 Good morning, everyone. How are you all this morning? So my name is Elisa Valentin, and I am the communications justice fellow at Public Knowledge. And I am proud to say that I have led and organized this year's emerging tech for social change event alongside my wonderful colleagues at Public Knowledge. I'm so thrilled that you all could join us here today in person as well as online and we're streaming live right now, so if you guys can't stay the whole day, you can always watch it online. And I want to begin by thanking Congressman Mark Tocano. We are here today because of his leadership on these issues. And I also want to thank his wonderful, hardworking staffers, including Emily Paul, who worked with us, and she serves currently as his tech congress fellow. I also want to thank our very generous sponsors, Google, as well as the Internet Association for making this event possible today on the Hill, as well as our reception and showcase tonight at the Google DC office. And because I don't want to make any assumptions about what people know or who people know, I want to begin by telling you all a little bit about Public Knowledge and the history of this event. Public Knowledge is a consumer advocacy organization here in DC, and we work to promote freedom of expression and open internet and access to affordable communications tools and creative works. We work to shape policy on behalf of the public interests. Some of you probably remember when this event was branded as 3D DC, which was an event similar to this, except it focused specifically on the wonders of 3D printing. In 2018, this event was rebranded as Emerging Tech DC, so we can include policy discussions about the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, as well as virtual reality. And now in 2019, we have Emerging Tech for social change. And as I stated earlier, I had a little something to do with this in my role as a communications justice fellow. No matter what issues we focus on at Public Knowledge, whether that's about expanding broadband access, intellectual property, platform competition, artificial intelligence or data privacy, it is my job to approach these issues from a social justice perspective. And it's a pretty amazing and impactful role, but I also feel as though it's my responsibility, not only to myself, but to people who look like me who came before me, as well as people who look like me who will be here long after me. I believe technology can be used for social change, and I believe there must be regulations in place to ensure that change is something that's positive and beneficial, especially for our most marginalized communities. We haven't always made the right decisions in the tech space, and we've suffered serious repercussions because of it, hashtag privacy, but we can't give up in the fight for equity in this space. And I'll tell you right now that I'm not going to give up. I'm a Valentin, I'm a Black Latina from Tifton, Georgia, I went to Howard, so it's just not in my DNA to give up. So I hope that everyone in this room fights alongside me and our esteemed panelists and our showcase participants as we work to center voices at the margins, uplift people who have been held down for far too long, and empower communities that have been disempowered. And I want to be clear, I don't think we're always going to get things right when it comes to tech, but we sure can make a concerted effort to do so. And we must ensure that those who have been most oppressed in society are the same people who lead the conversations about equity and justice in tech. And with that being said, welcome to Emerging Tech for Social Change. So before we move on, I have a couple of housekeeping items. So if you want to access today's schedule of events, please use the QR code, we haven't listed in the back, sorry, and we also have it on our Eventbrite page as well, we're trying to go green today, you all. We will break for lunch at 1240, so you can head over to the cafeteria here, or if you feel like making the trek to Rayburn to get and pizza, you can do that as well, but it might take you a while to get back in. But just make sure that you're back here at 140. After we conclude here today, we would like to invite you to our showcase and reception at Google DC, which is located at 25 Massachusetts Avenue. It's about a 15-minute walk from here, depending on how fast you walk, but if you don't want to walk and it's hot by that time, you can always take a ride here or a cab. And if you have any questions, you can talk to one of the PK sappers here. Can the PK folks raise their hands so people know that they can ask questions too? All right, so we have these folks, I think we have some folks outside as well. And lastly, be sure to use hashtag tech for change for all of your tweets and social media posts. We encourage you to take photos and hear your thoughts about today's event. And we really want you all to stay engaged online, especially if you're a watcher online. All right, so I think we're going to go ahead and invite our panelists up here for our first panel, because we're waiting for Conor to get here, and he, never mind, I think they're walking in. But the panelists can go ahead, if you guys want to go ahead and sit up here and Megan, where's Megan at? You go ahead, Megan. Or we can be settled. As I said before, Congressman Mark Tacano sponsored this event for us, and he's the reason that we're here. And again, thank you to Emily Paul for all of her hard work. Congressman Mark Tacano represents California's 41st Congressional District. Congressman Tacano serves as the co-chair of the Congressional Major Caucus, and he is a huge fan of 3D printing and how it can change and impact manufacturing, as well as entrepreneurship. And we are thrilled to have a representative here who leads in that space. And beyond his work in tech, we are thrilled to have a member of Congress who understands and advocates for marginalized communities in all spaces, because that's what the conversations here are about here today. Without further ado, please welcome Congressman Mark Tacano to the stage. Well, good morning, everybody. Well, I'm Congressman Mark Tacano. I represent the 41st Congressional District in California, and I'd like to start by commending public knowledge for bringing together a diverse group of people to talk about emerging technology here in the capital today. And as one of the co-chairs of the Congressional Major Caucus and an advocate in Congress for sharing the benefits of new technologies, I am excited, really excited to be here to help kick off the emerging tech for social change event today. Now, there's been a lot of talk in Congress and, rightfully so, about the harms of technology, whether it's the violations of people's privacy to misinformation and the spread of hate online, hate speech. These are important and necessary discussions, but they aren't the full story of what Congress is doing on technology. And that's why it's so refreshing to have an event like this that focus not only on how to address potential harms of technology, but also on the ways that technology can contribute to our well-being as individuals and well-being as a society. Now, most advances in technology are not inherently harmful or beneficial. But what we see happen is that the decisions on how to use these new technologies are made by a small and privileged group of people. And because of this, the potential for innovations to discriminate and exclude can be overlooked. And that's why I'm happy to see today's event focused on the ways technology affects the ways in which technology affects and can benefit communities I am a part of and care deeply about. People of color, LGBTQ people, veterans, people with disabilities, and the working class. These communities are an amazing source of creativity and innovation, but they're not always given a seat and a table when decisions are made about how the technologies should be used. And that needs to change. They need to be in the room where it happens. Today, you'll be hearing about emerging technology, including virtual reality, and you'll be having important discussions about how we can promote inclusive uses of these technologies. Before that, I want to share a few applications of emerging technology that I find exciting. The first is related to the use of virtual reality, otherwise known as VR. I work closely with many of our veterans in my district, Riverside, as well as veterans living across our country and around the world. One inspiring effort that shows the benefits of emerging technology is the use of virtual reality to help veterans dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. Over 20 years ago, researchers at Georgia Tech first tried using virtual reality to help treat PTSD. Since then, virtual reality has been used in numerous PTSD studies and is currently in use at several of our VA facilities. I've actually visited one not far from here. It's interesting to just walk through this virtual reality or not walking through it, but your virtual reality is sort of happening around you. It is new technology and a group of people with an in-depth understanding of an issue affecting the community. They were able to apply this VR technology to really make a difference. Another version of technology I'm interested in is through you printing, as you've heard before, and many of you know that we actually have a P.D. printer right in my congressional office. There's a bust of me that somebody sent me the program somewhere online. The online program that you can actually just print out the computer bust of me. We keep it on this shelf but sometimes we use that shelf as a backdrop to do videos, but we are always careful to take it down to the side because there are online viewers out there, many of them don't like me that much. I'm sure they'll key in on like does this guy have a bust of himself? But it's a discussion piece where he's like, what is that? It's actually to see me going. There's a maker space in my own district called Vocatomy. I've been excited about the ways in which 3D printing and the maker movement more broadly empower a diverse group of people to use their creativity to be active participants in the innovation of the communities. And Gene, who owns Vocatomy, Gene Sherman, he had visions of helping engineering students gain the practical machining skills that they don't get when they go to engineering school. They learn highly theoretical stuff. What was interesting to him, what was interesting to me is that what people come into his maker space do is they make costumes for Comic-Con and very elaborate costumes. Everything from the plastic molded helmets to the very fine leather work, a futuristic sci-fi designs that you might see in the movie set. That's what a lot of people were using his maker space to produce. Just last week, I was at a VA facility in Seattle and saw how they're using 3D printers to print actual medical devices like custom orthotics for people with diabetes. I'd seen a lot of work that the VA had done with printing prosthetics. This orthotics was a very web-like material. Very flexible. Many of you might know that diabetes is one of the largest causes for people to lose their limbs at their ceremonies. These were products that were designed to help ease some of the stress of the sores on their feet. It made out it was very flexible material. 3D printing allows for a lot of customization. And so when someone's device or someone's orthotic breaks down on wears now, the VA can just reprint it and ship it to them, saving a lot of money. And actually, it's a product that is generally available. Using these emerging technologies for social good isn't just about healthcare. It's also about creativity and expression. As a former public school teacher, I see the potential for the making a movement to empower students to design and build things themselves. Not just students. All sorts of people in the economy. I've been trying to get my friend for years, who was left behind by the last recession and never really got back on his feet, just to go and tinker around in a maker space. Because the very non-threatening places where you're not great at all things, you can just go and tinker around and learn how to do things and learn how these new technologies work. So I see the potential for the making a movement to empower everybody to build things for themselves. This to me is a crucial part of the effort to ensure that everyone is able to access the tools they need to create and innovate and help shape how we use new technologies in an equitable way. By involving diverse voices in the design of new technologies, we can move closer to realizing the full potential of emerging technologies to benefit all of us. Well, thank you all for being here today and being involved in this discussion and good luck today. Thank you. Alright, I'm going to introduce our first panel for today. We have Megan Stiefel here. Stiefel, not Seifel, if you all. Megan is currently the Senior Policy Council at the Global Cyber Alliance. And so very recently, I think like in the last two weeks or so, she was a Cyber Security Policy Director. Previously, Megan spent eight years at the Department of Justice and there she was the director for Cyber Policy in the National Security Division, served as Council in a Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the Criminal Division and began her DOJ career as an attorney in the Office of Intelligence. We are thrilled to have Megan here to join us as she moderates our first panel of the morning, Emerging Privacy and Security Threats in Consumer IoT, Protecting Consumers to Drive Social Fame. Thank you, Elisa, did I get close enough but not too close. Good morning everybody. Thanks everyone for coming. Thank you Elisa and the team at PK for putting this event together. I think it is incredibly timely and I'm delighted to have the opportunity to participate. So our plan for this morning is hopefully not to scare you away from all of the great things that Congressman Takano just talked about with emerging technologies like 3D printers and the like, but to help inform the conversation as we think about how all of these technologies can enhance our lives. And I think most of us on the panel would agree that it starts with security and privacy. So our goal is to help inform the conversation about how we can best address those challenges and interests as we develop additional emerging tech for change. So we're going to quickly introduce ourselves and then we'll move into some questions. We save time at the end for questions, but if there's something that's burning, perhaps we can stand up and I think we have a mic if there are questions. So we'll talk for about 40 minutes or so and then look forward to talking with all of you about some questions. So I'll turn it into Dr. Eswick first. Good morning. Thank you PK for the invitation. So I'm currently the director of the National Cyber Security Institute at Excelsior College. Excelsior College is an online educational institution catering to adult learners. I'm also the director for their cybersecurity program and also I come from really a background of 20 years being an intelligence community. I spent eight years serving in the United States Army and what we call information security. It was in cybersecurity back then. Intelli communications and then 17 years, about 17 years at the National Security Agency where I held a multitude of technical positions from computer science researcher to before I left there in 2016, technical director in their NSA cybersecurity threat operations center. So thank you for having me. Hi, good morning. My name's Adam Saju. I'm a policy advisor at the National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST. NIST is part of the Department of Commerce. We're the Department of Commerce for actually a national laboratory program but unlike a lot of the other national laboratories, our focus is all on industry teams. We're also a measurement agency so everything we do is focused on, that's where the standards come in that everything we do is supposed to be focused on measurements. We do things like maintain the atomic clock that synchronizes all of your cell phones and all of your computers. On cybersecurity we develop standards and guidelines for information systems. So we really help the federal government but also help industry on how do you use technology, old technology and emerging technology. Hello, I'm Harley Geiger and I'm Director of Public Policy at Rapid 7. Rapid 7 is a cybersecurity firm based out of Boston. We've got about 1,300 employees and about 7,800 customers. We sell a variety of cybersecurity software tools as well as services so we will hack you for money. We also sometimes hack you not for money and tell you what your vulnerabilities are. We do a fair amount of independent research including on IoT and work with manufacturers to try to catch them. Okay, so I just wanted to give everyone a background very briefly about the work that public knowledge has done on cybersecurity as Lisa mentioned, up until recently I was the cybersecurity policy director there. Our work was supported by a generous grant from the Gila Foundation. Unfortunately they changed their approach and so I'm staying in the neighborhood but not exactly in the same place as public knowledge. So what we really tried to do was to think about how cybersecurity, better ways to talk about cybersecurity with consumers in particular obviously that includes the business space. So last spring we published a paper entitled Securing the Modern Economy, Transforming Cybersecurity through Sustainability. And essentially the argument of the paper is the Internet is an ecosystem, all elements of the ecosystem play a role in protecting it and advancing and securing it and using it. And at the end of the paper we outlined a series of steps that a number of stakeholder groups could take to best secure themselves and contribute to a more sustainable Internet ecosystem. Following on that work earlier this year we published a paper that advocated for something that is like the Energy Star for cybersecurity entitled security shield and thanks to Dylan who's in the back and others in PK for their great work on both of those efforts. And the idea around Energy Star and security shield is to think about ways to communicate to consumers how they can participate in IoT product consumer facing IoT product that has been built in the most secure manner possible and can be deployed in the most secure manner possible. We won't spend too much time today talking about that. I don't think but we're happy to instead I think what we should begin with first is to say to kind of set the table what are Internet of Things things. How do they differ from other security threats that we've talked about for a long time. We all had desktops and then we had laptops and now we have processors on our phones that could are stronger than what a million tell us about what we had back when we said the first person to the moon. How do we manage these new fully capable devices in our lives and how is how different than what we had 10, 20, 50 years ago I think of course but so yeah so Internet of Things you know we hear that term thrown around a lot right and basically is IoT looking at devices that are connected via wirelessly or cable to the internet right and things that can be controlled sometimes remotely so I like to tell people all the time on a high level right. Internet of Things it's just smart watch right it's the folks have wireless cameras now around their homes it's the thermostat that you want that also to control from your phone. We want the convenience to control everything by our phone right and it's become so pervasive in our society that I ran across the status that by 2020 meanwhile I think I saw the stats out a year ago so 2020 is next year right so by 2020 right world population is supposed to be like million people but IoT devices will be at 36 or 36 billion right so that's four devices per every you know human on earth basically and I don't know about all of you but I know I have more for it more than four devices by myself right I think we all can probably speak to that so it's one of these things that we definitely of course have to think about we have to develop policies around and try to figure out how can we best mitigate cyberattacks based IoT. Strategic differences between where we are not where we are just a couple of other thoughts on the definition of IoT what we can see of it and I think it's one of the challenges that you run into if you're looking at making policy around IoT and how to define it because in any sort of legislation you have to define things very clearly because it's all going to end up into work and every word will be scrutinized right and when we think of as IoT like the physical objects that are connected to a network of some kind of electrical network as a CPU in memory actually encompasses a huge range of devices your printer is IoT right under that definition your laptop your car tank is IoT and so just from the outset the definition is difficult second is that a lot of things that we can see of as IoT are actually an ecosystem of technology so most IoT people think of it as just the device but it's not right there is also a network that it is transmitting information to there is also the cloud of storage that many of the devices are uploading data to there is the mobile app that you can manage and control your device and there are vulnerabilities at each stage of every stage of that process so it's not just a piece of hardware that we're looking at it is really an ecosystem and why some folks cast doubt on this concept of IoT security like is there really the internet of things or is it just computer security? Yes I think that's right and coming from this where everything likes to be defined and standardized that's sort of what we do we get this question a lot about what does IoT mean and is there a definition especially when in other areas when there was a bit of a gap this did come in which brought a definition so cloud computing is an example when that term came out people wasn't really sure what it meant for some people said well I already have a server that has a lot of data on it does that mean I have cloud computing so in that instance it was somewhere where we came in and put out a notional definition that ended up being one that everyone likes and is now used throughout the world and on IoT we haven't done that instead we sort of refer to existing definitions of that particular use case because I think building off what Harley said I think one of the challenges we have here is there are good ways to look at it both horizontally and vertically and what I mean by that is what are the attributes of generic IoT devices where as Harley said computer security what are we thinking about particularly when people that are building products don't necessarily want to build a product and say okay here's how it would be used in the financial sector in this use case and here's how it would be used in the healthcare sector and that would be the vertical because is it appropriate to look at IoT from that broad horizontal which is what are the generic properties when in some instances I might want to have different security protocols on the security camera in my son's room versus my heart monitor or my car makes sense that you might want to think about those differently so those are some of the challenges and how we address this and how we think about IoT as a broader set of policies. Thanks I think another thing to think about is we went from not every home having a large desktop computer to now more than four devices per home so one of the ways we think about this is the so-called attack services increased exponentially and so in order for us to gain the benefits that we've heard about today we need to be able to secure those devices to ensure that we continue to trust in those devices so there was a large attack that people have said is sort of what prompted what we're about to talk about next a little bit but I don't want to bore you with the details we have enough fear uncertainty in doubt you can open the newspaper and read about whichever company was most recently the victim of malicious or malign cyber activity so what's being done about this exponentially increasing attack surface there are lots of things that are being done I thought it would be useful for us to frame the conversation a little bit about around what the executive branch is doing and I'm going to turn to Adam first to talk about what's being done under an executive order that was issued in 2017 which is if you're writing this down it's EO13800 it was the most recent executive order in a series of executive orders another one that Adam may or may not talk about is EO13636 students in the room watching online taking notes these are little guide points to help you so I think we'll begin with that and then kind of branch out from there and maybe get into some of the details about what this executive order did and maybe you can talk a little bit about what came before it but I didn't tell you about that before and so put you on spot I'm happy to bore you with some of the details on these things so looking back on how some of these policies have been developed and are being developed, just a bit about my background is that I actually worked in the Senate from the Human Security and Male Affairs Committee from 2001 all into 2010 so I actually saw this become sort of a topic that cyber security or information security as a topic that wasn't of interest to many of the members they thought it was this kind of weird adult topic to something that you know we have is debated every day multiple bills mentioned in addresses by presidents and one of the transitions that I witnessed there and I think how it became really of interest to policy makers and this is just cyber security generically was the conversation or uncritical infrastructure and the idea that this greater connectivity of things that were designed without concepts of it being connected to this global information network all of a sudden were being connected and what does that mean what was the impact of that so the scenarios of electric grid being subject to remote attack became something that really made members of Congress sit up straight and say well this is really something you can do something about and Megan mentioned Executive Order 13636 I mean the focus there was largely on this conversation of critical infrastructure but I think if you look increasingly at the policies that came after that we sort of moved from critical infrastructure to just bronze out bit by bit more and more and you had the Sony attack where people had to ask themselves well that's not really critical infrastructure is it but that's something that feels pretty important to us as a country and then increasingly you had attacks on these major cyber security companies that impacted consumers so really if you just look at the set of policies coming out of the Obama administration now into the Trump administration it's sort of reflecting that this is something that's just segmented just to critical infrastructure just to businesses really has the broader consumer interest in mind and that's really where we get at IOT which does impact enterprises and governments but it also has this direct impact on the consumer in a way that these other ones didn't because you have to work directly with consumers instead of just working with electric providers or big financial companies and so one of the reasons why we talk about the ecosystem so much is that it's an increased realization that you just can't work with one node but with one part of this much bigger system how that manifests itself in policy and the executive orders that Megan mentioned was Executive Order 1300 asked for a report that we call the botnet report yeah I'm getting there but also was about what they call automated distributed attacks and so people also refer to botnets almost as zombie computers so big networks of computing power that are then used for various purposes and the particular incident that Megan was talking about was something called the Mariah Botnet which really did harness a lot of consumer security cameras to have something with a lot of compute power which can be used for denial of service which means that you would be preventing people from getting on the internet or for other purposes the reason why I think that's a good example for this IOT device for this IOT conversations it's really at the nature of the problem does a consumer necessarily care if their perfectly well functioning security camera is being part of a botnet when it doesn't impact how the security camera is to them from their perspective the security camera is working just fine they're getting the information they need so maybe it's doing this other stuff on the side I don't have anything to do with that and then as the consumer if he goes in the store and says would they necessarily be willing to pay more money for a security camera it wouldn't be subject to that bot if it again is delivering them the service they need if it serves that function I mean these are some of the really challenging questions that we have to ask ourselves when we were trying to solve this problem what the executive order did was it tasked departments of commerce and department of Homeland Security to work with stakeholders to develop a plan realizing that there are a lot of different dependencies here and just focusing on individual devices might not be the most effective solution and also looking back taking some recommendations from an independent commission that came at the entity Obama administration and looking at why hasn't the federal government working with industry been able to make progress on these issues in the past and the conclusion was sort of a lack of sustained effort right you sort of started and stopped and thought about it and then you moved on to a problem without trying to really commit understanding that it's not just one organization or one set of companies moving it really requires people to act in a coordinated fashion and the reason why I say that is because when we talk about IOT there tends to be a lot of focus on the security of the individual devices right how do I make those security cameras more secure how do I make my phones more secure really what we're trying to do in the botnet report and with these other efforts is try to address it at multiple levels understanding that there are some dependencies there and then there are some additional vulnerabilities so an example of that would be I'll use the security camera example again