And welcome to Hawaii is my mainland. I'm Rob Kinslow, guest host for Kauilukas today. With me today is Kristin Olivera, a Sustainable Community Systems Designer. Welcome to the show Kristin. Hello, thank you for having me. Sure. Can you tell us a little bit about your background? I met you some years ago and you've exploded into this new potential and I want you to tell the audience a little bit about who you are and what you're doing. Okay, well I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, moved away for college in San Francisco, studied sustainable community design, interior architecture and design as well, where I really blossomed into understanding what I wanted for the future.  I wear a lot of different hats there. Oh cool, can we see slide number one and we'll talk a little bit about Kristin's projects from her school and then we'll segue into Koko Kolegi Valley. Okay, can you tell us a little bit about this image? So this is, in school we're always given something to redesign structurally, internally and my designs are basically formed from nature and so this is a library in Half Moon Bay. Originally the structure was just a box and so what I did is I took parts of nature and I made it into something else that was formed through nature and so this one was shaped as the gourd, the concept was of gourd because in Half Moon Bay that's what they produce mostly is pumpkin. And so I wanted to use something that is also culturally significant in many different cultures. People use the gourd as music instruments, as food, carrying, as knowledge to prolong knowledge and so through this building I created different spaces through a library. Just wanted to bring a different sense of education to a library and so here we have different ways to learn how to farm aquaponics. We have a apothecary, we have different viewings of media because kids nowadays they don't really want to open a book and so we have that there. This is a living library? Yeah, it's a living building and so it was, the water is really filtered throughout the walls and so The walls of the library filter the water? Yes, the different stages of filtration and it also collects water vapor which produces the energy. So you're collecting rainwater? Collecting rainwater and the moisture in the air because it's very, that's really innovative. What other innovations do you think you, that people in Hawaii might be interested in hearing about from this design? Well this design there's a lot of things that are going on right now in Hawaii but through this design I really use the gray and black water treatment, vapor collection, the surrounding filtration through the building and so the water that's collected throughout the building also cools the building and then the living room system and when I was in college it was passive cooling too. Passive cooling, yes and I was really into biofuel and algae and so creating energy through that and so underneath the building there's a place to renew energy with biofuel so this whole big concept and ideas I just do everything into. Okay so the concept is a gourd and then the walls and the structure of the building and even underneath the building serve as sources of energy and water and then tell us about the interior what, how did you design the interior to be like nature? Well I also also follow biomimicry and so to try to look at nature and how it evolves and so a lot of the wood is of course natural wood from there but the paint and the windows there was something about biomimicry that Jeanine Benias was looking at the abalone shell and how they collect energy through the abalone shell and so my idea was to have the sealant on the windows as like solar cells to collect the energy through it so everything every material in there has a purpose not just a chair or a carpet or a wood floor it's more than that and so that's kind of where I was thinking in school is that everything has different layers to it it's not just one. And that's a core concept of biomimicry is to use nature's efficiency and nature's design to create more efficient structures that humans can use as well. So where can you put that image back up again? Let's look at that again I want to ask some more questions about that so I see the shape of the gourd in that the you know the curves that you have there so this green area on the right as opposed to the brown area on the left what is that that oval egg looking thing in there? Oh the egg so that's the skylight that also acts as a part of the collecting the water vapor and so through that it brings it down I don't have a 3d image of that but in that you can in the building there's a long passageway that you can see the water that's collected in the different steps of the filtration so it's also not just having that in the building but also showcasing it so people can understand understand that flow of nature and that flow of harvesting natural elements around them. And so tell me again the school you went to and why you chose that school? I went to the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and I chose that school because a lot of the advice I was getting was to leave Hawaii in order to bring something back that wasn't being taught here and so San Francisco is really innovative and I moved when I was 22 and so I kind of had more of a sense of what I wanted and so I feel like going there helped me evolve into what I really wanted for a whole year what how I wanted to contribute to the community and my culture. Okay and so let's talk about let's segue right into that how are you contributing to Hawaii at the moment? So right now I work for Kokoa Kaleegi Valley which is a non-profit in Kaleegi and it started in the 70s from we call them super aunties they went door to door and asked the community what they wanted what they wanted for health and they wanted all these different things like elderly care dental just medical and so it grew into we have now have nine different centers and we have elderly programs nutrition diabetes OBGYN we just we kind of housing compass the encompassing of health and we're the first organization health center in Hawaii that has a nature preserve so we have about 100 acre nature reserve in the back of Kaleegi Valley that stewards land connection to people in health and so even that right what you just told me is innovative because you're working from the community first yeah tell us all that and so I when I came back from college I really I was going to work for a firm but I really wanted to reconnect with the land so I was farming for a while and then I did harvest management data collection moved into budgeting work and I was running the front of the house of our root cafe and then now I'm a mobile market manager so now I'm in charge of the distributing the accessibility to organic and healthy local food to our community and so I feel with that I'm learning community outreach and how to speak to our communities that really need help and to help them and so and with that I'm also using my the skills I learned in school to do graphic design so I'm creating a lot of like informational flyers handouts recipe cards banners and different things to kind of provide the community with the information they need to sustain healthy lives wow that's really exciting I mean I think that's cutting edge innovation you know government isn't like surveying its customers to find out what they need and then providing those services in that way but yet this private non-profit is actually filling a need that government at the moment can't fill so that's very innovative I think yeah and so you know we're kind of we're kind of really grassroots down in the community and down in our food systems thinking what they need and how are we going to connect them back to you know because in Kauii people aren't just from Hawaii they're from Micronesia they're from Salon there's we speak 21 different dialects in our centers and so um how do we help them connect to something when they're when they're not home and so you know a lot of Hawaii houses people that call it home but they're from other places so yeah what kind of foods and what kind of things can you provide for them can we put up the next image so that we can talk about that image a little bit tell us about this mobile market program that you're now the manager of so yeah I run the mobile market program and basically it started off as the people in our center we have we have two different um farmers markets where we double people's EVT and so they give us $20 we give them $40 back so they can have the feasibility of fruits and vegetables and so this program came about because our staff were able and other people were able to get the vegetables that we were selling and so we started loading up carts and pushing it around and selling it to our staff and then it just kind of grew or um I brought on about seven to ten new organic farmers and so we're completely organic now before it was um it was just local but now we're completely organic and what's the purpose of them why is it mobile and what does it do you mean so the mobile market we bring it to elementary schools we bring it to elderly centers we bring it to resource centers in Kalihi and so it just kind of provides the accessibility even further and I also make value added products so I'll pickle things I'll make like kalo chunks or kalo pa different things that people may not know of or have a hard time cooking or just are lazy to cook I'll provide it for lunch so they can try that and eat that and I'll explain the value in it it's not just making something it's actually adding value okay let's put that image back up again and you can point out the different areas of this image and tell us about what it you know what you just said okay so um the banner on the top is what I've created for um letter community you know what we have you know we we take EVT we don't double it we only double up to five dollars um we're funded by a little Karen snap and then the the the cards on the right hand side um that's kind of what we push around in the community oh so you go actually go door to door yeah no we did not throw it yet but we're just going through our community center and our cooperative health center um and then the bottom left is me and um our ahua lo kiki which is our um Hawaiian children's and family program that we also run with root um but they were helping me prep for the next picture which is the senior mobile market at the gulik center um that's one of my favorite mobile markets because I'm Filipino and so I get a gift back to my community in my my culture and so um that's their spining faces and then the last picture is of ulu which people the cultures in kuli he really love and they they have a hard time finding it so I try to bring it to them for an affordable price um does kuli he valley grow any uh i mean they grow all these vegetables right yeah we grow a lot of food up at whole line up but basically that's to share food that's the tissue community how to grow food and how to work with each other and it's also a place where you connect back to the earth which connects you back to your health and so it's not just um eating it's more of a spiritual experience so it really it kind of cleanses you and we also have a kulua pulana which is a community garden in kbt or coheal park terrace and so um that's where we also are able to show how to grow food for the community that's really exciting i you know i was born and raised on a farm and so to see this evolution of food growing and supply and availability uh into like a mobile kind of food market and this intergenerational sustenance providing that you guys are doing is just really exciting