Hello, everyone, and greetings to everyone from SOAS, from London. I'm Bhavna Dave. I'm the postgraduate tutor in the politics department. And I teach in the department. My area of specialization is politics of Central Asia and the Caucasus. And I teach two postgraduate modules, geopolitics of the region and state and society in the region. And also work on China, Central Asia, Russia relations, geopolitics and issues of migration. I'm happy to talk about politics department and especially how we teach and what our approach is to the discipline and also talk about what is it that makes SOAS a very distinct place. What is our niche? After I have given a brief introduction to the master's program, I will, I will introduce my two colleagues here who will be giving you a taste of what it is like to study at SOAS. So they will be talking on this theme about politics during the pandemic. Let me just introduce them. Felix Berenskirter. Felix, I guess people can see you, who is the head of the department and he works on his specialization is in theory of world politics international relations with focus on issues of identity, security, power, the concepts of friendship and strangeness. And he has written about friendship and estrangement in IR in transatlantic relations. Then we have a Hagar Kotiff who teaches political theory, political thought with focus on feminist theory, gender studies, post-colonial theory, liberalism and its critics and its critics. And her empirical work has centered on Israel-Palestine on issues of mobility, immobility in the history of political thought. Let me just begin talk in the next minutes about what is so distinctive about studying at SOAS.  So what is our niche? Two things. First, our focus is global. So we look at the world specifically through the lens of Asia and Africa, but at the same time we don't lose sight of global issues and we put the regions in the broad context of global politics. So by no means is the focus only on Asia and Africa. Second, we look at politics through non-Western lens. So we teach bearing in mind that much of the existing knowledge theories concepts have originated in the West. We teach about how these ideas, ideologies, institutions, practices, which emanated in Europe, but they spread across the world, how they are being challenged, how they are being critiqued, how they are being interrogated, and what are the new forms of knowledge and new forms of thinking about these issues that are being produced. So in that sense, the approach at SOAS is critical, which means questioning the existing concepts, theories, knowledge and not taking anything for granted or anything as given or anything as this is how it should be. Next slide, yeah. All the members in the Department of Politics and International Studies display a unique mix of disciplinary grounding, regional knowledge and the relevant linguistic skills, field based, field work based research, which is also fused with disciplinary knowledge is something that's our specialization. So everyone that who is teaching here has had years of experience learning the language culture of a particular region and talking from the perspective of that region and even the colleagues who don't specialize in a particular region, they are also who specialize in concepts and theories, they are also able to talk and apply these to specific regions. The modules that we teach in this sense are a unique mix of our own personal insights from immersive field research as well as disciplinary grounding and knowledge of the region. You can browse the website and look at the whole broad range of modules we teach and many of these modules are the ones which have a specific kind of SOAS identity on it so you won't be able to study in the similar way with the similar approach elsewhere. I would just talk about very briefly the different MSC programs that we have MSC international politics, you see the list here, so MSC international politics. It again reflects a distinctive SOAS approach to study of international politics to hold range of questions such as why do wars happen, is global peace possible, how is power exercised in international politics, what are the conditions for cooperation among states, how does migration challenge and change the international political order. We also look at these theories and debate them by also incorporating issues, questions about colonialism, imperialism, race, gender and class. And the focus tends to be global and at the same time it also sheds light on it also eliminates areas which are considered very marginal and remote. The second is the MSC program in politics of conflict rights and justice, which focuses on politics of human rights on humanitarianism international and transition transitional justice, especially in in post in conflict and post conflict areas. There are members of staff who are not only specializing in terms of research but who are also actively engaged in in these conflict areas and and are also contributing to policy making to peace building and various other works and engage with a variety of non academic actors non state actors NGOs and others. So this particular specialization is highly relevant to anyone who is intending to work in international NGO international organizations think tanks advocacy groups in areas of rights and humanitarian assistance transitional justice. Next is MSC in political thought, which is not just the study of political theory but it's also from a distinctive perspective. It's also linked to this how to study theory by linking it to practices of global domination resistance. And using that also also using the framework of imperialism colonialism capitalism, racial capitalism to it. Again, a distinctive approach here is on understanding how many of these concepts travel across the across the world, how knowledge and concepts and theories travel, how they intersect with distinctive local practices and how these are articulated differently in different times and spaces. The politics of the Middle East. Sorry, we need to go back. Politics of the Middle East is again, it's a, the modules here they balance historical and theoretical works and rigor, and they also cover provide many up to the minute analysis of regional and global developments given the very complex history of the region. You need to get the very strong grounding in the history in order to shed light in order to understand ongoing events.  Then we have MSC politics of Africa, where again, as in the politics of Middle East, you learn about historical, historical debates, the, the history of the region, how many of these ideas I have, have been applied to Africa. Also, learn about the contemporary institutions, evolution in the post colonial context, and the various debates, which are underway in the region, and how these are informed by many of the key concepts in politics. So, so again, the focus is on, like in Middle East, studying Africa from the perspective of many disciplinary concepts as well as focusing on the context on the regional context and and the highlighting the regional specificities. And the final one, MSC politics of Asia, which is a new offering from, from this year. And the focus is on close analysis on politics of Asia. We have two streams here, South Asia and East Asia. We have a range of modules options which are available which cover Southeast Asia, Central Asia, other parts of Asia. And these modules also focus on questions such as how do globalization, nationalism, arms race, nuclear rivalry, urban development affect political life. And also, how do we understand the specific characteristics of politics, formal as well as informal in different parts, different parts of Asia. So as I said, it's organized along two pathways, South Asia and East Asia. And you also study regions, different regions of Asia from different disciplinary perspective. This degree is, is also very popular with people who are interested in working with international organizations and NGOs and also those who would like to pursue further research oriented work. So now, having given you this overview of our theory, let me hand over to Felix, we're in scooter to talk about to, to give you a taste of his approach and how international relations theories and concepts can illuminate our understanding of the current state of politics connected with the pandemic. Let me hand over to you, Felix. Thanks, Bavna. Hi everyone. My name is Felix beyond scooter and I'm the head of department of politics international studies I also am an academic who, if I'm not a head of department I also teach international relations have been doing this for 10 years now. So as, like my many of my colleagues, I don't actually come from Britain, I come from somewhere else in my case I'm from Germany originally I studied in the US. And I think one of the things you will find in our department is that we are an incredibly diverse bunch of colleagues, just as diverse as our students. So what I want to do is just very briefly give you a taster of what I might teach you if you would come to source me or some of my colleagues. And I took as a theme here the politics of security or insecurity because the politics of the pandemic really are in some sense preoccupied by thinking of the virus as a security threat. And this is really important for us to kind of understand and not just take for granted. Why is that. How is, how is a virus becoming a issue of security or insecurity now to get there I think what we need to understand is that threats and the question of security have always been contested. So there is no taken for granted understanding of what is what it means to be secure or insecure, even if we think that you know there are some obvious dominant threats out there that we just know about. Look at these images here you know we see a nuclear explosion of a nuclear weapon, you know the famous mushroom cloud we see, you know the attacks on the Twin Towers in Manhattan in 2001. We see, you know the picture of a hacker so the idea of a cybersecurity threat. We see a virus. We see a boat full of people coming across the ocean. You might think, well these are just people on a boat ride but usually these these sort of pictures suggest that they are refugees, and in some, and in many cases, refugees are actually considered to be threatening because they for some reason seem to be different from us. So often migration and refugee streams are cast in language of security or insecurity, then you see a protest movement. And you might think well why is a protest movement considered to be or talked about in terms of security well it might well be, because it endangers the stability of a regime and it challenges conventional ideas. And of course we know what global warming we know the poor iceberg on the on the on the cap there that is just a symbol for climate change. So we have all these security discourses all these images of threats around us and I think we need to understand that they are not natural they're just not given. Most obviously in the lower part. Why why is migration often talked about in terms of security or insecurity why I migrant sometimes considered to be threatening to a society, why is protest, sometimes considered to be a danger, and in what sense