from the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer Conference, Spring, San Francisco. It's theCUBE. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer Spring event. We go to Chief Date Officer. This is Chief Analytics Officer. There's so much activity around big data and analytics. And this one is really focused on the practitioners. Relatively small event and we're excited to have another practitioner here today. And it's Kevin Bates. He's the VP of Enterprise Data Strategy Execution for Fannie Mae. Kevin, welcome. It's a mouthful. Thank you. Yeah, you got it all. You got strategy, which is good. And then you've got execution. And you've been at a big Fannie Mae for 15 years according to your LinkedIn. So you've seen a lot of changes. So give us kind of your perspective as this kind of trend keeps rolling down the track. Okay. Yeah, so it's been a wild ride. I've been there, like you say, for 15 years. When I started off there, I was writing code, working on their underwriting systems. And I've been in different divisions, including the credit loss division, which had a pretty exciting couple of years back around 2008. More exciting than you care to. Well, there was certainly a lot going on. Data has been sort of a consistent theme throughout my career. So the data at Fannie Mae, not unlike most companies, is really the blood that kind of keeps the entire organism functioning. So over the last few years, I've actually moved into the enterprise data division of the company where I have responsibility for delivery, operations, platforms, the whole nine yards. And that's really given me kind of a unique view of what the company does. It's given me the opportunity to touch most of the different business areas and learn a lot about what we need to do better. So how's the perspective changed around the data? Because before data was almost a liability because you had to store it and keep it and manage it and take it care of it. Now really it's a core asset. And as we see with valuations up and down 101, probably the driver of some of the crazy valuations that you see in a lot of the company. So how's that attitude changed? And what have you done to kind of take advantage of that shift in attitude? Sure, it's a great question. So I think the data has always been the lifeblood and the key ingredient to success for the company. But the techniques of managing the data have changed for sure. And with that, the culture has the change and how you think about the data has to change. So if you go back 10 years ago, all of our data was stored in our data center, which means that we had to pay for all those servers and every time data kept getting bigger, we had to buy more servers and it almost became like a bad thing, right? That's what I say, almost a liability. That's right. And as we've certainly started adopting the cloud and the technologies associated with the cloud, you may step into that thinking, okay, now I don't have to manage my own data center. I'll let Amazon or whoever do it for me. But it's much more fundamental than that because as you start embracing the cloud and now storage is no longer a limitation and compute is no longer a limitation, the numbers of tools that you use is no longer really a limitation. So as an organization, you have to change your way of thinking from I'm going to limit the number of business intelligence tools that my users can take advantage of to how can I support them to use whatever tools they want? Right, right. So the mentality around the data, I think really goes to how can I make sure the right data is available at the right time with the right quality checks that everybody can say, yep, I can hang my hat on that data, but then get out of the way and let them self serve from there. It's very challenging. There's a lot of new tools and technologies involved, but that's really the change. And that's a huge piece of the old innovation game, right? It's have the right data for the right people with the right tools and let more people play with it. But you've got this other pesky thing like governance. You've got a lot of legal restrictions and regulations and compliance issues. So how do you fold that into opening up the goodies, if you will? So I think one effort we have is we're building a platform we call the Enterprise Data Infrastructure. So for that 85% of data at Fannie Mae, what we do is loans.  There's a pretty finite set of data areas that are pretty much consistent at Fannie Mae and everybody uses those data sets. So taking those and calling them enterprise data sets that will be centralized, they will be presented to our customers in a uniform way with all the data quality checks in place. That's a big effort. It means that you're standardizing your data. You're performing a consistent data quality approach on that data and then you're making it available through any number of consumption patterns. So that could be applications needed. So I'm integrating applications. It could be warehousing, analytics, but it's the same data and it comes from that promise that we've tagged at Enterprise Data and we've done all that good stuff to make sure that it's good, that it's healthy, that we know where we stand. So if it's not a good data set, we know how to tag it and make it such. For all the other data around, we have to let our business partners be accountable for how they're enriching that data and innovating and so forth. But governance is not a, it is, I think in the past, another part of your question, governance used to be more of a slow everybody down. But if we can incorporate governance and have implied governance in the platform and then allow the customers to self serve off of that platform, governance becomes really that universal good, that thing that allows you to be confident that you can take the data and innovate with that data. So I'm curious how much of the value add now comes from the not Enterprise Data, the outside, the core, which you've had forever. I mean, I don't know if you know, I have a hard number, but what's kind of the increasing importance and the increasing overlay of that exterior data until your Enterprise Data to drive more value out of the Enterprise Data? So that Enterprise Data, like I say, maybe the 85%, it's just the facts. These are the loans we brought in, here's how we can aggregate risk or we can aggregate what we call UPB or like the value of our loans. That is pretty generic and it's intended to be. The third party data sets that our business partners may bring in that they bump up against that data can give them strategic advantages. Also the data that those businesses generate, our business lines generate within their local applications, which we would not call Enterprise Data, that's very much of their special sauce and something that the broader organization doesn't need. Those things are all really what our data scientists and our business people combine to create the value added reports that they use for decisioning and so forth. And then I'm curious kind of how the big data in the analytics environment has changed from the old day where you had some PhDs and some really super bright guys that ran really super hard algorithms and it was on mahogany row and you put in a request and maybe from down high someday, you'll get your request versus really trying to enable a much broader set of analysts to have access to that data with a much broader set of tools as you said enabling a bunch of tools versus picking kind of the one or two winners that are very expensive, you got to limit the seeds, et cetera. How's that changed kind of the culture of the company as well as the way that you were able to deliver products and deliver new applications, if you will. So I think that's a work in progress. So I have to say we have, we still have all the PhDs and they still really call the shots. They're the ones that get the call from the executive vice president and they wanna see something today that tells them what decision they should make. We have to enable them. They were enabled in the past by having people basically hustle to get them what they need. The big change we're trying to make now is to present the data in a common platform where they really can take it and run with it. So there is a change in how we're delivering