Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's Bitesize Talk. The speaker today is Solyne Corion from the University of British Columbia in Canada, and she is going to talk about variant catalogue. This is a next-for-pipeline, but it's not part of NFCORE yet. Variant catalogue is used for population analysis from whole genome sequencing and specifically to identify variants and their frequencies. Since Solyne is living in Canada and due to the big time difference, we decided that it's best to record this talk. Therefore, if you have any questions, please ask them in the Slack Bitesize Channel. As usual, I would like to thank Solyne for her time and the Jan Zuckerberg Initiative for funding the Bitesize Talk series. But now, without further ado, I hand over to Solyne. Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's NFCORE Bitesize Talk. I am Solyne Coréar. I'm a research associate at BC Genome Sciences Centre in Vancouver, Canada. And today, I'm going to talk to you about the variant catalogue pipeline. First, I would like to acknowledge the lens on which I work, live, and play. Those are the traditional ancestral and unsettled territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Selweduth nations. First, what is a variant catalogue or a variant library? When we talk about genomics and DNA, a variant catalogue is the frequency of the variants within a population. For example, in this population of five individuals, they all get their whole genome sequenced and at a certain position in their DNA, some individuals carry an A and some individuals carry a C. From that individual information, we can deduce the frequency of each allele in the population. In this example, the A allele has a frequency of 006 and the C allele has a frequency of 004. This is the main information that is within a variant catalogue pipeline, the frequency of the variants within the population. When do we use a variant catalogue? There are several ways to use it, but a very good example is through the NF core rare disease pipeline. During the variant annotation and prioritization step of that pipeline, they use Nomad. Nomad is the biggest variant catalogue to date. The reason they use it is because a variant that is frequent in the population is unlikely to be responsible for a rare disease. When we are looking for the variant responsible for the rare disease in a kid, we can already filter out all the variants that are frequent in the population. As I mentioned, Nomad is the biggest variant catalogue to date. It helped tons of families to get a diagnosis in rare diseases, but when we look at the ancestries of the individuals within Nomad, we can see that most of the individuals are from European ancestry. Some populations are not even represented. They are not represented or underrepresented. This lack of representation from some population is leading to an inequity in genomic care because if the kids affected with a rare disease is from an ancestry that is not represented in the variant database, then it's harder to remove the variants that are frequent from this population and so harder to give a diagnosis to this kid. This is a known issue, so several variant catalogues were generated around the word. For example, Iran with the Iranian population or Kova with the Korean population. The project I was working on is the silent genomes project in Canada. It's a partnership with the indigenous populations of Canada to build the indigenous background variant library. A very similar project is taking place in New Zealand with genomics athera where they are working with the Maori population. When we were working on the indigenous background variant library, we needed a pipeline to process the data to get the variant frequencies. Some pipelines were existing but none of them were filling the three constraints that we had. The first one is that we wanted the pipeline to rely on open access tools that were previously benchmarked because we didn't want to develop anything new and use software or a new tool. We wanted it to be comprehensive and by that I mean it had to include single nucleotide variants but also mitochondrial variants, structural variants, short-term repeats and mobile element insertions. All those classes of variants are known to be potentially implicated in real disease so it's very important that all of them are present in a variant catalog. And finally, we wanted it to be able to work on local servers or on the cloud because different projects may have different constraints. We developed a variant catalog pipeline that you can see on the left here. This is just an overview and I'm going to describe each part in more details but the edges that it takes as input FASQ files from participants and it output VCF files, so variant calling files with information about the variants, their position, the allele, the frequency of this variant within the population, which is the main information we want, the frequency by sex as well as some annotation. So the pipeline is divided in four sub-workflow that can work independently or all of them can be run in parallel or at least in the same pipeline. So the first sub-workflow is the mapping sub-workflow. It takes as input short-trip and sequences for individuals as well as a reference genome. It has been developed so far for GRCH-47 and GRCH-48. The mapping tool is BWAM and it output one BWAM file per individual. The second sub-workflow is the mitochondrial variant sub-workflow. It is mostly based, it's very much based on the work from Larisha and all that was published in 2022 and it's therefore very similar to the pipeline that is used by Nomad for their mitochondrial variants. So it takes as input the BWAM files previously generated. The variant color for the mitochondrial variants is GATK-Mutec2 and the reason why there is sort of a parallel section here is because the mitochondrial DNA is circular. So to be able to map the mitochondrial reads against this reference genome, it is linearized with a fake breakpoint around zero here. So the maps that are supposed to map, the reads that are supposed to map over the fake breakpoint do not map correctly. So variants located around these regions are not called correctly. So I read that issue. They developed a shifted reference genome where the fake breakpoint is located on the other side which allowed to call the variants correctly in this region. Then the variants are lifted over. The information is merged into several VCS. I will detail the steps at the bottom later. The third sub-workflow is the single nucleotide variant sub-workflow. It is the most straightforward one. For a variant calling we decided to use deep variant and we are using GL nexus for the joint calling. For the fourth sub-workflow, which is the structural variant sub-workflow, it was mostly deployed by Mohammed Abdullah, a postdoc within the Wasserman lab. It was decided to use smooth and menta for structural variant colors. Jasmine is used to merge the variants and paragraph is used to genotype the structural variants within the individual data. Then the information is merged with VCF tools. For the short tenem repeats, we are using expansion hunter and for the mobile element insertions we are using melt. And so all the variant calling part is very similar to other pipelines such as NF Core Red Disease or NF Core Sarek. What is really specific about this data, this pipeline is the steps at the bottom here. It's the sample quality control, variant quality control, all of frequency calculation and also sex imputation. The reason for that is the quality control is performed differently if you have just one individual or trio versus if you have a population. So all of this is performed within AL, which is a Python-based analysis tool that is also used by Nomad and some other variant catalog pipelines. So as I said, it performed some quality control as well as the variant frequency calculation. And then the information, the variants are annotated using VEP. So that was just an overview of the pipeline. This is the actual complete pipeline. It's available on the Wasserman Lab GitHub and it's described in more detail in this preprint. It was tested on a hundred samples and it works. The details of the number of CPU hours as well as the number of samples as the variants that are filtered out by the quality control steps is available within the preprint. However, these versions still rely on locally installed software. And that is an issue for two reasons. First, it's really hard for all the projects to use. And second, it's impossible to test very easily like we are used to test other NFCore and extra pipeline with just one common line. Therefore, the future for the pipeline is to move it to an NFCore level pipeline. My goal is to move the mapping as well as a single nucleotide variant sub-workflow during next month's hackathon. So if anyone wants to team up with me for the code or for coding review, please reach out. After that, we will have to move the mitochondrial and the structural variant sub-workflow also to NFCore. This will allow first other people to try it more easily, but it will also force us to do better documentation. And that is very important to make sure that other groups can use the pipeline. If the documentation is good, then it's easier for other people to try and use this pipeline. To test the pipeline, I actually needed to create a new data set because the one that were available within the NFCore did not fit my needs. So I needed Peridential ReadFascue files that included part of an autism as well as parts of chromosome X and Y to impute sex for the individuals as well as read mapping to the mitochondrial chromosomes to test sub-workflow 2. I also needed read supporting the presence of structural variants to be able to test the sub-workflow 4 and several samples, including X and XY individuals to be able to test the variant frequency calculation part. So this will hopefully be available to others soon, in case you need them to test your tools or your pipeline. I will also include the reference genome for the same region and additional files, such as the short 10M repeat catalog, the mitochondrial reference file and the shifted one I mentioned before. In other future developments, I would like to include more to test at least more reference genomes, including the T2T for humans, but also non-humans reference genomes. I would like to include more software, for example, to give the opportunity for the user to decide which mapper they want to use, which variant colors they want to use. We also want to make sure that it fits with the NF-core rare disease pipeline. I know that they use slightly different colors for structural variants, and it would be interesting to make sure that there is a good fit. And it's also possible to include additional metrics, such as ancestry inference, mitochondrial lab pro-group assignment, or relatedness calculation. Those are metrics that are often associated to Brian catalog pipeline. It was out of the scope for the silent genomes project, but we understand the relevance for all the projects, and it would be perfectly, it would be great to also include them and have them as an option. So, I would like to acknowledge everyone within the Wasserman Lab, especially Wyatt Wasserman, the team leader, Mohammed Abdullah, who worked a lot on the structural variant pipeline, sub-workflow, and the rest of the pipeline, as well as Brittany Hewitson, the silent genomes team, and also all the NF-core community. It's been a very welcoming community, and I've learned a lot. Obviously, this is not live. If you have any questions, please reach out on the NF-core variant catalog channel to spark a discussion and start threads on different things. If you prefer to reach out directly to me, you can do it through Twitter or GitHub. Thank you for your attention, and have a great rest of your day.