is climate change a threat to us and to whom exactly. And so you need to unpack these questions you need to need to ask, who is actually telling us what the door this means to be secure and insecure. Now if we go to this phenomenon of the pandemic that all of us have been living with now for about a year. We see these discourses. And these are more from the from the beginning of the pandemic but you saw this about a year ago when when it's, you know when it when it took hold in much of the world. A lot of leaders started to talk about the virus as an enemy that we are at war with. Yeah, and this is not something we should take for granted we should ask why is this. Why is covert 19 understood to be a security problem. We know it's a health problem. And we also know that it affects the economy so it has definitely and you know and economic dimension. You know, people cannot go to work. It is difficult to earn money it costs the state a lot of money to compensate for close businesses and so forth so we know the health dimension. We know the economic dimension, but why is it talked about as if we are at war. And this is not something that you hear once or twice. Yeah. Many leaders have talked about this notion you know Trump talked about you know him being a wartime president. Boris Johnson in the UK said we must act like a wartime government. Emmanuel Macron talked about said we had war, and we see the military being involved in testing. We see the idea that those on the front line the nurses and so forth I treated like heroes or frontline workers. And, and even those scientists, you know, who who kind of was researching for a vaccine or what we're calling informing the public about the dangers of the virus, where I'm talked about in terms of, you know doing a service. And what I'm self sacrificing themselves for the greater good and so forth. Now why does that matter. What it matters because it puts us in a situation in which government can claim to have a special and extraordinary situation at its hand, where it has to redirect resources to fight this enemy, and where criticism or alternative issues don't really have much of a space to be heard. So the problem here is that you can create an environment in which a health issue or an economic issue is turned into a security issue that closes down debate that gives governments the power to act in certain ways because they consider it necessary and direct a lot of attention resources to this particular undertaking. So what we need to do when we hear politicians, the media talking about something like a tiny virus like an enemy and thinking like we are at war and something that must be defeated which is of course not possible we cannot defeat the virus we need to live with the virus right and so we need to ask these critical questions and and as a student of politics a student of international politics, you would ask these questions not only in a particular context, but you would ask these questions. From a global perspective, and you would ask, why is COVID-19 defined as a security threat? A threat to whom and who defines it as such? And is there variation? Is the response in the United States the same as it is in China? What about the different European responses? What about the perspective from India? How does it affect countries and societies in sub-Saharan Africa? What are the consequences of framing the response as fighting a war for political debate for decision making for behavior for identities? What does it mean now that we have vaccine passports probably coming towards us? Does it mean that some people are safer than others? Is there going to be discrimination in terms of age, gender, occupations? How does the virus reframe the way we see each other as being in danger to society? And I think in the end we need to ask, what are alternatives, ways of framing and acting? If you look at the previous slide, all of these are men. Is there something, is the agenda dimension to the fact how we talk about this virus? How the responses are being framed? Is it possible that female leaders of states have a different approach? Talk about this differently and maybe are more successful in tackling the pandemic. So this is just a very brief window into some critical questions that you would have to ask about even something seemingly obvious, such as how we deal with a pandemic. So and with that, I'll hand over and I think quite nicely, link up with my colleague Hargar. Thank you, Felix. Hi everyone. It's really weird to talk without seeing your faces onto an empty screen. I want to kind of follow Felix's lead and open another window in order to think about the pandemic, but maybe I'll say a few general words before that. So I teach political theory at SOAS, which means I will be your course convener should you decide to take the MSC in political thought, but also our models are open to you if you take other degrees as well. They're all ready a question about this which we're going to address in the Q&A, and I'm taking this opportunity to invite you yet again to post any question you have in the Q&A function. As Bhavna said, like many other subjects when we teach political theory at SOAS, we do it somewhat differently. And we do it somewhat differently both by opening up to texts that go beyond the regular westernized or western canon. Also in terms of being very committed to thinking about the world we inhabit and share. So whereas in many other places, political theory would be the intellectual space where we engage in abstract thinking in abstract ideas. At SOAS, we try to tie these ideas very concretely to political histories, and specifically to histories of colonialism and imperialism, and to the real world politic today and of course the two are very tightly related. In my tester today, as you can already see in the slide, I want to do this, even if very briefly, by thinking with you through Foucault on COVID, but I want to begin with marking much more generally what it means to think concretely about abstract ideas. So the point from which we start the study of political theory at SOAS is that we can never talk in abstract about ideas such as say equality or democracy. Silor James argued that it was the wealth generated in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean's that allowed Europe and the US to start playing experimenting with democratic ideas. When we read in our classes, many of the constitutive texts of democracy in the 17th and 18th century were being told repeatedly by their authors that self-full requires time, that if people are to engage in the practices of democracy, they need some leisure. Without leisure there would be no knowledge of the world and without knowledge of the world there would be no proper decision making processes. But time is a function of wealth, or at least of some material stability. Time arrives with the possibilities to suspend labor. And this possibility was given to a groin British class precisely through the plantation economy, the sugar and the tobacco and the related slave trade. This is just to say very quickly that we cannot think about liberalism without thinking about the economy of sugar and slavery. Or to take a very quick another example. Some of you may have heard about Habermas in your A-levels or GCSEs. The theme essential to democracy is the idea of the public sphere, as far as debate, as far that is often imagined in intellectual communities as a space in which people have the time to debate, have coffee, smoke, cigarettes and engage in public affair. But where does the tobacco come from? Where is the coffee coming from? There is no political thought, I guess this is what I want to say. There is no political thought without post-colonial thought, and this is what we try to engage in in so as. But as we said in the time I have, I do want to try to talk not about post-colonialism for a moment, but about COVID and Foucault and to stay within the British context. So Foucault very basically told us that we are thinking of power in the wrong terms, or rather according to a wrong image, and this is the image of sovereignty that you have at the top of this triangular. And what he tried to do is to develop two new ways of thinking about powers, two new ways of understanding powers to argue that there are two other modalities according to which power operates, which is biopower and disciplinary power. I cannot elaborate much about any of those, you have the slide here, but I want to try to get into your common sense through thinking about context.  And I hope you can understand it almost intuitively because when it emerges, it emerges basically as a form of a lockdown. Each family was confined to its house. There was a strict ban on household mixing, even though they did not call it this way.  So it was very management of how people get their shoppings, et cetera, et cetera. So it was very much like what we experienced. And Foucault describes it as a power that operates not through an ancient, through a person who oppresses you, or making you do something, but through the very organization of space, and that is in very defined allocated points in the space. And we can talk about it more if you'd like to engage as part of the Q&A also in an intellectual conversation. But if we look at the UK, we see that not all elements of the pandemic were treated in the same way. That is not elements were treated through a rigid control of individual bodies, through controlling mixing by making sure each one knows where their proper space is. I think of the idea of bubbles as precisely such mode of organization, social bubbles. There are elements of life, there still are elements of life, which have been continuing to operate along an almost opposite logic. A logic of circulation, of allowing the free movement of people and goods, leaving the airport open throughout most of the pandemic until very recently and to some extent also now is probably the clearest example of all. Now, my time here is very limited and I'm not sure how much time more I have. So I'll just say the one thing that I think is important and much Felix rather than trying to answer the question, I will ask the question as a way of showing you what kind of questions we're asking. So a way of thinking critically about the government's approach may begin with mapping better what was being halted, according to a disciplinary technology of confinement. And what was subjected to a different logic, the logic to which Foucault calls bio power, the one you see at the bio power, the one you see at the, at the right bottom of the triangular there. Who and what, in other words, were allowed to move freely and where to, which movements were secured facilitated even and which was war halted. And I think once we engage in this mapping we can start thinking more accurately and more critically on the pandemic. Do I have like one more minute you think. Okay. One, I'll use half. So, so, I'm not going to try to answer this but I want to give you a hint of how to start approaching this question. Foucault tells us that bio power is the main technology of new liberalism. It's the logic of governance that unlike disciplinary power, or unlike the idea of the lockdown, if you will, does not believe that we can