if you did make the extra money if you paid the extra amount of money if you did get a device that you understood the greater security and then you took it home and asked you to create a login and password and you decided to make your login login and your password password then you have undermined a lot of the security settings of the devices so we're trying to think about it not just from the individual devices but also consumer educations and they understood what to do what additional resources they might have and also at the network level understanding that we already have a lot of these devices out there a lot of them aren't going to have good security capabilities what are the other things that we can do better understand what's happening across the network to try to make the entire ecosystem a lot more secure so that work under the executive order led us to draft a report the reports been out for a little over a year now I think okay one of the things that we changed and we tend to do these things through an open transparent process where we try to make sure that everyone has the same information we have as we're making these conclusions so we do it through workshops we do it through public submissions so that people are curious how individual organizations what they look like and what we did with them they can sort of look over our shoulder make sure we did that in a fair and equitable way and one of the things we did at the end of the report is not just which really looks at it in different arenas and also gives out sort of different homework assignments to different parts of industry things that we should do things that they should do things that other departments and agencies should do and then one of the last things we did as we moved the document from draft to final we also gave ourselves a requirement to sort of check in after a year understanding some of the conclusions of the commission where you know the government seems to be starting these things and then stopping so in some ways again we're grading our own homework to a certain extent but we will be coming out with a report in October to show how much progress has been made over the course of a year in implementing that report and then trying to figure out what we need to adjust to be different. Thank you. So there was a report and then there was a roadmap that followed I think that was published near the end of November of last year and it had basically five lines of effort enterprises and so I think as we get into this conversation it'll be helpful for us to we're talking in our language making sure that we talk about in everyone's language what's an enterprise it can be it's the dot gov mail.house.gov network that we're sitting in under which we're probably sitting although it's probably also in a cloud it's in hopefully lots of different places so there's redundancy infrastructure we talked a little bit about critical infrastructure the power companies and other things and it can also be infrastructure such as ISPs those who operate the backbone. Tech development and transition we probably won't spend too much time talking about that but among other things we're talking about research that the government can do for its own purposes that then could be transitioned out to the private sector and then education and awareness so I think it's it'll be helpful for us to spend a little bit of time talking about what is being done in the roadmap space and how that can specifically impact social change and marginalized communities and I think one another way to think about this is we have this IoT we have this IoT camera baby camera security camera it might be a 3D printer in other cases these devices are deployed I have some in my house please don't hack them but they are all over the place they are I think most prominently in small and medium sized businesses and so Dr. Isocouise had our prep call we talked a little about small and medium sized businesses and micro businesses and I think it would be helpful for us to kind of frame our minds today around particularly as a result of IoT deployment how these devices impact communities particularly marginalized communities and maybe you can give a little more example or drill a little bit down on what might an enterprise be to those who are not you know it's not mail.house.co but maybe it's small businesses down the street right right so it's really that corporate infrastructure right that we talked about so when we talk about if they are connected to a larger organization absolutely and that organization is its own entity as well so absolutely so I think so it's been interesting for me the past three years that I've been in this higher ed educational training awareness space I've had quite a bit of folks reaching out to me especially small and medium sized businesses and micro businesses which are subset to small businesses right and you know when you think of small business and you think of micro businesses right we live in this gig economy I think we've heard that term quite a bit right where folks got multiple jobs and they're probably interacting with businesses that are small businesses or they're micro businesses micro businesses are tend to be an organization a business that has less than five employees right and that one employees probably owner itself and four additional employees right and their start up so to speak money's tend to be low capital right and they also have traditionally low revenues well not low but about 250,000 in revenue that they bring in so but they are the backbone right of our society if we think about everything from the food trucks outside right to you know our local shops around our communities to many of the small businesses and micro businesses so I'm just I'm a computer science person so sorry math is my background I love bringing in stats so just reading this this is just a 2016 small business credit survey and it talked about 89% of the small businesses are actually micro businesses believe it or not so the median age of typically for micro businesses are 46 to 55 years old so already right there we're dealing with a little bit of a gap right when we talk about technology when folks talk about technological natives versus those who are from the that persuasion right who are technically not natives right to of course the millennials right which are considered technological natives right and then percent of these firms are also minority owned 3% are actually a micro businesses on minority owned so when you talk about cyber threats and you talk about IOT you talk about devices many of these micro businesses and small businesses because they are a part of supply chain right of these many of these companies their independent contractors consultants you know consultants so forth they are using technology very quickly so they adopting technology without understanding probably the side security impacts noting that unfortunately if they are hit with a bread right they compromise in some way that could be detrimental to their company completely wipe them out so there's been just a lot of momentum behind assistant organizations and businesses that are kind of at the backbone of our society but unfortunately are not equipped with the infrastructure and resources right to identify and mitigate any of the cyber threats so it's been something reached out by a lot of startups saying help me I got this great app I got this great service a great product but I don't understand the side security implications and I need help with that so yes definitely early I don't feel like you're in the conversation enough so feel free to chime in but otherwise I'll quickly turn to Adam and maybe it's a good point to talk about so again we're talking about some of the challenges what are we doing about how are we addressing these challenges on the roadmap there we mentioned the five elements I think it's also useful for perhaps Adam to talk a little bit about the privacy implications and how this is helping developing tools to help everyone in the ecosystem but primarily through a trigger land effect primarily industry and the government to think about the privacy implications of deploy technologies but before we get to the privacy implications we talked briefly about the CS13636 which spawned the cyber security framework so maybe you can touch on that and then talk a little bit about the intersection of CSF and the privacy framework is it so one of the things I'm hoping you can maybe speak to is how I mentioned the trigger land effect so if you're a small company and you're like I see lots of references to ISO standards and things and that's not my game how micro businesses see the effects of that or how could they perhaps ask of their people you're pretty good with but if you're going with your local cloud backup storage guys how can you better position yourself sure okay it's a lot I'll take a bit by bit so yeah so back in so just a bit about NIST and we're 100 year organizations so I won't go too far back but you know historically how we worked was developing standards and guidelines for federal information systems right and that means that that means for if you're working department of Treasury you work department of state and you are using a technology and you're not sure how to configure or use it you have to turn to NIST and this will help you provide that guy and a lot of that was developed so that or that method and the broader way in which NIST has worked in the standard space is sort of to solve this problem of how does the government effectively use technology and how do we stop building our own stuff so for example I think it was only a year or two ago that the Department of Defense stops building their own folks right so you go out you write a spec and you say this is why I want my phone to work with the security capabilities and that historically creates real challenges because of course that requires the Department of Defense or whatever government agency to keep on going out with procurements and requests when and if industry is moving faster than that wouldn't it be easier just for the federal government just to get a phone from Apple and if they're additional or Samsung or whoever and if they're additional security capabilities that they need make sure that it's configured in that way so that's sort of at the heart of what we have done and one of it is to prevent the you know it's very similar approach in other areas to prevent things like $250 custom DOD ashtray and the reason why we've been effective in that space is because the federal government used to spend is still the largest procure of information technology in the world we spend about $90 billion and so if you want to sell to the federal government you want to work with NIST because you want to make sure that you're able to believe your product is being reflected in that but increasingly these as more people use technology the people that make the technologies might not care about selling to the federal government when they can make sufficient money just selling to consumers and they might not want to go through those additional hoops and so we've thought about our approach a lot differently because also the needs of how the federal government uses technology is increasingly pretty similar to just companies use technology. It used to be the people would go and try to get jobs from the federal government because they got to use cool technology. I don't think anyone's saying that nowadays you know we get to use MacBooks and we always are looked at jealously by our colleagues in other departments and agencies because their technology folks haven't figured out how to do that in a secure way and so part of our work this is a long build up in the biggest part of where we're at but part of where this took us a few years ago was something that was called the cybersecurity framework and this was really focused on industries needs particularly critical infrastructure and what policy makers were really struggling with was the idea that there were a ton of best practices out there there were a ton of standards and guidelines out there and they couldn't figure out why organizations just weren't using them and so instead of choosing an approach where we just said well we're just going to require everyone to use them we actually had a dialogue to try to understand where some of the gaps were or some of the challenges were and figure out how to work better with them to address those challenges and in cybersecurity it really did seem to break down to some challenges with communication and also some breaks between different sectors and how they communicate cybersecurity risk which became an increasing problem as technology exploded and more people were relying on more technology so it used to be that industry might have come to us and said you guys are the government you're the private sector we move faster than you are we feel pretty good about what we do we don't really need your help but even five years ago instead they were coming us to say hey we're pretty confident in what we do we hire really good people but I'm dependent on the telecommunications industry on the internet I'm dependent on the energy industry for my power I'm dependent on all these different sectors and different organizations and I don't know what the heck they were doing I don't know how to help them to improve their game and so where the framework came out was really a tool to help people communicate what they were doing in cybersecurity both within their organization and externally and try to go up to the highest level it's just a simple communications tool and then provide a guide to more detail and implementation guidance so that if you were having a conversation about cybersecurity from the CEO level you could say follow the cybersecurity framework which are words like identify, detect protect, respond and recover and you could say I don't need to know how we're doing it but under identify do we know where our risks are do we know where vulnerabilities are under detect do we understand when there is an incident when a bad thing is happening protect are we using technology to make sure that we're protected and then respond and recover understanding that there will be incidents that there will be in case it might be as simple as someone leaving their laptop on the train do we have the right processes to make sure that we're getting back on and recover which is not just the immediate crisis but longer term how do we make sure that we're operating better and delivering services in the way we're intended to and so that's where the cybersecurity framework came out it's been I think used very widely through industry beyond what we never expected and not just by critical infrastructure companies tech companies, financial firms a lot of regulators have referred to it so a lot of companies use it that way and we also see it internationally because other governments are grappling with the same problems and they said well this seemed like a pretty effective approach so it's not just used here in the US it's used in Israel framework and the cybersecurity framework may become something like a standard of care that might invite the FTC to the table and whether not to put you on too many questions to you but what do we think I think one thing that we've spoken about it PK's been active in talking about is whether the FTC has enough authority and resources to do the work that it has and then whether perhaps that needs to expand I'm not asking you to buy on that but give us in this review please. So NIST does terrific work it's extremely accurate it's very very useful and it's necessary work I don't know how many folks in the room have actually looked through the NIST cybersecurity framework quick show of hands anybody a few people okay so you know that it's 60 plus pages right there's 120 or so different controls that are listed in the framework tied to you know plethora of standards that themselves can run into well over 100 pages for large companies you know large enterprises and these are the types of folks that I think have the resources to spend to go through all of that and the framework itself also doesn't say here are the things that you must do it is here are the things that you must consider and try to decide which of these are right for your organization and just kind of right size it and stay flexible it's not it's not a checklist it's actually what you want from their work it's always more difficult than that I hope that it is being taken up by by micro businesses by consumers to manage their own cybersecurity by companies that are you know that are outside of the United States in particular IoT manufacturers that are using commercial off the shelf commodity products to build their IoT devices before shipping them out but I have serious doubts that those types of parties are in fact using the NIST cybersecurity framework and sitting inside the NIST cybersecurity framework consider also that there are dozens and dozens if not hundreds of IoT security best practices out there for manufacturers and operators for companies that are integrating it into their environments as well as for consumers I interned at the Federal Trade Commission in 2008 and you know well over 10 years ago and they had a long running consumer education campaign about security as well as a long running campaign on small business security these issues on a voluntary basis alone I think we are starting to see that it is not working and it's not working particularly at the low end of the market right you can expect better security in general in general from name brands from sophisticated devices nothing will be completely secure you will find a new story that Tesla has security flaws I know but in general they are not going to suffer from a lot of the same basic security flaws that you'll see in consumer products that are at the low end of the market that uses commodity products and there are a lot of those probably the majority of IoT devices are those types of products so what do we do about those if the voluntary best practices are not working if NIST's great work is not being adopted by these parties what do we do and can we call that a market failure and if it is a market failure then what is the role of government from our perspective there are things that government should be doing that are doing to address what we think is a market failure for those types of devices there are several agencies that have put out voluntary guidance about their own like describing how IoT fits within their authority and when I say voluntary in some cases it's kind of been quotes because they are still able to pull recall of your car if your car has a cybersecurity defect that will affect safety so they put out the voluntary guidance but it's sort of like look at the things that you can do but if you don't do them it's whatever we are still going to pull your car that has a safety defect so NIST did this the consumer product safety commission is starting to do this but they did have a recall it was just for something that actually caused a physical harm the FTC is doing this for COPA so COPA is for children's privacy it includes security requirements so they put something out on that great guidance for medical devices pre-markets and forward shifts as well as after markets so once it's actually out in the field but there are a lot of gaps also the federal trade commission that Megan have brought up they do have limited authority to go after poor data security but they don't have original finding authority which means that you get your first buy of the apple almost free if you were if you have poor data security it also of course thrown into question whether or not breach of information alone is enough to trigger that authority or whether there has to be some sort of actual harm so it's like well your nudes got leaked because of poor security on your device it's like well I can't prove that that caused an economic impact to me but it causes extreme embarrassment and it is the sort of thing that people do care about now but if you can't have a measurable financial or economic or physical impact then the ability to actually require the company to change those practices from the FTC's perspective is limited same thing with their civil finding authority so we have urged a couple of things one there's a big privacy debate that's happening now in Congress it is far beyond IOT as it ought to be we think that data security must be a part of that legislation and one of the advantages to putting data security into privacy legislation is that it would be tied to a definition of personal information not a definition of IOT earlier you heard us describing about the difficulty of defining IOT the fact it is bound up to a bunch of other technologies and ecosystem technologies and many of the things that we think of as IOT vulnerabilities are actually not related to the device it's more like you've improperly configured your cloud storage so that would help take care of that we hope that legislation would beef up the FTC's authority to regulate on data security practices without the limitations that I had mentioned before and if they don't I mean if it's not the states are moving in that direction some 24 states do have data security legislation but it varies on the details separately we have said that agencies ought to all look at articulating how IOT fits within their authority their existing areas of jurisdiction there may be like some sort of impulse to say well there just needs to be a new agency that does everything outside of security and that's ridiculous you know we have agencies that have deep domain expertise on things like cars you know things like medical devices and these are parts of their medical devices just because they have internet in them doesn't mean that they're not cars or medical devices anymore and then lastly one of the things that this is doing and we hope that it will be successful is the idea of a label the idea of some sort of transparency consumers do have a role in buying security and maintaining the security of other IOT and having some sort of a label, seal, transparency mechanism whatever you want to call it that lets consumers differentiate their products not just based on cost but also on security features we think will help them fulfill their role and their responsibilities Thanks So one of the things that I didn't spend too much time talking about this but it's discussed in our paper a little bit is in order to have a label you have to have something to qualify as to get a label and so there's a process on our way at NIST to develop a security capabilities baseline that was an element that was concluded in the roadmap that we keep sort of referring back to I think there's a sort of summer late summer maybe sort of draft timing there is legislation that's been proposed by Senator Warner and I'm forgetting who this co-sponsor was Gardner to essentially require the capabilities baseline be developed to enhance federal procurement purposes I didn't get that exactly right what we propose in our paper is that something like that could then be followed on with a label that would attach to products that qualify and meet the capabilities because as Adam I think mentioned the government is the largest procureer of goods at this point and so if there is a sort of a triple up effect if you will the rising tide lifts all boats idea that if the government is procuring products just like energy star that met a certain set of requirements that would help the lift industry and then thereby consumers as well and we won't go too far down the road of that just to note that the things that we're talking about in our hobby debate right now the debate is happening now in Congress so on a transparency label or on government procurement or on a security baseline priority devices and some of the pushback that you're seeing particularly from large traditional business trade associations is that it can't be done it's going to stifle innovation it's impossible we should just move up on a voluntary basis as I've tried to discover I think that voluntary basis has failed particularly for consumers and particularly on low end devices I also think that for the baseline that this is putting together many of the items that will be in that baseline have been in best practices guidance documents for years like we don't need another best practices document or another framework to say that if an IOT device is storing personal information that information ought to be encrypted we don't we've heard for a long time that IOT devices need to have some sort of way to push security updates to the device it's really it's I'm very skeptical of the idea that another set of best practices is actually going to suddenly cause particularly again the manufacturers of low end devices to say oh we should probably include these in here because it's now this new set of best practices even though it's been going around for a long time these are not just best practices for IOT devices they're best practices for computer security in general so we've talked a little bit about what's been going on in the space what's being what are the security threats particularly as it relates to IOT we haven't spent as much time as I think we all intended to speaking directly about how it impacts marginalized communities but there are as Harley and others have said there's ongoing debate there's an opportunity to get involved in the debate I had a follow on question which was how can particularly these communities what advice will we give them to become to get better involved in the conversation but we'll save that in the event that we don't have any audience questions questions from the audience otherwise I'll keep going one quick question the internet of things big things automobiles so cars are the new generation cars we will talk to each other so one car will know another car is coming through very fast and hit the bridge but there's two evolving language that they're talking about should there be a policy to make one language instead of two and second of all how secure do you think it will be that somebody else hit it and talk to everybody's car so I'll try to sort of repeat the question which was secure vehicles are vehicle to vehicle communications are emerging right now in fact BK put a paper out about a year and a half ago or some comments in the process that the FCC was leading how do we there are two different standards for communicating that are emerging should there be a policy that dictates that there should only be one standard and then the question is how secure is this VVV communication anyone want to take that I don't know the answer to that question I mean I can see both sides of it I know on the one hand I'm not sure whether it is the role of government to choose the language that the two cars are speaking I mean that might be something that is better for the market to work out in terms of whether everyone would be able to speak to every car that sounds like a really huge problem but it ought to be adequately addressed before it hits the road not that it wouldn't come with safety benefits but if the risks are severe enough then I think that the technology needs to weigh but I'm sure that that's being looked at and addressed one thing that I know that is attended to that problem is the idea of spoofing we'll fix the problem by just making it so that we're sure that the cars are only talking to other cars and the other cars will have some sort of an ID number or something like that that ID can be spoofed and that actor can say well I'm actually that car over there and so forth so it's a real problem I don't think that there's necessarily a new law regulation that needs to be put into place because we already have anti-hacking laws and vehicle safety laws that I think would cover those scenarios so I guess we'll see one of the questions too is whether the incentives back to this question about what will it take for vehicle manufacturers to ensure that they've done everything they can before they put the vehicle on the road so Adam, did you have something to say? No I do but that wasn't the way that's what I was saying, I wasn't saying I don't know enough about the competing standards but sometimes these things are sorted out through international standards bodies and another role of NIST is to make sure that US participation in those standards bodies is coordinated and departments agencies know what their role are, we participate a lot in those international standards bodies as well and I think that's also an important question here overall we've talked a lot about what the US is doing but given that this is a global market that's being made overseas, what is the rest of the world doing and how can we have an impact on products that might be outside the scope of our regulatory reach are also big questions that we think about so we do look at what's happening in the international standard space quite a bit, we actually put out a report last year that tried to do a high level analysis of where some of the gaps are I think the communications means of communications is an important topic here and I think it's a good IOT example overall because you're going to have the cars communicating not just with other cars they might be communicating with things on the highway there might be a law enforcement component of that as well we are seeing some of the impact of data localization laws back to this question of privacy, if you're looking at the old model and you're concerned about where data might be going and you're trying to set requirements to empower the consumer to decide what you're doing what something you own is doing with the data you can start thinking about use cases with automobiles maybe in one country you're driving in another country and the data is trying to make those sorts of decisions you quickly get into a very difficult use case when do you as the person driving the car have to click on the windshield those are the sorts of things that are breaking the existing models and are other things that we have to think about you all believe you need to be sure that IOT so the question is whether over the air is it sometimes called updates to deployed IOT products whether they should be automated or you should have the opportunity to opt out so I think Harley mentioned a little bit about that but I don't know if there are others who want to ask a bigger question whether you can opt out is there a policy approach in place so as the final decision that some of the devices would be able to keep up in terms of not getting hacked into or not being segmented so the feature that you talked about about a security update we think