What's up guys? Michael Rajaspi is doing a quick recap for our 2023 Topstribute Six Box Case Break. Pick your team number three. Here are the teams in case you guys forgot. That's the list. We're getting into the recap here. A lot of nice stuff. Got Tom Glavin Otto, Hudson, Michael Grove, Mark T'Sher Otto, Dual Relic of JT, Real Muto, and Yvonne Rodriguez. That one's going to Philly. At a one-of-one, Shay Langlier is printing plate Rookie Otto, and another one-of-one of Jeter Downs. Rookie Otto there for the Red Sox. Francisco Alvarez Rookie Otto out of 75. Jim Palmer, Cakes, some Relics, McGee. Alvarez, yellow out of 75. How about a Joe Maurer at a 99. Yeah, just the base. Tom Siever, red out of 10. Trout. Goose Gossips, that's a cool one. Michael Harris out of 150. Peter Lanzo. Wade Boggs out of 10 for the Red Sox. Mujigba, Tori Hunter and Buxton. That's a cool one. Casey Meis, Albees, Cal Mitchell, Kershaw and Bueller, Dual Relic, Eddie Murray, Zavato, Sal Mitchell, Glaber Torres, McGuire, Cardinals Edition, Bellinger, Grove again, Pascantino, Tyler Freeman, Chipper and Austin Riley. That's another cool one. Ken Griffey, Triple Relic, and the last couple cards here. Another Kershaw, Triple Relic. Rizzo and Jake Cronin one. All right, so that does it. Thank you to everyone who got into the break. Thank you guys for watching. I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye, guys.


Welcome to the webinar series of the Emerging Conservation Professionals Network, or ECPN, a network of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. My name is Karri Rainer and I am the 2016-2017 webinar coordinator. Today's webinar is entitled Emerging Leaders in Conservation, Developing Leadership Skills of an Early Career Professional. I am really pleased to say that we have 111 registered attendees and we're really excited that there's been so much interest in this topic. Moving on, I am very pleased to introduce our three speakers, Sarah Staniforth, Molly Gleason, and Michelle Piccini. Sarah is the president of IIC and she recently co-talked the workshop at the Winterthur Museum Learning to Lead Training for Heritage Preservation Professionals in April of 2016. Our following speaker, Molly, is a project conservator at the Penn Museum, a professional associate of AIC and a former chair of ECPN. Our third speaker, Michelle, is a paper conservator from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, a fellow of AIC and a former chair of the book and paper specialty group. Before we delve into this topic, I would like to quickly familiarize everyone with the go-to webinar program. You can use the control panel to make modifications to your audio settings, and you can hide the control panel with the orange arrow at the top of your screen. All attendees are automatically muted by the program, but you can communicate with us and ask questions during the webinar through the question box. Although we unfortunately won't have time to answer all of these questions during today's program, we will collect your questions and answer them in a follow-up blog post or session. I'd also like to take a moment to briefly share information about ECPN and our webinar series. ECPN is a network within AIC that is dedicated to supporting conservation professionals in the first stages of their careers. We regularly update our Wiki, Resources for Emerging Conservators, and ECPN is active on the Conservator's Converse blog. In addition to events in different geographic regions aimed at connecting emerging professionals, each year we hold a session at the AIC annual meeting. At the 2017 meeting in Chicago, this will consist of a lightning round poster session showcasing the work of emerging conservators. Please visit our webpage on the AIC website or our Facebook page for more information about the events and resources we offer. Our webinar series includes two webinars each year on topics relevant to emerging conservators. Whether you are pre-program, a graduate student in conservation, or a recent graduate, our goal is to facilitate discussions and to provide information that will help you develop as a conservation professional. Our webinars are all recorded and the full videos are available on the AIC YouTube channel. If you have any ideas for future webinar topics, please feel free to contact ECPN at the email you see on the screen or post suggestions on the ECPN Facebook group. So now let's turn to today's program. We're going to begin with Sarah Staniforth, who will discuss leadership styles, speak about leadership qualities, and provide tips for effective leadership. Sarah, if you'd like to begin. Okay. Thank you, Carrie. And good afternoon, everyone. Good morning to you, to those of you for whom it's still before noon. Next slide, please. As Carrie said, I'm going to start off by just saying a little bit about what we covered at the Learning to Lead workshop that was held in winter tour in April this year. And we had 58 participants at that workshop, which was considerably more than the 24 that we planned for, but it was great to have so many people there to realize how much interest there was in this subject. And at the workshop, we covered a little bit about leadership types, which I'm going to give a summary of this morning, and also leadership skills. And then I'll talk about my own personal leadership journey and top tips for success. And then I'll finish up by saying what I think the next steps might be after this webinar. So next slide, please. So the Learning to Lead workshop was held at winter tour and was organized jointly by the Winter Tour Museum, Garden Library, and the University of Delaware. And it was organized by Joelle Wickens, who you probably know, teachers on the postgraduate conservation course at winter tour. And she is also the Preventive Conservator for the Winter Tour Museum. And also Bob Norris, who is a professional leadership trainer. And so he gave us really useful information on general leadership principles. Next slide, please. Starting off with leadership types. And we ran through a number of leadership types and discussed when they might be appropriate. And I think it's important to say right from the start that there is no single correct leadership type, even for one individual, that leadership responds to the situation that you find yourself in. Or the position that you find yourself in. And that we discussed under the sort of headline of situational leadership. But within that, at different times, you might adopt anyone of the following leadership types. And of course there are others as well, but these are the main ones which we discussed. So the first is the leader by position achieved. And that, I guess, equates to seniority within an organization, whether it's the chief executive, the director, the head of department, etc. The second is leader by personality. And those are those sort of charismatic and inspirational people. I don't know, people like Richard Branson, who heads up Virgin in the UK. And then leader by moral example. And I suppose the most obvious people who fall into this bracket would be religious leaders. But you also find leaders by moral example in other professions as well. Leader by power held. I suppose the most common form of that would be politicians who've been elected to their positions. Leaders who can influence others to follow. And those are those people who are so persuasive that regardless of what position they've achieved, and they could be quite junior in an organization or an individual, people want to follow them because they have a message that really appeals to people. And then intellectual leaders who lead by their brightened power and their understanding of knowledge and experience of a particular profession. And then leaders by ability to get things done. I guess those would be the people who are leading as managers. So we discussed all of those leadership types. And we also thought about scenarios in which a particular form of leadership might be appropriate. And I will come back to that when I talk about my top tips. So now let's get on and talk about leadership skills, which are in the next slide please. And so these are some of the skills that we thought about. And I'm sure they'll be very familiar to you. The first of course is effectiveness. So whichever leadership type you're using for a particular situation, it's using it effectively and understanding what buttons need to be pressed to achieve the goals of that particular leadership task. The second, I can't emphasize this enough, is communication skills and also of course related to that listening skills. And when I talk about listening skills, it's really active listening. So it's not those people who when you're talking to them, they're sort of looking over your shoulder at the next person who they think they want to talk to. It's really focusing on what people are saying to you and showing that you're listening, both by looking at them and also by making responses which just demonstrate listening. And then delegation, really important particularly as helping people to develop. So it's costing employers to do a good job and really giving them tasks and then letting them get on with it and praising them if they do a good job. But also if things don't go as well as they might, using that as a learning experience and using it as an opportunity to do a bit of coaching and mentoring to help that person do a delegated task better the next time. And flexibility and understanding. So that's really responding to a particular situation, not just setting out and carrying on regardless. Coaching and working collaboratively and of course working collaboratively ties in with teamwork that I've always also listened. And that's the whole business about really understanding a team and helping a team and all the team members to do the best job that they possibly can. Emotional intelligence and empathy and that's becoming more and more important as a leadership's quality and that's really building on that understanding of people and what makes them tick and empathizing with their situation. Teamwork, no one person can do something to achieve goals on their own. They always need to be working with other people. And then finally, this is not an exclusive list but finally for this list the importance of an even temperament so that people know what they're getting that you respond in the same way, a consistent way every time not sort of leaping to conclusions or making rapid decisions. So top tips for me, next slide please. And these relate really to two different stages of my career. For really nearly 20 years in my role at the National Trust I operated as an advisor and as an advisor I had no management responsibilities but nevertheless it was possible to lead in an influential way to ensure that my advice was listened to. And so the first top tip is to really understand the difference between leadership and management and it may be that some formal training can help with that. The second is to hone those soft skills and those soft skills of communication, emotional, intelligence, active listening and influence which I've already mentioned. They're not necessarily born with them, it really helps to practice them and you can practice them consciously by asking a coach or a mentor to work on them with you or you can practice them in your everyday work just by thinking to yourself well how am I going to really actively listen to this colleague who's explaining something to me or asking my advice. And then the third thing is to really understand your organization and I am aware that not all of you will be working for large organizations so I want to just touch a little bit on smaller organizations and individuals at some point but for those of you in large organizations it's really important to understand your organization and understand what other people's jobs are and what their priorities are. It's not all about conservation in a big organization. Management will have other priorities which will include for example visitor experience and financial