to me and it's i'm really thanking you for being involved in this yeah i really love the work that i do which is why i think that um i've taken a break from actual design and it's been designing for communities and thinking of ways to um bring apart health not only in spaces but in people's lives and their bodies and uh what what does that mean to you uh bringing health into people's lives what do you mean well through food like you know through food and connection and their family and and really um letting them understand that the land is there for them you know no matter where there's land everywhere you don't have to just be in hoi to to connect to the land you can be anywhere but just appreciate um what you have growing around you and to be self-sufficient and try not to rely on other things like ships coming with food yeah well what does happen if ships stop coming or if we have a big hurricane well i feel like that's what we're teaching the communities to grow for yourself and to to really like rely on your neighbor so one of our slogans at kqv is neighbors being neighborly to neighbors so it's like if you need something ask your neighbor and then if your neighbor needs something you know help them out and so i feel like um you know we teach people how to grow food and so hopefully they'll take that but people are busy so that's where their mobile market and our food hubs come in to like help them get that produce and get that help um do that oh well thank you um i think we're about ready to take a break and uh i'd like to talk a little bit more with you when we come back about uh the other projects that you're working on and what you actually have for envisioning the future okay thank you welcome to sister power i'm your host Sharon Thomas Yarbrough where we motivate educate and power and inspire all women we are live here every other thursday at four p.m and we welcome you to join us here at sister power aloha and thank you this guy looks familiar he calls himself the ultra fan but that doesn't explain all this he planned this party plan the snacks he even planned to coordinate colored shirts but he didn't plan to have a good time now you wouldn't do this in your own house so don't do it in your team's house know your limits and plan ahead so that everyone can have a good time welcome back to Hawaii is my mainland i'm rob kinslow guest hosting for kawi lucas and today again we have with us christin olivera who is a young community sustainable systems designer and she works at kukua kulehi valley and we've been talking about her projects there in this next segment we're gonna talk about uh where she's going in the future and what she would like to uh you know create uh here in hawaii welcome back hi yeah good so can we put up the next image and uh talk about that okay so this is called visions for the future and it's kind of in a collage of a lot of different features and uh i see it's almost utopian if you would know that word and understand it but it's also makes you relax a little bit when you look at it you go oh that's a lovely photo what's here and what what is the potential for our communities that you see um in this photo i it's actually in san francisco yeah i was going to school i found this photo um it is called utopian society actually oh really and so um i don't know when you look at this photo you can really see the land even though it's a cityscape it's breathing it has um natural elements everywhere it's collecting harvesting um what nature provides for us and so for the future i really see our earth coming to this or our peoples and our communities believing in this even though maybe our government may not believe in that i feel like it's in the people's hands um to really care for one another and to care for this earth and so in this photo it you know it shows this beautiful woman out on her balcony um breathing in life and um everyone around her is collecting energy and being happy and there's you see in the picture there's no cars you know people are all walking but you know people need cars but in the sense that people are being more reliant on themselves and other things to get to what they need um well when you move food closer to people and you move energy closer to people where they live then perhaps you don't need and you move jobs into the home space perhaps you don't need uh you know so many cars or so many yeah and so there's a lot of edible landscaping um you know where edible landscaping especially in cities and i was going when i was living in san francisco they were creating that where they dig up sidewalks and put plants in the ground in order to um hold the rain water so that's what this is is two streets that look like they have been dug up and planted yeah and so and so what they this this one man brock dolman he runs the occipital college of art in um san aroza his tagline was slow it sink it spread it and so in order to collect the water because now water is coming so hard yeah that we need to slow it sink it and spread it in order in order for the earth to um to soak up that water because water is essential so i see what do i see back there i see uh i see domes past i see solar panels i see food growing on rooftops wind turbines okay uh what else is in this picture that i think i i actually see now um like these are all things that we could do yeah and oh yeah air flying cars wow like jets and stuff i don't know if it's flying cars i think it's on cables all their own cables so it's like a cable car yeah cable cars in the air not in the ground like yeah cable cars you don't see any utilities lines so all the energy is generated local so yeah everybody's generated i used to say uh there's enough energy for all if we all generate energy and that's same with food right yeah does that so that that is a really inspirational picture yeah if you can kind of get past the maybe the reality of today and it's kind of a dream world yeah it's kind of like something that i like to envision to keep forward my my dreams and my aspirations because in reality there's a lot of really crazy things that are going on and so i feel like if you can keep a higher sense of what you want and a picture that you want you'll get there it may take different paths or different ways it may not look like that but it'll be something like that i've heard that uh expressed in a in a way that really struck me just recently uh one of my teachers was talking and she said you know reality focused focused on the problem is like putting your installing your windshield in the floor of your car and you're saying i don't need to look up because i'm focused on the reality whereas creating a vision is putting the windshield up so you can see where you're going why why would you want to look at the ground instead of looking at the reality why not look at the vision and i think that is borne out by research which shows us that people are not inspired to change by problems they are inspired to change by visionary ideas is that what you're kind of trying to do here in hawaii yeah like paint the picture and have people understand that different things are possible by showing and doing and so you can talk all you want but it's mostly when you show the community that it's possible and say like you build a 3d model and you show that there's this one building this one structure that can happen and people believe in that um i feel like that's powerful and tell me what is the importance of models do you think and uh in envisioning the future i think models are important to see that you know to see the space and to see how people can can live and dwell in that space or be a part of that space and so um it's just it's just really like a vision board to like have a vision about it yeah and same with honolulu i think if there was some group effort at modeling the future or envisioning the future of honolulu you know with all kind of stakeholders we could have uh you know an imaginative effect on designers yeah and i think it all depends on who's the stakeholder and who what vision is it because there's people that have a lot of different visions you know there's someone that has oh we want all these houses we want all these buildings and that's going to save the world but it's really not i feel like the vision is to stop building on ag land and having that for people to dwell in and to learn and to grow and then building in the inner cities and keep that you know keep that in habit and compact yeah compact and can we uh take the next image okay so tell us a little bit about this image it's uh to me it's you know it's soft and it's welcoming and it's a lot of light why did you choose this image so i took this image at 645 a.m. in the back of kubihi at honolulu i know when i was farming and to me this image is multi-layered this doesn't mean a tree with beautiful light in the morning i looked at it i look at it and i see fractals and i see different ways of the exploding exploding of the universe and the exploding of mind and i also on a reality basis i see um what i want to do for the future is build be a part of building natural birthing centers and elder care living um community centers different places where people can learn off of the land and so this is what honolulu land is it's for that like we have we have now um hawaii natural birthing program back there too the all up all different things but that picture really shows my vision of the future and how you know to keep those valleys and the back of the valley sacred so we can hold those spaces for people to heal and for people to be together there's a lot of research now coming out showing that nature and bathing in nature and going to nature is a wonderful de-stressing and it's a cure for a lot of stress diseases that are out there um is that part of your vision too yeah it really cleanses the soul um this one lady that comes and volunteers at the whole line uh she um had a stroke and she would come there every thursday on her growing farmers workday and the more and more she came the more and more her stress levels and the more and more her movement in her face and everything else came back to her because she was on that land and she was working and touching the soil and i believe that i strongly believe that in order for ourselves to heal we need to have that avenue and so if we keep building on our agland we keep building in the back of the valley that's going to be gone for our children and it'll be ruined and so um people i work with were really strong for you know conserving that land and that um aspect that our culture had long before there was building yeah the web of life is indeed complex and humans are not yet so much aware of our role and our part in rebuilding that complexity and in fact you know restoring that complexity based on the previous 150 years of industrial destruction really um so i wanted to thank you so much for coming in i'm just empowered by uh all the stories you told and uh excited that the next generation of designers is you know alive and you know out there embedded in their communities working for uh the betterment of our society and for the restoration of nature and uh i wanted to thank you for having that heart that that soul that that light that uh you know ability to speak your truth of course thank you for having me speak that allowing me to speak yeah we need more of you and i hope that i hope that you'll uh you know also take up a teaching role at some point in your life and train the next generation for you because uh sustainable sustainability will be nothing without that dialogue within generations that we're having today yeah and i think it's important to think about seven generations not just yours we are your daughters or your sons i think it's important to think about their daughters and their sons and and so forth and so my uh native american past says that we should be thinking about the three generations before us and the three generations after us and then of course with us is the bridge between those then we got seven so that's what you're talking about yeah especially like listening to our punna because without them without their knowledge we wouldn't have what we have today and the stories we have today so thank you so much for having that yeah ability to of course to do that i want to thank you all for joining us today with on cali lucas's hawaii is my mainland i'm rob kinslow and we're wrapping up with christa lauvera sustainable community systems designer uh it was a very lovely talk and uh i hope you'll look her up on the web and maybe contact her if you have uh some designs that you want to do in your community