is critical and we think ought to be part of any baseline for IOT security without a very good reason not to and no matter how good your security is you know devices shipped from the warehouse with bugs there's millions of lines of code used for very simple devices there's actually a lot of complexity to them and for more sophisticated devices there's so many good parts that there will inevitably be bugs going through secure development from the start there will have to be some way to fix known vulnerabilities after it is already in the field and the way that you do that is with updates and there are several ways to update the device one of them which is pretty old school is used in like infrastructure is to have to have a technician physically on site to plug something in to deliver the update that doesn't scale there's automatic updates so that they just push it and you might think that's the best way to do it but there are some perils there so one of the I think it was the WannaCry attack which is a malware attack that took out a bunch of possible one of the problems that they had there was that it was taking advantage of an automatic update feature to infect different machines but not having an update feature is the worst option we think because then you have vulnerabilities that stay, they don't get addressed and there's almost nothing you can do about it except recalling the device and that means contacting the consumer making the consumer care enough to take out their device send it back and so forth and this was one of the things that exacerbated the Maraibot net the Maraibot net was the one that called Internet cameras and took down critical infrastructure, information infrastructure in large swaths of North America in parts of Western Europe and it was exacerbated because they could not update those cameras so yes we think that it is really a very important feature one that ought to be included inside of any baseline and we think that that baseline there's a few more features we think ought to be part of the baseline we think that baseline ought to figure into what agencies are saying this is our expectation of privacy and security and we think that it ought to figure into what ends up being the reasonable security standard or personal information in any privacy legislation so in our paper just to bring it back to you a little bit to the security shield we said that essentially the ability to update ought to be a qualification requirement before a product that might be otherwise qualified for the security shield label and I think Adam I'm pretty sure that that's also part of the war in Hardinville and I think that's part of a few others that have been introduced by anybody want to add on so one thing that we didn't kind of because it takes a minute to talk about education awareness right so that's a big one I know I know that's a big one so when we talk about small businesses small medium sized businesses and micro businesses I can't stress enough that I understand I'm a computer scientist I'm a software engineer I understand security by design by design absolutely but the education awareness to be there it's very anecdotal but I do have people contacting all the time saying they bought this device what should they do you know they keep default passwords so there's things of course we talked about that they need to do but also to understand that the language needs to be clear right so every time you open up an app or device they all have what we call ULAS right the end user licensing agreements and most folks don't pay attention to it right you just accept or you hit it yes right whatever you just click on let me let me move on and try to install this thing right and I'm a computer scientist and I don't even understand the language right so it's one of those things that we need to I love them the label idea and the security based on understanding I mean something simple where companies especially small medium sized businesses and micro businesses understand at least what the potential risks may be and let it be there to discern you know should I accept this risk or should there's ways I can mitigate it and so on and so forth because they are part of the supply chain right we talk about third party risk right so these are things that we really need to just make sure we get the information out there get the training if you don't know where to go if you're small medium sized business and or micro businesses there's different organizations that is many support unfortunately but there's like the association of entrepreneurial I think entrepreneurship opportunity there's your local minority development of business organizations that you have in the community SBA right small business association they have some assistance as well and resources so yes you have to try to do your homework as well so yes thank you so I'll give a quick plug to two things first of all the global cyber alliance organization for which I now work just released earlier this year something called the small business cyber security toolkit small medium sized business cyber security toolkit it is pretty straightforward if you go to global cyber alliance you can find it and more importantly or not more importantly but equally as important the idea or the need for awareness education raising is part of this roadmap that we keep referring back to I think it's important though to also remember that first of all there's only so much the government can do they have limited resources the budget keeps shrinking so if we have some friends who have some spare change that they might help share with folks like NIST and DHS and others in this ecosystem that would help a lot with education and awareness raising but there are a lot of companies that are also involved in this space some of them are very proactive in trying to enhance user awareness and education Microsoft I think has been a supporter of PK so has Google not to endorse them per se but they are doing a lot to try and move the needle there are others who are not and I think from the consumer standpoint around the advocacy space there's an opportunity to push corporations that are developing these IoT devices to be more responsible in their development and use of them we have one more minute so maybe we can do two questions I think it's one more minute so I appreciate your panel brought you by today on the IOC I'm interested in your policy perspective though do you see more focus not on the federal level but at the state and local level are there governors and the local state entities that are looking at this as a practical issue they want to address because the feds are too slow they're not doing it in a human fashion like with them or are they waiting for the private sector to say oh my gosh we have to respond to something that happened and if not like it I heard the question which is what's happening at the state and local level around this are they waiting for the government to step in or are they acting themselves and I think I'll quickly answer the short version is a little bit of both we've spoken a little bit about the work underway in a number of states around data region, data security, notification requirements the National Governors Association has been active in cyber security I think the question to answer that I'm not entirely sure but the fact that I'm not sure is I can speak to it a little bit so the main action is actually happening overseas it's happening in India, China and now of the European Union but if you're looking just at states in fact looking at IoT specific registration it comes online in 2020 it's tied in a weird way to the California Consumer Privacy Act so there's a little bit of limbo there but it essentially says that you can't have default passwords that are shared across many devices so it's essentially a unique default password requirement to my knowledge that is the first IoT specific state legislation 24 states have data security legislation but it only applies to personal information they all already have all states and all territories in DC have the average notification and that's ineffective for other reasons we can get into it later the other states and other localities are looking at IoT I heard that Houston as an example is looking at a security requirements for their procurement of IoT as they rebuild post-harping so yes the federal inertia on this issue is leading to other entities, other states, locals and particularly international governments to take charge I know we're running low but just a 10 second I think a lot of them are looking at it in the context of smart cities as well that is a wrap for us I think some of us are sticking around for a few minutes if not you can find us and thanks everyone again thanks Elisa and thank you to our panelists for joining us this morning so we have some more people in here so I'm going to go over a couple of housekeeping items one more time if you want to see the agenda for today's event you can go to our event right page we have everyone's information listed there at 1240 we are going to break for lunch and you can go have lunch in the cafeteria or somewhere nearby just make sure that you're back here by 140 and also after we conclude here today we'd like to invite you to our showcase and reception at the Google DC office which is that 25 Massachusetts Avenue sweet right and you can get there by walking it's about a 15 minute walk or you can take a ride here or a cab to get there and again I'm going to ask the pk folks to raise your hands if you have questions you can ask the folks that are raising their hands we have a lot of folks outside as well and also be sure to use hashtag tech for change for all of your tweets if you want to be engaged online we are bringing in some more chairs in a few minutes so if you are standing then you will have a seat or you can get the seats that are now empty so I want to go ahead and introduce a special guest we have Virginia Long Abrams she is a seasoned communications and public affairs executive with two decades of experience working in technology, media and politics she is a senior vice chairman of communications and government relations at Starry a technology company focused on reimagining and revolutionizing how consumers connect to the internet because Starry's groundbreaking 5D fix wireless network and her role at this company Virginia advocates for and represents Starry in front of governmental agencies at the local, state and federal level and she engages the policy makers and the public interest community she also leads media and analysts relations for the company as well as the company's digital equity initiative Starry Connect and as you all know all of these devices that we are talking about today they don't work if you don't have the internet so Virginia is going to be talking today about the importance of digital inclusion making sure that everyone has access to affordable and robust broadband Good morning Thank you Elisa for that kind introduction it's really wonderful to be a part of today's talking about all of these emerging technologies that while nascent today will become part of our daily lives of the not too distant future when we talk about the potential for artificial intelligence the internet of things or platforms that utilize virtual or augmented reality we often overlook the one thing that enables access to all of it the internet or more importantly access to the internet I don't think there's anyone in this room that would disagree that access to affordable reliable broadband is critical to our daily lives and yet today more than 20 million Americans still lack access to broadband and millions more are under connected in both rural and urban areas these emerging technologies have the potential to affect positive social change and lift up marginalized communities but they will never meet their full potential without ubiquitous affordable broadband today when we talk about broadband access most people often associate it with core cutting and the ability to Netflix and chill but the truth is internet access has become fundamental to participation in our broader society sure you can stream great television shows and movies and make instagram stories to your hearts delight but broadband access enables all of us to do this and so much more it's the bridge to job and educational opportunities access to healthcare and social services it even makes filing our taxes easier and at a most basic level internet access enables human connections to a wider community in the world around us electricity fundamentally changed our economy and how we live internet access is the modern equipment so how we make sure all our communities are connected how do we ensure that millions of Americans don't get left behind and are able to share the benefits of broadband and all these wonderful emerging technologies how do we narrow and close the digital gap with technology companies like starry the way we deliver internet access to the home is changing and that's a good thing starry is innovating wireless last mile connections that reduce equipment and network deployment costs by nearly a hundred times today it costs roughly two thousand dollars to pass a home with fiber with starry's technology that passing costs reduced to less than twenty dollars and we can connect homes and apartment buildings without having to tear up streets and sidewalks and without having to access public rights of way the efficiencies we've built with our technology create massive cost savings for consumers which is why we can offer both fifty dollar and fifteen dollar service plans so why does a company like starry even care our company was built on the fundamental belief that connectivity is a social good the more people that are connected the better off our communities but there's always been a massive imbalance in the internet service provider marketplace more than sixty percent of our country has only one choice when it comes to broadband providers and it's much higher when you get to the block and building level in each community this massive market imbalance didn't feel right to us and so we set out to build a technology that was cost efficient and could easily scale because fundamentally we believe that competition alright so I'm going to introduce our moderator for this panel chris lewis is the vice president as public knowledge and leads our organizations advocacy on capital deal with other government agencies prior to joining public knowledge in 2012 chris served as a federal communications commission as deputy director of the office of legislative affairs and advised the FSC chairman on legislative and political strategy and chris loves 3D printing you all he's very excited about this panel he's excited for the showcase later and he's made like everyone else at public knowledge who hasn't experienced it before very excited about the 3D printers so don't worry about it chris thank you alisa thank you everyone for coming out we've got a few more things being brought up here to the front but while we're in transition here it's also I'm sure it's been said but it can't be said enough thanks to folks who helped sponsor and put on this event of folks at the internet association our friends at google we really appreciate your support on this annual tradition of the emerging tech event at least is right I do love 3D printing I fell in love with it at my first one of these events where this used to be just a 3D printing event now it's expanded it's a great emerging technology but I'm glad I get to moderate the 3D printing panel because this is where we started so thank you guys for being on our panel thank you all for coming to our final panelist so with this panel on 3D printing and social good and social change we have a fantastic group of experts up here from the 3D printing community and 3D printing space I'm going to give each of them a chance to talk about first who they are, where they represent and the work that they do and to introduce themselves but before we start going down the line we're going to try something here since this event certainly represents innovation and trying new things in the technology we'll see that we have the words up here to the right and our friends at 3D printing come up with this idea that we're going to try and see how it works but as our speakers talk we have three categories up here, questions truths and myths about 3D printing and so if you're not familiar with the technology or the truth or myth that you want to test we'd love for you to write it down and our friends at 3D printing can give you a sticky kind of paper write down your truth or myth and we'll see if there's any we want to address where are our friends from 3D printing we'll start with Matt Rita right there in the middle so if you have a truth or myth or a question you can write them down so with that we're going to get started on the panel and our friend from 3D printing Richard Brown and he's going to talk about his work and his view on 3D printing I hate it when people don't use mics or don't use a write so I'm Richard Brown, I'm one of the founders and the CEO of 3D Connected Printing, we are a small company 12 people who we develop our own products we 3D print them and we sell them on the internet, a couple different channels at craft fairs and B2B where we sell a number of products to one company and they give them to the customers or key people I wanted to mention kind of how we got into this because people are always asking how did you decide to do this we had developed a prototype in another industry of a product and as we were doing it we realized there always are connectors there always are pieces, boxes, there are things that no one sells and in order to acquire them you have to either go to a machine shop, I see this gentleman's nodding or you have to use a 3D printer we went to a 3D printer with this device and we said can you copy it and he said sure, but he wanted them a month later it wouldn't fit, it was wrong he said give me another month, I gave him another month, it was still wrong so then we ordered a Prusa kit and built it and two hours after we got it running we had our part and then everybody said forget about the other business we need to do this and so we did we have an unusual team including four people under the age of 16 and two 75 year old electronic engineers who are very important in the organization and every age in between we learned from each other, we learned from the older ones, we learned from the younger ones, Hannah was teaching me Photoshop the other day she's 12 and our people have come from maker spaces they've come from engineering school, they've come from art backgrounds, you know, I think one of the nice things about 3D printing is it's growing so fast that there's lots of room, there's room for people who are minorities there's room for women, there's room for older people it doesn't matter and it is growing there's people who are older who is the big expert on 3D printing 3D printing is growing 36% a year it is still tiny, it's a very small slice of industrial production, less than 1-1% but because it's growing it represents an opportunity to get in on the ground floor the, okay we've handed guys have you handed out the stickies, okay they're out so as we're talking please note a truth about 3D printing on one and a question on another and a myth, something that people believe but you don't think it's true 3D printing is one of several new technologies that follow Moore's law, who in the audience knows Moore's law, okay what's Moore's law about processing power will double every 2 years? pretty close, the cost of a computer decision is cut in half every 2 years and that's been true for 50 years, some of the other things that follow Moore's law are sensors they don't think much about sensors but they're very important, they're in everything and now there are diapers that have sensors they cost 2 or 3 cents now, they were $30 not very long ago also there's the human genome who here has had your genome figured out by a 23 and me or ancestry, raise your hand, look at that 7 or 8 people, that analysis would not have been possible but for all of this progress so let's talk about the effects of 3D printing on us, okay let's start with the people one of the things that we've seen is many more young people are learning CAD, computer aided design, from people like David, David at schools, universities and high schools and elementary schools, and they're learning product development and engineering, which is, I mean it's fun, it's interesting also it's a new creative outlet, you don't just have to paint that picture or do the woodworking you can actually develop a new product and sell it yourself and make some money, people are in new jobs where their design is part of the job before you might have been a machine operator, now you're going to be much more than that so this is changing our world although, bear in mind 3D printing is still a small slice of what we're doing people are receiving implants, jaw bones, teeth, bladders, joints that have been 3D printed it's happening more and more, we're testing those things like livers and kidneys in animals now before long, this terrible problem of needing that kidney is going to go away but it'll take 4 or 5 years people are benefiting from customized products requiring good fit, I understand now there's a company that's doing bras, braziers that fit you better than the ones you might buy I've never worn one, but they're there shoes, earplugs, headsets, sheet machine masks, sleep machine masks, diving masks, all these things that require fit, people are starting to 3D print them disabled children and adults, Marie is going to talk about that are benefiting from receiving 3D printed prosthetics and disabled people who need prosthetics have a tough time, it's really, it's a hard thing talking, and then we can talk about products basically we're shifting toward customized products we're shifting toward the thing that you need when you need it and even things like automobiles are now being revised, not once a year, but monthly and quarterly, so I think we all see this effect you see products that are more for me than what we used to have in summary, I just want to say that 3D printing, in the future you will be able to use something until it no longer gives you joy, Marie Kondo and so instead of putting it in the garbage bag as she shows on her videos, you're going to recycle the contents and 3D print what you do need that's the distant future that was my intro we don't see any stickies yet, please we're going to keep going down the panel please raise your hand if you need one or if you haven't turned it in and we'll come back and see what we've got, but as we keep going down the panel next we have Naveed Preet, who is one of our two academics here from the university, he's with the university of District Columbia and he's going to talk a bit about his work hello Benny you did a summary of the entire 3D printing world what do you mean? so I'm Naveed Preet I'm an architect and an artist and an educator my background is actually strange because I started with making small things I had a degree in jewelry and metals meeting and after I started architecture so I worked for several years in Italy and here in the United States designing and making big stuff but when I moved to the United States I had the opportunity to study sculpture and I did my MFA and my MA in sculpture and I started thinking about all the experience that I had before in 3D modeling and animation computation design during my architecture work a combination of new technologies and traditional one like 3D printing, 3D scanning and metal casting from EBS and PLA, so I think that in 2010 2009, 2010 I was one of the first trying to melt down practically everything that there was 3D printing in order to create bronze sculptures and aluminum sculptures so my professor actually let me doing a lot of experiments with it I was lucky when I started working with Corcoran College of Art they gave me a small grant and some money to study Fab Academy so I studied digital fabrication a little bit more electronics and computation design and programming and I was overwhelmed by the incredible amount of information that you can use in order to create artwork and when I started working as a professor in the DMV area I tried to create a class that could teach students in introductory classes the use of new technologies and the use of 3D printing, 3D scanning in an easy way using easy tools, something easy to understand and to manage right now I teach practically a couple of classes I teach sculpture, introduction to sculpture, advanced sculpture and a class that I developed six or seven years ago sculpture in technologies so it's a combination of traditional sculpting techniques carving and other deal with play and all the new technologies that help us to produce pieces in artworks in an easy way so I think that it's going to be just at the beginning of discovery what 3D printing can be like. Very good and I have more questions come back to you about some specific uses that I know you've been working on but next we'll go to Sergio Picozzi if I'm saying that right our other academic from Catholic University and please tell us a bit about your work that you're doing in Catholic and how that impacts marginalized communities. Right so I am a physicist but I'm currently serving as a professor in the Department of School of Engineering at Catholic University in particular of material science and engineering and as a subset of that program we have been pushing this professional certificate and added in manufacturing aka 3D printing so this all came from interacting with the industry leaders, military leaders so the director of my program is a retired Navy Admiral so he has lots of connection with government in particular with the U.S. Navy and so talking to many of their leaders and to again industry leaders it became apparent that the technology as far surpassed the level of education in the field so there are lots of wonderful shiny fantastically looking machines out there but the level of skills needed to make the most out of those machines is lacking and research has backed up research conducted for example by the lights of the Lloyds or Stratasys itself backs up the fact that in order to fully explore and implement the ways of additive manufacturing we need an educated workforce so using a 3D printer or actually conducting an additive manufacturing process which is more than just 3D printer is not just a matter of pushing the print button you actually have to be knowledgeable about the science behind it behind you have to know how the technology works and you have to be able to also make decisions like for example this is a wonderful pump impeller printed in metal so I don't know if you can see it but the geometry is extremely intricate so this will be very difficult to make with traditional casting methods so it looks fine but are you confident that you can install this part on a mission-critical application and make sure they will not fail like are you confident for example you can install it on a helicopter as part of a rotor for example and make sure that it will not fall out of the sky so very little research has been done on this subject because you know the manufacturers basically vouch for the geometrical accuracy of their parts but in terms of the microstructure of the part that ultimately determines its performance in service very little has been done on the topic so we felt that we needed to fill in that gap in terms of explaining what's behind this otherwise amazing technology but also enabling decision makers to figure out whether they could give a green light it's like ok we got a green part it looks great but can I install it can I put it into service so three components the science behind it the material science behind it the technology itself and then finally the decision making aspect and there's also a forward aspect with which we are involved indirectly along with the business school so if you are an entrepreneur you have to be able to make a decision whether you do have a business case for adopting this technology so I can make this part is fine but can I make it cheap more cheaply more affordably than the traditional methods it depends on many many factors and you may have the best technology in the world but if in the end your business case is weak you end up on the losing end of the proposition so it's a very complex enterprise so to speak now how would that affect marginalized communities so let me start from a very strange place you know in the middle ages you could be imprisoned even tortured and maybe beheaded if you spoke ill of the monarch if you say if you made unflattering remarks about the powers that be so that's also this was of course outrageous and so that's ultimately where the issue the concept of freedom of speech came about you cannot be imprisoned for speaking ill of the authorities and God knows if we do it these days freedom of speech freedom of expression freedom of religion those are all terrific but let's face it do they really matter if we cannot put food on our table so if you're hungry it doesn't matter that you can express yourself freely you know you don't make it till the end of the day so my belief is that social justice this technology begins with economic opportunities and this technology this suite of technology that is known as additive manufacturing is potentially a great enabler of social justice and social equality via the democratization of the manufacturing process so before this technology sure you will get a degree and then you count the big companies such as General Motors or Delights to be so gracious to hire you and there could be a lot of barriers towards that accomplishment it could be that perhaps you know you have taken a couple of wrong turns in your life for whatever reason and they look bad on your resume and they would disqualify you it could be that for whatever reason you might not have access to the right education so that could essentially be a deal killer for you and so you'd be relegated to one of those entry level jobs for the rest of your life whereas now as long as you are enterprising enough if you're clever enough and if you have the discipline of learning the ropes you don't need to ask permission of General Motors Boeing that is so good with planes these days to give you a job but you could start your own operation the entry level the entry fee is not as prohibitive as it used to be you know if you want to decide you want to make cars right you need hundreds and millions of dollars worth of cattle you don't need that amount not even close to start a small 