sustainability and really understanding where they're coming from helps you achieve your aims. And then practice change management. And a lot of leadership is about helping people through periods of change and again you don't have to be the director or chief executive of an organization to be bringing about a bit of change. You could be bringing about a bit of conservation change and thinking about how you influence people to go through that change can be very helpful. And then the fifth thing when you're like you're waiting for a formal leadership position is to have some formal leadership training and I think that we may want to think about what leadership of training is available for conservators perhaps in the Q&A or following up on this webinar. And next slide please. My next set of top tips really came from when I was in a position of either managing a department or being on the senior management team of the National Trust which was the organization for which I worked nearly 30 years. And so these applied when I was in the role of historic properties director, well first of all head conservator then historic properties director then museums and collections director. And these were the things that I find really helpful. First of all to have a mentor and that mentor is usually someone in your own profession as opposed to a coach who is able to help more generally with personal development. A mentor is someone with whom you can discuss your goals and think about the ways that you need to develop in order to achieve those goals. And then to broaden networks to reflect the role. So when I moved from being head conservator having had a very good network in the conservation world I needed to broaden my networks to reflect my historic properties position which included archaeology, buildings conservation, gardens and parks conservation. So quite a broad array that I needed a new network to reflect that role. And then moving into senior management it was extremely important to understand the government of my organization and to influence those people who were involved with governments which of course were the trustees and the experts on the various advisory panels. And for any organization, this is part of understanding the organization. You need to understand governance as well which really helps with getting your message across at whatever level you are in the organization. And then the importance, the real importance of employee development and succession planning. So thinking about who is going to step into your shoes as you are promoted or move from the organization. It really is rewarding for employees to feel that their managers are interested in their development and also in their career goals and then of course finally to plan your next role. So to think about where do you want to be in five years time, even where do you want to be in ten years time and to work towards those goals, perhaps using a mentor to help you to do that. And my final slide is a summary of what we felt were the next steps after the winter tour workshop but I think that may well still apply and we can think about working on this following this webinar. So the first thing that I think we need more sort of opportunities to learn about is the real difference between leadership and management and that probably is best achieved on a formal leadership course. Help with finding a mentor and or a coach and that can be done within professional networks and of course developing networks. You have an absolutely wonderful network for the EPCN and of course there are equally good networks in AIC and of course in IIC. And we touched on gender issues, sort of recognizing the fact that conservation is becoming an increasingly female profession but the leadership doesn't necessarily balance the gender balance of the wider profession and then related to that thinking about work-life balance and how you ensure that you have time for yourself and time for your personal life and indeed time for reflection because one of the things that people find most difficult is really the time to think about themselves and their development. And then a bit more about the smaller institutions. We don't all work for large institutions. Some work for very small museums and some people work for themselves. So what does leadership mean? What does leadership look like for those people? And at the workshop we touched on personality types and recognized you absolutely don't need to be an extrovert and so understanding other people's personality types really helps with team building and finally building confidence and really supporting people which we can do through mentoring and other networks and of course how do you do succession planning? How do you think about who's going to follow you and their development needs? So Carrie, that's me finished and I guess it'll be on to Molly next. Thank you so much, Sarah. It's such a privilege to get to hear about your experiences and I really do hope that some of these points you bring up on the last slide we can address with resources after the webinar perhaps. Our next speaker, Molly Gleason, will introduce some real-life examples from her own personal experiences with leadership and outreach. Thank you so much, Carrie. I'm really honored to be speaking in this webinar with Sarah and Michelle and with the time that I have I'd like to talk about my personal experiences and motivations. While I often feel like the course my career has taken has developed organically, when I reflect on things I can clearly see that I've relied on and used several leadership principles which have shaped some of my decision-making and resulted in opportunities. Next slide, please. So going to focus on me is five things. Know yourself, know your strengths and know what you want. Seek out mentors throughout your career. Volunteering for and saying yes to things. Connecting, developing relationships and empowering others. And engage with people in positions of power and influence. Next slide, please. So I'm going to start out with Know yourself. A few years ago I was facing a difficult decision. As you can see by the star I was in San Diego. I was four years out of graduate school and in San Diego for mostly personal reasons. And I was trying to figure out a way to make a career for myself there. And my options were mostly private practice and contract work. But every time I tried to dive into these efforts and really commit to them, something just didn't feel right. I really, really wanted more day-to-day mentorship, especially at this point in my career. I wanted colleagues and I really wanted to work in a collection. I also like teaching outreach a lot. I'm really drawn to that. So I was filling in the gaps in the private practice work with these opportunities. But despite the occasional rewards I was feeling through these efforts. I just wasn't thriving. I felt stuck and uninspired. I kept thinking if someone else was in my shoes they would be more successful. And that wasn't helping either. So I went to AIC that year. A colleague I really respect suggested I apply for a job at the Penn Museum. It wasn't a no-brainer. It was working on the Egyptian collection which I had very little experience with. It also was only a one-year contract position and it was 3,000 miles away. But it did have some benefits which were it was a job at a museum, a university museum with possible opportunities to connect the students and faculty. And it included a lot of outreach. So I discussed this decision extensively. I took a leap of faith. I applied. And I was off of the job and I took it. Next slide please. It really, oh sorry if you could just go back one time, one slide. Just for a moment. It meant leaving behind great colleagues and friends and other possible opportunities that I was excited about. But it ended up being a really good decision for me. Next slide please. Not only have I learned a ton in this job, but it has really allowed me to use and develop my strengths and interests in outreach and teaching. And most importantly, that one-year position has now turned into a position that was recently renewed for another four years. But to get here I really had to put aside what I felt like I should be doing and remember to focus on knowing myself, knowing my strengths, and knowing what I value. Next slide please. So seeking out mentors. I mentioned mentors already and I cannot emphasize enough how important these relationships have been to me in my career. I've been so fortunate to have had the guidance of so many wonderful conservators throughout my career. Some of these relationships were set up just by chance. I happened to take an internship with somebody who was a great mentor and still is. But then there are other mentors who I clearly sought out because I wanted to align myself with them the way that they work. I wanted to learn from them. And I credit so many of the opportunities that I've had to the encouragement and advisement of these mentors in my career. So a good example is my previous role for two years as the chair of ECPN. I didn't pounce on this opportunity to be honest with you. It was suggested by a good mentor of mine that I apply. And she strongly encouraged me to apply. I was a little uncertain at first. I didn't really know what I was going to get myself into. But it turned out to be such an important experience from a leadership perspective, getting to know how an AIC committee works, getting to implement some meaningful projects, and really getting to connect with colleagues that otherwise I wouldn't have had the opportunity to connect with in this way. I am really grateful to have mentors who make suggestions and provide encouragement for me to challenge myself and to step up into leadership roles. Next slide, please. So what I just said ties in with another important quality that I think has opened doors for me. And this is volunteering for and saying yes to things. A lot of times I volunteer for things because I know it will be appreciated. This includes saying yes to simple things. But also to things that maybe are a little bit more difficult to commit to or you're uncertain about. So as an example, the summer after my first year in graduate school at UCLA, I volunteered to assist with an FAIC-funded Adhesives Workshop at the gate. And I volunteered to do the prep work for this because it had some obvious tangible benefits. It allowed me to sit in on the workshop at no cost whenever I didn't have to be doing other things. It also included a small stipend and these were really wonderful for being a graduate student. But the unexpected benefits were that I formed some really wonderful relationships with the conservators who were attending the workshop. And these relationships have continued to this day and turned into people who have mentored me, actually. And they've resulted in work opportunities that I'm really passionate about, including teaching basket care workshops in Northern California to basket weavers and organizing sessions and workshops for archeologists through the Society for California Archeology. And this all came from volunteering for something completely unrelated. Next slide, please. So there are a couple things I know define my personality and also my career choices. And one thing is that I really value getting along well with others. And the second thing is that I have a strong desire to connect with people outside of the conservation community and to make our work relevant to other people. Working to build relevance requires being a good listener, developing trust and respect, seeking collaboration and partnership, balancing different perspectives and needs, and working to empower and engage other people. And these are also good leadership principles and they should be applied to our work relationships as well. I have been put into the position of having to lead people, sometimes when I'm asked to supervise interns. And then there are times when I realize that I need to step up as a leader. A lot of that that I've learned about being a good leader has come