I would also like to give a shout out to Christian Hemphling who is a extremely valuable member of the community, does so much work on plasma accessibility and has so much passion for it and who proposed the first accessibility goal in 2019 and it's great to have the accessibility goal elected as one of our goals for the coming few years. And with that in mind, if you're in this room right now, I imagine you're someone who cares about the growth of KDE as an organization, the spread and adoption of free software by people everywhere and that's what I'm going to talk about today through the lens of accessibility and compliance specifically. So I am David Collane. I've been a KDE contributor since 2018, starting in promo and communications, also doing some builds and packaging. And I am a cloud and infrastructure engineer at Bixel. Bixel is a contractor who works pretty much exclusively with the United States federal government. So accessibility is a hot topic there. It's highly important and we're going to get into some of those regulations today at least at a high level. And in terms of my duties and job, I do a lot of DevOps and infrastructure operations. And let's actually get started. So what is accessibility in the first place? That word gets thrown around a lot, but let's just make sure we know what we're talking about. And what it really is fundamentally is just to make a product usable for as many people as possible. And that's regardless of any physical or cognitive disability or any kind of other impairment that they might have or even according to some definitions, socioeconomic status, which at least on that front KDE I think does very well. And this includes not just physical and cognitive, but also as a further example, vision problems hearing problems, limitations with motor skills and cognitive and neurological issues. According to the CDC, 26% of Americans self-identify as having some sort of disability at least in a minor capacity, for example, that includes needing eyeglasses. That still is an important consideration of vision when you are designing software or a graphical interface that people need to work with on a daily basis. So accessibility, why is it so important for KDE? Well, there's a number of reasons. Accessibility sits at the nexus of several of the proposed KDE goals that came up in the last couple months. First, professionalism becoming an enterprise grade organization that can deliver enterprise grade software. In order to actually get our software adopted at a wider and broader level in major institutions, we're going to need really good or passable and functional and highly rated accessibility and compliance. And this is also just fundamental to human-centered design and the principles of human-centered design because accessibility in many respects determines if big enterprises, public or private, can legally use the software. And this has a knock-on effect that because of that, down the road, this also impacts how many people are going to be exposed to KDE software or free software in general. We all know that since the early days of Linux user groups, the free software movement and community has targeted public institutions as the center of our growth and evangelism efforts. And KDE is no exception to that. For example, some of the history here, Brazil in 2008, KDE software was deployed to school computers serving up to 52 million students based on the activity in the computer labs there. We have active contributors today who discovered KDE and discovered free software through that initiative. Valencia in Spain, long-standing relationship with KDE, 120,000 or more school computers in their system are running a plasma-based distribution, LIREX. And in fact, Valencia has no budget for proprietary software in the schools except for 10 schools with special needs. Now you can see where this is going. This is a highly important issue, but also I want to highlight that we do continue to have success in the education sector more recently in Kerala, India. That's a state in India where a plasma-based and KDE software using distribution is deployed in their schools and the government there announced a plan to train and teach 38,000 teachers to use KDE software. And this is a major, major, major push in terms of how we get KDE in front of people. And it's extremely important that we keep up with the evolving standards of accessibility and compliance and KDE, it's fundamental to our growth as an organization to keep the pace and maintain a high level of accessibility in our software. Now in terms of some of the regulations, the most widespread standard for accessibility in any type of software is in fact WCAG that stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This is a standard from the World Wide Web Consortium and even for desktop software. This is referenced in law in United States law, in European law in many countries, WCAG is the standard even for desktop software. Now WCAG organizes itself into, it describes itself in a matter of principles, the most important part of understanding these principles is in general the idea that anyone with an impairment should be able to assess content using an alternative sense. So if someone has a hearing impairment, they can use their vision. If someone has a vision impairment, they can use their hearing to aid in their comprehension and understanding of the material. Also important is the ability for people with mobility constraints to use their preferred input methods. This can be a keyboard driven navigation or mouse exclusive or alternative devices altogether. And in the United States, who was a pioneer in this respect in terms of digital accessibility law, one of the most fundamental pieces of legislation was Section 508, which was a 1998 amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. This functionally puts WCAG 2.0 into law in the United States and government institutions must have a WCAG compliance for not just their websites, but their desktop software and there are even significant regulations on devices and hardware as well. Another important law to consider here is the Americans with Disability Act, which was passed in 1990. This is broader in scope. It's meant to be a holistic protection of the rights of disabled people in society. It's also important for our purposes for understanding the fact that the ADA applies to public and private enterprises and that anybody who is an employee of a company or a citizen who is trying to receive some sort of service from the government has a right to request an alternative tool or device or what have you if the device that was granted to them or their working conditions are not accessible to them. So there's a degree of personalized guarantee in terms of what needs to be delivered. And this comes into play when companies or government entities are considering what vendor are they going to go with for their operating system or a certain application. Are they going to go with an application which is not accessible by default and then they would have to budget for an alternative in the event that they have disabled employees or disabled customers. And so this is why it's very important in terms of adoption that we maintain a competitive level of providing accessibility options. And in terms of the European Union, the European Union first set out to create a European wide standard with the Riga Declaration in 2006, which cited Section 508 as something to be influenced by or aspire to as a model for what they were trying to do. And eventually this culminated in the excitingly named standard EN301549. So this current version of this European standard is based on WCAG 2.1 as a baseline level of accessibility 2.1 is a substantial improvement over 2.0 in the sense that it provides additional measures for people with neurological issues, photosensitivity, I think memory problems and cognitive issues of that nature. In addition EN301549 applies not just to public websites, but like Section 508 also has regulations in place for desktop software, hardware, and mobile applications for government entities. And some of the national laws are important to consider as well because up until fairly recently there was no European wide standard in Germany. Some of the most important laws here are BITV, which was passed in 2002. That stands for Barrier Free IT Declaration. Now in its current form, updated in 2019, this essentially just matches the EN301549. There is also the BGG or the Disability Equality Act passed in 2002, which like the ADA is broader in scope and meant to provide certain guarantees to disabled people in society. In Spain there is Law 34 of 2002. Now this is since 2012 a WCAG 2.0 compliant, so that's not yet matching the European guidelines, but it does match at least the Section 508 standard. And in Belgium also there's a law called the Law of July 19, 2018. This now of course also matches the EN301549 standard. But important to note here is that for public websites in Belgium, if the website is not fully compliant with WCAG standards, they must include a list of all WCAG criteria which are not fully met and cite the WCAG criteria annotation that they are missing. So there must be a list present of not missing or inaccessible WCAG criteria. And that's important to note as we get into this next topic, which is the topic of VPAT and ACRs. Okay, so what is this stuff? So this actually is highly relevant to KDE because last year we received a request for VPAT from NASA. So somebody from NASA actually wanted to use Labplot at work for their purposes, whatever these crazy people at NASA are doing. So the initial KDE response was a bit lacking. People didn't know what a VPAT was. They just saw an email come in from a US government agency that had a lot of legalese in it and it was talking about some government document. So understandably, I can understand many people in that situation would have a desire to rage against the machine. But what we actually do want to cooperate on this type of thing because the VPAT is the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, which is essentially an extremely thorough accessibility checklist that works the same way as the Belgian law. It is a list, a self-assessment of WCAG compliance and you need to itemize the different criteria for WCAG and see where you are strong and where you may fall short based on your own recognition. This is important because the VPAT is essentially the first step towards getting an Accessibility Conformance Report or an ACR. An ACR is a US government requirement that any software that needs to be used by the government requires this ACR. So without it, it's going to be difficult to get permission to actually adopt at least on more than a personal level, certain