bring everything under control. That does not believe that we can completely eradicate negative effect. We rather need to minimize damages and maximize benefits. I think about the idea of flattening the curve right it's not about stopping the disease it's about flattening the curve, or the idea of herd immunity that we had at the beginning is a perfect example of this. Why is it, because the important thing here is to maximize circulation and above all the circulation of capital. The circulation of capital is the one thing that must not be hunted, halted. We reach together one day in one of the classes in this exercise of mapping. I think we can think critically about what is being promoted, but also the prices and what is being lost in this understanding of what's more important and what's less important, and I'll conclude with that, and move to Bavna to conclude our discussion. Thank you, Sagar and also thanks Felix earlier. I'm not going to be making any presentation but just offer some of my thoughts on what my colleagues have talked about and on the concepts and debates that they have introduced the questions that they have asked. So, I will just talk about how I address some of these themes in the module that I teach, and this is one of the postgraduate modules that I teach is geopolitics and security in Central Asia and, and the caucuses caucuses. So broadly speaking, it's the region of Eurasia, China, Russia, Central Asia, there's also coverage of Iran and Middle East. So even the concept of Eurasia as a very broad kind of an idea. So a number of themes here focus on China's Belt and Road Initiative, which is China initiated globalization globalizing China, and the also China presenting articulating this vision of a different kind of vision which is not a liberal vision. But it's a, it's a, it's a vision that emphasizes infrastructural development people to people connectivity investments in transport technology and trade and ties between the people. Again, it's what is interesting here to look at is and linking that with the previous debate about politics, how the politics has changed during the pandemic. How do we look at the current state of geopolitics now in the COVID stage from, from last year when, when COVID became the global phenomenon. And then what we find when we talk about the lockdowns and when we talk about this kind of the state imposing these various restrictions and close closing of boundaries and restrictions on movements and other things and and also the, the stagnation in production capacity. We look at this initiative of China and and say what does that mean how do countries how does a major rising power such as China with its globalizing vision address these issues and and also we what we remember that are originated from China. So all this border closer and everything initially affected China. So, so we look at this paradox between these visions of connectivity, the increasing trade, promoting trade and transport and infrastructure changes and the new forms of closure, which have an immobilities, which have come into place and we don't know how long lasting these are. To what extent these might some of these may also become fairly entrenched in the system. So that's one of the things that we we talk about and and reflect on the effects of this across the globe as well.  I focus on the region of Eurasia, but there are implications for many other parts of the world. And many other questions have come to the fore. So the as the crit some of the traditional geopolitical issues of the traditional notions of security and boundaries and state sovereignty. Concepts also need to be defined somewhat differently, because in many ways the addressing COVID requires a new way of cooperation coordination between the various regional powers countries in the various regions and also global ties it also requires looking at the north south issues from a new perspective. So there is also an obligation for instance about redistribution of vaccine, making vaccine available at an affordable pace to various countries in the world. And here also we find that the countries in the region are engaged in both in a sense promoting countries which have vaccines to sell the West, the US. Sorry, but I mean the US the UK, number of other countries and also Russia and China have their own vaccines and many of these are also being now produced in Russia, sorry, in India. So the distribution of these vaccines and and the related to that is not just the power dynamics the competition. Also the soft power dynamics where countries are posing as helping other countries China, the belt and road initiative. Very quickly China started labeling that as the Central Asia component the Silk Road initiative Silk Road economic belt, China began calling it as also the health Silk Road. So we are seeing anyway these ongoing adaptations and emergence of new new patterns. I think in the interest of time I will stop because I know you will have questions about the program about my colleagues have said. So, so please type up your questions. And as people are typing questions let me just read a couple of questions I've answered a couple of questions which were raised. Let me just read out one question by area Lopez. What are international politics and emissive political thought. It seems there's quite a bit of overlap between them, between what studied and career directions so could you please clarify the difference. So maybe hug or Felix, do you want to say something. I'll take the second question about the difference between the main international studies diplomacy and emissive international politics. Hagar I think typing or do you want to answer. I can answer. I was beginning to type but maybe. Okay, then go ahead. So generally, maybe it's better to answer this way because it applies to other programs we have. Generally, we try to maximize options for students and to allow as much flexibility that does not then damage your the course of your study, which ends up in sometimes have been overlaps because we want to open and every model we can open to as many of you as possible. But if you look at the structure and the core demands you'd see quite a lot of a difference between emissive international politics and emissive political thought. So international politics and maybe Felix would add to this later is in a way a widest degree program. It offers the widest scope in thinking about questions of international politics whereas emissive political thought focuses on political theory, even though it is not just to also include regional expertise if you'd like one. So so to allow you to do this and and to allow you to think also beyond or or in combination with theory. So, so the structure is different, the different the core options are different, but in terms of choice, we try to have as much overlap as possible, just to make sure that you can all enjoy whatever interests you the most. And to follow up from that so the one question on what's the difference between the emissive in in international politics and the international studies and diplomacy which is offered through our center for international studies and diplomacy that the simple answer is that the emissive international politics is the more conceptual or theoretical like academic oriented. So this doesn't mean that we don't engage practical issues, of course we do. But the the MSDMA international studies and diplomacy and deliberately K does want towards those who want to and maybe come from a practitioner's perspective and a practitioner's career. Who want to work in international NGOs, or who come from that sort of work and are interested in diplomacy negotiation diplomatic practice. And, you know, it has a study to attached to the program where, well, not this year because of the pandemic but usually West students go to Geneva or maybe to the United Nations in in New York. So that's the MA international studies and diplomacy is slightly more expensive. But you get something else for it. I would say that the the MSC international politics I mean you have both programs on the website you look at the structures you look at the modules you see which ones interest you more. I'm pretty sure that you know you would be happy with either of them. So I think it is, it is more a question of whether you're keen to to engage a bit more with a theoretical conceptual conversations and debates and international relations and the discipline. Or whether you're more keen to think about the applied angle, you know, to engage in and learn about negotiation skills, diplomatic practice and so forth. So I would say that is roughly the main distinction between those two degrees. Yeah. Thanks, Felix. The question again about the difference between MSC rather than MAs. It's simply that the degree politics is part of the social sciences stream. Whereas MA would be master of arts. So if you're doing languages, arts, languages and cultures you would get an MA but in politics international relations is MSC. It's also the question by few rules on the thesis requirement for MSC and international politics and what kind of research right what the research and writing process is like so I will say a little bit to this and if my colleagues want to add you can add to it. You, the dissertation is also that counts as one a separate module. So you select the dissertation topic. You finalize it in consultation with people who you're been working on so you have plenty of choice you'll be guided once you start your masters you'll be guided through that process and then sometime by end of February. You settle you decide what is the topic that you want to work on an abstract and again we will guide you through that a lot of times students decide a topic that they want to slightly change it. That is all fine. You will have a supervisor in who will again guide you through that process. So you have number of sessions number of hours of supervision with them and you are also free to approach other colleagues in the department to talk about how to clarify this topic, but the supervisor is the main person in charge in the term term three that is also component where you do we, you do a literature review and there are some other set of readings which are relevant to preparing for the research and then you have to submit a 25% I think of the mark which is based on the people that does literature review, and you will have a number of people in the department giving lectures on this and again, talking about the methodology on how to do literature review how to conduct research how to refine your question. And then after in this in the rest of the summer, you work on your dissertation you do the research, you have meetings with your supervisor. And the dissertation is submitted in mid September. And that's basically, yeah, is what the process is like. So just to follow up from that. Taking on the, the next question by anonymous. What are the future prospects after doing their main international politics or international studies. Is that placement system in what areas are alumni of these programs working in. There are two, there are two points here I think the first is that you do a degree. A master's degree that that puts you on a very broad level of in terms of skills. So when you when you study international relations you not only learn about, you know, conceptual methodological theoretical angles that make you see the world in particular how to analyze how to critically engage with with literature with political discourse, you know, you learn how to write a dissertation, you learn how to present. I mean all these things you also learn another master's degree so this is not just unique to so as these broad skills and capacities that you bring attractive to a whole range of employees. All alumni is really go to, you know, from NGOs, so non governmental organization into government into media into, you know, even some go into business, others go into finance others, other may end up being a photographer. There is really no, you know, fixed job description that comes out of a degree in either international politics or in any of our regional degrees, you know, Middle East studies of course are also of great interest to let's say companies that look for risk analysts who want to understand, you know, what is what, you know, what is the current political social situation in particular parts of the world, can we go and invest there. How can we implement our programs our peace building programs mainly you know for the United Nations or the, the World Trade organizations. So basically I think you need to see all these degrees as not only attractive in terms of general skills but the actual expertise that a source degree gives you makes you particularly attractive, because source has a very good reputation.  