from just emulating other leaders that I observed, good leaders. Then there are other situations where it's a little bit more difficult to prepare. And as an example, when I first moved to San Diego, I had a grant funded position at a small museum. And when I started, I was warned by many people in the collection staff about somebody who worked in collections who was difficult to work with and required a lot of special attention. So I got to know him a little bit and I started to realize he was being asked to do things that he knew very little about and he was really being given no guidance at all. So I spent some time getting to know this person and I realized that what we're seeing as difficult qualities were in fact some really valuable qualities. He's a great researcher. He took a lot of pride in his work. He took guidance well and he took his work seriously. So I ended up working with him to develop this project, giving him some more guidance along the way. And he ended up leading a really important project for our department. And by the time I left, he was really one of my favorite people there. And from this and many other experiences, I've learned the value of taking the time to get to know people, to connect with them and empowering them often by providing them with the opportunity to lead themselves. Next slide, please. So we are not often in the position to be engaging with our organization directors or board members or people who are funding the work that we do. I recognize that I am in a unique position at the Penn Museum. I work in the Public Conservation Lab, which puts me in the position to be the face of the ambassador for our lab and our field. The lab is a readily accessible place for our colleagues to visit and to bring potential visitors, donors, scholars, and for schools and university groups. I know that when the museum director or development team brings somebody into that area, I know what that could mean. But sometimes you just never know how you might influence somebody. In fact, it was through an interaction I had with the family visiting on their own nearly three years ago that led to a relationship with them and ultimately this family's commitment to fund the lab and my position for a total of six years now. In this instance, I had no idea that I was engaging with a family who could provide this type of support. But I learned that by bringing enthusiasm to what I do, no matter who I'm talking to, can make a huge impact on others, can excite them and inspire them about our work, about the museum, and even about their own life and their pursuits. But getting back to engaging with those who you know are in positions of power and influence. I recently attended the Learning to Lead workshop at Winster earlier this year and it really gave me more of a language to use when talking about leadership. It crystallized some ideas for me. At the end of the workshop, we were all asked to write down one concrete thing that we would do when we would go back to work the following week. So I thought of a very concrete and pretty easy thing that I could do which was to go to our museum director's office hours, which he holds weekly, but I had never attended, to tell him about the workshop. I thought he might be interested to know that this was a topic that conservators and conservators from our department were interested in. And not only was he interested, but in coordination with my supervisor, he offered to continue my professional development in this area and he supported my enrollment in the first of a series of leadership courses offered by Penn and I've just started that first series. So just to conclude briefly, today I've gotten to hear me reflect a little bit on my career, my strengths and values and some leadership principles that I've followed. It's been so incredibly valuable for me to do this, especially as I think about moving forward in my career. And I really encourage all of you to do the same sort of self-reflection and self-evaluation as you think about how you would like to move forward and apply some leadership principles into your careers as well. And then I have one more slide, just with two recommendations of reading material. One is this book, Quiet by Susan Cain, which really speaks to the idea that you don't need to be an extrovert to be a leader. And then secondly, this book by Nina Simon, Art of Relevance. I mentioned Relevance. This book isn't specifically about leadership, but rather her speak actually about this book. She was so engaging. And I think that this topics brought up in this book have a lot of relevance when we're talking about leadership principles. So that is it for me. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Molly. It's incredible to hear about your personal challenges and successes and you've done a fantastic job connecting that to some of the broader concepts that we're talking about. So thank you so much. Our final speaker is Michelle Piccini, who will focus on professional development and growth as well as successful workplace communication. Thanks so much, Kari. Gosh, this has been really wonderful. I'm so pleased to be part of this really great panel. So what I'd like to bring to the discussion is really talking about leadership in the workplace. I personally have been working for Art Museums for over 20 years now, and much of my time has been spent with really wonderful mentors and people that I've watched over the years be very successful with negotiating with their colleagues as managers, navigating difficult projects, trying to bring really good things, good fruition from day to day. And so I'd like to share with you different leadership skills that you may be presented with or can hone throughout your career as Sarah said in the kickoff of this. We aren't all born to lead right away. There are different stages of our development. We all come into the field as pre-program interns. We go to graduate school. We have our fellowships. We have our first jobs. Each of these roles that we have at different times of our career, we have different opportunities to hone our skills, valuable time to think about who we are, what we want to do, where our careers are going to go. So thinking about opportunities for career growth over time, how can I make the best of what's available to me at this stage of my career? When you're in pre-program, you're going to have a very different day-to-day tasks than let's say when you're in your graduate program or when you have your first job. Think about where are you, what's available to you right now at this moment? What is the best use of my time? Perhaps if I'm in a fellowship that's a three-year fellowship, I need to think about what do I want to get out of this opportunity and how can I plan that? Who can help me grow? What mentors can I identify around me to help me get to my goals? And what skills do I have right now that I can share? This is a really important point for me. I love watching the intern come into my workplace who has such a command for something, whatever that specialty is, whatever that strength is that they're really good at, and they shine and you see it, and everybody always wants to tap into that. And as far as for the ECPN for Emerging Professionals, this time in your life, when you're first starting out in your career, you have enthusiasm. You have time to hone these skills. You have time to think about what maybe a specialty will be for you, what appeals to you, and I really encourage you to think about honing your leadership skills through all of those avenues. So here's the skill set that I see for people that I really appreciate as leaders around me in the museum field. And really, these can all happen in all stages of your career. This isn't just for people that are in charge. This is for everybody to have all the way through. Always have short and long-term personal goals. This is so important. I think we always have to be thinking about how can I successfully do this thing that I've identified for me. And when I say for me, I mean you as your best advocate, you know in the job that you're in or the job that you think that you want, what skills you need to hone. But you are the only one who can decide what it is that your long-term goal should be or that short-term goal. As Sarah mentioned earlier in this discussion, listening, active listening, this is really difficult for a lot of people in general. Listening is hard. Most people come to conversations with their minds already made up. If you can come to a meeting, if you can come to a person and really not think about your own initiative at the moment, but just think about what it is that they're saying, those are very, very powerful skill sets to have that are going to help you later. Make yourself available.  And if you're open to them, you'll find them, you'll see them. If you're prepared, this is a big one. I really appreciate when my colleagues come into my meeting and they've really thought about the subject and they're coming with something to offer. This shines leadership skill right there. Be confident in your ideas and express them well. People really like well-thought-out conversations. And if you're prepared, you are able to offer this to your solution, to your project. Offer creative solutions. I really believe when lots of people come with different ideas, you have a really wonderful outcome. This is far superior than everybody having the same idea and not really kicking the can forward. Now, in order to do this, you have to offer creative solutions. And everybody loves creative solutions, but you have to be prepared if people don't necessarily want them, or they don't necessarily work out. So this takes really a level of confidence to not only offer up a creative solution, but then to really be able to take on the compromise of perhaps that not being chosen. But I guarantee you a creative solution always pushes ideas forward. Transparency is key when you're working with others. People want sincerity. You have a lot more opportunity to compromise with people and instill confidence in people when they see that you're coming wanting the job to go well. Knowledge and respect are earned, and this takes time. It takes time to be really good at something. It takes time to hone your skills, but it also takes time for people to recognize that you're working toward that and that you are prepared and that you are confident with your advice. So exemplify dependability. See potential in your colleagues and find a way to work well together. This is really important. We want to see what is the strength in all the people that we're working with. And Molly really exemplified that when she talked about her collections care person. Celebrate the success of others. It's so nice for everybody at the end of a project to really come to a place where they feel like things went well and they did it together. So recipe for success in the workplace. This is my sort of boil down list of things that I think are really important. Put yourself in other people's shoes. What are your colleagues goals? What does the project require? If you can balance these two things, you're really ahead of the game. Just understanding what's the strengths that other people are bringing and what are the kinds of things that will motivate them to help you. You really have to think about things from the other person's perspective to get good at this. Create solutions that motivate everyone. One person can't win. When you're coming to a project with lots of different people, you have to compromise. But again, you have to identify what are those shared goals and how do we get this job done. This helps you to figure out how do I motivate the team so everybody walks away with something. There are always point persons and information for projects. You need to respect other people's assignments and boundaries while being helpful. Now this really requires some emotional intelligence to understand that you can bring advice to a project and you can try to be very helpful. But then you also don't want to take away somebody else's power if they're a manager in the situation. I think this is really important for emerging professionals and how they can really contribute to a team even if they're not in charge of, let's say, that project. Also, this is my favorite. You can't be at every meeting so your colleagues are your representatives and power them. If you've earned your colleagues respect and trust and people know what it is and want and need and understand your goals, they'll help you support them even when you're not there. And that's a really, really powerful way to tap into strengths of other people. So communication is hard. You're going to disagree with people.  