nstitute of Information Technology and he is an information security practitioner Dr. Ali shall walk us through the history of attempts to adopt electronic voting in Pakistan he sounds a caution about technology fetishism and mentions that electronic voting designs should only be adopted after due public consultation and after understanding the objectives that we are trying to address that's the same kind of concern that Shreem Shankar also I liked it right in the beginning so so without further delay a request for this presentation by Dr. Paha Ali I think that is important I think the recording is being pulled up and it will get started okay right good afternoon everyone my name is Taha Ali title of my talk is Elections Technology and the State Perspective from Pakistan sorry I can't be here in person for this talk but I hope you find this interesting and worth your time a bit of introduction about myself so I am from Pakistan I am an assistant professor at NUSD in Islamabad National University of Sciences and Technology Department of Electrical Engineering my PhD is in Network Security from the University of New South Wales in Australia and then I followed this up with a postdoc in 2014 in specifically looking at next generation electronic voting systems I also got a background in cryptocurrencies and the blockchain and since 2016 so I have been in Pakistan since 2016 and I have been involved in the national activity on electronic voting so there has been frantic activity over the last 5-6 years and we stand at a pivotal point in time and so I have written I have authored research papers on this topic I have written in fact one of the highlights of my career was a contribution to a book which my research group was instrumental in putting together my new class of research group so this is real world electronic voting so this brings together all the latest research on the new systems that are being built secure and verifiable systems which use cryptography I have written newspaper articles I have been part of several government committees I have authored reports which have influenced the discourse so my goal here in this talk is to bring you up to speed on what is happening in Pakistan like I said there has been frantic activity over the last 6 years and we are now at a historic point actually I will get into that in a bit and I hope to give you a personal perspective as in more of an insider account so you can see things from the inside many of these things you probably already know but some of them will still be shocking for you or illuminating and there are lessons to be learned here for developing countries because from what I have read and what I have seen election technology experiences in developing countries tend to have a lot of things in common and you know what they say that those who do not read history often end up repeating it we have actually repeated history we have repeated the mistakes made by other countries and we might end up doing that again so it is good to talk about these things so that people know and people find out and they can think more clearly so a bit of humor history repeats itself and every time it does the price goes up and this actually happens too I can testify to this from personal experience so anyway so before we get into what is happening on the ground here I would like to clarify my stance and this I believe is the stance of the of the majority, the overwhelming majority of the election technology community today to which I belong which is that technology can be a viable and promising option for elections it can be very useful, it has several good qualities, advantages but deployments must not be done in haste when you approach election technology you have to exercise caution and skepticism and what happens is that when you bring in technology to fix a problem the technology can end up creating problems itself and sometimes those problems can outweigh the initial problem and then what people tend to do is they tend to bring in more technology to fix those problems and you get into this vicious circle spiral of sorts so this is well known there are lots of papers written on this this is well known in the literature if you look at any expert any handbook on expert guidelines one thing they make clear is don't rush into this do your homework go slow, scale up, gradually address challenges as they arise so that is what I am saying here as well and that new technologies should be deployed for transparency and security things like verifiable voting risk limiting audits, I believe there are calls in India for these as well you've probably already heard Subashish's talk at this forum great care, effort and liberation is required for the ecosystem so technology requires an ecosystem around it, so you have lots of things around it there are human factors, socio-political things, dispute resolution mechanisms, how to handle technologies, procedures, lots of things and this effort is often underestimated sometimes the effort and costs of the ecosystem can actually outweigh those of the technology itself so this has to be factored in and there is a critical lack of expertise and processes in Pakistan, so no one knows anything about election technology absolutely no one, and this is pretty much in many countries unfortunately and we do not have more important, we lack the processes to talk about election technology, like we lack the forums and the we lack the knowledge of how to go about building our expertise and we are often in denial, at least from what I've seen over the last six years all the stakeholders I've talked to they are in denial that this gap even exists for them, elections is just an IT problem, bring an IT to fix it yes but IT doesn't fix it, okay fine bring a blockchain that will fix it so we need to confront these challenges, we need to take ownership of them we need to recognize them and then we need to address them and they can be addressed that is what I believe as well so that is my stance and that is the stance I'll take throughout this talk so one important point for Pakistan, for elections in Pakistan was 2013 so the prior elections prior to 2013, we've had quite a few were, they were problematic but they were mostly peaceful and they were low stakes, low stakes in the sense that you had two political parties and they would just swap every election, they would just, it would be one or the other and you knew that and there would be some rigging but it wasn't too much or it wasn't too obvious the 2013 polls were historic, historic for three reasons the first reason was that this was the first in all of Pakistan's 70 plus years of history this was the first election where you were having a transition from a democratically elected government to another democratically elected government, right before that what had happened was that either democratic governments had been overthrown by military coups or what happened is that the president would dissolve the assemblies and would basically dissolve the government at call for new elections. This was the first transition from democracy to democracy so this was historic in that sense. The second reason was that for the first time the pattern of the the two-party pattern was broken a third party had emerged and this was the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Nsaaf which was led by Imran Khan, you might know the former cricketer philanthropist and a very charismatic and new faces and he completely galvanized the discourse, they changed everything and there was this wave of change, the dili which was due to come so everyone was very excited and that's why we had 55% voter turnout in these elections which is again historic. I think this was the largest turnout since the 70s so this is this was a big deal and the third reason why these polls were historic also was because these elections were a nightmare in terms of in terms of how they were conducted and the rigging and the fraud and so let me get into that. So the election watchdog body so these were the most controversial elections we've had also in 40 to 50 years so the election watchdog body at the time, Fafan, free and fair election network, they've done some fantastic work in Pakistan, they recorded some over 71,000 irregularities and this there were all sorts of irregularities there was weak polling station management polling staff were doing things they should not be doing ballot boxes breach of protocols, ballot boxes were being brought in and the seals were already broken there was ballot stuffing some constituencies recorded more votes cast than actual voters on the election rolls there were over 288 recorded incidences of violence some of it was severe, some people were killed there was poor results management I'll get into the result management in a bit, this was a big factor in what happened so people, the polling workers were submitting precinct results on handwritten on paper normal pieces of paper not on not on the letterhead or the actual forms and the forms which were supposed to consolidate the precinct level results in many cases the totals did not add up in some cases the seals were missing, the signatures were missing there was no provenance or no accounting for how these forms were managed it was a nightmare so right after the elections there were allegations of massive organized rigging 21 political parties claimed that the rigging had happened the election tribunals were packed with complaints they were overflowing with complaints then a whistleblower emerged from within the election commission who said that yes massive rigging, lots and lots and lots of rigging the chief election commissioner resigned and later on he revealed that he resigned because the judiciary would not let him investigate these claims of massive rigging the NADRA chairman resigned so NADRA is our is the national database registration authority so they manage the they assist the election commission with technology matters and they maintain and with the electoral roles they assist them and they had a role in designing the election protocol the chairman was a very active figure he tried to investigate this fraud himself he held a few press conferences then in the middle of the night he was fired suddenly by the government and he went to the Islamabad high court and he got his job back but then he claims he started to receive threats he and his family and so he resigned and left the country so this was a complete disaster and you had failures at almost every possible level it was a collapse your election administration collapsed your checks and balances collapsed the dispute resolution mechanisms collapsed the judicial mechanisms collapsed parliament refused to investigate so the tribunals were packed with complaints but it started to take years it took almost months and months up to a year for the complaints and they were still not resolved because that process itself was broken so Pakistan, Tehran and Saf again Imran Khan's party they decided to do something about this and they released a white paper 2100 pages with evidence affidavits copies of the forms lots and lots of evidence and then after one year of basically exhausting all possible avenues to get redress they decided to launch a political movement to to get an investigation into what happened so they launched the freedom march Azadi march and they started with protest rallies in larger cities in large cities and then culminated in a sit-in in Islamabad and this again was a historic sit-in this was the largest sit-in in Pakistan's history it got worldwide attention the people actually lived there they set up tents and trailers and right in front of parliament and they would sleep there they would cook there they would be everyday people would from Islamabad would go over to join them in solidarity there would be speeches the entire news cycle 9 to 5 media cycle was completely disrupted it was focusing on those protests there were speeches every night fiery speeches so things were at a fever pitch and this protest was so huge it cost estimated losses of 5 million dollars afterwards it was discovered in terms of lost productivity and