It is my pleasure and honor to welcome you all to ChaosCon 2023 North America in Vancouver. Super excited that you're all here with us. Also shout out to everyone who is online and joining us remotely. I am super stoked that we can come together again and have some interactions. And I'll go over a few housekeeping things and then get into the program for today. First I have a few thank yous. First I want to thank our sponsors that we are able to come together and provide the environment that we are providing. So thank you to Google and the Alfred Pease Loan Foundation. I also want to thank our program committee. It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of planning ahead of time to put together a program to plan this all out. And so thank you to everyone who has helped in that process. I also want to thank you all for coming and for being good participants today. This is my shout out that we have a code of conduct. We are sharing it with the Linux Foundation event. For being here you've all agreed to it. And this just reminds me we want to be welcoming and inclusive to everyone. And if you have any issues please let me know or the Linux Foundation staff that we can address any concerns. I do hope that we have a good time together. Now this is for everyone. This is for you here. Everyone online please join our Slack channel where we can ask questions, where we can ask common and communicate throughout the conference. When we have a hybrid event like this with people online and here in the room, it is really we need some kind of tool to connect and bridge that gap. So we are using the Chaos Slack. We have a dedicated channel, the ChaosCon channel. And that's where we'll look for comments online for the speakers later if we have any discussion. I'll leave this up here for just another moment. It has worked really well at the last ChaosCon events. For those taking pictures, I assume right now you're scanning the QR code. As you are taking pictures throughout the event and posting status updates, we do encourage you to share it on social media. We have a Twitter account. We have a Macedon account. There is a LinkedIn profile. Please use any of those and use the hashtags ChaosCon and Chaos. That way we can find it and share it and we can create some excitement around what we are doing here today. We have an agenda and my role today is to keep us on track for time. We have three keynotes and then a lot of discussion and interaction. This is intentional. We wanted to have a lot of collaboration going on. We have first, Sofia Vargas, with how do we build towards open source sustainability. Discussion of issues, opportunities, expectations and the role of individuals, companies and organizations. And then we'll have a discussion. I'm super excited for what Sofia has prepared here. And then we'll have a coffee and tea break that is great for connecting and talking with each other and getting hydrated again. And then we'll move into the keynote two by Emma Irvin, which I'm so excited that you're back at ChaosCon. It's been a while. And the topic is how do you interpret, motivate to improve and share results of open source software community health related findings within an organization? So how do we go beyond just looking at the data but actually talk about it and convince others that we have some really good insights? We'll have a discussion session. And Emma, we didn't talk about this, maybe during the break we can talk about this. There's a discussion that comes directly out of your talk or if we use some other prompt that we have prepared. And then the third keynote, this is shared between our software groups in the Chaos Project where we will see some of the latest developments and get to see what we have today in the Chaos Project for collecting metrics and getting insights.  So the two discussions that we have in the beginning or throughout the day, we'll ask you to collect notes and then at the end we'll report out. And that's where we get to share this and have a conversation about it. So that's the plan. For everyone online, we will have, for the discussions, we'll pause the stream because this is really where we'll have conversations here in the room. You're of course welcome to take the discussion to Slack. We're just not quite sure how that will work, so that's why we decided to pause the stream. Now, to kick off today's event, we have a few thoughts that I would like to share about where we are today, what's going on, and then also about the Chaos Project so that we understand where we are, what are we doing here. When we look at the industry as a whole, there are several challenges. I just cherry-picked a few challenges here. One is open source has immense value. There's a lot of interest in open source. The open forum Europe has published a report where the value, the contribution to the European growth domestic product is estimated between 65 to 95 billion euros. Adjust in Europe. Open source available worldwide. There's a lot more value that is being created. And from study after study after study, we also know that open source has found its way into almost every source code, every source software base. Anywhere between 70 to 100% are the studies that we have seen in the last years coming out. So open source is everywhere. What we also know is that a lot of open source projects fail. Whatever that means that it fails, usually that there's no more development, there's no community forming. And then we have some open source projects that get really big communities. And we need to understand these dynamics a little bit better. So there's a demand for software to demonstrate the value of metrics as we are looking at our communities to understand this, what is going on here at the project and ecosystem level. The risks, so one was the value, but there's also huge risks. We have seen, and again just cherry picking two examples here. There was a lock for shell only two years ago. If you remember that, it was right before Christmas and there was a huge scramble trying to fix this vulnerability and close it, which has existed for years in the software without anyone knowing. And it was affecting 93% of enterprise clouds and a lot of other systems. Huge investment to mitigate that vulnerability, find it wherever it was in our software and our supply chain and close it. And then a couple years earlier just to say this is not just a problem for tech companies. This is a problem for society as a whole. We saw this example of Equifax, a company in the United States that is collecting private data, personal data to create credit scores. They were using an open source library and did not update when a security fix was provided because whatever reason, they might not have even known they were using it. No one was paying attention, whatever it was. And 40% of the population of the United States had their data stolen because of this vulnerability and the way that Equifax was managing open source. Huge economic loss that happened here. So this is affecting everyone and the risks are really big. And we've seen governments getting involved. We've seen legislations being drafted for securing the software supply chain and getting a handle on, you know, just how do we secure this infrastructure that is being built with software and open source is super important part of this. So there are several things that need to be done and that are being done. There's software composition analysis that companies are doing to find all of the components in their software, all of their open source libraries, which is good to have a good understanding so that we can find what we actually are using. That's the first problem. A lot of companies don't even know what's all in their source code. We also then can do vulnerability detection, scan the code and have reporting on the ecosystems. That's where we would like to go. We can do proactive risk assessment where we want to see, okay, let's take a look at what is that software that we're using that is in our code base, in our company. Let's collect some metrics on this. And software bill of material, SBITX format, it's a huge initiative that's been going on for, what, 10, 20 years now? Slowly making its way everywhere so that we have a way to communicate. This is all the open source software that we are using and then we can analyze it. So there's a lot of things that are happening. And again, there's probably a lot more that I haven't mentioned. And chaos is at that intersection here. We are providing something valuable as a community around the community health. So there's the source code, there is detecting everything, finding everything. But then how do we actually understand who is making those open source software? Who is in those projects? And there are four primary stakeholders that we thought of when we started chaos. We have the open source contributors that want to know where they should place the efforts to know that they're making an impact. We have the open source communities that want to attract new developers, new members, and want to make sure that they are being consistent, have good quality. We also have open source companies that want to engage with communities, engage with the software, but want to have some guidance on where to put their efforts, what actually needs help, where do we go. Make some good decisions here. And then foundations. Foundations are shepherding a lot of open source projects, and they need some insights to how they're doing, report on that, share to their members, and make sure that their work is being impactful. So that's why we created chaos in 2017. We wanted to improve the transparency around the health of open source communities. We wanted to educate maintainers, companies, foundations, and then help ideally, you know, this is supposed to contribute to creating more healthy communities. By understanding it better, having shared language around metrics, we can build towards best practice around it. The way we imagined this was we'll have metrics that we need to define, create some shared language, we'll have some software that implements this, we start collecting the data and producing it, and that was the idea, and they inform each other. As we are defining metrics, we'll see what we can do in the software. As we're implementing things, we need to update the descriptions because we learn how it's actually being used. This was the idea, basically move from metrics to software and help everyone. And to talk about the chaos project, how we set this up, we have two software projects that are advancing this metrics right now. We have the grimoire lab tool and the auger tool. They take different approaches, they do different things, different metrics that they're focusing on, innovating in different areas. And then we have the metrics. And the metrics are defined in working groups that are focusing on risk metrics, diversity, equity inclusion metrics, common metrics, and then building metric models where we bring them together into use cases or specific scenarios on how they can be viewed as a collective. And then, so that's the working groups in chaos, how we are organized. That's where a lot of the metrics discussion is happening. We also have working groups, not just on the metrics, but also on context. So we have working groups dedicated towards what one is for open source program offices. One is for the app ecosystem, GNOME and KDE specifically, Science, University, Academia. They're different focuses that we want to set and define, okay, these are the metrics relevant here, these are the metric models. And then as chaos, there are also some supporting functions that we need to provide, communications, we need the website, we have the software, we have a diversity, equity inclusion, badging program, we have a podcast, so a lot of different things. And finally, this is a fairly new addition is via added chapters that are providing local communities throughout the world. We have Chaos Africa, Chaos Asia Pacific, we are working towards having one in Latin America and Eastern Europe as well. So this is where I'm going to leave you, a little overview of where the chaos project is today, what we are working on. And I encourage you, if you're here for the first time, just getting interested, come join us. And to everyone who is already here, thank you for being part of this. Another great way to learn more is to listen to our podcast where we bring on different people from the ecosystem to talk about their own metric journey, what they're doing with community health. And we are all chaotic, so thank you for being chaotic, thank you for being chaotic today and being here and participating in this. This closes my part of welcoming you and sharing where we are and we can move forward in our agenda right on time. Well, we are actually five minutes ahead of time, so perfect. And next up we have Sophia.