You have to find balance with the nature around you. Be kind to your colleagues. People are sensitive to criticism. I find that people in creative fields such as conservation are really filled with very empathetic people who feel really deeply. So keep this in mind. People are sensitive to criticism. How can you bring your advice and bring your strengths and bring service without necessarily making people feel like they're being criticized? Again, this is emotional intelligence at its best and this is definitely a skill to hone. Forgive. We all occasionally say things we don't mean. And this is a two-way street. Sometimes it will be me. Sometimes it will be you. But we all need to come together and decide that we're going to move forward and we're not going to linger or hang into bad feelings. Don't forget, you want to change.  This is good for everyone. We can't put people in a box and leave them behind. We want to grow. We want other people to grow. Recognize others for a job well done. Thank your colleagues. We are rarely successful without the help of others. People want to be seen and they want to be heard. Supporting the people whose names are not at the top of the project. Really letting people know that they were part of the success. Everyone wants to be recognized for their work. Never take credit for everything and not give credit to your colleagues. I find this is a really painful management mistake. You want to keep people's respect. You want to earn that respect. And you can't do that by taking all the credit. You have to give thanks. And if your motivation is truly the success of a project, then your tone is always positive and is always inclusive for your peers. You are working for the team and the team wants to work for you. So, here are the keys. Envision goals for yourself. Plan a path for your short and long term success. I cannot overemphasize how important this is for you as a leader and for you to be successful. But don't forget, be flexible and open to the opportunity. You never know when the call will come and it will be a wonderful opportunity for you. Sometimes you can't see it right away. But if you're open to it, you will. Know your strengths. Periodically check in with yourself. This is so hard to do. We never set time aside for us to really think about how we want to grow and what our goals are going to be. But you need to do it. And also think about, what do I need to improve? Sometimes a mentor can help you with this. What skills should I develop further? Think about it for yourself. Sit down. Write a list. This is really important. Know yourself. Now after you think you've identified those things, talk to your peers. Talk about your professional development. Diversify this group. It can't just be people that love you. You have to talk to people that you think will bring you a really honest, neutral opinion. And if you disagree with them, sometimes that just hardens your true idea about what it is that you want. So think about all of these things as you're diversifying your mentor group and the people that are going to help you move forward. Connect with people. Ask good, thoughtful questions and engage. I love good interns that come into my lab and it's a two-way street. Not only are they giving me advice and talking to me about things that they've learned or done or what they've had, but they're also asking really good questions and this always leads to really interesting conversations and growth I think for everybody. Tap into conferences, workshops, visit labs, join these online discussions. I think these are all ways to really grow your network which both Sara and Molly talked about the importance of. So one of my number one things when I'm on a project is leave with a task list. So this is my task list for you. Things you can do right now. Everybody can sit down, make an appointment with themselves and have a self-assessment. Find peers, ask peers that you trust and mentors for that growth advice. Write down your short and long-term goals. My next point that I think is always really helpful for people is to pay attention to the job market. Keep your resume current and ready and become aware of the trends in the field. Sometimes people are hiring lots of conservation scientists. Sometimes you see a lot of photo conservator jobs. Look at all the preservation trends. See where the jobs are. Are they on the east or on the west? Is the Midwest booming right now? Look at all of those patterns and think about how that applies to you. Also applying for jobs gives you the opportunity to make decisions. In the end, this actualizes the job you really want. Sometimes it's parts of many jobs that you've seen, but identifying those things and how that fits in with your short and long-term goals is really important. Right now, you can participate in your professional organization. Most members of AIC can upgrade their professional designation right now. That requires you talking to people, finding mentors, updating your resume, figuring out where is it that you can grow. What are your strengths? Upgrading your membership is a really good way to have this appointment with yourself. Becoming involved and giving your time and expertise is so rewarding and again, expands your network and your skill set. I really encourage you all to volunteer within the organization. Certainly here in America, the AIC and Mali Specialty Groups provides many, many opportunities to do that, not to mention with all our online resources. So, just to summarize everything that Sarah and Mali and I, this is really the boiled down slide. Listen. So important. So hard, but really important. Active listening. Trying to figure out what's happening around you and taking in all that information and using that tasks toward being a better leader. Build trust. It is really important for your colleagues to know that your advice is good and you've earned everybody's trust and that you are dependable and prepared. Look at the perspectives of all the players on the project and the team. This is such a powerful component to compromise and getting things done. Inspire. Everybody loves an inspirational leader and if you have really some things to say that will really get the group going or really get the creative juices flowing, this is always a great thing to add to any discussion. Grow professionally and take others with you. It's so much more powerful to have this network of colleagues around you who've earned their trust, who know your strengths, who understand your leadership skills and then it's a two-way street. You want to tap into that and you want to tap into your colleagues' strengths and their leadership skills. But ultimately, you are your best advocate. You have to do that self-assessment. You have to identify those paths for yourself for how to continue to improve your strengths and know it is where you want to go in the future. Thank you so much Michelle. What fantastic advice and I'm actually going to linger on this last slide because this is such an incredible summary that I talked about today. I think we do have a few minutes for maybe just for one question. One of the questions that we received earlier is whether the speakers feel they've sought out most of their leadership experiences or whether they fell into them and have they ever turned down leadership roles and if so, why? So, Michelle, maybe we could start with you. Well, I think for me personally I've always worked in art museums and I've always been attracted to working with really a group of creative people and the idea of working together for preservation was something that I always found strengthened. And as my career unfolded my pre-program work and then going into graduate school I was always preparing myself to go into private practice. So, I had my sort of pie in the sky goal of being a permanent employee at an art museum but I always had three or four things going in the background in case that didn't work out. So, you know, slowly acquire equipment. I actually always was working in private practice. I constantly had a treatment. I always had tools to work with the public figuring out what kind of documents I needed and insurances and things like that. So, for me personally I was always working in the round. So, I always had that 10-year goal but I sort of always had a safety net and trying to figure out what was the strength of my character and how could I make that work in the scenario that I had.  I've you know, had colleagues that have been so strong at so many things and I think, gosh, you know, why isn't this person in this position? Why hasn't something come up yet? And you know, you never know where the chips will fall but you can always make the best of what you're given. And I think that's really important is to feel like you're never sort of taken by the flow and you do have some control in your life and you can sort of push through and do those things that you consider important things that you want to do. So, yes, I think it's hard and things change and there's a lot of factors but I think you always have to for yourself feel like you made the good decisions you know, you have to own your decisions and you can only do that if you've identified when the one comes up that you want. Thank you so much. Those are fantastic points. Molly, how about you? You seem to allude to this a little bit in your presentation of falling into leadership positions versus seeking them out. Yeah, I do think that that's true. However, you know, as Michelle was speaking I was thinking about how falling into these things doesn't mean that they just come your way without doing anything not usually anyway. Something that I've been really appreciative of in my current job is that I have been given the space to show or to demonstrate the skills that I have and the interests that I have which may not apply directly to my day-to-day work and so I've been given opportunities or offered opportunities for my supervisor to assist with or work on and take on leadership roles on some other projects that have come up. So, I mean, in one way I've fallen into them but actually I do think that it took an active demonstration on my part to speak up about what I'm interested in and to be an active participant in the conversations. And about turning down leadership positions I can say that one time I did do this. Sometimes you have to think about all the things that are on your plate and when things come your way a couple of years ago I was asked if I would be willing to run for a position on the board of an organization and I just felt like I had too much on my plate and I was very concerned about what I could commit to and so I didn't do it but I knew that there was going to be giving me another year and I'll be ready to do it and so I have now saw that those opportunities. Thanks Molly, that's really great. How about you Sarah? Sarah are you with us? Yes I am but I lost you for a minute. Just for me like Molly I have turned down leadership positions mainly in trustee type positions because I've had to think very carefully about whether I've got enough time to give to them and I think it's always hopeless if you take on too much so I think knowing your own capacity and this goes back to my work-life balance point that in a way it's irresponsible to take on too many things at a particular time if you know that you can't dedicate enough time to them but