stalemate so there was a stalemate because the key demand of the protesters was that the prime minister should resign and then there should be an independent investigation into what went wrong in the elections and the prime minister on the other hand Nawaz Sharif he said that alright you can have your independent investigation but I'm not going to resign and this went back and forth for quite a while and neither party was budging then the stalemate was broken a terrorist attack happened in a terrorist attack happened in 2015 this was on the army public school and it was allegedly the Taliban they burst in and there were 150 casualties almost all of them students and teachers and this was horrific the attack itself and overnight the entire discourse changed and the Pakistan Terikin Saab they called off the Pakistan Terikin in the interest of as a show of national solidarity with the government and they both the government and the opposition they got together to tackle terrorism and but they made it clear that this matter was not over and shortly afterwards the judicial inquiry commission was formed to investigate these rigging allegations and side by side a parliamentary committee was working on electoral reforms so this is what was happening then the judicial commission did an inquiry and they cleared the elections this was surprising it was not a very satisfying result but the conclusion they drew was that elections are definitely broken they said the opposition parties were justified in calling for an investigation it was very justified but while there were problems and incidents there was no proof of necessarily what you can call a specialized rigging so there was a bit of semantics here as well and they said that yes by and large the elections did sort of reflect the public will and the spotlight then turned from rigging it turned on to the election commission the report made clear that the election commission had failed here they had failed to administer the elections they were the weakest link in the chain they had failed to have any accountability they had completely failed so just then the parliamentary committee came out with the elections reform bill of 2017 and this bill was designed to empower the election commission to make it more independent and autonomous so they were now given the powers of a high court and they were given greater freedom in terms of flexibility for financial matters in terms of administrative rights and duties and they also called the bill also called for a transparent results management system because one thing that had emerged in this judicial commission in the enquiry was that this result management system this had failed catastrophically so what happens in Pakistan is you've got these precinct level camps which are documented in what we call form 14's every precinct when the polls close they document their totals in a form 14 and then these forms are collected at the district level and their totals are organized in something called a form 19 and as per the election commission's protocol after the elections they were supposed to post all of these forms online so that everyone could see there was transparency into what was happening but the judicial commission found that about 30% of Pakistan's form 14's were missing they could not be accounted for we didn't know where they were and this was scandalous I mean this was catastrophic and then several of the form 19's their totals did not meet did not match what the form 14's were saying so there was a big fiasco they called for a transparent results management system and this bill also called for piloting electronic voting machines and biometric voting machines and this was the time that I also returned to Pakistan in 2016 and I contributed a couple of articles to this discourse and this was the same stance that yes machines have a lot of advantages but they do not solve all your problems and there is a lot of technology fetishization involved here which we have to be careful about and then I talked a bit about mistakes other countries have made and so on and so forth and then the ECP election commission of Pakistan they reached out to certain universities in Islamabad for a potential collaboration R&D to modernize Pakistan's voting systems and I was part of these discussions we met for like almost a year and we hammered out action plans and things like these but then those talks fizzled out for some reason or the other and then the attention shifted to internet voting for overseas citizens so this time again the Pakistan Terikin staff took the lead they went to the supreme court and they petitioned the supreme court to order the election commission to empower to enfranchise overseas citizens using internet voting now Pakistan's constitution does allow for overseas citizens to vote it is recognized as a fundamental right the moral argument here is that Pakistan a big bulk of Pakistan's GDP is actually depends on the remittances sent by these overseas workers to Pakistan and therefore they should at least have some representation in parliament so that was the argument but for a very long time the argument put forward by the election commission was that we don't have the means to do this so they tried piloting postal voting and telephone voting but those mechanisms according to their reports had failed and they said that internet voting is not reliable yet so the supreme court then asked Nadra again the database authority to can you help with an internet voting system and Nadra said yes we can so in 10 weeks they put together something called I vote an internet voting system and the supreme court unveiled this system in 2018 about 5 months before the election they called in civil society the politicians, all the stakeholders academia the media and the system was unveiled and this was called I vote and at that meeting the academics including myself we raised a vigorous protest we said that this system from what we can see it seems to be repeating all the mistakes made by earlier such systems and it seems that the people who have made this system they are not aware that all such systems in the past have failed they have failed in very very obvious ways and I can see from the presentation that is presented that this system has those same mistakes in fact one of the things I talked about was that I vote if someone had bothered to google I vote you would discover that I vote is actually the name of Australia's system which was the largest internet voting system at the time and that had failed and it had failed and this system was basically using the same model so based on these discussions the supreme court then set up an internet voting task force to assess the system and check if it was suitable for use in the elections if it was suitable for use and I was part of this task force as well along with other technologists people from other universities from provincial technology technology boards and we were given 45 days to look at the system so there is just a brief summary of our findings the main findings so the obvious is that when you vote when you take voting outside of the polling booth into some remote setting then there is no privacy you cannot guarantee that a person will vote a certain way for instance I might be standing here I might force my wife to vote a certain way my wife might force me to vote a certain way so an employer might force his employee to vote a certain way and these fears are not unfounded in the sense that what happens in this diaspora a lot of it is concentrated in the Middle East and in the Middle East the relationships between employees and employers are very complex the employers are usually Middle East citizens citizens of Middle East countries and they hold the passports of their employees that's the normal practice and they are able to force them to work in certain conditions which others object to there is a lot of pressure there and there is a lot of potential for this kind of coercion, voter coercion and then we found certain very standard flaws which are not surprising at all we found that we could do phishing attacks we could send emails pretending to be the election commission which reroute the voters legitimate voters to our websites which look like election websites and basically we steal their votes and their voting credentials this has happened in the past for a long time people tended to be government websites Pakistani government websites for a long time and it has proved very very difficult for government bodies in Pakistan to get these websites down because they are based overseas and this has been happening for a long time then there is the standard man in the middle attack in fact what happens here is that so a standard practice when you set up a website or a web service is that to protect to prevent denial of service attacks you don't route website traffic directly to your website you route it through a filtering service like Cloudflare or Akamai and they have very large data centers so there is a lot of spam and malicious traffic coming in they filter it out and then they send you the useful traffic and that is what this voting system did as well but as researchers have found in the past that when you use this kind of solution then you are trusting this body this middle body, this middle man to actually look at your votes to actually even change them and then forward them on to you and you don't have visibility into this process and many of these body these organizations like Cloudflare they are not based in Pakistan their servers are overseas they are subject to foreign laws and foreign jurisdictions so we don't have this kind of control over them and elections are sensitive you can do other things you can entrust other activities but not critical activities to this kind of a setup and then we found certain very careless flaws we found one for two flaw which is a bit high opening so basically when you log on to the system you can cast two votes as an overseas voter I can vote for one national assembly seat and one provincial assembly seat let's say I've got national assembly NA 125 and provincial assembly 35, PA 35 NA 125, PA 35 but if I go into my browser and I open up the raw HTML code then within minutes I can make changes it literally takes two minutes and then I can vote for any two seats of my choice like let's say NA 250, two votes gone and counted and this was shocking and basically there was no security sensibility basically you had two people who had done some IT work in the past they had met and they decided oh let's build a voting system and this is the kind of voting system you would get in this case there was no security sensibility, obsolete components had been used, old database technologies which had been hacked, captures which had already been broken and what was really eye opening to me was that there was no homework done in this case now this system was going to be the largest voting system largest internet voting system in the world the largest voting system before this the Australian voting system, the I vote had catered to about two to three hundred voters at that time two to three hundred thousand voters two to three hundred thousand this was going to cater to six to seven million voters so this is equivalent to climbing Mount Everest but you haven't even done any basic homework, you haven't even climbed some neighborhood hill or the Margala Hills of Islamabad there you have no background in this area and now you're suddenly within four months to go you want to ascend Mount Everest so this was eye opening to me that this kind of gap, cognitive dissonance existed and then there was no recognition that there was an ecosystem involved in this process for instance we had interviews with all of the stakeholders so we went to the people who built the system and we said alright so this system has this component, this component and this component who's going to take care of this, where is this going to be housed who's going to talk to who, what are the procedures what are the security clearance is going to be, who are the people how many employees do you have none of that homework had been done they