Hey guys, welcome to our empty house tour. We're so excited to be homeowners and we want to take you through because if you're planning on doing some renovations and we definitely want to keep this video for our memories but also just share the journey of all the renovations. So let's go ahead and get started. Starting off, we have a dining room over here which also could be a sitting area but we definitely want a dining room because this whole time in an apartment obviously we just ate our coffee table the whole time. So we're very excited about this and Ryan clearly just told me we needed a dining room table but I'll show you what I want our priority to be over here. But these are the stairs so we're gonna most likely rip out all the carpet into home. We're currently in the living room which the light looks so good today. These past four days and especially the day that we closed on this house it was gloomy and eerie and it just felt like a fever dream. Everything just did not feel real. So today it really felt like home and we had some friends come and just like see the place though it was really fun. First thing that we're doing to the house is getting rid of all the flooring. We just bought the hardwood floors yesterday. We got a quote earlier this morning for someone to come lay the hardwood floors down. I feel like changing the hardwoods and getting it a nice new fresh paint color is going to change it drastically. So over here we have our fire place. How freaking cute is this? There was like a foundation issue so that's why it's kind of, you know, messed up over here. So we might want to get like a new mantel or I don't know, we like this but we also want it to be like have an edge, you know. We're like a Christmas garland. Wood thing. Yeah, we'll figure it out but we definitely will hang the TV over here and then moving on over here. I have an idea to kind of like cut out this part of the stairs and make it see through again so they're like just more open and have like spindles and have the light wood stairs. So in our closing day vlog, you'll see which hardwood floor we picked up. I'm not really sure if I showed you guys. I think I did, but there were a lot of samples. Yeah, these are makeshift living room furniture right now. We have these French doors that just opened up to the backyard. This is pretty spacious backyard so we're really excited about that but I think the outdoors will probably be one of the last things we do, especially because winter is coming and I feel like everything's going to die. This is the breakfast nougat and I love this little area. I think it's gonna be so cute and this is definitely something I want to make sure we get a table for over first instead of the dining room because I feel like we'll eat here more. And then over here is the kitchen, which is massive. Compared to a lot of the homes we toured in Austin. I think definitely one thing I want to make sure we do is paint the cabinets. I don't love the gray color. I think we're probably gonna go for like a creamy white color. We have some pink samples over there. I did that. What? I said I did that today. What? Oh yeah. So we need to get in front of these. I think this is probably the first thing we need to do. But I really just bought some recess lining on prime day or rain doorbell on prime day and we're just gonna kind of try to smart home the whole house out affordably of course. But yeah, so this is the kitchen and the one thing I love about this kitchen already is that number one, this is a dishwasher. So it's a panel ready dishwasher, which later down the road, I really hope to do this with the fridge. But this fridge sticks out so much on the side. So I'm thinking we'll get a smaller fridge. Maybe put this one outdoor in the garage, which I've always wanted an outdoor fridge. Back to the cabinets. They thought of everything. There's these Lazy Susan organizers over here. These are soft clothes, which is so nice. That's definitely a luxury. In the island, there's like some drawers and it's really nice. I keep seeing TikTok videos that are saying that cabinets are just less efficient, especially for down here and that you should have drawers. And so they already have drawers. One other thing I really want to do is to take this out and put a hood right here. I think that will definitely change the space up. And then where that fridge is, I'll probably do an appliance garage. Just some more cabinetry. And then right over here will possibly be the panel ready fridge. So these are just ideas that I have. Obviously, I don't know the cost of everything and like the timeline and what we're going to do first. And well, we're going to do the hardwoods first. I said that, but pretty much these are just all my ideas that I want to share with you guys. So let's go into the laundry room. Here's the laundry room and this is an issue because we just went to Home Depot and we're like looking for washer and dryers. And apparently they're just getting more and more like deep. And right now we need a little less than 30 inches because this length is 30 inches. But also apparently this needs like four inches, the guy said out. So I think the ones we're looking at are like maybe 27 inches, but they're small. And the guy said you would need like a 4.5 quart something to do even bedding. And so I feel like that's like standard maybe, I don't know. So we're like, what the frig do we do with this area? And like also what did the previous seller have here? We're so curious because these doors come out swinging. So we're also thinking, well, I'm also thinking they will do a pocket door here. And then behind you, Ryan, is our pantry. And I have big dreams for the space. I've always wanted a butler's pantry, which is kind of just like a kitchen countertop thing. And maybe we'll put the microwave here and a mini fridge here. Again, just ideas. So I'm not sure if we can actually execute all of this, but up here we'll probably just be more pantry shelves or like actual cabinetry. So we can like hide it and make it nice and pretty. But I definitely want kind of just like a coffee area, maybe another place where I can put like one or two appliances like an air fryer or something. When we were looking at houses, we saw this really nice, beautiful home newly built. And we walked out of it, at least I walked out of it thinking like, oh my God, should we buy this house? I think it's perfect, great location, great price. And then I went home thinking, you know what, I really need a garage because I want an outdoor fridge. And obviously Ryan this whole time was like, I want somewhere to park. And I was like, we can just park anywhere. But also in Texas, it's so hard to park outside because it's so hot, your car is literally overheated. So I'm very, very happy that we did get a garage. I feel like that's kind of boring because I won't show you guys that. But there's a lot of workspace and so I'll probably show more of that in my vlogs. But over here we have our powder bathroom. It's pretty basic right now. We would just have vanity and a toilet, but there's a good amount of space in here. It's not like tiny by any means. So I'm excited to kind of get creative with that. But I think this will definitely be like one of the last projects because it's not something we're gonna be using every day. And then over here is a stair closet, which is really cool. Just loving all the storage. We are going upstairs right now. As I said, I want all of this carpet taken out. So literally the whole upstairs has carpet and it's all getting gutted. We have a little loft area up here. We have no idea what to do with this. And honestly the first time we looked at this house we were like, oh my God, it's huge. Like what do we do with all this space? But I feel like we'll definitely figure it out along the way. So this is the Zoomie room. Oh yeah. I kind of think we'll maybe make it like a formal living room. I'm not sure if we'll put a TV here. Maybe just like a sitting area kind of cozy vibe. But we were also thinking we had friends over recently and they were saying maybe we should do a projector screen and we have a projector. So that would be really cool. So here's one of the bathrooms. The wood floor is already coming up. Like we didn't even realize during touring the house that the wood floors were so bad. But take a look at this. Like we could literally pull it up. So the inspector guy told us that. This again will probably be one of the last things we do. Definitely want the primary bathroom done first. And here's some more storage, which we love. That's my whole closet right there. This is probably gonna be my room. I have no idea what to do with it because in my apartment right now I have like a filming room slash like my office. But technically if everything is to my liking like every corner could be my filming room. So I think we'll probably just dedicate it to being my office and I'll have my walking pad. Ryan's gonna take my desk.  I don't know.  But we'll walk. Oh you need for your walking pad. That's true, I forgot. Well we can take turns trying out the walking pad. I do have those floating shelves in my office right now that I'll probably want to put somewhere in the house probably here. And then I have a really nice spacious closet right here. Yeah I want this room. I don't know how you get the bigger one with the big closet. If you like that closet, just wait until you see the primary closet. We were walking into Ryan's room which honestly, no one's looking at it. It has a lot of light in here. I don't know. Look at this background. Nice zoom background. Yeah. He's loving this wall you guys. He's loving it. I'm indifferent. But he's not hating it. Take a look. Take a look. This is obviously a nursery from the last people that were here. And I personally feel as though this is just not the vibe. But I'm not hating on this thing. I feel like it could all be painted black and just have some texture poking out of the wall. What do you guys think? Comment down below. There's some shelving, some baby book shelving. Maybe you can put all your Georgia memorabilia here. That would actually be cool. You have kind of a lot of it. Not really. You should do. Like one helmet. That big Georgia metal thing. You probably have your Diploma. You've got about, I think you have a lot more than you think. But here's his closet. It's pretty spacious. I don't know. It does not have a door right here. I can't even fit in this. Okay Ryan, how many clothes do you have? Why do you get two giant closets? We got them a girl. So? Because it's just... You wear three things. I wear this every day. Welcome to the primary suite. And it is legit a suite. Actually, I don't really know what a suite is. But look how freaking big this place is. So much room for activity. I can't even. And it just keeps going and going and going. So this is probably going to be