as far as seeking out leadership positions yes on the whole I have applied for roles which have been in my initial medium and long-term plans and I have sort of looked for the development opportunities to make myself ready for them but one more thing I just wanted to say about this work-life balance issue is that when I was quite early on in my career with the National Trust the head of conservation job came up the head conservator job came up but I was on the alternative and I really felt that I couldn't cope with taking on a senior job at that stage and that actually put my career back by over 10 years and this is one of the things that I think women have to think quite carefully about and I don't know how many of the people listening are women but I guess for those of you who have reached that time in your careers when you're thinking about family it really is a difficult decision to make about career and family and how you plan that and I think this is one of the ways in which having someone maybe another woman who's been through that could really help you and I'm a member in the UK of the Women Leaders in Museum Network and that group has been very helpful to members of the group in talking all of those sort of work life balance issues through. Thanks Carrie. You know this is Michelle I also want to say that there's such a great advantage to I think having a balanced workforce and having people at different stages of their career because you may have someone who their children are grown they do have a leadership position within the department but then to be able to support women that perhaps have small children because you understand the things that they're going through at that point in their career and again the enthusiasm of a fellow that's there who doesn't have children who's right out of school. I think all those parts in your career are valid their leadership positions in ways you can hone your skills at every level and I think as a group we need to be kind and really think about how all of our colleagues have something to offer at all of these stages no matter where they are as women or men or family or whatever the version of the theme is I think everybody has something really really good to contribute. Thank you Michelle these are such good points and I hope we can follow up more with this in some sort of you know after the webinar post or session I hope we can address some more of these issues. I think we're unfortunately out of time for more questions but once again we will have some sort of follow up responding to questions we receive during the webinar and we have some additional resources we're planning on posting including a bibliography related to leadership if you have any additional questions in the meantime or suggestions for future webinar topics I would really encourage you to email


As-salamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. So first question, said, how can I refrain from idle talk especially with friends? I'm struggling make two hour for me. So first of all we ask Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala to bless you with the best of this world and the next and we ask Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala to make you and I from those people who guard our tongues and who guard what we say and whom or for whom our tongues will be a witness for us on the Day of Judgment and not a witness against us. So how do we refrain from idle talk with friends? Here I'm going to talk about two or three separate aspects. The first thing is the selection of the friends that you have is very important. The Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam said المرأو على ديني خاليلة فليانظر أحدوكم من يخالل A person is upon the religion of their close friend so let every one of you look who he takes as a close friend. So when you're associating with people who their normal kind of way of dealing with things is to talk about things that don't benefit them and things that might be even sinful then for sure you know there's no doubt that that that one aspect is being careful about the friends that you keep. The second aspect is being a person who is whose tongue is busy with other things and the very word idle talk is such a powerful word because it shows us that the whole idea of idle talk is that our tongue is idle it doesn't have anything else to do so give your tongue something else to do make it busy with the remembrance of Allah make it busy with beneficial knowledge make it busy with learning and asking questions so that it doesn't become busy with other things and the third thing is to develop a culture among your friends and among yourself or with yourself that whenever you fall into something some kind of idle talk you stop yourself and you remind yourself it's very difficult in the beginning but over time it will happen you know you stop even for example someone has a habit let's say for example someone has a habit of swearing it's just a habit you know they've grown up with it that every other word they say they you know they curse and they swear for example and the person it's hard for them you know they keep falling back into it because it's a habit they've been in so what i would suggest for this person is really simple is that every time that word comes out of their mouth they make a stilfar and they remind themselves about it so i'm not going to say that again and they carry on and it may be a few days of slipping here and there but by the end of it that person has got rid of that habit the same with back biting so person i've got a habit of back biting but first time as soon as they hear themself do it as soon as they hear their friends do it it's astaghfirullah you know what it is i'm making a big effort not to do this i need to remember about that so inshallah i'm not going to do it again and they build a culture and a habit among themselves and their friends that they're not going to do that again so thinking about who your friends are obviously we're not suggesting you leave every single friend you have or anything like that but you know thinking who your friends are making a habit of remembering Allah and busying your tongue with with that which is good and when you do fall into it clearly you know stop yourself and openly remind yourself and remind yourself you're not going to do it again and over time that habit will be built inshaAllah ta'ala


Happy Sunday, everybody. It's Robin with Creativity RV, and welcome to a new Sunday Morning View Queue where I answer all your questions about my full-time RV life. Today I'm going to tackle a few doozies, including the rumors of my death, and this is not related to COVID. This is going on for two or three months now, and how Doug and I survived being in the RV with nine degrees outside with no skirt. And, oh my god, I gotta tell you about this thing that Doug got me for my birthday, how Doug is doing, he's right out there, how the cat is doing, and if I got comped all that solar I'd just reviewed or if I paid for it. Hey birdwatchers, happy Memorial Day weekend. So I got a lot of questions from you guys after I was out sick. I wanted to let you know that I'm doing a lot better, and for the people that was worried I was like by myself in the fifth wheel up in the mountains in the snow, with no one looking out for me, I was under the care of a teled nurse and a teled doctor. And I had people looking out for me, Doug would come up and socially distance, visit me and brought me propane, and I was constantly in touch with my friends and family. So no worries on that, I have seen an actual doctor in person and I'm doing just fine. A lot of you wanted to know how the cat was doing while I was sick. You know how animals can tell when you're not feeling well. Most of the time you wanted to crawl up right here and like sit on my face. What is it? What is it? Are you going to stop screaming at me? Are you going to stop screaming now? Because I've been home for a while and I've gotten you everything you wanted and love. Okay, you're okay. And so half the time I was like oh my god this is just allergies, get off of me. He's fine and he likes being out there in the snow as long as I'm with him. But he could sense something was wrong and he's doing just great now too. Doug is doing fine too. A lot of you wanted to know if he also got sick. As you know, we were together in this heinous snow. It just kept snowing and snowing and snowing. It's still snowing. It's pretty though. Pretty deep. And we ran out of power because all I had at that point was solar which I'll explain in a second why he didn't have a generator with me. But we ran out of power and we were two or three times stuck in the RV with no power, no water, no heat. So when we first started getting a little sick we both thought it was just exhaustion. You know being up in the middle of the night trying to hook up the truck to get a little bit of power. Maybe dehydration. I think Doug was a little sick. He wasn't as bad as I was. Thank God. You know, he got headaches. He got sore throats. He got really tired. You never know, right? But we're both doing just fine right now. Now, you guys had some of the best questions about how we survived nine degrees with no skirt. Which you guys, that was really funny. If you're not RV people, let me tell you that an RV skirt goes around the outside of your RV. It stops the cold air from getting underneath your RV where, you know, it comes up through your floors and it can get really cold. You know, if I knew I was going to be in that cold location and I thought it was going to be cold for a while, I would have built a skirt. But, you know, the storms were not supposed to be that bad. They would say it would be an inch and it would be eight. They would say it would be two inches and it would be 12. So we had this snow on my solar panels. And like I just said in my solar videos, I did not have a backup. I wanted to put my money into the solar instead of into the generator. When we saw the storm was coming, I actually did buy a generator from Home Depot that never was delivered. It just never came. And it went through four different shipping companies. Trucking and shipping was a little bit hairy then. And somehow it went from one company to another company. And I don't know if it fell off the truck or what happened, but they never delivered it. So then Doug and I went to Harbor Freight. They, you know, brought this thing up to the car for us. Another generator. So again, in the snow, we're out there trying to start that up and we finally got it all out and put together and got the fuel put in it. And we ran it for five minutes and my host said, oh my god, that's so loud. You can't run that. We're going to get complaints from the neighbors. And that's when I learned a really good hack on my solar that I'm going to tell you guys about soon. I was told by the solar company that I could not plug into a house because it would just pop a breaker. And they showed me that when I was with them. So I thought it was not possible. But we found a wonky way to change how much voltage the system actually draws. And so we were able to hook into my friend's house finally. A lot of you wanted to know how we survived nine degrees outside with no heat. We had propane, like I said, but we had the little baby ones and we were running through them in a day. That's how cold it was. I mean, just to keep it like 56 in the house. Doug was coming up, God bless him, and just dropping off propane tanks every few days for me so I could have heat. But during that storm, our batteries went down to nothing. So we couldn't even run the furnace, the little electricity that takes even though it runs off of propane, we couldn't run the water pump. So we just had to figure it out. And one thing I've learned is this. If you're in a small space like a van with some insulation, it's a little counterintuitive. But the smaller the space with a purse center or two people in a pet, the heat actually builds pretty well in a small space.  