We don't just read about Africa, you know, our colleagues have, have lived there they study there they speak the language and they know the culture. So this is something about giving you an edge I would say over someone who does it at the LSE, or Kings College, if you take another London competitor, but I would also mention by the way that the London location is a huge advantage because you know it's not. I mean, source doesn't have a placement system in the sense that we kind of give you an option options to work in, or we'll have direct links. I mean some of us as academics do have direct links to employees. But really, I think the key is that London is a market is so incredibly rich in terms of job opportunities that it is very difficult to, to kind of ignore that, you know, if you do your PhD, sorry, if you do your master's degree in a small town, you just don't have everything at your door steps, you don't have all these connections all these events where you can network where you can meet people, and where you can get a foot in the door. So that's a long answer to I think a very important question, because the degrees are quite short they're only one year. And in the end, you, you know, by, by May, June, you already want to know well what am I doing afterwards, and you apply for job so that is an important we have a careers office as well by the way they help you thinking about that they help you with the CB to help you. You know if you have a job talk and so forth so we prepare you for that. I need to continue from that and addressing two questions I thought I answered in the Q&A box but I actually pressed the wrong button and it did not type my question. One of them asked about people who arrived to us after actually taking a time off studies and having a career and coming to do an MSc. I have quite a few people like that some of them have long careers in journalism in NGOs in diplomacy and then they come to us and do MSc. I don't have the numbers. I just have an impression from what's going on in my own classrooms. Maybe Felix would have the numbers, but these also give you an advantage because you share spaces with people who have real hand experience, not just us, but also your fellow students. And another question was about languages. So, I think in all, but at least in most of our degree programs you have the opportunity of taking language. And again this gives you an edge if you want to go and work in some region, you will have a source language qualification. Thanks. I think there's a question on the CRG the conflict rights and justice program and the center. The answer is yes you can attend the center organizes various seminars which are open to public so some of so you are free to attend any of these lectures. There are also depending on which particular program you're doing you. There are also modules in the conflict rights and justice which may be available for the program that you're doing. So the center isn't really a physical place where which has boundaries and very, you know, in only certain people are now allowed it's an open forum that for different talks and ideas. And many activities are available to all members of so as and and also people from outside. Yeah, I think actually that's a good, like in general the fact that our programs are, you know, not only hosting the same department but many of the modules actually are also hosting other departments. So, when you when you come to so as sources not a big university is a quite small university but it is big enough to give you a whole variety of options and choices so you can actually take modules from other departments from other disciplines. So, you know, taking one particular degree or signing up for one particular degree doesn't mean that you're restricted only to that theme. You really have a look at the program structures that we offer at the different options that that are available to students because again not just in the politics department, but also across you know to law to economics to languages so to anthropology to the arts. Often we you can take modules in other departments as well. And I see a final question about the politics of Asia. There's a question of which path students usually take. I wouldn't say that there's a path that students usually take the politics of Asia degree has two parts as my colleague, I've not pointed out an East Asia and a South Asia path but I think the important point here is that, you know, if you're interested in South Asia. That's what you should focus on if you're interested in East Asia. That's what you should focus on you shouldn't think about which one gets gives me a better job opportunity because if you do well and if you, if you're interested in and if you convey a deep understanding of that region, you will get a job.  And yeah, so I wouldn't think too much about which one gets your better job I think you should do what you're interested in. Okay. Thank you I think we are going to be disconnected very soon automatically right because of there is another meeting starting. I think we have two more minutes. Okay. Yes, the person a question or if you have a degree in business or technology. What are the additional requirements. For working prefer for a politics degree you, we see there are cases where you can do what is known as a certificate course in order to then be able to apply but maybe you should write to me and I'll be able to explain this to you in greater detail than what I can right now under this, but depending on. Yeah, on your background. Yeah, I think I would say, look if you're interested in a particular program, right to the program conveners. Yeah, right to those who run the programs who are also responsible for admissions, because they will tell you whether your profile is suitable or not we're quite open in terms of profiles you do not have to have a social science undergraduate degree. You have to demonstrate some knowledge in the in the area but you know I mean we have, we had professional musicians doing a master's degree in international politics so it is not impossible for you to have an unconventional background. I would suggest if you're interested in a degree in a degree program contact our colleagues that the information is on the website. And they'll be happy to answer any questions you may have. Okay, thanks very much and any questions just email us and we'll be happy to answer these. Thank you for your for coming here and Have a good night, morning, afternoon wherever you are. Yes.


At Primatica, one of the main secrets to our company's fast growth was that we've hired from day one and we've hired fast and a lot. We currently have 26 people on staff with the company existing less than a year. This helped us break through barriers, grow the company substantially faster than anyone else in our industry, and dominate the competition. You want to do that for yourself. You want to leverage your time. You want to be a business owner that can delegate, that has entire departments running in your company. The only way that you're going to be able to do that is with people.  It's a terrible activity. It takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and it's really, really hard to do. It's hard to find the right candidates. There's a huge pool of people that are going to work for you, and most of them are just not going to be a good fit. So, with Primatica, we've actually managed to take the hiring process and make it super efficient. And that's what I want to offer you today. What we're providing is a full, done-for-you service that is step-by-step to help you identify the right positions for your company, help you find the prospects, meaning that we'll actually find them for you, and teach you how to interview them, how to create trial tasks for them, how to manage them, how to come up with the right salary that would be much cheaper than what you would normally pay for a local, but much better for them than what they would normally get. So, if you want to hop on this journey and help us help you take your business and turn it into an empire, click the link below and go to this page, sign up for a call with me, and I'd love to explore this and show you why we've built what I consider the most effective hiring platform in the world. Thank you.


Youth and Truth is roaring. Well, four events over today, we just came back from the Mount Carmel College and we had a roaring event out there. And we are having one more event with the football player, our Sunil Chaitri, who's done wonders for Indian football.   Hence, he was called Vigneshwara. It is just uncanny that after many, many years this is happening, that I have never been to any functions, festivals, weddings concerned with the family for many years. Last year, during the Rally for Rivers, just by chance, I ended up in Mysore with my family on the Ganesh Chaitruti. And once again, tomorrow I happen to be in Mysore. So, I really thank those who organized schedules knowingly or unknowingly, they put me in Mysore. It's great and after that is a very exciting event that is I'm going back to school, my school where I studied high school for two years only. After forty-five years, a lot of excitement in Mysore about that. And there is also offbeat events. We are going to the Sadhguru spot in Chamundi Hill with a group of people and then we are also doing a little bit of motorcycling in Mysore. So, lot of things happening with youth and truth. Much excitement slowly, it's building up everywhere. Well, keep yourself connected with the Facebook and Twitter and whatever else will keep you posted on this. However old you are, this is the time for you to get youthful and of course to get the truth about it too.