our sitting area thingy. And then turn around with me right here. We're probably going to put our bed facing the windows right here. This wall is the wall with the outlets like right on each side of the bed. And that wall isn't. But I feel like if we put the bed here, then that's kind of like wasted space. So if we put the bed over here, then... And dress over here? Yeah. And then I'm thinking I can have like a mirror whenever I take outfit pics. Maybe I can be... I'll put a plant right there. I can do that too. I just feel like the light is going to be so good. So very happy about all the natural lighting in this house. This is my space. Yes. I'm going to put two chairs. Big coffee table, bar car, TV. It's going to be so cool. Cool like Pulp Fiction poster. Oh, you guys are not ready for this. Come on, come on in. Just keeps coming, just keeps coming. And then it ends, but it's still a lot of freaking space. I love it. This is like one of the main things that sold me on this house. I mean, like I said, there was just so much storage in this house and space and it's amazing. So I think we're going to split this closet, which will be fun when we don't want to like clean, when I'll be in my cleaning mode and then you're like, I don't want to put my clothes away. So... So we're going to have a hamper right here? Yeah, we'll probably put our hamper right here. Our current hamper is broken. So I definitely need to get a new one and probably a cuter one. And then our bathroom's right here. It has this massive window right here. And we're like, who put this big of a window in a bathroom? Like, I'm not complaining, but I'm just curious. It's a great private. Yeah, yeah. Like I love the lighting, but also I wish the lighting was like on the mirror side, you know, this is like kind of backlit. So you would think the lighting would be good, but then if you're doing your makeup and like the sun is behind you, I don't know if that's going to be the best. But anyways, this countertop, oh, the whole bathroom if you want to redo. But this countertop is so low. Like I'm sure I feel like, but it's even low for me. So I can't even imagine for you, right? But yeah. So there's a lot of space to work with which is nice. And then we have a linen closet kind of dry. That is the whole house. I'm so excited to take you guys along this journey. I'm definitely going to vlog it all here and follow me on TikTok and Instagram stories because I want to do like live updates and things that are happening daily. And I honestly don't know like what the timeline's going to be. We're just starting to kind of get quotes on like things. And this weekend we're going to have the painters come and we already bought the wood flooring, which I said so that we'll probably get laid down in the next couple of weeks. And we really don't know when we're going to be moving in. So we'll keep you guys updated on that, but we're so excited. Subscribe if you guys are not already and we'll see you guys in the next video. Bye.


or have questions either for Jessica or Michael? Yes, I have one for each of you. Let's see if this works. Yes, if I can start asking you, Michael, this, I mean, it's seen from an ecological point of view. You would think that if you were isolated, you would go looking for someone to hang out with. So did you see or did you measure whether these isolated flies moved around more? I mean, they slept less, but did that actually mean that they, you could sort of interpret it ecologically as if they were trying to find others? Right, so we have looked at whether they showed more motion, more movement during the waking time and they don't. But then they may know it's futile to look for others because they're in a tube by themselves. But it's, yeah, I think it must be a pretty strong signal that something's very wrong if none of your compatriots are around. I mean, it strikes me as something that would have pretty deep evolutionary roots. Why would this happen? Why is this a benefit? And if everybody's gone, maybe that's a pretty good signal that something catastrophic is at hand.  You stay alert and you consume as much food as you can handle. But this is a good, it might be interesting to put them in arena and see what kinds of interactions emerge on being reunited. We know that if we reunite them that sleep comes back to normal and appetite comes back to normal. But we haven't looked at the behavioral aspects of, did they show some level of extra effort to get back to their comment? Yeah, it would be interesting if the cage was bigger, maybe it would be possible to study something like that. I don't know. May I also ask a question for Jessica? I was super interesting with this focus on taxonomy and collections. I think that is a very under communicated issue. The fact that we need these collections for so much of our science. And I just wanted to ask you, do you have any ideas of how we can work to get more students to study taxonomy and become taxonomists? Good question. Yeah, that is a good question. We actually talked about it a little bit during the lunchtime discussion about what was considered to be a womanly pursuit was often to go out and collect feathers and shells and create cabinets of curiosity. And there was a history and entomology of this being something that could be an excellent pastime to do taxonomy. And we like to sort things, we like to categorize things. I think somebody showed yesterday their child kind of identifying differences amongst animals. We love doing that. And somehow we get away from the idea that taxonomy is cool by the time we reach high school. So I think it has to start from a very early age, perhaps, underscoring that systematics and taxonomy is important. It's not dusty. It's not something from the past. We're still actively discovering species. I mean, I feel kind of like Indiana Jones. You're kind of like going out and exploring and really discovering new species can be exciting. We just don't communicate that. We imagine taxonomy as kind of as the two characters in Silence of the Lambs who are just kind of deprived from sun just sitting in a dark room looking at fly maggots. That's not what systematics is. Systematics is a vibrant science. It includes biochemistry and genomics and morphology and histology. It's more than just staring at an insect in a vial or on a pin. So we need to kind of glamorize the taxonomy, I think, from a very early age. Thank you. Yes, John. Yeah, I think this is a question for Michael primarily. A big theme in your work clearly is finding surprising commonalities between fruit flies and humans, including these extraordinary data you were just presenting about social isolation leading to loss of sleep in both cases. I'm curious about how this has changed the way you see the flies as individual creatures and whether it's changed the way you treat them. Whether, for example, it might lead you in the future to think let's be careful about keeping these flies in socially isolated conditions. Yeah. Well, this is the first thing my wife brought up when I showed her the data. These little flies have some kind of an emotional response. And of course, that's one way to look at it. When I was in college, I can remember that you were always, there was a lot of pushback if you ever tried anthropomorphic kinds of thoughts were always pushed back. But the more homologies you see, the more you think, why would you rebuild the system from scratch? And so if this is the way you can get a certain behavior, then why wouldn't it apply to another organism? So are they depressed in anything like the way we would think about it? And I think it's a real possibility that there's something like that going on. One of the things that I'd really like to understand and we're still struggling with ways to pursue it is when we turn those neurons off and make the responses go back to baseline, have we relieved the stress of social isolation or are we just, is the animal still in distress but we've cut off its ability to express that? And I think I lean to the side of the former where we're in the easiest explanation for losing two different responses, I think, is to say you've relieved the stress that was associated with the problem. Also brings up questions about humane treatment of prisoners. Isolation may be a form of treatment that has many more connotations than when you originally, you throw somebody into isolation and in the penal system, for example, is this an added form of punishment that was not appreciated before? I mean, I'm sure we'd all agree that in the case of humans, social isolation raises serious ethical concerns. I mean, do you see this as having practical implications for how you treat the flies? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, yeah. You know, it rang strong. We didn't, you know, this story wasn't told yet when you were talking about these things but as I was thinking about our own work, I could understand where the question was coming from. And it goes back to this question, you know, is it one chicken or one fly? What's the difference? Is it the weight of the animal or is it the response that is elicited by whatever insult you produce? I guess that's maybe why there was concern about raising millions of insects instead of one chicken or was that a stronger ethical position? And I think that's a difficult question. Hopefully we'll know more about what's going on in fly's head in the future. Can I ask a question related to that? It's a technical question, it's a quick one, I think. Yep, and then the second hand.  