Okay, absolutely incredible. Even before the 11 o'clock hour here in central time zone in the United States, we're already at our largest liquid margins attendance ever. So clearly this is a topic that folks are interested in and we're excited to have this conversation. Hello, and welcome to Liquid Margins. I'm Jeremy Dean, Vice President Education at Hypothesis. For those new to Hypothesis and Liquid Margins, Hypothesis is a social annotation tool used in classrooms across the world as well as other professional contexts and in everyday life on the internet. Liquid Margins is a show we host in which we gather practitioners of social annotation mostly educators to discuss how they use this technology in their teaching. And you can see we've got some upcoming topics ahead. So follow us to see what we're gonna be talking about in weeks to come. This is going to be a pedagogical discussion about teaching strategies using social annotation. So if you're looking for a basic demo of the Hypothesis tool suggests that you reach out to education at Hypothesis because we're gonna dive in pretty deep pretty quickly here and other ways to get to know the tool if you're new. We'll be taking questions if you have one in the Q&A portion of the Zoom interface here. So feel free to ask a question and we'll have a Q&A period at the end. Looks like there's already a little one in the Q&A section. So we already got some questions here in the first minute of the episode. And if you would like to turn on closed captioning you can also do that through the Zoom interface. So the rise of chat GPT how to work with and around it. Welcome. Today we're here to talk about another technology AI writing tools like chat GPT much the buzz these days. We'll be talking about the role of platforms like chat GPT in education and also how social annotation tools like Hypothesis can be used both with and against AI text generators like chat GPT. For the sake of definition that GPT in chat GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer. It's an example of generative artificial intelligence which are algorithms that can produce or generate new content. In the case of chat GPT what it produces is text. That is part of what might be called a chat or a conversation. What it's trained on, what it's scraping its words from is the entire body of the text entire body of text on the open internet. Here's how chat GPT defines itself when prompted. And what's remarkable to me and I think to many others speaking as an English teacher for many years is that chat GPT produces reasonably well-composed writing when prompted. It's often wrong and it's prose can be stilted but it's pretty good for some it's scary good. So the advent of chat GPT has prompted quite a lot of human writing and conversation and chatter over the past couple of months about what this technology means in education generally but also what it means in the English classroom specifically where a major part of what we do is teach students to write or if you will train them as humans to generate text. There's a lot of fear about students using chat GPT in place of their own writing and thinking about the use of AI for grading about the need for teachers and students to teach and learn to write at all if computers can be so fluent. It is indeed existential if you've been reading the articles published on this. There's also a lot of curiosity and self-reflection. If computers can write like this what is the job of the writing teacher? How have we been teaching? What have we been teaching? How should we be teaching in this new age? A long time fellow traveler of mine in writing and social annotation circles Dr. Mia Zamora at Keene University in New Jersey who somehow was already teaching a class on this topic expresses what I think a lot of us are thinking and feeling nicely in her course description for that class. What does it mean to write in the age of AI and GPT-3? The algorithms can write faster than we can. AI is now a mastered structure form and syntax. Still it doesn't have a clue about meaning. At this stage you can offer a prompt and the program will spit out something useful within seconds. For those will be grammatically correct. Words will be coherent. It knows basic paragraph structure and it connects ideas together effectively. So where does that leave us human writers? Today we're joined by four English educators and users of hypothesis social annotation to try to answer some of these questions. I'm gonna let them briefly introduce themselves before we dive into it. So let's go left to right here starting with Kat who isn't called out as an English educator in this current slide but I know for a fact has taught English in the classroom. And so we'll just go one by one here and we'd love to hear where you teach, what you teach and what kind of courses and Kat why don't you kick it off for us please? For sure, hi everyone. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks Jeremy for having me. So I'm Kat King. I teach freshman comp and critical thinking Las Pasitas College which is a community college in California and I'm a project coordinator at Diablo Valley College where I do a lot of training on instructional technology, supporting faculty in online education and incorporating technology into their classrooms, talk pedagogy, all that kind of stuff. So excited to be here talking with you all today.  Hey Jeremy. My name is Joel Glenn and I am an assistant professor at the College of Western Idaho we're a community college, semi world community college in the Treasure Valley of Idaho. And I teach first year writing, American literature, a few other courses but those are the main ones. And I also facilitate a little bit at the Rebus organization and their textbook, their OBR textbook program there. Yeah, so I'm excited about the open world and HPT is kind of an interesting kind of intersection with that. Thanks for being here Joel, Rachel go ahead. Sorry. Yes, hi, I'm Rachel Rigolino. I've been teaching at the State University of New York at New Pals and I did the math for 30 years. This is my 30th year. I work primarily with developmental writers but I also teach business writing. So this is really interesting to me and I'm a big ed tech nerd, serve on all kinds of committees about educational technology. So yep, and I'm excited to talk about this too. Excellent. Finally, Nick. Hi, thanks for having me here, Jeremy. I'm Nick Lollardo. I teach in the expository writing program at OU which we teach second semester freshman composition, small seminars and my background is maybe relevant insofar as I'm an American lit professor and originally and my particular interest is American poetry, especially experimental poetry. And so I look at, but generated writing from that perspective as well. Excellent, glad to have the creative writing perspective represented here. Well, great. Let's get into it. First, I just want to hear from you guys general and maybe we'll go in reverse order here. What's the mood like on campus these days with chat GPT, both with your campus colleagues but also in your networks. We'll start with you, Nick. I know you've done some presentations at the University of Oklahoma on this topic already. So how are folks thinking and feeling about it at University of Oklahoma? Actually just one, but I mean, I appreciate the shout out. I presented at an academic tech expo right before this semester started. So I guess I pitched that presentation in December when the buzz was already happening, gave the presentation mid-January. A bunch of people came out for the topic and they had questions from all different perspectives, all different kind of disciplinary takes, discipline related concerns. So there was a lot of buzz, there was a lot of concern and I think people also still have very different reactions as well. Rachel, I know you've written about this for inside out higher education, is that right? Yeah, and I was being a bit provocative in that article but to just piggyback on what Nick was saying, I think it depends on my campus who you're talking to. We had a great presentation two days ago in the faculty center, a person out of visual rhetoric that was really super interested in it, thought it was great, not great, just categorically but really energized about it. But then I came out of an English department meeting and it's like we're going back to oral exams and handwritten in class tests. So there's a real difference and diversity of opinion, certainly. That's fascinating. Joel, how about in College of Western Idaho? Yeah, there's also a similar like divergence here. I would say most faculty are fairly excited about it and I'm on the arts and humanities side of things and we actually, I'm so a part of the English and actually surprised by what Rachel reported at her institution, but like we're mostly excited about what it has to offer and like, I mean, I've seen it, some of the conversations have kind of viewed it as potentially an equity tool depending on how it's used. And I tried to try to play around with that a little bit. But it's also like there's, you notice kind of speaking of equity, faculty who traffic in certain networks have a different, like it does a different vibe with them, surrounding chat CPC versus others who are like, hey, we're just trying to do our job. And things have been working so far, let's not move too fast. And I think the pacing of how this rolls out, I noticed this creating a little bit of uncertainty and friction in some places. And that's kind of what I'm noticing. Yeah, so I would say that's probably one of my concerns is just the pacing of things and how to adjust. But yeah, otherwise overall like fairly positive. They are as promised, moving