In this presentation, we will discuss scatter diagrams, how to use them, how to create them. Scatter diagrams are going to be used as one tool with relation to the mixed cost. You'll recall that the mixed costs of those costs that we couldn't break out between the variable costs and the support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course, each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion, making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again, click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. They fixed costs and they have some components of both variable and fixed in their nature. Things like we said wages could be possibly a mixed cost or utilities. In some cases might be mixed costs. Those times when we have both fixed and variable components, we then need to break out the fixed and variable components. There then is the question of how do we do that? How do we think about what is fixed and what is variable? One way to do it is just to plot some points on a graph and think about and look at what those points look like with relation to that graph. So here's some numbers with relation to units produced and utility cost. And this if we plot these points, if we say, okay, this is January, February, March units that were produced and we then graph utilities in relation to it, we can then plot those points. Now note what we've done here is we have these points in terms of the date they're in order by date. We could reorder this grouping of number to be in order by units and we would then see that of course as the units go up, then the cost goes up to some degree in some kind of relationship. However, the relationship is not linear in nature.  It's pretty straight. It's almost a straight line, but it's not completely linear. So this is one that's pretty close to having a nature that we can at least say is it going to be a linear type of nature. If we were to graph a line on this, then we could say, okay, here's the full diagram of it. We're plotting. We're just taking these points and plotting these points. This is going to be the dollar amount on the vertical axis. We have the units on the horizontal axis. And of course you could see at 100, we have 100 and that's at 5,250. And then again, it doesn't go quite in order in terms of the units of production. It's at 190 here somewhere up here. And then we've got 7,860, 7,860. And then it goes to the 110. But you can see that as we go up in terms of units, we have an increase typically in the dollar amount as well. Although the slope is not exactly the same. If we were then to draft a line that would approximate what we think would be the trend line of this set of data, which here is going to be pretty straightforward because the data points line up pretty close to the straight line, then we could just put the trend line in place. And that trend line can give us a lot of information about this data. So we can then once we have the line, get the slope of the line, and we can get the formula for the line. So the formula for the line then would be y equals 29x plus 2,350 in this case. Once we then have the formula of the line, we can determine when this line will hit the vertical axis. And at that point in time, that's going to be the fixed cost, because that will be at the point where we have zero units being produced still have some cost that cost must be the fixed portion of this type of expense. So how do we do that? We set the x to be zero to the line, and then we solve the equation. So y equals 29 times zero plus 2,350. y equals 2,350. So in other words, if we were to extend this line out, then it's going to hit the vertical axis at 2,350. And that then is what we would think would be the fixed portion of this mixed cost. Now, if we were to see a scatter diagram that would be a little bit more crazy in terms of where the points line up, there's not so linear in nature. It might look something like this. We might see scatter diagrams that aren't so linear for whatever reason. And we could do the same type of thing. We just happen to have some data that doesn't quite line up in a linear fashion as we would expect. We could look at this in detail and try to figure out why that happened. We can try to think about what's this kind of outlier type of points that we have in the scatter diagram. But if we take that set of data, then we could still do the same process and add our trend line to what we think is the best representation of that set of data. So we're going to say, hmm, there's the set of data, we're going to put a trend line because we need a linear line here. And now it doesn't line up too closely, or it's not approximating or touching all the dots here, of course, but we're going to still try to create the best line that we can. We could do the similar process with this once we get that trend line. And we will show, if you take a look at the examples, how to do this in Excel, we can plot this, we can make the graph, we can use Excel to give us our trend line, and we can use Excel to help us to get a formula even. Although we can once we have the line, we can get the formula for a line, which in this case is going to be y equals 27.567. It's not exact x plus 2617.9. Once we have that once again, we could take that line and extend it to the vertical axis, we can use a formula to do that, y equals 28x plus 2001 18 2006 18, we could then make x zero and solve for y, which of course would be 2618. So if we extend this out, then we're going to say this is going to be somewhere about 2618, where it hits the vertical axis. And that again is what we would assume would be the fixed portion, because if it's if it's at zero, and we still have 2006 18, that must be our fixed costs, we're going to say, but that's for going to be the fixed portion. And then we can try to estimate or approximate what the slope of the line is with our line, which is going to be our trend line in our scatter diagram.


I'm a faithful Muslim and also I'm a very avid follower of yours. You know, I'm helping, trying to save the soil, how do I navigate these two?  When we die, we go back into the soil. Irrespective of our religion, race, nationality, caste, creed, let's go beyond that and bring solution. If we do the right things in the next fifteen to twenty years, we can turn back the soil in a significant way. If you let it go for another thirty, forty years, they will not be able to do it because the loss will be too big.  So let us see how to protect that for ourselves and for the unborn child.


Welcome to the Baxel webinar number 56. Today's presenter is Adam Hospital for IRB Barcelona, Spain. And he will present about 3DRS, a web-based tool to share interactive representation of three-dimensional molecular structure and molecular dynamics reactor. I will host this webinar together with Stefan Fara from the University of Edinburgh. My name is Alessandra Villa and I work on the Royal Institute of Technology. So, Adam is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona. He is also research software engineering in the Spanish National Institute of Bioinformatics and is leader of a workflow package in BioXL Centre of Excellence. He has developed a series of public web server and database, for example, an MD web, a nucleic acid flex and a big nucleic acid seam. And now he will speak about the new tools that he has developed. Please, Adam. Okay, fantastic. So thanks, Alessandra, for this nice introduction. As Alessandra was saying, my name is Adam Hospital and I'm going to present today a tool which has been developed in the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona. Within the BioXL Centre of Excellence and the tool is called 3DRS, 3D Representation Sharing, and basically is a web-based tool to share interactive representations of 3D by molecular structures and also molecular dynamics trajectories. I've divided the webinar in four main sections. I will give you a brief introduction about the tool, about the idea behind the tool. I'm going to try to convince you of why we have developed this tool and I will show you similar tools for you that I think are really useful tools in our field. I will explain a little bit of how it works, including the main functionalities, how you upload structures, how you edit the representation and how you share the final representation with your colleagues. I will give you a live demo of the web server and I will end up with some conclusions. So starting with the introduction for the tool. This is a true story. It all started when I was reading a paper, not this particular paper. This one is pretty recent from two months ago. But I think that it's a really good example that illustrates very well the idea behind the tool. And this, for example, this paper is demonstrating how a glycan gate controls the opening of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. I'm sure that all of you now already know what the spike protein is from the SARS-CoV-2, but basically is the protein that makes the SARS-CoV-2 virus able to recognize the human host cell. And it does so using this small domain here, which is called receptor binding domain from the spike protein. And in order to do that, it needs to make a kind of a conformational transition, needs to detach and get exposed outside of the spike protein. That means that in this case you can see here a conformation that is completely closed and slowly it is opening till the last conformation which is completely open. When it is exposed, it is able to recognize the human cell and it starts the infection. You can see here also that there's a couple of views, side view, top view, side view and top view from the closed conformation and also the open conformation. I'm showing you that because when I was reading that or a similar paper, it always came to my mind that I really would like to see this kind of static figures in a more dynamic way. I know that there's a lot of different conformations here as you can see, that we can see maybe in a kind of a movie. Also here, top view, side view, we know that we have interactive tools to do that in a more interactive way. And I'm always thinking about this kind of future journals, if you want, from like these ones that appeared in the blockbuster movies in the beginning of the new century, you know, Harry Potter, The Daily Prophet and Minority Report USA today. Of course, we are not there yet in terms of technology, but what we can do maybe is to work a little bit with HTML pages like this one. And maybe we are not talking about the future kind of journals, but we are talking about more recent journals and I will try to convince you about that. Actually, when I was looking at the, I was reading at the paper, I was not reading physical paper, I was reading a PDF like this. I'm sorry, a PDF, an HTML file I was reading directly in the website. And I was scrolling up and down and looking at the figures, as you can see in this GIF. And basically this is something that we are kind of used to that now. Actually, the new generations, they are grow up, knowing how to, how to work with a touch screen, how to click, how to scroll up and down. And this is something that is not the future anymore. This is the present. So we started to analyze, if we want to convert this kind of static figures to something more like live figures or interactive figures, what should I, what should we do and what should we, what do we need for that. And the first thing that we need, of course, it's a three dimensional representation or viewers like these ones. I'm sure that you all know them. They are really famous nowadays, but they were kind of a jump, real jump between the old technology and the new one because they are all working with WebGL libraries. And these are the ones that they are using GPU power, graphical processing unique power from our computers, jgsmall, ngl, molestar, lightmall and this many of them that I'm sure that you know. So this kind of HTML embedded viewers are present. We can use them. And actually we are, we have been using this now for for one of them then GL for years in our website so technology for this part is ready. Interactivity in websites in HTML pages. I think that it is ready as well. You can see here one of one tool that we developed a couple of years ago in the group that basically it's showing you an analysis