our systems to make sure that we have the lowest level of granularity, that we have real time data, there's no longer waiting. And the technology tools that have come out in the last 10 years have really enabled that. So it's really just about implementing that, making it available to all those PhDs. There's another population of analysts that is now empowered where they were not before. The guys that suffered just using Excel or like access databases that were the, I would call them not the power users, but kind of the empowered analysts, the ones who they know the data, they know how to query data, but they're not hardcore quants and they're not developers. Those guys have access to a plethora of tools now that were never available before that allow them to wrangle data from 20 different data sets, align it, ask questions of it. And they're really focused on operations and just running our systems in a smoother and lower cost way. So I think the granularity, the timing and support for that kind of explosion of tools while we'll still have the big, heavy SAS and R users that are the quants that, I think that's the combination. It's sort of everything has to be supported and we'll support it better with higher quality, with more recent data. But the culture change isn't going to happen even in a few years. It'll be a longer term path for large organizations to really see maybe possibilities where they can restructure themselves based on technology. Right now the technologies are early enough and young enough that I think they're gonna wait and see. Right. Well, I was gonna say, because obviously you guys have a ton of legacy systems and you've got all these tools, but you've got that core set. As you said, your enterprise data that doesn't really change that much. That's right. I mean, what's the objective kind of down the road? Are you looking to expand on that core set? Is that just such a fixture that you just can't do anything with it in terms of flexibility? I mean, where do you go from here? If we were to sit down three years from now, what are we gonna be talking about? So two things. One, I hope I'll be looking back with excitement at my huge success in transforming those legacy systems. In particular, we have what we call the legacy warehouses that have been around well over 20 years that are limited and have not been updated because we've been trying to retire them for many years. Folding all of that into my core enterprise data infrastructure that will be fully aligned on terminology, on near real time, all of those things. That will be a huge success. I'll be looking back and glowing about how we did that. Excellent. And now we've empowered the business with that core data set that is uniquely available on this platform. They don't need to go anywhere else to find it. The other thing I think we'll see is enabling analysts to utilize cloud-based assets and really be successful working both with our on-premises data center, our own data center supported applications, but also starting to move their heavy running, quantitative modeling, and all the sorts of things they do into the data lake, which will be cloud-based, and really enabling that as a true kind of empowerment for them so that they can use a different set of tools. They can move all of that kind of heavy lifting and the servers that they sometimes bring down right now move it into an environment where they can really manage their own performance. I think those are going to be the two big changes three years from now that will feel like we're in kind of the next generation. All right, Kevin Bates projecting the future. So we look forward to that day and thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. Thank you. All right, thanks. All right, he's Kevin, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from the Carinium Chief Analytics Officer event in San Francisco. Thanks for watching.


Good afternoon and welcome to today's energy seminar. It's a great delight for me to introduce our speaker today, Joel Swisher, who back in the 1990-ish was sitting in your seats, and I was lucky enough to be one of his many advisors. Normally seeing a topic like his, the Four E's, energy, engineering, education, and everything, I would be worried if there was actually anything interesting in a substance to be talked about. But following Joel's career where, as a grad student, he was probably the first person that actually did a very serious study of carbon offset markets. Now everybody's doing that, but he was the first one. He left here after his PhD and was instrumental, I claim, in Rocky Mountain Energy's movement, to direct, more direct and active engagement with the business community and as well was well known for that. And since then he's moved to Western Washington University and is the director of energy studies there, and I've just got a chance to get caught up a little bit with them. So I'm anxious to see what new adventures he's been on. I think he's going to talk about those today. So without further ado, Joel Swisher, thank you, Joel. And right now, today, as we speak, I've been around Stanford a long time. This picture shows the demolition ten years ago of the Turman Engineering Center that was built and opened my junior year. So if that doesn't make you feel bad. I'd like to start, though, by honoring some heroes in the energy circle around Stanford, starting with my long-time friend and colleague, the late great Carl Knapp, who was a pioneer in the solar photovoltaic industry, worked at the city of Palo Alto, buying wind power back when it was hard to buy wind power, then later worked at Stanford alongside Jane Woodward, who had and continues to support just about everything in energy education here at Stanford. And among other things, Carl led the courses that took field trips to China, and that was a picture extractive from that. I'd also like to acknowledge another long-time friend and mentor, now retired, Professor Gil Masters. And Gil taught at Stanford from the early 70s until just a year or two ago when he retired. He taught the Intro Environmental Engineering course, taught Intro Electrical Engineering. He also started and taught for many years. Really his signature course, CE176, which became CE176A and B, Energy Efficient Buildings and Renewable Electricity. And I'll come back to that course again. But Gil was inspiration for thousands of students who went through his courses and his mentorship and went out into the energy profession. If you bump into anyone in the field who's been at Stanford and say, well, you know, how did you get into this? They'll say something like, yeah, well, I was a mechanical engineering or computer science major. And then I took Gil's class. And so really one of our heroes. And I'll mention his course again. I hope it's not boring, but I want to recount a little bit of history, including my own history, partly to set the stage and to kind of explain why I think that I know something about the topic I'm going to discuss. You all can judge for yourself, of course. Back when I was an undergraduate, energy became an issue that we talked about because of the energy crises and the concern that we might run out of the resource. And whether we could keep up with demand or whether we'd have to keep waiting in line to buy fuel. And Elvis met the president. That was a landmark, too. And around that time, people started asking questions about other energy paths and started thinking about energy efficiency, including the late great physicist. I think he was Enrico Fermi's last PhD student, Art Rosenfeld, at the University of California, Berkeley, later in the Energy Commission for the State of California, Ralph Cavana, still active as an attorney at Natural Resources Defense Council and architect of many California energy policies. California has been in the vanguard, of course, of energy policy going back to the first Jerry Brown administration, back when he had hair and was dating Linda Ronstadt, the singer. And then also our colleague, Emery Lovens, who came up with the idea of the soft path, as he called it, considering energy efficiency as a resource, he, too, met the president. Any resemblance with Elvis is purely coincidental. Emery talked about the idea of energy efficiency in the context of questioning the conventional wisdom at the time around energy supplies. And at the time, the expectation was that energy demand would follow something like that red curve. And that we would have to chase that with ever growing energy supplies from oil, coal, nuclear power, what have you. And he asked a couple of basic questions. First, what in the world are we going to use all that energy for? And second, is couldn't we do more with less and maybe follow a curve more like the blue line? And I got to tell you, at the time, that was absolute heresy and he was attacked from every direction. You remember John.  