Yeah? Some of them were, yeah. Some of them were isolated from nature. And, oh, okay, I hope that's better. Some of the strains that we tested were isolated from nature and particularly those that had naturally longer or shorter intervals of sleep. So as I was saying, like many individuals, human individuals, that will tell you that they have lesser or greater requirements for sleep. And it really didn't matter and as I was saying, this wasn't just limited to Drosophila melanogaster, we saw it in several Drosophila species. So we haven't gone beyond that, but we probably should. And I was just thinking because, I mean, I'm thinking about their ecological aspects of Drosophila, right, that they often do feed together. I know that they're often on the fruit together and I'm just wondering if you suddenly end up that you're the only one on the fruit. I'm just wondering if it's loneliness or like, maybe, like you said, maybe something's wrong and I should be going somewhere else. So I'm just to push back on your loneliness just a little bit, cause this is what we're supposed to do here. No, no, I agree. I mean, maybe it is that the reason that the metabolism and everything is up-regulated because the fly is going, all right, there's something wrong with this food cause I'm the only one here. Maybe I need to fly somewhere else, but of course they can't cause they're in year two. I'm just curious. No, I agree. I agree. It's almost as if you need a taster, you know, it's, you know, it's a sale. Like if you're the only one in the restaurant, you look in the restaurant, you always look in a restaurant. If there's nobody in there, you think, maybe I shouldn't be eating here. Yeah, I'm just wondering if that's, it's a similar, so it's not loneliness, but kind of like, maybe this is really, there's something wrong with this food. Yeah. Only these guys are eating. Yeah, so, yeah, but then, I mean. But I take your point because who knows what the response to that kind of stress would be, but you're absolutely right. Second, you had a question. So my question to Jessica. So I was really, thanks for the excellent presentation, but I was really struck by the colors, a variety of colors of dragonflies. And I was sitting thinking, why would they have evolutionarily that type of color, knowing that maybe there will be the next meal to the variety of this other organism. So why does that want to attract attention with the colors or does the colors have any impact on that? Why does it have that color? Those colors, yeah. That is a good question. And color is a really big part of the story of dragonflies. And there's two main types of color, structural color, where there's kind of bumps and ridges on the cuticle. When light bounces off of it, eyes can perceive it as being kind of a metallic or shiny color. And then there's the coloration that is granules of pigment inside their epithelial cells. It can migrate up and down. And that actually, dragonflies are able to kind of change their color. So they can be what's called bright phase, where they are very bright color. And they can be what's called a dark phase or a very dark color. And we don't exactly know the purpose of all of their color, but we know that their eyes are capable of seeing a wide range of colors. So we think communication is part of it. Some of the color patterns are their wings. We see behaviors that dragonflies do, but they kind of flash their wing patterns. And we think that there's sexual, you know, communication that's taking place. We also think thermoregulation is part of it. So dragonflies that are quite cold tend to be in dark phase. And early in the morning, when you first find dragonflies, they tend to be in dark phase. And we think that perhaps they're absorbing as much sunlight as they can, and heat, because they need to have a certain amount of energy for their flight muscles to kind of work and for them to be able to take off in flight. And indeed, you know, frogs jump out of the water to catch them, fish jump out of the water to catch them. And there are some dragonflies and damselflies. They're all doing this kind of mating dance at the water. Very vulnerable time for them. And there are some like RJ Apicalith, which is a damselfly, that as soon as they complete mating, they actually go from bright phase to dark phase. And some like Amanda Wispel did her PhD on this. She argued that this was so that you could avoid being seen by predators. So they're, it's a very complex story, the story of color in dragonflies. But we think a lot of it is this combination of thermoregulation and communication. Perfect, thank you. I have another question from the audience for you, Jessica. The research you and your colleagues have done on dragonflies is fascinating. And it's complex. And the question is, are there similar types of exploration of the systematics of other insects, perhaps some that aren't quite as charismatic as we might consider old mates to be? For sure. I mean, there are some systems to study all different types of insects, but there may not be as many of them. So there are groups of entomologists who spent their whole life studying lice. They collect lice, they dissect lice, they do genomics of lice, but they don't have big international lice meetings the way that we have big international dragonfly meetings take place. Well, they do. I mean, every meeting could be a lice meeting if you have lice. So there are entomologists who study different groups, but there are, I would say that the one common lament is that if you look at all across all of entomologists, and you look at what they study, a majority of them study social insects, so bees and some wasps, very few, relatively speaking, entomologists study the evolution of termites, even though they are social. A lot of people study butterflies. Butterflies are large charismatic animals. And if we look at those two groups, social, that relates to humans, and beautiful, you know, butterflies, and we like beautiful things. So things like earwigs, things like various, like for ecology, various ear mites, you know, headlights, pubic lice, these are things that people spend far less time pondering, but they have an evolutionary trajectory that's really interesting and fascinating too. So I would say there's an entomologist for every kind of insect, but the number of entomologists for some insect groups is really high, and the relative number of entomologists for other insect groups is really low. So coming back to your comment about reaching out to students, encouraging them to go into systematics, you need to be pursuing lice, and fleas, and earwigs. Is that what I'm hearing? Okay. So when I started... That's gonna get them in. Everybody loves a lice biologist. I will say, I had a graduate student years ago who's now a professor at the University of Illinois at her band in Champaign. His name is Dominic Evangelista, and he said, he really wanted to study, he was interested in cockroaches, and he really wanted to study cockroaches. I said, there is almost no one studying the best social behavior of the subsocial roaches. There's very few people that are studying the evolutionary behavior, the evolutionary trajectory of cockroaches. If you go and study cockroaches, you could be like the cockroach person, and he really liked that idea, becoming the cockroach person, and now he kind of is the cockroach person in the States at least. And so if you like the idea of being an expert on a group, there's a lot of groups for which we don't really have kind of living experts, because unfortunately we lose taxonomists, and we lose expertise. So there's probably a beetle group that hasn't been studied since the 1920s, that you could be the expert on. You just need to dip your toe into entomology. I think earwigs could do a service to themselves if they would rename themselves, because that's not a, that doesn't invite participation. Another question that has been, this has been kind of a theme, I think, through all the talks is, so this is for you two in particular, but really anybody on the panel, why do the diverse experiences and perspectives of individuals who study insects influence the nature of what we learn, and why does this matter? That's a good question. I guess I could, do you wanna dive in? Well I was gonna say, I think, I mean we've seen how different the perspectives are, the different focus that's represented here, and I find it pretty refreshing. And something that we're, many of us molecular biologists, get a molecular biology meetings, and talk molecular biology, this is much more exciting. So I think it's important to hear these different ways of looking at biology, and the sense I get is maybe some of these tracks or something that can be added on and mixed with what we're doing. So it's very valuable. I think in the area of systematics, one thing that we see for insects, certainly for dragonflies, is that traditionally when people talked about selection, they talked about sexual selection, almost everything, and pardon me for talking about genitals again, but almost everything focused on male genitals, the male control of reproduction. So if we look at the kind of literature for insects, for dragonflies in particular, dragonflies are unique, because males have two penises, they have a penis at the tip of their abdomen, a secondary penis at the base of their, at the beginning of their abdomen, through which sperm is transferred, and people thought that was fascinating, and we kind of have focused a lot on male genitalia. But it turns out that female genitalia is actually fascinating too. Females have kind of, there's a lot of interesting things. Females are able to store sperm. In some cases, for dragonflies, they can store sperm for quite a long time, but in cases of things like termites, they can actually store them for decades. So understanding how female reproductive system works has been largely overlooked, and there's many people, and only just now, that are trying to kind of understand this other half kind of of the piece of the story. I think it's because we're having a diversity of voices, we're having kind of more gender parity in the scientists that are actually setting this, thinking maybe it's not all about the penis. Maybe there's something interesting that's happening in female reproduction as well. All right. All right. Every diverse background that comes into the field brings a new perspective, and with new perspectives, we ask new questions, and with new questions, we learn more. And so to go back to Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall-Kimmerer mentions how she wanted to study and how she went up to an advisor, and he said, what do you want to study in graduate school? And what she had to learn was sort of how to speak academic, but what she said she wanted to study was why goldenrod and whatever the purple flowers that go with it, so why do yellow flowers and purple flowers look so good together? And she was laughed at, and she was told that that's not a scientific question, but we saw it was beautifully in your image, and insects can see those colors better. And so it was her perspective of understanding the patterns in nature from her perspective, and she knew that purple and yellow happen together a lot. And so she needed help in the academic, like how do you form this into a testable question, but it was a genuine observation that deserved further, you know, looking into it. Anyone who has not read Robin Wall-Kimmerer is welcome to leave right now and rush out and start reading it because it is a spectacular book, Braiding Sweetgrass, or really any of her works, but that one in particular. Anyone else have thoughts about Margaret's question? Okay. Go ahead. You know, we have to go back to philosophy a little bit here, and you can correct my pronunciation here, Lisa. The philosopher, Wittgenstein, once said, if a lion could speak, we wouldn't be able to understand it. He would certainly have said the same thing is true for flies. By that he meant that our worldview is too distant from other animals for us to understand them. Do you think he was wrong? Can we really learn to think like flies? Can we really recognize the joy of bees? Yes. I'm sorry. My