fast and breaking things. Kat, what's the vibe like at Diablo Valley and Contra Costa? Similar to what I'm hearing here, this resonates. We've got everything from faculty who are very curious and excited to engage with students about this. And then it sounds like as other places, we've got instructors like having this existential crisis. Like this means we can't do online education anymore because students will cheat their way through the whole thing. And kind of wanting to have that surveillance state moment like we saw in the beginning of the pandemic with the rise of like Praktorio and Honor Lock and watching students as they do everything. So there's a little bit of the whole spectrum. I think there is a lot of excitement though and I'm happy to see that because I understand that sort of existential crisis as this is profoundly disruptive to teaching. But in my mind, like it's students who are the ones who get to have the existential crisis here not faculty for the most part. We're in an industry where we have like tenure and strong unions and shared governance and like things are gonna be slow to change in some ways. But for students, I think once we get past the, oh wow, this is the shiny new tool that is maybe a hack to education. I think there are gonna be some profound moments of potentially despair as they realize how this type of technology potentially is gonna disrupt industry and like what they thought they wanted to do with their lives, the things they're studying. Suddenly you have a student who is like, your creative student going into artistic stuff is looking at bots that can generate some pretty impressive art. You have practical students who are going into computer science that are now realizing AI can generate code really quickly. I think there is gonna be a lot of anxiety as students start to realize what this means on a larger level. And I'm hopeful and see a lot of faculty stepping in to support students kind of navigating that conversation and what that means. That's great. Well, there's quite a range of topics to dive into here. I'm super interested to hear more on the equity tip, Joel and others. And also obviously we mentioned plagiarism here, which is definitely one of the words that's getting used a lot in these conversations. There's a lot to talk about. Let's use Kat's last topic there in terms of students. Have you guys talked to your students about this? Are they talking about it? What's the student perspective, if any at this point? I'll jump in if we're moving to a more informal mode here. Just to say that I introduced the bot and the implications yesterday in the context of introducing my initial essay assignment for a course. And as it happens, the assignment was a manifesto to write from a generation Z perspective. The classes theme is generational conflict and media generations essentially. So I showed them an essay, which I said had good and bad qualities. This was a true statement on my part. The essay was written by chat GPT. I temporarily withheld that information, got some student feedback first, then revealed the essay. The students were quite critical of the essay in what I thought were generally very perceptive ways. They commented on a kind of a generic template, lack of detail, a kind of one level of abstraction over the whole surface of the text, no particular feeling of authorial identity, and a refusal to take a strong stand, which was particularly ironic in the context of a manifesto assignment. Somebody said, this is a bland manifesto. Blandness is not a virtue of that genre as traditionally conceived. So when I then showed the students the bot version of the essay, rather than making the plagiarism approach, which is kind of both obvious, and in some ways insulting to them, I wanted to make the point that like, don't worry. The bot's not gonna replace you, you are human beings with a need to express yourselves, and that's gonna remain the case, at least for the foreseeable future. So that was how I was able to introduce it this semester. Go ahead, Joel. I think you're muted. Thanks. Something Nick brought up, but I thought that's usually smart of him is that Nick showed generated writing, had them critique it, and then revealed like, hey, this is generated by a chat to BT, so let's talk about does that make a difference? That was kind of, that's a smart way to go about it. Something I've noticed is, and I just ran across this morning when I was working with a student using chat to BT to leave feedback on an essay, where you're kind of playing around with how it might be useful, but also how we need to be critical thinkers when we respond to this feedback. And something you'll notice if you play around with like feedback or essays that involve citations, it's actually quite, can be really clunky with citation issues. And the student, like I saw you ask the student, like, hey, what's your impression of this feedback so far? And she said, hey, I thought it was really good because I pointed out my citation issue, you have rewrote the paragraph correcting for the citation. And I looked at it, it was actually wrong. The citation wasn't correct. And I was like, hey, this isn't a good example of where, of why, when you're in course like this and you wanna use a tool, you need to understand the limitations of chat to BT and other AI writing tools and how they can, you can be productive with them, but also how they will hallucinate, right? Just kind of tell you things to make you happy that aren't true and just kind of get things just flat out wrong, right? So that's, I think something that I'm trying to work on right now is figure out how to coach students and how to use the tool. And as we kind of work through using the tool in class in real time, talking about the feedback they're getting and like my student, I noticed they just trusted the chat, the chat to BT, because it was so convincing. Like, oh, like surely this must be right. And there was no, like, oh, it can be, like there was no thought that it could be wrong. It just felt really convincing, yeah. Yeah, so there's not more to say, but I'll stop there for now. Reminds me of the early tidal debates about using Wikipedia as a source. Joel, I just wanted one point of clarification before we hear from Rachel. Did you say that you had a student enter an essay they wrote in chat to BT to get feedback on the essay? What, how were you using feedback there? So this week and one of my courses, we've started using the tool and that in itself, like we can talk about the issues with trying to like, like walk students through just logging in is an issue. So like one of the questions is about concerns related to equity students who struggle or unprepared for certain kinds of digital literacy. It'll take them longer just to get set up properly on top of that chat to BT. Is the server is frequently busy when you try to work through this synchronously and that's a problem, like how do you plan for that? And so I've had to actually tell the students, like, hey, we're gonna work for, we're gonna try chat BT, chat GPT. We're gonna use it to practice getting feedback on small parts of our writing not entire essays just yet. And we're going and, but here's a backup link. If that doesn't work, we're gonna have to go to the opening a playground and play around with that, even though it's not as good or as intuitive as a chat GPT. And so yeah, that's kind of the process we work through and it's a frequent issue. And this is part of like, things are moving very quickly. There's one question is just about the pedagogy. Let's assume everything works as we expected to. Like there's a lot of pedagogical issues, but there's a whole range of technical issues of how to make this work in the classroom right now because it's in flux, like everything's in flux, right? Yeah, for sure. Rachel, what's been your feedback from students or have you introduced this to students? No, and I'll tell you why I briefly mentioned it and I've gotten some sense of who may be using it, not among my students per se, but one thing I wanted to say it, Joel said, things are going so quickly. The reason, and this has to do with equity too, the reason I'm not playing with it in the classroom as of yet is this whole kind of reaction to it, which is so negative to the point of people putting in their syllabi, if you are caught using this, you will just fail the course. I mean, I'm serious.  So I'm kind of, usually I'm pretty impulsive about ed tech, I just wanna use technology right away, but I'm kind of stepping back a little bit because I kind of wanna protect my students and myself, till we see what's going on. So next question is just about how you've adjusted if you've adjusted or done anything differently. It sounds like you're waiting and thinking, Rachel, but maybe you have adjusted in some way.   That you've written up around chat GPT. So the question is around how you've adjusted your course setup in various ways, if at all to address the fact that chat GPT is here for spring 23 courses. Sure, yeah, that's a great question. So I think, so just a little bit of background here, I was playing around with or introducing open AI, the playground version that was in beta, which still seems to be in beta in the summer. So it's been around for several months, that version of it in earlier iteration.  