3D printing operation just to give you an example say you know you have a washing machine and a part of your washing machine fails so you contact the manufacturer they let you know that they discontinued that model but they would be happy to sell you a new washing machine now you don't need a washing machine you need a $20 replacement part right so the day will come in which you can just walk across the street to an establishment not unlike a FedEx canker or something and you can have your part 3D printed for you on the spot maybe a few hours and you're good to go for a few tens of dollars and that operation may be run by you know just half a thousand people and these people don't need hundreds and millions of dollars of cattle so we can we can envision say a network of such operations especially small communities even a small town in the Midwest or some place like that you don't need to send out an order for replacement part that may come days later from a huge warehouse instead you can have your own local operations and you can have your parts for whatever you need to be made just right for you so this is one of the many examples in which this new technology potentially if we get it right will revolutionize social order in a positive fashion Fantastic, thank you Sergio and I'll be moving around because I'm reading some of the great things that our audience has written up on the board and we're going to get to those as soon as we, you guys are making my job as a moderator really easy there's great stuff up here but I want to welcome back Maria Escuela from eNable if I'm saying it right, welcome her back and also that she and our other panelists have extended the tradition of bringing practical things that they can show actually 3D printed material to the panel to demonstrate just how the technology works but Maria tell us about your work at eNable and all I do is if you don't mind passing through them so I'll leave them there very nice thank you and it helps a little bit about that but it also yoked the 3D printed project that we do to a number of other original technologies and issues and at the very end are some bullet points which are examples of calls to action in our youth advocacy working group which go back to two years ago when we walked the hill together and asked for people to join the congressional make a caucus and manufacturing caucus and to declare December 3rd 3D day and include advocacy and highlight all of the different technologies that are involved in scanning and animation and AR and VR as well as to new printing and so I put that in your hands there is a small picture in the bottom and I want to start with that that picture is our youngest designer he holds six open source licenses for things that he is creating for himself he was born without a hand due to amniotic band syndrome there were bands in the amniotic fluid his limb became tangled in it when there's no blood flowing then nothing rose so his lack of a limb his upper limb difference is because of something that happened as he was being formed and it's not something that creates a sense of pain and trauma in his memory he was born this way it's his lucky fin he goes to camps for kids like him he designs for them and what he has learned to do is use play and sculpt to adapt his toys and handlebars and anything that he wants to manipulate when he gets it just right then he gives it to his mother to bake and so she is creating this concrete version of it when they scan it using a free app on her phone to create a digital version of it if it really works if he likes it because that creates something that doesn't need to be created one off again in an artful way it creates a solid digital version that can be recreated again and again and share and that's what they do they share it under his name since he's done the work as an open source license so that anyone anywhere in the world is able to adapt the handlebars on their tricycle or hold a paintbrush or hold a harry potter wand when they go out so these are things that this little boy does when he first got that hand it operated like the hand knife bag it was something that was 3D printing in this fashion there are some pieces of it that are treated flat and that not only makes it easier to print but it also creates more structure when you heat it and thermoform it so the hand that you have in the bag this is how you would wear it so slightly the parts are all 3D printed the files are parametric so that as you scale them up or down certain parts of them retain a standard size and so that allows you to keep using standard size screws for instance the objects that are used to put the handform together to create a working body powered robotic hand things that we wanted to feel sure that people would be able to find just about anywhere in the world that it would be affordable and sustainable and attainable things so the fingertips here for very small hands we have even cut the tips off of pacifiers to test those out as ways to get people good these are just the silicone fingertips that you get at Kinko's or at Staples to take money or take tickets but we have also used plastic dick a number of other 3D printed fingertips using TB or TPU the elastic cords that you see here are just from the jewelry counter section of a hobby shop but you could also use orthodontic bands and different kinds of fingers that we have on file the static cords that are tied at the fingertips and then run through the palm of the hand and attach to the wrist piece at the tensioner block that we currently use 80 pound fishing line that's long coding so it doesn't cut into the plastic, fishing line is commonly available it's just a very simple surgeon's knot every scout knows how to do a square knot at another half on the inside here we're using a very simple velcro but as you can see you can 3D print those parts we've also taken to taking our failed prints melting them into sheets and cutting them with lasers to create those parts and then there's the gauntlet so if you want to try this on it's not going to fit you just put one finger inside the palm press against the tensioner block to hold it against the back of your hand and imagine that it's something that's been fastened here below the wrist by bending your wrist 30 degrees you're able to create enough tension to be able to close the hand it's going to shorten the fingers at the core and lengthen the fingers across the back of the wrist so this is a very very old design this was the raptor reloaded this goes back to 2014 the hand that's going around is Phoenix it's much better for use in places where you're going to be playing hard this is a modification of the Phoenix hand where if a person doesn't have a working wrist then you're able to use the elbow the first object that my daughter and I worked on was actually an arm for someone who didn't have that kind of strength and so we used aquarium tube and we ran it across the back to touch it using a velcro harness to the opposite shoulder and so the lengthening of the cords across the back was not only really successful but the muscles being used for that came from the opposite side of the body and from the waist by pushing the shoulder forward so I'm going to pass this around and then lastly in the past year we've been working on a passively closed design this one was part of a destructive test there's a hand in the bag that shows the difference between the orientation of the crank giving strength because that thumb is printed landscape, if you can imagine that, this would be printed as if it was vertical and so the lines of adhesion for those layers would be very vulnerable to breakage so one of the things that we do in our community is engage very young people as young as four and five years old and building the hands we're designing hands like this for people who are even too young for medical devices because this has very large parts, it's not a chokeable and so the first hand like this, this was a prototype for it was a father who was a prosthetist in California who was two year old son. What we found when we scaled this up was it was also ideal for another request from a runner who wanted to hold a water bottle while he job so a hand that is like this is able to hold 70 to 76 pounds it's something that you can use to carry water, carry your groceries, do rugged work and that was a great easy solution something that once it's off the printer is really quick to assemble and it's something that four and five year olds could do but it was also a gift that they gave to us in saying instead of using PVC pipe for the forearm what if we used laminated paper? So we call this a Jedi arm because the young man that got the first one wanted to have a Star Wars theme. I brought it with me for the fourth of May but I also wanted to show you that this is something that's two pieces of printing that can be done away like where you have access to power for a long period of time. We have a lot of quality control. The last piece that is to be 3D printed is a very small ring that's based on the measurements of the person receiving it and that this forearm, this paper in a laminated pouch is something that can be based on the art or where it's being fitted it could be something that is gifted or shipped flat to make the shipping look less expensive but these are things that young children can assemble and achieve the same outcomes as professionals with 15 or 20 years of experience in engineering. There is nothing wrong with that. So the reason that we need to create this niche is because there are so many people in the world that do not have access to medical care for their upper limb difference. In fact it's been estimated by the United Nations that of the 30 million people living with limb loss, 80 to 85% are living in fragile states only 5% of them have access to medical prosthetics that they can afford. There are so many that 9 million people have never received medical attention for their limb difference and that there is a global shortage of prosthetists. So we need to create citizen scientists who are designing for themselves in collaboration with experts in their field, engineers teachers, prosthetists, medical and allied health professionals and together in collaborative research they're creating these open source designs so that anyone anywhere in the world could receive a free device created in service learning by the people in our network. So that's where we're waiting at the moment. Thank you Maria. That's fantastic. The prosthetics are always popular. Please yeah, we have about 30 minutes and then we'll go to the board. So a few months ago I saw this report of GBS TV from Damascus, Syria. Oh my gosh. Basically we're talking about you know very young men who are communicating via internet with their American counterparts whereas changing files and were they could be printing prosthetic parts in Damascus because you know as you can imagine the country is ravaged by the Civil War and so those parts are in short supply over there and they could be printing those prosthetic parts for victims of the conflict and they could be done in real time. So this is something we impossible to achieve without this technology. I do. So Mohamed and Ahmet and some of the others that were on that episode, they stayed in place during the battle, the volunteers stayed in place during the battle the volunteers that were underground in Aleppo that I did find until almost exactly a year ago. Today I asked them last April if they would begin to hold girls informal educational clubs workshops so that they would be able to restore the education that had been so disrupted not just for you know the guys who are coming but for families to come and that's something here in the states that worked very well that if I had families to come and we had intergenerational and we had girls who stayed but for a year now they've been teaching girls STEM and they gifted their first dozen hands two days ago. So I'm glad to report that not only have they been able to study and keep printing but that it's been a very inclusive process. It's a fantastic story and we've had previous 3D printing panels folks from the Pentagon talking about how the military uses it in the field but everyday folks absolutely can benefit as well without the infrastructure bureaucracy of the military so that's wonderful. So we've got great stuff here on the board from the audience thank you everyone and I've seen some connected themes here one of them up here in our questions someone asked can we 3D print with sand and what kind of materials can be used but also related and I like the way this is phrased. Where did it go? There was one up here that asked basically what material do you think can have the greatest impact for social change right now that you see the potential for that you see out there right now because what we're handing around is plastic, surgery abroad metal but you can print so many different things so let's talk about materials. I can mention that there we go thank you. People are starting to build in remote areas using 3D printers to build structures and the idea as you go to a place that is remote that has very little infrastructure and you use the local dirt or sand or rock or whatever it is and you mix in binders okay so we're talking 3D printing on a different scale we're talking about building a hut, building a school building a house it is being done there's some groups working on this they bring their solar panels with them to generate the electricity they bring the 3D printers with them and also the same process is being done in developed areas people are beginning to learn how to build buildings but you were to ask about materials did you have a? I was going to add carbon fiber because it's so uniquely suited to 3D printing that not carbon fiber. Carbon fiber? I don't know if anyone's familiar with it. There's a company that works with Mark Forge they specialize in and you want to mention something oh this is a part of that type do you want to pass that around? Let's pass that around I know other folks had ideas for architecture a lot of companies are developing technologies related to concrete extrusion for 3D printing of houses and buildings right now I think that maybe in the United States we have more than 20 companies developing 3D printers for houses and one actually was Russian I think. They were going to 3D print a house in one day in 24 hours of course there are a bunch of issues connected to how to start the foundation and mechanical plumbing, electricity and so on but the idea that you can actually personalize a design an architectural design and send only a big 3D printer practically a sort of big crane that can move around the center and deposit the concrete can be amazing in certain situations where you have to build faster you have to build with the materials that you can find in local and you need to personalize the design based on different necessities so I think that the same company they just won the competition for the Mars challenge so using the same technologies that they are studying how to send to the moon or to Mars 3D printer use the materials that they can find in local mix it with different kind of binders and actually build a new house I have two more on this one is there's a company called Algex Filament from Algex and we bought some of their we met them and we bought some of their stuff the other thing is there's so much of this plastic waste I think we're getting like 8 trillions 8 trillions tons of plastic waste in the ocean every year there are some groups starting to build with collecting that waste and recycling it and turning it into products that we can use if you look at the back of the car that has the little voice picture we have a lot of partners that are working on what we call project alchemy which is taking the waste plastic returning it to the recycling stream using it to create filament and then printing arms and hands there are a couple of things that need to be said about this first of all is that it creates the opportunity to print at the point of need because the point of care can be too far away so if you go to project.com we'll show you on their website not only the cases that they've printed for the Philippines, Costa Rica, the United States but you'll see digital badges which are a way of credentialing people for presenting evidence that has been reviewed and approved by groups in our community so that this is a way that we credential people through our learning process through requests part of the million waves project extends over to the coast savers, so if you go to coastsavers.org one of the people collecting waste plastic on the beach is a girl named Abby and no one pictures show her wearing her 3D printed prosthetic from waste plastic that in the process of harvesting it one of the youth in our community in 2014 or 2015 asked his family his friends in this little town to save the Starbucks clear plastic cups and the clam shells which he shredded in the family's blender which is from their old blender and then he used it to produce film with which he produced one of his own hands as a youth in our group. He is now a sophomore in Ohio but during his gap year he created his own company called Form 5. It was an outgrowth of his blog which was alive with 5 referring to the fact that he only had 5 fingers but he calls the company Form 5 originally it was in deference to the blog that it replaced but also because he's using number 5 plastic. The youth in my community I cannot pay, I can't pay the volunteers but I try to give them opportunities and I'm trying to use the increasing cultivation and nurturing of scientific practices in our community to give them opportunities. So for 4 years now youth in our community have been doing bioprinting. In Drexel they were looking at the levels of skeletal cells in solutions before they loaded syringes and began bioprinting in a mesh micro matrix using the secret sauce and other ratios to create a structure for the mirror image of an existing bone to create a replacement bone in a shoulder that had been crushed or in an area of disfigurement so that person was going to receive in 2 and a half weeks their own bone their people who were printing in cartilage in Johns Hopkins we've been printing skin and the burn unit on the patient in order to seal that wound. There are a number of ways of bioprinting. When we go to the FDA we're talking about binder printing we're talking about printing stomachs on chips to measure the absorption rates of medications. For at NASA there's some extraordinary things also some other other industries we joined in partnership with one of the only fire prevention programs in the country so that we had access to some heat resistant materials outside of the military industrial complex where they were printing prototypes for aerospace engines just so that we had regular access but that's how we're making a hand for a fireman who lost his hand the people who've been printing with carbon at the University of Maryland are truly on the cutting edge and one of the students they received a $25,000 grant but his problem was the same as ours that how do you put an arm on a small body that's in motion that wants to pick up something that could be very heavy and manipulated so for humans it's a cute satellite and for me it's a four year old on the playground and it all works out to be about the same. The service learning is incredibly valuable at local motors our board member offers tours to when he comes in because it's really printing real printing vehicles and that's where we're getting our customization station prototypes found. So very briefly I'm teaching this semester class this call Introduction to 3D Printing Science and Technology and a few weeks ago I did an exam and the first question on the exam was describe the differences between additive manufacturing and subtractive manufacturing conventional techniques. Now of course we could be all day discussing all the many differences but if you had to name just one one difference which is the difference what would you think that is? What would you think that is? between conventional fabrication techniques and additive manufacturing the one difference that makes all the difference last place that's important but what I was thinking of is that with 3D printing you do away with tools you fabricate with no tools so what if you happen to be in the middle of nowhere when you have no tools and what if you happen to you know General Motors wants to make a certain car model so they have to shut down a factory for six to eight months to retool hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and if the car does not sell that's all gone whereas if you're 3D printing you don't need tools so today you 3D print what you sell today tomorrow you're ready to 3D print something completely different to make something completely different so in that sense technology is a huge enabler because once you don't need tools all you need is to change your cal file and you're good to go let me get to another one from the board and then we can come back because there's one that's on truth and one that's on myth that are related until let's talk about whether it's truth or myth on truth it says 3D printing will be common household appliance by 2030 but someone also put on the myth it's a myth that having a 3D printer in your home will be common in the very near future so our panel of experts how simple this will be common in folks households and what sort of impact will that have I like to compare 3D print with photography so when photography was born in 1939 there were artists saying oh from today painting is dead because we can take a photo and we don't need to paint and spend hours in order to make a portrait now anybody with basic knowledge of photography even my grandmother can take a photo crop it change the luminosity of the contrast so it's very common to improve this knowledge and it's part of everybody's lives so I think that we 3D print is actually our technology because it was born in 1984 right it's a cool with photography and only in 2008-2009 when the patent expired we were able to open up the production of 3D printers make them cheaper have actually more convenient accessibility to the machinery and as you know normally artists that are starting artists they didn't have a lot of money so only 2009-2010 artists started working with these materials so I believe that we are still far from having a 3D printer in every house a basic knowledge to access it because you need to be able to 3D model something prepare the file for printing so with a slicing software be able to send the file to the printer I'm not really sure that you don't need any tools there is always some post processing of the parts but I believe that we are going to see instead of that we are going to see personalization of the production so instead of having a 3D printer in every home we are going to have huts or places shops where you can go and you can have your personalized object 3D printed over there so you can go to a shoe shop you can 3D scan your feet download the model from internet have the shoes 3D printed over there so I think that we are going to have Marina do you agree Richard do you agree? In England right now in order to increase the value of the post office the 3D printers are at the post office that you email them what you want and then they deliver to you with your mail so it's not a requirement to have a 3D printer to have that kind of a service I think the makerspace model is ideal and we are seeing that in the way we are making libraries that third space where people meet and do if they don't have a makerspace on hand or their schools don't have them Right, libraries are definitely turning into knowledge sectors now One of the interesting things in this year's Terry Wooler's report is that the growth in the sale of desktop 3D printers are decreased this past now they are still more of them sold than the year before but the increase is lessened Our experience with using 3D printers is that they are there is a learning curve there is work you have to do and you have to have the file Rita asked me to create a little basket to go underneath a coffee maker we have that would catch the water so I created one but it doesn't fit right the water still leaks out this is harder than people think so I think, yeah did you There has nonetheless been a lot of market penetration as well already and a lot of people are learning to use the tools and I think part of this is where the entry level printers are starting to become the people who are willing to live with that have them and people who aren't are going more to the professional market which is expanding Sergio you were talking about the importance for marginalized communities and the democratization of the technology we had questions up here about in order to make that possible and what you are describing is there a way to simplify it for just average folks learning technology I think someone wrote up here like a Microsoft office for 3D printing to help people make it more intuitive and easier for people to learn how to use computer data design Did I get that one wrong? Did you write it down? Well why don't you pose the question So it says up here how can we make CAD more intuitive and accessible like Microsoft Word That actually has nothing to do with additive manufacturing it's about using a software so CAD was invented before additive manufacturing so it's like saying how can I make Microsoft Office easy to use I think it's important for us to teach that as part of digital literacy to our kids not only are they downloading files from sources that have integrity do they know how to look at a file to see if a file they downloaded matches the intended original but also there's something called Morphe it's one of many free CAD softwares but it's designed to teach kindergartners how to do CAD we have a project file there there are many other types of free licenses for some or free CAD software a way of empowering people to take what's in their imagination and to make it real and put them in the process I think also it's fundamental to allowing people to speak for themselves or create for themselves so that we're not creating a new kind of digital colonialism or creating another method of appropriation of someone's culture this is an opportunity for us to give skills to people who have been disenfranchised so that when they're designing for themselves they have leapfrogged over that manufacturing age where there would have been colonialism so that they brought it back on a small scale so that it looks like their culture it's coming from their culture it speaks to the rest of us and the rest of our world but that they have not learned these things in service to us this is a manufacturing process that belongs to them so this one is actually a sculpture from one of my students and if you think that this one is the introduction to sculpture so they had only two or three weeks to learn basic 3D scanning basic 3D printing and how to modify the 3D model in order to create an object with a meaning and if you think about an art piece like this from 18 years old, 19 years old student without any previous knowledge of 3D modeling, 3D printing or even sculpting it's quite impressive how the concept of duality and the social issues or race and gender they were able to create something really interesting in just a couple of weeks and with hardware that is like three or four hundred dollars and software that is free now if you are a student out of this you can download any software from out of this if you are a DC resident you can use your DC library card to access linda.com and have access to training so I think that this is more a matter of simplifying the process I think that we are actually doing a great job in terms of promoting 3D printing, promoting the 3D model If I could just add on, we use Tinkercad all the time and it's not hard to learn, I watched an 18 year old master it in three hours, this isn't hard it sounds like we just need to get the technology in front of you I mean you have young people, we are very young people using it it's just getting in front of people I think it's important also for people to understand the components in 3D printing not just the material or the decisions that go into that design at that moment but that it could even be the slicer as well as the CAD and when people are creating their own printers in places like TENS and the other building the amount of e-waste and we are trying to help them when every printer in the room is different the outcomes are the same because they have the availability of free software that is getting closer to what you described So there was a question here our theme is social change and social good and doing good things with technology, someone actually asked is there something about 3D printing that you're worried where it might cause harm and how do we address that, how do we get in front of it when we are in a place of policy making, so let's start searching So before I answer this question very briefly I would like to add that the hardest barrier to access this technology is not so much how to use the software but how to learn the design that goes without it in manufacturing because it's true that pretty much you can design anything you want in the virtual space but not all that you design in the virtual space can be 3D printed by any machine and so that's a skill that takes a lot longer to master because essentially you have to learn how to design things it's not about mastering the piece of software Now in terms of harm, well the question that comes to mind of course is the impact on employment So could it be that there would be fewer and fewer people needed to make things but I don't really know the answer because the technology is still evolving very rapidly so I don't know which way it will go but it's certainly a huge concern probably not as much as a concern as with AI and robots, pretty much taking everybody's job so it's not the Mexicans who are taking our jobs, they are the robots the robots the shop ignore politicians talking and speaking to that because very soon the ones that are not nuclear engineers will probably have to figure out how to make a living One worth mentioning is intellectual property counterfeiting products around the world is a terrible problem 3% of all medicines sold around the world are fake are counterfeit and people die every day because someone sold them medicine that wasn't what it said it was 3% will result in counterfeiting if it hasn't already, it will also be used by bad people to create resources they need like the gun or the bomb or whatever it hasn't really erupted