And in hindsight, it's interesting to see that the actual U.S. energy demand and consumption follows the solid black line. This isn't quite updated. It's continued to decline slightly since the last update there. And so it's still tracking a little bit above that blue line that Emery had projected. And, you know, you might argue that he was right for all the wrong reasons, but it's kind of hard to argue that those critics were that wrong for all the right reasons. But the key thing was that Emery introduced the idea of energy efficiency as a resource and the idea that technology and innovation in policy and in business models to support that technology could actually help us deliver ever more services with the same or less energy resources. So at the time, I was an undergrad and after taking Gill Masters environment class, I signed up for his brand new first edition of CE176. The textbook was there on the lower right. And the topic of the course was what we called alternative energy. It was about energy efficient buildings and solar heating and that sort of a thing, which didn't really fit with something you could describe in an energy catalog at the time. And so the title of the course, and this is on my transcript, it was Designs for Alternative Lifestyles. That shows you how mainstream and how accepted the ideas of alternative energy were at the time. Gill went on to, with his colleagues, update the book. That's the gray image in the middle. And then more recently, his recent editions of the CE176A course has used this textbook that he coauthored with a former student. And I shamelessly stole not only the material from the book, but also his teaching materials for a course that I introduced up at Western Washington. I'll talk about that in a minute. John said I came back, did a second tour at Stanford as a PhD student. I like to say I did IPER before IPER. I did a dissertation on carbon offsets where I analyzed both the emission reductions of an electric utility in the United States and a set of conservation and forestry projects in Central America to consider the supply and demand side of a potential offset transaction. At the time, this cartoon appeared in the San Jose Mercury that pretty well encapsulated both the promise and the pitfalls of international carbon trading. And I remember John saying at my defense, you know, if you'd drawn that cartoon, I'd sign your dissertation just for that. But I didn't, so I had to do all the number crunching. Eventually they passed me anyway. So later I was working at the UN Environment Program and still very much interested in this idea of efficiency as a resource and in integrating energy systems. And I worked with a Brazilian colleague and another former Stanford student, Bob Renlinger, who I think works for Apple these days on a textbook on integrated electric resource planning, integrated meaning, integrating the supply side and the demand side and breaking through the, again, conventional wisdom of planning is just about supply chasing demand and trying to keep up. So let me, this is complicated. So most of the decade of the 2000s I spent at Rocky Mountain Institute, which is the nonprofit organization in Colorado that was co-founded by Emory Lovens. And again, we were co-conspirators there. And the mission there is really all about energy efficiency as a resource and finding ways to advance that resource with serious clients in industry, buildings, government, et cetera. One of the most impactful things we did was, I think it was 2003, we convened what we call the design charrette. It's basically an intense interdisciplinary brainstorming workshop, kind of like a hackathon, I suppose, except not necessarily focusing on software. It's actually just down the road here in San Jose. Looking at energy consumption in data centers, which in the early days of data centers, which were basically warehouses full of servers, so they basically designed them like big warehouses and with the energy systems to match. And the concern was that these things were so energy inefficient and the demand was growing so fast that before long, data centers would be using the entire electricity production of the United States. And so we found that, A, that wasn't really true, but B, that there was potential with just off-the-shelf technology to improve the energy efficiency of data centers by almost in order of magnitude, I mean like 88, 89%. And that's without any fancy measures like software virtualization that could take the efficiency improvements even farther. And many of those recommendations and strategies were adopted pretty swiftly and almost all voluntarily by the industry, led by firms like Hewlett-Packard and others. And so we really felt like we had moved the ball down the field on data center efficiency. Another project, we were thinking about the integration of energy systems and at the time people were talking, starting to talk about the smart grid and the smart house and the smart car. And I thought, well you know, the place where the grid meets the house and the car is your garage. So we probably just need a smart garage. So we started calling the project the smart garage and we were looking at the potential for connecting grid, building and vehicle through electric vehicles and charging and the fact you've got these grid connected batteries that are generally not on the road 23 out of 24 hours of the day and the potential for those interconnections to make it possible to make the vehicle way cleaner and more efficient. And the grid cleaner and more efficient by adding connection with that storage element and making it easier for example to integrate renewable sources. And I have to admit at the time I was running around talking to utilities about things like vehicle to grid technology and so forth, a little premature. But still the integration idea I think was pretty sound. So after that I came back to Stanford for another tour teaching part time and I did a couple of courses. One was building on that utility planning theme, did a course on power sector resource planning and co-taught that with a colleague named Ren Orens. Ren was the co-founder of a prominent consulting firm E3, Energy and Environmental Economics. And one of the students in the class of course stood out and Ren hired him to be part of E3. His name is Zach Ming and he now teaches a course on electricity economics. I think it's 173S, 273S. And it's basically the first half of this course that Ren and I were doing a few years back. The second half of the course went kind of beyond the classroom theory and took a real electric utilities resource plan and then tried to hack it and say okay, use the tools from our course and the quantitative methods and so forth and make it cleaner, make it cheaper, make it more reliable, you choose. But the idea was to really have that kind of hands-on exercise. So on the screen it's my image, should the slides be up there? It's okay? I mean, I'm not that good looking, I think you'd rather see that. The other class I taught at the time was a course called greenhouse gas mitigation which was kind of a fun course because we went across all the different sectors whether it was buildings, transportation, industry, electricity and also the land use sectors of farms, forests and grazing lands and looked at how to reduce emissions, how to count emissions, how to monetize reductions, strategies like carbon offsets and so forth kind of bringing in some of those concepts from my dissertation but also, again, looking at whole system integration. Okay, so around that time, actually during the last year I was teaching at Stanford in that previous era, there was an event convened by the design school, the