thought that alright we've got this thing up and running that's it, now somehow everything is going to fix itself or we can fix it at the last minute and this was shocking to me as well and then the worst thing was that there was no concept of best practices, standard practices like I'm sure there are many technologists here who are listening to the stock and for instance when you go to build a house you don't just start, you don't bring the bricks and you start building the house, first you go to an architect and you come up with a blueprint a map, an architectural diagram and this blueprint has all the details of the house, it has the doors the number of rooms, the height, the width, everything so you can actually see the house before it is built and in the development community the equivalent we have is something called a software requirements specification before you build a piece of software you document the essential features of that software, so that later on if you have a dispute both parties have this to refer to that alright I was supposed to do this and I did this and then you can also visualize what you're going to get, the output now this is a standard practice, we teach it at university every student who makes a final year project, the first thing he does is submit an SRS but in this case this was a 150 million rupees project there was no SRS there was no recognition of the need for an SRS so we were really at rock bottom and so our recommendation the committee's recommendation was that in fact let me see if I have that okay no I don't so the committee's recommendation we wrote a detailed report on this and our recommendation was that the election commission of Pakistan invest on a critical basis they invest in a research and development wing, so that they could come up, they could look at new technologies they could look at best practices, they could guide the national discourse, they could basically provide, they could inform the discourse right now everything was going in the dark we literally had the case of the blind leading the blind, that's one intellectual called it that he said in most policy we actually have the scenario it's blind leading the blind and this is an unfortunate reality and this is not just specific to Pakistan this is a common problem across the developing world and if you look at election technology experiences in the developing world most of those are just white elephants you bring in very expensive technology and then you realize it doesn't work and there are even worse stories than this I think it was Namibia or Nigeria one of these countries so they got these very fancy biometric yes sorry it was Kenya they got very fancy biometric voting machines which was state of the art top of the line and then they deployed them and then on election day they discovered that alright the batteries have run out and these plugs the polling places aren't equipped with power sockets so we can't really run these machines and in midday they had to switch to so this is basic homework that needs to be done when you try to deploy technology the technology itself is one component the ecosystem is generally ignored and that can prove fatal so this we delivered this report in 2018 and in 2019 and 2020 activities started again towards getting an election technology system up and running in 2020 so I was asked to join several committees lots and lots and lots of committees and basically I must have attended over a hundred meetings at least a hundred and fifty meetings I mean there were days when every week every day of the week we were having meetings it was either this ministry, that ministry present subcommittee, this forum, that forum and I was giving talks on what we should be doing, how should we we should be going ahead and so at that point in time so the message I was giving was I made dozens of presentations dozens and dozens, like I've given lots of presentations but I've actually physically prepared dozens and dozens of PowerPoint slides for this audience, that audience this topic, that topic and the message was consistently the same that there is a lot of homework to do and we must not underestimate election technology we must not rush into it but unfortunately I was not having much luck and bit by bit I was gently nudged out of all of these committees so at first people would be very receptive to what I had to say but then when it became clear that this was a colossal amount of effort literally a mountain of effort then people would start to soar on the whole idea so this is how the meetings would normally go so almost 99.99% of the time would be spent on high level discussions and thought experiments and there would not be we wouldn't have any the discussions would generally not be rooted in actual ground realities of election technology of the complexities, we would not we would not be discussing new technologies there would be no talk of risk limiting audits or hard to build machines and developing indigenous expertise there have hardly been any pilots conducted, there has been no capacity building no talk of best practices so we are still where we were three years ago in 2018 when we submitted our report on high voting and basically where we were then was basically we were at least 10 years ago in terms of the global experience I think we're still at in the early 2000s so 10 to 15 years so this is where we are today so all of these meetings there were some positives I met some very interesting people that's how in fact that's how I discovered the Hazgid community we've started some nice collaborations I discovered some people reached out we authored some research papers we in fact a few of us we managed to raise research funding so now we have the semblance of a research group myself and two or three students of mine sorry a handful of students some working on a volunteer basis so now we have a small community where we are actually doing we are trying to start on the big homework assignment that has to be done for election technology I've written lots and lots of articles on this they have thankfully had some they've managed to make a dent in the national discourse now there is talk of an ecosystem Nadra has recognized that there is something called end to and verifiable voting so that is good but there is still this huge gap like in Pakistan we still do not have any organization or any entity which can talk authoritatively about election technology we don't have this so we are not that organization so my research group we've tried to make a start at this by we've launched a web presence on twitter called pivot promoting innovative voting technologies what we try to do is we try to comment or provide we try to deconstruct or break down what is happening in the election technology ecosystem in fact we post stories of interest to Pakistan for instance we posted on the news articles on the Russian voting system that failed the Moscow blockchain based voting system which elections I think happened last month and last week I vote Australia's I vote system again collapsed in mid election we sort of try to raise awareness about these things and point to the way forward and then last month we had a landmark development again so the government actually amended the elections act 2017 and now they have mandated the deployment of electronic voting machines and internet voting in the next general elections of 2023 so that's about a year and a half away so this is where we are like I said this was a historic this is a historic point we are at a crossroads the government is convinced that this amendment is extremely controversial the opposition parties resisted it vigorously the election commission resisted it vigorously civil society organizations election wash talk bodies they advised against it the only the government was behind it and the government was convinced to bulldoze it through parliament they had the numbers so they managed to pass it and they apparently they are convinced from my dealings with them I believe they are convinced that this is the way forward this is also a failure of the election technology community of people like myself we have failed to convince the government that so when you have large scale deployments of election technology typically it takes at least 4 to 8 years to scale up to fully this is two such deployments so if these deployments happen this will be perhaps the largest deployment of internet voting in the world and it will be the second or third largest deployment of machines in the world and with this kind of a setup if you are rushing into projects like these national infrastructure projects on a global scale you would expect that there would be tons of homework there would be a whole bookshelf filled with feasibility studies pilot reports manuals design specifications environmental impact studies procedural mechanisms legal requirements all sorts of things, commentaries but there is nothing there is no paperwork on this nothing at all so this is historic so now we are at a point where we have to decide Pakistan has to decide are we going to are we going to challenge this in court the election commission might challenge this amendment in court the opposition might challenge it in court and get a stay or at least a delay the election commission might decide to go ahead they might bring in all these machines then we might be set up for another Kenya type disaster where we haven't done the homework and then we have a catastrophic systems failure on election day which is in the whole world can see what is happening but this could be the start of a healthy engagement with technology where we decide that all right now we are going to get our act together we are going to invest in R&D we are going to go step by step we are going to follow this process through to the end and this is actually the reason I am not able to deliver this talk in person I am part of the election commission's technical they have a technical committee and we have a meeting at the time of this talk it's one of these critical strategy meetings so I have to attend to the formulating policy I would request all of you to pray for us let's see what happens so the estimated cost of this deployment of just the electronic voting machines is about 150 billion rupees for nationwide deployment so we cannot afford to get something like this wrong but the reality is as I have explained we have no homework in the last half year no country has been able to deploy to this scale in one and a half year no country that I know of so anyway that is where we are and this is I believe a failure of the election technology community and so I am about to wrap up what I want to talk about is that there is there is this big disconnect between our community and the general public the stakeholders for the stakeholders there is no problem election technology is not a big deal I mean the most obvious question I get is if I can bank online why can't I vote online and election technology is simply an IT problem that's how the world that's how people see it and this is how they see it in the west as well up until very recently this is what if you went to the they have state level election boards in the United States and if you talk to their administrators they would say just election technology it's an IT problem let's bring in the IT people and then many of these meetings the commissions I showed you a long list of committees that are joined they would have a small technical group I would be part of that technical group but the other people would always be an IT expert, a software developer or electronics expert some of them would be very good people but they would have no inkling of what election technology is so what can be done what has been done they would have no idea of the failures of the Australian system the Estonian system what went wrong in Kenya what went wrong in Germany the Netherlands they have no idea they haven't seen they haven't read about the hacks into the Indian voting machines they don't know who many of these people are so there is this disconnect and I would have to spend a lot of time trying to explain that no this is like if