in our face yet but those things need to be watched I believe 3D printing will create more employment because it is more complex you get into product development, you get into design, you get into slicing, you get into the modeling you're taking a process you're moving away from mass manufacturing or customization more people will get work because of this a few years back, public knowledge worked with policy makers who were concerned about 3D printing guns, helped them structure the laws they were writing to go after undetectable firearms but not the technology itself so it will be interesting whether it's that or employment concerns how do we make sure we promote the technology while addressing any concerns of unintended consequences sorry we were running out of time I think that I'll create more jobs if we look at small batch manufacturing and our innovation process because you're creating things knowing that the next one is going to be better than the last I think that would involve more people and bring manufacturing back to where people are when people live, I'm concerned about the security not only of people's identity, of their data because we're talking about something that's already bespoke their personal information, we've been looking at partnership with Solid, Tomb Raiders League, allowing people to create pods to hold their data, to allow people to access some of it and then be able to withdraw it, which is a completely different way of sharing information than we do now as a way of doing credentialing and credentialing in an ecosystem and then finally blockchain I'm using blockchain to assert in an immutable timeline the intellectual property to defend open source and open hardware, I'm using the supply chain smart contracts right now, monitoring using IOT for temperatures, the filament staying in temperature is a crystalite before it gets there, it's more than just a cryptocurrency which certainly gives you a way of allowing people who are unbanked or in fragile states, ways of receiving sustainable payment and then for open data, when you monitor that, you can see if they're spending money on medicine and food, don't send them stuffed animals make sure that the next set of aid is more filament, more aid but the transparency needs to be addressed because you are exposing people's information their location and so on, so I'm hoping that we'll be more encouraging of more agnostic blockchain pathways like hyperledger where it allows for more privacy and where the permissions are not dependent on the UPN Alright, so I'm going to ask Lisa to come back up, she's going to help us dismiss the lunch but also can we give a hand to our fantastic panel Thank you for being here and we'll turn it over to Lisa We have to shape policy on behalf of the people who have been in D.C. for a long time, forever those folks who are blasting the sounds of familiar faces and backed our band those are go-go bands for those who don't have, outside of the T-Mobile owned store and a corner of the warden who are down there and we have someone who is already doing that work, who we can work alongside so please welcome to the stage, Lindsay Parker Great, that's all I have to say I was wondering if you were trying to feed myself and realize that it's a good thing for all of us to be able to go and talk So, one thing I just wanted to say, congratulations to Howard and congratulations to public knowledge, I think those kind of partnerships are, you know, speak, just, you know, it's wonderful for me to see that happening in people on these files and sort of why I like to do what I do so thanks for being here today, thanks for bearing it with me as I sort of talk a little bit about what we're trying to do here in D.C. and use all of your thoughts and your help in doing just that. I wanted to say that I live around the corner from that T-Mobile, so I was running center I definitely did not call it to be for music, let me tell you I was on the other side and we had a great mayor, Mayor Bowser that was right along the side saying let's not eat this either so if you know anything about what I'm talking about, I think you'll be happy for that So I wanted to start and kind of I usually try to be a little vulnerable and give you a little sense of who I am as I think it's really important as we start talking about shaping technology that's going to help shape our futures and so, you know, I have this honor for, I've had this honor for about three months now to serve D.C. Mayor, Mayor Bowser and the residents of Washington D.C. as the chief technology officer and so everybody goes well what does that mean? Well the truth is I've got a team of more than 600 people trying to think through how we create an infrastructure to allow for the innovation that we know needs to happen in our city in order to be a more inclusive and diverse city, the inclusive that we all love and that's why we sort of choose to live here and so I'm going to kind of go back a little bit. I'm the product of multiple generations of public service. Duty to community and country is firmly entrenched in sort of everything that I think through and I was fortunate enough to grow up product of a dad from inner city Baltimore and a mom from Delaware for parents that moved around a little bit and I have no idea where I was from but I went to kindergarten here and so here I am coming back to the city that I know the most in the U.S. So I was fortunate to grow up in six global cities before turning 16 due to my dad's career as a U.S. diplomat. So dinner table conversations revolved around the inner politics, diplomacy, trade and how that really shaped geopolitical stability around the globe. So you didn't think I was going to talk about this. Dad was assigned to NATO when we lived in a Plemish community in Brussels about 30 years ago this year and I vividly remember watching on CNN the many hopeful faces in the crowd as the Berlin Wall came down. Not knowing that I was witnessing sort of a major first step in the democratization of information. Does anybody else remember that? I think about half the crowd. Dad was the cultural attache in New Delhi, India where we lived across the street from Tata Motors, the Tata Motors Air when parliament at that point lifted trade barriers to allow for foreign direct investment in a country that once shun free trade. Add the world wide web around the same time and suddenly the largest democracy in the world once with the most obvious social stratification system that we've ever seen, the caste system started witnessing upward mobility and not just for the Tata family. I'm talking about middle class. So with information and trade came options and with technology came room for new ideas, small towns became cities literally overnight. Our CISO today in Washington is from Hyderabad and that was a town when I moved to India, town. When I left India there was a city and you probably know it. In just four years a complete shift had occurred in India and my family and I witnessed a technology empowered middle class grow and grow rapidly. I had a front row seat to the creation of pathways to middle to the middle class. For many who were held back for generations both in the former Soviet Union when you're thinking about the Berlin Wall and then throughout India. And I always read a section of Thomas Freeman's book where Jerry Yang, the co-founder of the ASEAN, quoted a senior Chinese official as saying where people have hope you have a middle class. And so technology really provided that hope in both cases that I talked about. I finally realized that the technology revolution that has taken place over the course of my lifetime, some of you think I'm young some of you think I'm old, has led to innovation policy being my work and my passion. As I believe it's key to retaining American competitiveness. And more specifically, I think it's innovation policy in our urban centers that's going to help us find a way to break those cycles of poverty so that we can remain competitive. And really so cities like Washington DC can continue to grow and prosper. And so I strongly believe that cities are our future. I'm focused on it. I love it. I came to work for city government as Adrian Fenty convinced me to come work for him think about economic development policy almost ten years ago and it was the best job I ever had. And so I tried to leave. I went to Symantec. I tried to leave. I worked for Gabby Gippers and I rapidly I loved Gabby, still love Gabby, but came back as soon as Miro Bowser decided to run for mayor because there's a lot to do and we get to do it really quickly. And so we continue to look for those innovative solutions to keep DC on track to become an even smarter city. I inherently think that cities are smart and what we are doing today is thinking about how to make them smarter. And it's got to be responsive to that diverse and innovative community that calls DC home. So it's our diversity that I believe is both a resource and a source for learning. It's what attracts some of the big players think Amazon and the startups. And it's how DC becomes one of the top cities in the U.S. for inclusive female driven entrepreneurship. So if you don't know DC has once again been named the number one city for women in tech. Most notably because women in tech are making 95 cents to every dollar our male counterparts make. Still more work to do. DC government is, if you don't know this I want you to know this. Take away nothing at all. We're a city county and state. All in one. And we regulate and implement city services. We also kind of regulate ourselves, which is interesting. So we're providing a city service. We got to go get a business permit or a building permit to build a building for DC government. It's kind of a weird world. We have big challenges and we have some of the smartest people at the table finding some big solutions. Smart cities is not really just a monitor here. When we find a technology that solves a problem, we can operationalize pretty quickly. I think some of the things that we're doing might surprise you. So at the Child and Family Services Administration, we're testing out whether virtual reality technologies can help us train social workers. So they're prepared for some of the interactions we're going to have with parents, the foster families with children, before they're actually put into an environment where that has to be realized. We recently held an innovation challenge called Gigabit DCX where we partnered with U.S. Ignite to not only offer an innovation award, $34,000. That would be exciting. But also the opportunity to work with many diverse and talented entrepreneurs actually across the globe on a common goal for betterment of our city. In this case, Vision Zero. So Mayor Bowser's commitment to reach zero fatalities and serious injuries to pedestrian fighters and other users of our transportation systems. The winners were a team of young engineers. Sorry, not Howard. If you were there, we would have won. It was Washington University, a great group of kids that presented an innovative approach to analyze video feeds in real time using data to help transportation planners make safety decisions that matter. And of course, data is publicly available. That's something that we hold preeminent. Our police force, some of you may know, Metropolitan Police Department was one of the first to fully deploy body-worn cameras for all patrol officers. So we've highlighted the approach we found that while our officers didn't act differently when they had the cameras on, the information we could glean from the footage allowed us to tailor our trainings and allowed us to ensure our officers continue to improve their ability to connect and engage with communities, especially communities of color. And so the Mayor and the Chief at that time, Chief Kathy Lanier, there was a bunch of us in a room going, so we have to spend a whole heck of a lot of money to implement this. We didn't see anything from the pilot that actually suggested that this would change behavior. And the Mayor said, you know what, we've got to do it anyway. But we're going to do it anyway because we want to see how we can better use technology that train boats in the field. And so as CTO of the Nation's Capital, I'm tasked with looking for ways to leverage technology to securely and more efficiently provide user-centric city services, making for a smarter DC. I'm working to do this by driving innovation, improving customer experience, and focusing on people who can make that happen. And so that's why I'm here. Any new job? Are you interested in doing something different? You should think about DC government. We're doing a lot of really cool things. And so the one thing that I always talk about when somebody is like, what's the top of mind issue for some of the folks in government today? And I would say it's a customer-relation management tool, it's a CRN tool that nobody has figured out. So I'm going to be vendor neutral right now. But there are tools out there that help the corporate world track sales. They are sort of a linear cycle that everybody understands. You catch the person, you get them excited about doing it. They swipe their credit card and you move on and you try to get them to do that again next month or the next year. With government, it's not really as cyclical as that. What we're trying to do is be trust. And so one of the challenges that I would throw out to this team is help me and help each other think through tools where we can start assessing trust. So wherever constituent comes into government whether that's in our school system, the police office, a fire department, to get a permit, to get a new driver's license, how do I use that experience to start building trust right? And I call it rebuilding trust. Because I think right now when you think of local government you're like, why do I have to deal with you? However, if you think about our department of motor vehicles, I don't know if you've gotten your license with me lately, but I hope that you've had and if you are a DC resident you've had a better experience than the guys next to you who did go to the DMV in DC. That is my hope. We've done a lot of work to streamline that process over the last eight years in fact. So that being said, I'm really working hard and here it is, my communication scene is really good. I'm working hard to retain and attract diverse and innovative tech talent to work for DC government. Whether you're at the beginning of your career, the middle of your career, the end of your career, we can use you and you can find a really interesting path forward designing, thinking, working with different groups of people. And so in March, for instance, here's a good example of folks that I hope are on my team eventually. I met with a group of fourth and fifth graders at Henley Elementary School in Ward 8. It's a community across the Anacostia River, for those of you that are from here. And actually the community that I was specifically in is probably experiencing some of our highest poverty rates. So excited to show me a robot that they had recently designed for a competition. But then they quickly moved on and they're like, okay, robot competition's over. Let us tell you what else we're doing. They said, we have a business plan that we're putting together. These are fourth and fifth grade girls who were annoyed that the boys were stealing their iPads in class and so they turned to their teacher and said, we want to do a girls only thing. And that's why they were girls only robotics club. I love it. But they said, we have a 3D printer that we wrote a grant application for and got this 3D printer delivered the other week. And we decided that we want to sell educational tools that we're building on this 3D printer. And I was like, well that's the coolest thing ever. Are you kidding me? And I was like, what if we weren't? And they're like, well if we walk around the halls long enough, we'll hear teachers screaming about tools that they need to help in class. Whether that's a pencil holder, whether that's a place to clap out erasers. But they found, they had basically walked around the halls, I think probably like cornering the teachers to be like, hey, what do you want us to build? And they've done such a great job that now I think they were just in the hallways here last week. They were called the robots. They were talking to members of Congress about what exciting things they were working on. So I want to make sure that they think of DC government too as a place that they can come and build robots to make DC smarter. I know that the same creativity that drives and motivates the spark robots is why you're all here today. Prioritizing civic engagement, user-centric design, tech innovation for good. And it seems to me that you're all motivated by service first, tech second. As opposed to and no offense to the congressman's office, another valley where tech comes first and sometimes we think about the people, right? Here in DC the mayor has challenged us to ensure that everyone living and doing business in Washington DC is giving and getting their fair share. And so I take that challenge personally. I try to make sure that my team lives and breathes it every day. She really challenged us to work together, to advance, to work to advance together and make sure that a rising tide does in fact lift all boats. And so in the recently released resilient DC plan goal number three in the plan is smarter DC. And I'm so excited because we all envision a DC that embraces these advancements in technology while minimizing the negative consequences of change while thinking about an inclusive way, the diverse audience that these technologies are going to have to touch and making sure that we're building solutions for all. And so a smart DC is really one that works from the roots and finds a solution, not the other way around. So our mission is simple. How do we support our residents in solving our city's biggest problems? It's a reward that drives us and it's really being able to see the first-hand results to see firsthand the results in our neighborhoods, our communities and our residents. As cities across the world are defining and redefining and redefining again what smart cities mean, DC knows that the future is coming and we need to be prepared. And so I'm charging you with helping us think about how we open up new opportunities for collaboration, for public private partnerships, for data analytics and testing. We've got a new data lake on the way. We are already thinking about how we open up new data platforms so that you're able to see what we see. We're calling 18F in to help us think through Vision Zero and sort of the amount of transportation data that we're kind of overwhelmed with. We have too much, right? So much. So how do we care down to think about what we really need and what can be predictive? We want to provide values that guide and drive innovation with purpose. And we want to do that with you by ensuring that our inclusive innovation ecosystem in DC has a seat at the table for everyone to grow and to innovate. So we have a really critical responsibility to prepare DC for the technological changes that are at our doorstep. Being the diverse demands of our residents, businesses and visitors. You know, there's a whole bunch of people here that like cars, bikes, you know, they don't really get along all that well. A lot of diverse needs. I'm excited to have the opportunity to bring what I know about resident desires and expectations, agency operations, strategic communications and the lovers at our veil throughout DC government to my role. But I'm even more excited to say we need your help. And each and every one of you has a unique position and need role. And we want your voice as we think about a smarter DC. And so whether or not you live in DC I encourage you to think about it. Try to. And if not, either way, you know, check out the resilient DC plan resilient.dc.gov. See what we're doing at octo, octo.dc.gov OCTO.dc.gov 1,100 open data sets for you to play around with. But really, I just impress upon you that we're thinking about, we're thinking creatively and the best tools that I've kind of seen develop in DC are tools that we've kind of gotten a hint of from California, a hint of from Colorado right? It's when we all work together that we find the best the best way forward. And so thanks for meeting today. Thanks for sharing and talking through really tough problems. And I welcome you to the office. I'm over. I'm not that far away. I'm sort of a walk away at 200 and I street southeast. And we're doing a lot of really good things. So thanks so much. Really appreciate it. If anyone wants to ask a question, two questions, what could be a question? Not a statement question. Who are you? Yeah, some of us will recall that Amelia, Dr. mentioned that there were a whole lot of micro businesses in the United States. These are 5 to 8 people making an average of a quarter million a year. Many of them are minority families. So we're obviously and as a small business owner still, I understand the issue. She was saying they don't really understand about cybersecurity. They really don't understand about how to protect and respect what they do. Now we have all these devices and so once DC can really develop more micro businesses, it's a very, very good question. Something that I talk about with my team all the time, I think I have two big hurdles there. So all this is great great kind of that's one huge audience, no question. But really my first audience is the employees of our government. We have to make sure I need to make sure that I'm sort of changing the way that they work so that we're better at protecting the data. And we're with the data that the public trusts upon us. I want to make sure that we're doing everything that we can to make sure that we're being thoughtful about it. And the two kids DC, every cyber attack that hits the federal government they try it out on us first. So we're kind of federal government like in the eyes of those that are trying to hack into our systems. And so I'm doing this. One is we're trying to ensure that people understand that they should be thinking about cyber. It's the same way that they think about putting a fence around their home putting a camera on their door. And how do we do that so that we're changing the way that people work at their desks in government is one thing. So I've done a mandatory training and I've got everybody that I have to have everybody take. But the other thing that we're trying to do is, and I'm going to forget the name of it and Mark might help me I think they're crypto parties. So I think they're phenomenal. So crypto parties are a way to engage a diverse group of residents that don't know each other. So you might have a book club, you might have a small business group that are interested in learning a little bit more about how to protect yourselves online. And what we're doing is we're bringing that sort of very common sense approach to cyber to you. So talking about the fact that not everybody is going to have the same need for the same type of protections. We're going to be comfortable with utilizing Apple Pay. Some of us are going to be comfortable with having our credit cards on our phones. Some of us are not going to be comfortable with that. But what we need to do is kind of remove the fear and make sure that we're giving people the tools. And so that's what we're working on. New York City recently launched an app that says that if you download it, it's unclear. So basically it's like a cyber app. I'm afraid of that. I don't want to provide a tool from the government that's like, here this is going to help keep you safe. Because I think the liability is like one ridiculous and then two I'm not going to be able to put together an app that's going to keep you safe. And so instead it has to be an ongoing conversation. And so starting with those crypto parties, we're going to start actually in communities of color at first. Because I think there's a greater fear of sort of the technological change that's upon us. So we've heard in more of our small our smallest government entity is called the advisory government commissions. We've heard more rancor about the fears of 5G and like what that means in communities of color. So we're going to start there first. Yeah. Who are you? Unfortunately also comes with a big two part question. What do you do about operating 5G and the job platform? Is the government do that in the end? Is it going to be large too? What do you do about the work that you do? What do you do about the work that you do? So what do you do about the work that you do? Specifically kind of like the workers who are not as we've been we've seen a really really large article that they're not being paid kind of like what do you all do? What do you do what do you feel that can be done? I'm going to answer what I thought was the harder question. And then the second one you're like asking me that I can't weigh out in front of the mayor. So we'll see. I'll try to figure out what I can say. The first one actually Lark Tony who I was talking about it's on my team in the back and she's going to have to be happy to point her out. And she helped me stand up a reverse job fair earlier on this month actually where we had unemployed and underemployed residents get into a program and spend a year with us. They got certified in three different areas. They all worked really really hard. I invited the people that try to sell to me. There's a bunch of different members that are interested in meeting with me every day and I'm like hey I have a place for you to come and meet me. It's going to be this reverse job fair. And so I had each of those each of the interns actually sit at stations and so instead of having like Amazon and Cisco and all these sort of big names around the room and people having to approach potential employees having to approach potential employers I reversed that. And I asked those employers to hit every single table. So it kind of I thought it was neat. It kind of worked. The way that I see some things that we're going to test out going forward is we'll put folks in different rooms. So you won't even sort of the bias DNA bias that you have as you approach a table. You won't even have the bias to sort of skip over a table or whatnot. You'll have to enter each room where you'll have a different candidate. So those are kind of some of the things that we're trying out. The best example that I've ever seen was an organization called Foster League in DC and they had an intern network and it went away because Adam decided to like start his own business but the idea was we're trying to think about how to bring it back but the idea was if you were looking for an internship sorry if you were looking for an intern the algorithm would sort of populate a part of a resume without the name without the address without the college actually. And then the employer would say hey yeah we're interested and then the first time you would meet and get sort of the personal details was at that meeting. So trying to do as much as we can to think about taking out that inherent bias before actually getting it. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Sorry. Alright, let's give let's see Parker another round of applause please. Can my panelists for the AI and privacy panel go ahead and come to the stage please. And you all just let me know that I have to clear bites sharing is caring everyone. Alright, I'm going to begin by introducing our moderator Yosuke Toshu serves as the media and democracy programs director for Common Cause where he leads campaigns to engage the public and policymakers on key initiatives around media reform and broadband access. Prior to joining Common Cause Yosuke served as a policy fellow at Public Knowledge where he worked on a variety of technology and communications and communications issues. His work is focused on broadband privacy, broadband access, and affordability as well as other consumer issues. And Yosuke I'm going to give your panel until 3.30. So 3.30. Alright, take it away Yosuke. Thanks Alisa and thanks to Public Knowledge Apprentice Together this amazing event. Thanks for social changes and a huge passion to mine. Everyone, I'm super excited for this panel and for all sort of panelists that I get to meet with today and hear a lot about what they think about these issues. So we're going to talk today about artificial intelligence privacy and the impact on communities of color. So artificial intelligence is emerging as a transformative technology and it's likely to grow even more ubiquitous in the coming years. As big data and autonomous systems become prevalent there are legal and policy issues that are continuing to ramp up as Congress and other lawmakers start thinking about these issues. What often gets left out of discussion is how these technologies impact communities of color both positively and negatively. Issues such as algorithm bias, a lack of comprehensive privacy protections and the future of work all affect equal opportunity to access to news and information, education, employment housing and a host of other issues. So this panel today will explore these topics as we discuss various approaches to privacy, artificial intelligence and the impact on communities of color. So to start off I just want to give each panelist an opportunity to introduce themselves and briefly explain to the audience here what is your particular approach to how to look at AI privacy. Thank you and thank you for having me. My name is Sean Pariment with the Internet Association My official title there is Director of Diversity and Inclusion Policy and Council It always strikes people as kind of an unusual title. I work at looking at diversity through a policy lens, specifically how do algorithm bias works, how do power communities of color affected by issues of privacy. And I think the way I approach this is that we have to look at the current landscape of what's going on even though AI is quickly advancing, algorithms are not a new thing. This has been in our society, the data sets have been in our society and they've been problematic all that time, but now we're finding some new technology how do we look at this and do it in a responsible way in ways that we haven't thought about before, frankly. So that's the lens that I come at this from from a policy lens, having worked on the know and now working for a trade association that represents a lot of the biggest tech companies in the country Good afternoon. My name is Italian Conde and I'm a tech policy analyst and I'm a fellow at Data and Society Research Institute in New York City and I come to this conversation really as an advisor to Congresswoman Vivette Clark. She's the Vice-Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and in January of this year when the 116th Congress came in, one of the things that we were told from the leadership's office that was that tech accountability was going to be a legislative priority. So when I look at these issues, I'm looking at them both through a human rights lens so thinking about how can we how can we ensure that these technologies that are being developed many of which I'm now seeing, we keep hearing that they're advanced but quite frankly I sit both in the research and development world as well as the policy world and a lot of these technologies are still experimental but they're being used on test cases which is in my opinion problematic but also looking at market structure and how can we think about changing incentives because the other part of this is incredible wealth is being made and concentrated outside of communities of color so can we enact antitrust and other vehicles to try and create economic equity as well as some of the concerns that we would look at through a human rights lens. Hi everybody, my name is Frencel Archilo, I work for National Hispanic Media Coalition and I think of myself as the translator to make sure that we find ways to humanize the impact of some of the data harms that we're talking about. When we think about what our data regulations look like and the truth is that we have various templates to look at however the truth is I think we don't know what's the fit for our economy and for the type of society that we want. The truth is that we want to hold on to a lot of our capitalist values but something that Miss Esquela mentioned on the last panel earlier today was something about digital colonialism and for those of you who have maybe never heard of it I think it's a great frame that way, it's essentially thinking about a small number of organizations, companies controlling data for the masses and the problem with that system is that a lot of their bias and a lot of the issues that historically cause separation of wealth and other socioeconomic division are essentially embedded into code and those codes and those regulations are basically seeping into the way data is shared and managed by certain people at the top and other people at the bottom and there's no way to get out of that digital caste system. I think that it's important for us to be able to translate some of these things in plain language so that more people are involved in the conversation. I think that it is important to talk about not just how these things impact communities of color but how we can impact consumers of color and I think that it's important to remember that the things that are good for consumers of color are very often going to be great for all consumers. And my name is Leonard Bruce. I have two main gigs. So my first one is working with my community, the Hue River community down in Arizona. That's a program that I work for our government. Working on up-over-ight issues for child welfare, things like that. Also I'm an HD student at ASU in the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology, which sounds super fancy and I'm so excited to say it every time I do. But a lot of my work here is looking at the future of work indigenous people need specifically, how emerging technology are affecting indigenous communities in Arizona and across America. Specifically looking at how automations impact jobs and on notes it's really interesting being here in the 3D printing panel because I think the question of there's a lot of negatives that are possible and that we see there's also a lot of social good and social change that can be brought about by these technologies if they're leveraged the correct way. So a large part of my job and also my research is how can you leverage those technologies to a future that we want and not a future that is kind of handed to us. Good afternoon. My name is Gabrielle Raichwe. I'm a law fellow at Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology. The Center is a think tank focused on privacy and surveillance law and policy as they affect marginalized communities. So coming to this panel I hope to bring a perspective for looking at how you look at the demographics of people who are designing these technologies and their predominately white men. The schools that they're going to they're not receiving an education that's centering ethics. And when you look at the news every week we're hearing a story of bias in technology. And that's a reflection of the education that they're not receiving. Communities of color don't really care about these topics about privacy about AI but they're not in the rooms and they're not given the chance to share their concerns and if you empower these communities to share their concerns people will see a change in the stories that we're seeing. Great. Thanks. So I want to start the conversation off by talking about how do we address algorithmic bias when it comes to AI, AI technologies. One of the issues that I'm really interested in and what sparked my interest was a panel I was on a few weeks ago organized by Lisa and others, was data sets and incomplete data sets. So I'm really curious what is the impact when there are certain communities, particular communities of color that don't necessarily have access to these technologies and how do data sets or incomplete data sets impact that? So Leonard and Bricella, I want to turn the two of you to really answer this question. If you can provide any examples of how certain communities don't have connectivity that may be impacted by the lack of data that goes into AI. I'll give you a recent example. One thing that I think about all the time is government surveillance and how essentially when we decide on whatever data sharing regulation we come up with, here the government is going to essentially exempt itself. And one of the most dangerous things is the way that they've actually used information with third parties or how they collect information from companies. And I was thinking about the Motel 6 settlement and for those of you who aren't familiar, Motel 6 just settled a client earlier, it was about three weeks ago, to make $12 million because they were systematically passing over information to ICE to target whatever they got with Latino sounding names of people who are staying at their hotels. And this was the system. ICE agents would go and stop people at the front desk at Motel 6. They would collect information about their names, ID information, license plate information anything they could, room numbers, card information. And then they would target the people and stop them. And they would detain them. Sometimes they would question them and if they weren't satisfied, they would open up deportation investigations that led to hundreds of deportations. And there was absolutely no consequence because those families won't be reunited and people are legitimately living in fear. What happened is that wasn't only happening when Washington State brought suit against Motel 6, it's also happening in Arizona and other places. And the truth is that, you know, a fine yeah, it's the slap on the wrist, but the truth is that it shouldn't have happened. And those people are among the most disconnected population Latinos are only ahead of Native Americans living on tribal lands in terms of disconnectedness. And so the truth is most of them don't have access to go and find out what type of information whether it's the government or their apps, phone tracking how you think they don't have access to find out what kind of information has been collected about them. However, they are constantly being targeted and in that case supported. Yeah, and I think it also talks about one of the big issues that we have is it's really interesting to see articles that question the digital vibe. We all kind of know that it is a real thing. Especially in tribal communities, on reservation, I mean that's where I grew up and that's where I live. And it's very interesting to see how many folks do not have access to these systems to be able to get online what is increasingly like common passes online. You know, college applications of this application will be there. But I also think, and that same comment that Yosef was on I watched was about data justice. One of the very facts is that when we talk about onward bias, we talk about there's a lot of data that is not going into those data sets because folks are not having their data capture, which is can be just as problematic as being over surveying. And so one of the things I looked at was there was a great report that came out about the Jose of America that came out from Walmart and McKinsey in collaboration talking about our future work. And so they broke down every American county into kind of eight different architects of what is how is automation going to impact these different counties. One of the things that was left out, which is often left out, is how it's going to impact Native American reservations. And you know, it's really problematic that these are sovereign nations. There's five hundred and seven hundred tribes in America, and we're not included in that conversation. It makes it really hard to be able to come lobby on the hill if we don't have that kind of data and research to be able to back up our clients and our consumers. Super helpful. So Sean, I want to turn to you. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how the tech industry has addressed it and said what actions they're taking. Yeah, I just wanted to weigh in really quickly. Tech has done some things. Microsoft, Google are all trying to, what we're talking about here really is twofold. One being broadband access. We're trying to get to these communities, whether they be rural or urban, that don't have broadband access. And we're doing initiatives that do that, but really this is a government. This needs to be a government-led solution because the economics of it are such that we're not going to make a rural community more dense. And that's the only way for us to make economic sense for a lot of these companies, unless you put some other intensive from the government in there. But the other thing we're talking about besides broadband access is power. Because, you know, a lot of people here probably live in some way or another, live in an IoT connected device, whether you have a watch or whether you have a smart thermostat. You're generating millions of data points at any given time throughout the year and you can imagine how much that is in real lifetime. And you use that data to benefit in some way. It could be whether for your health care, it could be saving conserving energy or whatever. These communities that have already been marginalized are left out of those data points and they cannot use that data because they don't have connectivity. However, they are still subject to algorithms and AI in the most perverse ways because they're being surveilled. You know, whoever is going on in New York where Congressman Clark is from, they just had a low income community that installed facial recognition technology for all its residents to see, you know, I don't know what they're monitoring, whether the bright people are going into the house or whatever. But that is notoriously technology that can go awry, that can actory especially for communities that they're targeting. So we have to think about not only just protecting people in their privacy, that is important in paramount as well, but also there are communities that are left out of the data conversation other than for surveillance and law enforcement purposes. And we have to somehow reconcile that what's going on there. Interesting points. So there's clearly issues with lack of connectivity, and there's a lot of resilience that disproportionately impact communities of color. I want to shift the conversation a little bit and also start talking about our communities who have access or who are actually actively participating in using these technologies. There are still harms when it comes to biases, inherent biases and algorithmic biases. So I want to turn to Gabrielle. Maybe you can start talking a little bit about what are some of the commercial data practices or uses of technologies that unfortunately impact our communities. Sure, so everybody beats up on Facebook, so we'll start with them. So looking at their advertising algorithms, Facebook collects a lot of information on you to the post that you like and the pages that you follow. Their algorithms are able to create a profile on you and they have what they call a look-alike audience. So they get to predict your race, your age, things of that nature, even though they don't collect that information on you. You turn around and you look at what advertisers then do with that information. And so in 2016 for a public of that report that advertisers were able to target or exclude certain communities from the same advertising. And then you can imagine with employment as well, you target trucking jobs to men and then nursing jobs to women. And so that's one example of the data practices that they do. You look at Amazon as well in 2016 when they rolled out Sandy Shipping originally, they excluded predominantly neighborhoods of color. And so that's not necessarily a practice where they took data and then committed a harm. But you see how when you're invisible or you're not including the data they Amazon defended themselves by saying that oh we looked at where we had warehouses and so that's how we determined those things. But when you take the picture of the communities that were excluded and you put the maps from redlining back in the 50s and the 60s, it was almost 100% a perfect match. We're seeing how these algorithms are either using data then to exclude people from opportunities like housing or from commercial services and how it's just a continuation of the stereotypes and the bias that we've been seeing for years. Super helpful. There's definitely a lot of discussion about how advertisements or data practices are specifically excluding certain communities. Matali, I want to actually turn to you. When we talked about these biases and how our communities are being excluded or targeted one way or the other, how are lawmakers actually looking at AI technologies? How are they looking at some of these practices and what's the view that they should be taking? So in April, Congresswoman Clark was the house sponsor for that algorithmic accountability act along with Wharton and Booker in the U.S. Senate. And when we look at that act we were thinking about it in two ways. I do agree with Sean that there are some parts that are government responsibilities so certainly around public education to your point to make sure that people understand what algorithms are and how they impact them but we were also looking at industry. And there are tools that can be used to audit algorithms to think about the inputs that they're using to make sure that the racial proxies are not then visited upon the marketplace. So for example popular input is zip code because it can be got from census data, it's free. But with zip code the history of redlining and the racist history of redlining, then yes, perpetuated out. And the issue that we are looking at in the bill is actually a commercial law issue. So if we look at the Facebook algorithm, Google algorithm, the Amazon algorithm, these are protected by these are black boxed. So they're protected by commercial law because the company will argue that's how that's our secret source. That's how we know to do what we do and we do it well. And one of the things that we're trying to do in that bill is really argue that if this, if Google search for example which is ubiquitous is used by over 90% of the population is actually much more from public utility than it is a private product so we need to be able to look at that input to find out how it's impacting the American people. We're levying personal fines against company owners as well as fines against the companies themselves and even within that there are arguments like the FTC are going to levy this $5 billion fine but Facebook just made, if you look at the Q1 earnings, Facebook had $50 million, excuse me, in Q1 earnings for 2019 so levying a $5 billion fine is like a parking ticket. Like it's a lot probably to you and I. Well it's a lot to me. I'm not going to talk about that. I'm going to learn but it's not a lot to them so how are we thinking about changing incentives? I don't know if that was too long but we're just trying to think about ways of taming the beast when the beast is so big. That's actually super informative and thinking about alternative ways or ways outside the box to tackle some of these problems. Well I'll turn to Sean who maybe talked about how tech companies are trying to limit some of these biases and also looking at how they're trying to change some of their practices, some of the issues that Tyler talked about and how they're collecting data or whether current enforcement system is working, whether we need to change that. So I think that some of the things that are going on and people are probably familiar with this already, we're trying to get more human centered when we talk about AI, when we're trying to get humans in for oversight at all stages to make sure that things are not going to arrive. The important thing though to remember is that it shouldn't just be any human we need to think about communities that are most impacted by this and I think tech is coming to that realization and that's something that needs to be addressed but also having diverse data sets doing auditing I think that's what mentioned earlier we cannot be with AI at least some of the consequences of this, you can't just test out in a while you have to make sure that it's implemented in a responsible way but I think what's important here is we talk about risk assessments and I sort of smirked a little bit when we talked about tame police I don't want to minimize what happens in tech, I think there are certain things that are very concerning we're talking about advertising and what we're talking about taking whatever you use or AI for in the tech platform but there is algorithms in AI being used to send these people unfairly there's AI and algorithms that are being tracked like you have LPR or license plate readers that are tracking your every movement throughout your city and that's being used so when we talk about tameing the beast, I think we have to think about what is the risk here, what are we really talking about and what would be the real factors that are up with some of this technology and I think there are companies when we focus on the technology we aim at tech but not technology so when I meet by that we're aiming at the tech industry which there are a lot of things that need to be fixed within the tech industry and you know they're taking some responsibility for that but when we talk about the technology that's used by banking, that's used by law enforcement, that's used by the legal field, you know your mortgage how your mortgage is calculated, they're using AI for that and a lot of the data they're using may not be used responsibly so I think that there is a need for us to have this conversation and talk about how we regulate these sort of things but we have to make sure we're having the full conversation of how this technology is really impacting society and it's not limited to one industry Thanks so I want to actually take what Sean just said and Mary that's what we're talking about, I kind of compare the different idea to some of the new points and hone in a little bit on how specific communities are using this technology, some of the biases they might be experiencing, some of the disproportionate impacts, I don't know, Francella, and the two of you can maybe talk a little bit about how are the indigenous communities and the Latino community actually experiencing some of these disproportionate harms So I think it's interesting because like Sean had this conversation before is that you know algorithms are not new, I think it's a great buzz word and it's bringing something to do with core social issues to the front so I mean one of the things in my community specifically like I have a very clear example of this is like carbon and having a vehicle in Arizona is really important because if you're not living in a metro area you're pretty much screwed for getting anywhere unless you have a car So when you look at something like that, conservation is one of the things and this is, I mean there's a variety of social reasons for this but it's really carbon with the carbon and the folks who are on our community are paying 20-25% interest rate on standard carbon if they can get the car and so some of these are just created and perpetuated by some of the algorithms that have been created by the carbon that are surrounding us and so there are situations like that and there's other situations where there's been algorithms that have been used for a long time that are now being created and perpetuated more in the AI that are expanded and I think a large portion of it is because you have more data and it's quicker and you have a system that can move through it that is a lot faster that there has ever been export. So specifically I think one of the main things that I would think about going back to what Sean is saying is like looking at some of these technologies I think AI is kind of a tagline for the panel but there are a lot of technologies that are reliant on just that data processing that we really do look at the technology that's there and the people who are building it. There's sometimes a technology that can do that but then also I think people building it go back to the earlier comment there is not a lot of like an extreme engineering there's not a lot of ethical requirements for you to build a system so what happens when that system is built by a small startup and then suddenly the interaction you don't know what it's going to be when I think about the impact on Latino communities but about what are essentially the far-reaching consequences of feeling like you are in a community that's constantly over-policed, constantly under surveillance, constantly targeted, whether it's online for predatory lending, whether it's by your government by watching all the time and hoping for deportation leads. The truth is that it manifests itself into people who are maybe in mixed status families not wanting to enroll their kids in school, not wanting to seek medical services, not wanting to take advantage of government services that they're entitled to because they might work in big taxes just like all of us and they still don't take advantage of it because they don't want their information into a system that they really can't see into and can't control. That has consequences also under participation and voting and participating in the census and these are things that essentially you start with a harm you end up with essentially a group of people who feel like they're constantly suspicious and then there's additional harms because then they don't participate in the census and voting. So we create new problems from those original from where we started. One thing I do want to make sure is that I cannot be separated from this conversation is digital literacy because the truth is that once people do have access do they really have the tools to be able to navigate, oh I can control my privacy settings on this app or oh this is how I turn off my tracking, like does the ordinary person know how to do that because a lot of us who have several ways to log in if I have myself on my laptop right now I still it would take me a second to walk through some of my apps to turn off certain settings and the truth is that for people who have limited access do they necessarily have the opportunity or even just to know how to be able to do that. So I think part of the reason why some of those voices just are simply not included in this conversation is because we haven't given them the language. I think the truth is that we're talking about data sharing and privacy and algorithms and for some people especially in largely non-english in Latino households that predominantly speak Spanish at home, they are coming from countries that are traditionally suspicious of government regimes and they are now under surveillance every time they walk out of the house. So the truth is we have to be able to give them the language to be able to participate in conversations about saying these sort of things that you can do to safeguard your information because I don't think people are always thinking about this is that we are constantly contributing to a digital footprint that we will not be able to escape for a lifetime. Your credit score will stay with you forever. The rate that you're paying for your mortgage is going to be similar to the rate that you pay for your next mortgage. These are things that we create this digital footprint and have we given people the tools to be able to help shape their own profiles. Super helpful and that leads perfectly into our next discussion about privacy. So everyone knows Congress is actively thinking about privacy legislation right now and we've heard a lot about one key piece of that which is the algorithmic bias and the particular impact to creating the color but I want to actually broaden this out to talk about all the other aspects of privacy legislation. It's complicated, there's a lot of parts to it, so I want our panelists to help us break it down a little bit. So I want to start with you. About the algorithmic bias issues, what are some of the harms that communities of color are experiencing from all that privacy protections or the current privacy regime that we have now that isn't as adequate as it could be? Are you asking about like what should privacy look like? Yes. I think step one is kind of taking a step out from just privacy in particular. At the center we're trying to encourage conversation not just to be about privacy but about data practices writ large so that we're encompassing all of these things including your algorithm that's deciding what more did you get or how much you paid for a car loan. We're hoping that this legislation centers civil rights protection so there's strong anti-discrimination language in the bill to ensure that it's not only Facebook that can't use an algorithm against you but also like we said like these other industries that are also using algorithms. We're hoping that the FTC gets rulemaking, strong rulemaking authority, in addition to empowering state attorneys generals so that they can also bring claims. We think about California or New York that has a history or like in other states I should say that have strong histories of consumer protection and making sure that they also can have, they can also help the federal trade commission in this work. I think I'm trying to find out a lot of other things. I'll turn back and tell you in a second. I won't actually go to Mattale. One, if you have any additional thoughts on what should privacy legislation look like outside of the health advice issue because there's a lot of other issues that we haven't talked about some of which we all mentioned but also what is the issues of privacy or how tech companies are looking at it and what are some of the concerns you have with the approaches they might be taking. So one of the projects that I'm working on now is looking at facial recognition and really not so much that this is a very technology centric conversation but there is another part of this which is usage and specifically from my perspective and the people that I'm working from, we want people to be able to invent. We want to make sure that there's innovation but we also want to make sure the deployment of these technologies are in the public good. So just to correct Sean slightly from earlier, I serve a New York based New York City congresswoman and within the district that she covers there's actually a landlord that wants to replace keys with facial recognition technology because it would be more convenient to look at your door and it opens than use a key. People in New York, we are a city that believes in striking, marching, telling people to get the hell out telling people to leave us alone and that's basically what's happening and the reason that we're concerned about that is the secondary use. So it's not just this fourth amendment question around surveillance that we're concerned about. We're also concerned about once those faces have been captured, and we know that IBM has this project for a million faces and they are using, they're using arrest data for people that are perfectly innocent. They're using pictures of people that have been sex trafficked and all of these really, you know, really horrible ways of diversifying the data set, what, if you're enterprising and you have these faces anyway and you're in an African American community and African American building, there's nothing to say because we have no regulations or laws around this that those faces could be captured and then sold on. And I think that that's really the issue. So as I'm looking at facial recognition as a policy area, I'm thinking about the use of facial recognition and I'm so, I'm going to be in San Francisco in the next couple of weeks speaking to some of the people out there because they want to ban it. They want to ban these big facial recognition within the city and I love California for many reasons, not just Tupac but many, many others. I'm on the black panel so, you know, but I do really like that state because they are very, very serious about this idea that we have the right for private space. That's actually part of our inheritance for living in this country. That's why people like me am great here. So I would say that we're looking at quality life issues. We're looking at secondary markets. We're also looking across to Europe. So we're going to be in Brussels trying to figure out how the EU are thinking about this and we understand different continent, different history but can some of those learnings come here and the reason that we do, the reason that we're very much focused on the tech industry and the big companies isn't because they're not the only people doing this to Sean's point. This is addictive. But if we can bring down a giant then by bringing down the giant and showing that the work can be done there it's going to have huge impact across the industry. So Sean, I want to give you a chance to respond to that. I'm also just really interested in how the tech industry looks at privacy policies, how they're updating the policies to limit and reduce a lot of these harms that all the panels address but also maintaining some of the positive impacts that tech companies also offer. Thank you. I would hope the goal is not to bring down any particular company. The goal should be to protect citizens from overreaching whoever it is. It shouldn't be to bring down a giant. I think that's some of the concern that you have companies that are successful then it becomes a big problem for them. Let's look at them. I think we need to look at how these are going to be used across the board. We had the FBI come in and tell us that they had this massive facial recognition since database that is made up of a lot of driver's license photos. It's like, do you go to a DMV and thinking that you're going to be entered into an FBI system where they're going to scan you every time they're looking for criminal? No. So I think we need to think about privacy. This is a larger thing outside of bringing down giants. But to your point about privacy, the Internet Association released a privacy principles late last year. And I think we need to look at this. I think the industry recognizes there needs to be a federal legislation on privacy period. There has to be something. And the data needs to be yours. It needs to be portable. You need to understand that. You need to be understanding how your data is being used. All of those things are important. So I think it's making a privacy framework where the American public has an idea of where my data, how is it being used? Can I take it? Is it my data? Can I take it with me? All of those things are important and we have those principles out. Did I answer your question? I know you were asking about what the industry is doing. But I think everyone's looking for a federal legislation on this. So just to follow up on that, Francaela, I know you've been working on this more than most advocates. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on some of the issues that we've talked about with the various provisions to privacy legislation. But I'm also curious in all of your advocacy, what do you see as the role for members of color or try caucus members to really play a role in shaping privacy legislation? Okay, a couple of things. And now Francaela has a couple of my concerns about some things that were mentioned earlier about data minimization and what happens when you essentially say I don't want my data minimized anymore. I had a really important question from my four-year-old nephew, Zander, and he was talking to Alexa and he is like, where'd that voices go? And he's like, and I was like, and he's like, I think they're in there. And I was like, I don't really know. And I never really thought about it. And the truth is that it's part of my terror all the time. It's like where is this information going? And even when we're talking about facial recognition technology, I know that I think it was Senator Schatz and Blunt if I'm correct to introduce the Facial Recognition Comprehensive Act last month or this March, I think it was. The thing is, it's like, I know that Congress is thinking about it. I know that they're thinking about what are ways that we can take essentially steps towards whatever is this larger framework. I think that in general, the larger framework is going to have to address this in bite-sized pieces because essentially the issues that I have with maybe facial recognition are a little bit different than some of the other Internet, you know, Internet of Things issues versus just how you're choosing information, sharing data online. So I think that in general we need to think about, okay, we can take this step here, we can take this step here and not try to address it all at once. But I do think to the question of who does this data belong to is something that it has taken a long time for whether it's companies or even the government to get to a place to say that the data is yours. That has been a very long, like, long struggle to get to be able to say that out loud. Because the truth is that once you claim the data is belonging to you, then all of a sudden you are vested with these new rights that didn't belong to you before. Because remember a lot of the times before, you have a lot of third parties who are sharing your information that are saying, I've manipulated it to the extent that it is no longer yours because it cannot be re-identified. Is that really true? I don't know because you won't show me your algorithms because they're proprietary. So we have this riddle. And so the truth is that we have to decide, okay, fine, we're in a riddle. Let's start deciding on what can we actually find a solution for right now. Because I think that we do have good models about things that we can extract to say yes, this can work in our society. But to Gabrielle's earlier point, we have to constantly be thinking about centering the voices that have been either silenced or marginalized into this conversation. Because again, we are going to bring whatever our bias, whatever our divisions, whatever is the separation that we have before this is about a digital economy and essentially embed that into code that's going to carry on into the 22nd century. So I think that we should be thinking about this with a forward-thinking approach and I think we should think about what can we address bite-sized pieces at a time. It's super helpful. And Leonard, I just want to give you the final word before we close out privacy legislation. You have any particular thoughts on what legislation should look like? I'm really interested in what Frank Selig has said about real solutions and maybe key provisions you think should be included in the bill, whether that is focused on indigenous communities or some of the civil rights aspects. Yeah, I think it's... So the privacy conversation is really interesting because Native Americans historically have been super over surveilled. Going back to the non-preservation, having also surveilled them, having to get many passports to leave for innovation. And so I think one of the really key things for us when looking at some of these privacy issues is, like Frank Selig said, having to see at the table, having people to be in those decision-making positions, because I think a lot of the times when these policies aren't active, they are not enacted in a way that provides an avenue for meaningful conversation from not only Native Americans but for many communities of color to be able to take a seat at that table and say, hey, wait a minute, there are aspects of this that we're doing in a way that is going to affect us very equally. So I think one of the major things that I think about, and this is going back to Gabrielle's earlier point about in ethics training, is that we have to have more diversity and inclusion, not just necessarily at the policy-making, but also at the creation of the technology at the teaching and the training of the engineers who are building these things so that we have stuff like what happened. I think it's great what's happening in Google where the employees are taking a stand and saying, hey, wait a minute, we shouldn't be doing this project in China over-sensoring the internet because you're making these ethical principles and you also have a company which arguably is enabling and empowering their employees to be able to make those decisions and speak up, which I think is what we need more of. I think regulation, in personal opinion, I don't know regulation will be quick enough with the emerging technology. We had a talk for free bringing about Moore's Law, and I guess Moore's Law in convergence with all these technologies, I don't know if we can ever create a legislative protection fast enough to deal with this stuff. So instead I think we need to really focus on the individual as well and make them so that they can be empowered to be able to speak up and also to be knowledgeable enough about how it works. You said something about surveillance, and I just want to give you a really uncomfortable example just so that if you are a part of family that does not feel like you are constantly under surveillance. Back in, as after the New Deal when states were essentially implementing welfare, it was totally ridiculous if someone were to come and raid your house and basically determine whether or not you should be eligible for welfare. And even in thousands when they were like asking people who were part of welfare programs to do DNA testing on your children in some states, you're constantly being asked really invasive questions about your partners and your sexual history, all sorts of things that's documented. And the truth is if you were in a group of people who's never been surveilled, I'm just giving you an example of poor people who are constantly under surveillance by the government. If you were to ask rich people to go to like undergo something that was so ridiculous to say I'm going to raid your house and decide whether or not you should have to pay this amount of taxes or that amount of taxes. I'm going to ask you to log the DNA of all of your kids to make sure that you're eligible for certain benefits. That would sound ridiculous. And the truth is that the problem was that when the government was trying to implement these rules, it was kind of like people in a room that were probably very homogenous decided that this was going to be a great idea because they were raiding houses of people of color. And I just want us to be thinking, whatever we're thinking about, whatever framework we come up with if we can find a way to include more voices at the beginning, we won't have to raid people's houses because we built it together. And I think that's the way I want us to kind of think about how we're approaching the problem solving. That's a great point. And I think including more voices, more diverse voices is just a strong point that should be prevalent in all of these issues today. And that gets to the third and final issue we'll cover before questions, which is AI and the future of work. So Leonard and Gabrielle, I'm really interested in both of your takes on how will AI impact the future of work, particularly in communities of color, who hold current positions right now that are likely to experience automation? Sure. So with the future of work and automation and how it's going to affect communities of color, if we aren't so, sorry, taking a step back, the surveillance aspect, we're seeing that again in the future of work, where algorithms are managing workers. And then maybe you didn't see, but there was a lot of news articles coming out about Amazon automatically firing workers because they weren't working fast enough. And so when you think about these warehouses where it is people, maybe not only people of color, but these are people who are marginalized, who don't have as much power. That's something that we're going to start working at. When you think about gig workers that are also predominantly people of color who are now, this is their only form of income, and the algorithm is telling them to do this and that and they don't know how much money they're getting me. That's what we're looking at. And so if we aren't, if the culture is this and the backing star is profit, we're going to continue seeing a lot of these principles where it's, you need to pack the spots in 5 to 15 seconds. And if you don't do that, then this is going to automatically fire you because now we need to make sure that our company's model is on customer clicks and they send in all the information and 4 hours need to make sure that's ready to ship. We can't, I mean this is my reason all the sendries we use, but so you can be really on Mount Everest, you can be virtually in Jurassic Park, you can be really, but not really inside Chemical Park. Yes, that's a great way of describing it. So how many people here have had a virtual reality experience before? Stick around. So the way, I mean, historically you think about it, there's actually very prominent computer sciences and I think he's like, it's the new doors, it's one. So now, he has something called like the reality spectrum. So on one end of that you have virtual reality, which deals with, you know, computer generated background. So the way I over this is, you know, what's the difference between VR and AR and XR is something as simple as it's the background. And more specifically in technical terms, in Unity we'll call that the scene. So in VR, the background is computer generated. That scene was actually developed by hand developers. In augmented reality, the background of the scene is actually the real world. So you have virtual objects. So for example if the sign he had an AR object that looked like the sign he bought it would actually sit here on the table. So that's what augmented reality is. And some of you may I mean, you probably encountered every single day, you probably used filters on Snapchat. If you use Amazon, any of their shopping experiences now you can use a camera and place objects inside of your house. So that's the way I think about augmented reality. Thanks. I had to go get my, this is the hashtag VR Yeti show and I think it's we hand, we customize this ourselves. It's a nice take away actually because technology should be even friendly and we really think that customizing crystallizing your technology is making it a priority. It helps people get over some of this initial confusion about some of these terms in VR. So I'll try to address that. There are a lot of semantic work games going on in VR right now. What happened is that really 360 video came out first and was sort of called VR by the media and it stuck and then VR kind of stuck. And a lot of us in the industry are trying to I think maybe unsuccessfully but I think the attempt is through XR to have a term that really can encompass the entire VR product. So the whole, all of the various technologies that are related to VR there's some sort of virtual augmented scenario, fantasy world, digital overlays, what I call AR, over reality. And some people call it extended reality. I prefer to think of it as X is just a variable that you put in front of reality you're extending to. Thank you. That's very helpful. So there are some people who may think that VR is actually a mechanism that detaches people because you know, you're behind a computer, you're behind a headset. But Hall at Discovery know that you do a lot of projects with educators from K to 12. And so I was wondering if you could talk about these projects and how you see them as actually building community empathy rather than detaching students. And then if anyone else wanted to talk about similar projects that we're working on. Yeah, I'll say what we're doing. And I think that that's one of the real power of the virtual reality is not that you can hear about very much but we're in the education space, we're in the control space. And for us it's a lot of times the story of the power you bring to an individual. So there are a lot of stories about how people have several moments that set their career. I bet that most people in this room had a moment back to it and say, you know what, I decided to go into what I'm doing now because of the thing that happened when I was this person and that stuff. But I'd like to tell the story of Ray Montaigne who was the first African American woman who run a computer department in the Navy. She was my last year in the Navy. And she knew that she wanted to be an engineer when she was seven years old and was visiting her grandfather. They was in Arkansas and took her to tour a capture of German suffering. In fact, you know this story. And she saw the dials. She put the periscope. She said, what do I have to do to know how to do all this stuff? She's seven years old. She's in Arkansas. I said, well you have to be an engineer. You don't have to worry about that. You have to be an engineer instead of an engineer. And she became an engineer. By the time she retired, she was briefing the joint Jesus staff. She was building programs for Richard Nixon. She was doing great stuff. That's one. The Cherry Grant show was a quarterback. Well, it gives him a moment when he's seven years old and won by a Sears store. And there was a football and a helmet. That's the first time he ever seen me the one. And he decided that's what he won. And don't ask me why. But then he'd get the football and throw it in the air and go pick it up and throw it back it. There are lots of stories like this where somebody was in the place that made a difference in their lives. And if you are in a community or you're stuck in a neighborhood and you don't ever get out, you're not exposed to those things. And I talked with a math teacher in Hollywood. And we had kids that went to the beach. We lived in L.A. and they'd never go. We'd take them on a field trip to the ocean. Right? Well, if that's true, and if rain money never goes inside that German submarine, or Terry Dungeon ever sees that football, their lives are different. With this, we really and this is sort of the game changer, the high quality VR. They're now under $200. They're accessible. You see a lot of these in schools. It means that I can take you someplace and maybe change the way you think about farming or mining or the military or about being a pilot. And it's an experience that makes a big difference. If you can start at 7 and go through 12, the people will never accept it. Right? I've heard this story in NPR last week. We're going to walk into, she's in college, never heard a symphony before. Season changed their life. Now the assistant can conduct a symphony in Cisco. $2,000 a year. She has another job. It affects us. It's one of those things where all it means owns everybody in it. So that's part of the deal. It's finding a way that it won't really work. The other thing you can do and I'm sure you'll be talking about this. When you talk about empathy, we were trying to put together videos and I thought that where you put this on and I can walk you through the world of a child that's dyslexic. I can make sure that every book you see is colored in such a way that it's very, very hard to read. You can concentrate really hard and you can do it. But to walk around like that and let teachers take that experience you only have to be in there about 7 minutes. Being able to have a child look in there. That's about 7 minutes maybe less. Then you build everything, you change. Other people walk out of people's shoes and to me that is a really, really useful thing. Can I push back a little bit? Sure. I love what you said but I think empathy is something that is a really difficult thing to talk about with VR. And the reason being, especially to folks who have had situations that we may not be able to understand or put on the device and understand. I think it may be a misstep for us in VR to call it empathy. And that's why I try to reframe my own thinking around this and I'm still playing with this idea of is it empathy or are we really teaching compassion because people are having a lived experience in VR that is simulating a real life experience. Because you're not actually having the same experience as the other person. You're able to have some level of compassion and you're able to understand what it might be like to be in your shoes. But I don't think you actually come out of VR and go oh, I don't know what it's like to be this person. But I do think it enables us to put people in this embodied, cognitive place where they're able to have an experience of the other or whatever the other is. And they're able to think about maybe their own transformative experience that they had inside of VR or how that might be an experience that has happened. So I worry about that empathy word sometimes. I think it can be difficult in the VR community to use the word empathy and sometimes feel like the wrong word. And I'll take cognitive, I'll take that. But I know that there was a fundraiser where we're trying to raise water for a place in a different basin. And follow one rules for a job to go here and get water and how long it could take to get one jar of water and do it about 7.5 years in a day. So once you're saving that and you spend an hour and you realize, oh my gosh, this first line is a little higher, then it does change your thinking. So if you're right, you can't. It's like a change the way you think. But I love what you were saying about the kind of experience that people haven't had before. Because one of my colleagues that runs VR Nation and Alexander talks about it as obtaining the unattainable. Which I think helps people also expand their imagination. It helps them think about what might be possible for themselves. And that is something that both the digital media and news media work that we do and work that we do in underrepresented communities make sure they have a voice or providing opportunities to have a voice. I think we can do that same in VR, but in an embodied cognitive opportunity where people can sit inside of an experience like the one you're describing and have a sense of what it might feel like. And then to actually take the headset off, I think the key is having something we ask them to do right after that experience. So we can really use that opportunity as a teachable moment, as an educational opportunity, as an opportunity to go one step further than VR can do. Okay. I think there's another one there, which is the limitations you have with, I think VR has received this unwelcome and I'm assuming I guess responsibility to teach empathy. Now this is technology. So for example, I mean, they're just technological challenges that you have with you can teach empathy, right? So for example, you put on a headset to your question about attachment. I always say like, there's no being VR, there's no attachment. You are when most of us walk around with our smart phones. To be quite honest, I can't. Because I can completely like into my HTC Vive and have a very normal experience in this regard, everything else happening in the world. And I'll do the same thing walking down a street with my iPhone. So the attachment issue is really a concern. I think the concern is that how do we build as technology, how do we build a sense of presence in VR? Like that's the true technological challenge. And oftentimes we can't do that right now because there are still areas of human computer interaction. For example, how do I truly smell in VR? So I'll never know what it's like to be a chef. I can't smell the casino actions. What does it actually feel like to be a person of color and unfortunately have to be tapping? Well, you can't really feel yet in VR. So even there are limitations to teaching empathy that we hope will be solved with new areas of human computer interaction for the next few years. Thank you. That's really interesting. So I'm wondering if there are current hurdles for people to access VR. So whether that be education about their technology or the neighborhood you live in or affordability. And if there are hurdles, you could talk about them in ways that we can combat them. Sure. So this is predominantly what we do. We provide access to anyone in our community can come in and use about eight different tools that we have. We teach several different classes on VR content creation. We help people support people when those tools go away because the start-up that started them just went poof. And then we provide ongoing opportunities to build community around VR technologies. So we had a VR eco hackathon a couple of years ago that was the first ever in Austin. And out of that we had about 40%, 40% persons of color to 60% white person folks. And I think it was about 60 40 male female too, which was kind of huge in 2017 actually. And I actually think that there's a huge space inside of the VR field right now. It's really recent. I keep saying that in the last four years but it's still really really recent. We are building a brand new technology and we're building, it's a paradigm shift. A lot of people talk about it like it's just a media tool. It's not. It's a whole shift and it's a 3D spatial computing shift which is not how we see things right now. And that's going to really shift everything. It's going to shift how we consume media, how we create media. And so some of the biggest obstacles we saw early on was that people never tried VR and if they had they tried it with Google Cardboard and had horrible experience. They never wanted to do it again or native nauseous. And that's what happened to me. And then I saw the Syrian Gabo's Beast from the United Nations which was an amazing beast that showed a young woman 12 years old in a Syrian refugee camp. She was Syrian but she was in a French refugee camp and I took the headset off and I was in tears. And I had no idea it was going to be rude or so. But it was because that sense of presence was so strong but I didn't have access to an HSC vibe or it was ripped at that time. I just happened to go to a conference. So we're still even four years now that we've been doing this work. We're still finding that a large percentage of the population has not had access to VR and they have instead of bad experience. And we are trying to spread that across the country by working with arts and cultural organizations to help them. We train trainers. We teach them how to fish. We don't want to be the renderer. We want them to be powered or have the power to create programs on their own and be able to bring VR to their communities. So we think that that should be publicly accessible just like the Port of Pac was back 35 years ago. My kind of sense there, the Port of Pac was the first publicly accessible video camera that was huge and regular average people didn't have access to that and public access television made that accessible so that citizens could go out and document stories that were having in their community and then actually help their government officials accountable because they were able to report local, hyper-local way on stories. And I think we're really trying to do that in the VR aerospace. We have about 15 centers around the country that have taken that on and have started moving. They're expanding the mission into that VR aerospace. But we can only reach so many. So I think the other obstacle is that philanthropists aren't giving yet to VR because the technology is still really new. Just in Boston and that ecosystem just last two months we've seen one foundation just get started. And we're very excited. We have a VR scholarship fund. It's the first in the world I think it's definitely in the country that we're going to be providing to four-year college students higher education so that they can start getting these skills early on that we're building in our job training program and that's a challenge too because philanthropists aren't giving money to those programs as they don't really understand the art yet. So I have to take this headset to Sundance and stand in line and talk to people about what VR is, how you can use it, how it's going to change the world. Get them to maybe believe me a little bit and then see if we can get funding. But that funding trail right now is not following where we need the resources which is at the grassroots levels. It was really held support to not have access to a lab at MIT now so that they can start creating and playing and practicing and making mistakes just like we did in traditional media and in the tech world. Those are some great points and one that I'll sit with is to be quite honest with you VR is a 1% technology. It is designed in for the 1% so far. And it probably will stay that way just giving cost displays to actually putting the HMD ahead and not display the actual headset that's the HMD. So they probably will stay cost but I think discussing affordability without discussing usability is just as important. And I think that there is, in my opinion, there are really just two active groups in virtual reality right now. We have the enterprise group that use virtual reality for things such as training, staff, I think UPS, Walmart or even the way they're in any other community which most of our users are dropping on the game and can win the community. And for individuals like that there aren't any hurdles because they already are in the next paradigm of the meeting. Our average user spends about 25 hours a week inside of his, and I say his because most of our users are predominantly white males, inside of the set set. And once again because of that there aren't any hurdles. I can actually go forward to pre-order to do Oculus quests that will be released right this week. But typically affordability and usability I think they aren't as mutually exclusive as people think they are because I get to meet someone like an obviously normal individual right. To say like I want to go back to what the art experience because I can't move throughout the day without my phone. But you can move throughout the day without your VR as said for most people. I'm sorry, I just want to follow up and say the Russians are really important because they're working in the browser space. Once that becomes out there where you can, now you go to a website and see all this great stuff. So you can go there and see that website VR. That's a pretty powerful thing. In terms of accessibility and barriers it's interesting because money is not so much a barrier anymore. It used to be to have the kind of experience that you had that made you cry both for everything that made you cry. It was really too grand. I mean it was what it was. And that's not going to get in the many classroom. The Oculus Go and that's what we both have up here. These are under $200. That's now in a donor's choose model for a classroom teacher. So these are starting to bring meaningful experiences closer. You can always get the, this was way, the first session was on 3D print. You could 3D print these little guys and you can have them. And it's not the power that's great. So you say you can have them. It's pretty good. What do you need for all these things though? For this and for these is internet connectivity. And I've got stuff I've downloaded here. We were playing with it earlier. You can see the California wildfires. Yes, you go out in space and visit a particle lighter. That's because I downloaded it at a good height. If we're going to do this at schools, if I'm going to be able to have this and be able to check it out so you're going to go home and have your submarine experience where it's going to be, you're going to have bandwidth at home. And that's important. These things, the lower price heads, it's all work with cell phones. How do you have cell phones? There you go. So if you're going to download a VR experience though, you're going to need a height that will let you do without killing your data plan. You've got to have open Wi-Fi to be able to do that. And once open Wi-Fi happens, then we've got that whole new level of greater, like