D school and it was about reimagining undergraduate education at Stanford in 2025 which then was quite a ways into the future and they came up with some really interesting insights and there's a whole report about that but I just summarized it briefly here with a couple of the graphics showing a couple of their points and the bottom line was what they said is well rather than the traditional model where a student arrives and they declare a major and then they work within that discipline to collect knowledge in that field and then they graduate and leave and that's it. Rather than that, the reimagined educational model is to say, okay, students will arrive and declare a mission and then they'll work to acquire skills and tools with which to carry out that mission and then they'll leave but then they'll come back to study. We're to teach and it would be a much more fluid model and the disciplinary boundaries would be much more fluid and we'd break out of our silos a little bit and it would be, at least from the student standpoint, mission driven and that really kind of stuck with me. I thought that actually is the way I see education. I guess I was also biased by my kind of sneaky interdisciplinary approach in my PhD but I ended up at Western Washington University which is up in Bellingham, Washington. If you don't know where that is, if you look out the window to the north you can see mountains and those are the mountains that are the backdrop for Vancouver, Canada. So if someone's from the northwest, we're northwest of them. Western is a comprehensive university. So Stanford, for example, is a research university. There's also liberal arts colleges. Liberal arts colleges just grant BA degrees, BS degrees. Research university of course has bachelor's, master's, terminal degrees including PhDs. Comprehensive university is kind of a mama bear. It's in between. We grant bachelor's and master's degrees but we don't have terminal degrees. We don't have PhD students. And you can imagine that changes the business model so to say for research. For the faculty it changes research a lot. If you don't have PhD students who are around for four or five, six years you have master's students who are there for a year or two or you're getting research work out of an undergrad. But it's also a different business model for the students and frankly for the undergrads it can be really beneficial to have much more contact with the faculty just out of necessity because they don't have the advanced PhD students to share their research work with. Some of the things that Western does pretty well and it's as comprehensive universities go I think it's typically rated in the western U.S. as one and two with Cal Poly. So we're kind of well regarded in our niche. But the things that it emphasizes is experiential learning and collaborative learning including undergrads in research. Again that's partly making lemonade but it's also by design and really engaging the community and the campus in service learning as part of the experiential aspect. A sustainability focus actually using the campus as a laboratory I'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute with a whole array of interdisciplinary programs including energy studies but also entrepreneurship and others and then a global perspective. Western is actually known for its prodigious output of Peace Corps volunteers. So I was thinking about those things and I put those values in the left hand column here and just after I started there I observed this thing that happened with President Obama convened a bunch of the engineering deans from all around the country with the idea of advocating for educating tomorrow's engineers to meet the grand challenges of our time and our generation like climate change for example and the engineering deans signed on to a pledge to improve engineering education in a way that would fulfill that aspiration and the things that they offered to do in this pledge was to create research opportunities for undergraduates and to offer more experiential learning and working in interdisciplinary topics including service learning with clients and mentors in the local community incorporating entrepreneurship in the program and having a global perspective. I looked at this list and I thought that sounds familiar. That sounds a lot like us.  Maybe this is an asset and then what I need to do and what we need to do in building an energy program that we aspire to is to take those assets that we have and add some technical content to really fill in the material that the profession needs and so we set about to create a portfolio of curriculum and degree programs including a couple of BA degrees this is the catalog page for our BS degree in energy science and technology if you squint you can see some of the text there probably sounds like me preaching the gospel about becoming leaders in Washington's emerging clean energy economy and all that sort of a thing that is what we were hearing was also needed from the profession and from our advisors and to support those degrees of course we had math classes and we had physics classes and econ and all those things but we designed a series of courses that were probably a little different from what you see in most university catalogs sorry for the busy slide I highlighted a handful of some of the courses titles in red there so you can just kind of squint at those you can see that but you can see a few things that the courses are not discipline driven they're not building on Chem 101, Chem 201 rather they're problem based but they're not focused on problems they're focused on solutions and particularly solutions to the challenge of decarbonizing the energy economy and averting climate change and so you'll also see that I stole liberally from the Stanford catalog including some of my own classes which I taught for a few years at Western and then turned them over to other faculty whom we had hired I also stole of course Gill Masters courses and taught my version of them and then turned them over to faculty I added some other courses in the building energy arena and then we created some other new titles that again were in response to the interest of our professional advisor things like community solutions to climate change really focusing on the perspective of a city thinking about how do we reduce the carbon footprint of our operation in our citizens thinking about energy management and organizations down at the bottom from the perspective of running a business or a campus how do I manage energy efficiency procurement standards all kinds of topics at the intersection of the technical requirements and the business requirements and so we created these courses to populate those degrees both the BA and the BS side that we had designed one of the things we needed is more hands-on opportunities again that was kind of the theme and the expectation working at Western and State of Washington is pretty stingy so they weren't about to build me like laboratory building or something like that but we realized that as we observed energy efficiency as one of our biggest resources and energy efficiency in existing buildings the biggest part of that it occurred to us that we've got existing buildings they're not particularly efficient and we've got some really astute energy engineers in the campus facilities team and luckily for us and unlike some other campuses I'd been on they were actually really keen to work with the faculty and the students and so we created this idea of campus as a lab where we literally do our energy in the built environment courses with labs going into our own buildings a building how do you do an energy audit how do you identify and quantify energy efficiency retrofits and upgrades and we end up with the students actually helping write applications for funding to the state and utilities for upgrades to our buildings actually becoming an asset to the facilities engineers themselves and so we have this sort of triangular relationship between hands-on activities in the campus and the coursework and the key to it is that we pledge to the facilities team that the students we send to them will be an asset not a burden because they'll know their stuff having been through some of that coursework and of course they'll learn a lot more but