advisor told me that you can. And I mean, yeah, we're completely different. I agree. We can't see UV and Polar Zays, Riesli. I'm sorry. I had to just say this, but we live on the same planet. It's not like they're living on some other universe that we have. I agree. You know, maybe we'll find an alien species and we have no relationship to it because they have such a completely different world, but we live in the same world. We see the same blue and yellow flowers and the same. I mean, there are common allies. It's everything the same art, you know, as I think it was you that said that, you know, they don't have symphony orchestras and things like that for sure in Sextone. But we can learn how they do. As I said, there's basic things that they have to do. They have to eat. Michael showed this so nicely in his talk. You know, they do sleep, most of them. There's a lot of their basic needs that are very similar to ours. And the way that they find food by foraging is not so unlike the way we find food. They just do it while flying, like Jessica's beautiful dragonflies do. But I don't... I think it's a... I think it also... It's a little bit... This otherness that we create is also false. And it's also a little dangerous because the more we other, the more we also, you know, you would talk about this with humans, but I think that's also doing it with other animals as well as if they're so different than us that we can't possibly understand them. And then that starts this process of not caring about them. And they are really important. So yes, we can think like a fly. Thank you. Mike. Jonathan. Yes, I think understanding comes in degrees. There may be aspects of the ways of life of insects that we will always wonder about and that will always struggle to understand. You think about something as basic as seeing the plane of polarization of the light and seeing UV. We know they do that, but we don't know what it's like from the insect's point of view to experience like that. So in some ways, there'll be aspects of the experience that remain inscrutable, but the same is true of other people. You know, there are aspects of other people's experience that will remain inscrutable to us, but nonetheless, a huge amount of understanding and bridging is possible. And I think the same is true of insects. Thank you. I think that it's not that we... Part of me, I think, is that not what we wouldn't understand them. I think it would make me feel inferior that I can't sense the world the way they can. I mean, there's all these things. I can't see UV. I can't sense magnetic fields. And so I would know it like, I wouldn't... It's not that I wouldn't under... It's like a... It's the difference of like not understanding another language is like, I don't have that. Like you have the skill I don't have. And I think there's just, there's a different way of looking at it instead of ignoring them, being like, oh, I don't understand you. I think if we really think about it, we see how limited we are in our sensory perception. And so it's a lot of like, humans are not the exceptional ones on this earth. A new form of imposter syndrome. What? A new form of imposter syndrome. Yes. You know, years ago, when I started work on circadian rhythms, I had more senior colleagues that were behavioral biologists that said, what are you studying a fly for if you're interested in circadian rhythms? And it always struck me as quitting a little too early. And now we know, as you look at the components that are involved in regulating something like that behavior, they're the same components that we have. So how many other things are there that we can build from the bottom up that show, you know, you really do have a fly inside of us. You know, it's part of our heritage. And so why wouldn't there be vestiges of some of this? And you know, I agree completely with the issue of particular sensory abilities and so forth, but there's so much that we keep running into that is tangibly the same. So the last thing you wanna do is assume that when I, to my mind, you know, again, when I was an undergraduate, I was told that you couldn't assume that if a deer was running from a lion, that it was afraid, it just runs from lions. And I think that's a wrong way to think about the problem. So I'll follow up also with another question to you, Dr. Young. Research related to human well-being has generally focused on fruit flies. How could the study of other types of insects enrich our understanding of human well-being? And this question's going to you, but I also suspect that other folks on the panel can provide interesting perspectives on that. Yeah, that's a tough one having spent so many years, you know, being grateful to this little fly. You know, part of the problem is the problem, part of the problem of changing focus to another system is that there's so much that gets developed that you can use by others. So, you know, every year, every 10 years, you have completely new tools that allow you to go deeper and deeper. And those are not just immediately transferable to other systems. It'd be wonderful if some of those were, but I think there's still a long way we can go asking these kinds of questions in Drosophila and you've got a large body of people that have developed expertise in working with them and again, developing tools. And so I tend to run all that out before throwing up your hands and going somewhere else for certain kinds of questions. There are other kinds of questions with the wrong organism. Yeah. Well, I mean, if there was another insect group, I would just advocate to the group, right this, maybe we can all agree on this, that there should be a non-holomotabilist insect. So, fruit flies are in the holomotabila, they have an egg, larva, a pupa with a complete rearrangement in the adult stage. So, I think if you wanted to have another model organism, I think we should all agree right down now that it should be a non-holomotabilist insect, perhaps something near the base of the insect tree, perhaps something dragonfile-like, would be even the best, I think, let's go for it. So like maybe we have a little bit of cockroach in us too, along with that fruit fly. Exactly. Thank you. Yeah, crickets as well, I think, very interesting. It raises this big picture issue about the role of model organisms in science and in particular in the life sciences, where if you think of Drosophila, there's just so much stuff you can do with Drosophila that you could not do with any other animal because it has this whole technology built around it. So, you can use extraordinary technologies like optogenetics to study in just extraordinary detail and have incredible control over which neurons are active. And that can't be reproduced in bees or crickets or anything else. So, when we're doing studies in Lars Chickas' lab at Queen Mary, much more low-tech and we're not imaging individual neurons, we're looking at whole animal behavior because we're not using Drosophila. I think we need both kinds of research, really. We do need to be making the most of these technologies that exist and that have been developed for specific model organisms. But we need diversity of different species as well.   And let's try and learn some of that stuff that we still don't know about their observable behavior. Randa, I was just thinking, I mean, with this loneliness, being alone versus being together with others of your species, like locusts, maybe it could be something interesting studying locusts that shift between these gregarious species and the solitary species. I mean, see if anything is parallel. And I mean, I guess we do know a bit about what triggers those shifts and it's super interesting because while they're solitary, they hate each other and then something happens and they are suddenly very good buddies and they love to be together. So I think that would be one group of organisms that could sort of maybe fit or fill in the picture from what we have learned about being lonely as a fruit fly. And I was also thinking, I mean, insects can not only help human health through model organisms, but also like these studies of leaf cutter ants that have specific antibiotics to make their fungi farming stay healthy. And I mean, by studying these ants, we can hope probably, or not probably, but hopefully we can look for and hopefully find new forms of antibiotics. That would also be super helpful. And that's another way of looking to insects to gain new insight that is good for human health. Can we move on? A number of people are asking a question about the implications of your research about loneliness. How can we use this information to help understand and prevent loneliness while also preventing a prescription drug culture to develop something that would cure, quote unquote, loneliness? Do you have hopes? Well I guess, yeah, so I guess early steps might be to look at a mammal, you know, a different research model. You know, does this happen in mice, for example? Are there specific areas of the brain? Or even before that, do you have changes in behavior that parallel what we see in a fly? And that would also make the comparisons that we've made, you know, they're distant comparisons to look at behavior in humans that seem to be in parallel, but I think you could gain a lot more confidence if you were looking at mice and you had molecular tools to say, yes, this behaves in a certain way in certain areas of the brain light up when the animal is isolated. And I think that's the kind of path I would tend to advise. Do you have, I guess I would ask, do you have worries about possible choices others might make in using your research? To all we need to do is invent a technique or a drug that would enable us to incarcerate people more effectively, for instance. Well I think before you get to that, you'd get to an appreciation of what you're doing when you incarcerate people. I would hope that that would be the thing that hits you first and that you respond to it. But I don't, that would be like dreaming up new forms of torture. I don't think that, I don't see anybody advocating for that that I work with. Yeah, that's a dangerous part of science. I mean, that's the history of my field. I mean, anthropology, we started out as typology of one group versus the other and started making value assessments that based on your skull size and this skull size, these people, usually the white people, were considered to be superior by their measures and then that was used in the Holocaust as justification. And so we have to be very careful in sort of how we do our science and present our science. So I don't know what you could do different to prevent this road but I think we need to, I think that is a legit question and a concern. I think it's also the choices of the experiments you do. I mean, I don't know if anyone thought about this but the VR work we are doing was essentially target