I think this is gonna be big. Let's start playing around with this. We used it very informally, kind of playfully, we'd kind of workshop some things. And then later on in the fall, chat GPT rolled out and it was clear that this was being picked up by students at a number of institutions. We started to get reports by faculty, okay, I'm noticed this was AI generated, I failed the student, and then there's like this lot of discussion about what the right recourse is when we think a student is cheating. And so coming into the spring semester, I just saw suggestions from a number of people about Sylvester language. And so I decided to design around, like design with chat GPT in mind for this semester, but like in a very basic way. And I wanted to provide some kind of structure and framework for students to use it productively and not like on the sly. And so this, I think kind of like, conversation with Rachel is concerned here, I felt like it was incumbent upon me if I'm gonna introduce this in my course, I need to provide a framework. And also I need to take on the responsibility of I'm introducing technology that, it seems like 80% of these students are 90% did not know about until I mentioned it in the syllabus. And so what do I need to include there that starts them down the right path and reduces the likelihood they'll use it to cheat. And so the syllabus language includes things like kind of a brief guide, like here are problems with chat GPT, here's what hallucination means. It's not hooked up to the internet in the way that you think it is. Just all the downsides, I tried to emphasize, but then try to clarify how we would use it in the course and then how it related to academic integrity. And I know that's a kind of non-growing conversation, but at least that framework provided me with a structure I could go back to. So it's not like, hey, by the way, week four, you all heard about chat, let's start playing with it, right? Like they know there's already some guidelines in place. Does that answer your start to answer your question, Jeremy? Yeah, and I'm curious for others, you guys have been all very good about raising your hands. How have you or how have you seen others adjust their courses and their activities to deal with chat GPT? I'm happy to jump in here. I am trying to lean in and start the conversation with students, and I think just how quickly this happened really reinforced for me like that I need to weave in digital literacy skills into my course to again get students thinking about, you know, information they're gonna encounter on the open web, and what does that mean when that information is potentially generated by AI and all of those things. I have been trying to lean in a little bit and have, because it kind of disrupted what I thought I was gonna do this semester, I started playing around with chat GPT to see how it could help me. So like for example, I went into chat GPT and said, write me a lesson plan about, that gets, you know, first year college students thinking about chat GPT and what it means for them. And it actually produced like a pretty decent lesson plan that started with like, okay, you start with a little direct instruction similar to what you did here, Jeremy, kind of defining some terms. And then here's this article that students can read and annotate together, and then they'll break out and have a discussion about it and discuss it in small groups. And then as the instructor, you're gonna pull everybody back together and talk about it. And I was like, oh, okay, this is interesting. And so I started playing around with like, what else can I do? And I'm teaching a novel I haven't taught before. It's our campus read at Las Pesitas. It's there there by Tommy Orn. So I was like, hey, give me a handful of essay prompts. About this novel. And I was skeptical at what it could do. Five seconds later, it gave me like seven essay prompts that were all like pretty decent. I was like, wow. So then I was like, okay, now, now write me a model essay that my students can see on these essay prompts. And bloop, it wrote me out model essays that I could share with students, which usually I'd have to wait a semester to get those model essays to share with students. So I've been trying to kind of lean in and see where can I, this is kind of disrupting my time and shifting my instruction, but how can I help have ChatGPT help me to the left, if that makes sense. Other thoughts about how they, how you all have adjusted your courses or your teaching style for ChatGPT? I think a lot of folks are still at the beginning of the process, but if I could just say something, I mean, potentially this is the kind of adjustment that will be most beneficial if it happened at some kind of campus-wide or at least programmatic level. And I say this as somebody who has been involved in WACC style work at university writing across the curriculum, writing enriched curriculum. And maybe a little pessimism is warranted at this moment, which is just to say that for a long time, writing instructors, writing professionals have sought to kind of spread the gospel of better writing pedagogy across campus. And for a long time, they've struggled to get a foothold for a long set of reasons that, we have no time to go into here. But I do think, this potentially presents a kind of opportunity if people in writing pedagogy are seen as being able to provide valuable answers or to help their response to a sudden crisis. So I'm certainly thinking about what I might, what more I might want to say about this spot and the problem of bot-generated text in general, at a university-wide level. But I would also say that to some extent, the answer is an old-fashioned answer which has already been offered and rejected, which is to say writing assignments need to be made meaningful to students in certain kind of ways and info dump exam question style writing assignments are not going to be helpful. That if you're teaching writing solely as a means of information transfer, you need to sort of rethink why you're using writing at all for that particular process. Did that come across as feisty? I'm not sure yet. I love that. I think that's great. And as you've got some hands up from your colleagues here, so we'll start with Rachel and then go to Joel. And I would add, yeah, I agree with those type of exam quite, I mean, come on. But to get to this existential crisis, so you're talking about writing is critical thinking and that was our discussion in the English department. I mean, people hold this very dear that when you're writing, you're engaging critically with a text, right? So the idea that students, the English majors will be using chat GPT. And see, I teach mostly non-majors, you know?  And I think that exactly if you're invested, a student who really is invested in an assignment, it's not going to just run to chat GPT and type in the prompt and, you know, yeah, I was a little bit surprised by that, but the connection between critical thinking and the process of writing, I mean, all of us English teachers, yeah. So. Joel, you had your hand up earlier. Yeah, it's so like the Rachel's comment about like the importance of critical thinking is resurfacing, right? That's always kind of lurking in the background. And I think what's interesting about the chat is that I would imagine what critical thinking means in each course. We're sorry, what critical thinking means is going to be determined by the context of the course in which the chat GPT is deployed. Like, it'll kind of like raise certain questions about like, okay, what critical thinking skills do we teach in this discipline and this course that would allow us to evaluate the usefulness of this generated text. So that's going to be highly relevant or that's becoming a highly, highly relevant question. But thinking about the assessment piece because that's part of the anxiety, I think I've seen less anxiety among faculty and this does privilege. Maybe this privilege is certain kinds of disciplines over others, but maybe not. But I've seen faculty who have been shifting towards process-based assessments and reflective writing becoming more comfortable with this. Whereas those who like had not yet implemented those practices or yeah, you know, or it just doesn't play as much of a role in the course. And that makes sense. Like it's going to be all over the place depending on the field that you teach with them. That's where I saw war anxiety. So this is anecdotal, but that's kind of like my observation there. For me, the importance of process-based assessments and then students reflecting on and analyzing in the form of cover letters or other kinds of writing where they're actively rethinking about how they're using certain, the choices they're making, how they're using certain tools to achieve a certain result, that's very comfortable. That can become very comfortable with deploying tools like this. So like I'm clearly like on the less, like I'm kind of, I'm playing more, I'm maybe I'm moving a little bit faster than others or I'm more comfortable with moving faster. There are risks to that. I'm breaking things that I need to be careful about. But I think where the kinds of assessments that we had already been moving towards in my English department and that I've seen elsewhere like allows us to kind of pick this up a little bit faster. That's a great opportunity, I think, to transition to social annotation and other strategies and tool tech practices that we might be able to use to alter the way we teach them. And you guys are all veteran social annotation users. So I would just be curious about the role you think social annotation plays. Joel, you mentioned I think a key piece of this which is the process oriented pedagogy versus product oriented, right? If there's a simple paper assignment that's been used semester after semester, it's pretty easy to, and that's kind of the culminating summative thing. It's relatively easy to plagiarize that. I mean, if that is a concern and it's also just not maybe the most interesting type of learning then maybe students would be less invested in it. But I just be interested in y'all's take on, if you see social annotation as a way to, I guess at first, rethink what we're assessing and what we're assigning. I don't know who wants to take that one up first. In ways that might be sort of an anecdotal to potential abuses of chat, GBT. Go ahead, Kat, sorry. Yeah, yeah, I didn't know. So this is interesting. Just again, a lot of this resonates. I'm a longtime user of social annotation and have been a big fan for a long time. I recently changed the way I waited my grades in my class where I used to do a lot of social annotation but these were kind of more formative, quick check-in assessments and then the bulk of students grade was still like that essay that the annotation helped prepare them for that and so it was kind of a smaller percentage of their grade and then the essay was this big thing. I'm now shifting the way I wait my grades and really thinking about like the work that happens in the margins, those annotations, those engagements with the text as being probably in many ways a more accurate reflection of how students are thinking critically and understanding content in class. I think that annotation is really important because as you get into these conversations about all our students using chat GBT to cheat, I think it's good to pause and ask students like or ask yourselves like why do students cheat and ask students like why did you cheat, right? When you come across that and for the most part what I've heard when I have had to have those uncomfortable conversations with students is like, oh my gosh, I was so busy, I've been working and I fell behind in the reading or I wasn't understanding the reading. There's like so many students who have undiagnosed learning disabilities like dyslexia or a student with ADHD who was having a hard time focusing in on the reading using social annotation to like help keep students on track because you can see are they engaging with the reading, are they keeping up with it, are they trying, is there an area where I can see, oh, the students trying but there's a misunderstanding here I can address in the moment and it's not like that student gets six weeks into the course and it's so long that then they're feeling like they need to go and use chat GBT. So really like leveraging the power of hypothesis to provide that like consistent ongoing feedback loop with students to kind of check in and help make sure they're supportive in what we're asking them to do. I love it. Rachel's got a hand up, go ahead, Rachel. Yeah, just said again, Kat, that was great. I mean, the critical reading piece is always the stuff that that's how I came into using hypothesis. Two years ago, we did an internal assessment and realized the students critical reading skills. I mean, we knew they weren't strong but you could see with the help of hypothesis which we piloted, it did improve. Now we had some guided annotations, guiding them through the reading, but with chat GBT and that kind of was my thesis in my article on inside higher ed, much of what we're gonna train students to be are very critical readers, like yesterday with Bard, a huge error, right? I mean, it's embarrassing, right? They launch it and then there's this error factual error. So information literacy and using social annotation to look very closely at scholarly journal articles at any kind of writing. I think it's just brilliant, it works so well. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention I sort of take issue with the use of Bard for their new search, that's our word in English literature, I feel like. Other thoughts about the role social annotation can play in changing the way we teach to address this chat GBT moment? Go ahead, Nick and then Joel. Okay, just quickly then I will say, I think for me the global reason, like the overall reason to use annotation and I don't think any of my particular practices are super distinctive, but from the beginning of a class, I try to suggest that annotation is gonna be the concrete bridge between reading and writing and that I'm trying to get them to read as writers, to read as potential writers, but to start actualizing that potential by writing in the margins of texts. And so I think waiting that kind of writing more heavily in how I evaluate students seems like an obvious direction to go in, but I also think that that kind of writing has the effect of, there's no reason. If one annotates on texts, that's also just a concrete way of getting students to do the reason, to do the reading if I wanna just say the pragmatic thing that I know some people will need to hear. Requiring annotations with a rubric is obviously a really effective way of getting students to pay close attention to texts. And in evaluations, I have consistently had students say that engaging with the details of paragraphs was not something that they were accustomed to having to do in college and that they were kind of shocked in an ultimately salutary way at having to do that. Joe, go ahead. Yeah, totally agree, Nick. So I dropped in a couple of links into the chat there. I think one, so on the student-facing side, one thing that I'm trying to think about right now is the role of hypothesis and helping students, or helping coach students and prompt and better prompts and how to prompt, right? That seems to be like a key practice surrounding these AI generators is understanding what is involved with the prompts and how to make them as effective as possible. And I think a hypothesis and other social annotation tools could be really, really effective here. I'm imagining situations where the instructor might develop a series of conversations with chat GPT and then how students, let's say it's an asynchronous course, how students who don't have the luxury of doing that real-time kind of coaching, how students respond with social annotation on the conversation, noticing what's working, what's not, exercises, critical thinking skills within the context of the discipline about why certain generated texts might be useful and other texts might not be. So two things that are related here. One is, I sent two links in the chat. So you might be able to pull up that first link, but or you can just share it either way, Jeremy, but that's a link to the open AI guide to educators or it's called educator considerations for chat GPT. And this, if you log in, I sent the link that has the Viya.hypothesis routing. So it kind of populates that hypothesis pain. Some of the people attending may not be familiar with that. So I don't know if it's gonna automatically populate or not, but if you do sign up for hypothesis and you log in, you'll see comments in the margins. And this is an example of how educators are using hypothesis to communicate with other educators about concerns related to chat GPT on the open AI website. And Anna Mills here is the one that is commenting quite a bit. She's really active in this area and it's really on top of things. And I asked Anna a question in response to one of the things. Yeah, there you go Jeremy, thanks. So this is, you can see on the right hand side how Anna Mills is kind of annotating open AI's document educator considerations for chat GPT. And this is like their vision of how educators might should use their tool, right? And so Anna, I think she was invited actually to leave feedback on this document before it was actually published to the public.  And also some areas where she's glad to see the progress they're making. Someone asked in the Q&A about citations, how to site chat GPT, this actually addresses that. In part, you'll see a code, you'll see a code for bib sex that's kind of mentioned. And I'll just say one more thing here. So we have this really cool use of socially annotations for educators to be connecting and discussing what's going on surrounding this technology. If you want to socially annotate chat GPT conversations, one tool that might work. And I haven't done this yet. So I can't promise that I will, but that's share GPT. And that is a Chrome extension. And what happens is that when you have a GPT conversation, you click on the Chrome extension and I'll generate an HTML link to that conversation, which you could then feed into hypothesis. So just a little thing there, you might use that as like a citation method as well until OpenAI actually rolls out their stable HTML links to these conversations. I think the guide says they're in the process of doing that, but it's not quite there. Just want to call out a couple of things here. The way I've been thinking about this is, maybe this isn't how I've been thinking about it, but let me rephrase this. How might a traditional English educator not particularly interested in chat GPT using it as part of their course, use certain teaching strategies or assignments or things like social annotation to rethink how they teach traditional English composition or English literature. And I think we heard from Nick and Rachel and Cat about the importance of critical reading and how social annotation emphasizes that. Cat also made a really good point about when social annotation is part of the process, the teacher is more present and the student is getting more support. So maybe that leads to less of a situation where somebody would get up worried and enter a prompt into chat GPT and then submit the output as their own. And Joel kind of pushed us forward to thinking about critical engagement with and social annotation with chat GPT. So just to sort of, for everybody's sake, there is the use of a hypothesis to annotate the site for open AI. And it's great and I'm glad you called that out. I'll drop a link in or I dropped a link in some folks are using chat GPT EDU as a tag with hypothesis to annotate not just open AI, but I annotated your article, Rachel, from Inside Higher Ed with that hypothesis and with that tag and I've annotated Anna Mills's work as well. So I definitely recommend engaging with the debate yourself as a scholar and a teacher. And perhaps if you're teaching about social annotation, having students annotate with hypothesis on the web, there's a great set of articles that Anna's put together that I'll share in a second. And then the other piece that Joel mentioned is share GPT and I have used this, which creates a stable URL for a session with the chat bot and thus allows in terms of being critical consumers of technology and helping our students become critical consumers of technology, they could have a session on a topic with chat GPT and then annotate it in terms of where its mistakes are, where its biases are, where it's insights are, where it fails to properly cite its source, where it hallucinates as Joel said. So share GPT is a great way to use hypothesis to annotate a session with chat GPT. So we've got about 10 minutes left, but I'm interested just in hearing more from y'all about social annotation kind of to combat traditional teaching strategies that might be problematic for chat GPT, but also innovative ways to use social annotation with chat GPT. We've already got a taste of that, but Rachel, I'll see you have your hand up, so go for it. Just really quickly, I think I need to take a page out of Joel's book, he seems more relaxed about all of it. It was kind of brainstorming things I could do. Right, I plugged in a scholarly journal, like part of a random scholarly journal article and I said, put this in a silent form. And it did it.  Where is this Hemingway-esque? So I think there's, you know, with some imagination and I just, as I say, I'm just fearful. I guess as I get older, I'm a little bit like, oh, you know, 20 years ago, I would have been gunk-ho and pulsive, let me go with this, but I think there's a lot of great stuff that we could be doing with pairing these up. Anyone else? Anyone else gonna follow Joel into the world of diving in with the chat GPT and the other AI tools and being critical and thoughtful as we do? Go ahead, Nick. No, I think I am, you know, in the near future, picking up on Rachel's point, I think the extent to which chat GPT can potentially be used, you know, to draw students' attention to the texture of text, right? That it's not just an information bearing medium. There's more going on here. Then annotation-based assignments are a really good way of getting anyone, you know, to focus their attention on that aspect of textuality. And asking students to generate an essay themselves and, you know, then to mark it up using hypothesis, you know, with a particular rubric, for example, to serve as the critic, that seems like an assignment that would both integrate the technology into an already existing pedagogy, but not necessarily take the full dive into, you know, against originality, and we must all write conceptually in the future. Though I myself might be temperamentally willing to take that dive at some point, I think a lot of these questions, and maybe what I'm saying now connects up to the earlier conversation as well, I do think in a lot of our answers, we need to remember that the solution, sometimes when we're talking about solutions, we end up restating. And so the instructor of record needs to spend more time and do more work here. And, you know, the instructor of record, if they're teaching writing, their labor conditions are often not optimal. And so the tension here, one of the things about web annotation that I like so much is it's a persuasive way to use technology to still teach in what I would call kind of a traditional way, potentially. Rachel, I may be misremembering, but was it your article on Inside Hero that talks about editing? Yeah, so what happened to me very briefly, I was fired from my side gig, which was writing for content-driven advertising for a car company, where I wrote about things like where do you, how do you replace a battery in a 2012 Cooper Mini or something? So I was doing this writing and I was giving 20 minutes to do it for each article. And of course I was replaced by a chatbot, right?  