you said. So this is a VR camera. So all day I'm making video pictures of this. Getting this through security was interesting in my mind. What is this? I said it's a VR and they explained to me, what time is the panel? So if the security guards are coming, I think it's a very big sign. But with this, and these are under $200 to, I could show the experience of moving from this panel to where we have lunch, right? Because the school kids were filling up the cafeteria so we had to keep walking. But I can demonstrate this and use a free tool from Google. Thank you Google for sponsoring this. Stitch it all together and you can walk in my shoes to have lunch. Or a kid can take, use this and show how to go from their front door to the school where they attend. Or what their cafeteria is like. And I can stitch all those together with free tool. So the money is not so much the issue anymore. But you've got to have the bandwidth. And the bandwidth has to be there for everybody. Everybody has to be in access. I do want to say you can actually watch all of your content offline. So you do have to download it. But you can watch it offline. We took three HTC vibes to Nairobi, Kenya to do a project with the United Nations on a three-dimensional globe where we put all of a particulate matter for 35 years, mapped it onto the growth globe and then showed world leaders how you can use VR to tell stories in a three-dimensional way. And even though we didn't have these at the time, and I would have rather taken these than the 50 pounds and trying to get it through customers like my other HTC vibes work, it's still, I have to say, I really do think that having a full system that allows you volumetric VR, which this does, but having a full Oculus Rift, well, and Quest, and we have two that just came out this week, and the HTC five having a 15 by 15 foot space, when I go to the senior center and do demos for seniors, and they can throw sticks for a robot dog and have them jump up and rub his belly and have them jump for sticks, I have to watch out that they don't run through the brick wall in my building. Because it is so real, but it's also physical. We did a part of recreation class on fitness inside of the HTC vibe. You can't really do that with this. So I do want to just differentiate that there are many different headsets. We can do two hours on all of the different technologies and do you make something in 360, do you make something in Unity or Unreal or A-Frame, which works on the web, in a web browser and is a really accessible free open-source solution by Mozilla, there are so many different ways that you can create VR content, and I think that's one of the challenges to get back to your question around accessibility is also the fact that we're so young as an industry that we don't have standards. There's very little standards around cameras, there's very little standards. There was only three years ago an editing program, you know, Premiere took on editing into the 60 event. There are new programs coming out every day that will allow you to do things easier and easier. We haven't quite found the dream weaver of VR yet, but we're getting there. So you guys teed up my next question nicely, because Paul talked about broadband access, and in public knowledge we care a lot about making sure that every neighborhood and everyone has access to broadband, high-speed quality broadband. So you said that's really important for VR but you also said that you need to, sometimes you can download things about having internet. If you're going to, from a good example of this, it doesn't work for bandwidth, it's Google or VR which won't work on the other ones, it won't work on the big ones. If you have a good pipe, and I have a pretty good pipe in my house but I still hardwired for that, you can look around, this way you can like fly over Paris and go down to the street and you look around and take a little walk. If you're waiting for the image to load, it's kind of like that old movie in Session, right, when you're building slow, if you're on a good bandwidth you can really explore lots of different things and that's it. It's got to be the good one but without bandwidth, Google or, which is really somewhere out right now really won't do it. So there's a lot of stuff I download. Right, and there are a lot of policy makers in the room, so I'm curious if you want to talk about why broadband access is important and if there should be policies what they should look like to increase access in the climate. Yes, so this is... Anyway, it's... Look at this one because in terms of VR and AR I mean I go to Beijing once a recorder and some of the technologies that I'm seeing over there are moving a lot faster because of the vibe change that I'm trying to do and they have help. So in terms of like being in a policy, I mean I feel like it's one of those things where we need to make mistakes first and that policy makers will kind of come in and govern us or can we govern ourselves before we can get there and I'm not sure if we can and in my opinion I think that policy makers are going to need to allow us as creators and developers of the platform to really mess up to do things that we probably should not have done that are slightly unethical. So we can actually figure out where those issues are because right now it's still rather early to say like okay I'm not sure that everyone has a problem or they have access. And let me just say that discovery education is moving us into education because it really works really effective in a lot of ways for a lot of subject areas that otherwise aren't as effectively delivered but in terms of policy, YouTube are a new industry I mean we're going to start with schools and hopefully go out and home but if we want this industry to grow like the video business grew, like software business grew then you've got to have the highway use that. It's 1% but I think your stuff could be 10% but usually everybody has access. Oh without a doubt. Because I mean I think a lot of in terms of technology works as 5G right now. So one of the biggest issues right there is the latency, right? So when you talk about latency you're talking about the responsiveness of how it can actually work. So you're so deep in the heart of it. Yes, yes. And because of that, typically I think they'd say anything under the latency. And right now that's for like post real lives. For VR and AR you need to like below 20% and you can't even get it because 5G isn't there. So you can't have shared AR experiences yet as well because of that lack of technology and that's what we just don't have right now. I share some of your thoughts about that but I'm also really concerned about getting the industry total power right now and letting them mess up with my data. I'm not okay with that. I think that we need to be asking the hard questions now about VR and not make some of the mistakes that we've made with social media and other privacy issues. For example, Facebook owns this. You have to log into Facebook to do anything on this device. And so it's not just the examples you brought up. Imagine if you have this headset on in Facebook or any other company is looking everywhere you look and creating heat mounts like YouTube already does with all of your videos. You can watch heat mounts of where people are looking at 360 videos right now. You can see how effective your 360 videos are on those heat mounts. But what it also tells you is where people's focus is. And as a developer and as a creator I'm very excited about that because it helps me make better content. However, as a private person I'm very concerned about who's going to know where I'm looking and making certain assumptions about that. And what are we going to assume about people's sexual orientation? What are we going to assume about people culturally? What are we going to assume about people politically, economically? All of these issues are going to impact us if they have the data they will be able to make these assumptions about us. And I think that is cause for concern. Early on we have the ability to create standards for this industry that we did with other technologies that went really, really rapidly into where they're at now. And then on the broadband issue I was a VTAP recipient out in California. I worked in Latino communities, mostly migrant communities on broadband adoption. And you have to have, I mean I think the bottom line is in order to experiment and play and create and learn with a group, which this generation really loves to do and I think it's really important that we cultivate and support that, you've got to have everybody online and you've got to enable them to all have their own device. My mom was actually, I just went and saw Senator King today and thanked him because he worked on the main laptop initiative with my mom who is the head of the main teachers in English 15, 20, 20 years ago I think now. They gave every fifth grader a laptop in the state of Maine with my home date. And having a device in your home that you can then play with and not have to share with somebody else, that's actually as important I think as having the broadband that goes with that because we've got to give people an opportunity to play with different devices and I wouldn't say that $250 is necessarily means that money is not an issue anymore. It's also having access to the cultural reference points of technology. Technology people speak a different language. My husband's always like, we need to talk more like a normal person because I'm not talking about eFrame and I'm talking about this and I'm talking about latency and it's true. You need to break down the, you don't need to make those assumptions about what people know in the room. You just break down these definitions because people can feel really excluded by that language as well if they haven't been exposed to it or they haven't been in a community that is as tech savvy. So, you know, don't assume you know what it is. So I'm going to ask a couple more questions and then take a few questions from the audience and start thinking of your questions. So Russell, before you said that, most of the VR users are white men. And this teed up my next question because I wanted to Well, I was referring to, our users are X-Roc. I won't make that a history. But in general I wanted to talk about the importance of diversity in this space and I'm curious if you think that the VR space, and this is for everyone, but if you think that VR is a diverse field in the sense of the content creators, developers and users, and if not how can diversity in VR be improved? Well, that's a great question. So, we've been working on Drop 4, we're four and a half years old now, but oh gosh, we're almost going on five cents. And since then, have completely developed myself and myself in the industry. And one thing that you will notice, whether you go to GDC, a game developer conference that happens every year in March, whether you go to things such as the augmented World Expo, to the augmented reality VR conference in San Francisco as well, is that oftentimes the majority of us are male, post or older more than likely white male as well. You will see very few women, and it's very great that you can see most people of color. Like I know, for example, with GDC Microsoft Post, a Blacks and King beat up just during GDC. And something I've seen in terms of developers and users just over the past four and a half years is that I would say in the last two years, you now have women in XR fun. So you're seeing more women who are actually building in XR and VR at the moment in terms of the diversity of the developers as well. I get a lot of calls from friends who work in living in Los Angeles, who are content creators, and who are from underworked communities, and they're interested in figuring out like, okay, how do I build this AR conspiracy to an AR kid? So I'm starting to see folks outside of the space, like artists, and storytellers, and creators who are like, oh no, I kind of want to see what this tool can actually lead into. So I think the last two years have been quite interesting. But I think during the early days, it was like very hard. Yeah, it was very hard to find people who, you know, kind of look like us, you know, around us. It's very hard. So yeah, I would say that diversity is slightly improved. I would agree. I think there's, in Boston, we have a really awesome ecosystem and a very diverse ecosystem. So we've had we've had diversity right from the beginning in Boston. Boston VR if you go, you'll see, you'll look out in the crowd, it's very diverse. Which surprised me actually when I first went because I thought I'd be the only woman, and it would be all white guys, and it wasn't. And so I think partly Boston has 16 universities, one of the biggest, you know, school town in the world, I guess. So there are a lot of students, and there's a lot of international students, and there's a lot of diversity in that way. There's also some women leaders. I do, we have women in next realities that we started in Boston a couple of years ago. There's a women meetup in New York City. I definitely encourage you to look into if there's women meetups in San Francisco, which I know there are. The only reason I'm on Facebook now is because of the women in VR groups. They are constantly posting jobs and holding each other out. I mean it is not uncommon for women, at least women in our field, to have 50 people post on, hey, what kind of curriculum can I use for this project I'm doing? Or, hey, does anybody know any projects in Berlin? Or, hey, can I find a unity developer to do this? So there's a lot of helping each other that reminds me a lot of 1999, which was, you know, I was a web developer in 1999 and we were all helping each other out, and there were computer using groups, and we meet and we'd all like help each other. And that's really, VRLA came out of that. Actually VRLA came out of a meetup, and it was one of the biggest tech expos for VR over the same years, and it had that community vibe really strongly. And so I do think that there are a lot of spaces in VR that did not see in even the early days of the Internet, South High Valley, that are very conducive to diversity and inclusion. I think, generationally, I mean, most people that I work with are, could be my daughters and son. So, you know, they're 25 years old and they've already started. One of our participants, it was her first event, she's from DC, Morgan Mercer. She came up to Boston for our eco hackathon in April of 2017. She had never done anything with VR at all. And Morgan, she's African American, she is entrepreneurial, she's super smart. She basically now has a $10 million company with contracts with all kinds of tech companies, and it's a VR product that's all about sexual harassment training. And I just think that's amazing because of how young the industry is, and because of the inclusivity that I think a lot of us have felt. A lot of things are possible right now. The other two folks I want to mention is just Kamala Sinclair, who's done a lot of work with the Ford Foundation. She has an awesome series, I guess, of a blog and reports on making a new reality about how VR is conducive to diversity and inclusion and how we can do more about that. Especially in this story that we tell, if you have women creators and people of color creators, you're going to have stories that are really different than some of those algorithms that are built on the web that when you look for CEO, for women CEO, you get a picture of CEO Barbie. Still, still the first page in the first search forms, right? So we have an opportunity to build something different now, and I think I'm excited about it as you can probably tell. I think there's a lot of opportunities for us to bake that in now. But I think we have to do it in a really conscious way. We have to talk about privacy and we have to talk about inclusion now. I would agree with that. One of the things we got to do over the last Saturday is post the 53 year old California Student Media Festival. They're all projects from kindergarten through 12th grade. I've been looking at it for 20 years, and then we just did it last Saturday. Lots of women, lots of people of color, they're all there. They can all make this stuff, and right now we don't have a vision of what a VR creator looks like. I mean, you know it's a lot of white males, but no one else really does. What does it look like? We can change what people look like, and therefore change the way kids guide. To do that, when you start, that's why it's not a lunch counter thing. It's getting us kids to do this. So when we talked about barrier, I was talking about school, so $250 is three textbooks, really two textbooks. That's it. If I can get this and this, it's equivalent of four textbooks into the hands of the kids we're talking about to create their experiences. This isn't owned by the old guard anymore. This is owned by the new guard. We can do that, celebrate them, and create festivals for that, and lots of stuff will change. So that was absolutely the time to start moving this stuff, modeling this stuff in the kindergarten to 12th grade space. That's why our conversation was so good. That's great. Thanks. So we're running a long time, and I'm wondering if there's a couple quick questions from the audience. Wow. Wait for one of the other panelists. Remember my role? We're asking questions with not giving long monologues. Thank you all for a great panel on this subject. Antonio White behind that news group. You all talked about the diversity inclusion issue, and it seems as though we haven't understood your responses. The only way to sort of combat that is from a grassroots approach, but what we know from diversity inclusion practice is unless it's centered at the highest platforms, and the executives aren't supporting people for those issues, it's hard to move the needle. So understanding how intellectual and economic capital flows through these big companies, what can companies be doing to make sure that there are more people of color from disadvantaged backgrounds who are able to help create and shape those experiences so that if you're trying to build compassion and empathy, those of AR, VR actually reflect the reality. And then the second part is I've been doing some work with the Berklee Klein Center at Harvard on misinformation, particularly through social media and how it impacts people of color. Do you all foresee with the future of AR, VR us needing to have a public education about how you perceive this AR experience so that it's not a developer or person with a certain perspective on how they want you to see the world, but it is actually authentic and true and based in real information and honest information. So I know it's a two-part question, but please respond anyway. Thank you again. I would love to touch on your first question, which is the responsibility that companies have. So something I've looked at is one day on the record, I was looking at the team and I realized that everyone on our team at drop has gone into a top engineering program and more than likely he or she is either a white male or Asian, for example. And I bring this up as a very personal start when I thought about it. And the reason I was like, why is it that all of our engineering talent pretty much looks the same and has very similar lived experiences. And I realized that when I looked at the makeup, the team is at the team's ex Sony PlayStation VR. The team is, you know, ex Google Adrian. And the reason that we were, the reason that when they were at drop was when we hired the best is that oftentimes when you look at these larger companies, I have noticed that there are not a lot of women and people of color on a bright spot of teams where they can give the experience that they need to mention to a startup. So for example, I was looking and I was saying, I would love to hire a female computer vision engineer. And I was like, it would be better if she was, you know, a woman of color. And one of my friends, she needs a very prominent MA, a machine learning team at startup. And she said, where are you going to find her? Because they're probably only a handful most probably of research institutions. So when I look at larger companies, something I would like to see is that when they're recruiting engineering, specifically when they're recruiting engineering talent, to put them on the right product teams, the ones that actually truly matter would actually give the experience that they can then take that knowledge capital and then bring it to a company like DROP. Other organizations, because that's the issue that I'm recurrent in not even I, but I've talked to other founders as well that we're seeing right now is where it's like why don't these folks have the knowledge capital? Because if you think about it right, if you look at, you know, I know we've been talking about like HBCUs for example, and something I've seen is that oftentimes a lot of HBCU graduates who then go take on engineering jobs at large companies, they aren't on the right product teams. They are working on engineering problems where I'm like we can have, you know, someone who just went out of program yesterday actually fix that. But imagine if that HBCU graduate now works on a Siri team at Apple, and then he leaves and goes start some machine learning startup. That's a completely different trajectory compared to working at Apple on, you know, Apple music picks and bugs because, you know, the user couldn't get the next screen to work. So I think that the long-winded response to your answer is that I would love to see other companies put engineers and folks who kind of hold the knowledge and technical capital in the right positions. Because I think that right now, I mean, tech is a major wealth generator. I mean, let's not ignore that. And a lot of that wealth generation can only happen by people who have the knowledge capital in the war. So who will leave their company? I want to address the other thing we brought up. Two things. One, yes, that's true with companies and companies. I think one of the things very specifically that they can do to attract diverse talent is to pay people to come to hackathons. So I saw Vos do this recently, and I thought this was awesome. So, you know, one of my staff people was able to get paid $1,000 to do a three-day product hackathon. Because those companies, when you go to a hackathon, they're using your ideas. You're selling them something when they realize it or not, and you're usually doing it for free. So if they want to make sure that they're attracting diverse folks, they're going to get more people from different backgrounds if they're paying them for in exchange for that. Secondly, the grassroots diversity thing for me, we have 1,500 community media centers around the country. We're under attack right now. One of the there's an FCC order from Folds Rulemaking that could really produce 0531, I believe. They can take away half of our funding. We have been for 35 years providing training to anyone in the community who wants to come in and make content, and we're doing the same thing in VR. I'd like to see us be protected so that we can continue to do this work. And also we work with libraries and arts organizations and film festivals. Those folks are all doing that work, and they're attracting a really diverse group of creators and majors to their spaces. And lastly, building a network. So one of the best things if you I think for getting more diversity inclusion is to give access to your networks. So that's what I see a lot of women doing for each other is that we're giving each other access to our networks. I do not even hesitate a minute if a woman reaches out to me on Facebook and says hey, I'm a woman in VR, do you have time for a 30 minute call? Yep, absolutely. So I think all of us who have talent and who have interest in nurturing the field, we should all be doing that right now. No matter what age, you know, I have 25-year-olds mentoring 50-year-olds, and we have a lot of women who are coming in and creating, and sometimes they get sidelined to marketing teams or communications teams or taking the notes for the meeting teams. And I want to put them into positions where they're the engineer, they're doing all the product, not only the design, but actually doing the coding. So we need to, as allies, make sure that women are getting put into positions where they can have opportunity to learn some of those skills, because that's why the white guys just stand up and do it and sometimes we don't, and so we need help. And so I think helping each other will be that. Sorry, that wasn't short. One of the things that we do is to discover education very seriously. One of the things, and Charmaine could talk about this better than I could, but we work with companies like Toyota to do content creation and that's where you see every kind of person come up and do the last Toyota Challenge runs, I think, were two high school girls of color. And if you can tata the consulting firm who has a computational thinking site that's all free, all of them are free as in English as in Spanish, those things are really important, and we can get them started before they get out of high school, then when they hear you and talk to you, you can pull them in a direction, have the skills and the effort to love that something they want to do. So start young, go to your school, see if they're doing that, that they're not just doing my test scores, I know test scores are important, but say are you giving kids in this school the chance to create material for this? Because they can do that. That personalized experience question, by the way, that you asked about VR, all media is edited, right? And so the best thing we can do is teach young people to have really awesome critical thinking skills, and I have to say I work with a lot of young people who don't seem to have that as a priority, and we really need to help them make that a priority, because whatever media form we move to, if they're not thinking critically about both their role as a creator and their role as a consumer, we've lost everything. Alright, so we're going to combine two questions here. So I need these questions to just be 30 seconds or less. I need the responses to be 45 seconds or less. I have a question about how you all are approaching policy makers and regulators with VR. Either what County just talked about with the FCC regulations, but more importantly how the nonprofit groups and other or maybe not more importantly, but how other groups are utilizing VR technologies to make, to present their case for whatever it is that they're doing at the policy level. Because in my experience, we are going to find the VR and experience the VR as general public as policy makers as people needing to be entertained in gaming. So what is that looking like and what can that look like? Thank you. Let's go ahead and get this question in and thank you guys. Thanks more about and I think I might have the best answer for this, but I'm a neuroscientist by training I'm just curious, in parallel is there a body of research that's looking at the cognitive, you've talked a lot about cognitive immersion to the point that I was like, huh thinking about cognitive immersion in the different communities. So my question is where are things that I know everything's very nice and right now, but where is it at in terms of understanding what does that immersion actually do to us in terms of our conversation and how we're experiencing that. That may not be a quick question, but it's not a quick answer just to find the answer. That too? Yeah. Do you want to answer while you're getting somebody else? Yeah, I'm giving myself a timer. On the cognitive neuroscience, I can put you in touch with some people because there's a lot being done, but there's a lot going on. We're actually organizing with a number of friends on Twitter and different folks at different universities, a white paper, research paper on seniors in VR, for example. There hasn't been one yet. So even to answer your question, you know, how are folks using VR for policy change we're not entirely there yet. I think the best use case has been Planned Parenthood, frankly, who came out really early on and worked with Maddie D'Alepena, who is one of the, I think, least unsunk heroes of VR. She's the godmother of VR. She did a piece with them called Across the Line that you can download and watch. And it gives you an embodied experience with what it would be like to walk across a line of protesters. She used real audio from outside of reverse clinics, whatever you want to call them, clinics. And that audio is very intense. And so when you're, it's being directed at you inside of that VR experience it's pretty impactful. And so they had a whole kit and a guidebook. We have a project on immigration and migration storytelling that we're using as a policy and a facilitating community dialogue conversation. I can tell people more about it if you come and talk to me. And we'll be up to you at the thing tonight too. In terms of the research, I'll just say that there is some research that's growing. Ted, the congressman started off talking about how it's being used in VA hospitals now for post-traumatic stress syndrome and how effective that is. I've seen studies that reduces the pain of childbirth. So there is some stuff there. The experience, especially against this level, can do wonderful things. But the research is just growing. I just saw a study just this week, actually, that they compared VR and other pain users. And VR was like the best. Because it actually had no drugs at all. So there was a study, there was something I saw this week I think it was an article about the opioid crisis and how might we use VR to move people out of addiction. Which is an interesting idea and again we have to do more research on that. And I'll just quickly say check out Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. They do some really impressive white papers on presence, immersion, cognitive understanding of VR. Great, unfortunately we have to wrap up but thank you so much to our panelists, it was wonderful. At least it will be a closing remarks. All righty well thank you so much to coming to emerging tech for social change today. You are invited to our reception and showcase which takes place at the Google office, which is located at 25 Massachusetts Avenue. You can either walk there, it's about a 15 minute walk or so. Or if it's really hot outside as I said at the beginning over or at lift. So I hope that you guys can join us there and make sure that you interact with our panelists. And let's give a round of applause for all the panelists. And be sure to use hashtag tech for change. Thank you.