you want to launch a space program or if you want to build a nuclear power plant or you don't bring in an IT person or a database person to advise you on space technology likewise for election technology you need to build this expertise or at least bring in consultants or experts who can advise in this domain but the whole point was that oh no IT can fix it and then these buzzwords AI and blockchain made everything worse because oh the point of view would be oh if it can't be fixed by IT let's bring in blockchain that will definitely fix everything and that would obviously this would be very very frustrating for me for a long time only recently I've started to get over this and see it as an opportunity and but what I want to get across is that this communication gap is very genuine it is very real and people like us who are working in this domain who want to help with election technology in our respective countries our first goal should be to bridge this gap and I'll tell you how I have had some luck in bridging it and maybe that can help you as well so this is a cartoon which you've probably seen it before which is pretty much along the same lines so aircraft designers when you talk to them about airplane safety they say yeah but the chances are very low it's wonderful it's super safe and if you ask people elevators the engineers say oh yeah the elevators are perfect they're nearly incapable of falling but when you ask software engineers about computerized voting electronic voting they say oh no no that's terrifying don't ever do that and then you when you get into more details you see I don't trust voting software don't listen to anyone who tells you it's safe we are terrible at what we do everything will go wrong if you use electronic voting and then you say oh but blockchain takes care of everything I said no no no keep away from it bury it in the desert where gloves it's all wrong it's all wrong so this this gap is very very real right so I've started to see it as an opportunity if someone says if I can bank online can I vote online I asked them to sit down and then I give me five minutes of their time and then I go into what the difference between banking online and voting online is and I believe that if you can explain this properly to the other side if you can connect with them on this if you convince them of this that these are different problems then things become much easier right and then you have a real chance of impacting the mainstream consciousness and the way to do that is you talk about how banking online is different from voting online and this is how it is really different in that when you bank online or when you use an ATM machine everything is logged right everything has to be logged the moment you slide in the card that is logged your password is logged the moment you make a transaction the amount is logged the interbank mechanism the movement of the money that is logged everything is logged and it has to be logged it has to be logged so that you so that the money can be protected right so if something goes wrong you can raise a complaint you can even get your money back if your account gets hacked the funds can be traced so you have to have logging everything has to be fully recorded otherwise the system falls apart but you can't do that with elections because when you start recording things in elections you forfeit the privacy of the vote because when you cast a vote all identifying information is stripped away from the vote and this has to be because privacy is the fundamental principle the bedrock of free and fair elections it is in the UN human declaration of human rights it has been known for over a millennia the Greeks the Romans even the Indians used to have this concept of secrecy of the ballot so when you remove all identifying information from a vote this is an interesting thought experiment can you track the vote can you protect the vote you can do that in a physical setting like when you slide your ballot into a physical ballot box when you slide the paper in you effectively anonymize it and then you keep an eye you put a camera you train a camera on the ballot box and you make sure no one tampers with it right but you can't do that with a machine because a machine is technically a black box things go in, things come out you don't know what is happening inside the machine you don't this is the reason that Germany, Netherlands so many other countries, Ireland they phased out, they terminated their electronic voting deployments and other countries like Finland the UK, France etc they just chose not to jump into this they chose not to open this Pandora's box and this I believe it is easy once you put the argument like this in front of people it is easy to convince them to to get them to see what is happening and then you can build on it you can say that because you have this black box the system is actually more vulnerable to fraud than a paper based system because in a black box you can write computer code that can manipulate votes without being detected that has been done these attacks have been demonstrated in the US likewise you can have retail fraud like in paper based elections it takes a bit of effort to manipulate one vote to manipulate a thousand votes or 10,000 votes you have to do a lot of physical effort you have to set up a you have to capture a polling station you have to capture a ballot box, you have to spend all night you have to have a coffee machine running, you have to spend all night manipulating the ballots and these things can be discovered but to manipulate a thousand votes in an electronic voting machine you just have to press the single button there have been attacks which have shown that all you have to do is you just slide in you just walk up to a voting machine you slide in a USB, in one minute you take it out the votes have been manipulated that's it so this is called retail fraud like wholesale fraud in bulk you just one step, thousands of votes manipulated likewise you often go up to ATMs and you might your ATM is out of business the link might be down you walk up to another ATM you use that in the sense you might log on to your internet banking portal, the portal might be down you log on 20 minutes later the portal is up but with elections you don't have that luxury the machines have to work on election day and they have to be available if they go down that immediately casts a whole cloud of suspicion on the elections and how you recover from incidents like for instance if my banking account gets hacked there is a whole audit trail investigators can follow up and they might be able to recover my funds I can even protect myself I can get insurance against banking fraud but there is no such equivalent for elections, I can't get insurance against fraudulent election and in many cases the attackers people who hack elections the goal might not be to manipulate votes it might just be to cast suspicion on results like if we knock off a results transmission system or if we knock off the online voting website for 4 hours we can cast genuine suspicion on the elections that is in a sense an election it's not only that the election must be fair it must be seen to be fair and if it is not seen to be fair it is technically a failed election so this is very important and likewise then banks elections when you hold them so they are national infrastructure level projects they attract a whole different class of attacker, elite intelligence agencies so now you're in the domain of cyber warfare banks are not subject to cyber warfare online banking they're not but elections are and you might be aware that in 2017 the US Department of Homeland Security officially designated their election systems as critical infrastructure in the same class as dams or power grids in the sense that if you attack election systems that might be declared an act of war it might be considered an act of war and likewise these attackers have resources that we cannot even imagine unlimited resources and one for instance one capability they have is something called zero day attacks what these agencies do they look at popular software and they document certain flaws they find certain flaws but they don't announce them publicly they hoard them and then when they have enough they put together an attack using those flaws and they launch that attack and the effect is devastating because technically the person who is attacked the party that is attacked has zero days to recover from the flaw because they have no idea this flaw even existed so when the Iranian nuclear reactors were attacked that attack had four zero day flaws it was unprecedented and it set the nuclear program back by a few years and in 2015 researchers demonstrated zero day attacks on New South Wales eye vote voting system so this is we have the proof of concept these attacks are very real so if this argument is followed you do manage to have common ground with you make some progress on overcoming the cognitive dissonance that exists between the technology community and the general stakeholders the politicians, the media the general public, the watchdog bodies civil society so this is something that I've had a lot of luck with and I'm going to conclude now because I think I'm out of time so the conclusion here is this is a very positive thing which I've discovered only in the last year as well that when you try to generally connect with the stakeholders, when you meet them on their own terms, when you engage with them with their dialogue that itself, that leads to visible results, visible progress and apparently the literature suggests, the research suggests that this actually is also good it leads to more fruitful outcomes using election technology as well so this is the again, this is a very nice paper, one of my favourite papers from this domain, digital dilemmas it's a study of election technology deployments in African countries and they looked at what failed and what worked and a lot of things failed and they found that unsurprisingly, the greatest gains from digitization come from countries where the quality of democracy is higher and the election commission is more independent because when people, when the stakeholders when they genuinely understand technology and they have the means to discuss it and debate it, then they come up with solutions which make more sense, which are more transparent and they also take ownership of those solutions so what happens also as well is that in the event of a mishap, there is less finger pointing and there is more movement towards the solution so we don't, people who are working in this domain, people like myself we don't just have to push forward the right technology, we should try to inculcate a democratic culture we should go about it in a democratic manner which means that we should sit down with the stakeholders we should look them in the eye, we should respect their integrity as individuals and we should engage with them honestly we should try to change their minds but we should be open to the possibility of our own minds being changed as well and so this is what I have to say and this is what I'm going to be trying at our, what I have been trying for for a while now and what I'll be trying at our meeting so I hope you enjoyed this talk and I'm sorry I'm not here to answer questions and thank you for your time and I'll hopefully see you again so thank you that was Dr. Taha Ali very fascinating story that he had to tell us and a very passionate delivery because he's obviously very passionate about what he does although he's not here and therefore cannot take the questions right now any questions or concerns that are put in the chat will be shared with him and perhaps we can get him back on our project page as this impression has suggested let me take just a few minutes, maybe two minutes or three minutes of your time to share what I heard the speakers say starting with who had fabulous stories and raised very far-provoking questions about the complexity of the election whether we understand it fully or not before we attempt to change anything and the important point he made was that you know we should not have a false