search behavior and extracting that and I don't think it's a very long road from coming up with more efficient algorithms for target searching where you can get to some pretty scary conclusions. So we made very clear decisions in the experiments that we were doing to really tie them to ecology and really be careful that they couldn't at least very easily be misconstrued into something that could be used for, let's say, weaponry or something like this and I think you really have to think very far ahead. I know nobody would like an apple fly in an orchard like it doesn't but honestly that's how a lot of things happen, that you're actually only concerned about your little world and you don't even think about how it can be taken to a completely different place. So but I think we have an obligation as scientists to do that at all times and to really think like what is the craziest thing that somebody could do with our research and do your best as best you can to be true to the science but also be very careful that you don't open up doors that maybe you don't wanna open from your ethical and moral standpoint. So. Jonathan, did you want to? Yes, I mean, I think it could be a really good outcome of this research on loneliness if it feeds into preparation for future pandemics because we know that we will face situations like COVID-19 in the future and governments were flying blind at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic really not in a position to make decisions on the basis of evidence and so the benefits of lockdowns in terms of keeping people out of intensive care could be quantified and could be seen to be very large but the costs on the other side the costs of imposing a lockdown on people's mental health these were unquantifiable and so people simply had to guess and so one really good thing that could come out of this is if we work towards a situation where we have a much deeper understanding of the costs of these kinds of interventions and can weigh up the costs and benefits more accurately. Yeah, I agree. I mean, you know, some of those that suffered the most are the youngest people in the population those that didn't get to make those early social interactions that I think most of us think are pretty crucial and I guess you can build those up after the fact but would you want to do that again? I guess, you know, the next time around and there will be a next time around even something as simple as the effect on weight you are describing will have health consequences in that case in the future. Really hard to quantify. Margaret, I wonder if you'd like to ask a question that will enable us to bring this wonderful discussion to a close. This one's a short one this time. We're fortunate to have such a diverse range of expertise. I was wondering if any or all of you would speak to something that you have learned from one of the other speakers over the past two days. Good question. You're modeling now for our students. That was when you asked if we had questions for the speakers I'm like, no, but I want to like talk about the things I learned in the afternoon talks. And so for Jessica, the collections being moved on the slave ships, I had not heard that. That was new to me. We reckon a lot with the colonial history and anthropology, so it's nice to see it being discussed in entomology and so that was new to me and thank you for enlightening me to that. And then for your talk, Michael, I'm just so fascinated by the idea of ladybug pets for fruit fly. And so I just want to know more about that. That was just the coolest thing to learn, so. Well, it constitutes a good pet. Yeah, exactly. I want to know what species view each other in that companion kind of way. Yes, for me, I think learning is really nourishing. Every day I ask myself, what have I learned new? And if I'm not learning new, I always Google something to read. So this week was just marvelous because I learned from each person amazing, amazing things. So I'm really hoping that I would find the video online so that I can listen to everybody's talk again in the privacy of my home. It is just fabulous and wonderful to meet all of you. So it's really wonderful. And wonderful for the audience, also the excitement and the question, the interaction is just wonderful. Thank you. Thank you to you both. Yeah, I thought your description of these symbiotic interactions in mosquitoes was something that was completely new and extraordinarily high potential. And there have been so many attempts to do something about malaria that have hit dead ends and this sounds like an extraordinary new opportunity. And your plantings with plants, with propellant plants versus the crop that you want. And the weed killers, those were all fascinating to hear about, completely new. Thank you. I will go back and tell the team that they received a compliment from a novel laureate. They will be very happy to hear that. Jonathan, did you have a question? Yes, I was thinking, I mean, I've learned a huge amount. But one thing we've learned is that there is an audience. We've learned that there is an audience for hard discussions about the science and ethics of insects. And I think that wasn't really obvious at all. At the point of planning this event, it was a brave thing in a way to make this the theme. And I think it's been an ingenious theme because we've seen over and over again how important and urgent and huge these issues are and how entangled insects are with questions of sustainability, how to live together, how to preserve the natural environment. And that's a great discovery. And I think the more conversations like this we can have, the better. We know people are ready for them and we need to keep that going and just try and talk to more and more people, get these conversations happening in more and more different places. I think we're at a very precarious point in humanity. I think we're at a point where there's a lot of potential and I think there's a lot of possibility for destruction as well that we're already seeing. And I think we have a choice to make and how we're going to go forward. And I think what I learned from each of these speakers is that whether you're taking it from, you know, an ecosystem or ethics or human well-being or food security or biodiversity or living in the global south that there are real questions that we need to answer and real avenues that need to be pursued. Insects are part of these questions but there's also a lot of work that needs to be done and a lot of fronts. I think we covered so many things this was not a conversation about insects, it was a conversation about the role of governments and corporations and, you know, ethical science ethics and so many things. And I think that it really shows that we need to have more conversations like this. I think this conference is a very good example where bringing together people from very diverse backgrounds is needed at so many levels today. And I hope that the people in the audience continue to have these conversations in their communities and at your school and seek out people different from you to talk to them about suffering or loneliness or whatever you talk about, right? Because I think this is what is needed today and this is what is going to drive change. Yes. I'm on the last one. No, I think like you said, I think also I've learned something from each and every speaker and I've really enjoyed being in a setting like this, really all of it, the entire conference with this much contact also with the student groups. And I think at some early stage, I guess yesterday, I talked to someone about that we have too few sort of playgrounds in science or for scientists and or in academia where we can sort of have advanced discussions but still on sort of a level where we are allowed to ask these sort of dumb questions or say that we don't know the words in that sort of a discipline. So I really think it is so rewarding to be part of a setting like this and to exchange, to listen and to have conversations and to exchange opinions about such a broad concept. And like you were saying it, in a way this is how we should talk about insects because they influence every part of our society. They do influence all this food security, the ethics, everything. So yeah, I think this conference really sets a good example of how we should talk about insects, include them in all sort of walks of life and all parts of society. So thank you for being part of this. I like everyone has said I really feel like I've learned a lot and I think the thing that I learned as I do whenever I've had the good fortune of speaking in an interdisciplinary setting like this is how different our styles or presentation are. I actually find this fascinating because different schools, the way that we present data, the amount of data that we show, the way that we use the stage and the podium, the way that we talk about insects, the vocabulary that we use is slightly different even though we might be talking about very similar things. So I've actually learned a lot just from my fellow presenters about science communication and so thanks for sharing your different styles of presentation. That's great. Absolutely, absolutely. I've commented a number of times about the ways in which TED talks have transformed our process of selecting speakers because many of you have done TED or TED like talks. I did say to Jonathan you wrecked it for all future philosophers because some of you may know that philosophers haven't always been among the most engaging presenters at the Nobel conference there. You heard me say that. And he has now wrecked it for future philosophers. The bar has been set differently. But that's absolutely true. So thank you. Thank you for that. Interesting. We often try to make there be at least some kind of a thread connecting a particular conference to the next conference. And interestingly that was one of the reasons that we chose to end our conference with someone who does research on the fruit fly who has done research on circadian rhythms because next year's conference, and I have to say I came up with this title. I'm very proud of it. Sleep Unraveled. All you Shakespeare scholars in the room will get the joke. So and just a nod to what people were saying about the diversity, the breadth of disciplines that will be represented here. We have psychologists. We have neuroscientists. We have cultural historians. And we have someone with degrees in performance art and theology who describes herself as the NAP Bishop and has founded the NAP Ministry. So it is gonna be a conference that is gonna transform and she has a very serious social justice agenda connected with that.  So that happens next year, October one and two. Please mark your calendars now. It's gonna be, it's gonna be dynamite. It's gonna be really spectacular. So drive safely home and get a good night's sleep and dream of insects.