So that's where I got into this thought of being thinking about that about, well, my business students, they're gonna have to know how to do this. I mean, this is kind of some of the writing they're gonna be doing will be then to edit. And then my editor is then having to look at, is this stuff correct? So I think the shift, that was kind of my argument that the shift for many of our students, not our English lit majors maybe, but for many of our students will be this role of editing what chat GPT type of AI produces in the workforce. So yeah. I thought that was a really, really interesting point. Well, we have just a few minutes left. I just want to give everybody a final word to maybe tell us where do we go from here? What are your thoughts? Again, I think there's a lot of anxiety out there, although you guys all seem pretty relaxed. But I've sensed a lot of anxiety. There's a question about, we haven't really gotten to the Q&A effectively, I think, but there's a question about where the anxiety comes from. And I guess my question for you to kind of riff off of that is where do we take the anxiety from here or on chat GPT? I can jump in and just say, I think like as much as we can channel that anxiety into curiosity, I think the better will be. Like I'm sitting here writing down notes. I think there's brilliant ideas that I want to go now try. I'm excited, yeah. Yeah, and I can see why this feels like this crisis moment. Because what does it mean for our role as teachers or what does the future of education look like?  Like if our students really wanted to learn any of the content we teach them, there's a million YouTube videos and the library, they could go and like learn all that stuff on their own if they were super motivated. I think it kind of reinforces our role as educators as helping guide students through content, cheerlead them on, encourage them and through community building tools like social annotation and hypothesis, we can still build that community with our students and help them kind of understand this new world and I'm excited for going forward even as strange as it is. I think there's a lot to be excited about. Thanks, Kat. I'll just finish up here going, Joel, Rachel and Nicola have the last word. Thanks, Jeremy. Yeah, I'm looking at the chat here and notice like some people are asking or expressing concern about like, hey, you know, I'm at a more foundational level. I just wanted to know how to get started with chat, CPT, this, you know, some of this conversation might be higher level or at a later downstream of kind of where I am. And if others, you know, like who are attending and have suggestions for what personally allowed help them get started, like, you know, feel free to drop that into the chat. I will say like, you know, I feel free to reach out to me or anyone else on this panel for, you know, more help. I'm open to workshopping with anyone if you want to talk about this. And I think I just want to put this, I want this to be my final comment, which is what I appreciate about this disruption because it's kind of been that to a certain extent. What I appreciate is how many conversations it's provoked and how many people I've talked to recently about what they're doing in their classroom and webinars like this, hypothesis conversations, Twitter conversations, Facebook conversations, like it's generating a lot of important conversations about our vision for the next, you know, five, 10, 15 years. And, you know, at the very least, that's a really, really good thing, I think. And just quickly, I would say about what Kat said about who we are as instructors, right? And social annotation to me helps more than even a discussion board. And I used to love discussion board, but they're kind of stilted. But that relationship that you build with students, I think, you know, it's part of this anxiety about the students cheating and this and that. But building relationship with students, I think it's just so important and it even speaks to some of this anxiety about the unethical use of technology. But it's always going to be at the core of teaching. I mean, at least the kind of teaching it seems that all of us are doing. So I'm just throwing that out there. Okay. Yeah, well, let me pick up on a couple of these. Wait a second. Did I interrupt? Are we last? Am I last? A couple of points that my fellow panelists here have made disruption is absolutely going to happen. And social annotation, you know, preserves traditional reading practices or remediates traditional reading practices, you know, in the context of digital technology, which I think makes it such a versatile resource. But I was doing my own reading for last week's class and remembered a story that is told, was told about the First World War, famously, told by Groot Groot Stein in this case, where she writes that the generals had all planned to fight a 19th century war using 20th century technology. And then we know what happened. A 20th century war is what happened. And to some extent, we're in the academy, technology is going to be ahead of us. We can respond, but we cannot anticipate so that our responsiveness ultimately is just gonna be crucial. Well, that's wonderful. I really appreciate this conversation, y'all. And thank you very much for joining us today. As Joel pointed out, the conversation continue online on Twitter. People are also using Hypothesis to annotate. And if you're here and your school is not already using Hypothesis, we'd love to have your school join us. We have a summer booster promotion right now. It's a heavily discounted pricing for unlimited summer usage, includes implementation, training and certification through our new Hypothesis Academy program. I don't know if you guys are certified Hypothesis educators. Certainly you're advanced Hypothesis educators in my mind, but now we have a certification. The summer is a great time to get started with Hypothesis and increase engagement and try it ahead of an adoption in the fall. So, and there's also if you sign up for multi-year deal we'll apply the cost of a summer booster promotion to a multi-year deal prescription at your school. So reach out to education at Hypothesis if you're interested, please. And again, I just wanna really thank y'all for all your work before we met today and had a conversation. Now you all are interacting with colleagues and with the wider network of conversations around this issue. And I think it's really important to have leadership, thoughtful leadership like that and commend you for that. And also thank you for taking time to join us today. To the audience, thanks for coming. Please join us on a future liquid margins. And in the meantime, go forth and annotate. Thanks everybody.


Hello and welcome everybody at this press conference today at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It's Thursday and today we will be talking with some distinguished speakers that have joined me here today about the topic of healthy aging. All the speakers are, as a matter of fact, from the European Union, so we'll talk also in a little bit more granularity about where we are in Europe, and we'll be hearing from each of the speakers. We have three speakers who are researchers at the European Research Council. Next to me is Dr. Konstantinos Demetriades. Welcome. Then next to him is named Linda Partridge. Welcome to you too. And then at the far end is Professor Virpi Luma. Welcome to you too. And in the middle we have their, I suppose their boss in a way, Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, the President of the European Research Council. Welcome to you too. And then last but not least, there is Carlos Moedas, the European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation. Welcome. And why don't I start immediately with you, Commissioner Moedas? We're talking here about healthy aging in the context of Europe, and of course you are responsible for the domain of science and research into that topic. Could you tell us a little bit more about why this is important for the European Commission and perhaps also why it's important for the citizens of Europe? So thank you very much, and welcome to all of you. It's really a pleasure to be here. I mean, and I wanted to start by a couple of words to thank the scientists. I think the reason of the value of the European Union is about having this power of the network of scientists all over Europe. And the main institution that we have that is able to leverage this power to a point that I've never seen in my life is the European Research Council. And the European Research Council has become really the brand of fundamental science of Europe. In the last 10 years, we were able to have grantees that became Nobel Prizes, six of them. We had four Fields Medal. We had five Wolf Prizes. And so it was a project that became 10 years ago something that a lot of people in Europe didn't believe. They didn't believe and it was difficult to get off the ground and we were able to do it. So first of all, thank you to the scientists. Thank you for their word and I have all the time about Europe and for their great work. But let me tell you why I think it's important to be here today as a politician. If I look ahead and I think what are the big challenges? What are the big challenges that we have ahead of us? And I'll say three. One, as a politician, I would look at climate change. The second will be about the whole digital world that we're living. But the third one is about aging. And it's about aging because this will be the big challenge for politicians. You know, once Chancellor Merkel said that in Europe we are 7% of the world. We are 25% of the GDP of the world. But our social welfare state is 50% of the whole cost of what people expense in terms of welfare. And so we have to think for the future how can we, without reducing the services, without