objective whether speed or lower cost are the considerations we cannot have those considerations we can have only one consideration otherwise subsidiary objectives will take over and in his words making the election fair and more democratic if that is the objective that's a good objective and technology and all other efforts should be aligned in that direction and in no other because the other objectives should not be allowed to subvert the main task that we have with the elections however even if we select the right objective we cannot be lax we have to evaluate the risk we mentioned a lot of that loss of secrecy analytics and targeting the people the problem of bias which is probably so obvious in technology and the problem of trust all these problems will have to be examined even if we design a system to deliver on the objective that we are looking for so first is what is the most important thing when we do that and even then we should not give up due diligence as it is he shared that when he saw Facebook become big he thought it will reduce the cost for the political parties but it actually increased the cost as he does it is very difficult to predict where it will take us and therefore no amount of diligence is actually raised Dr. Subodh Verma provided a theoretical framework for judging the suitability of voting systems and he walked us through details of some of those systems very illustrative and worth going into all those systems in detail because the importance of thinking through and each of those systems help us think through individual problems that they are designed to solve none of them can solve all the problems Dr. Subishi's energy of course is always very clear in his presentation and he helped us see the system we follow currently and what we could do to improve it he shared the recommendations of the success commission and the insights that went into the formulation of the recommendations so that was very useful of course and then finally we had Dr. Taha with the story of the pools and pressures that every institution in this country had to deal with in holding and preserving an election and he shared how big the gaps were between what the elections were supposed to do and what the reality was found to be and in that situation it's not unreasonable for people to look towards technology for solutions now whether technology can actually solve those problems is far from what P.S. has pointed out and that is why the evaluation of the technology and all the approaches is needed he mentioned about overseas voter being allowed to vote on the internet which by itself is problematic as as many have pointed out I mean it can be done in small numbers for a few people but it cannot be a large-scale thing at all and other problems that he mentioned of course were related to technology processes and can actually solve but you know whatever the architecture is whatever the code is it has to be open and that means all the code including what is part of the firm so I think there is no getting away from evaluating this and doing the homework I think for me is that we have to choose the right reasons we cannot let the name objective which is to conduct a fair election be subverted by other considerations and we have to have the right process you know which is consultative and collaborative and everybody who can contribute to solving the problem is encouraged to come together is welcomed and their contributions are integrated and then we see if we can improve our system or whether we should leave it alone but technology tends to move forward and we cannot really ignore it and therefore we need to do an evaluation and all the hard work that is mentioned by so thanks a lot, thank you very much thanks to the organizers for letting me share my thoughts here and for inviting me to this conversation and I would like to thank them for the very important work that they are doing on behalf of all of us thank you very much thank you before we all wrap up I just want to point out that we will continue to organize more of these conversations as we lead up to a conference that is coming up in January please do register and subscribe to the project page to receive the updates these the talks of today from today would be uploaded to the YouTube channel and we will be taking some time to summarize and extract some of the key points and also post to our project page thank you for staying with us thank you thanks a lot


There are many safety measures firefighters take when conducting prescribed fires or fighting wildfires across the country. There are additional precautions they take when working near the border because of illegal immigration and drug smuggling. First, let's listen to the importance of briefing resources on current border issues. Common part of our in-briefing for personnel who are coming to the refuge, we give them a really thorough sit-down briefing for quite a length of time about the ins and outs of what you could expect and what could happen and how we would deal with it and that seems to help a lot because people don't like to get blindsided by individuals running out of burn units and so that seems to help quite a bit. A lot of the guys that are from the district here kind of have that heightened awareness and that's kind of what we give our severity resources, a briefing before they come in and brief them on a lot of the hazards and some of these severity resources are really astounded. You tell them you're going to run into people, they'll see maybe six young men in black walking south who have already have smuggled drugs and are looking for a ride back to Mexico. Last year we told this engine crew a lot of the same things we're talking about and they, you know, about two hours later they were driving down this road right here and they saw eight guys walking south and they said you were right, we just saw eight guys over here and you know, they get to where they, people do get educated but it is, it's a long education process, we usually take about two hours, have a good two hour briefing for the severity resources. So this is a briefing I give all incoming resources. We have laminated border watch out cards that are text on one side and a map on the other side that show the three areas levels of concern, you know, most dangerous near the border and then certain miles A, B, C and I give everyone who comes in one of these laminated pocket cards because I want people to be thinking about this all the time because it's an issue that catches everyone by surprise usually. When we can get engines from other places we'll usually marry them up with a local engine for a few days, show them the area and then once they're familiar with it then we can kind of put them on their own, you know, we let them know that they could run into illegal immigrants or they could run into these bundles of drugs and we tell them they will run into the trash and it's just something that they need to be aware of when they come down here that they, there are going to be situations they're not used to. Firefighters indicate having a law enforcement presence on fires is critical because the officers can deal with any drugs or illegal activity that shows up. We are very, very sensitive about going into fire without law enforcement with us. If we're fighting fire we have to pay attention to fire.  If we have people sometimes watering through the fire sometimes we do have groups of people that come close to the fire. Law enforcement is usually on site and they will contact Border Patrol or the correct authorities or if we don't have law enforcement on the fire we'll just call our dispatcher and maybe give them a GPS location and just let the proper authorities deal with them. We don't confront people or try to apprehend people at all. It's not part of our job to put ourselves in more harm's way. We've had firefighters out on the line doing suppression work and then had illegal aliens come and vandalize and burglarize the vehicles so we tried to make sure that we have a presence with the vehicles to deter that. Two years ago every fire that we had out here in the San Rafael Valley had illegal drugs in it in one way or another. We get pretty wise to that situation and we know that we're going to be watched and have the potential to have problems so immediately we try to get law enforcement heavily engaged in that situation. Last February we had severity resources from Montana here and Wyoming and they were out on a fire. We left them there overnight with law enforcement and law enforcement was kind of sitting on a road and about 19 smugglers with backpacks on their back and marijuana walked up the road that led to the fire that the firefighters were on and so a couple of them dropped their bundles and they ran off but if we hadn't had that law enforcement presence they probably would have walked right into our firefighters. One thing we're still struggling with in a safety aspect of it, first of all a lot of law enforcement people are not firefighters either. So for an IC it's an extra burden on that person because you not only have to worry about your folks you've got to worry about the law enforcement person and whether they're paying attention because if the fire all of a sudden comes a problem for you as an IC then you got to start looking for your law enforcement person and not only worrying about your own folks but then you have to worry about that person too. Fighting fires at night can be very risky along the border. For this reason most crews are pulled off the line or follow special protocols. Before a night time operation check to see what protocols are followed in your area. Early in 2002 we brought in some crews from South Carolina and somewhere in there and we put them up on one of our mountains up here overnight in the spike camp where during the night a load of drugs went through and about 25 UDAs walked through their camp and that was the first time we really realized we had a really really serious problem. On this district we do fight fire at night as long as we have law enforcement on the ground we do fight fire at night and the reason we do is because down here in the desert temperatures are cooler they get some humidity recovery we provide extra protection through our law enforcement people and border patrol. Night operations require special considerations that would seem to come alive at night here with people and I think that's basically why we don't fight fire at night anymore unless we do have a lot of security with us you know it's just a different world at night and we all need to realize it. Maintaining communications along the border can be a challenge but it is critical firefighters try to keep their lines of communication open. Our radio frequencies are usually have a lot of traffic from Mexico on and especially our air to ground and we haven't really found a way to solve that problem so just about any channel we use it seems to be the ranchers and the ranch hands use the frequencies and taxi cabs in Mexico the smugglers also have radios so we have a lot of interference from Mexico and it does interfere with our operations if air to ground gets too loaded with that stuff we usually try to order another air to ground but a lot of times we just have to deal with it. At times we're on fires we'll be on the radio and we'll get bleed over from Mexico and it's usually taxi cab drivers and bleeding over and we'll just have to change frequencies but at times you know you get that bleed over at the wrong time and if it's our air to ground frequency which it can be then that's generally the biggest problem on a tack channel we can go to another tack channel but bleed over is a concern also with cell phones you'll dial a number and somebody speaking Spanish will answer it and so that's also another concern. Generally what we'll do is if we can't talk to air attack we'll go through dispatch and let them try and get it. Most air attacks will be listening to the tack channel that we're using on the ground they'll be monitoring the air to ground and your forest net or district net and you have to stop and get that communication back. Because of all the air