A lot of chefs, you know, like the dream is always to open their own restaurant and for me I can't say I've ever had that dream, you know and I've cooked for a long time and and Explored a lot of different types of cuisine and kept learning as much as I could and at some point I Figure it out that I didn't really want to learn anything else except for the food. I'm doing So that's when I thought it would be a good idea to explore a little bit more about Malaysia Mm-hmm, and give something back to the community and I think with my experience of opening long tail and other restaurants I kind of had that in the back of my brain. So it kind of came together Yeah, exactly and I started to get more excited about it But definitely it wasn't something that you know since I was a kid or since I started cooking I was like, oh I want to have my own place right so that passion just kind of grew on you You're like wow it's and then now you just want to have your own creative outlet to actually bring that cuisine Yeah, and I thought it was just It's not I think at this point of my life It's it's not even all about the cooking of course It's great to showcase something creative and and and your own story and stuff like that but it really is about giving back to the industry as well and When we hire cooks and two chefs and stuff like that to give them an opportunity to grow and learn something different And and and I hope as well that they'll be just as successful Right just try to be yourselves, you know, and and that's what is we try to keep a small menu I know some people expect something larger and some people might compare us to other in Malaysian restaurants like banana leaf and so forth That have an extensive menu But what we try to do is the same idea of the name potluck. It's it's really a coming together of different Southeast Asian Cuisines and it's not just focused on Malaysia. It's it's inspired by my mom's cooking But I mean I have cooks from the Philippines from Burma and in Vietnam in all sorts of places So it's really bringing all those flavors together and keeping everything fresh like we keep a short menu We change it frequently. We're not afraid to take something that's popular off the menu so we can put something else on right? And there's always gonna be demand for certain items to stay Yeah, but we keep continually trying to push ourselves That's why I try to teach all the cooks as well to also have a Input on the menu as well because that's how we all grow together, right? Like I know so many you know chefs that they have like a secret recipe that they don't share you know Yeah, to me that's just holding yourself back You know the moment you stop and you say like what's made me successful is this one dish That's when you stop growing yourself So always innovating, you know what not a lot of people can actually keep innovating, you know It's tiring it's a lot of work It's a lot of R&D and it's a lot of money spent and time spent on it You know the challenge is actually holding back because really, you know As you can see like, you know, we have a small kitchen small restaurant very little fridge space very little freezer space so In some ways that's to our advantage because we got to keep things fresh We got a prep day by day and whatever we use we sell out right so the branding and you know All these little bottles and they're so colorful and they're naturally part of the design, right? Yeah, but naturally they are part of what we use day day and day out, right? so for people to see that and a Lot of it could be nostalgic moments for people, you know, oh like I used to use this at home and stuff that that's exactly what we were Talking about you can never have a shortage of storage space, right? So so for us to be able to use utilize the wall and and the pony wall and stuff like that I still showcase it to customers. It's great And I think at some point, you know, we can you know have some products for sale as well So that people can try to make the food at home themselves


Okay, we're back here live in Silicon Valley in the heart of Big Data Land. This is Stratoconference in Santa Clara, California. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the data from the noise. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANG. I'm Joe with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. And this is our segment on in-memory or extended memory. And we just heard from one CEO about their in-memory grid architecture. And we mentioned on that segment a company that we introduced to our audience last fall, a company called Aerospike. Very interesting company. Actually, a little twist on in-memory. And we're here with the founder and CTO, Brian Bakowski. Brian, good friend of theCUBE. Welcome back. Good to see you again. Hi Dave, thanks. So, I was joking, Brian, that somebody had said a dupe was the new tape. And I said, okay, that's, but it's ironic. We're hearing all this stuff about in-memory. You guys, you know, focused on the flash layer. The two worlds are coming together. The traditional BI, everybody's talking about real time, in-time. What's your take on all this? What do you see going on? What's new since we last talked to you? So, since we last talked, the biggest change that's happened in flash and SSD is a dramatic change in the last six months of price and density. All of our largest customers are doubling or quadrupling the size of each and every node. So instead of having, say, only 500 gigabytes of SSD or flash per node, they're all moving to one terabyte, two terabyte, even four terabyte architectures. That's pretty life-changing for a lot of these guys because they're going from 40 node clusters of our system, which is satisfying big advertising use cases, big real-time real data, big real-time data, and switching over to just a couple of terabytes each. So 40 node clusters are turning into four node clusters, still giving them hundreds of thousands of transactions a second full-up time. And prices are now down around one to one and a half dollars per gigabyte, which compares to the $30 per gigabyte of RAM. So it's a 30X price performance difference and a big change in the density that you can have. Yeah, I'm just pulling up an article that David Floyer initiated back in 2009. And essentially what he did is he did different scenarios on pricing the flash relative to spinning disk. And it was very obvious, no matter which scenario you picked, that the high end, the high spin speed, the high performance disk drive, which is obviously an oxymoron, was doomed. And that's what's happening now, isn't it? I mean, we were just talking before, not only the prices, but certainly the prices, but the productivity impacts of putting data into memory and into flash are so overwhelming that the economics just become more attractive to the point where it doesn't have to be less expensive from a cost per bit standpoint. Well, it also doesn't have to be slower anymore. That's what's really exciting about where we are right now in terms of flash. So the issue we had with flash before was at 10,000 transactions per second, it was the bottleneck. And you had to stripe a whole bunch of them across each individual server. Essentially that day is over. What we have right now is the network is now being back to its position as the bottleneck. And at a network level, it's hard to get past 100,000, 200,000 transactions per second per server. Flash has blown past that in the last six months. No, the other thing I want- So if you've got SSD and you've got in memory, you might as well use flash, because the memory is going to be the bottleneck in either case. Sure, in memory is faster, but if the network's the bottleneck, save yourself a factor of 30. Well, and if you have to reload the data into the, into the- That's another issue, right? Absolutely. There are a lot of issues there, but it's counterintuitive to a lot of people, right? People assume, oh, well, it's obviously faster, because the specs are faster. And it is faster. There are cases where in memory, so in memory solves this particular set of problems and rotational disk, if you've got to put together petabytes, you know, you're on rotational disk. That's still- Otherwise it's too expensive, right? Otherwise it's too expensive, because it's 10 cents, a buck, and 30 bucks. Well, you know, if you're, 10 cents is attractive, right? If you're going to be, on the other hand, $30 when, you know, you say, well, 30 times, but I should get 30 times the speed. I'm not getting 30 times the speed. It's maybe 50%, maybe 25%. So yeah, we're big believers in flash and the increase in density we're now seeing. Very excited. Brian, let me ask you a question. I want to drill down on something. We don't want to up-level a little bit for the audience. We've had a lot of conversations, I was in the past two days around Hadoop, the Hadoop distributions. We had some segments around SQL meets Hadoop, no SQL versus structured data, untrusted data. So can you explain to the folks out there what real-time no SQL means and why it's getting a lot of attention and specifically connect back to the in-memory? Because I think that's an important concept to clarify. Sure, John, the main architecture that we see among our customer base is there's still what used to be called OLAP and OLTP or real-time and warehouse, right? And warehouse has been taken over by Hadoop, it's been taken over by Vertica and column databases, Cassandra, all those kinds of things. That's where you generate your insight.  You have to respond to web requests. And Hadoop is never going to be on the front side actually responding to HTTP requests, either at age-base maybe.  MapR has their no-SQL distribution. That's their attempts to bring no-SQL go in that direction. But we're over here at Aerospike. We're over here in real-time trying to push out into analytics to change MapReduce, the MapReduce semantics, and say, hey, MapReduce isn't just batch. MapReduce may only take a millisecond. MapReduce can be done in 10 milliseconds. MapReduce is a programming technique and MapReduce is becoming real-time as well. People like MapReduce, people like the Java, they think they can whip up some MapReduce quickly. That's how some hearing from developers. But explain the importance of real-time and what specific applications are real-time that you see your customers using, because that's an elusive term, near real-time, inline, as Dave points out, that Chris Lynch coined that term. But real-time, talk about some of the use cases around real-time and debunk some of the myths around that's not really gettable right now in terms of performance. Sure, so let's talk about threat detection. Threat detection, you've got all of these insights, you've got all these patterns, you've got all these signatures, right? And on a moment-by-moment basis, you need to track more and more data that says, hey, look, I've seen this pattern from this IP address. I've seen this particular signature out of this. I've seen this particular payload. Well, that's got to be on the front side. That's your algorithm that's saying, hey, look. And what we had previously to now, the shift we're going through in the market right now, is what we used to have was extraordinarily fast key value stores, right? And that's all you could do. It's fast key value stores. And now we're shifting over with the NoSQL crowd, folks like Aerospike, shifting over into, let's do a little MapReduce on that. Let's do a little more data. Let's touch 10, 15 rows. Let's touch 100 rows. With the changes in hardware, you can now do- And hold on, why do they want to do that? Why do they want to do that quickly? Sure, let's say I want to, part of my threat pattern is, if I see this particular user from sets of IP addresses that's geographically dispersed, maybe it's a threat. So then I want to do a MapReduce over every IP address and say, hey, look, I've got this packet coming in. I need to look at all the different things that I've seen from these different IP addresses really, really fast. So that's where, say, network threat detection. You can do that