applications. Now, in terms of the accessibility goal, which I'm very happy just was announced earlier this morning, I think this would be worthwhile to maybe consider going through and doing a VPAT for specific applications that we know are targeting enterprise customers or users. That would be a lab plot, for instance, G-Compre is a highly successful education-based software. We just had earlier this year a Belgian educators conference where there was a good reception for G-Compre. And I think Ocular would be a good candidate for that as well. We do know that one of our newspaper, there's a newspaper in India that our KDE-India folks helped get onboarded and using KDE software, including Ocular, in the business of their newspaper. And so as far as I want to briefly go back a little bit in time so we can highlight just how significant the work is that KDE contributors in the accessibility department have been doing for a number of years and show some appreciation for those folks. When Plasma 5 first shipped, it was not the most accessible thing in the world. And Frederick Gladhorn and a few other people spent a lot of time going back through the code base and doing what is essentially labeling. So this is going through individual objects in the code base and saying like, oh, we're going to add focus true here so individual elements can be focused. And accessible.name also important. These are labels that are applied to facilitate keyboard navigation, create grabable elements. And this is important not just for people who are dependent on keyboard, but it's also essential for how Orca functions. Orca is the speech of the screen reader on Linux. This is a GNOME program and this is vital, absolutely 100% vital for blind people and people with serious vision impairments. This is how they use the computer. A device is reading the screen out to them and this depends on the grabable elements and it also depends on the labeling to some extent. And this is important because even though a number of years have gone by and we've made significant improvements in this area, just because of the scale and size of KDE software, there's still lots of this kind of labeling that can be done to improve further our accessibility. Now in 2019, Christian Hemfling dropped an accessibility goal proposal with the goal of raising awareness for what was going on in accessibility and putting a spotlight on these issues. We didn't get the goal then, but what did happen was that accessibility was added to the HIG shortly thereafter. So our human interface guidelines, there was an accessibility section which was added to that, that was a very important milestone. And in 2020, Carl wrote an accessibility checklist and also added that and that was a significant step forward. And we can see I asked Christian to put together a sort of review for the changes in accessibility from that initial proposal in 2019 and on through today. And some of you, many of you may have seen that. He actually posted a blog post to two parter that went over some of these issues just very briefly, maybe running low on time here. One of the great highlights was the new kickoff. The new kickoff is one of the things that was built after these other things that I just mentioned like the accessibility checklist and so on. So this was a vast improvement. There was a lot of, this shows the benefit of accessibility being part of the development process from the beginning. And then we can have a strong, robust level of accessibility. Instead of the alternative to that, of course, is people trying to go back after the fact and fix things up. Of course kickoff was a rewrite and it was only after the rewrite was finished that we were able to close bugs from 2018. So there are limitations to what can be fixed after the fact. It's essential that developers are really working with accessibility folks in the process. And I think kickoff was an example of that showing and yielding great results. And there's still a lot of work to be done. For example, SDDM can't even start ORCA while SDDM is up before the actual plasma session begins. So that's a difficult problem. There's, of course, various issues with adding and arranging widgets and specific plasmoids. However, even since Christian posted his blog up, people responded very well to that. And there have been improvements on, for example, the network manager plasmoid and the volume control plasmoid. So that's great to see that level of enthusiasm and work being put in there. One thing that labeling can help with still is there are still lots of elements not being spoken by ORCA when it's trying to read what is present. So I think labeling can help there with things like context menu entries and various missing elements in plasmoids and other places. So to wrap things up here so we can maybe have a little bit of a Q&A, it's great to see more interest than ever in accessibility. And this is absolutely fantastic. But I'm very pleased that we got that goal. I'm looking forward to seeing what can happen there. And Carl and Christian have been building up a new accessibility team. There's a lot of new people in the last year or two. And from a developer standpoint, I think it's important to consider reaching out to accessibility people, having accessibility testing integrated into the development cycle, that's really the number one issue. And use the accessibility checklist. Another thing I would point out is I think we would benefit greatly from a closer relationship with the ORCA developers. I know the maintainer, Joan Marie Diggs, has been active in KDE spaces on and off whenever usually there's activity on the KDE side. So I think there's a lot of potential there that would be beneficial as well. And despite the focus of this talk really being on the impact of accessibility on enterprise and how important it is in the enterprise world, the main motivation for trying to raise the profile for accessibility is ultimately just so we can live up to our KDE manifesto, create an operating system and suite of applications that is free and available for people to use and for anybody to use. We do have, waiting in the wings, a certain community of people who are very happy anytime new accessibility improvement gets merged. And it's important to remember those people, those are the users who are even more than typical users, in many cases dependent upon their computer systems and their electronic devices for their quality of life. And it's always a pleasure, anything that we can do to empower people through the power of free software and our KDE software. So thank you everyone for being here with me this afternoon, if you're in Spain. And if we have any time for Q&A, go ahead and field any questions you've got. All right, let me check for online questions as well. So Victoria asks, one of our new KDE goals is having better internal processes. KDE isn't inaccessible by random chance, but because devs aren't great at it. What dev processes would you change or what dev processes changes would reverse that, would improve it? Well, I think I showed earlier, maybe like a few years ago, it was fairly common it seemed that accessibility folks were not included during development of like Plasma 5, especially when it was first being really the transition from 4 to 5. But I feel like we are moving in the right direction with that. That's why I wanted to stress that having accessibility testing during the development process, that is the number one thing that can make improvements there. And we saw those improvements in real time with, for example, again, the kickoff rewrite. And Harold, I know, has recently been working on trying to get some sort of automated testing for accessibility and compliance issues. If we can pull that off, that would be a very significant achievement as well. So I think we're on the right track. We do have some ideas of where we're going to go. So we just need to be able to execute on those and I think we'll have a major improvement overall. As well as closer relationship with the known folks and the Orca developers and other members of the accessibility community in the Linux sphere who are not internal to KDE as an organization. All right, Harold is right here. And there's one other question or more of a comment coming in from Ingo who writes, I spent months improving the accessibility of Cleopatra, the GPG key manager, which is used by German and other European government agencies. I'd really like to share my experience with Qt. I guess that's more of a comment about how things could be better. So that's something for later. I imagine we will have some kind of sprint or get together to talk more about accessibility and specific projects. But Andy has a question. I'm not sure if we've met before, David, but this is Andy. And I was going to say, if you haven't had a chance to talk to visual design developers, you're welcome to always join the Telegram channel that we have for that. It's I think I'd like to make a little bit of an excuse for the non-inclusion of some of these standards. And I think it's not because there is no desire among visual designers to get this done is that sometimes it's simply not on the table. And because of the nomenclature of people that we have, we have a lot of junior developers, a lot of seasoned developers that simply this is not a focus. What they what they aim for is to get their code out. You know, this is exciting, this is cool. I would love somebody can adopt it. But in that, I think we definitely can do a better job of saying, you know, before we merge any of this, let's make sure that you are, you know, compliant in some of these areas. I personally have worked in my professional life with some accessibility and building VPAT, I mean, making sure the VPAT is completed properly for my work. But I don't think we've formally had discussions like that here. But those discussions are welcome. And those discussions are always on the table. And so if you want to like have a more focused kind of access to the group in that regard, the visual design group is generally a good place to go. I doubt Carl and others, you know, have seen any negative feedback from requests like that. So I think we're very open to, you know, let's go with it. We're all about integration. So just kind of a heads up for you there. Well, thank you for that. And I agree. I think the visual design group actually does a good job with concern for accessibility issues. I think that we have improved a lot. Some of the worst examples that I gave there are maybe a couple of years old now. My intention I suppose was to show the improvement. I think we're on the right track. I do think that you're right that some developers don't even think about accessibility which is not in a negative sense, but they just don't consider it. And that's part of the reason why we have talks like this, why we have like the goal proposal, which was very well received. And I think communication is important on this front communication and education and showing people the benefits not just to disabled users or what have you, but to KDE as an organization and to our future growth. That's kind of the intent is try to get people maybe a little more excited or start thinking about accessibility and its place in software development. So thank you for your remarks. And I do appreciate the work that people put in on trying to improve the situation as well. And I think we are on the right track for sure. All right. Thank you, David. We are on the right track, but we can get better. With this, I would like to wrap up this talk and this session. We've got a couple of minutes of changeover before the next talk. So thank you again, David.