traffic along the border it is essential everyone keep their eyes open for new aircraft in the vicinity of a fire. The law enforcement agencies around here are excluded from a TFR which are temporary flight restrictions and so a lot of times they'll fly right close to our fires and so then we have to slow down our air traffic that is coming in and out or stop it for a bit until we get contact but lately we've had a good working relationship with those agencies usually call when they come in but there is usually some type of intrusions into our TFRs. We've had border patrol helicopters just above our fire flying which has been a problematic concern when we have air tankers flying in the same area and they're looking for people that either could have possibly lit the fire or they saw crossing the border somewhere and so that throws in another concern with fires is letting our air attack or our tankers coming in helicopters that we do have law enforcement over the fire at times which is border patrol and we don't have communication with the border patrol when they're flying over our fire so that's why we have to let our side know and generally what we do is we stop all flights any kind of air resources coming to the fire and along the border here we have border patrol flying we have the National Guard flying we also have ranchers that have small helicopters that are flying around all the time too so there's a lot of air traffic we like to have everyone keep an eye out for other aircraft because our pilots are not always going to be able to see them so if anybody sees anything please bring it up to their supervisors because you might be the only one that sees it as illegal immigrants and drug smugglers cross the land they leave huge amounts of trash and sometimes even drug loads at times these catch on fire affecting firefighters health bring trash is an issue act in some places what gets particularly difficult with firefighters is that a lot of our fires are right on some of the heaviestly used smuggling routes and some of those layout points that various coyotes will use with groups can literally be anywhere from ankle to knee deep in old clothes and and water bottles and synthetics and materials that you don't want to you know inhale the smoke from when you're burning through a field of trash that is toxic smoke so I mean that's something else to consider when you're on the fire line get out of that smoke get around upwind if you can we've had situations where our firefighters have been exposed to large quantities of marijuana smoke on the line and not even though it was there yet because we're working our way around we've worked on a fire part of one afternoon and oh probably just that dark around 7 38 o'clock at night we come on a huge load of drugs and they're on fire and many times what we'll do is we'll back off and we'll get away from some of those spots and let them pretty well burn up before we'll actually go in and suppress the fire right there finally firefighters try to protect the lives of illegal immigrants by taking extra precautions before they light prescribed fires we try and get prepared for the prescribed fires by notifying the locals and that includes both on this side of the border and the other side of the border that this is something that we're going to be doing and try and get them to steer their traffic around this area to minimum and head it off before they ever actually get here during that planning process we've actually gone so far as to have fliers created in Spanish and distributed on both sides of the border and areas where we think that the message will be spread we've posted messages on potential burn units and high traffic areas saying you know that this area is going to be involved in a prescribed fire and that you know you don't want to be in here when it happens and just trying to describe the the dangers associated with doing landscape level burning and how fast fires moves and things like that closer to the operation beginning we coordinate with our law enforcement folks really tightly and other agencies as well the border patrol most notably I've kind of an elaborate search routine that we go through it starts just before the burns we try and identify areas where we think are likely to be lay-up areas for illegal aliens or folks traveling through maybe even go out and scout them out and see if there's sign of people coming through there or spending time there this area has been swept for over a week before we started burning in here they bring agents in here and they walk every trail early morning late night and then they start putting up a barrier if you will almost a human vehicle barrier they run the roads to the south of here very heavily and try to force the illegals to move up and around here they may not see them but they see the border trolling and they'll flush up into the higher elevations on the day of the burns have law enforcement go out and do kind of a grid based search of high priority areas and then the rest of the burn unit in addition we do a grid based search an aerial search with a helicopter that we contract with that's a very slow low level flight depending on the size of the burn unit can take anywhere from half an hour to an hour we had a couple of burns this spring that we had border patrol doing sweeps through we did everything we possibly could to make sure that the area was clear before we started our ignitions and not 40 minutes into the burn I heard from you know back further down the holding line that we had 16 travelers coming out of the black that was barely cold and all I can think as they they got down into a rocky wash and just held it out and thought they would sneak on out after we'd gone by with our ignitions but it makes me sick to my stomach to think that we could possibly be harming somebody if they're stuck in the middle of this bird I just hope that in my tenure here on these this border forest that I don't end up inadvertently killing somebody either by wildfire or you know backfire prescribed bird that's something I think about quite a bit quite a bit we can't possibly stem the tide of individuals trying to cross this refuge and their motivation for getting into this country has very little to do with us or nothing to do with us and so we really can't have an impact on their decision to come across here or not so it's a greater national issue that we can't deal with at this level and until it is dealt with at a different level we're going to be constantly exposed to this problem the most important thing to remember from this module is that fighting fire along the border is different than anywhere else in the country firefighters in this area can come upon illegal immigrants drug smugglers and drug loads this requires them to take special precautions to maintain their safety and the safety of others while fighting wildfires or lighting prescribed burns


My name is Bill Crossley. I'm the J. William Uregg and Anastasia Vornaz, head of Aeronautics and Astronautics here at Purdue. I'm really excited to introduce my colleague, Alexis Yashuren, as the next associate professor that we're celebrating. I'll take longer while he's getting set up. That'll work well for me. So, Alex joined us in 2015, and he's a slightly different than typical faculty member, that he had a really long career as a research scientist at the George Washington University. And then prior to that, he got his Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University in 2008, where he had spent six years as a researcher. And even before that, he worked for the Institute of Applied Physics, which is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences. So, Alex came to us well-prepared as a researcher, and has stepped into the faculty role, doing an outstanding job in our classrooms, and also introducing some neat classroom opportunities and educational opportunities for our students. If you ask me what Alex does, is he works in plasmas. That's his main field. He's a core part of our plasma team here at Purdue. Diagnostics of plasmas, laser-induced plasma for combustion. Does flow control, a little bit of nanotechnology? Perhaps David might want to talk to you a little bit later if he hasn't already about some of your medical applications, including the plasma knife you did a few years ago. Alex has got an outstanding publication record. At least 80 journal articles. There's probably more since I got this information. Presents and conferences regularly. He's a leader in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Plasma Dynamics, and Lasers Technical Committee. So, he's involved in all those activities. At least eight patents for patent applications at this point, three of which I know are in the medical field. Several others have been here since he's been at Purdue with Purdue students and researchers. Graduated several students. I want to highlight a little bit. One of his neat projects, and I think you'll show it, I'm sure, Alex has managed to develop an interesting relationship with General Atomics. So, General Atomics, the company, has been funding Alex to work on something called Trackset, which has opened up a bunch of new opportunities for our students and for Alex. He'll tell you more about that, but that's a neat opportunity that Alex has brought, and it's kind of become a model that we'd like to replicate for others. And his path to being an associate professor, he's developed something that looks like it's a neat approach for others to copy. Alex has taught five different courses for us here at Purdue. He's a fish in our aerodynamics area in our school, so he's taught our introductory aerodynamics class. He's taught our 500 level intermediate aerodynamics class, but the spacecraft electric propulsion is a new class that Alex brought to Purdue that's hugely important to our industry. So Alex is making sure that Purdue's got a footprint there. The plasma laboratory, to our knowledge, it's one of, if not the only laboratory class of its kind teaching students about plasmas in a classroom environment. And then also the Trackset project. And in doing those, Alex always gets rated really highly by the students. So he's an outstanding educator, in addition to his exceptional research record. But rather than do that, let me just introduce Alex. Alex, again, congratulations on your promotion. I'm happy to introduce Alex Shoshuren. Yeah, so at that time, I would say that my physics teacher probably had a very prominent impact on me and introducing me to physics and showing me a beauty of physics and creating the interest in both physics and math. At that time, I was very much interested in participating in physics and math, Olympiads solving the non-standard, more advanced problems, collecting some trophies along the way. This interest brought me to study physics in my hometown institution and I was very lucky and fortunate to be part of this lab. I joined an outstanding school of non-linear optics back in the home institution. And under my advisor, Alexander Sergeev, who is currently, by the way, the president of Russian Academy of Science, I did the work on interaction of at-the-second policies with a matter. Moving forward, we had to switch to a different topic for masters, so we had to do thesis on the Bachel level and then on the master's level. So on the master's level, I switched to another advanced school in the home institution, which was a plasmas and non-linear plasma effects. And I studied some, that one was already a fully laboratory experiment settings to model some ionosphere phenomena. I think that at this point, I fell in love with experiment and by the end of my master, I start feeling that I want to add more of application aspect to the work which I was doing. That was all very interesting and fundamental concepts and I just wanted to add some application story to that. That brought me to Tel Aviv study, a very application-related side of the plasma, plasma science, referring to deposition of film films. This is about the time where I started having some visual evidence and you can see the environment which was around me, that type of various equipment and