And that was true in those rigs also. Well, when we were in the situation in the fifth wheel, I said to Doug, we're going to be just fine because what we're going to do is go up into the bedroom. The living room has tall ceilings and a lot of windows, right? That's where it gets the coldest.  It's a small room, small windows. And I'm telling you, the two of us in the cat, we got too hot up here. Even though we had no heat, Doug is a human furnace that the cat has learned recently. So now they're friends. It was just like a slumber party in here. And we watched movies and played games and played on our tablets and that was it. So actually it was kind of fun. Okay, let me get to the whopper that I mentioned in the beginning of the video. There have been rumors that I died for about two or three months. They are founded on something that actually happened, but not to me. This is what happened, you guys. About the end of February, early March, I was camping out in the desert and I got a text message from a good friend of mine that I've known for decades, you know, but you talk to me four times a year. So she texted me and she said, are you okay? And I said, yeah, I'm great. How are you? And she said, where are you? And I said, I'm in the desert. Why? And she said that a friend of hers that doesn't know me texted her and said, I heard your friend Robin was stabbed to death. Of course, that also was not true. I was just fine. But here's what happened. There was another woman very close to my age from Colorado that was killed in a murder suicide. And that day, it came out of the news, Robin Barrett murdered and my friend sent me a screenshot that said, I'm Google and Google search Robin Barrett murdered and then my picture because you know how Google goes, you know, they have the stories and then the images depending on how you set it up. And because I have a bigger online presence, my picture was coming up first. So at that time, I had about five of you email me and say that you heard that I was murdered. And I actually was really torn about it at the time because if that rumor snowballed, I thought I needed to address it. But I didn't want to at the time because I didn't want to get clicks on a video based on somebody else's misfortune. And a victim's memorial was asking people for a photo of the other Robin Barrett. And so people were going on to Facebook and putting in Robin Barrett, Colorado. And I was coming up, I called the people that I know best, Doug, my mom, the people I was camping with. I didn't get any more messages from you guys. So I was just going to let it go. I felt really bad for that woman and her family. I did see a picture of her eventually. And she just was like our people, you know, she was just like a 50 something fun, happy woman. And I feel really bad for her and her family. But I'll tell you guys, it is really disconcerting to see your name with the word murdered next to it.  There was that and then the COVID thing. So I have realized the universe is trying to tell me, you know, like all of us, that we have to live our best life because time is short and it is. The reason I bring it up now is because when I stopped doing videos, when I was sick, a whole bunch of you googled me and I got a lot of emails and messages from you guys going, hey, I read that you were murdered in February, but I saw you put out a video in March. I don't think it's you, but please tell us if it's you. Do you know about this story? You know how rumors go. So I just wanted to address it now. It was another woman with the exact same name as mine from the same state as me, almost the same age as me, but it wasn't me. Yeah, so that happened. It was weird. But I wanted to let you guys know if you hear these rumors, not true people. I'm still here, just fine. Now let's get to some fun stuff. I have got to tell you about this thing I'm wearing. My birthday happened around the time that I was sick and, you know, I was getting the chills and stuff. So Doug got me this, like, look at this thing. It's a hoodie sweater. You can see it has massive pockets. It's one size fits all. And here's a picture of Doug in it. And what's funny is it matches my bedding that I'm obsessed with. Like, this bedding is so soft. And I don't know how he found this thing, but I will put a link for it below because I know you guys will ask me for both things. And I love it so much. Doug is getting one and we just did one as a gift to my friend Carol for her morning campfire. But I'll tell you on cold nights I sleep in this and it's great to go out when it's chilly and it's just really comforting. It's just like a big, it's like wearing a blanket. So that's how great this is in my boyfriend is. So let me address the questions about the solar. So you guys know I just did a couple of videos on my solar install and my test where I tested my 1280 watts with six lithium batteries in a rainstorm for seven days. A lot of people were like, well, of course it's easy when you don't pay for these things and, you know, clearly it was comped. It was not, you guys, I paid for it and I paid for the installation. You know, usually I don't address the comments about money, but I am going to say one thing about that. I know that, you know, everyone has a different circumstance and people kind of project their situation or they think that they're stuck. You know, it's like my mission in life to help people get unstuck. Honestly, that's why I wrote Be a Nomad, Change Your Life, because I wanted people to know that they can live on a lot less in an RV, which would allow them to pursue their dreams, especially if they're a boondocker like me. So I did that, you guys. I figured out how to do that with my life and then I wrote the book Work From Home While You Roam with 300 remote job sources, actual links to apply, information, everything, because I got so many emails from you guys going, I really want to be on the road, but I can't figure out how to make a living. It's up to you. Everyone has a different circumstance and some people cannot be on the road and even if they are on the road, they can't afford what other people can afford. I understand that, but I have a budget like everybody else and what I did is absolutely possible for everybody else. You just have to figure out what you need and what your budget is and how to get there. When you boondock, it's a lot easier because normally I'm not paying for a place to camp. Pretty soon I'm going to do an updated budget for you guys. Don't think that other people do things that you can't do, what one of us can do, all of us can do. That's it you guys. I hope I addressed all the questions. As always, if you need the links for this stuff or the books or whatever, they're down below. If you have any questions for me that you want me to address in the next VueCube, please do just leave them down below. I hope you're all doing well out there and having a good weekend and staying safe and I'm thinking about all of you right now. I hope to see you on the road soon until then. Everybody have happy travels and be free.


So this is joint work with my co-authors, Prabhanjan and Abhishek. So what is the question that we're interested in? Namely, what is the exact round complexity of MPC? So obviously, why do we even care about the round complexity of MPC? It just so happens that round complexity is a fundamental measure of efficiency for multi-party computations and, you know, it's importance, the importance of round complexity, that is, extends to general interactive protocols as well. So now that we have sort of the question out of the way, let's sort of finalize the setting that we're going to work in. So we're interested in computational security. We allow a malicious adversary to corrupt an arbitrary set of parties, and we work in the plain model. So specifically, if we assume a trusted setup like this ERS, then this problem has already been resolved, and we know of two round protocols, and we know of a bunch of them. So I'm now sort of going to briefly take you through a history of the works that address this question of round complexity in MPC. And this starts with the work by goal Mikali and Wigderson, which show a polynomial round construction of a protocol. Obviously, we want to do better, and the constant round protocol, the study was started by Beaver, Mikali, and Rockaway, and it was followed by a sequence of works not limited to the ones on the slide, which used various assumptions to construct these constant round protocols. Of course, we want to resolve the exact round complexity of MPC, so we want to do better than constant. So what about the exact round complexity? Do we know of even lower bounds? So this is sort of established by an important result by Katz and Ostrowski, who showed that four round is impossible with respect to black box simulation. There is a caveat which is the communication channel is this unidirectional message model, and this is sort of unique to the two-party setting. It's sort of not going to be used in the multi-party setting, and I'll shortly tell you the different communication channel. So what about weird interest in multi-party computation? So what about MPC? And this was a very recent result by Garg Mukherjee Pandya and Polychronia 2, and they showed that three rounds are impossible with respect to black box simulation. And this is the simultaneous message model, which is the more general model in MPC, and that's the model that we are going to be working in. Okay, so now we've got lower bounds. Do we have constructions or that are close enough to this? So the same paper also showed a five round protocol based on IO and some other assumptions. So given that this is sort of the state of the art, the natural questions that follow are, does there exist a five round protocol based on standard assumptions? Because the only one we know is from IO, and does there is the sort of upper bound tide? Does there exist a four round MPC protocol? And the results in this talk show that if we assume DDH, we construct a five round protocol. And if we assume one way permutation, then sub exponential DDH, we construct a four round protocol. Of course, given the results, the four round is optimal with respect to black box simulation. Now, we should point out that there's a concurrent work by Brackersky, Halevi, and Polychronia do and they construct a four round protocol as well. They use slightly different techniques and their assumptions are different as well. They assume adaptive commitments and sub exponential LWE. So I'm sort of just going to sort of touch briefly upon the template of this state of the art work and I'll show you why there's an inherent sort of limitation in extending this work to get the results that we do. So their work, the basis of their work is this two round protocol in the CRS model, and we know of these from IO and LWE. And specifically, they construct the five round protocol from IO, so that's sort of going to be the focus, yeah. So you can think of it as being simple enough. I have a CRS, I need to get rid of the CRS, so what am I going to do? I'm going to replace it with a coin tossing protocol. And they construct a four round coin tossing protocol, and it just so happens that it's possible to parallelize one round of the MPC with one round of the coin tossing protocol, and this gives me a total of five rounds. So what are the limitations then of this approach? It seems almost inherent that one round of the MPC, rather the second round of the MPC, seems to depend on the CRS. So we're sort of unsure of how you would parallelize both rounds of the coin tossing protocol with this MPC. And the other is, irrespective of whether we can solve this, this still limits our construction to the assumptions of the underlying MPC. And that we know for the five round case only from IO. So there's another methodology for constructing protocols, and that's using this GMW compiler. So what does it do? It takes a protocol that's secure against semi-honest adversaries, and converts it into a protocol that's secure against malicious adversaries. So how does it do that? I start with this