in a way that and so the campus has a lab strategy you know it's partly making lemonade out of the fact that state funding is rather stingy but it's also part of the approach that we're using and we are doing all of this in consultation with an advisory board that we convened which is really kind of a who's who of the energy profession all across Washington and the Northwest and what they were saying is we need something different in addition to the graduates whom we can already hire from you know the engineering school of the University of Washington or the business school there and those sorts of things and so what they call for is really a program that's explicitly interdisciplinary and so we're trying to break down those discipline silos but we're also trying to hack because I remembered when I was at RMI and hiring dozens of recent graduates and people would come with an interdisciplinary environmental studies or something like that and we'd have a great conversation but I never hired a one of them I'd always end up hiring the engineering grad or the business or the hard science student and maybe be a little frustrated that their background was a little narrow dimensions but the idea was that the interdisciplinary model also had to be upgraded to make sure the students came out with a real skill set and the ability to get through that interview that those students didn't get with me and hit the ground running day one we also wanted the program to be experiential bringing in the undergrad research problem or really solution based coursework linking to our campus as a lab work and the entrepreneurship program on campus and in doing that we found that we actually had to teach a little bit differently because we were teaching a broad range of technical topics and bringing in business concepts and policy concepts and teaching them with a pretty wide range of student backgrounds and we had a lot of students and a lot of students who are kind of playing catch-up ball from maybe not the best high school preparation and we couldn't overwhelm them with prerequisites and so we were designing some of these technical oriented courses to be as accessible as possible and that was actually consistent with the type of material that was more about systems thinking and about synthesis maybe a little higher on Blooms taxonomy if you know that thinking about teaching but we had that course list that I show you were actually different types of courses and then there was the approach of being mission driven and really looking at helping students become leaders in the clean energy transition to overt climate change okay so let's talk about that mission a little bit when you think about decarbonizing the economy there's really three what I call pillars or key strategies continued and accelerated improvement energy efficiency dare I call it extreme energy efficiency decarbonizing the power supply and we're certainly making a contribution of fossil end uses that now are direct uses of fossil energy like transport and heating I don't know about you all but if you saw the Super Bowl I think there were four car ads and three of them were only electric BMW Chevrolet is one other one so we're making progress there and of these pillars the second and third one on the supply side are pretty fully covered here at Stanford and in academia generally but energy efficiency much less so and you might ask well you know if you've got that zero carbon power supply and you're going to electrify with it you're aiming for zero carbon and I don't think that's the right answer if you look at a building for example and you want to have a net zero building so you put solar panels on the roof and how many can you put on the roof and if you want to make that building actually net zero and supplied fully by those solar panels you got to shrink the demand you got to make the energy use more efficient that way and then the other aspects of it are how fast can you grow the renewable supply you know something like one and a half percent a year of decarbonization would probably be what you could achieve with maximum growth and renewables and you need more than that you combine that with aggressive energy efficiency you could get further you'd also save money for our least cost energy resource and then finally at some point you're going to have constraints even on the renewable energy supply and whether it's in land or other environmental impacts and so bottom line if we want to decarbonize the economy the efficiency resource is really key to it and if you look at some of the studies of deep decarbonization strategies it's really interesting they go into great detail between these different supply options and how fast can you phase out coal and oil and how fast can you build the renewables and then integrating wind and solar and the time variations and you need storage and you have to rely on other resources you have to go to carbon sequestration and all of these different things and they kind of treat efficiency as exogenous and these days at least there's an assumption that there is energy efficiency progress built into the baseline scenario but it's generally not treated as an option to go further this is a reproduction of a couple of graphics from a study by the advocacy group American Council for Energy Efficient Economy where they actually took the typical baseline study where maybe 20% of the reductions are from energy efficiency and said according to their analysis of potential you could get half of their reductions from efficiency and then they had a whole pie chart there of the different policy options and you can see how it boils down to one or two silver bullets afraid not it's actually just a little of this and a little of that and a whole portfolio of different options but the bottom line is we're not really treating the energy efficiency resource with due respect this is a survey collaborative of the university energy institute directors and they were just trying to collect data on what everyone is doing they sent around this survey which energy resource does your institute primarily work on and I looked at that well gee I've been walking around speaking and quacking about we have probably the most comprehensive undergraduate energy program in the country anything I could check on this graph on this survey was other you know do energy efficiency and demand response and utility systems and resource planning electrification and climate mitigation decarbonization everything from the system perspective and it's not just about extraction of a resource and I realize we're kind of and it's true it's a unique perspective and to really address the challenge of decarbonization and in particular capturing the efficiency resource you really need to think differently and so to challenge our academic resources to think differently shouldn't be that big a deal at Stanford because it's been done before I remember as an undergrad the cool course that everyone wanted to take and if you're an engineer you could get in but the other people had to get on the waiting list was mechanical engineering 101 visual thinking where they integrated drawing and design and it was just the beginning of a whole evolution of what became the idea of design thinking and the D school the design school and really the rapid prototyping all that sort of thing and I think we're thinking about design but also more about what you design but that was one key paradigm the other was entrepreneurial thinking coming out of the business school and Stanford is the wellspring of Silicon Valley and all of the conceptual brainstorming and everything that comes out of that and pivoting and the whole entrepreneurial kind of playbook and so this idea of a new thinking paradigm is not new to Stanford so with that as background we're offering now a couple of bonus contributions together with Amory Lovens and our other colleague Holmes Hummel we're co-teaching this course called extreme energy efficiency and it's the 107R, 207R this quarter and also next quarter so advertisement if you're interested in the course and what we do is a deep dive on integrative design for energy efficiency so we're not teaching the engineering concepts behind energy technology but we present technology in all different sectors