that always excited me. Well, not always experiments well very well and bring into some degree of frustration sometimes, but overall I realized that I want to continue in the field, speaking seriously of experimental, heavily experimental plasma science. That brought me to my next step in being postdoc and then research scientist at George Washington University. This is the point where I added some aerospace content aspect to my work. We worked with a broad range of various applications, ranging from electric propulsion and for cube satellites, ARCJET facilities to model hypersonic conditions and much more than that including synthesis of non-materials and even biomedical applications. Of course, I want to highlight my primary influencers here including my wife and three kids who came on a different stage of this journey but always provided me help and support and excitement to do what I do. I started as Bill said in Purdue back in 2015 and this is the time when I was fortunate to get resources to establish a lab and we call it electric propulsion and plasma laboratory and you see some student faces here and some equipment which we are in and experimentations that we are working with. Just covering a couple of research areas which we are working, if being asked to name one specific research area out of all we are working which mostly characterize us and which we are mostly known for. I would probably call microwave scattering diagnostics. The idea is coming from Dr. Michael Schneider from Princeton back in 2005 and four years later, I was actually in 2009, I was introduced and met Michael Schneider in the first time and that was quite a life-changing event for me. He became not just a colleague which we collaborate constantly starting that time. In addition to that, he just became an older colleague which I admire a lot and he has substantial impact on my research interest and professional development since then. We expanded quite a bit from 2009 in terms of scattering, doing more start-up with a collision regime and recently doing Thomson scattering regime and applying it for various plasma objects. We develop these technologies through platform technology if we are applicable for many areas of plasma science and engineering. Speaking about filamentation physics, it's a way to detect and measure electron number density and photoionization rates in cross-section which are highly sought in this area. For electric propulsion aerodynamics area combustion, it's a way to measure species in gauze mixtures and this in combination with resonant enhanced multi-photoionization can be done along with a microwave scattering. This is probably one of the fields where we as a lab are most known for and going to other fields. We do micro propulsion for cube satellites and the goal there is to overcome some conventional problems and issues with those referring to limited lifetime. So we are developing a bundle of thruster and ignition system. We are doing a pulse plasma thruster which operates with a liquid propellant along with some special ignition system which allows us also to work on a long extended lifetime. This is another area of research where we operate, actively operate and this is non-second repetitive pulse discharges referring to intense and fast energy deposition into gas with the purpose to modify flow and have both aerodynamic flow control application and combustion application. We are applying a bunch of diagnostics which we already mentioned like a microwave scattering and others. We will go to understand physics of energy deposition and plasma dynamics. This is a short video on a result on a non-second time scale of what we are studying. This is somehow a newer project referring to high power microwaves to couple electromagnetic energy with gas and heat and gas to reach flames of extremely high temperatures. We are talking about 10,000 Kelvin. And those experiments in this field is done to test materials in conditions mimicking hypersonic flight. We have just recently been announced some big of work about that. I'm probably not going to go into details, but we are having a good development for this area as well. Of course, a big part of what we are doing is a teaching and right here at Purdue it was almost odd that a school like Purdue doesn't have the course on a spacecraft electric propulsion which was a very relevant and very natural niche for me. So I started to teach this course covering most conventional and as well as most state-of-the-art electric propulsion techniques. Another course which I could not not to do would be this plasma lap and I was fortunate enough to receive the resources first of all to build all that. So we have several experiments starting from a whole thruster experiment, electrostatic, iron-greed accelerator and some diagnostics like varying from Langmuir probes to microwave interferometry and optical emission spectroscopy. And this is one very special additional course which I was happy to develop at Purdue and it's a truck set design build test. This is a cobstone design course. We are testing various CubeSat related technologies. One of them you can see on this visual for demonstration of coal gas propulsion on a 2D low friction surface enabled by air bearings. Additional portion of what we are doing is a laser communications and you can see on this next video. Let's see if it's working out. Well, it's switched to the third one. The laser communication and establishing a secure link to communicate the video surveillance, say video of the robot through the laser communications. Very special course as Bill mentioned. It's supported by our colleagues from General Atomics and I was very happy to be able to receive these resources and develop this course. With that I want to wrap up and think of course to my Purdue colleagues, Professor Sergey Maturit and Alina Alexenko, they are the two most related to my plasma field, plasma science and technology field and they are, I would say, supporting me on a daily basis. More general support but also tremendous help from John Sullivan and Stephen Collicott and of course help from Tom Shee initially in my tenure track journey and Van Bill Crossley. With that I'd like to thank you and would be happy to answer your questions. Thank you. I think I get the chance to help moderate questions and answers. Are there any questions from the audience here? Let me ask one first, Alex. It's been a journey to get to this point. What was the thing you thought was going to be hard and was easy and what was something that was easy that you thought, I mean, on the inverse, I think I just said that the wrong way. But we all look back at this and go, I thought this was going to be hard and turned out that was easy and I thought this was going to be easy and this was a little harder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the easiest as coming as an experimentator was, of course, to build a lab and put together all these courses, both lecture and experimental, especially plasma lab. It turned out that it took about a year to get a space and get everything established in a lab and provide electricity and the necessary supplies to the lab. So that took a little bit more time than I thought initially. That's about what was thought easy and turned out to be a little bit harder. Yeah, in terms of what was hard, well, it's been a not very easy process to get funding for the project, especially given that experiment is a little bit delayed due to this development of the lab. And well, I would say that it didn't turn easier when I thought, so it was equivalently hard as I thought, but I was very fortunate to get in this context with industrial colleagues and referring to a previous talk in the real world application that is helping a lot actually to reach out to those folks in industry and learn about actual problems that you can tackle in a lab. So what is your favorite class to teach, Alex? Is it the plasma lab? I think that's going to be my guess. It is really, really hard to answer. I think, yeah, being again an experimentator, it's between a plasma lab and a track set. All right. I don't want to dominate the whole thing. So let's congratulate Alex. Congratulations on your promotion, Alex. Happy to have you here as part of our team. Thank you.


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back everyone to day two of theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. You still have my voice. You still have it, yes. Okay, we'll see how you do tomorrow, but you're still going strong. But I'm really excited about this panel. We have Farrell Howe. She is a GM in IT, service management, asset management, business management. Have I forgotten one? No, I've got it all at ServiceNow. It's this week. Exactly, at ServiceNow. You run the biggest business for ServiceNow. Thanks for joining us, Farrell. Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. So I want to talk about employee experience, which is really, it's just the cornerstone of this conference, but really ServiceNow's purpose. Why has it become so increasingly important in IT today? Okay, well, in IT, really, you saw it today in CJ's keynote, the era of great experiences here. And in IT, we've been really, really great at managing productivity and managing cost and making sure we were running efficiently. And we still do that and do it really well. But now we have to also make sure not just our customers have a great experience, but our employees do too. And companies that do that well have the competitive advantage. It's absolutely required that we're able to do that now. And so, ServiceNow's paving the way for great experiences on our platform for customers and employees. And we're excited to be leading the next era of great experience. So I don't want to minimize the accomplishments that ServiceNow has made because they're phenomenal. All right, I'm happy for you not to minimize them. But I want to say this, you have thrived. I mean, when Fred Lutty developed the platform, you thrived in a sea of mediocrity. And you drove a ship through that sea and just mopped up a lot of business. Awesome, congratulations. And in this world we live in, it's like, now it's becoming table stakes. If you guys have pointed out our home lives, we live with these consumer interfaces. We expect that now. So as a leader of ServiceNow as a largest business, how do you continue to push the innovation lever? We expect now so much more. How do you continue to differentiate because your competition has woken up, the world was waking up? How do you stay ahead? Well, you saw earlier today CJ Talk again and you'll continue to see this theme from us. It is all about the platform. We are a platform company. And when we build and innovate, acquire and then innovate, it is all within the platform. And that is our competitive advantage. So then every application that is in existence today or that we build in the future can take advantage of that innovation natively. It's all integrated and seamless. And there's nobody else out there who is able to do that and to deliver those experiences. And so that is going to continue to be our strategy moving forward. So let's double click on that a little bit. Maybe get some examples.  I think you guys have made some investments in design firms, right? There's machine intelligence, I'll call it, AI. You're infusing AI throughout the platform. Those are just two examples. Maybe talk about those and give us some others if there are them. Sure. Well, you know, in the IT keynote that I'm going to have this afternoon, it's all about the era of great experiences and taking the roles that are in IT. It will be about the Fuffillr, the Requestor, the Planner and the Operator in IT and how we've taken to the road and gone and done user research out with our customers and we're building great experiences in the platform for those roles. No longer is it going to stand for you to just use your best judgment and go and build product and hope everybody will come. You've got to get out there, side by side with your customers, truly understand the work that they're doing and then build that back into the product and iterate again and again and again. And so, you know, that's the direction we're going from a design standpoint to build those experiences. So let's unpack this, this era of great experiences, something that's simple, easy, intuitive. But what are we really talking about here? How do you define a great experience? Yeah, well let's take it from something that we can relate to. We're all requesters of services one way or another, right? And me as an employee, I need services from IT in order to do my job. The thing is that the channels that we have today are not enough. Phone and email aren't going to cut it and a lot of times, if I'm on the carpool line waiting to pick up my daughter and her friends from school, I, you know, and I'm trying to check in on the ticket status for a laptop that I need immediately and I happen to think of it right then. I'm not going to call IT.  