we last time we start we completed the ETC algorithm right and then we started discussing what are the other possibilities. So, one option we said like this to do greedy leave. So, what the greedy algorithm is going to do? It is going to simply play an arm i t which is simply arc max i of a medialic this t minus 1. So, what are the estimates you have for each arm till round t minus 1 just play the one with which has the highest mean value and we just said that this is going to be a bad thing right if I am going to just select the arms greedy leave. What was the example we gave?  So, let us say this is Bernoulli with 0.5 and Bernoulli with 0.8 and now if you are going to do this let us say in t equals to round 1 you played let us say i 1 equals to 1 and you observed value 1. So, initially you do not have anything right like what you are going to do in all these things to have at least some estimate of this we need to have at least one sample right for item. So, let us say initially you play each one of them once. So, that is i 2 you played 2 and you got a value of 0 for this. So, this is t equals to 2 and after that what is going to happen in t equals to 3 now you start applying this when you start applying this which is the arm you are going to play you are going to look at. So, this is what this is your sample right for arm 1 you got 1 and arm 2 you got a value of 0. So, when you come to round 3 the estimate you have for arm 1 mu 1 hat is going to be 1 and mu 2 hat is going to be 0 right that is the value you have so far and because of that which is the one it is going to pick. So, it is going to pick i 1 equals to 1 and it is going to observe whatever value let us say it observed now this term 0. Now, in round t equals to 4 now in round t equals to 4 what is that it is going to observe. Now it has played now arm 1 and arm 2 arm 1 twice once it observed 1 once it observed 0. So, the average value of this is going to be half whereas, that for arm 2 is still going to be 0. So, which one is going to pick again and even let us say if it observes 0 here then in t equals to 4 what happens still the mean value observed for i 1 arm 1 is going to be some positive number right whereas, the mean value so far observed for arm 2 is still 0 because of that you will continue to play i 1 even though it has a smaller mean than the other arm. So, if you going to do like this gridily you will be stuck in a bad arm. So, now, we said that because it is very likely that in this case the initial samples matter and if you only going to start selecting the arms gridily it is very likely that you can stuck in the bad arm. So, we have to some kind of once in a while come out of this gridly selection another option you said is epsilon gridly. So, in this what we will do is we are going to some epsilon is given to you as an input. Now, i t is going to be this arm whatever it is, but this we are going to be going to do with probability some epsilon let us say. The other thing is select uniformly at random. So, this we are going to do with probability 1 minus epsilon or maybe let us say this is let us say this is 1 minus epsilon this is epsilon. So, what we will do is you will take a coin which has a bias epsilon you are going to toss it in each round. If you toss it let us say and it it it shows up head with probability 1 minus epsilon let us say then you are going to gridily select the arm otherwise let us say it shows up tail with probability epsilon then what we are going to do is we are going to just select one of the arm uniformly at random ok. So, because of that. So, now, if you go back to this suppose let us say when you come to round t 5 and there is some chances that you may be end up in this situation right instead you toss a coin in round 5 and let us say with with a probability epsilon whatever it is then you are in this case you could be either in this case or this case right when you ended up in this case then you are going to select an arm uniformly at random and in that case it may happen that instead of selecting one you may end up selecting two and in that case you may end up with a sample one. So, that will possibly will take you out of keep on selecting arm i 1 itself all the time ok. So, this epsilon griddy in a way tries to overcome, but what is the problem with epsilon griddy is it like if you if you then the question here also first is how to choose epsilon right. If you choose epsilon to be 0 this is same as griddy algorithm right all the time you will be selecting an arm griddily, but suppose let us say if you make epsilon 0, if you make epsilon then you will be always selecting an arm uniformly at random ok. If you are going to select an arm uniformly at random it is like on an average you will be selecting each arm equal number of times. So, you have only selected the optimum only 1 by k fraction of that rounds other times you have not selected the optimal arm. So, that is also going to be bad and the regret is going to be linear in that case. Now, how you how to choose this epsilon ok. Ultimately, you were interested in algorithm which gives sub linear regret right. Now, how to choose that epsilon ok one has to choose this epsilon in appropriate fashion may be like you do not want to fix it epsilon fixed throughout, but maybe like as the round t increases maybe make it a function of t right like make it let it decrease as t increases. So, because you know that as as you have more rounds you have more samples you do not need to go and do the uniform selection then it is enough like if you start selecting greedily once you have enough samples and good estimates of your arm means right. So, then maybe one option is to let you choose start choosing epsilon t that start decaying as t tends to as t increases, but that the question then again the question is how to make it decay as t increases ok. So, you will you will analyze this in one of the assignment problem ok. What are the other options ok. So, as we said epsilon here is kind of deciding how much to explore and how much to explore right. So, this when you are here you are trying to exploit greedily and when you are in this you are exploring different arms. So, if you chose your epsilon t to be very small then most of the times you are just trying to exploit. On the other hand if epsilon t is high or close to 1 you will be trying to explore either of the extremes are bad you have to choose your epsilon t appropriately. So, ideally how you want to do. So, when t is small that is in the initial rounds maybe it is good to explore right because you do not know about anybody just go and sample them uniformly each one of them. But as t increases you have got some samples now you have some estimates of the arms then maybe you want to just restrict you want to focus more on exploiting the things right. So, so this is like you kind of have to see like when is good to explore and then after that at what point you should start exploiting. ETC algorithm exactly did that right. What ETC did it initially explored for certain number of rounds and one is it is confident or whatever like once it felt that this is enough number of samples then it started exploiting right. Now, the question is is it possible that instead of doing this exploration and exploitation separately it is it possible to combine them ok. So, we will see some algorithm based on that today it is called upper confidence bound based algorithm. So, before we move into this do you think of any other possibilities for algorithm selections here. Like so far we we are always talking about selecting the arm in a deterministic fashion right. You just go and select which is the highest name why not do it a bit probabilistically the way we did it in the adversarial setting. So, how about another option may be I will just write 3 here. How about saying that I am going to choose i t is equals to i. So, I will define this when I have this estimates currently let us say in round t I have this estimate then I am going to define the probability for arm i to be like this ok and let us say this is p i. So, this gives me a probability vector p on the k arms. Now, select an arm according to this probability distribution. So, this is very similar to what we did in weighted majority algorithm right. So, do you think this algorithm should perform better if you do probabilistically like this. Now, let us come back to this upper confidence bound algorithm. So, little bit history about this algorithm. So, this problem of studying this banded problems it has been there for quite some time ok. Like maybe in early 1930s there were some studies like especially in the in treatments right like when we have a set of treatments which you are applying on patients. You do not know which patient which treatment is going to be effective on on the patients. Now, we are exactly in this case right nowadays like coronavirus we do not know what is the treatment, but everybody is now want to identify a drug which gives you the most effective treatment, but none of us know what is the right treatment ok. Now, what how people will do they have to apply some set of candidate drugs will be there and I have to test them ok. And if that drug happens to cure good that is a good drug for me, but the drug can also kill because if the I do not know apriori that is going to be effective or not. So, it can also kill the person. So, what I want to do is if I apply a bad drug it could effectively cause harm or maybe it is just neutral also it may it may not cause harm, but what is my goal? I want to quickly identify the drug which cures maximum number of people right. And how I will do this? Like I apply this drugs on patients and see that whether that person responds positively or negatively to this drug. Now, it is not necessary that if I apply this drug on one person and if he responds this drug is the good one ok. So, we have to find a drug which is effective on an average on most number of people and that is exactly this problem right. So, this I have set of drugs their effectiveness