buildings, industry, transport electricity materials all those things and then we do a series of class exercises where each class session is kind of like a mini hackathon and the students are posed what we call a puzzler that they have to solve to redesign some kind of system from a very first principles standpoint to open up the thinking process but also to recognize the potential that exists for the energy efficiency resource and it's a class that's obviously familiar material to engineers but it's open to students from all majors and maybe this is a model for the type of new thinking for example for Stanford's new school and of course also taught by our colleague Holmes Hummel and another colleague Anthony Kinslow is on the equity aspects of the clean energy transition it's called the quest for an inclusive clean energy economy and recognizing that the clean energy transition has to take place in parallel with breaking down the severe inequality in our economy and in this design class integrative design for extreme energy efficiency it's kind of hard to encapsulate the approach but a few of the what we call pillars of the integrative design method are really setting aside your assumptions starting what we call beginner's mind and really taking a focus from the end use to stepping to the technology bringing in unusual sources of knowledge like emulating natural processes even though you might be talking about a building or a vehicle and relying on actual data not rules of thumb and using that for feedback and learning and so forth and so these are concepts that we used in many of our Rocky Mountain Institute and that Amory has been engaging with now for decades who do we teach this stuff to well okay engineers of course but this is where Amory and I actually have a little bit of a disagreement he thinks that there's so much energy and bad design out there because engineers are doing the wrong thing that they learned in school and as a graduate with three degrees and experience teaching here I kind of have to defend the profession a little bit and my thought is that engineers design what they're assigned to design and they start with the assumptions that they're handed and if they're just repeating past designs that's because that was what the management asked for and so we think that these materials and these methods need to be available to and offered to are trying to innovate and established organizations and really anybody who's declared the clean energy mission going back to our first exercise from a few years back and so it also opens up the possibility of taking a new approach to teaching some of these topics as I mentioned before where the engineering content the technical content can be more accessible to people with a wider range of backgrounds because it's not all dependent on everybody has to have 30 credits of advanced college math and rather we focus more on synthesis and on design thinking and bringing in again a wider range of concepts from the policy and business side so this kind of brings me back to thinking about where we've been in this experiment in trying to build this interdisciplinary energy program at Western Washington University and how that might relate to what Stanford's doing now with this new school that's under development and it seems to me that we really have an obligation to help prepare you all as future leaders in this clean energy transition and that the solutions that integrate the technical, the business the policy, the equity aspects of energy including the demand side and energy efficiency as a resource and that enterprise is explicitly interdisciplinary again not in the old way of a little of this and a little of that but in the new interdisciplinary approach and that a program of this sort ought to be incorporating experiential learning and hands-on experiences that really address these problems and solutions including for example integrated design for extreme energy efficiency but also some of these other models that Stanford has pioneered in design thinking and entrepreneurial thinking and that they all work and they can be complemented particularly with the experiential approach by co-curricular activities outside the classroom and so it seems to me that what Stanford's embarking on here is a much more generously resource version of what we've been through at Western and judging from the reception from our professional advisors we think that it's the right path and hopefully our couple of new courses that we've introduced are a good start and a model for adding some of the new material that fulfills some of these aspirations so if you're interested we'll be teaching extreme energy efficiency again in the spring please come and join us that was great and as predicted you once again are you and your group ahead of your time if I must say so myself so I think a lot of food for thought in there there are a few things going on that you probably all know about that are sympatico and consistent with this but I think I really appreciate the big picture look from soup to nuts about being to scale things up much more rapidly than we've been able to do before which does require a different way of putting the disciplines together because academia is too slow to adjust in interdisciplinary ways number one and number two working with stakeholders in the business community at the NGOs and what not the kinds of things you did so we have time for a few general questions and then we'll break for the student I think you'll probably take a lot from this I mean is this new is this stuff you've already figured out or I think some of the principles yes but not the implementation details so for me that's what I really loved about this start is I was kind of saying well maybe a little bit a little bit of this but you've actually tried some specific implementation pathways of I could call it that in addition to the class I think we will as a community be picking our brain on how to do this and hope he'll help us do it as well as we can the nice thing about this experienced roles have is you didn't get everything right but he got a lot of big things right and that actually were the things that you even started with that really have changed the world and it could change it in a more sustainable direction so any takers on questions that I do are you going to follow and hard guy to interact with anybody want to ask a general question I'm sure the students who will meet with yes ma'am this is a little sub part I think of your talk but there is a slide on like brain health gas mitigation and I wanted to understand the numbering because you have the graph that was actually a graphic I stole from Hal Harvey but the idea was that if you want to have deep decarbonization and reducing you know the 40 gigaton global emission footprint you're not going to get it all in one sector you really need substantial reductions in buildings through energy efficiency in agriculture power in industry also on the land in agriculture soil carbon forestry range lands and all of those seemed at least in house formulation and I kind of agree that a few gigatons each which is really big we're talking about a really huge dramatic change but technically feasible and maybe even economically adding all of those up you know then you're kind of in the ballpark of the sort of deep decarbonization targets that we're talking about you know to meet the goals of the Paris agreement and so forth and that if you only focused on a couple of sectors however promising the potential may be that wouldn't be enough that you really had to take a comprehensive approach and sort of fit in the pedagogy that we're looking at carbon accounting and we're looking at you know reduction potential and carbon monetization and all these different sectors but that they all kind of fit together into a strategy and you could sort of pick and choose which ones you thought were interesting to go and work on yourself. Yeah for more on that there is a great lecture in this seminar by Hal Harvey where he presented the basics you know they have their own way as you know you probably know this more recently than me if you look at their methodology it's one way to put the pieces together I think the nice thing about Joel's it's a learn pitch is their approach his group is this