phase which I call coin tossing, and then for each round of the underlying semi-honest protocol, I'm going to prove honest behavior. And that's going to be this, this underlying protocol. Now I'm going to attach a zero-knowledge proof saying that, look, I behaved honestly in this round. I'm going to sort of repeat this for each round, and so on. So in this work, we're sort of going to consider semi-honest protocols that are secure against bad randomness. And so I'm sort of going to just ignore the coin tossing protocol. I'll come back to this point later on. So now that I've got rid of that, no matter in terms of rounds, no matter how efficient the underlying protocol is, the main overhead is still in terms of the number of proofs, which are, of course, multi-round. And the idea is then, can we reduce the number of proofs? And so this is sort of what we're going to tackle. So our strategy is then to start off with the semi-honest protocol of a specific type. So I'm going to have a protocol that's split into this computation phase in the output phase. A computation phase is when each party computes a share of the output. And this can be multiple rounds as is denoted by these dotted lines. And the output phase, typically a single round just exchanges the shares and then they compute the output locally. And this, in turn, actually is satisfied by most MPC protocols that we know of. So this leads to this idea of, can we prove honest behavior just once for the entire computation phase? If so, the protocol would look something like this. I done with my computation phase, I send a proof and so on. Well, this sounds bizarre, right? Like it might be too late, allowing an adversary to deviate from the protocol even in one round might break privacy completely. So of course, we're going to sort of require some additional properties from the underlying protocol. Specifically, we're going to call this property robustness and it's going to pertain to the computation phase. And the computation phase is going to maintain privacy against malicious adversaries but it's not going to guarantee the correctness of the computation. So why is this point sort of relevant? And why can't I sort of push the output phase further up? Know that because the correctness of computation is not guaranteed, the adversary could potentially change the function being computed to the identity function. Of course, privacy is still guaranteed till the end of the computation phase but if I don't complete my zero-knowledge proof prior to revealing the output phase, then the adversary learns the honest party's output. So this proof in between sort of acts as a shield between the computation phase and the output phase. So this technique, we call this underlying protocol a robust MPC and this technique is sort of called delayed verification and was introduced by this work by Chandran Goyal or Stravski and Sahai and was introduced in a completely different context. And I will point out, as I've already said, that this protocol is already secure against bad randomness. So we can ignore the coin tossing phase in our compiler. So in the rest of the talk, I'm sort of going to talk about compiler from a four-round robust MPC to a five-round protocol and similarly to a four-round protocol. And for the construction of the four-round robust MPC, I'll just briefly talk about some of the key points. I won't have too much time to really go into that. So a five-round protocol, the template is simple enough. If you remember, this is what we had and if you see the number of rounds that the computation phase is reduced to one, so it's three plus one, four. So the idea is, of course, if I want to reduce the number of rounds, I have to parallelize the proof somehow. And if I want to parallelize the proof, it's important to understand what the statement is. The statement is the entire transcript. So if I want to parallelize the proof, it has to be input delayed. And the next thing is, of course, we don't, there are impossibly results for black box simulation for three-round ZK, so this zero-knowledge, these proofs rather become four-round and if I were to sort of push them up, it would look something like this. In fact, I can do even better. I can sort of move the second zero-knowledge proof up and sort of just leave the last round to be in parallel with the output phase. Of course, one would hope that something like this would work, but of course now we've parallelized things and issues crop up. Mainly, this issue of non-malabilities like a big concern for us. Why so? It's because in the case of parallelizing the proofs, standard soundness does not suffice. So what do I mean by this? In general, I have a prover and a verifier and then the soundness just guarantees that an adversarial prover can't prove a false statement, but now when I'm sort of squishing these proofs, an adversary is acting both as a prover and verifier, so it's something like this. So in the case that I'm trying to prove the security in simulation, the adversary is going to be a recipient of a simulated proof. Now in the case of a simulated proof, can I still claim that the proof on the right-hand side is sound? So this is sort of what is called simulation soundness and this is sort of inherently linked to non-malability. So instead of now having these normal zero-knowledge proofs, I'm going to sort of switch them around and I'm going to replace them with non-malable zero-knowledge proofs. Fortunately, we know of input-delayed NMZKs and these can be constructed from collision-resistant hash function and you'll hear about this later in crypto in one of the talks. So this is sort of like a general overview of the construction, of course, the details I've sort of glossed over. So what about the four-round protocol? I mean, we saw the five-round case, so what are the main challenges in terms of getting this down to four? Of course, I explained as to why we can't let this output phase be revealed before the end of the proof. So it seems like this is sort of our bottleneck and of course, it might have been nice if we could reduce it to three. But like I already pointed out, three-round zero-knowledge proof with black box simulation is impossible and so this sounds a little tricky. It almost seems like we don't know how to go beyond these five rounds. So let's look at a specific property of this robust NPC and the nice property of this robust NPC is that the simulator needs to cheat only in the final round and for the computation phase, it can just run the protocol with random input. So in some sense, the simulator uses the output phase to fix the computation that it has done in the computation phase. So if I have the protocol like this, if I'm simulating the output phase, I can go from a computation phase with the real input to the computation phase with the random input. So why is this relevant or important to us? Remember, I had this, but now I don't need to simulate the NMZK because I'm sort of behaving honestly in the computation phase with a different input, but the behavior is honest with respect to that input. So I can hope to use a weaker primitive than zero knowledge and this primitive that I'm gonna use is called strong witness indistinguishability or strong WI. Now, I'll come back shortly to what strong WI is and why it suffices for us, but say I had hypothetically a three round strong WI, then I could replace it there and then I'd push everything up and hopefully this would resolve the problem. So what are these strong WI proof systems? Say I have a distribution D1 and D2 that are computationally indistinguishable and from them, my sample a statement and a witness. So strong WI guarantees that the proof associated with these statement and witnesses are computationally indistinguishable. So recall in our setting that the statement is the transcript of the protocol and the witness is the input that generates the transcript. So when we're changing from sort of the real input to the random input, the witness is of course changing, but also know that the transcript is going to change. So your standard notion of witness indistinguishability is not going to apply, which is why we need this stronger notion of strong WI. But what about known constructions of strong WI? In a recent work by Jain, Kalai, Khurana, and Rotblum, they construct us three round strong WI from DDH, but the only caveat is that it's in a limited setting. So why is it in a limited setting? It works only if the prover sort of reveals the statement only in the last round of the proof. But in our case, since the statement is the entire transcript and the transcript is sort of available to everyone before the last round, their setting, their result is not applicable to our setting. So what do we do? We construct a three round strong WI. I've put a start to denote some additional properties that we need. So we construct them, sorry, based on one-way permutation and sub-exponential secure DDH. And since I've alluded to the fact that we require these non-malability properties, it's also going to have the requisite non-malability properties. So an important point to note that even though we are assuming sub-exponential security, our final simulator is still going to run in polynomial time. The sub-exponential security is sort of going to be only used and argued in the hybrids. So just some remarks on the security proof of both these constructions specifically I'll focus on the four round case. There are several challenges and one of them I've already alluded to is the non-malability and specific constructions of the constitutive imprimitives are modified accordingly. Another point is that for a simulator to argue security, it needs to extract the inputs of the adversity. So for that, we add this extractable commitment, a three round extractable commitment where the parties commit to the input that they're going to use in this robust MPC. And now the proofs are also going to state that the value committed in the commitment is consistent with the rest of the protocol. And these extractable commitments which are extractable by rewinding are known from injective one-way functions or the three round ones, of course. So now we have primitives that require rewinding and because of this, we now also need the other primitives in the protocol to be secure against rewinding. Specifically, just think of right now just the strong WI in the extractable commitment. So when I'm sort of rewinding to extract from the extractable commitment, I require that the strong WI property still holds. And there's no guarantee that this will actually happen. So we need to sort of incorporate this into our protocol and primitives. And we do this either by using primitives that are rewinding secure or we sort of entirely bypass the thing and use complexity leveraging. And this is another place where we sort of use the sub-exponential security. And again, this is used entirely in the hybrid. It doesn't show up in the final simulator. And finally, I'll just like talk about a few key points of the robust MPC. From the GMW construction, we know that the round complexity is proportional to the depth of the computation. And a common idea to reduce the depth is to use randomized encodings. And Applebaum Ishaik Kusilowitz showed that I can reduce general functionality computation to computing degree three randomized polynomials. So if I now compute these degree three randomized polynomials using this sort of GMW style, I get a six round semi-honest protocol if I use semi-honest OT. Now, if I use two round OT, which is maliciously secure indistinguishable, I get six round robust MPC. So we already have this robust MPC. So sort of the main contribution is now, of course, to bring this down to four rounds. And unfortunately, I'm sort of not gonna have time to go over this, but this sort of gives me a four round robust MPC. And it's important to know that we can construct it from DDH. So the assumption for the robust MPC is just DDH. So yeah, of course, this now brings me to the end of the talk and yeah, if you have any questions.