reducing the welfare, because that's on the DNA of Europe, what can we do to have better health? And how can we have a better output? And I think the better output that we can have is exactly about aging. How can we have a better life? How can we prevent disease? And that's what these scientists do. So their work, even if it's in very fundamental ways and about curiosity-driven research, is at the end of the day about politics. And you see that in different countries in Europe, you see that people today, they are upset. They are upset because they say, look, we pay taxes, but then we don't get the services we deserve. But if we had a system that was more focused on the outputs than the inputs, then with the same amount of money we could have better health. And so I think that for me this is extremely important. And I always start when I talk to young people, I always say to young people, you know what's the life expectancy, what was the life expectancy 100 years ago? And people are always puzzled because they normally get, oh, no, it was probably 60 or 50, no, no, no, it was 30 years old. And then we did these amazing work of today looking at the young generation, my children, and I say, look, you're the probability that you go over 100 is amazing. But I want you to have a good life. And that's what these research is about. So as a politician, I just wanted to have these two words, one about the link of the work of these scientists from the very fundamental research to the day-to-day of people. I wanted to thank the president of the ERC, which has been the engine of these institutions. And I wanted to give you the incentive and to tell you that in our proposal for the next program of Science of Europe, we're talking about increasing the budget of the ERC. That today was around 13 billion for seven years to almost 18 billion euros. So that's the importance we really give to fundamental science. So thank you for inviting me. I feel very humble around these tables. So now I will just listen. And if there's any political question, please ask me. Yes, absolutely. And I've no doubt that we have some questions at the end. So in about 10 minutes, we'll come back to you and the other speakers. But first, you mentioned what can we do to have a better health, because that's a challenge for people now that we are getting older. But I want to take a step back and ask, perhaps, Dame Partridge or Dame Linda, what is actually the situation in Europe right now? How old are people getting? And how healthy are people? Could you tell us a little bit about that before we turn to your research? Indeed. And I also am delighted to be here. Very glad to be able to talk about aging in this wonderful context. So we are indeed all living longer. It's actually been going on for about 200 years in developed countries. And the problem is that healthy lifespan is not keeping up with the overall increase. So by the age of 80, most Europeans have at least eight different medical conditions. So a big burden of multi-morbidity. And the indications are from the current demographics that the increase in lifespan will continue at least until 2030. So we're going to see a growing population of elderly in many countries against a background of falling birth rates. So the ratio of older young is also changing. So the real challenge for the kind of research that we're doing that is funded by the ERC is to try to tackle this period of ill health at the end of life, to try to keep people healthier for longer before the end of life. And happily, aging is proving to be a very malleable process. So work with animals has shown that a lot of different interventions, genetic, environmental, particularly diet, but also drugs can increase lifespan as it happens. But what we're really interested in is health. And it can keep them healthier for longer. So a quite simple intervention, eating less, dietary restriction, can protect laboratory animals, including resus monkeys, against multiple different aging-related diseases. So dementia, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and others. So the thought in the field is perhaps instead of waiting for these aging-related diseases to happen and then treating them, we could instead develop a preventative medicine based on what we now know about the biology of aging and the interventions that can affect it. And my own work here is primarily based on the use of drugs because we've discovered so much about the fundamental mechanisms of aging now that we know how to target some of them, sometimes with already approved drugs actually for aging-related diseases. So there's quite a prospect rather than for new drug development for drug repurposing in this area. So I'm particularly working with three different drugs in a variety of different animal models. And what we're finding is we can keep the animals healthy for longer. They don't get the age-related conditions that their particular species gets. And I think the prospect for the future is definitely prevention, probably based on the use of a cocktail of different drugs that target these different features of the aging process. I think that's the really exciting prospect that we're potentially looking forward to. And I think it could do a lot to tackle this growing burden of multi-morbidity at the end of life. Excellent. We look forward to that. Of course, just one question. I know that there's now increasingly talk in popular press about people living a hundred years and a hundred year life. Are we actually close to that for babies that are born today or how old do they get in Europe? Well, as you know, protection is very difficult, especially of the future. But if current demographic trends hold up, then yes, we're looking at a very significant proportion, perhaps even 20% of the babies born today living to a hundred. But of course, there are unhappily contrary trends. The obesity, the diabetes in the young could send that one back. But potentially, yes. So we have to be careful what we wish for. Thank you, Dame Linda. And then I want to turn to your colleague, Dr. Konstantinas Demetriades. If you do similar research into what is possible actually with medicine, with biology, could you tell us a little bit more from your perspective? Is it indeed a good idea to use the medicine that we have right now, or should we rather take a step back and do some more basic research? Thank you very much. I will try to explain our research in a way that is as simple as possible. This is usually tricky because we're working on very fundamental processes, and sometimes we fall into the technicalities. So you just heard about different dietary regimes that we have already and different drugs that can mimic these processes. However, unfortunately, it's not as simple as that. So although we know a lot, we're not there yet, and we cannot simply get a sip of this drug every morning and stay healthy and live forever. And the reason behind that is that we don't quite understand the very fundamental processes that are affected when we touch upon these cellular mechanisms. So our ERC-funded work aims to understand how precisely these molecular mechanisms work in healthy cells, and what goes wrong in aging and age-related diseases. And I believe that this way we will be able to identify more precise and more targeted ways in order to modulate these processes in the right organs and at the right time and to the right extent. So in particular, we're looking at nutrient sensing. So this aims to understand how ourselves sense the availability of nutrients in their environment in order to modulate or adapt their processes accordingly. And we know that this is very, very important because these exact mechanisms are the ones that are very commonly dysregulated in many different diseases. And we know that these very same mechanisms go bad as we age. I understand. And so you're hoping to find out in the coming years more about those mechanisms, I suppose, and to find more effective ways of, let's say, preventing or treating aging diseases that go with aging. Yeah, that's correct. But our purpose is to understand better what we do before we actually give it a try because this way we might be able to improve the efficiency of the overall process of clinical trials and the application of these findings all the way to patients or to the senior people. And as, sorry, not professor, but at least Commissioner Moeda said with a welfare state that's costing us 50 percent of our budget, it would be a good idea to look into the effectiveness of how to achieve it, especially with so many people aging right now. I want to turn now to the last speaker of the researchers at least, Professor Wispy Luma. Could you tell us a little bit more about your research into this matter? Yes, thank you. So studying human aging is a little bit difficult in the sense that the study subject lives as long as the researcher. So we are facing a little bit of difficulties there. But nevertheless, in addition to this fantastic lab research on model organisms, we also need to study longitudinally the aging processes in humans as they grow older. So I've taken a little bit different approach in my research and I've looked back into the history to try to understand how we age today. So ERC re-transformed my research when they gave me a grant to computerise thousands and thousands of family records from my country in Finland so that I can build 15 generations of pedigree following people from birth to death. And using these records, we can look at many factors that influence differences in lifespan between people like genetic factors, environmental factors, socioeconomic differences and so on. One particular question that I've become very interested is why do we actually live as long as we do? So what sort of lifespan did we evolve to have?  No other species practically has this. So it's been a dilemma. And one idea I had was that perhaps because our babies are so much effort and need a lot of care from the mothers, we basically evolved to become grandmothers who can't have their own babies anymore but still are really much needed for the success of their families to raise these grandchildren. So that's what I've been studying. And we've found, my team has found really big benefits of the grandmothers for the success of the families, for the survival of the grandchildren and so on. So that was a really key finding but of course everything is changing in the modern world and people live now further and further away from their grandparents which we can also study with these fantastic data we've collected. So there's a problem that the elderly today actually spend most of their time with other elderly rather than with their families like used to be the case. And I think we should pay more attention to this because birth rates are declining, people are citing problems with childcare and social networks as one of the key reasons for this. And if we could improve the healthy lifespan and the healthy years at the end of the life, perhaps then actually if these elderly were more involved in their families like always being the case or something else which stimulates them, there might be actually multiple benefits for not just one generation but several generations in terms of their health, in terms of actually economic factors and social factors. It's absolutely fascinating and I want to ask you on behalf of the fellow men in the room though, if grandmothers have that social function of growing so old, what about the grandfathers?  