kind of learning and adaptive thing where you really will be able to consider a bunch of different ideas and mash them up in this kind of creative design thinking framework so I don't think he really got into that I do have to do one thing to augment what you've already said is there is a group in engineering that does entrepreneurship and design thinking and that Stanford Technology Ventures Program that's located right outside the the door here to the left I think they could be very useful you may know that group as the group that runs the Wednesday seminar normally in this very room called entrepreneurial thought leaders this impression of Karl Knapp smiling down on it who would have thought that Tesla would now be on the order of a trillion dollar market cap company that's now calling the shots for all the other so there's a good example of what you're talking about well and their long time CTO JB Straubel was one of Gil's students yeah I was getting a say he was an ME student who also had a degree in CEE and met Gil Masters great okay so I think we're just about out of time so we gotta move to the student session thanks to you all for coming thanks for one good question and Joel thanks for a very entertaining provocative and thought thought expanding talk today thank you very much again thank you thank you John


What do you think has been going on at the plate? It's just baseball. Sometimes the hits fall, and sometimes they don't. Why do you think they haven't been falling for you? You hit a couple balls right at people, and now they're out. So it's just sometimes luck isn't going your way. You just keep grinding, and get in the next game. He had said the other day that you'd been working quite a bit with Marcus Timms on a couple of things. What specifically were you working on? Getting hits. And how are you? What were you changing in order to accomplish that? No, I'm just making sure I swing at the right pitches. That's a big thing, and I feel like I've been doing that. Getting pitched on the corners a lot, and then taking a couple right down the middle isn't too good. But yeah, it's just about just trying to control the zone, and still trying to swing at the right pitches. How do you explain 16 straight wins over another ball club, and 17 to 2 in a season series? It's been total domination. Yeah, it's been fun to be a part of. These guys, it doesn't matter who we're playing, we're going to go out there and give them our best. Our pitching stepped up, our hitters, it's 1-9. You've got guys that are up there trying to do damage, and it's a tough line up to try to go through. So once you get through the first nine, also you've got to top the order coming back up, and those guys are ready to bang. So it's just relentless. Make it a little easier to work on things and go through a bit of a stretch like you're going through with the way the team has been playing, and other guys have been stepping up offensively? Yeah, it's got to get on base. That's my main goal, being at the top of the lineup is to get on base for the guys behind me, with Gio, DeeDee, Gary, all these guys. So just continue to get on base and keep having quality of bats. What do you expect from yourself? Is it hard not to get frustrated with how it's been for you to stay to be more consistent? I mean, you've had a couple of nights here and there and stuff back and forth. Yeah, it stinks. You want to help out the team any time you can. And when you don't go up there and you don't produce, man, it's tough. But the team keeps winning, which is the most important thing. So I've got to just keep doing my job, keep trying to do good defense. And I'm going to try to get something going with the play. Easy is the right word, Aaron. But the fact that the team has been winning, does that make it a little easier for you to take? Are you trying to find your way a little bit? Well, the most important thing is winning. So if I keep going 0 for 3 and we keep winning, I think we'll be fine. Aaron, with October still a long way off, how does this team maintain its focus on each game, each series? That's just how this team is built. We're focused on the present and focused on today. Doesn't matter what, if it's March 30th or October 1st, we're focused on today and what we can do to win today's game. And when you've got a club that's doing that for 162 plus postseason, that's a lethal weapon right there.  Having said that, are you looking forward to playing a team like the Indians now coming in? Yeah, the Indians got a great club, great pitching staff, great offense. It's going to be packed to us this weekend, I know for sure. So it's going to be a lot of energy here. We're excited and we're ready.


Day two of triple AS here we go. It's day two of triple AS. I think it's actually day three of the meeting But this is the second day. I'll be here Good yesterday We had a great session on exoplanets which included some of the biggest names that I know in the field Including my good friend Jada Arney and Courtney dressing longtime viewers this channel will remember sat right next to me at the test launch Really fantastic people but today we move into something that I've been very excited about lately And that is SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence There's gonna be a great session this morning on the search for life both techno signatures and biosignatures And I think it's going to be really exciting There are folks here from the SETI Institute and the breakthrough listen project and there's even a talk today by UW zone Victoria Meadows who's the leader of the virtual planetary lab hands down the best astrobiology institute In the world I think I've been surprised at how different this meeting is the breadth makes it really fun I've been learning lots of little things about a wide range of science But the difference in format is also really interesting the lack of a lot of traditional posters means There's not a ton of one-on-one interaction with like junior scientists unless you find them in the hallways I've been really impressed with the exhibition hall And I think there's some really cool things we could take away from the triple AS meetings and bring to the double AS meetings One of the other interesting differences about this meeting Is it was scheduled to run thursday friday saturday sunday today when i'm filming this this is saturday And since it's happening at home that means that my kids are home and i'm not spending time with my family So there's always attention about when you host conferences should you try to overlap the weekends so that people have them free Especially people who are teachers or teaching faculty But if you've got a family weekends are a really bad time to take off because that's the time you spend with your family And with your kids There's no perfect answer and no matter what you choose a weekend conference or a weekday conference There's going to be a lot of tension with a large portion of people no matter what So I kind of like that the triple AS split the difference and did two days on the weekdays and two days on the weekends Honestly, I think that's a pretty good compromise. All right coffee in a few minutes Let's go Started building rovers About 10 years or so ago last year we won the international Canadian Rover challenge and that was the second year in a row coming in first place Our rover is a smaller version of what you see going on bars We have a six-axis arm a full base chassis with a full e-box setup with full control And along with a full science machine going on board It doesn't matter what convention center you're at the staff are always very serious about timelines So the exhibition hall with the coffee doesn't open until 9 30 and they are not opening it a minute early It's okay. They're professionals that they're doing their job And 30 exactly I love the alien inside of the mech robot thing. That's awesome So behind me is the tech tangle area, which is like a battle robot arena Except for their mars rovers and they don't seem to be weaponized at all So I have seen very little robot carnage, which is probably a good thing What I saw was all the competing teams seemed to actually just be visiting with each other Repairing things and doing obstacles as much less battle robots and much more like what