and one analysis of a long DNA fiber and you can see how the three different sections in the website are completely linked one with the other. This is an ngl viewer that you can zoom or rotate wherever and and you can click on one of these, for example, plots and the particular structure is represented here so we have the interactivity. We have also the 3D viewers and what we also have and this is because we are now in the era of the streaming data. We have a really high bandwidth nowadays. You know, we are all watching series and films and movies in Netflix and kind of streaming platforms and the pandemic also helped a lot on that. And basically, we have everything that we need to try to go from static figures to a live figures we have WebGL tools we have interactivity, and we have a network one. So, can we add, can we try to add interactivity and movement to this kind of static figures and go from the, you know, the future journals that I was introducing before to the present journals let's let's try to do that. Now, using HTML websites. Spoiler alert, we can. And I'm going to show you. Let's see if that works and I am now changing from the presentation mode to an HTML browser. And I'm showing you our publication our paper for the 3D RS tool and if you scroll down here this is HTML again. You will see static figures like this one this figure one and you scroll down more static figures. Another one, but when you reach the results page. Now, this is not a static figure anymore this is a dynamic figure that you can rotate you can zoom. You can see for example in the spike protein the different domains and terminal domains are bd for the three three different chains. You scroll down a little bit. You can see here how an antibody is attached to the receptor binding domain of course you if you want to see that in a little bit more detail you can make it full screen. You can rotate it again. You can see for example the red dots here which are the residues from the South African variant of the virus have many information in the caption of the figure as if you were looking at the figure but in this case interactive figure, not static figures anymore. And if you scroll down a little bit more. You can even see something like this. There is not just a figure that you can interact with but this is also a movie. And in this case, again, a movie of a project related to SARS-CoV-2. This is what you are seeing here is the RNA dependent RNA polymerase from SARS-CoV-2. This is the mechanism of reaction and inhibition of Remdesivir and here you can see how a bond here is slowly broken and another one is forming. You don't have time to maybe see that but I invite you to take a look at the gallery of 3D RS to see this nice movie. Going back to the presentation so we can do that and at that moment we sit for a while and ask ourselves if this was worth developing it just to have live figures. I can tell you that in my opinion this was worth it because I really like the idea. But we also thought about why if we can have something like this which is not just a live figure but also a URL to share the representation with our colleagues. And this makes a lot of sense, for example, for internal meetings. It happened to me a lot of times that I went to present results to my boss and presenting him. For example, taking this figure as an example, we have a two magnesium, the coordination of two magnesiums here. And in one particular snapshot of the MD, something happened and my boss was asking me, okay, I want to see the structure. What happened with the structure? What happened with the coordination? What happened with the atoms and the residues behind it? And I had to look for the trajectory, open BMD, try to build the representation. It took me like 5 to 10 minutes and my boss was no happy with that. And this is even worse when you think about collaborative projects, you're not in the same room. And as an example, think about our bioxial center of excellence with the different European partners when we are sharing information from a particular MD simulation or a structure or model of the structure. It's really useful to have something like a representation already built and a URL to share the representation. And finally, also for representations like this one for webinar for conferences, one thing is to show one particular representation like this one or a video. And another thing is, if you can show the representation and also share the representation with the audience, with just the URL that you can share. And this is, for me, it's really interesting. So, of course, at that moment we thought, okay, let's try to look at the literature and see what is already there. Tools that are already existing with these functionalities and we, of course, we discovered that there was many of these tools. Proteopedia was maybe one of the first ones to integrate the animations of structures and now they are using JS mall. There's also PolyView 3D integrated in a framework of bioinformatics websites. You have this nice IC in 3D viewer that is integrated in the NCBI websites, also 3D bio nodes from Elixir Spain. None of them were really focused on generating representation in a really easy way and then sharing the representation. Although in most of the cases you can have a URL at the end to share the representation, but they were focused on linking the structure with different sequences databases with analysis with any kind of tools. They are really complex, many menus with 1000 different options. That was not exactly what we were looking for. We're looking for something like Web 3D mall. It was the most similar to what we were thinking at that moment. But you see that this is easier, at least in a graphical interface than the other ones. But it was missing, sadly, a couple of functionalities that for us were crucial. One of them is we wanted to be able to upload the structures models, the structures, theoretical structures, snapshots coming from molecular dynamic simulations. And in this case you can only use PDB structures coming directly from the protein database. And of course the other functionality is the possibility to add molecular dynamics trajectories that was crucial for us. It was not implemented at that moment in any of these tools. So we thought that maybe we can start developing our own tool and we started with the 3D RS development. How our 3D RS works, these are the main functionalities of our tool, five main functionalities. It is important to highlight that one of the main objectives was to make an easy tool to generate 3D and also 4D by molecular representations. And for that we used state-of-the-art technology, single-page application, web-based graphical user interface. That means that with a single web application what you have is a seamless user experience. It's like that you are working with a standalone program, no reloads, no saving buttons, you will see that in the demo. And to make things even easier we used the BMD-like selections and representations. Anyone familiar with BMD will understand in just two minutes how to generate new selections and new representations with this tool. And you will see again that the tool is able to represent and show molecular dynamics trajectories. And for that is using MDSERF technology. It's able to not just represent one single structure at a time, but you can upload multiple structures at the same time. And again another of the main objectives of the tool, it generates a persistent URL to share the by molecular representation with your colleagues. After that we added a new functionality, which is the representation forking. And you can think about that as the forking that you can do in GitHub repositories for software. And that means that you can generate a copy of the whole representation and then start modifying your own copy of the representation. And this is how it works. It's a cycle of 3D-RS. You start editing your own representation when you're happy with the representation that you have built. You can share the representation and the final user. If she wants to modify the representation, the representation can be forked and then they have their own copy of the representation that can be extended, modified in the addition and then shared again. I was highlighting before that the graphical user interface is really easy. And here this is an example. There is a launch section, launch menu here. And you can launch from a PDF file or you can upload your own structure or structures, drag and drop really easy. And after uploading your own trajectory, you can start editing. This is the cycle again. This is the addition mode of the tool. And this is the sharing mode of the tool. You start with the addition when you are happy with the representation, you share it and you enter into the shared mode with a persistent link. If you want, if the final colleague that is looking at the representation wants to fork the representation, it makes a copy. With the fork and starts again with the addition mode, but starting from the representation that has been shared before. So I will explain a little bit about the addition mode now. As I was telling before, it's the selection and representations, they are VMD-like. That means that just a reminder for all the ones that are familiar with the VMD and also for the ones that have never used VMD. You will see that this is really easy. You have the idea of representation. You can create new representations here. All these lines are new representation. If you double-click the representation, the representation is hidden. If you double-click again, the representation is shown. You can of course delete. Every time you add a new representation, you can modify the coloring method, the drawing method. Of course you can modify the selected atoms for the representation. And this is mostly everything in the selection and representation part. And then you have here the possibility to add a molecular dynamics trajectory. Here you have a number of frames. Here you have a control player that you can go forward and backwards. And you can modify the step and also the speed. So this is exactly what more or less what we reproduced in our graphical user interface. Here you can see our addition mode and it is divided in different blocks. The first block is the representation block where we can create a new representation and modify the molecular representation and the color scheme. And in the second block, we can select the fragment of the structure that we want to represent with this kind of representation. So both windows are completely linked. Here you select the fragment of the molecule and here you represent, you change the representation. Of course in the middle you have the stage panel. You have some useful tools here in the toolbar. And you have the final button to share the representation when you're happy with the representation. In a little bit more detail, you can select here in the selection window. You see here the selection window is the right part of the graphical user interface. You can select by chains. You can select by residues here from the sequence of the, in this case, the protein. You can select also heteroatoms, ions, waters, all that is included in the structure that you have uploaded. You can also have the possibility to click here and make a custom selection, and this is using NGL syntax. If you click here, I will do that in the demo. You will see that NGL has a really powerful syntax for selection of particular fragments of the structure. It is quite similar to BMD again, so it's easy. You have also the possibility to select clicking on the particular residues or different residues in the stage. So if you click on a particular residue in the structure represented in the stage panel, it is also selected and added to your selection that you are working with. After having all the selection ready, then you can modify the molecular representation and the color scheme. The molecular representation and color schemes that are available are the ones that you can imagine, the ones that are also integrated in BMD, and also in NGL, backbone, ballistic, cartoon, you know, all of them, and also the color scheme, by chain, by B factor, by element, the typical ones. You have also these small buttons here to hide the representation, such as in BMD, edit the