is like how good they are like they being effective has certain is related to certain mean value and I want to identify a drug which has the highest effect and that I want to do as quickly as possible. Now, such kind of problems are pretty much like these these kind of problems have been there for quite a long time and in earlier some of these problems have been studied and some algorithms were proposed, but only like late 1980s when people thought ok this is a interesting problem let us been studied, but we need to understand its theoretical guarantees what kind of things. So, in 1980s when we talk about this lower wound we will discuss that paper like people talked about this and see what kind of performance guarantees you will get like how to model this problem if I am going to model this problem this drug testing problem as this stochastic multiambed problem what kind of performance guarantees I get and people give algorithm ok, but those algorithms are bit complicated to analyze, but people give some algorithms and also showed that you cannot do better than this they established a lower bounds ok. But only in the late 2000 I think it is around 2003 this algorithm is proposed called UCB upper confidence bound which are kind of easy like this algorithm is not complicated as you will see and also it is kind of easy to analyze. So, till that point whatever the algorithm we had they are kind of very complicated also like in terms of the algorithm and also to analyze ok. Only after this 2003 this algorithm called UCB is introduced may be this algorithm is not so old compared to its history like the first the medical diagnosis I just discussed those are like 1930s paper and the ones which give some algorithms initially they are like 1980s paper and after that like after a long gap this algorithm is come in 2003 in that way it is 2002 ok, 2002. So, in that way this is not far away right about less maybe like some still less than 20 years ok. Now, what is the idea of this algorithm? So, this algorithm is basically saying that it is kind of trying to exploit the fact that if you have the estimates ok and you know you if you can you have some confidence ok. This estimates if you are going to take the maximum value of this estimates. So, ok this ok not a not a maximum value. Suppose that it is just saying that you estimate a bound on your estimates such that with high probability it contains the true value you estimate the bound some range and try to treat the upper value of that bound as the actual value of your mean value and now then apply this greedy algorithm on that. So, ok just how it says suppose let us say this is arm 1 suppose after a certain number of samples at some point I have an estimate of that and let us say I got the estimate of arm 1 to be mu 1 hat. I can also come up with a confidence bound on this value. So, let us say this is an upper confidence bound and this is the associated lower confidence bound. So, this will be symmetric about this point right and similarly and we know that this confidence interval is such that the true value of the mean will be somewhere in this interval the true value the mu 1 will be in this interval with high probability. So, that is how this interval is built. You do similarly for each arm. So, maybe for arm 2 you estimated that this is my estimated value and you have some confidence interval in that this is the this is the upper confidence bound on and let us say the arm 3 in this case you ended up getting this estimate and you have this confidence interval on this ok. So, you this confidence interval depend on how many samples you had right. These are the confidence intervals the confidence interval the length depends on how many samples you had to estimate that particular arm ok. So, if for some arm you have lesser number of samples that is interval will be some smaller and if some arms you have more number of samples its interval is going to be larger. Now, what it is saying that ok fine you have this interval for each of this arms treat this point as the actual the true means at that particular time and just select play the arm which has the highest value of this upper confidence box. So, it is saying that at any point whatever the observation you have made about your environment through the samples and the estimates you have pretend that they are they are as good as possible to be close to the true values of the environment and pretend that like and be optimistic about these values and then just take these values are the true values and play and apply the greedy thing on that ok. It is saying that whatever the observations you have current till now treat them the upper confidence interval and upper confidence bound you have on each one of them to be the true values and just apply your greedy algorithm. Now, the question is why does this idea work and how to what is the right how to take this what is the right confidence intervals I should be taking right like ok. Now, I am just going to first thing is how to construct this confidence intervals. We know how to construct this confidence intervals based on our concentration bounds anything so far ok. So, what we have known so far what we know is probability that mu hat minus mu greater than was it 2 here or in the denominator 2 log 1 by delta. So, if I have this what is this probabilities upper bounded as it is delta right. So, what we are saying that is if, but we need to assume that all my random variables the distributions when you center them they are all sigma quotient right. Then we have this result ok when my random variables are my distribution. So, let us say this is for i term there was also n here somewhere in this ok. Let us redo this right what we have. So, what we said probability that mu hat minus mu. So, what is mu i hat it is the let us say it is computed from n samples ok. So, again mu i hat is let us say my mu i hat I was able to calculate based on my n samples drawn from that i term. Now, we said that this probability is being greater than epsilon is upper bounded by exp minus n epsilon square by 2 sigma square right. Did we say this this is a bound is this 2 is in the right place. Now, set this epsilon to be so, if you are going to set your epsilon to be like this. So, if I am going to set my epsilon like this. So, what is this quantity is going to be epsilon square right. So, 2 gets ok you are saying it should be like this. If I have this then I know that this probability that mu i hat minus mu i being greater than or equals to epsilon is upper bounded by delta. So, because of that it says that my and similarly I can also write probability that mu i hat minus mu less than or equals to epsilon is also. So, I want this to be. So, this is a absolute value right if I am going to take this to be this beyond that and I want this to be less than or equals to minus epsilon and this is also delta ok. So, it is saying that if my mu hat if I calculate it somewhere here and if I take my mu i hat plus minus epsilon and mu i hat plus epsilon here. So, my true value is going to be somewhere in this interval with probability taking into both it is like some 2 delta right. Now this is once I have some n samples I can come up with a interval like this where I can say that ok. If I estimate this mu mean to be mu i hat like this I can guarantee that within this interval the true mean will lie with probability that is going to be this is 1 minus 2 delta not 2 delta, but is 1 minus 2 delta. So, now based on that I can compute my confidence intervals here right. So, what I will do is if I have n samples I am going to take in this case this upper guide to be mu 1 plus I am going to take this 2 sigma square log 1 by delta divided by n and similarly this is going to be mu minus 2 sigma square log 1 by delta by n. So, I can construct this upper and lower confidence bounds on my estimates using this results based on my concentration bounds ok. Now, then I can use this quantity here the upper confidence bound to be the current estimate whatever the value for my arm 1 and similarly this for arm 2 and this and for arm 3 and then just decide which one gives me the highest value and play accordingly. So, that is why this upper confidence this kind of idea is called as what is this optimism in the face of uncertainty. So, you are trying to be optimistic here right like the you are facing an uncertain environment, but whatever the current is the best values you could get you are trying to be optimistic by taking the upper confidence value and here you are trying to be optimistic in the sense that we are trying to be like environment is going to behave as if these are the true values and then you are going to play apply your greedy value on that. So, based on this idea the UCB algorithm. So, it is it is as I said it is going to be based on optimism. So, most of the algorithm that we are going to study for the stochastic bandits they are going to be based on this idea of optimism in the face of uncertainty. And now once we have this what is your algorithm is going to be? Now, your algorithm is going to be in every round you are going to compute the UCB value upper confidence bound value of these arms. So, how we are going to compute UCB of arm i in round let us say t minus 1 I am going to define it as its estimate plus. So, let us assume henceforth that this sigma square is 1 that is we are assuming all my distribution to be 1 sub Gaussian ok. So, this is just for simplicity. So, if it is not if it is sigma square known you can appropriately scale your bounds ok, but for time being assumes sigma square is 1. So, I am going to take it as 2 log. So, far instead of this 1 by delta here I am going to replace it by t you will see that why later and then. So, what we do? I think we use n what was n i n i of t minus 1. So, this we defined as number of samples we got for arm i till round t minus 1 right it was t i we defined it as. So, here it is we assume that this is computed based on n samples, but we do not know right how many samples we have till round