I need more channels on more devices, anytime, anywhere at my convenience, not someone else's. And so that's the kind of stuff that we're talking about. We can't, it can't just be good enough anymore. It has to be prolific. I'm interested in how you're using an applying machine intelligence. It seems like you're trying to anticipate my needs, put things in front of me that I might, shorten my search time or might be relevant that I hadn't even thought of. Is that the right way to be thinking about how are you using machine intelligence? And second part of the question is, what are you finding that machines can do better than humans and how do they complement each other? I know a long question. I love this question. That's okay, I love it. Okay, so our initial approach to agent, to machine intelligence, artificial intelligence, all of that is to, you heard CJ say it today, you'll hear micro moments or moments that matter. And we're looking to inject intelligence right there, right there. Those are very, very practical use cases. They're not a panacea. They are not the answer, but they are an answer in a moment that critically matters. And so a perfect example of how that would play out would be my example previously of checking in on my laptop. The virtual agent that we're bringing to the market in our London release is all conversation based. And so I can very quickly see what topics that agent can handle. And I can immediately engage on what that looks like and get the confidence that I need back and forth engaging with the virtual agent in my convenience, wherever I am, whether I'm at work or I'm at home. And so that is a moment that matters for me because it eliminates the mental overhead for me to keep track of the administration of just trying to do my job every day. Now, take the flip side of that, the person who's on the other side of that virtual agent or would have been had that virtual agent not be there. They are not having to answer those kinds of questions. Is my laptop coming? Please just assure me. They're not answering those questions. And so maybe that's not necessarily deflecting an incident, it could be. But it's also reducing the administration that's happening when, and so it's cutting down the time it takes to resolve incidents. And it's reducing friction and frustration between fulfillers and requesters of service. And so that's how we're looking at it in those moments that matter. And then as technology evolves and gets stronger, there may be bigger and larger use cases. And the machine versus human thing, I hate to say it that way, but things the machines are doing, you're seeing categorization obviously as one at scale.  What are the things that increasingly machines are going to do that humans can't do as well? Well, I would say a use case besides maybe the virtual agent and those conversation based topics, which really are just guided flows for conversation. Another thing might be being able to, if there's just so much data that would take me a while or I would need a business analyst to maybe go and look for insights, that's something that machines can do. And that's not replacing humans, that's scaling our ability to act. And so that I think is the next foray to really move into. And we'll start poking in different areas of insights as well in the moments that matter for work getting done in the enterprise as well. Because that is what we're really trying to do is help people get their work done quicker and more easily. And when we talk about employee experience, it's simply that. Please, just let me get my work done. And let me have some choice. I'm going to have a personal tool chain. Don't force me to use service now. Please don't force me to use your messaging client, our Kinect chat. If I want to use Microsoft Teams or Slack, let me do that and let me keep that UI. So when we talk about employee experience, it's a very broad arena there and it's a great partnership between IT and all the other lines of business to deliver what employee experience is going to look like. And you know, Rebecca, we talked about this yesterday. John Donahoe took on the machine replacing humans and very transparent. The example I would use is search. When I was at IDC, we had a big library, had like three or four librarians. They're not there anymore. But nobody is saying, oh wow, search. Search is a machine. It made our lives better. It created new opportunities. I think that's a good example, a small one, but one where I'm an optimist, even though things are getting more complex. Me too. I'm absolutely an optimist on that. And so for example, with our virtual agent, go do a search on LinkedIn and you will find, for conversation designer, there are new jobs being created to be able to support this kind of technology.  So speaking of jobs, you have been a very successful leader in a high growth organization. I think on your Twitter it says, I'm on a rocket ship ride of a lifetime. I am. So I'm here to tell you. So I'd love to hear what your advice is for other leaders who are trying to affect transformational change in their IT organizations. All right. You know, I think whether it's personal change for yourself, you're trying to evolve or you need to evolve your organization, the first thing you need to do is check your assumptions. You know, the older we get and the more, you know, we're barraged by noise. We think we know. Make sure that you're really clear on and have some self-reflection, but also go and check that with people around you and get some clarity around, all right, is this really the reality? What's our reality that we're trying to transform? And when you're talking about transformation, it doesn't necessarily happen overnight. It can happen overnight and that's called disruption. But transformation that you are initiating, give yourself a little bit of breathing room. You got to know that this is a marathon and you cannot be doing it at a sprint pace. You will burn out. So keep your eye on the horizon on what you're trying to accomplish and just get started.  You're going to tack your way through it. It's going to change anyway. Just get started. The rapid iteration we were hearing about is absolutely DevOps and personal digital transformation. You got it. I also want to talk to you about women. I mean, there is a dearth of women leaders in technology. You are one of them. What are you doing personally to promote diversity and inclusion at ServiceNow and then what is the company doing? And finally, what should the tech industry be doing to face this challenge head on? Yeah, you know, my take on it is it's all about belonging and I got that word from Pat Waters. So diversity, inclusion and belonging, that's something that she's championing and we are so fortunate to have her as our Chief Talent Officer. Prior to having that word, I was just really focused on connection. Really engaging just with people and trying to understand where they're coming from and really making sure that you're practicing active listening. That has been the key for my success, I will say throughout my career, is just being able to constantly reflect back what I'm hearing. One, to make sure I didn't put any filters on it, obviously, and then two, people want to feel heard. And so whenever I get into the conversation around women in tech, yes there are some very real facts, fact-based, data-based challenges ahead of us, but where I choose to put my focus is a much broader conversation that includes everyone. And really just focusing a lot more on connection and belonging overall makes a huge difference. What you're saying is really resonating because that's what we keep hearing is happening. What perpetuates the old boys club is that, oh, I know this guy because we went to college together or some other kind of biases that you hold that it's just, oh, he's like me, I want to promote him and bring him along and there are fewer women in positions of power who they can bring up the people that they see or like them. So I think that's another problem too, is that you have to, yeah, that goes back to a really great HR practice, which is you cannot just reach deep into your network every time you get in trouble. Rely on a great HR standard practice that says no.  So when you're going back to, we talked about transformation earlier in this conversation, check your self-awareness. Be clear about, wait a minute, do I really know right now what I need? I'm not sure. Let me broaden my perspective here and HR has been a great partner to be able to do that. So that's a great point because gender and race and sexual preference are part of that diversity and certainly other factors. But like a financial advisor, when the portfolio gets overbalanced in one area, he or she has to rebalance that portfolio and again, it sounds formulaic, but I think, Farrell, your point is, what you're looking for is to open up that network to a wider audience and not just a good old boys network. That's the key. You know, I have a little bit of a bias here. You know, my background, I'm an English major and I'm running a large business for service now and we need more English. We need to open the diversity up to English to liberal arts background. I don't want kids these days to think that if they pick one path, they're stuck in that path and they're locked into certain jobs, it's not true.  Now listen, you're not going to go put me on the platform, although I probably could. Go in and start coding. You're not going to rely on me to do that right away. I could learn it. But allowing us to, allowing yourself to start to believe that, hey, wait a minute, the labels that I've grown up with and put on people, maybe I can remove a couple. And I love it when I'm surprised and are able to bring an employee onto my team that I'm like, yeah, doesn't necessarily make sense on paper, but look at you, you're amazing. Well, one of the things that supports that is digital. For years, if you were in the financial services business or the manufacturing business or the automotive business, you were there for life. But if you have digital skills, you can traverse now much more easily. So kids today have just phenomenal opportunities. I know, I know, it's great. I think it's so cool. And I love making, I love opening up tech a bit more to make it more accessible, that more appealing, that there are so many different roads to come in. And it's important that we get people who think differently, creative people, people who are good strong communicators, who can bring clarity to a situation. We need all of that. And that to me is the first step for diversity. And because that's the stuff that robots aren't very good at, is the empathy, the creativity, that kind of broad thinking. That's right, yeah. Awesome, way to bring it home. Yeah, right. We've come full circle. Yes. Farrell, thanks so much for coming on the program. What a fun and enlightening conversation. Oh my gosh, super fun. I really appreciate it. And you're speaking today at 1.30, good luck with that. Yes, and by the way, we have a diversity inclusion and belonging lunch with Pat Waters and CJ Desai, which will be at, I think, 12.30 as well. Great plug, excellent. Thank you so much again. Okay, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18, hashtag No18 just after this.