representation name, clone a particular representation, and open the label settings. You have here the label settings that you can modify the name and the size and the color. But this is everything. There is nothing else than that. It's really easy, believe me, and I will try to convince you during the demo session about that. The last thing, the last block from the demo mode is the toolbar where you can, well, you have useful functionalities such as reload the scene, center, change the background color, go full screen, superpose the different structures, modify the camera type from perspective to orthographic. And as I was telling you at the beginning, it has also the possibility to upload trajectory files, in this case, MD files in these formats, and it is done thanks to the MD serve MD trajectory server that is implemented behind the tool. The demo 500 megabytes size, of course, you need to reduce a bit your trajectory if you want to share it, but we have tried with many different trajectories and I can tell you that 500 megas. It's enough to represent a trajectory nowadays, of course, reduced. Of course, you have trajectory settings, you can change the range of the trajectory that you want to expose. You can change the step the interpolation from one frame to another, the timeout which is basically the speed of the trajectory. You can make the trajectory loop or rock, and you can make the representation when you share the representation, you can make it out of place so the dynamic simulation will start playing directly without the player button. And finally, there is the sharing button. And this is important once you're ready, and you're happy with your representation you click on sharing and you can take a look at the final draft and if you're happy you can click on share the project. You can enable fork, this is important. If you enable the fork, your colleagues will be able to continue copy your representation and modify and add or extend the representation always making a copy. If you deactivate this, then there's no possibility to copy the representation, you can make the project public or private, if you make the project public it will be included in our list of projects in the homepage of 3DRS so that all the community can take a look at the different representations. When you click on the share project, you will have this short URL which is basically the link that you need to share the representation. You have also the possibility to copy this embed HTML snippet in your HTML and this is what allows you to make these live figures, such as the one that I have presented you at the beginning of the presentation with our live paper. And you have also the QR code if you want to try it's nice to use the smartphone to look at the representation of your macromolecule. Remember this is a cycle. I have explained you the addition and the share. We are now going to take a look very briefly to the shared mode once you have a persistent link what you can see. The main difference between the addition and the share mode basically is that in the share mode you cannot modify the representation. So the representation is there as the author of the representation wants, including the zoom including the rotation of course you can then modify the zoom and the rotation but you cannot modify the selections, the representations, the labels, the background color, anything like that. So it's a shared mode, it's not an addition. You can still interact with the scene and you can still see the atom and residue information, this small box that appears at the bottom of the interface when you hover over one of the atoms of the structure. What is new in this case is the figure caption, the trajectory player if you are sharing an MD representation, specific tools for the toolbar and the forking process. And this is what I'm going to tell you now in just a couple of minutes. Those are the blocks for the shared mode, you have the stage panel again, the main representation you have a figure caption, which reproduces a caption of a figure in a paper, but in this case a little bit more interactive so you have bold and italic type of letters you have also links that you can also of course add to the figure caption. You have the trajectory player here with a slider here that you can control, you have a play forward and reverse, you have the toolbar that in this case is a little bit different, you can take a screenshot, you can get the embed code to add it in an HTML, but you cannot modify the background color for example you cannot modify the perspective. And finally you have the forking button here. This is almost everything that I wanted to tell you about the 3D areas now I think it's time for a demo, which is always nice to see how it works in a live session. I have here prepare one PDV ID remember this is the launch menu from the tool. I'm going to put here one PDV which is the EGFR file, epidermal growth factor receptor, the kinase domain. In this case this one as you can see here is the one that is complexed with Kefitini before not the FDA approved drugs, you know the EGFR is really popular, because it's used, it is related to many cancer diseases and this is one that is used in these cases, Kefitini. You have a default representation when you start using the tool. It's this default representation here it cannot be changed it's just for you as a to have a reference of everything that your structure contains here you can see that there's water molecules there's a sodium ion. There's the Kefitini small molecule there's the protein everything you can hide the representation anytime you want, but I recommend you to use this representation as a reference you just can modify the opacity the transparency and keep it there. And then you can start creating new representation this case I will create the new Kefitini representation for the small molecule. When you started representing there's a lot of information here saying that there's a new representation created. You can close that you have the new representation which is now now contains everything all the different. Atoms of the structure but if you go to the sequence, you can go and select any residue that you want for the protein you can select any other atom that you want you see that is highlighted in the stage panel. You can also select the ions in this case the sodium ions and finally you can select the waters. You can select one by one or you can select all of them in this button here, you can view the sequence in an extra window here is the protein you can also select by secondary structures. But in this case we are interested in selecting the at the bottom this one here I can center the view this button and I can use the click option to select now. It says that these at the bottom structure has been added to the representation so now we have the representation we can take a look at that. We can modify sorry we can modify the molecular representation to licorice now that it's just this small molecule that is represented give it a little bit more of radius so that we want to highlight it a little bit more and modify the color scheme element. You can always go to the default representation and deactivate and see exactly the representation that we are working with. Okay, I think that now I have the representation that I want. I'm going to now generate a new representation I'm here a GFR representation. And in this case what I'm going to do is to select all the residues of the protein just the protein I can click here and select all the residues all the residues has been selected. And now I'm going to modify this to cartoon. And again, if you go to the default and deactivate that you see that there's no waters there's no audience just the protein and the legal. It's okay then I go back to the protein I will lower down the opacity because I'm really interested in the active center and not just a protein. So now I'm going to create a new representation active center. And now I'm going to use the custom selection. And I'm going to say okay I know that yes if we go here. You can see the syntax language selection language of angel so you can see that is really powerful there's many different options that you have one of the options to select is using the residue name. So, I will use the resume name to select the get fit in it that I know that is called it. I are you see in the bottom of the page you always have information from the items that you are hovering. So I select that. And actually I'm not interested in just this one I'm interested in the active center so all the residues that are in a certain distance from the legal. So five Armstrong's in this case I can modify that but it's okay. I am interested in the whole reduce surrounding this. And now I have the representation of the surrounding residues I want to modify the representation to ball and sticks to element I kid who. And I will now reduce a little bit the radius because I'm interested in seeing all the different atoms. Okay, I did something wrong I selected something that I shouldn't let me do that again. Don't worry. I just wanted to if this happens there is a button here which is really nice which is enable navigation mode because that makes you let's you navigate through the scene and click on the different. Atoms and residues without affecting the selection. And, for example, you have water molecules. I hope that you can see the water molecules here that are selected as being on the active side. Okay, now I'm going to. Let's disable that to clone. What is the clone clone the current representation because I want to have the same active center but with another representation in this case I want to represent it with surface. I'm going to put here a uniform color and something like, like this. And again I will play a bit with the opacity and transparency I think that's enough and this way I have the active center highlighted I have all the residues from the active center. I have a small molecule and I can see the different interactions. And this is nice because you actually can interact and can rotate and consume when you share the representation the only thing that you have that I have done is to highlight the active center. Okay, that's enough. Now I'm going to add a caption with the project settings. This is the bio Excel webinar. EGFR protein, Excel, 3D RS webinar here maybe. EGFR protein, the pdb code is the 4WKQ. And I can add a link that I have here, just like this. And I will make this bold for example. This is saving and you are not clicking any button to save. And you can close that and now we are going to the share button and let's see the draft, the final draft. So this is the final draft that you're going to share if you want. You have here the caption that you can expand. Of course you can rotate. You can zoom. You can go back and reload the representation. You can spin. You can make it full screen. You can take a picture of the representation. And if you're not happy with that as a final user and you want to, I don't know, take a look at the different interactions here or make a bond. I don't know if we have time for that. No, don't have time, but you can fork. The project, well, this is a draft, sorry. I need to, this is a draft. You need to enable the fork and make the project private in this case. I can share the project and now here you have the final short URL that you can copy and share. If I open this one, this is a final representation shared. And now in this case I can fork the representation. And if you fork the representation, you basically go back to the addition mode. And here you have everything. All the different representations that I have created. You can modify, you can add more. And remember this is a copy of the original representation and you can make your own representation. Okay. I think that's all for the demo. Let's use the last five minutes to go through the conclusions. I just presented you a tool, 3DRS, that it's making easy and this is important, the generation and sharing of living interactive 3D and also 4D with trajectories, custom representations. It is designed with the state of the art technology, single page application. It has these selection and representations, VMD-like, so they are really easy to understand and it works with NGL behind to efficiently show the 3D representations