So I studied mainly historical families and I hate to say but in the historical families grandfathers didn't really have much of a benefit for the grandchildren in the same way as the grandmothers did. But that's not to say that the grandfathers today would be useless because of course our society has completely changed so both grandparents today are much more involved, hands on in these issues. Let's see what happens. And I didn't do this on purpose but of course we have a last speaker, President Jean-Pierre Bourguignon of the European Research Council. You have heard Commissioner Moueda speak about his ambitions to raise the budget of the European Research Council. I heard I noted down from 13 to 18 billion, quite a big increase. Could you tell us a little bit for what benefit this money is used and what you have in mind for the European Research Council going forward? Thank you very much for that. First of all, I'm a grandfather so I'm very pleased to acknowledge this at this moment. Of course it's very important what we heard from Commissioner Moueda but I think it's very directly connected to what we heard from the scientists themselves, namely that while developing the European Research Council I think the European Union and European Commission had the duty to do that, developed a program which really has been stimulating and making Europe more, stimulating the researchers and making Europe more attractive. So you heard that this huge variety of research which has been developed at our level were covering all fields of science and you heard some samples here focused on one topic. Of course this topic is extremely relevant as a fantastic societal impact and also shows that the concerns of people is really addressed and maybe one element I would like to make here is the fact that very often the scientists are more or less accused which is maybe too much but people think they are living in their ivory tower and I think it's something we see at the ERC level completely differently because actually the researchers are submitting their most ambitious ideas to us and we select, of course we are selective but we select some of the very best and definitely what we see is a fantastic impact on the level of research at the European level and this is of course something which is very important at this stage where other continents are investing massively into research. I'm thinking about Asia in particular but I think Europe it's not as, for the reasons that Commissioner Moritz has put forward namely has a very special situation of, I mean small number of people already quite still very advanced countries but also in terms of social benefits so we need to rebalance this. Maybe my key point I would like to make also concerning the European Research Council is its breadth so at the moment we are over, typically at 9,000 grants we have been given which have been employing more than 60,000 people in of course many different institutions we are now at 800 institutions which benefited and of course for us the future is we want it's critical that we can keep the quality and that quality, scientific quality should be the only criteria on which the projects are selected because we know that as soon as we get away from this then the whole thing is going to fall apart and this really made a difference for the success of the European Research Council and we are very pleased to see when we look at really the studies we have been doing or even some other people have been doing really now is ranked as one of the most successful funding mechanism in the whole world and this is not our figures it's the figures of really independent evaluators and just to give a close on this note in our case with our exposit evaluation of the projects we see that typically about between 70 and 80 percent of the project every year because we do that on a yearly basis we have either a breakthrough or a major scientific event which for us is very comforting shows that our choices have been definitely very reasonable and really we know we have provided resources that researchers have used remarkably well. Thank you so much Mr. Bourguignon and I want to turn to the floor for questions from the audience. Stephen Fittler from the Wall Street Journal if you can stand up with the microphone and ask the question. A couple of different questions I wonder if the researchers could if you have extended healthy life do you kind of necessarily thereafter have a period of unhealthy life so are you just pushing back these say eight years of unhealthy life to the future so you'd start to what do you conk out much more quickly after your healthy life and the prospect there after the healthy life and the second one is the question about Brexit I'm afraid and what would be the relation of the European Research Council what can you say about the relation of the European Research Council to the UK after Brexit. So I think I can tackle your first question I think there are two quite encouraging lines of evidence that if you try to compress the unhealthy period you actually compress it so you don't just draw everything out so the first is that people who die at really advanced ages so well into their 90s or over 100 or even over 110 often have relatively little ill health at the end of their lives so it's possible to combine a long life with a short period of ill health at the end of it they're there we can see that happen and some of these interventions that I mentioned particularly dietary restriction extends lifespan and often makes it rather difficult to say what the animal died of so with your control animals it's usually pretty obvious it was a tumor or something else that you can see pathologically with the animals that are dietary restricted in a sense they just died it's really hard to say what problem was so again there really seems to be a compression of that morbid period at the end of life so I think it is achievable and of course that's what we should aim for rather than simply stretching everything out Thank you and then now for the elephant in the room we actually prepared this press conference and we thought that we were going to have a different elephant in the room because actually one of the researchers has done research on elephants but we can talk about that later so the elephant in the room breaks it I'm very happy to answer that question but I was thinking about the dietary restrictions that I have to have so I'll ask that question to Lida afterwards you know I'm it is such a sad situation for research and science and I say these from the bottom of my heart because in these five years I saw and I visited all these researchers in the UK, in other parts of Europe and my conclusion is that we really need each others so the UK needs Europe and the European Union and the European Union needs the UK and so as a commissioner for research and science what I could do and I did was to try to open my arms for the future in terms of our proposal for the next programme and so if there is an agreement between the European Union and the UK then it will be very easy for the UK to look into the framework programme the next programme of science and it is there in my proposal it's just very easy the UK can join can join and we have a very simple system where nobody in terms of amount of money the UK will pay their part we will pay our part so imagine that you have ten scientists five are from the UK and five are from other countries then the UK will pay their part and we will pay our part and so it's a very fair system and so I think that we have proposed a really very very good deal that makes possible that the point will not be about the money I think that the researchers in the UK really want to participate and we can ask that question to Linda not because of the money it's because of the network because of the ability that you have to do but everything I did and I've put these really with very careful in my proposal it does not depend on me it doesn't depend on us it depends on an umbrella deal on the deal above and so if that deal exists and the same doors are open to countries like Canada and countries like New Zealand that we've been talking in Australia so we want this program to be really open to the world the really amazing thing that I've seen in this program is to see scientists that come from the United States and work with us or other parts of the world from China, from Japan and the president of the ERC basically I mean I think that nobody has travelled has he has travelled to the expense of his health I imagine of doing these just telling really you are part of it that Europe is an open system and the European system of science has to be open to the world so Stephen I'm sorry that I cannot answer the first part of the question which is the political question between the UK and the EU and I think that we have proved that we really want the UK as part of the game so we've done everything in our proposal for Horizon Europe for the UK to be Thank you Commissioner and then I think we have time for one more question before we close the press conference and if there's none I will ask Yeah go ahead When Virpi was describing her work I was thinking about the relationship of her work with policy making and one of the interesting experiences that came to me was this experience in Japan where they have put a senior living facility next to a kindergarten and so you can see that the work of a scientist can then be at the end you can think about solutions so if the grandparents are not anymore with the families probably we can find other solutions and the results of that work are very interesting for the people that know it will be interesting to see and to link so I'm always trying to do these links because I think there's a lot of link even with a very fundamental I mean what you're doing is fundamental research but we can find that for the future of Europe is important Very well and with that I think we've indeed come to the end of our press conference I want to thank all the speakers and I want to thank people both here and soon with another update Thank you so much