in transactions. You can do that in online gaming, what we call matchmaking as a use case, the ability to find the best opponent for a game. That's also where you want to say, hey, I've only got 500 milliseconds, a guy's sitting there clicking on a button, right? And I still want to do an analytics. I want to do a fairly complicated little match algorithm and figure out who's best online right now, not in some batch job. Yeah, one of the things happening at this show that's really not being talked about and amplified by the press is kind of elusive and it's hard to get your arms around or mind around is that this notion that, oh, the real-time, super geeky stuff that you're mentioning is a very narrow use case. But in fact, on the keynotes today, they're saying, no, no, that's not the case. You mentioned game, you mentioned threat detection. We're breaking news on SiliconANGLE today around major security issues going on in the US. But that real-time operational sense is not about just known things. There's a lot of unknown things. So today, what people will talk about is, oh, no, no, operationally data warehousing and business intelligence, you know what you're looking for, it's operational. What you're saying is there's some operational needs that are unknown of which require low latency. Is that kind of what you're getting at? Yes, and the number of use cases really is, use cases are really what drive our industry. That's what actually puts benefit into people's pockets. Find a problem, build a solution. Find a problem. But it also means folks who are trying to push the boundaries on what has ever been done before. Let me give you an example. I was talking to some folks a couple of weeks ago and they realized as a financial services company that they were actually a media company. The analysis that they do on stocks and bonds and all of that stuff, they publish that. And if you go to a library, you can find a book with all of their analysis going back 100 years on the financial services industry. Well, guess what? Now, media is real-time. They need to vend all of that information second by second. That's their next frontier in being a financial services media company is having all of their data for all of these positions online moment by moment. Well, heck, that's a big analytics problem, first of all. And real-time it means millisecond by millisecond getting answers into the hands of people. Okay, I got to drill down on this because this is awesome. One is, actually in memory is a hardware issue. You got flash SSDs in memory. There's a hardware issues. But one of the things that we've been banging hard at wikibon.org is software-led infrastructure. It is software at the end of the day. Intel coming in with their distribution. They're essentially a software company still although they make chips. So talk about the role of software in particular to make all this happen and some of the nuts and bolts under the covers. Sure, so software-led infrastructure for me is all about flexibility. It's sort of the next step and a maturation of a lot of the cloud technologies. It's allowing us to mix and match, hey, my router isn't just my physical router. It's really the next step of VLANs, et cetera. So what does that mean? It means that for a database company like ourselves, being able to flexibly and elastically add capacity when, well, maybe one of those servers is somewhere completely different. Maybe it's not on your local network. Maybe it's here, there, somewhere else. That level of flexibility. So I really like software-led infrastructure because it's taking us out of all of us database guys going elastic and everyone going, well, what the hell is elastic? And instead saying, hey, look, it's software-led. You can just mix and match stuff. It's good. And that gives what for the customers out there? Well, it gives them the ability to respond very quickly to different business conditions. Dave, what are you finding on software-led infrastructure? Obviously, we coined the term Wikibon, led that analysis as groundbreaking. It kind of takes the notion of old convergence which is defined by HP and kind of puts some coherency around the hype around software-defined data center, software-defined, whatever, right? So what are you hearing on that? Do you agree with what he's saying? Yeah, absolutely. I think I would add to that the sort of databases services becomes a new opportunity that's enabled. But I think that we're really prescribing a whole new metadata management paradigm, right? We used to manage data from slow disks and that's not the right way to do it. You can't do that in this near real-time world. So a whole new metadata management approach where today metadata is locked inside whatever it is, some device or some network device or switch or array and bringing that into a place where you can access it and actually leverage it across the infrastructure. So that's something that we're seeing as great potential, particularly to impact, as we were talking about before, Brian, corporate productivity. And that's really kind of what you guys are all about. We had Tapat on earlier. Was it this year? No, it was late last year. No, it was early this year. A fantastic story. Now, that's a story of ad-serving, right? And of course everybody quotes Hammabarker saying, the tongue in cheek, the greatest minds of my generation are figuring out how to get people to click on ads. But we heard at Dumbbill talk about, there are other use cases that will be spawned from that, and particularly, you know, behavioral science, behavioral economics. So I think, you know, the key for us is software-led means new kind of productivity impacts to the organization. And that's really what you guys are dealing with. So let me ask, we have two minutes. I want to get to a quick point because obviously we went to Sapphire now three years in a row with theCUBE and we were there covering on the ground SAPs and now we had a chance to talk with the inventor of HANA and also Jim Schnabe about big data. So there's a kind of a world of the in-memory guys that HANA was built way before, kind of the big Hadoop world hit, and they kind of have a little bit of a different solution position. You guys have a unique in-memory database.  How's that relationship between those two worlds? You mentioned MapReduce. How does things like HANA, because we're going to have HANA on next to talk about this, fit into that. It doesn't fit in well. Is there architectural mismatches, opportunities? Does it matter? So the first disappointment I have with HANA is that SAP has decided to create a single layer where other database players can't play. Everywhere else in the SAP infrastructure, you can plug in a different database. You don't have to use, you know, you can choose Oracle, you can choose Sybase, you can choose any of the big relational players, right? But in this very important area of new database technology, SAP is taking the position that, hey, we're going to have only one database available for our customers. And frankly, I think that's, the great thing about SAP, what has made everyone very excited about HANA, is how fast you can snap together solutions.  And that's great. But there are more databases than just HANA out there. There should be a plethora and an ability to bring in technologies like ours, flash-based specialists, et cetera, into that infrastructure because there's a lot of great database companies out there. And I think SAP is really losing out by betting on only one horse. Do you think they could bring in other databases in the future? Is it, do you think with their current architecture and roadmap they could open that up a little bit? I think they could. I think that what they signaled in the last month by making HANA essentially free with all SAP licenses is an unwillingness to do that. And I hope that that signal was not a sign of the future because in-memory databases are here to say they are an entire market category. And they're distributed resources, so you can't really have a monolithic solution pretty much. Yes, you should have a variety of things. HANA is better at some things. And we can talk about the technology of HANA and in-memory versus flash, but I think that SAP customers deserve a choice. Well, we're going to have them on next on this in-memory segment, but just final question on the parting question is, give us an update. You guys have had a good whirlwind. You've rolled out some really big use cases, big deployments in real time. What's going on with the company? You guys go and mock 100, give us an update on Aerospike. So our biggest push right now is to user-defined functions. So taking a page out of some of the other in-memory specialists and bringing the power of user-defined functions, which will essentially allow you to customize your database. So by being able to run a part of your query, essentially in database, figure that out, and which allows you to do things like MapReduce on top of it.  We're bringing user-defined functions and that kind of customization into the world of Flash and SSD. We've got that out in beta with a number of customers, folks gaming customers, online retailers who are doing matchmaking, folks like that. So it's a very interesting new direction for us. As we were saying yesterday, the pink on your world view and how the world spins is a lot of different beach heads for everyone, whether it's HANA in-memory, will they all converge, will they all be separate? Does it matter? We're going to be deconstructing that here inside theCUBE on day three. I'm John Furrier. We'll be back with our next guest in a short break and we'll come here from SAP directly on some of those questions. We'll be right back with our next guest as the short break.


Item Number – SCP-573 Object Class – Euclid Special Containment Procedures – Object is to be locked in one of Site-62's secure lockers. SCP-573 requires the agreement of two members of Senior Staff in order to be removed from containment. No one is allowed to make use of SCP-573 without at least two backup researchers. Testing of SCP-573 around children is hereby denied without O5 approval. Description – SCP-573 is a flute made from bone. DNA and carbon testing reveal the material to be human, female, and approximately a thousand years old. The bone is a femur and, from the size, comes from a child between the ages of 7 and 12. SCP-573 was discovered in Louisiana by agents investigating the disappearance of local children. Agents arriving on the scene were attacked by a pack of wild animals, several different species working together. Once the animals were put down, the agents were then attacked by several of the missing children, being urged on by one derailed king, the then-owner of SCP-573. Agent shot Mr. King, ending his hold over the children and preventing a major incident. Testing of SCP-573 has revealed that, when played, it places animals and prepubescent children into a highly receptive state. All creatures so affected are eager and willing to do whatever the player requests, including things that are beyond them, when in a non-trans state. Once the instrument is played, subjects remain in the trans state for five times the period the flute was played for, e.g., play the flute for a minute, the trance remains for five minutes. Knowledge of how to play a flute is not needed to effectively use SCP-573. Anyone attempting to use SCP-573 will find themselves able to play the flute, as if they had been playing for years, and can play any song they desire. Addendum As of SCP-573 is not to be used on human subjects. As revealed in Diary 573, SCP-573 provokes feelings of revulsion and paranoia in the user, specifically oriented towards prepubescence. These feelings increase gradually but steadily, until the wielder finds himself acting out violently and maliciously towards any prepubescent under his influence. Human testing with SCP-573 is thus suspended indefinitely. 056 Lesson complete. If you missed the previous orientation, go watch SCP-572, Katana of Apparent Invincibility, right now. Or for the complete course, watch this playlist.