and using MD-Serve to efficiently stream the monochromatic data. I invite you to go to the gallery and take a look at the different examples that we produced. They are really, I think they are really nice. You can fork them, all of them are forkable and you can take ideas from that and from these ideas. I want you to try and play with the tool. And as I will tell you in the next slide, if you make this public, this will be even better. Remember that you have extended, really extended documentation in read the docs that you can take a look with all the functionalities, shortcuts, keyboard shortcuts. It is much more than what I can explain in just one webinar behind 3DRS. And what I was telling you one minute ago, please, when you try and play with this, if you can make your project public, this will be added to our list of projects in the homepage of 3DRS so that all our community can take a look at your representations and see what you can do with the tool. And of course, any type of feedback would be really welcome. I mean, European comments, results, suggestions, ideas, all of that will be really welcome for us. With that, I would like to close thanking, of course, to my group leader in the molecular modeling and bioinformatics, Modesto Roscoe from Ayeri Barcelona and to the very, very talented full-stack developer, Janice Bayari, who did everything that you have seen in this webinar from the database that is behind that to the installation on the MDSERF and all the technology and also the graphical user interface. And I would be really happy to take questions for you and discuss about 3DRS. Thanks for being here and for your attention. Thanks for a great talk, Adam. It was very nice, very clear. Yeah, so we'll do the Q&A now. So some of you have written in questions, so I will read them out. So if you type a question, I will read it. If you want to speak a question, then I think we've now enabled the raise hand feature on Zoom. So if you click raise hand, then I can unmute you and you can say your question out loud. So it's up to you. So the first question we have is, so where is the information stored when we share a persistent link? Do we need to upload the trajectory via the internet to your servers? Yes, well, there's two answers, I think, to this question. The first one is all the information is stored directly to a Mongo database that is behind the tool. That means that we are basically everything is directly saved in the Mongo database while you are interacting with the scene. As you have seen, there's no save button, so everything is automatically saved there. This is one thing, so everything that you need to reproduce the representation is there. With the exception of the structures and the trajectories, structures are saved in disk, in usual disk, because we don't want the structures to be replicated when you fork the different scenes, so we are using links to the same structure and trajectories are saved to this MDSERF application, which again, it uses a disk, but it is a usual disk, but it is streaming the MD trajectory frame by frame. That's how it is so efficient to use it in tools such as this. This is MDSERF that is doing that. I hope that I have answered everything. So next, do the forks work like GitHub? So can you do a pull request if you change something? Not really because actually you're not changing the master in this case, you're not changing the original, but you are making a copy. If you are forking in this case, it means that you're making a copy of the representation, and after doing this fork, you are working with your own representation, starting from the representation that it was generated before. So no needs of pull requests in this case. So can a user extracts data, i.e. the structures or the trajectories from the 3DRS representation? No, and there's a reason for that. And basically it's because we didn't want to do that. What we wanted to do is to share the representation and not the data. We are working in different tools to share molecular dynamics, simulation data, where you can extract a particular frame from the trajectory. You can download the whole trajectory. You can download using the rest API fragments of the trajectory, but this is not the tool for that. This tool is just to share representation. Okay, so next one is about, so I think not having private projects is a great open science stance. Could you comment a little bit on the data storage policy? So where is it kept and for how long? Yeah, we thought a lot about this. All data is stored now in our own premises. This is a Mongo database with horizontal scaling. You know what that means that we can add new machines and we have replication, we have sharding. That means that data is kind of secure there. If we lose one node, one disk, we can still recover everything. And after that, we also have backup policies. But this is in our own premises. And the idea is, if this server is popular enough, if we have many, you know, if it's successful, let's say, then we can think about moving all of that infrastructure to a more robust infrastructure. Let's say BSC, for example, because we are working with them. But now it's everything in our own premises. It's, you know, it's secure for all the things that I have told you, but we are thinking about moving if needed to a more robust infrastructure. Yeah. And in the time now we don't have time. Well, you've seen when you create the representation, if you don't share the representation, it is removed from our server. We are not saving everything. But once you share and you generate the persistent link, we don't have expiration date now. So that means that we will keep that here happily forever. So can you render when you save the figures? So I guess like when you render with VMD? Not for the animation, but yes for the representation. So you have a take a screenshot that comes with the NGL. There is nothing that we have programmed. The NGL has this functionality. What we can modify, well, what we modified is the resolution. We have put a very good resolution so that you can take a very good screenshot from the representation. But there's no, as far as I know, there's no way to extract movies from the animations. If one protein does not have a PDB file, then can I use Alpha Fold 2's prediction of that protein's PDB format? After that, can I use it in 3DRS? So I guess. Yes, as Alpha Fold 2, if I'm not wrong, it is giving you PDB format files. You can use this PDB to upload this in 3DRS. I was thinking we have not integrated the PDBs generated from Alpha Fold 2, but we can do that. We have done this in another tool. Maybe it's something that we can think about. So can the representation be embedded into another web pages? Yes, you can do that with these embedded snippets that I was telling you during the demo and I think also in the presentation. Well, if you want more information about that, there's in the documentation, but when you share, when you click on the share button, you get three different ways to share the representation. One is a URL, short URL. Another one is HTML to embed, a snippet of HTML to embed that in your HTML website. And the third one is the QR code. Okay. So I guess, so this question says, is there a cap on the file size? I think you said was 500 megabytes for the trajectories. Correct. So is that something you're going to sort of keep or I guess, does people run longer simulations and bigger ones? You might need to. Yes, but yeah, I also commented that, of course, we have much, much larger trajectory files than 500 megabytes. But if you can reduce this structure to something like my 500 megabytes, you can reproduce very nicely, I would say trajectories that are now generated nowadays. So are any of these interactive figures allowed to be published in papers at the moment or I guess are you in, have you been talking to any journal websites who would allow you to embed these HTML links? That's a really good question. But well, the first idea was exactly that to talk about that to the different journal editors. We have started the process not really successful so far. It seems that it's complicated to jump from now to the future. You know, I think that we will go slowly go there. You can take a look and you will find in the literature different journals that are accepting some kind of interactivity live journals. They are slowly appearing, but in our case, it is 3D RS is not yet implemented in any of the journals, but we will fight a little bit for that. I guess this is a similar question. Is there a feature to represent these visualizations in presentation software? So I guess that sort of PowerPoints or Google slides. No, there's no way. I had to make gifts of all of that. Again, I think with HTML you can do almost everything nowadays. I'm sure that the embed code will be, I don't know now maybe there's something and we will need our main developer for that. He knows, but if it is not there, I'm sure that in months from now we will have something to use this embed HTML and use it as a presentation. I don't know, but I'm sure that there will be something soon. So can net CDF trajectories be represented by this tool? I guess to an extension to that, what file formats can you supply molecular dynamics trajectories in? To be honest, I don't remember, but if you let me go back to the slide, I guess that you're still seeing the presentation. Yeah, yeah we are. I have one for MDSERF somewhere, sharing and trajectories. And you can see here it's really small, but is XTC, DCD, TRR, BIMPOS and net CF files are accepted. Again, this is not something that we prepare. This is something that is in the MDSERF technology. But I think, you know, nowadays you can compare from one to another very easily, so it shouldn't be a problem. So then we have another question. So what's the role of the server in your implementation? The rendering appears to run client-side, couldn't the whole thing be serverless? Well, I guess it could be. The only thing is that we have to use, you know, the new functionalities from the new web browsers that gives you a kind of database, client-side database. But I think that, well, we discussed about this and we thought that it's more secure and it's clear to have something in server-side. We have control of our Mongo database. It can be really scalable. And of course it's more flexible than using just the memory of your browser that is limited, of course. But yeah, that's a nice suggestion. We can explore that. Nice. So that's what's going on. We have some more questions. Which is good. So is there a plans to implement a gif maker feature, a gif maker feature so you could easily generate gif images from representations using 3D RS? Not now. Well, I was thinking that if you have an extension of Chrome browser or something like that to generate the gif is as easy as to use that. I don't know if this will add value to our server, but we can explore this depending on the difficulty of that. If it's really difficult, I will be happy to just forward our users to the gif maker as an extension of any browser. Okay. So I have a question actually. Have you sort of, so I guess there are lots of web browsers and lots of machines out there. Have you tested which web browsers generally work? We have tested with the more popular ones. You know, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, we had some problems with Safari, but we solved them. We still, we still know that there's some issues with particular browsers. We have also tried that. So I think that we are covered with the most popular ones. Okay, so I think that's all the questions we have now. So if anyone has anything else then feel free to send them in or raise a hand. In the meantime, maybe we can announce the new webinar. Okay, so the next webinar will be the 9th of November. And that we will have Charlotte Dean, and she will speak about computational design, therapeutic, anti-building combined in moon report, data and structural information. So you are welcome to register in the BioXL from the BioXL page you find the link to the webinar. And if no other questions are popping up, I would like to thanks again Adam for the wonderful presentation and all the attendees for attending and for making a lot of active discussion. Thank you very much. And we close here the webinar. Thank you.