t minus 1 that number of samples we have we are going to denote it as t i of t minus 1. And now the algorithm is you are going to select i t which is arc max of t minus 1. So, just let me formally write this algorithm as you can see here this term makes sense only when there is this t i is at least 1 that is we have at least one sample if you do not have any sample this term is 0 and it can it is not defined. So, the you see the algorithm is input is a number of arms that is k is given to you and for t equals to 1 2 like this what you are going to do? Now, before that play each arm once. So, in the first k rounds we are going to pull each arm once ok and then for after that you will be starting with k plus 1 k plus 2 rounds in the subsequent rounds you are going to i t equals to arc max of ok. So, little bit discussion about I said that when I started talking about UCB we said like why not combine exploration and exploitation right. Now, the question is this by doing so is it combining exploration and exploitation ok. Suppose, let us say some arm so far you have not played many times for that arm what is t i is what number of arms total number of rounds total number of times you have played that arm till t minus 1 right. If you have not played this i till round t minus 1 many times compared to the other arms that guy is going to be smaller right and because of that compared to the other arms the guy which has smaller value of t i is going to make this quantity large for that arm ok. So, because of that whatever the value of the mu i that arm has if this t i is going to be smaller this quantity is going to be larger because of that the sum is going to be larger ok. So, what does this mean? If you have not played this arm i many times that is you have got did not observe many samples of it you want to then this value could be larger and because of that you may be this algorithm may be forced to choose that arm to play in that round ok if you if it if that is the case if this guy and if it so happens that all the arms has been played enough number of times ok then what comes to dominate may be in that case or everybody has almost the same value of this what now differs for them is the mean values the and in that case the guy which has the highest value of the estimated guy may be picked. So, this algorithm is kind of doing the same thing right this is like you you say that this part is saying that ok exploit because the one which have the highest value of this estimates maybe you want to choose that, but this part here is saying no you have to explore also because if some guy has been not played many times I am going to give make him larger and because of that the sum will be larger ok. And it is not that this guy is you have to keep on increasing this all the time the number of samples has to be keep on increased there you see that there is also log t term there in the numerator ok this is also slowly increasing right as t increases this is also t t increasing ok. So, it is not necessary that if you have not played anyway if you have not played this arm many times it is going to make this guy larger and even let us say if you have for some reason you did not play it and or if you if you played it enough number of times this is not going to contribute much to that, but still there is a log t quantity here which keeps on increasing. So, so because of this if because this this this term log t is continuously increasing if you do not play a certain arm many times that this denominator become is small then also this term may dominate this terms right and you will be playing that arm and ok. Now, consider the case that you got good estimate for all the arms now the question is whether this algorithm will start stop exploring at any time like what happened in ETC algorithm right it it it observed the samples till sometime and after that it was only getting stuck to the one. Will it happen in this algorithm? Will it so happen that after sometime this exploration part will not have that much say in the some only this guys have say that is you have you have got enough number of samples for all the arms. So, then this way if you have enough number of the arms for all the arms right then this ti becomes large for all the arms and then it will make this quantity small right then only the say it comes from this exploitation part, but that is not going to happen right because there is a log t term here in which this numerate is also continuously increasing. So, even because of that even if you go further down into the time even if you have many samples for that particular arm I it may happen that this term may dominate this term and you may be still going and observing samples from the arms which may not be optimal. So, I am saying that because of this kind of specific thing we have it is not the UCB will never stop playing such up optimal arms even if it has identified let us say the exploration never stops. These terms keep on contributing to the sum and algorithm will keep on it will never get stuck to one arm, but deliberately this increase is slow enough it is not like it is increasing fast it is increasing very slowly right this log t is increases very slowly right. So, because of that when you have many ti's many many samples for each of the arms that because this is in the denominator it is going to make this small this term smaller, but there is a log t term there it is going to make this larger at a very slow rate because it is increasing logarithmically intake. So, because of that the algorithm will never get stuck into one arm it keep on exploring the other arms, but the exploration may be at a very slow rate ok because you do not want to explore very too frequently right because in that case you will be maybe playing suboptimal arms too many times ok fine. So, this is the algorithm it has this properties. Now, the question is what performance guarantees it gives.


We're moving on to the valedictory session on critical factors and forces that will shape communication in 2021. Let us put our hands together. Join me in welcoming Ms Catherine Devane, Deputy Managing Director and Head of Health of We from UK. Over to you Ms Devane. Very warm welcome Catherine. Hello, good afternoon everybody. It's a pleasure to be here with you, even if we can only be together virtually. So thank you so much for the IPRCCC for inviting me to speak to you today. They've asked me to bring a perspective from other markets to your conference, so that's what I'm going to do. The focus of the presentation is to look at how social movements are taking centre stage, consumer behaviours and expectations are shifting and forcing brands to own up to their past mistakes and adapt their products and services to a more socially distanced and inclusive world. So I'm going to look at how the impact of last year has shaped communications on a global level. Look at the trends that we think are relevant for 2021 and steps we believe are important for brands to thrive in the next normal. And to do this I've used a combination of research from We Communications and our partners Quartz and the Foresight Factory, as well as including real life examples from brands which are leading with purpose to make a positive impact on the world. So even before Covid the world demanded a new way to lead, to communicate and to work. Increasingly it all comes back to purpose. In 2019 the media called it the year of protests because of the crowds of people who are marching in the streets supporting issues they believed in. And 2020 was the same with people marching on issues from equality to climate change. Some estimates say that the Black Lives Matter protests turned out more people than any other movement in the United States history. So I think we can see that activism is on the rise. In the UK dance group diversity performed on Britain's Got Talent with a piece that supported the Black Lives Matter movement, queued almost 25,000 complaints to the UK broadcasting regulator, Ofcom. ITV, the UK broadcaster of Britain's Got Talent, defended the performance, the group and the message on social media and in print and I love the message that they ran. They said we are changed by what we see just as we are changed when we are seen. The lines taken from a powerful purpose led ad campaign that the broadcaster launched earlier in the year. So social action is a powerful force and one that we've seen with our clients that we too. In Australia for example we've had a three-year partnership with non-profit Plastic Free Foundation which encourages people to reduce plastic use and is the driving force behind Plastic Free July. And this year even with the global focus on Black Lives Matter and the pandemic the Plastic Free movement drove a record 326 million people to participate in the challenge which was a 30% increase over last year's participation. Every year we invest in the Brands in Motion study at WE and it's our research that helps us understand audience expectations in brands and guides our clients as to how they can respond. In 2019 83% said they believed brands could be capable of providing stability in uncertain times. Well I think we can safely say that we've experienced enough uncertainty recently. One such example of a brand taking a stance is Avon. So committed to help end violence against women and girls globally this was a critical moment for Avon in India to introduce its promise through action. It's not a pleasant subject for anyone to discuss and the temptation might be to look the other way but Avon has leaned into its purpose and given a voice to the voiceless talking about a subject which some consider unspeakable. Avon the Avon Foundation for Women and their communications partners Avon and WE launched the isolated not alone campaign. They worked with NGOs fighting against gender-based domestic violence, rallied support from influencers and hosted live sessions on Instagram to address questions around legal aid and mental health. Overall more than 15,000 clients received health