you expect to see at a science conference. It was cool Speaking of aliens the seddy session starts in 20 minutes time to go upstairs I also decided to leave my laptop at home today. So my backpack is Nice and light, but I feel weirdly vulnerable like I don't have my laptop. What if I need to do work? It's saturday. I don't need to do any work I like this format We don't use this usually at the double ass meetings with with the big tables in a big lecture hall It just kind of acknowledges that people are going to use their laptops Why make them stuff themselves into little rows just provide them tables. I like this One of the things about doing seddy with large surveys like lst And the big data kinds of data sets is that it emerges I think two of the biggest interests and strengths that the udup astronomy department has Astrobiology and data analysis and software What's going to be awesome about this session is it's got talks both from the traditional seddy side And the astrobiology side. I think it's very rare to see those camps come together in the same venue And as I said at absicon a few months ago I'll be really curious to see how this room fills up and what the dynamic from the community is if the community is interested In seddy as a as a scientific discipline. It's going to be interesting and ask themselves the question Are we alone here in the universe? It is an interesting question. It is a scientific question and you'll hear about some of that today It's been a quarter century Since we detected the first planet around a solar like star and since that time there's been amazing advances in technology and amazing results obtained We're at a point now where there are 4 000 also planets detected around nearby stars. There's exchange of material between planetary systems Just a couple of years ago. We detected the first interstellar object Oumuamua which got quite a lot of press For its possibility of being an alien spaceship We now don't don't think that it's an alien spaceship Our latest scientific results in a paper led by graduate student penn state, Sophia shake She performed a survey of stars in something called the earth transit zone The part of the sky where other stars could see our planet pass in front of the sun And that paper has just been submitted to the astrophysical journal and we'll show up on the archive I believe this afternoon We also announced a new partnership with our friends at the national radio astronomy observatory to bring the search for extraterrestrial intelligence To perhaps one of the telescopes that's most identified with the search But not used so much for it The Ganski very large array, which of course as many of you know featured Very heavily in the in the movie contact So i'm an astrobiologist We are not in this case in the talk i'm talking about we're not looking for little green men We'll keep a little green pond slime And so I will talk to you about how we might even be able to do that over distances of parsecs In our case what we're doing is focusing on the the impact of microbial life on the environment I mean in that case our access for increasing our probability is time Because microbial life dominated the environment of our planet for billions and billions of years Before we upstart humans appeared at this very last little slice here So so with our search for for we call biosignatures we are trying to look at An inhabited planet throughout all of its different Different types of biospheres and increase our chances that way instead of relying on the the probability Which may be rare that in fact technological civilization evolves Okay, so andrew mentioned carl sagan in his talk and Carl told us that extraordinary claims demand Extraordinary evidence and vicki has just told you about the ways that the Astrobiologists are planning to look for extraordinary evidence of biosignatures But what about technosignatures? What about intelligent life? There was just a huge Bus about these absolutely obviously hoaxed data and so we got ourselves together and we tried to Come up with something that would be like the Richter scale Develop something called the Rio scale and it's been modified the ones or twice even though it was in place It did not protect us from 2016 which is the year that the media discovered at right We had a claim that around voyage and star. There was perhaps the building of megastructures to block the light There was a claim in a paper that 234 alien civilizations were broadcasting Bright optical pulses very short. They all had exactly the same duration And lastly in that year We had a claim that From a large radio telescope in russia There was the detection of a signal. Look, that's how I spent 2016 But et was the wrong answer to these flames, right better answers for example for by asian star a warped thin disc of dust For the borea and trotier pulses Not alien transmitters, but the processing of taking the Fourier transform of a spectra Produced artifacts and lastly that russian signal where they saw it once when they looked at that star But not the other 38 times. They looked at that star A military satellite is is a better explanation As to be expected. It's been a very interesting day, but it's also been a little bit surprising So the morning started out with a great session on the search for life in the universe technosignatures biosignatures SETI one of my favorite topics in astronomy right now, and I'm really happy to report that the room was Was quite full the audience was great And I think like it seemed like 20 of the audience was science journalists So so there must have been like something exciting there Hopefully for the broader public and then my day has taken kind of a wonderfully unexpected turn Yesterday, I visited the uw booth. There's a big University of washington booth here at triple as And I asked the question We had the double s meeting here just over a year ago. Why didn't we have a great uw booth? And the answer seems to be that the uw press people people who would be responsible for putting that kind of booth together Uh, they didn't really know about the meeting until it was happening This led me into a conversation today with james urton who is the press information officer for science and astronomy At uw so I am now so much better off for having met some of these press and media people That work at my institution and then was able to have a chat with rebecca gurley Who is like the social media person like it's perfect like these are the people that i'm super excited to get to know In a general sense as an academic and as a scientist, we really like press and media coverage It's validating for our work And it's one of the most efficient ways to get the public Aware of what we're doing and it's also really good when you're trying to get jobs or go up for promotions or And so by extension knowing the media people the people who craft the public face of the university who worry about brand Guidelines and logos by knowing them and being on good terms with them That this will help my practice as a scientist and also as a science communicator And so i'm really hoping and they seem to open to the idea to bring in my camera to Their office and getting their take on what a scientist needs to know about interacting with the press office at their university So i think that'll be really cool content. Uh, and maybe they'll have some good tips for how to like Make my audio and my lighting better in these videos Okay, there's been a lot of good swag at the meeting But i think we've got a strong contender for the best or my favorite swag, which is the snap bracelet I do think actually it's for bicycling, but i'm definitely going to give it to my toddler to play with Very fun I love a friendly dinosaur


Fixing people requires three basic assumptions doesn't if I'm trying to fix you I have to number one assume something's wrong with you number two. I have to assume that I know how to fix you and Number three. I have to assume that my idea of how to fix you should also be your idea, too Trying to fix others is a long frustrating and ultimately losing battle. I hope you found that out by now because the problem often isn't That people are broken. It's that our idea of who we think they should be is broken. I Think people just want to be loved not fixed