Hey everybody, welcome back to theCUBE. We are live in Las Vegas at Caesars Forum, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, covering Snowflake Summit 22. This is day one, action packed. It kind of feels like we were shot out of a cannon, which is great. We love that at theCUBE. Our next guest from Slalom joins us, Hilary Fire, the GM of Data and Analytics. Hilary, it's great to have you on the program. It's great to be here, so excited to be here. It's great to be back in person. It is, it's amazing. It's like filling my cup just to be back with people again. I felt the same. And you could tell that on stage during the keynote, which was not only standing room only, but there was an overflow area. I was in the overflow room. I have to admit it. We had a breakfast meeting and we got there right on time and we ended up in overflow, but it was great. There was just great energy and it was exciting to see all the progress that's coming down the pipe. Tremendous progress, tremendous innovation, a lot of evolution, since we last saw Snowflake in person, which was 2019. Talk to us from Slalom's partnership perspective. How is data evolving? The use of data evolving, what are you hearing from the front lines of the customer? From the front lines of the customer, we're seeing a lot of customers go to the cloud and Snowflake's at the forefront of that evolution. We're seeing them take advantage of this separation of compute and storage to be able to scale to different levels and concurrency at different levels and collaborate. And we always say what we're actually seeing them unlock is this modern culture of data where people and organizations can fully take advantage at all different levels of this accessible but governed data. And I think Snowflake makes that a reality. So we go to a lot of events, of course, and you hear both sides of the story. When you talk to a company like Snowflake, you know, or one of the hyperscalers, it's like, yeah, cloud makes a ton of sense when you talk to some of the more established companies called them legacy companies. He goes, oh no, people are repatriating, they're moving back on prem or they can't move data, they won't move data in the cloud. The truth is probably some place in the middle, but when you look at the numbers, cloud is growing substantially faster. What are you seeing with customers with regard to modernization, the role of cloud and the role of Snowflake? I think they're flocking to the cloud. I think COVID had people flock there, right? You realize the agility it provides for you is unparalleled. And to some extent, I'd had conversations with customers years ago that they were like, hey, I know security, I do it better than anybody. And I go, honestly, AWS, Google, like the hyper cloud providers, they know security and Snowflake doing that data layer across all of them. They do security at a whole different level than any data center or any IT group that I've seen out there. We've seen the threat landscape change dramatically in the last couple of years where it's now no longer, are we going to get hit? It's when. How have you seen the security conversation elevate when you're talking with customers in terms of up the executive stack? Is that now something that it sees we? It's a top priority. It's a board priority. I can tell you last year, I actually spent time internally helping implement Snowflake for us at Slalom. And it's our president's top priority was security. And that was one of the reasons, honestly, that we went that way. We were a little out of date. We needed to modernize. We needed to migrate. And we wanted to practice what we preach with our customers. So we did a little bit of both. And we did more than technology. We did a lot of process change, a lot of people up leveling because we really feel like technology is only a piece of the puzzle. You have to bring the people along for the journey in order to make that a reality. So what was the business driver to make that change? I think it was honestly to empower more people. And then we also had the threat of systems that were falling over and just not meeting the needs of the business. We were pretty data-driven and the systems weren't keeping up. And they were on-prem systems? They were hosted in the cloud? They were kind of on-prem, kind of hosted in the cloud. They were SQL on EC2 instances. But we just, we weren't able to scale. Literally was falling over. Like, we have a day a week where all of the reporting comes out because we're time-driven. And it would fall over, literally. So you had a halfway house, sort of. Yeah. And then you moved much of it, most of it, all of it into Snowflakes. All of it into Snowflakes. All of it. And then some. Okay. Because we had certain systems that we were afraid, like Workday, right? All the PII, all the privacy data, we were afraid to bring that into our SQL server before. But we were able to bring that into Snowflake now. And it unlocks. In a governed, we have security in very compliant ways. We have a lot of interesting things that we've done in this past year to both empower more people but do it in a governed and secured way. And how long did that migration take? I'd say it took about a year. And it was... Pretty fast. It was a tough year, honestly.  We do it with internal consultants. And some of them in the beginning of COVID, we looked at it as an opportunity, let's get them, let's do it internally. And then we got super busy. The market just took off. And then we were begging for resources. We were like, okay, where can we find somebody to help us with this? Cobbler's kids. Yeah, we were the Cobbler's kids. But we got it done. And as a partner drinking the Snowflake Champagne, talk to me about the ability to influence the technology, the direction, the roadmap. We've heard so much innovation announced this morning alone. Do you have that capability as a Snowflake partner? Yeah, for sure. So I feel like we're always on the forefront. We're doing these strategy projects with our clients. And so we want to keep our ears to what's going on in the innovation. We look at a lot of the other partners that are here. There's a whole ecosystem that's grown up around Snowflake. And it's amazing to see the advancements that are happening. And the cloud allows you to leapfrog just so quickly, the advancements. And we talked about this before we started that I've been in this data space for 30 years and it's changed a lot. The progression, the real-time data, what you can do, the separation of compute and storage. It's amazing what you can do and yet some of the same problems are pervasive. I have too much data, not enough information. And so we're seeing the advent of more governance and catalogs and that whole semantic layer is coming into play. Yeah, the bromide is data is plentiful, insights aren't. And then monetizing data is really, really hard. What's your take on Snowflake's ability to change that dynamic? I think they're making it a lot easier. I mean, some of the advancements are coming out with and more and more companies are looking to monetize. And we're doing that in partnership with some companies like Meredith Corporation. I don't know if you know who they are, but they're like all recipes.com if you go there, they collect a lot of that data. We have a partnership together where we're looking and they're on Snowflake and we're doing a joint data monetization offering out to customers. Snowflake and Solem have over 200 joint customers. Solem has one partner of the year now, five times, congratulations, why that? Thank you. What is the secret, what's the secret sauce? What does the future of the partnership look like given the flywheel that is Snowflake that is incredibly fast? Yeah, I think the secret sauce to me is we started early and we like the product, but we had a lot of core values in common. If you look, the customer obsession, do the right thing always, just get it done. Really very, very similar, and so that translates out in the field and that's why we team so well together. But at the end of the day, our secret sauce is we know the product. We invested really early in getting skilled up on Snowflake and we were the first partner to train the trainer and so we literally certified hundreds of folks on the product and we stay on the leading edge. And we're now working with their professional services arm to really take a joint offering to the market around helping organizations not just migrate, but really modernize, because that's when you truly take advantage of the cloud and some people were quick to migrate and they're not seeing those advantages and we want to make sure we're unlocking all the advantages of actually modernizing. What do you think last question is we are almost out of time here.  I think it's having someone with a bold vision at the top that's willing to say, hey, we want to go to the new frontier and then sticking to the guns and taking a holistic approach. Don't just put in technology, don't just change a process, but think about it holistically. We have a whole framework where we look at five different dimensions and we help our customers go through and maybe you don't want to get to the most mature stage across all five, but figure out where you want to get to and then start actually slogging it out and going step by step to get it done. And it's all about people, process and technology. Those three together are absolutely critical. It sure is. Excellent, Hilary, thank you for joining Dave and me on theCUBE talking about the Slalom partnership, what you're doing with Snowflake and on top of Snowflake, we appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you so much, really appreciate it. For our guest and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage from Snowflake Summit 22, live from Las Vegas.


In this presentation, we will record a journal entry related to the requisition of materials in a job cost system. We're going to have the information on the left. We're going to enter the journal entry into our general journal here, then post it to the general ledger, and the general ledger will be used to create the trial balance. We can see the trial balance is going to be in order in terms of assets, liabilities, equity, income, and then expense accounts. In the trial balance, we're going to have the debits represented with non-bracketed or positive numbers, credits with bracketed numbers or negative numbers for Excel, and therefore the total debits and credits are equal to zero at this time, no net income at this time, nothing in sales cost gets sold, or any of the income statement accounts. Our focus here, of course, is going to be on the tracking of inventory through the job cost system. So we're going to be working up here in the work and process and the raw...