services including screening and counselling, $122,000 in grants to frontline services to support women and children in need and at risk and more than 2.9 million users were reached. Consumers are clearly asking for meaningful action over lip service or rhetoric and we hear so often in our society referencing this now as virtue signalling. Another example of a brand taking a stance and meaningfully acting with purposes of course Microsoft. Last year Microsoft announced its bold goal to go carbon negative by 2030 and then taking it one step further to pledge that by 2050 they will remove all carbon that they have admitted as a company since they were founded in 1975. We are really proud at WE Communications to ensure that the widest audience were reached with this announcement from consumers through to public policy makers and the timing of the announcement a week before Davos also made sure that maximum exposure with the financial and business community was achieved. For so many brands the pandemic has been a forcing function. It's driven companies to articulate and commit to a purpose that speaks to the most foundational human needs not just a product's utility but the real test of a true and resilient purpose led brand is how its purpose comes to life inside the company and for its people. We have seen a real uptake in client requests for support on employee engagement over the last year and we think this is only set to increase. Without employee engagement your company's purpose is hollow. Of course your employees are your biggest ambassadors for your purpose. In some cases in the past couple of years there's been a huge disconnect between outward displays of purpose and internal negligence. As IBM CEO Arvin Krishnapillett, purpose and profit go together reinforcing each other. PayPal CEO Dan Shorman took it one step further. I'd actually argue if you don't have a purpose as a company you will not succeed from a results perspective. When brands pledge allegiance to purpose for their customer's benefit and then fail to apply that commitment internally the hypocrisy undermines their credibility and erodes trust and ultimately impacts performance. For two years we has partnered with the publisher Quartz Insights to learn how communications leaders can help guide brands to a more purposeful future. Last year only 50% of respondents said employee engagement programmes were meeting their people's needs and only 20% are prioritising investments to address factors like emotional health equity and inclusion and culture. That's not just an HR or internal comms misstep that is a missed business opportunity. In the face of uncertainty and hardship we have all seen too many companies pull funding from internal programmes go dark on their employees because they just don't know what to say or simply let employee engagement efforts fall by the wayside as other priorities feel much more urgent to them. This year businesses are wondering how to be resilient in their purpose when they're constantly in reactive mode concerned about crisis response, reputation management and relevance. An excellent example of how a business has not just ignored the employee engagement in the light of these pressures is HSBC's commercial banking arm. Last year they established Drumbeat which is their employee engagement campaign and provides employees with regular newsletters and employee resources but beyond an email this also includes videos, podcasts, links to external content, question and answer sessions and so much more as well. It also includes engagement from different leaders through the business making sure that employees are getting information from the sources who matter most to them. HSBC discovered that 90% of employees surveyed found the drumbeat letter useful and in the first round of comms to go out after the COVID outbreak their clicks to resources increased by more than 100%. For many brands the pandemic has been a forcing function it's driven them to articulate a purpose that speaks to the most foundational human needs and not just that product utility. Kantar recently reported that brands who are able to deliver purpose in an ethical way saw their value grow twice as much as average brands during the initial weeks and months of COVID. Intel has been really clear about the steps it is taking to help fight the pandemic and communicate the impact of its product's unique value proposition. They've been very clear about their purpose in the world and how they're staying true to that in the current environment. Its scale to serve program helps hospitals install a platform that expands bed capacity in the ICU and care for patients. The company has also collaborated with medical device company Medtronic to enable clinicians to adjust ventilator settings outside the ICU to reduce healthcare workers exposure to patients recovering from COVID. A really important tangible demonstration of how technology is improving health. Scale to serve is a great example of digital transformation of healthcare which is happening across all countries. Digital innovation in healthcare is essential to improve patient outcomes, reduce waste and improve safety. However and I feel particularly strongly about this there is a real danger that as we digitize healthcare systems we leave behind some of the most vulnerable in our society. People who were either lack the technology or the ability to navigate digital appointments, online medical records, prescription services as well as patient support programs which increasingly live online. Our partners at the Foresight Factory identified a key trend for 2021 presence free connections and this speaks to the point about digital equality. The legacy of COVID-19 will recognize that modern life no longer requires us to be physically present and 2020 was definitely a year of cyber firsts as COVID-19 opened our eyes to digital alternatives in work in life and beyond and removed geographical barriers, accelerated tech adoption rates amongst all age groups and this provides opportunities for brands to use new platforms to engage with audiences. However and I think this is really important it also requires brands to take responsibility for considering the accessibility of their communications particularly for brands in healthcare financial services and energy. How can you ensure that you are not contributing to the digital divide? How can you work hard to ensure that the more vulnerable in our societies are not left behind? Well one way to tackle the issue of engagement is to seek input and canvas opinion from advocacy groups that represent these people even better still if you can actually work with the customer themselves. The stakeholder customer is another important trend for 2021. In 2020 foresight factory found that 63% of global consumers would like it if their favourite brand asked for their ideas for new products and 76% expected companies to use their feedback to improve their offerings. Moving forward the rise of stakeholder capitalism and approach demanding businesses be run for multiple stakeholders including customers, clients, employees, communities and the natural environment will keep brand purpose centre stage. Engaging effectively with all your stakeholders is going to build trust which is important in a world facing a crisis of trust created by the perfect storm of COVID-19 disruption, increasing polarizing politics and the rise of digital misinformation. Brands should prepare to offer new levels of transparency as consumers look for new ways to validate claims of all kinds. The trust economy is thriving however instead of seeing this as an added box to tick brands need to embrace the opportunity by sharing more information with the world from ingredients to common footprints to salaries and brands can differentiate themselves and strengthen their purpose and messaging together with transparency is authenticity of course not only are consumers more willing to trust when brands communicate in authentic manner there's no faster way to a trust erode trust than creating gaps between your brand's words and its actions. Just this final example I think is a really lovely way of seeing that come to life. It comes from Italian food brand Napolina although the brand has been tackling illegal labour in tomato supply chain for years an increase in media and shopper attention around the issue has created a need for added transparency so in response Napolina recently launched the product passport which is a digital experience showing consumers the journey of a product from right through the supply chain from farm to supermarket. The product passport can be accessed through QR codes printed on the products and is based on verified data collected through audits GPS mapping and blockchain traceability programs. The sustainability storytelling strategy has helped Napolina connect with shoppers while also providing evidence to support their global goal of becoming the most trusted FMCG supplier in Europe. So in conclusion 2020 has been an incredible level in so many ways forcing us all to reflect on many things as companies brands and individuals our behaviours our values and purpose and how we communicate. Communicating with the world is never an easy task and the world is in turmoil which has made it even trickier. We know it's tempting to retreat from purpose and focus on survival messaging but the top trends that I've shared and the case studies that that I found really inspiring show that leading with purpose and committing to positive action and remaining authentic will put brands in the best position to survive and thrive in 2021. Thank you. Happy to take any questions. Thank you. Because it's a virtual format we are not taking a Q&A session here but thank you for sharing those insights and your case studies here with us. Thank you for your time. I know it was you know a little delayed but thank you so much for being here with us. You're very welcome. Thank you so much for having me.


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