy rainy day Or even after the rain So how is the new earthworks looking? In that section just I guess north of lakeside where there's been a lot of work this summer and fall Yes, new catch basins have been Installed and the road will get even more of an enhanced crown once the final Code of pavement is on top So drainage will be much better when the parkway is done as you know, we don't have the full curb in So that's not steering the rain to the drop-in. Let's the way you'd expect once the project is complete So it will be better. It's probably a mix of better in areas of not so good during the winter Either your first comment about north prospect or south prospect is an interesting one if I could just Jump in and say what you were noticing was A stormwater tank that's underneath the road that is there to protect storm water and not have The combined sewer system flushes quickly and so There is a large detention tank under south winewski and it did surcharge a bit During the last storm and we were monitoring it, but it did not damage the pavement as it had in the past We put in some pressure relief design elements and it worked as it should Fantastic and I guess kind of circling back to the parking item I understand. Well, we heard in the summer There was a lot of talk regarding the main street project and and about the way Parking was all gonna all gonna happen You know during that construction and then after after the fact phase Is that data going to be included in our discussions going into the winter? regarding well rate changes for On-street parking and and sort of more forward-looking changes that the commission is looking to include And is there a way that we could maybe see the data right kind of get get an overview of all the data that we have currently To you know make that best decision going forward We can certainly share the main street data and yes that is Information that we will be using as well as more recent counts to inform our decisions right on That was a lot of work, too Like that that was really really amazing to see And yeah, really kind of I guess integrating everything is really what I think would would be best as you know, we have this time And uh, yeah, there's certainly a lot of changes going on. So, uh, thank you to everyone that's been working on that It's really been fantastic Thank you. Commissioner Sears I don't have any communications Thank you Commissioner Fox um So one quick thing, um, I'm glad director Spencer brought up the when you ski burlington bridge project Just wanted to flag that the project is doing a travel survey right now. It's super quick. Um So just flagging that that is out there in the ether um And then yeah, this is a sort of a random thing, but I thought I would bring it up I'm wondering does the city have any like And maybe this is included in the engineering standards. I don't know but probably not um Like what the standards are for installing rapid flashing beacons at mid block crosswalks I don't know. Y'all know I live on north ave and um, you know, every other mid block crosswalk is a rapid flashing beacon And those ones that are not like uh at strong street by the board minifire station um You know when there are parked cars on the west side of north ave It's impossible for drivers to see a pedestrian at that crosswalk Um, so yeah, I don't know just thinking about About rapid flashing beacons Great, you should yes, you should put in a request. We do have a standards document that talks about warrants for our fbs And uh, we'd be happy to review the warrants for that crossing Oh, thank you Anything else commissioner fox? No, that's it Thanks. Thank you um, my My only comment Believe it or not Is thank you for changing the signs on south prospect street from speed cushion To um, I think they're known as speed bump or speed hump. Um, I appreciate that I think it's a little more accurate representation of what The driver might be encountering um So that's it and um, thanks to the crews for um Getting out the the salt this morning. It was like a sheet of ice and um, when I started walking the dog He'll make him back. I saw the Sidewalk clouds had gone through so grateful for um for the crews work on that And that's it. Um, so that closes commissioner communications and um Let's move to um Close the meeting adjourn the meeting Um Motion to adjourn second motion to adjourn second. All right. All in favor Hi. Hi All right, great 732 I think holly wants to


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